Tag: Essay

Epistemic Theology Part 5
(Parts 1, 2, 3, & 4)

“Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

“Now that is just the problem with you Christians. All this logical talk, and then what does it really come down to? Circular reasoning! The Bible can’t prove itself! All your talking is just a bunch of…”

Oh pardon me, miseur. You misunderstand. The word of God in that passage is not the bible. The word there is Rhema, the living and present, verbal word of God. We have faith because God himself attests to the thing that we believe. I think you will find that this is perfectly acceptable. “Since He had no one greater to swear by, he swore by himself” (Heb 6:13b).

Ok. Let me get this straight. God is the witness who testifies to the authority of the Bible. How does he do this?

Not exactly. But close.

In Luke 24:13, after Jesus had risen from the , some of his disciples were walking on a road to a city called Emmaus. This guy shows up and asks them what’s up, and they tell him all their doubts and concerns about whether Jesus was really resurrected. The guy expresses amazement that they just don’t get it, “and beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was in all the scriptures” about Jesus.

The disciples get to where they’re going, and invite this guy in to dinner. At the table, he decides to do the honors, and when he breaks the bread, they suddenly realize that he’s Jesus. Then Jesus goes “poof!” and he’s gone.

Now check what they said: “Didn’t our heart burn within us while talked with us on the road, and while he opened the Scriptures to us?”

This is exactly how He confirms His word. When we open up that book, when he breaks the bread, His words burn in our hearts, and by that burning we know that it is his word. This is the same process you go through when you are converted to Christ. Someone proclaims the word to you, the Gospel (Literally, “God’s spell,” but that’s another teaching), and God’s Holy Spirit is present to ratify the word. He testifies, like a witness in the stand, that it is true. It says it in 1 John 5, “It is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth… if we accept the testimony of men, God’s testimony is greater.”

Do you realize what this means? Just as God has made a commitment to individually ratify the truth of the Gospel, so that each man is individually saved by faith, so also he has made a covenant with His word, that He would confirm that it is his word to every individual who hears it. Simply put, there is no authority in heaven or on earth that can authorize God’s word to you as an individual but God Himself. The church can’t prove to you the word of God; archaeologists can’t prove to you the word of God. Saints and scholars, none of them can prove to you the word of God. But open the book, and read, and His words will burn in you like fire in your heart, and you will know that it is the very word of God.

Understand, this is no new doctrine. Calvin said pretty much the same thing 500 years ago. Back then, the fallacy was that the Church verified the scriptures, just as today the fallacy is that archaeology verifies the scriptures. The irony is that the reason we have a church is that it’s authorized by God’s word. But whether it’s authoritarian government or human knowledge, the mistake is the same: the idea that human agency can replace a revelation from God. It takes a lot of faith to believe that God will reveal the same basic set of understandings to every one who reads his word. But generally, he does.

Nevertheless, the idea that God proves his word this way is very radical. It’s intimidating to a lot of people, because it throws the power structure right out the window. Any attempt to verify that the bible is true because so-and-so says (and so-and-so is a noble gentleman) ultimately falls flat on its face—because only God can be a foundation sure enough to provide the kind of authority that the bible has in our lives. The reliability of men quickly fails, and ultimately knowledge and understanding (i.e. science) will cease—there’s only so much power an authority figure can have over a person’s life, and all science can do is prove a very very accurate history book. But the word of the Lord remains forever. “…Since He had no one greater to swear by, He swore by Himself.”

A little Application

The chapel services at my undergrad school always went in a certain order. I think it was the standard Presbyterian liturgy. I don’t really know. I had never had a liturgy before. Honestly, I had barely ever had an order of worship. But one of the things we did every service was to have a scripture reading from the Old and New Testaments. Our chaplain would stand behind the podium and carefully turn to the verse and read it with these strong round tones, always careful pause just exactly right to maximize the echo effect. Having finished her reading, she would carefully close the bible, and slowly look up, and then she would say, “God always blesses the reading… and the hearing… of His word.”

I never realized before how true that was. Quite literally, he stands behind his scripture and confirms the reality of it, the power of it, to each and every person who reads or hears His word. And the amazing thing is that, as radical as this idea is, you can bank on it. For instance Billy Graham, God bless him, doesn’t bother explaining anything in his evangelistic sermons. Heck, he doesn’t even bother giving chapter and verse. He doesn’t need to. He just lists whatever the standard worldly position is and rebuts it with a single phrase: “But the bible says…” And people who hear him speak get saved in the thousands. Why? Because God absolutely honors His word.

People don’t need to quickly thumb through to find the text and say, “Well lordy be, it does say that!” and then make a decision that will change their lives. They hear the word, God honors it, and their lives are changed.

“One of the major premises throughout the entire Bible is that leadership is to be held to a higher standard.”

This is one of the meanest, most unchristian statements I think I have ever heard. It’s also totally untrue. Let me see if I can take a pinch hit at explaining why.

I had this comment directed at me in a discussion on Tim Bednar’s e-church blog. A new pastor somewhere made the decision to can the church web site and start from scratch. It was a bad decision, and people called him on it. Ok. So he was publicly thrashed. Rare was that voice to suggest that this was something else than evil pastor syndrome. Actually, I may have been that rare voice. Within a week or so the pastor saw the error of his ways and brought back the old design. (I’m not aware of the status of the old webmaster.)

For some, however, capitulation was insufficient. Perhaps public penance would have been preferable. But it was in this context that the above statement was made.

“Leadership is to be held to a higher standard.”

And my question is: By whom?
Certainly not by God. All have fallen short of the Glory of God. No one is righteous. Everyone is going to hell, apart from the blood of Jesus. Why? Because the standard is so high. Infinite perfection is unattainable by anybody. How can the standard be any higher for my pastor than it is for me?

But perhaps our eternal reward is not the place where leadership is being held to a higher standard.

If it had been some random wayfarer who struck the rock instead of speaking to it, would they have been allowed to enter into Canaan? From the other examples in the Penteteuch, I’d say anybody else would have been struck dead on the spot. If somebody other than the king had slapped his arrows on the ground only three times, would Israel have beaten their enemies perhaps five or six times in battle before they were defeated? I see no reason to believe so. Perhaps Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead for lying because they were in leadership.

There is, of course, the example of David, who was confronted with the specter of 70,000 dead because of a silly little census. If somebody else had taken a census surely there wouldn’t have been so many dead.

Yes. Well, there is that.

Honestly, I have no clue what was the big deal with the census. But apparently it was bad. The same with that whole David and Bathsheba thing that caused the whole country so much turmoil in later years. Heaping consequences for huge numbers of people. But is this an indication of a higher standard? I don’t think so. If a census is wrong, a census is wrong, no matter who conducts it. Having an affair and arranging to have the girl’s husband murdered to cover the evidence is wrong: it doesn’t matter if it’s you, me, or the czarina of Spain. There’s no higher standard at stake here.

There is, however, a greater level of ramification. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. The president of Enron screws up his books, and thousands of people lose their jobs. I screw up my books and I get overdraft charges from my bank. Perhaps this is what was meant by being “held to a higher standard.”

