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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Prayer: The Heart of the Matter

Posted on July 13, 2022 by salooper57
Viewing time: 25 minutes (approximate)

In this message on 1 John 3:18-22, we learn what role the heart plays in prayer and how it can sometimes hinder our prayers from being answered. Yet, there is hope, for “God is greater than our hearts.”

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The Prayer We Repeat Over and Over

Posted on July 9, 2022 by salooper57

In the church circles in which I have moved, and lived, and had my being, people sometimes speak of “a life of prayer.” They have in mind a person who prays more frequently than others. But beyond a life of prayer there is a life that is prayer. As was said of Francis of Assisi, “He seemed not so much a man praying as prayer itself made a man.”

The prayer that is our life can contradict the prayer that is our words. For example, a person may say, “Hallowed be thy name,” while their life cries, “Honored be my name.” They can recite with their mouth, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” even as their life pleads, “My authority be established, my desires be done.” Though they pray, “Lead us not into temptation,” their life declares, “Get me as close to temptation as possible.”

A person’s life is a prayer, a request, and possibly even a curse. It is the prayer that we repeat over and over, parrot-like, to the heavens. It is our real voice. If God were to translate what that life is saying – for one’s life is saying something, and God hears it clearly – what might it be?

What God hears some people pray in their true voice is, “Leave me alone. Just leave me alone.” Others say, “Let everyone adore me. I would be god.” Some people’s lives repeat idiotically, over and over, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.” Others say, like a broken record, “My will be done, my will be done, my will be done, my will be done…” to all eternity.

On the day of judgment, the real message of our lives will be dug out of us, and we will hear, beyond any shadow of a doubt, our true voice. We will know what prayer our lives have been repeating all along. What a farce it will seem to us then to remember how we punctuated our life’s unceasing mantra, “My will be done,” with the pious refrain, “If it be your will.”

A person’s life is a prayer which God hears and understands. Sometimes he hears a person’s life requesting twenty different things simultaneously, and all of them contradictory. They say thatthey want wisdom yet, when God gives it to them, they refuse to take it. God is prepared to do remarkable things in them and for them, but they are not ready or willing for him to do it. Their divided soul is demanding contradictory things.

What can be learned from this? We can learn that the divided soul, set on one thing even as it “prays” for another, is a problem for all of us – for the pastor and the parishioner, the sinner and the saint. In one sense, the job before us is to bring the life we live and the prayers we speak into agreement. As the two converge, we will see many more prayers answered, and we’ll remain hopeful about those that aren’t. Throughout the history of the church, the people who have been known for their answered prayers were men and women whose lives and prayers most consistently said the same thing.

What can be done about this? We can ask people who know us well to describe to us what they hear our life saying. We can ask, “If my life were a book, what would be its theme?” These friends will see and hear things we miss, things we need – but might not really want – to know. And yet we need to know them.

We can also set about bringing our life and our prayers into alignment. Or say rather, we can tune our prayers and life to the same pitch. This is not accomplished by tuning them to each other, which merely makes a person consistent, but by tuning both our lives and prayers to God and his ways, which makes a person beautiful. Then our prayers will be more consistently answered, and that has been God’s intention all along.

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Getting Married This Summer? You Need to Know This

Posted on July 2, 2022 by salooper57
Photo by RF._.studio on Pexels.com

When I was a kid, I hated to go to the doctor’s office. My doctor was a tall man who always wore a white coat and seemed to have an affinity for hypodermic needles. The only redeeming value I could find in Doctor Schafer was that he kept Highlights Magazines in his waiting room. And the best thing about the Highlights Magazines was the Hidden Pictures page.           

There was a big picture, and everyone could see what that was. But there were also smaller pictures hidden inside, waiting to be discovered. The big picture might be of a farmer’s market but, hidden in the umbrella, was a slice of pizza, and there was a porpoise in the clouds, and an envelope on the boy’s shorts’ pocket.

In a wedding, there is the big picture – “the joining of this man and this woman in holy matrimony” – which everyone sees. There is the bridal party, the beautiful bride, the nervous bridegroom, and all the flowers. But there are smaller pictures hidden here and there throughout the ceremony.

The wedding ceremony is haunted by something so old it could be a ghost – and some people have presumed it is dead and gone. It is the principle of covenant. It materializes at one place in the wedding ceremony, disappears, and then shows up in another. We might not realize it, but almost everything that happens in a wedding is built around the idea of covenant.

Ancient covenants included a sacrifice, which served two purposes: it provided the feast which celebrated the covenant and brought the parties together (the wedding reception does that today); and it provided a warning to the covenant partners. It was a way of saying, “If I don’t keep my covenant vows, may what happened to this sacrificial animal happen to me.” That is why there is solemnity as well as joy in the wedding ceremony.

Where are the covenant pictures hiding in a wedding ceremony? First, in the guests. The officiant welcomes the guest with words like this: “We have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining of this man and this woman in holy matrimony.” You, the guests, are one of those hidden pictures. Guests are witnesses to a covenant.

At the heart of every wedding ceremony are the covenant vows that will be kept no matter the cost: “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until they are parted by death.” There are no disclaimers here, no back doors for escape; just promises.

By making such promises, the couple extends their reach into an unpredictable future and make one thing certain: they will be there even when being there costs more than they want to pay. A promise, as Lewis Smedes says, “creates an island of certainty in a sea of uncertainty.”

Photo by wendel moretti on Pexels.com

In ancient covenant there was always a sign – a token that revealed to the world that two parties were in covenant together. In the marriage covenant, the rings are such a token. They let every other guy and gal the couple meets know that they are already in covenant with another.

Even the taking of hands is a hidden picture of covenant. The person making the vow takes the other person’s right hand in theirs. Taking right hands – the handshake – is a carryover of covenant.

Most people understand that it takes the power of love to hold a marriage together, But few grasp the power of marriage to hold love together. There will be times when a couple keeps their promises not because they feel affection for each other – that’s not what they’ll be feeling– but because they entered the covenant of marriage before God and witnesses.

But when we do that and keep doing it – when we love because it is our responsibility – we get to cherish as our reward. We can love even when we don’t cherish but we cannot cherish if we do not love. Experience teaches us that what we choose to love for years we get to cherish forever.

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