Why Wait: A Message on Prayer

Posted on August 15, 2022 by salooper57

This sermon, based on Abraham’s experience as detailed in Hebrews 11:8-13, helps us understand why we need to wait on God in our prayers, and how we can wait well. The key is to wait for God, not for things and to wait with God, not alone. Come and join us in the waiting room. God is already there.

Viewing Time: Approx. 27 minutes.

I was rushing around on Monday, trying to get things done in the most efficient way possible. I needed a haircut but first I had to stop at the bank so that I could pay for it. But before going to the barbershop, I needed to go to First Baptist Church to see the pastor for a minute and drop off something for him. I go to the barbershop five minutes early and Steve was ready for me. All was well in Shayne Land. On the way home I stopped to fill the propane tank for our grill. The order of my stops was calculated for time efficiency and fuel economy.

The place where I stopped for propane was on the way home; that way, I wouldn’t waste any time. However, the office staff person told me that there would be no one available to fill the tank for about an hour. So, I drove to Walmart to exchange the tank. It would cost more, but I was in a hurry.

When I got to Walmart, I dropped off the cylinder first to save time, and then headed for a check-out line. There were only three cashiers working, and the lines were long. I had already stood in the shortest of the lines for about ten minutes when an employee stopped and said, “Don’t shoot the messenger, but we need to close this line. You’ll need to move to another line.”

So, I went to the rear of the next shortest line and waited again. And waited. I finally got to the cashier who took my money. She called for a clerk to make the exchange but cautioned that it might take a few minutes. “A few minutes” was an understatement. I got a sunburn waiting for the clerk to come.

Waiting is not something I do easily. But if a person is going to learn to pray well, they must learn to wait well. This is a theme one finds repeated throughout Scripture. Even the greatest of God’s people needs to wait. Hosea wrote, “But you must return to your God; maintain love and justice, and wait for your God always” (Hosea 12:6).            

This is the prophet Jeremiah (Lamentations 3:20-25): “…his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” (If you cannot say, “The Lord is my portion,” you won’t say, “I will wait for him.”) “The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.”

To God Isaiah says: “Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him” (Isaiah 64:4).

Christians are, almost by definition, those who have “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven” (1 Thessalonians 1:9). Jesus left his first followers with instructions to “wait for the Gift my Father promised…” (Acts 1:4). The church didn’t begin by doing but by waiting.

Waiting is the rule, not the exception. St. Paul tells us that all “creation waits in eager anticipation for the children of God to be revealed…” (Romans 8:19) – and we wait with it. Waiting is a skill every Jesus-follower must master. This is especially true when we pray. Prayer is more like slow roasting than it is like microwaving. Rush it, take the prayer out early, and it won’t be done. The psalmist said to God, “In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation” (Psalm 5:3).

It is clear in Scripture that those who pray must learn to wait on God, but we are not good at it, and we do not like it. God’s Old Testament people were the same way: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it.” Instead of waiting on God, which requires faith, they rushed into action and missed the good things God had planned for them. “Yet,” the prophet says, “the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!”

I’ll mention two more things before we read today’s text from Hebrews 11. Even Jesus, the Son of God and Lord of men, has to wait. In fact, he is waiting right now. After writing about Jesus’s great sacrifice, the author of Hebrews says: “Since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool…” (Hebrews 10:13). Even Jesus waits.

God himself waits. In that passage from Isaiah, we read that all who wait for God are blessed. But just before that we read, “The Lord longs to be gracious to you.” I word “longs” (I understand) is the same one translated “wait” later in the verse. Even God waits.

There is no getting around it. Everyone waits. One man who did it well was Abraham, the man of faith. That is no coincidence, for faith is essential to waiting. Without faith, we cannot please God (as the author of Hebrews put it), but neither can we wait for him. When faith fails, we run ahead and try to force things to come out right on our own. We see this correlation between faith and waiting in the story of Abraham. He can help us understand the role of faith in waiting and the role of waiting in the lives of God`’s people.

Let me read what the author of Hebrews says about him in Hebrews 11, starting with verse 8.

By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. By faith Abraham, even though he was past age—and Sarah herself was barren—was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise. And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore. All these people were still living by faith when they died.