The problem is, these kinds of statements aren’t used to warn church leaders to be careful, so they can avoid harming their sheep. They’re used like spiritual BB guns to make potshots at any passing offense. They are used, in effect, to subtract grace in the very areas where we should be adding it. That to me is the meanest, most unchristian thing a person could do.

Obviously, where there is sin, call it sin. But, people, look for every opportunity to forgive. If nothing else, remember the parable of the Unmerciful Servant.

Epistemic Theology Part 4
(Parts 1, 2, & 3)

In X-Men United, the new X-Men movie out last year, there’s a scene where Storm, our lovely weather-controller, needs to get on the other side of a locked door. She turns to her friend Kurt Wagner, also known as Nightcrawler, who happens to be a teleporter. Nightcrawler happens to be Catholic. Very Catholic. In fact, he spends a great deal of the movie talking about his faith, presumably his faith in Jesus Christ. Nightcrawler has also repeatedly said that he can’t just teleport anywhere. He has to be able to see where he’s going, or he could miss, pop back into the world in the middle of something solid, and die. So when Storm asks him to teleport her to the other side of the door, he tells her he can’t—because he can’t see where he’s going, he could kill them both.

Storm puts a hand on his shoulder and looks deep into his eyes. “I have faith that you can do it,” she says. That changes everything. Nightcrawler nods his head, pulls her close, closes his eyes, and pop! They’re on the other side of the door. Storm rushes in and stops the bad guy and everything is better.

I always felt sorry for poor Kurt Wagner in that scene. I know it was important for them to get to the other side of that door—and it obviously worked—but it just wasn’t fair. I know it would have ruined the movie to suddenly take a break in the action for a deep religious discussion, but Kurt really needed to ask her, “You have faith in what?!”

What was she really saying here? Was she saying “I have faith in God, that he has been directing us since the beginning of this movie, and if he brought us to this place where we need your ability to do this, then he will give you the ability to teleport us to the right place.”? It would be nice, but I really doubt it. What she was probably saying was more like “I have faith in you—you can do it!!” That would have been a nice thing to say, but it really would have had no basis, since he had been undermining that kind of faith since they met him. But I can tell you what the audience was thinking: “Hey, if you can’t jump to the other side of that door, you’re all dead anyway… ooh, faith! that’s nice.” Me? I had faith in the scriptwriter’s love of money, that they wouldn’t make the movie bomb by having a major character die by teleporting into the middle of a steel door.

It really is important to know what the object of your faith is. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen,” literally. If you’re in the jury of a murder trial and a key witness tells you, “he did it,” then the only evidence you have is your faith in that witness. If your witness is a liar, then your faith is unfounded.

So. Who is the witness attesting to the scriptures? Fortunately, the bible tells us, in Romans 10:17, who our witness is: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

Epistemic Theology Part 3
(Parts 1 and 2)

Took me long enough to get here, didn’t it?

Lee Strobel, in his book, A Case for Faith, Tells a story of how Billy Graham came to decide that the Bible is the Word of God. I have no idea where he got it, so I’m quoting him, in probable breach of copyright:

The year was 1949. Thirty-year-old Billy Graham was unaware that he was on the brink of being catapulted into worldwide fame and influence. Ironically, as he readied himself for his breakthrough crusade in Los Angeles, he found himself grappling with uncertainty — not over the existence of God or the divinity of Jesus, but over the fundamental issue of whether he could totally trust what his Bible was telling him.

In his autobiography, Graham said he felt as if he were being stretched on a rack. ….

“If I was not exactly doubtful,” Graham would recall, “I was certainly disturbed.” He knew that if he could not trust the Bible, he could not go on. The Los Angeles crusade — the event that would open the door to Graham’s worldwide ministry — was hanging in the balance.

Graham searched the Scriptures for answers, he prayed, he pondered. Finally, in a heavy-hearted walk in the moonlit San Bernardino Mountains, everything came to a climax. Gripping a Bible, Graham dropped to his knees and confessed he couldn’t answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions that Templeton and others were raising.

“I was trying to be on the level with God, but something remained unspoken,” he wrote. “At last the Holy Spirit freed me to say it. ‘Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word — by faith! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.’”

It was a powerful experience, I’m sure, but how does it help me? How do you get this faith? If it comes from within yourself, if you just up and decide to believe one day, then your faith is futile. Not because faith is powerless. A firm conviction can lead people to do amazing things. But unless faith has an objective correlation with the truth, then you haven’t determined the truth. You’ve only determined what you’ve decided to believe. So where does faith come from?

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about this word, partly because we only use it in a religious context these days, so the word automatically takes on these religious overtones. People usually interpret the word to mean “belief,” or better, “really really strong belief.”

But the word “faith” comes from the Latin “fides,” which means something along the lines of “trust” or “adherence,” not just belief. It’s also the root word for “fidelity,” which I think we understand better, thanks to hi-fi electronic equipment (that would be your stereo). The dictionary definition of fidelity is, “Exact correspondence with fact or with a given quality, condition, or event—accuracy,” or, in regard to machines, “the degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or image of its input signal.”

What I’m trying to get across is that the word faith carries with it the concept of alignment. To have faith in something is to align yourself with that thing. This is an important concept because it means that you can’t have blind faith. I don’t mean you shouldn’t have blind faith. I mean it’s impossible. It’s as much of an intellectual absurdity as deaf radio.

Consider your stereo. Before the advent of digital media, fidelity was the number one indicator of an instrument’s quality. Everything was recorded in analog format, which is to say, an exact representation of the sound. If you take a cone and attach it to a needle and run that needle along a blank wax record, and then speak into the cone, the needle will vibrate in tune with your voice and the vibration will cut an exact representation of that sound into the record. You could then run that needle back over the record at the same rate, and it would vibrate back at you, making the exact same sound—almost. Fidelity would be the measure of how faithfully the instruments reproduce the original—your voice. With digital media, the record is reduced to a series of numbers, which can then be reproduced exactly, so fidelity is much less an issue.

For your stereo to have blind fidelity, it would have to reproduce a sound with out a record of the original. I think it could be a new wave: Bli-fi: Sound Without Substance!

Faith must always have an object. If I may wax metaphorical, it is the needle of your soul. The record is what your faith is in. You can’t just have faith in the bible, because it requires faith to believe the bible in the first place. There has to be something more foundational, more fundamental than the bible for you to rest your needle on. And the more closely your needle is aligned with this other thing, the more clearly it resonates within you.

So the question for Billy Graham, for you, for me, for my stereo—for everybody—is “faith in what?”

Epistemic Theology Part 2

If the Bible is authoritative, and I am not a schizophrenic, then there can be no disparity between my experience and the scriptures. If there is a difference, the problem must lie in how much thought I have applied to my experience.

Please understand that I’m not saying that we believe the Bible because we understand it. Far from it. Might as well say we believe in God because we understand Him. Rather, if we believe the Bible, and we see a disparity between the bible and our experience, the problem must be in your understanding. If you can’t believe whether an experience you had was real, you’ve got bigger fish to fry than whether you believe the Bible. You’ve got to go back to ole Rene Descartes and decide whether anything exists at all.

