What it Takes to Change: Hope for a Better Future

Posted on May 20, 2021 by salooper57

How do people change? How will we? There are three elements that must be in place for genuine change to occur and to last. If you’re going to change in a way that leads to even better changes and does not lead back into the bondage of old habits, these three elements must be in place.

First, you have to see the benefit that change will bring. You have to think it, feel it, want it, dream it, daydream it; you have to live with a vision of what your life will be. Without that hope, change won’t last.

We see this throughout the Bible: John presents the vision of being like Jesus to his readers and then adds, “Everyone who has this hope in him” – that is, everyone who lives with this vision – “purifies himself, just as he is pure.” The hope, the vision of a future that has not yet materialized, will draw us into change. The author of Hebrews speaks about how hope anchors us to a future, keeps us from slipping into self-indulgence and laziness, and keeps us diligently pursuing God’s promise (Hebrews 6:11-12).

Paul writes that we are able to say “’No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions…while we wait for the blessed hope…” (Titus 2:12-13). In other words, even established habits can be changed when we are possessed by the vision of a better future.

I have written about my mother when she was in her twenties. More than forty years later, after my dad died, I suggested she move to be near us. Before my dad got sick, he was talking about moving near us, and after he died it seemed even more important for my mother to move here. She thought that was prudent, so we had her up numerous times to do some house-hunting.

She found something wrong with every house we looked at. I eventually came to the conclusion that she didn’t really want to move, didn’t want to leave the house she’d lived in for 40 years, or the church she knew or the friends she loved.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think she had a genuine desire to be near us but couldn’t envision what life here would be like. She had no compelling vision. We hadn’t painted a sufficiently clear picture of going out to dinner with new friends, being part of the women’s ministry at Lockwood, having dinner at our house a couple of nights a week, going to the boys basketball games and tennis matches, having someone to mow her lawn and take care of things around her house. She could see what she would be leaving and see how much work was required to make the change, but she couldn’t see the benefits. She had no hope, no vision of a life here.

Something similar lies at the root of the failure of many Christians to make the changes that lead to Christ-likeness. Researchers have found again and again that there is little difference in lifestyle between the average Christian and the average non-Christian: there exists a parity in the percentages of both groups regarding substance abuse, addictions, divorces, and unethical behaviors. How could that be? Is it because Christians don’t really want to change?

I don’t think so. At least, that’s not the whole story. A real Christian really wants to change, but without a compelling vision of the future, without a “living hope” (as St. Peter puts it), genuine and lasting change will not happen, and many Christians have no such vision.

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Can People Really Change?

Posted on May 19, 2021 by salooper57

The Christian life is one of change: “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Paul describes the Christian life as one of change from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18). We are to be transformed (which is the verb form of the word metamorphosis) by the renewing of our mind (Romans 12:2) and conformed to the image of God’s Son (Romans 8:29). If you are a Christian and you are not already just like Jesus (which, I think, describes all of us), then, change is in your future. God intends to keep changing you until you are just like his Son; he’s making you like Jesus. That means changes in the way you talk, the way you think, the way you relate to others, even in what you desire.

One of the biggest problems in the Christian life – in life generally, for that matter – is that people want their circumstances to change but they expect to stay the same. They want a better marriage, for example, but fail to make a deliberate and determined choice to change. They seem to think, though it’s hard to see how this could really be true, that they will somehow drift into positive change. That’s like sitting in a boat on a river above a waterfall, hoping you will drift in the opposite direction.

I know alcoholics who have stayed sober for decades, but they stayed sober by changing and continuing to change – by growing. But staying sober is not the only thing that requires change; staying Christian does too. It requires progressive changes, one leading to another, across the span of a lifetime.

If that is true, we’d better know what it takes for people to genuinely and lastingly change. Let’s say you don’t like the shape you’re in – either your geometric shape (which is increasingly pear-like) or your fitness shape (which is lethargic and unhealthy) – so you go on a diet and you lose 20 pounds. You (1) Look better; and (2) Feel better; but (3) Will regain that 20 pounds in a year, and probably 20 more, if your outside shape changes but your inside shape doesn’t.

Let me tell you the story of a young woman who worked in a restaurant. She was about 23 or 24-years-old when a man about her own age came into the restaurant. Before he left, he asked her to go out with him that night, and she agreed. It was a warm summer evening, and he took her to a beach that was crowded with twenty-somethings. Everybody was having fun, listening to music, swimming – all the things twenty-somethings do.