You heard the refrain “By faith.” The power to wait on God comes from God and reaches us through faith. Faith itself is not the power but rather the transmission line that conducts the power. The electricity in your house is not produced by the electrical wires that run to and within your house, but by the power plant. But when the wires are broken, you miss out on the power. When faith short-circuits, you miss out on the power, including the power to “be still and wait patiently for the Lord” (Ps. 37:7).

“Abraham, the man of faith” (as the Apostle Paul called him) was able to wait because he believed God; he trusted him. He was not so much waiting for things – land or descendants – as he was waiting for the Lord. Persons inspire faith; events and things do not. “Abraham believed God,” as the Scriptures repeatedly and emphatically state, and so he was able to wait.

Notice what we learn about Abraham’s faith in verses 8-10, which give us the when, what, where, how, and why of faith. We find the When in verse 8: “By faith Abraham, when called . . .” Faith is not something we manufacture within ourselves from our own resources whenever we find ourselves in need of it. Faith is voice-activated. It is triggered by God’s word. Nowadays, if you have the right software downloaded, you can speak to your TV and it will play your favorite program. Faith is like that TV. When people have the right download (God’s Spirit), God’s word activates faith. When God called Abraham, his voice made a faith response possible.

Abraham was capable of exercising faith when God spoke to him. That was the when. Next, we find the what of faith. The text says (verse 8): “he obeyed and went.” The what of faith has two components, one of which is the same for every believer and one of which can vary from believer to believer. Whoever you are, at whatever point in history you’ve lived, in whatever strata of society you’ve occupied, the what of faith is obedience. When Abraham received the call that makes faith possible, he obeyed.

The original language here is as economic as possible. It is just four words in Greek. English Expressing it in requires a few more: “By faith, having been called, Abraham obeyed.” You could substitute your name or mine (or any believers) for Abraham’s: “By faith, having been called, Jim obeyed.” “By faith, having been called, Jenny obeyed” or “Rob obeyed” or “Megan obeyed.”

The first component in the what of faith is a given that is always the same for every believer: obedience – “the obedience of faith,” St. Paul called it. The second is a variable, which can differ for different believers (or for the same believer at different times in his or her life). Abraham obeyed (the given) and went (the variable). Shayne obeyed (the given) and preached (the variable). Jim obeyed and forgave. Jenny obeyed and shared her faith. Rob obeyed and gave his money. Megan obeyed and went to visit her neighbor. Obedience remains a given for of all of us, but your “and blank” may be different from mine.

Now here is where we get into trouble. We overlook the first element of faith – the given, obedience – but insist on the second, the variable. Here’s what that looks like. The Lord speaks to me about giving a sizeable percentage of my income to the church for its fundraising drive. I hear him, obey, and give the money. All is right in Shayne world. But then I start thinking that other people should be doing what I did. If they don’t, they cannot be good Christians – and maybe they’re not Christians at all! I assume that Jim’s and Jenny’s and Rob’s and Megan’s “and blank” must be the same as mine.

This leads to an ugly legalism and to the judgmental spirit that Jesus strictly forbids. When it comes to the things Scripture clearly teaches, we should all be in unity. But in things the Scripture is not clear about, it is wise to leave room for diversity. And in the personal guidance we receive – the “and blanks” – we must expect diversity.

Next, there is the where of faith, which might better be called the wherever of faith. The end of verse 8 tells us that Abraham “did not know where he was going.” That is not surprising, for in faith there is always an element of not knowing. The unknown gives faith room to breathe and grow. The unknown may be about the where (as it was for Abraham) or it may be (and is frequently) about the how or even about the when or why, but there will be an unknown. Without it, faith has no opportunity to function. Yet we do everything in our power to eliminate the unknown. If we could, we’d wrap faith up so tight in a straight jacket of certainty that it couldn’t breathe.

Next, we have the how of faith: “By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.” The when and where and what inevitably lead to the how. If we hear God when he speaks, follow where he leads, and obey what we know, the how will eventually become clear. The danger for us is that we will demand to know the how before we say “yes” to the what. We may call that prudence or common sense, but it is a faith-buster. It makes faith impossible.