If you’ll notice, what I’ve been digging at has been whether or not the scriptures are authoritative, not whether they are true. People often get confused and go off trying to prove that the bible is true, meaning whether it is factually correct. That question is kind of irrelevant.

I have a lot of books in my house that are, to the best of my knowledge, factually correct. I have Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, one of the most revered history series. I have several biographies – including an autobiography by my grandfather. I even have a translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I believe to be factual in its representation of what the scrolls say. But I don’t expect any of these books to dictate to me how to live my life. Being factually correct is a very good thing, but it doesn’t necessarily give authority. That authority comes from somewhere else.

Being factual is a good thing. If the books of the bible were historically inaccurate, it would put grave doubts in my mind as to whether it had any authority. But, while being factual is necessary, it isn’t sufficient. The linch-pin is the question of whether or not the Bible is, in fact, the Word of God. So how do I know if a particular collection of words is the word of God?

Part 1.

I’ve already made the point that God is the source and foundation of everything. I’d like to think, though, that I’ve also made a couple other points on the sly. One of those points I hope I’ve made is that the only way to really understand God is to experience Him. Job thought he knew God for the first 37 chapters of the book, but he realized he didn’t have a clue once he had first hand experience. The second point I hoped to get across was that there’s no way to experience God vicariously. I can’t experience God for you.

I have a droll joke I like to throw out, whenever the opportunity presents itself: Say I’m at work and a coworker turns to me and says, “Wow! I’m so cold I can’t feel my fingers!” Immediately I’ll say back, “Wow! I can’t feel your fingers either!” Inevitably, I get the stupid look—how am I supposed to feel her fingers when I’m way over here?

The same principle applies when it comes to knowing God. There’s no way my description of an experience I had is going to work for you. You have to encounter Him yourself.

So what good is the Bible? If the only way to really understand God is to experience him, why do we have a book?

Experience—or the Bible?

I hope you can see where this is going, and why it gets a little kooky here. There are basically two groups of people in reference to the scriptures: those who believe it is authoritative, and those who don’t. That is, either you believe the Bible is right and you must conform yourself to it, or you believe it’s a handy reference for what people used to think. There are lots of degrees between these two poles, but those are the two basic positions.

For the record, I’m part of the group that believes in the authority of the scriptures. But out of their absolute trust in the scriptures, I hear some people saying a lot of strange things. For some reason, there’s this odd pattern in the world, of people pitting experience against scripture. Usually, the question you hear is something along the lines of “are you going to believe the scriptures, or your experience?” Inevitably scripture wins out. Honestly, this is pretty embarrassing.

The problem is that people forget that everything still comes through the human filter. Even if God dictated the scriptures word-for-word to Moses and Paul and all the other authors of the bible, what we have would still be the written record of someone’s experience of that dictation. So the question is really, “are you going to trust someone else’s experience or your own?” Which is an absolutely unfair question. You can’t have someone else’s experience! You can have a similar experience. You can experience the record of their experience. But you can’t have someone else’s experience. So these people are actually asking you to judge between two of your own experiences. How confusing is that?

How can you say to yourself, “these two experiences that I had, one of them is true, and the other one never happened. As it turns out, I’m actually a schizophrenic. I have mad delusions of ordinariness.”?

Fortunately, you don’t have to. There’s nothing wrong with your experience.

A few hundred years ago, a man by the name of Copernicus was dragged into court. His charge: seditious insults about the nature of the universe. Copernicus, based on his experience and a little math had determined that the earth was not the center of the universe. In fact the earth rotated around the sun. This was terrible bravado, because it was as clear as day that the sun rotated around the earth. What Copernicus was saying was not only in direct defiance of everybody else’s experience, but it was contrary to the gospel of Aristotle. Copernicus was ordered to immediately recant or be condemned to for heresy. (“Recant” – to take back what you said, as opposed to “repent” – to take back what you did.) Copernicus, delightful man that he was replied, “the earth stands.” Poof. End of heresy. But as he was walking out of the room, he finished his sentence: “But yet it moves.” Today we agree with Copernicus and decry that heretic Aristotle.

Fortunately for us, the Bible has never said that the sun revolves around the earth. In fact, it quite clearly states that everything revolves around the Son. But we can learn a little from Copernicus: there was no difference between his experience and the experience of everybody else concerning the movement of heavenly bodies. The difference was in how much thought he applied to his experience.

It works the same for us. If the Bible is authoritative, and I am not a schizophrenic, then there can be no disparity between my experience and the scriptures. If there is a difference, the problem must lie in how much thought I have applied to my experience.

The next few days I’m going to be putting up some articles on some basic theological ideas I’ve been working through. Some of it may be re-hash, I’m not sure. I know a lot of it’s going to be very incomplete. A lot of these ideas would probably be good topics for books all by themselves, and I’m going to try to cover them in a couple or three pages. But they are all interrelated, and they do build upon each other, and I’m trying to work through these ideas, so you’re just going to have to sit there and suffer. Comments are welcome. No doubt there are going to be huge gaps that I’m missing. That’s what comes of trying to cover these kinds of ideas in just a few pages.

I’ve already made an illustrative attempt at expressing how God is the origin and foundation of everything. But let me go back real quick and touch on it again:
From a scientific perspective, the universe is held together by the power of His will. I’m not a scientist, so I’m not going to bother to try to substantiate that idea. I’m a better philosopher, so let me try from that angle.

Descartes is famous for saying “I think, therefore I am.” His basic point was that everything in the world that we experience could be an illusion. The whole darn thing could be a giant virtual reality trip. It seems solid enough, but then, so do the experiences of a schizophrenic man. So how do we know anything exists at all? Descartes’ answer was that we can’t. Since everything I get is filtered in through my senses, I can’t be sure than any of those things are real. The only things that I can ever be certain of are those things that I experience directly, whatever directly is.

So far, I’m actually okay with this. Now, I’ll say again that I’ve never actually read Descartes—I’ve only gotten summaries. But what comes next is where I think he and I diverge. From what I understand Descartes came to the conclusion that the only thing you can experience directly is yourself. Therefore, the only thing you can know exists for certain is yourself. If you turn your attention completely inward and focus on your own existence for just a moment, then you might catch yourself thinking. In that moment you have experienced yourself directly, without any intermediary filter, and you can rest assured that you exist. Typical humanistic foolishness.

Put that way, it doesn’t really sound very Christian, does it? That’s because it’s the farthest thing from Christian that there is. It’s man centered. More specifically, it’s self-centered, and self-absorbed, and as a result, it’s inherently wrong.

Here’s the flaw: No one can perceive himself. I am myself. I’m too busy being myself to experience myself. I can’t pry into people’s minds for an example, so let me zoom out a little bit and use something physical for a reference point: Hold up your hand for a minute. Can your hand experience itself? No it can’t. Unless there is something in particular happening to your hand, your hand doesn’t feel like anything at all. Unless an outside force acts upon your hand, your hand feels like absolutely nothing at all.