When they got to the beach, he got a cooler out of the trunk that was filled with beer. When they found a place on the beach, he opened up the cooler and had one. Then another. He shared his beer with the people around him, and drank with them, one after another. He got so drunk that he and a guy he’d just met wandered off and didn’t come back. The girl, who was new to the area, had to ask someone to take her home. That was their first date.

It wasn’t their last. He came back to the restaurant, apologized, promised it would never happen again, and got her to give him a second chance. Before long, they’d become an item. Not too many months down the road, he asked her to marry him. She later told me how he phrased the proposal: “If you marry me,” he said, “I’ll change.”

Dumbfounded, I said to her, “And you said ‘Yes?’ What were you thinking?” If they had come to me to officiate their wedding, I would have turned them down. But she did say yes and married him. So, do you think he changed? No. He kept drinking. Kept staying out all hours of the night. Kept disappointing her for years.

I know all this because the woman who told me this story, many years later, was my mother. The man was my dad. He eventually changed, and changed greatly, but only because, in the midst of tragedy, he gave his life in a deliberate and determined way to Jesus Christ.

(Next: What is takes to change.)

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Bury Your Idols

Posted on May 16, 2021 by salooper57
Photo by Suvan Chowdhury on Unsplash

(Posted with permission from Kevin Looper, who preached this sermon at Lockwood Community Church in Coldwater Michigan on May 14 and 15.)

From time to time the Scripture writers will take a step back, look at the big picture, and give us a critical appraisal of mankind as a whole.  Before the flood, God looked down from heaven and “saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5).  King David reflects sadly in Psalm 14 that, even in his time, “All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is not one who does good, not even one.”  Sometime later the prophet Micah cried out to God, “The faithful have been swept from the land; not one upright person remains. Everyone lies in wait to shed blood; they hunt each other with nets. Both hands are skilled in doing evil…” (Micah 7:2-3).

St. Paul noticed that, as time flows on, the corruption of the human soul has only increased and deepened, if that is possible.  At the end of the first chapter of Romans, Paul says that people have become “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity” (Romans 1:29).  And, as if that were not enough, “they invent [new] ways of doing evil” (Romans 1:30) Now, in these last days, mankind has reached the very bottom of the pit.  “They have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy…” (Romans 1:31).

What could bring humanity to such a dark place?  Created in the image of God, provided with both natural and divine revelation to guide us toward what is right—yet still we have fallen from the truth.  We are more than just corrupt.  We are broken.  We do not work right anymore.  Humans, who were made as the crowing achievement of God’s creation, to rule and subdue all things under the authority of God, have devolved into people who “full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful” (Romans 1:29b, 30a).

So how did we get to this point?  Paul traces all the wickedness, sinfulness and brokenness of humanity to a single issue:  Idolatry.  “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25).

Kyle Idleman gives an illustration of a man who goes to see a doctor because of a bad cough that is keeping him up at night.  The doctor runs some tests and, sure enough, the man has lung cancer.  But rather than telling him the root cause of his cough, the doctor prescribes him strong cough medicine and sends him home.  Soon the man’s cough is under control, but the real problem is still left. The cough will return, along with even worse things.

Idolatry is the root cause of all of the symptoms of sin.  The envy, the deceit, the lust, the anger, the gossip—they all have their source in “the one great sin that all others come from”—idolatry (Idleman).  That is why the very first of the Ten Commandments is “you shall not have any other gods before me.”  As Martin Luther says, “We never break the other commandments without breaking the first one.”  This is why we are in such a woeful condition.  Humans have removed God and set up idols in their hearts—the results have been disastrous.

But if this is true of humanity as a whole, would it not also be true for families?  The family is the foundation of society, but the structure of the family has been crumbling and breaking apart for years now.  Divorce numbers continue to climb, and more and more couples are choosing to cohabitate rather than marry. More than half of children in America are not raised in a household with both biological parents.  But this is simply the fallout from the fissures and cracks that have been tearing families apart through the centuries.  The disrespect, contempt and lovelessness between husband and wife. The lack of affection of parents and the disobedience of their children.  Yelling, greediness, workaholism, rebellion, unfaithfulness, selfishness, bitterness, resentment and unforgiveness has come to define normal family life.  Do you ever wonder why it is so hard for families to get along?  So hard to live with the people that you care about the most?  All the problems of the family have a root cause:  idolatry.  Whatever people might actually say or think about the primacy of God in their families, the problems and sins in our family relationships will always reveal if we have replaced God with an idol.