For Abraham, the how meant living like a refugee in the land promised him. Verse 9 says, “By faith he made his home [that translates a single verb that means he sojourned] in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents . . .” Had Abraham insisted on knowing the how before he said yes to the what he might never have left the city of Ur. But God always gives grace for us to live the how, even to thrive in doing so, when we say yes to the what.

Now we’ve come to the why, which we discover in verse 10: “For, he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” Abraham could live in tents like a refugee while waiting and praying for the land promised him, and the descendants to occupy it, because he was looking forward to the city with foundations. He could succeed in the insecurity of the present because he was certain of the security of the future. He remained confident, as only people of faith can, that God “rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Hebrews 11:6).

Abraham was taken by God into God’s big story. He was promised the Land and promised descendants who would dwell in the land, and a particular descendant who would bring blessing to all the people of the earth. That is a big story and big stories take time to unfold. Never forget that you too have been taken into a big story.

Now all of this raises a question: why did God make the promise so long before acting to fulfill it? Why make Abraham wait for the fulfillment of the promise and the answer to his prayers? Waiting is uncomfortable. Waiting is tedious. Pretty much everyone everywhere hates to wait. So, why not make the promise a few days – a few hours – before delivering on it?

For that matter, why make us wait at all? Why not answer us the moment we pray? If God operated that way, just think of strong our faith would be!

But would it? Does the child whose parent gives her everything she wants when she wants it become more trusting or more demanding? Does she develop the mindset that will help her become a compassionate, faithful, and strong person? The reality is just the opposite. Faith grows in the waiting. People are shaped in the waiting. It is a major component in character development. While we wait, the coming savior not only gets nearer to us, but we get nearer to him. There is a kind of spiritual magnetism at work. We get closer to him. He gets closer to us (James 4:8) and that changes us. The strength of that attraction continues to grow until the day when “Christ our life appears,” and we appear with him (Colossians 3:4).

God has us wait because it is in the waiting that we come to know him. Our relationship with him deepens as we wait. It was during the 25 years that Abraham waited that he grew so close to God that Scripture calls him “the friend of God.”  How did they become friends? They waited … together. Abraham didn’t just wait for God; he waited with God.

Another reason God also has us wait: it is during the waiting that his Spirit adjusts our prayers until they align with his will. (If you didn’t hear the sermon from June 19th, go on the website and listen to it. It is titled, Just Ask.) This alignment is not just a matter of praying for the right things but –more importantly – becoming the kind of person who can – and regularly does – pray for the right things.

Another reason we wait: God gets greater glory from receiving our trust than from answering our prayers. I’ve often heard people say things like: “Just think how much glory God would receive if my friend/family member was miraculously healed.” Yes, but he will receive even greater glory if you and your friend/family member continue to trust him – and even increase your trust – while you wait.

But how do we do that? It happens with us in much the general way it happened with Abraham. First, we hear God’s word to us. Remember that faith is voice (God’s voice) activated.) If, like Abraham, we obey his word to us, faith will grow. But we must expect to wait for things that we want badly, things that we are desperate to have, even things that God intends to give. Waiting is not the exception to the rule. In our broken world, it is the rule. Expect to wait.

Understand too that waiting does not mean wasting time. Abraham worked while he waited. He was a man of action and a man of faith. When we divide faith from work, we do injury to both.  Faith is the root; work is the fruit. Faith is potential energy; work is kinetic energy. Faith is the flame and works the light that proceeds from the flame.

Prayer is to faith what the light is to the flame. If you are having trouble praying – you are tired of waiting, beginning to doubt, ready to give up – it may be that you are waiting for God but not waiting with him. That’s what happens when we wait for things but not for God. It’s what happens when we wait for God but not with God. Come into the waiting room; God is already there.

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Are People Basically Good?

Posted on August 13, 2022 by salooper57

Christian theology has always been a hotbed of controversy. This is not surprising, for the one thing theologians do agree on is that God is incomprehensible. No one has the last word on God. No one has the last word except God.

Most theological controversies revolve around the nature of God, but one revolves around the nature of humans. Americans are used to hearing that people are “basically good,” but theologians are used to saying that they are “totally depraved.”