Now pick up an ice cube. What does your hand experience? COLD! What does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means that ice cubes are cold. Cold compared to what? Well, compared to your hand. So what does this tell you about your hand? It tells you that your hand is warmer than an ice cube. There was absolutely no way for you to experience the fact that your hand was warm, except for it to come into contact with something that was not warm.

This is true about every area of the human condition. Unless a person is in contact with something… different, then everything about them just feels… normal. Unless it is compared with something else, nothing exists at all.

I have hair on my face. But unless I touch my face or look in a mirror, I can’t tell that I have hair on my face. My face just feels…normal… like it isn’t even there at all. In fact, unless I make a good comparison, my face feels to me exactly the same way it did when I was ten or eleven. So this brings up another point: without a basis for comparison, not only can I not tell what I am, I can’t even tell if I’ve changed from what I used to be.

So much for “I think, therefore I am.” In the moment that I am actually sitting around contemplating the fact of my thinking about my existence, my existence becomes reduced to exactly what it is—nothing. Like I said before, unless I have something outside of me acting upon me, as far as I can tell, I simply do not exist.

Now. If I want to know that I am, all I need to do is have contact with something different. In a physical sense, touching an ice cube tells me that the ice cube exists, and that I exist. It also tells me that the ice cube is cold, and that I am not. If you ever touch an ice cube and don’t notice anything, it may mean that you have the exact same characteristics as the ice cube—which would strongly imply that you were .

That covers it for the physical world. But what if all that’s an illusion? Well, it would have to be somebody else’s illusion. My self-delusions always work exactly the way I want them to. The minute things don’t work out the way I want, I’ve encountered reality. And I know, because it’s different from me. I can rest safely assured that the world is not an illusion, as long as nothing ever goes the way I want it to. Rejoice when you encounter all kinds of trials and afflictions, because when you do, you will know that it isn’t all for nothing. Isn’t it good to know that we don’t live in Nirvana, that state of perfect nothingness?

But what if I want to know who I am? Again, I have to have contact with something different. For instance, I know that I am a morning person, because I grew up with my sister. My sister is not a morning person. She’d rather sleep in till noon every day. But “morning person” is not a very complete description of who I am. If I was left to compare myself only with my sister, it would never even occur to me that I was a bookworm. She’s a bookworm. I’m a bookworm. So if that was all I knew, I would think that “bookworm” was “normal,” that is to say that, as far as my awareness of reality was concerned, that whole aspect of me simply would not exist.

Sounds simple enough. So who am I? I don’t know. I mean, I could tell you a few things, by comparison, but you’d never get an accurate picture from me. You can know who I am by experiencing me, but I can’t experience me, because I am me. I can learn a little bit about me by experiencing everybody else, but humanness is such a smudgy thing. You spend too much time with somebody and you start to become like them, especially in the areas that you were already like them anyway. People are too relative to get a good picture of who I am from them.

Imagine if I got up in the morning and tried to find out what I looked like by looking at my wife (ignore the fact that I don’t actually have a wife right now). I would come back, at best, with the information that I was hairy, had rough skin, and was generally not very pretty. An in-depth perusal might produce the insight that I have separated ear lobes and a narrow nose. What I need is an absolute basis for comparison—something so altogether unlike me that it would show me for what I am. So I get up and go to the mirror. A quick glance at the mirror tells me exactly what I am, down to the individual pores on my face. It can do this because it is flawless. It is absolutely perfect along two dimensions, so that whatever comes to it is reflected back exactly.

Of course, a mirror is only flawless in two dimensions. All attempts at a 3D mirror inevitably result in a flawed 2D mirror. Once you try to bend a mirror around, you get an inaccurate reflection. Is there anything in the world that can do the same for telling me who I am in every dimension? Wanna make a guess about what is out there that is completely different from me in every way, and absolutely flawless in every dimension? Let me give you a hint: His name is Yahewh.

The bible says that God is altogether holy. Holy means to be absolutely different, separate and distinct. This tells me that if I really want to know who I am, or even that I am, then I’m better off looking to God, than looking to my self or to some other person. Self-absorption tells me absolutely nothing, or worse yet, that I am nothing. Comparing with other people gives me an out of focus, and often ridiculously incomplete picture.

There have been a few times where I have really experienced the presence of God in my life, and every time my experience has been to say, “Whoa. That was different.” I honestly cannot be confident that I exist, let alone be certain of who I am and where I stand, except in comparison with the living God. Moreover, not only do I discover who I am, but also who I ought to be. Beyond even that, I discover that he has the ability to make me into what I ought to be. His holiness is as infectious as our fallibility.

I’m waxing poetic, but I need to back up just a little bit. Humanness is a very smudgy thing, and we become like whatever we behold. Which is kind of funky, because we can only know what we’re like by experiencing something different, but then as we experience it, it becomes less and less different. God is… pardon me… different. He’s not very smudgy. He simply is. Part of that, I think, is because he doesn’t behold. God doesn’t learn about me by experiencing me. He simply knows me. He’s already in me and on me and around me and through me. There’s no learning process for Him, because he’s already “well adjusted.” Because God is the origin of the graph, he doesn’t need to compare himself to us to know where he is. Where he is is the center of things. He is Father Son and Holy Spirit, like the x, y, and z planes of the graph and who knows how many other dimensions of him that we simply cannot fathom.

A good example is in Job. This man goes through all these truly awful experiences, and then his friends show up and say,

“Dude, what did you do?”

And Job says, “I didn’t do anything!”

And the friends say, “Aw, come on, man, it’s pretty clear you screwed up something, big time.”

And it goes on like that for some time, and vast confusion ensues. Everybody’s got a point, and they all sound good. Then God shows up. And do you know that God doesn’t answer even one of Job’s questions? He doesn’t even explain how Job or any of his friends got it right or wrong. Instead he goes through a great catalog designed to demonstrate how different He is from everybody else. Job’s response? “Oh.”

I know that you can do all things;

No plan of yours can be thwarted

You asked, “Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge”

Surely I spoke of things I did not understand

Things too wonderful for me to know.

You said, “Listen now and I will speak;

I will question you

And you shall answer me.”

My ears had heard of you

But now my eyes have seen you.

Therefore I despise myself

And repent in dust and ashes.

Everything is confusion, until we perceive God. When he shows up, by our very awareness of Him, he puts things in perspective.

We need God, for reference, for relevance, for basic sustenance, but He doesn’t need us. Instead, He loves, He exudes, He gives. The radiance of who He is is so powerful that, from our perspective, we almost can perceive it as a need—a need to give—and we will know that we have become like him when we have beheld him long enough that we no longer absorb his goodness, like so many miniature black holes, and have instead begun to reflect him. We won’t be like him because we will somehow be able to radiate our own goodness (he is different you know), but because we will be shining, like He is shining, with the same substance that he is shining with, like carefully arranged crystal, that makes the light seem that much brighter.

Everything hangs on Yahweh, and you will fade out of existence, unless you can put your whole focus on Him.

It’s taken me a relatively long time to discuss this, evidenced by the lack of postings lately. I’m engaged. I should know this. After all, I bought the ring, I connived her into going hiking with me on a moment’s notice, I brought the conversation around to marriage, and I got down on one knee. Apparently, I even kissed the ring, which act I do not remember doing.

Nobody cried. It wasn’t particularly exciting. There was no moment of intense wondering whether she’d go with it or not. She said ‘yes’ before I got around to asking. It rained on the walk back to the car. All in all, it was rather anticlimactic for me. Rather like getting saved.

But the aftershocks have been phenomenal. It’s very difficult to explain, and I still don’t know if I can. At one point I thought I was going to have to go through my entire life’s career of romantic inclinations… my kindergarten friend who broke up with me after being laughed at for shouting “You stay away from my boyfriend!” at a crowd of older bullies…the embarrassing moment my mom informed me that we would not be buying $200 gold-enameled figurines for any persons that I had a crush on and whose names I had marked in catalogues…and the months of numbness after another fiancée had terminated another life. I may yet recite for you all the gory details, but perhaps not today.

Suffice it to say that, since my official engagement, have opened whole other worlds of dreams inside of me. It’s… more difficult than I thought. What is this? Repression I’ve been harboring inside of me? I can’t tell you. What I can say is…

In Peter S. Beagle’s classic fantasy The Last Unicorn, there is a secret door that our heroes must find to confront their enemy. Their only clue is the riddle “When the wine drinks itself, when the skull speaks, when the clock strikes the right time. Only then will you find the tunnel that leads to the Red Bull’s lair.” In the evil king’s main hall, they find a broken clock that never strikes the right time and the remains of the king’s former commander, but no wine.

The bungling magician manages to get the skull to speak (though first he only cackles) and conjures up some cheap wine, which happens to taste awful. Schmendrick (the aforementioned magician) is about to pour the stuff out when the skull cries out,
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“No, wait, hey, don’t! Don’t do that! Give it to me if you don’t want it, but don’t throw it away!”

Says Schmendrick: “But you’re dead! You can’t smell wine, can’t taste it!”

“But,” cries the skull, “I remember…”

The skull drinks the wine and tells them that the way is through the clock. Of course, the skull cries the alarm as they’re climbing through into the cave at the foundation of the castle.

A ring given is the beginning of a promise. And, as much as cynics may deny it, a promise is a sure foundation to build upon. And suddenly, something dead in me cries out, “But I remember!” And what was dead begins to act as though it was living. The Spirit of God (which often is represented as wine in scripture) begins to drink itself through me. Honestly, it’s rather frightening. I can’t begin to tell you of the hidden worlds that I have found in me. So many dreams that I had given up and totally forgotten. But suddenly, they seem possible.

What, because there is now a woman standing with me who believes in me? In a word, yes. Well, no. Not just any woman. That woman. Over there. The amazing one. No no… There! That one. The one who doesn’t think she dances, though she is made of light. Let me tell you about her:

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Six or seven years ago, when I was someone else, I was head over heels over someone else. Honestly, I was rather embarrassed about it, kind of like when I was a kid and my mom would read Tom Sawyer to me and I would hide my head under the pillows whenever mention of Becky Thatcher came up. It was hard to be so vulnerable then, not to the girl I was in love with, but to all the people around me saying “’Let him commit himself unto the Lord! Let Him rescue him; let Him deliver him, since He delights in him!”

Ok. So I had a perception problem. But anyway, somewhere in there I got a vision: I saw a sword made up of two people standing back-to-back. One was a man, and one was a woman. The man was lifting his hands up to ministry to God, and the woman was reaching out in ministry to the people. The hilt of the sword was an open book, the word of God, and reaching up and around it were tongues of fire, the Spirit of God. I wrote the description down and showed it to my mom, who immediately said, “Hm, thinking of getting married?” Heh. Heh heh. Wrong girl.

So that whole thing went up in smoke, but I remembered the vision. Do you know that crazy typical thing Christian couples say to each other when they’re breaking up? “It’s okay. If God doesn’t want this to happen, it only means he has something (i.e. someone) much better prepared for each of us.” That sentiment seems really trite when you wake up in the morning and realize you’ve got blood in your mouth from gnawing through your cheek. But the truth is… it’s true. Ain’t no woman like the one I got.

Let’s see…

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We met:

I’m taking this poetry class. I have learned since that I hate poetry classes. They teach you form, but no function. So I get told to write a poem. Go! Write a poem! These people have never heard of inspiration. So I go out to the local park and I wait until some thought occurs to me and I go back to school, get my food, take an empty table and set about saying my cool thought in the most cryptic way possible. Queens is a friendly little community, so about 3 people asked me if I was lonely and if I wanted to sit with them. I think it helped that it was about the 2nd week of school, and they were looking out for disenfranchised freshmen.

So I get done writing my poem, and I look up and I pick somebody to sit with who had asked me before. I picked the table occupied by a girl I knew named Julie. I had met Julie about a week before when she peremptorily jumped into a group of friends of mine and turned us into a tightly bound fellowship in a matter of minutes. Mad social skills. I sit down at this table and right across from me is this girl. She don’t got a lot to say, but there’s something about her.

No. Seriously. There was something about her. After months of study I finally figured it out. Unbreakable eye contact. And the most beautiful eyes… But I digress. We had this conversation… I mean, I admit I’m a talker, but that was the longest one-sided conversation I have ever had.

It gets fuzzy after that. I don’t remember if it was that night or the next, or the next week or what, but I asked her to go for a walk. Nothing romantic. Really. No, really, it wasn’t. I’m serious. At other times after that, I asked other people to go to parks and coffee houses and those weren’t romantic either. I was just being friendly.

Heh. Some friend. We talked over dinner for 2 hours, and then we took this walk, and that lasted for 2 or 3 hours, and then we sat around the closed office buildings and that took a couple of hours. All I know is we went to our respective rooms around 2 am that night. Like I said, I don’t remember much of it, but no doubt most of the night was consumed by me talking a lot and her making unbreaking eye contact. The only part of the conversation I can really remember was how delighted I was when I discovered that she was the only girl to whom I could say “I have a new computer with a 900 MHz processor and 750 MB of RAM and 2 HDD totaling 60 MB” and all she would say was “Wow! I am so jealous!” And I thought, man, this girl is amazing.

We fell in love:

Life happened. I wasn’t in love. She wasn’t my type. There was some mystery girl I couldn’t locate who was my type. She was tall and flagrantly beautiful and had this amazing singing voice and these radicalized personality traits… and I couldn’t figure out who or where she was. And then I saw this movie. It was a little classic romance called Emma. It changed my life.