If someone were to ask me if I believed in total depravity, I would want to ask them what they meant before I answered. If they meant that there is no goodness in human beings, I would say that I do not believe in it. History, and the evening news, for that matter, record breathtaking acts of love and sacrifice, which only a fool would deny were good.

The great English apologist and man of letters C. S. Lewis rejected the idea of total depravity thus understood. He wrote: “I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature.”

Lewis’s reasoning was, as usual, spot on. But I, who have quoted Lewis more often than any other source, save the Bible itself, am forced to admit that the premise on which he founds his argument is faulty. He is assuming that total depravity means absolute depravity, which is not what most theologians mean by the term.

By “total depravity” few serious theologians mean that there is no good in humans. The “total” in “total depravity” does not mean that everything human is as bad as it can be but that nothing human is as good as it was meant to be.

Could human beings be worse? Yes, unimaginably, and horrifyingly so – the stuff of nightmares, the stuff of hell. Could they be better? Yes, equally unimaginably so – the stuff of dreams, the people of heaven.

Theologians believe that our reason is not reliable, our will has been compromised, and our feelings distorted. The highly integrated organism we know as the human being has experienced – and continues to experience – a system-wide degradation. Our bodies, minds, and spirits have been diminished to such an extent that we require outside help – God – to set us right again.

This is not to say that human beings, created in God’s image, are void of any goodness. It is to say that God’s image has been marred and humans are less good than they were designed to be. They do not always recognize the good and, when they do, they sometimes do not desire it. Even when they desire it, they frequently find they cannot carry it out.

But this diminishment of the human being is not only about recognizing and doing good; it is also about being well, about functioning (as it were) according to spec. Theologians not only say that we cannot save ourselves but that we cannot be ourselves, at least, not without God’s intervention.

The theological irony is evident. It took the Son of God to live a fully human life and to open the way for others to do the same. The rest of us have lived far below our potential.

Sin has distanced us from the Creator and that distance has diminished our capacity to think, feel, and love, in much the same way that distance from a radio station diminishes the quality of the music coming from our radio. As the distance increases, the music fades, becomes distorted, and devolves into mere static. Distance from God causes a similar breakdown in humans. Hence, “Christ died…to bring us to God.”

Humans are capable of profound love and sacrificial goodness even in our current diminished state. What, one wonders, would they be like if they were operating according to spec? It is open for anyone to find out, for that is the future of a redeemed humanity. The biblical witness is that those with faith in Christ are already being “renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” and eventually will be transformed in body as well.

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Prayer: Where the Battle Is Won

Posted on August 8, 2022 by salooper57
Approx. 24 minutes.

I don’t think I’ve ever begun a sermon with a quote from The Art of War before, but I did this one. Sun Tzu said, “Every battle is won before it is ever fought.” Jesus proved it true through life and death. In this message we look at how Jesus won the battle before him as he prayed in Gethsemane.

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The Key to Knowing Oneself

Posted on August 6, 2022 by salooper57

In one of the Bible’s best-known Psalms, the poet asks God a question that remains, even at our current stage in human development, unanswerable. “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”

The biblical writer cannot understand why God is interested in humans. Indeed, God goes beyond showing interest; he positively cares for them. In our era of self-worship, this seems an odd question. Why would God not care for humans, who are so intelligent, noble, and good?

That God should be interested in us has not always appeared self-evident. The ancient Greeks called the gods apathetic; they did not care about humans. In still older cultures, it was understood that the gods only created humans to be drudges, slaves to do their work for them.

The psalmist presents a much higher view of humans, which he has come to through an exalted view of God. Human achievements did not convince him of humanity’s extraordinary worth; God’s interest in, and care for, people did. He realized that humanity must be great, but he could not for the life of him understand why. How, he wondered, can God treat bunglers like us as if we matter.

It is worth noting that his question, “What is mankind?” went unanswered. Only God knows what humans are and he is not telling … yet. There may be a reason for that. Christians of the past said that God has hidden humanity’s greatness from it to save us from vanity. The implication is that humanity does not know itself; we don’t know who we are.