I don’t want to get bogged down with the details of somebody else’s romance, so I’ll just skim over the essentials. There are four main characters: Emma Woodhouse, Mr. Knightly, Mr. Frank Churchill, and Jane Fairfax. The two characters you see the most are Emma and Mr. Knightly. Knightly is the perfect man. He’s powerful, he’s polite, he’s the epitome of courtesy and forethought. A gentleman’s gentleman. He also happens to own pretty much the entire county. Knightly is in love with Emma, who is the only woman who could live through his intolerant lecturing. Emma is amazing. Emma makes coffee nervous. She’s witty; she’s talented; she’s capable and influential. She’s so used to everything falling together for her and being handed her on a silver platter that she never actually applies her self to become really good at something. Life is a series of games for her and she lurches headlong after it. For which, of course, Knightly berates her.

Emma had a thought to fall in love with Frank Churchill if she ever met him, and when she does, it turns out he’s everything she ever imagined. He’s more charming than Bill Clinton. He’s fun. He organizes parties, he plays games and practical jokes. He’s also a bit of a conniver, which is why he is secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax. Frank is due to inherit quite a bit of money from is aunt, and if his aunt knew who it was he wanted to marry, shed disinherit him on the spot. So Frank flirts constantly with Emma to throw the whole town off the track, and shows his affection to Jane privately. At one point he goes to London “to get his hair cut,” and it just so happens that “a secret admirer” sends Jane a grand piano that very same day. Frank tends to be a little extravagant. Jane you hardly see at all. She’s poor, but very well liked and very accomplished. She sings beautifully; she plays piano; she is perfectly capable at every womanly skill. She also has very strong opinions about the world, but generally keeps them to herself unless somebody tries to push her into something.

Jane is quiet and unassuming, and Emma isn’t half the woman Jane is. And Emma knows it, which is why you don’t see much of Jane in the novel. The book is about Emma, don’t you know. Mr. Knightly points out at one point that the reason Emma doesn’t care much for Jane is everything that Emma could be, if she would just apply herself.

Sorry for the long synopsis. So I absolutely love this book. I love everybody in it. And Emma is my dream girl. (Like Anne of Green Gables—another character I like and Valerie can’t stand.) This is very convenient because Mr. Knightly is everything that I want to be. Key word: Everything I want to be. So I’m watching a movie of it, and it occurs to me that I’m nothing like Mr. Knightly. He’s too dang reserved. He thought the piano was an obnoxious, overweening gift to give to a poor girl who then has to deal with the rumors about who gave it to her and why. It occurs to me that I’m not like Mr. Knightly at all. God help me, I’m like Mr. Churchill.

Have you ever watched that old musical South Pacific? There’s this amazing high-tech technique they use all the time in that move, where somebody starts singing (“Here am I, your special island… Bali-hi Bali-hi!”) and the whole sky turns orange and purple. Ooh. Or those scenes where the main character has this sudden shocking realization and the camera suddenly zooms in from a panoramic to a close up and all the background kind of twists around funny? That’s what happened to me. I am not, nor do I ever hope to be, a Mr. Knightly. I am a Frank Churchill. I like giving people secret pianos. My whole life I’ve been chasing Emmas.

Do you know what happens when Frank Churchill goes steady with Emma? Emma goes crazy. You think I’m joking, don’t you? Every single person I have ever dated prior to Valerie has become a good deal more unstable directly after going out with me. I think it’s because I’m a catalyst. Whenever you’re with me, you become so much more of whatever it is you already are. I was constantly going after women for whom “stability” was not a good characterization. Certain people need something calming in their lives. I was one of them. So was every woman I ever dated. Basic rule. Don’t put unstable people with unstable people. Duh.

Well, it was a no-brainer, but I have a lot in common with that scarecrow. But suddenly my whole world shifted. If I’m Frank Churchill, what I really need is a Jane. And I turned around and there was Jane, er… Valerie. And instantly I was in love.

Yes. That is how I work. This is why women who love me go crazy.

I wish I could detail how the next few steps progressed. I wrote it all out once and emailed it somebody or other, but then my computer ate my email. The plan was not to jump out at Valerie in the woods and say “Heya baby! How’s about you bein’ my Valentine?” In fact, I was going to keep my mouth shut about it. You see, over the years, I’ve developed this great technique for getting over being in love with someone—a good skill to have if you fall in love as easily and as completely as I do. I’m like this bad mix of Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio all in one. It’s an especially good skill if you have ever found yourself inclined to fall in love with someone who, upon cooler inspection, would be a very inappropriate person to fall in love with. The first thing you do is don’t bloody tell anybody. The second thing you do is investigate them for flaws. Make up flaws. Magnify the fact that their hair is the wrong color. Explain to yourself how your parents would kill their parents because they’re pastoring a megachurch. Anything.

Do you know that my fiancée has no flaws? I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true. Oh, I mean, her GPA has dropped a little… down to a 3.9 or something. And she only came over and surprised me by cooking my dinner for me twice last week. But I’m talking about flaws here. I needed to know that she didn’t bathe properly, or that she had an obnoxious laugh. I needed to discover that she never wanted to have any children, or that she was a hard-core Republican who believed in abortion, but not the death penalty. I needed ammunition here. Do you know what I discovered? Valerie is the only woman I have ever met who can be accurately described by the 31st chapter of Proverbs.

I am so totally not exaggerating. I first heard somebody described as a Proverbs 31 woman when I was a freshman. We were taking this speech class, and at one point, every person who had to speak also had to have somebody introduce them. This one girl got up and was introduce by her girlfriend who seemed to come from an AME background. At least, during the introduction, I could hear the Hammond in the background. I can still hear her: “A woman of courage and truth, a Proverbs 31 woman!” And I thought, riiiight. Have you even read Proverbs 31? Nobody can do that. I’ve even heard and agreed that Proverbs 31 was actually a metaphor for “Wisdom” and it’s actually saying that a wise man is “married” to wisdom, and that it is wisdom that works so hard to keep him up. And then I met Valerie and tried to find fault in her.

I spent several days like this. On or around the 3rd day, when I found myself losing sleep and not eating properly and even moved to tears by considering her perfections, I decided I really ought to mention to her how I felt.

This actually proved to be a bit complicated.

The next morning was Sunday, and I resolved to skip my church and spend the morning finding hers. I knew the name of it, and I knew the general vicinity of it, so I just drove down there. I expected to find her car, park mine beside it, and step into the service where I would catch the tail end or so, and then we could go have lunch or something. It did not occur to me that there are approximately 13,000 members at her church. It took me half an hour to find a parking space. It took me 10 minutes to realize that finding her in that crowd would be pointless, and it took me another 15 minutes to find her car instead. Very shortly she came out.

We went to a place at the closest mall to eat, and had the most protracted conversation possible about our romance. Both of us were interested, and both of us were scared out of our minds. Since neither of us is as filled with guile as Frank Churchill, we had allowed the rumors to flourish at school about whether or not we were actually dating. When people asked us, we said no. End of story. But Valerie’s poor roommate (the one who introduced us) was constantly being buffeted by questions about us. Conversation slowly wound around to laughing about Julie’s poor consternation about what our relationship actually was. I tried to hint broadly that maybe we should redefine what exactly was going on between us. But what came out was something more along the lines of “are you confused about what we are?” “Of course not! We’re friends,” came the reply, brooking no discussion. So much for that tack. Clearly, she didn’t want anything more. But I really had to give her a straight question to get from her a straight answer. We went back to school and this kind of discussion went on for the next 6 hours or so. We’d exchange two sentences that were on-topic, recoil with half an hour’s diversion, and try again. It was awful. I think it was around 9 o’clock on Tuesday when we finally agreed that we were going to be “something more.”