In my final days in high school, an English teacher divided the class into groups and required us to answer two questions: “Do you know who you are?” and “What are you going to do?” Afraid of looking foolish, I answered: “I know who I am and what I am going to do.” It is apparent now that I knew neither then. I did not have a clue.

Self-ignorance is not restricted to teenagers. It persists into adulthood and extends unto death. It is not limited to the naïve and the foolish but encompasses the experienced and the wise as well.

This is corroborated in the Scriptures. John the Baptist was approached by a cadre of religious leaders who were trying to gauge the purpose and orthodoxy of his ministry. They wanted to figure out what he was all about, so they asked him a series of pointed questions: “Are you the Messiah? Are you the prophet? Are you Elijah?” John strongly denied that he was any of these.

Nevertheless, sometime after John’s arrest and execution, Jesus told his disciples that John was the Elijah that prophetic tradition was expecting. Scripture records Jesus explaining, “Elijah has already come…” and adds, “Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist.”

The disciples understood, but John never did. If John – the man Jesus once praised by saying, “Of all who have ever lived, none is greater than John” – did not know himself, what hope is there for the rest of us?

What we do not know about ourselves always exceeds what we do know. Both the depths of human brokenness and the heights of human destiny are beyond our ken. Fortunately, human greatness does not lie in knowing ourselves, but in our capacity to know the Creator and be renewed in his image. In other words, our greatness is not dependent on our achievements – what we have done – but on our potential – what we shall be. And our potential depends on God.

Lack of knowledge leads to problems. Not knowing the train schedule, but thinking we do, will lead to one kind of trouble. Not knowing the disposition of a stray dog will lead to another. Not knowing oneself leads to even greater problems, though none are insurmountable. But not knowing God is simply ruinous.

It is ironic. The path of self-discovery begins by looking up, not by looking in. The key to knowing oneself is knowing God.

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They Prayed: Prayer Together (Acts 4:23-31)

Posted on August 1, 2022 by salooper57
Approximate 27 minutes
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Why God Wants People to Believe in Him

Posted on July 30, 2022 by salooper57

Most religions have some concept of salvation. This salvation might be expressed as life after death, heaven, enlightenment, Nirvana, or union with God. The way to salvation varies by the religion.

In some, the way to salvation runs through good deeds that purify the soul, which may include the performance of certain ritual acts specific to that religion. For others, salvation’s path lies along the death of desire. For Christianity, salvation is a gift of God received through faith.

Why faith? Why not good works or rituals, which are quantifiable? Why not intellectual attainment? For that matter, why not the utterance of secret and sacred words of power?

The Scottish New Testament scholar William Barclay suggested that anyone can exercise faith. One needn’t be smart, highly educated, or initiated into the mysteries of some secret sect. They can be impoverished or wealthy, young or old, male or female, slave or free. In other words, faith levels the playing field.

Barclay was clearly onto something. Most people cannot afford to go on pilgrimage. Multitudes are incapable of attaining the mental concentration necessary to meditate. Few will ever have access to the world’s deep mysteries. Faith, unlike these other paths of salvation, is open to all. It is genuinely egalitarian.

Barclay was onto something, but equal opportunity is not the only reason that salvation is by faith. Faith does something that meditation, ritual acts, and good deeds – the stuff of religion worldwide – cannot do. It was by breaking faith that humanity was lost. It is in the recovery of faith that human souls will be restored.

The biblical story is that the first humans broke faith with God. Because they failed to trust God, they were unfaithful to him. Because they were unfaithful to him, the faith they did have was diminished even further. They were caught in a self-reinforcing cycle that still goes on today.

By its very nature, unfaithfulness injures a soul. If I break faith with a spouse, a child, a friend – even someone I don’t know – I have delivered a soul-disordering blow to them. How many souls, I cannot help but wonder, have I thus damaged?

The connection the first humans had with their maker, the author and quintessence of life, was broken. They suffered a soul injury so severe that a part of them died. They were left faith-less and someone who has no faith – in God, self, or others – will eventually become faithless to God, self, and others.

Faith is connective. When we trust a person, we cannot help but connect to that person. It is by trust that humans connect to God, “whom to know,” as Jesus once said, “is eternal life.”

God’s choice of faith as the requirement for salvation was not arbitrary. Faithlessness broke humanity, and it is faith that will put it back together. Faith is so powerful that faith in a friend or even in a celebrity can be a salve for the soul. Faithful marriage and lifelong friendship possess extraordinary possibilities for soul restoration.

But only a faith connection with the maker of the soul can fully restore the soul—can save a person. God’s astounding faithfulness, expressed in the self-giving Christ, gives people someone they can genuinely trust. Faithfulness, wherever and in whomever one finds it, will enhance a life, but trusting the faithfulness of the infinite God will save it “to the uttermost.”

In the original Greek of the New Testament, “faith” and “faithfulness” are translations of a single word. They are two side of the same coin. The difference between faith and faithfulness is one of perspective. Trusting someone is called “faith.” Remaining trustworthy is called “faithfulness.” Remaining faithful to a person in whom we have no faith is problematic at best, and exercising faith in someone toward whom we are acting faithlessly is a psychological impossibility.

God, through the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, makes it possible for us to have faith, and to be faithful. All this is captured in St. Paul’s brilliant line: “It is by grace you have been saved through faith.”

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A Different Way to Pray (Romans 8:26-27)

Posted on July 26, 2022 by salooper57
Viewing Time: 26 minutes (approx.)

Prayer is not the private, highly individual thing wethought it was. There is a work crew that assembles when we pray. Or, say rather, a dream team: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God invites us –in all our weakness – to join his team.

Prayer, as Paul thought of it, is more like basketball than archery. It’s done as a team. We don’t stand alone aiming at a target. Instead, we work the prayer down the court toward the goal. It doesn’t all depends on us—and we should never think it does. That would be like playing in a three-on-three basketball tournament with teammates LeBron James, Stephan Curry, and Nikalo Jokic, and thinking that it all rests on me! We need the team as we pray. Without God’s help, we’ll never move our prayers toward the target.

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Abortion Is an Important, but not an Ultimate, Issue

Posted on July 23, 2022 by salooper57

(Read time: 4 minutes)

Roe v Wade has finally and, from a constitutional perspective, quite rightly been undone. This is what pro-life activists have campaigned for, prayed for, and dreamed of since the Supreme Court’s ruling early in 1973. Dismantling Roe has been the goal, the brass ring, the grand prize.

Many people within the pro-life movement have dedicated their lives to overturning Roe. Abortion has been, for them, the epitome of evil and the symbol of all that was wrong with America. If only Roe could be overturned, they believed, all would be well.  

After nearly fifty years, they have got their wish, but evil has not been banished and America is still not right. The Court made the right decision, from my perspective, in overturning Roe. But instead of ending abortion, the Dobbs ruling simply moved the fight to the states, where it is being waged more heatedly than ever before.

After the Dobbs’ ruling was announced, abortion rights activists warned that no woman is safe in America. They vowed to fight on in the courts, in state legislatures, and in the Congress of the United States. It is ironic that, in 1973, these same activists or their predecessors felt that they had grabbed the brass ring, had won the grand prize.

Human beings have a habit of taking one issue and making it the be-all, end-all of human wellbeing. But brass rings are not worth as much as we think, and rarely is the grand prize as grand as we imagine. This is true whether one is a conservative or a progressive, a pro-lifer or an abortion rights activist.

There is a memorable line early in The Book of Jeremiah. The biblical prophet expresses God’s dissatisfaction with the people he has made and redeemed: “My people have committed two sins,” he says. “They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

In arid Israel, with its seasonal droughts, cisterns were important. Water stored during the rainy season would be needed when things got dry. But a broken cistern would not hold water. It would dismay and disappoint eventually.

When people ascribe ultimate meaning to penultimate things, they set the stage for their own disappointment and disillusionment. They also set themselves up to be manipulated by those for whom their cause is an instrument of self-promotion. This has certainly been the case on both sides of the Roe debate, where politicians mouth their fiery rhetoric with one eye on their base and the other on the latest poll.

This is not to say that issues like abortion are unimportant or that people should not take a principled stand – quite the contrary. I am opposed to abortion. My wife has gone further. She, along with many others, has worked to help people who are pregnant. They don’t guilt people or manipulate them, the way someone might who merely stood for an issue. Instead, they stand with the people and love them.