It was another 3-4 months before we let it out that we were officially dating.

We got engaged:

I don’t really want to recount to you all the details of how I graduated and saved up for a ring and then immediately lost my job and had to live off my ring savings, how I got a new job and then borrowed from relatives in order to buy the ring. I do want to tell you that I am open to any and all contributions. But I don’t really want to re-describe how I managed to get her to pick her own venue in which to be proposed to, how she picked hiking over a garden walk, how she said yes before I even finished proposing. These are things you should already know. What fascinates me is the inward thing.

I had a relationship some years ago that ended very badly. Very badly. I did not know that it was even possible to end a relationship so badly. In one quake, everything which could be shaken was shaken. I had to re-evaluate everything, from my belief in the existence of God to my function and purpose in life. I did get a warning from God about it. He said that he was going to take me back down to powder and start from scratch. He’s taken a few years to accomplish the rebuilding process, a process which did not take the path I expected at all. The first thing he took away from me was also the last thing he restored to me: a wife.

It’s breathtaking when I really stop to think about it. No really. As in “it’s hard to breathe.” There she is. Over there. The other part of me. In English, the story goes that when God created woman and showed her to Adam, the first thing he said was Whoa, man! In Hebrew it reads better: The Hebrew word for “man” is “ish” (pronounced eesh). The word for woman is “ishah.” So when Adam first saw Eve (since he was obviously speaking Hebrew), he said “Ish! Ahh!” It’s that sigh of relief that I’m experiencing now. Tensions that I didn’t even know were in me are uncurling.

I called Valerie one day recently, when I had suddenly realized that all the old dreams in me hadn’t left me. It has come to my attention that I am an inbound radical. There is nothing worth doing that isn’t worth overdoing. And the plans I have for life, for family, for career, are all radical ones, diverging from the norm. They’re still there and if I’m really going to live my life, I’m probably going to intimidate and offend a lot of people. Maybe even people’s family. I hope not. But chasing the truth is more important than appeasement. With knot in stomach I related these thoughts to her. She told me, “It doesn’t matter. No matter what, I chose you. My job is to be a counter-weight to you. Every thing you’ve told me so far, I’ve agreed with you. And everything you dream up in the future, no matter what I think, I will pray about it before judging.” Well, those probably aren’t the exact words she said, but I’m sure I got the thoughts right.

The best image I ever heard for a marriage relationship was that each of us is a cog in a machine. Your spouse is the one God has placed to run next to you, and they have to fit you in every way. Well, I am a strange and uneven cog, but my darling—she who is my beloved—she fits me perfectly.

I am so sorry.

This is not what I meant to say. I have a lot of things I’d like to say, as soon as I can set myself down enough to say them. But right now I’d like to say to the whole world, on behalf of the body of Christ that I am so sorry.

I’ve been living in a bit of a bubble my whole life. Honestly, I really liked my bubble. I grew up in a family with no TV and no radio. Well, we had a TV and radio, but nobody was allowed to use them. I attribute this fact to my mother. We’d attempt to have the TV on and she’d come home and hear it and cry out, “I hear stupid! Turn it OFF!!” Needless to say the TV wasn’t on much.

Since then I have spent something like 8 years in and out of colleges, ministry schools, and the like. For the most part I have been either too poor or too cheap to really find out what was going on in the broader circles of the church and the world.

I’ve had a few inklings. I was aware that, for the most part, the church has been ineffective in reaching the world of today. From the external perspective, it seems like a lot of this has been because the world has been getting increasingly slick, while most of the church just can’t seem to acquire the funds to put on that kind of a show. Deeper inquiries usually come to the conclusion that there is a substance, called “vival” which we used to have and may one day acquire again, a sort of “re-vival,” if you will.

I hear a lot of people praying for that, expecting that, proclaiming that. REVIVAL IS COMING!! They’d say, like it was just around the corner. I remember my roommate my freshman year coming back from a church service he’d been to where some famous minister or another had proclaimed that IT was coming at the next meeting, like some magical fairy dust that was going to sprinkle down on the congregation and then spread to the rest of the world. Tom was impressed, but I tried to mask my unbelief. I don’t remember if anything ever came of that expected service.

Later, when I was at ministry school, I was talking with my friend, who was telling me that his primary purpose was to pray for and facilitate revival. At that time, I had the opposite problem. My church was so darn vived that I performed no useful function. My question was then, what do you do when there are no needs? I was beginning to think that the world was neatly divided into two groups: We had the world, which had already pretty much decided that they liked “sin” and “fun” more than they wanted Jesus, and we had the church, which had God and all the spiritual answers, but hadn’t really become quite cool enough to get people to peek in.

Lately though, I’ve been a little more out in the world, and I’ve taken enough time to quiet my heart to stop talking and start listening. And I’ve listened to the Spirit of God, and I’ve watched people, and I think I’ve come up with a few observations:

First, people are sheep. This was a shocking discovery for me. I know, we hear it all the time, but it was a real revelation for me, because I’m not a very good sheep. I’m more of a moose. I like my kind and all, but I’m really kind of a loner, and if you listen to what I say, it’s usually really big and kind of goofy. So when I ran into normal people growing up, they didn’t seem like sheep to me. They seemed more like wild dogs. They travel in these great big packs, all doing thing, and automatically forming a hierarchy, and they’re kind of aggressive. And if you’re not the right breed, they’ll rip you to pieces. But they’re really sheep. They travel more in herds than in packs—packs roam all over the countryside, while herds stay in the same place until there’s nothing left to eat.

Second, sheep get scared really easily. They’re not aggressive, but when they feel threatened and there’s nowhere to run, they do butt into you and try to bite you. I thought I was being ripped into because I was the wrong breed. I was getting butted and bit because I was scaring the sheep. Apparently I wasn’t getting the TV memo on how normal people act.

Third, sheep need a shepherd. They want a guy to tell them how the world works, and soothe them, and take care of everything for them. They want an authority figure who can do authority figure things and hold their hand every step of the way.

Fourth, we don’t have enough shepherds. I’m really convinced of this. Most of the people who are set up as shepherds are really hirelings. I mean, they’re not all that bad. In a tight spot, a hireling is better than nothing at all. But the hireling doesn’t leave the 99 to find the one. A hireling conserves resources and moves on. A hireling makes a mental note not to go next to the cliffs from now on.

I’m saying all this because my roommate convinced me to buy an antenna this week. We’re going halves on it, so it’s no big expense or anything. Actually, we’re probably going to take it back. I barely got 12 channels on it. And most of those were fuzzy. But one of those channels that came in pretty clearly was a Christian station. I didn’t even know they made those. I was pretty impressed, so I stayed to watch.