Abortion, it is important to understand, is one symptom of a larger problem, a branch but not the trunk. Even if the branch needs to be cut, only a fool would stand on it while they sawed. And the idea that cutting one branch will bring down the tree is pure fantasy.

This penchant for mistaking penultimate things for ultimate ones goes back to the dawn of human history. God, in the Jeremiah passage quoted above, says that people have committed two sins, not just one. It is true that they have dug cisterns that don’t hold water. But that is what people must do when they have left the spring of living water, when they have walked away from God himself. That was the original sin, the foundational error. The broken cisterns are secondary; they are branches, not trunk.

With humans displaced from God (and, therefore, from each other), secondary errors are unavoidable. In the absence of God, humans invest penultimate things – many good and necessary in themselves – with ultimate standing, to their own detriment. As G. K. Chesterton noted long ago, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing; he believes anything.”

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Unanswered Prayers: The Rest of the Story (2 Cor. 12:6-10)

Posted on July 18, 2022 by salooper57
Viewing Time: Approximately 24 minutes

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What Do You Think of Church People?

Posted on July 16, 2022 by salooper57

Read time: 4 minutes.

My family didn’t go to church when I was a child, yet I had an image of “church people,” and it was a positive one. Church people looked like old Mrs. Fenwick, who led a vacation Bible school class I once attended. She was grandmotherly, kind, and welcoming.

After I came to faith and joined the church, I learned that not all church people are like Mrs. Fenwick. I knew a pastor, for example, who was never seen without a tie, whose wife always referred to him as “Reverend R.”, and who, to my recollection, never smiled.

If one were to survey people on the street with the question, “What are church people like?” I suspect their responses would be more negative than positive. I think this may be true even of those who never attend worship services and do not personally know any church people. It may be truer of them than of others.

Some of this, it seems to me, is due to decades of distorted representations of church people by the media. As soon as viewers learn that a character in a television drama is a church person, they can assume that they will turn out to be a spiritual grifter, an adulterer, or even a murderer. The religious hypocrite is a stock character in entertainment.

But grifters, adulterers, and other hypocrites have been in church longer than they have been on television. The Bible is quite open about this. The first revelation of hypocrisy in the church didn’t come from CNN but from the New Testament Book of Acts.

It is hard to blame people for thinking that church people are all hypocrites. If the televangelist scandals of the eighties and nineties weren’t convincing enough, we have the sexual abuse cover-ups of the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention—and whichever group comes next.

If it is hard to blame people for believing that church people are hypocrites, it is even harder to convince them that they are not – that the true church is no more a haunt of hypocrites than the bar or the barbershop. And how will they ever figure this out when they do not attend church or know church people?

Another church person trope, as prevalent as the hypocrite, is the stuffed shirt, the religious bore. Unchurched people believe that their churched counterparts are prigs. Unchurched intellectuals presume they are dolts. Church people are straight arrows, stuffy, and prudish. Fifteen minutes in their presence feels like an eternity.

Once again, this image has gained traction because there is some basis for it. Most churches have a handful of these people, but experience has taught me that it is rare to find more than a handful. Yet the image persists and is pervasive. Outside the church, people believe this is the rule. Inside the church, they know it is the exception.

People outside the church will never be convinced otherwise unless they come and see for themselves. If they were to hang out with people from my church family – and my church family is hardly unique – they would wonder where all the prigs had gone. The assumption that all church people were cast in the same mold would vanish. They would find interesting people from a variety of backgrounds with a wide range of interests.

My church family has people who have been to college, been to prison, and been to both. We have people who like their art in oils on canvass and people who like theirs in ink on skin. We have people who love Bach, people who love the Beatles, and people who love the blues. Some of our women are little old ladies, some are entrepreneurs, and some are homeschool moms. We have lifelong Republicans and lifelong Democrats. What ties us together is a shared commitment to follow Jesus and be God’s people.

The true church is not defined by politics, race, or economic class, but by faith in Jesus and love for each other. That so many people do not know this is a detriment to the church and a loss to everyone else.

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