I about gagged twice. These were well known ministers, in fancy suits, leading congregations mounting in the thousands, and they kept saying things that were just wrong. A lot of them were prosperity message issues, that I thought we had gotten over at least a decade ago. But it was all bad. Very entertainingly said, but…wrong! Sometimes I could even hear what they were trying to say and exactly where it was leavened with the stuff of hirelings.

And this is how I know I’m called to be a pastor (no matter what excuse I may make tomorrow)—it kind of made me mad. If Christians are the very possessors of the only word of God, how come what the world sees is this? The truth has been out for 2000 years. Hope and a pure life in Christ Jesus has been available for quite some time now. How is it possible that we keep forgetting? Why are there so few shepherds? Why is the unleavened Gospel so hard to get a hold of? Why is it that when a man is broken and hurting and alone in his house, it’s easier to acquire quality ography than quality preaching? Why is it that, for the man on the street, it’s easier to get someone to lead you to a meth lab, than to the presence of God? Is God so hard to find?

I think maybe He is. He’s as hard to find as fresh fruit at a convenience store. You go in there, and all they’ve got available is that “fruit juice flavored drink” stuff, which you know is made up of 10 percent fruit, 60 percent water, and 30 percent high fructose corn syrup. It isn’t as if the real stuff is harder to make. It just costs more.

So I wanted to say I’m sorry. I had no idea things were so bad. I had no idea we had such a dearth of good Christian teaching. I thought people were rejecting the gospel because they didn’t want the truth. But it turns out that, in a lot of occasions, the gospel hasn’t even been being preached. Or when it has been, the delivery has been so shoddy that it scared the sheep. Jesus said to beware the leaven of the Pharisees, and to this day we still think it’s because we don’t have enough bread.

So I want to make this promise to you (whoever “you” is, in the great big public void): I’m going to read my bible, and I’m going to deliver the obvious stuff. I’m going to say it as clearly and as simply as I know how. And I am sorry. I wasn’t doing it before because I thought somebody was already saying this stuff.

Pardon me while I take this moment to preach. I’ve been working at this ministry, and I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about theology and there’s one thing I’m very tired of—I’ll call it “get to heaven” Christianity. It’s this bizarre unscriptural idea that when you get saved, or become a Christian, or however you want to put it, you get a ticket into heaven and you get to admit yourself into the fellowship of other believers, but essentially your life doesn’t really change.

I hear this phrasing all the time: “Now you’re going to heaven, and you’re saved, but just because you’re saved doesn’t mean you aren’t going to sin anymore. We’re still human, and we still fail, but God forgives us our sins. It’s not that Christians don’t sin anymore, but Christians are forgiven.” I think this displays a view of grace that is fundamentally flawed. Understand, I don’t think that when you convert you suddenly become superman, able to leap over temptation in a single bound. We are still human, and we do still sin. But God help me if after 10 years of Christianity, I’m still sinning in the same way that I was before I became a Christian.

Let me put it this way: The Olympics is going on this summer in Greece. Imagine for a moment that you turn the TV on and watch the gymnastic events. Imagine that there is some there who executes every event flawlessly. She gets a perfect 10 in every event. At the end of the competition, they hand her the gold medal, and what’s more, she’s broken every Olympic record they have. What do people say about this ? She’s very Graceful. I don’t think that’s supposed to mean that somebody else took her place when it came time to stand for the judges. It means that she has the miraculous ability to perform excellently.

The Greek word in the Bible that is translated “grace” does in fact mean a gift. The word is “charis,” from which we get the word “charity.” It is also the word used in 1 Corinthians to describe the “gifts” of the spirit: charismata. But nearly every gift mentioned in 1 Corinthians describes an ability that is not within the normal scope of human ability to perform.

What I’m trying to say is that would be impossible for salvation to be a gift merely of nomenclature. Yes, Abraham believed God, and God accounted it to him as righteousness, which is to say that God just sort of pasted the label “righteous” over him. But God also gave Abraham the ability to act like a righteous man. Yes, Abraham did still sin. And he did some doosies. But that thing where he rescued Lot and didn’t keep any of the treasure was pretty impressive.

Paul makes this classic statement in Philippians 3: “Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me.” And to hear some people talk, that means that none of us are ever going to make any major improvements. We’re just supposed to press on, I suppose, for the sake of pressing on. We’re just to demonstrate our faith by working on it, but without the hope of ever actually getting anywhere with it in this life. Paul goes on to say that anyone who is mature in Christ should think about it that way, that he should never claim to have attained it, but should always be pressing on. And then in verse 16, he says, “Only let us live up to what we have already attained.” Which communicates to me that it is possible to attain at least some level of righteousness in this life.

“The wages of sin is ,” but sin brings wages, not an annuity. You don’t get the of sin in one lump sum after you die. Instead you walk out that every day. Sin brings its own suffering. Most people know the wages of sin now, in their lives now. They carry their own hell with them. So what great threat is it to know that when they die, they’ll go to a place where life is pretty much the same as it is here, perhaps a few shades darker? And what great promise is it to know that, that if they believe on Jesus, they will go to a place whose goodness they can’t really imagine?

Let me make this clear: If righteousness were only attainable once you get to heaven, I wouldn’t want to go there. I would ask God to blot me out of his book. What good is a God who can only set you free from sin, who can only make you righteous, once He puts you in a place where sinning is not possible? What kind of weak and powerless God is that? For this Christ died for me? So that once He’s weeded out all the bad people and put all the good people in a perfect environment, then we can finally stop sinning? Let it not be so!

I don’t believe that it is so. I believe that the cross of Christ was far more powerful than we currently imagine. No, I don’t believe that we will ever attain perfection in this life. Quite honestly, I don’t know that we will ever fully attain the perfection of God even in heaven. We are finite; he is infinite. Revelation describes a scene where 24 elders are forever sitting around the throne of God, constantly saying “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God almighty.” I believe that every time those elders look up, they see a new aspect of who God is, and they fall back on their faces, crying “holy!” At that rate, it may take an infinity just to perceive the holiness of God, let alone to attain it. Nevertheless, to follow Christ is to become like Him, and I believe that He gives us the power to become like Him, even as he gives us the ability to perceive how holy He is.

And because it’s who I am, let me end with another geometry illustration. Xanga won’t let me draw much, so please forgive me while I try to describe it. In your mind, draw a line going up and a line going to the right, so that they meet in the bottom left corner. The vertical line represents some imaginary measurement of how much a person is like Jesus. The horizontal line represents your daily walk. On the right hand side, draw an arrow pointing straight up. God’s perfection is infinite, so “having attained it” is infinitely ↑ that-a-way. Hopefully you’ve seen a population curve. That’s the one that starts real close to horizontal, and gradually increases the slope so that, before long, the curve is almost pointing straight up. But the curve never actually attains to a vertical line. That’s how our walk with Christ is supposed to be. Every day is a little more vertical. No, you never quite attain to perfection. But, by God’s grace, every day is a marked improvement.