In the ancient world, images of the gods were made out of wood and stone and given names like Baal and Asherah and Molek.  The gods were divided into classes:  there were cosmic deities of sun and sky and water, national gods that ruled over countries, and smaller family gods that protected and watched over the home.  There were gods that specialized in money, work, sex, family planning, war, and future success.  Really, the idols of these gods were a means to an end—they were a means to making life go as people wanted it to go.  A means to getting what you desired, securing your well-being and protecting you from your fears. Though the names of these ancient deities have been forgotten, the same gods continue to be worshiped all across the world and their images are now on TV and billboards instead of etched in stone. 

An idol is anything that people value more highly, trust more deeply or desire more passionately than God. Tim Keller talks about it like this: “An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, ‘If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure’.”  People often get the mistaken idea that idols are usually bad things—bad habits or addictions.  Actually, idols are usually good things in life—good things that have been raised to the level of ultimate things.  Something becomes an idol when you can’t be happy or fulfilled without it.  People can take even the best things and make idols out of them.  Our careers can take God’s place of primacy in our lives.  Ministry can become an idol.  Even our families and spouses and children can be given the place of ultimate importance.  Often, the higher and more noble the idol is, the more powerful and destructive it will become. 

As an act of worship to our true gods, we will always make sacrifices.  Those who make an idol out of money and career will sacrifice their time, their health, and even their families for its sake.  Those who idolize romance or sensual pleasure will sacrifice their integrity or responsibilities.  Parents who make an idol out of their own children and families usually end up devastating their families by their unrealistic expectations and unforgiving attitudes.  People will be willing to lie, cheat, abuse, slander, and steal in the name of their gods. How could they do these things?  Because their idol is of ultimate importance and all things in their lives are used to support and protect it.  Do you see how dangerous it is to put anything in the place of the Creator—even good things?  We become slaves to the things we worship—but God is the only good Master. 

In the ancient world, families passed their gods down to the next generation.  The gods of your father became your gods—it becomes your responsibility to sacrifice to the idol and provide for its needs.  And even today, idols become a family affair.  People often speak of “generational sins” – that rage, or marital unfaithfulness, or drug use gets passed down from one generation to the next.  But the same generational sins come from the same generational idols.  When the parents worship the gods of money or pleasure, the children are dragged into the same values and mindset.  These are the only gods they have ever known—whatever their official “religion” might be.  Until we throw away our idols and serve the Living God, our families will most likely continue down the wrong path.  The symptomatic sins of our idolatry will haunt our children and grandchildren for generations to come.

The difficulty with a sermon like this is that it is extremely hard to discover if we have any personal idols that we have put in the place of God.  We may know that we care about something too much or spend too much time focused on a certain thing, but the “god” behind those things is usually veiled from us.  Idolatry darkens the understanding.  Paul says that, “although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:21).  Tim Keller says that, as a pastor, he has had people come up to him and confess that they struggle with almost every kind of sin.  But he cannot recall a single person ever coming up to him and saying, “I think my greedy lust for money is harming my family, my soul, and people around me.”  His conclusion is that “greed hides itself from the victim.  The money god’s modus operandi includes blindness to your own heart.”  The same is true with other idols as well.  The sins that follow from them are obvious.  The idols themselves are usually hidden deep within the recesses of our hearts. 

There are a few signs that we have cherished idols in our hearts, even if it is difficult to see what they might be clearly.  First, our thoughts will effortlessly go toward our true god when nothing else is demanding our attention.  What fills your daydreams and fantasies about the future? Where your god is, there your thoughts will be also.  Second, where does your money go?  We will never think it a waste to overspend on our idols.  If you need to constantly exercise self-control to not overspend on something, that is an indication that there is something other than God that has become of ultimate importance to you.  Third, what circumstance or loss would fill you with despair and disappointment?  Or what brings forth anxiety and worry in you?  That may be an indication that you are attempting to secure an idol.  Fourth, what fills you with explosive or overwhelming emotion?  Out of control rage, fear, discouragement or depression is a tell-tale sign that you are clinging to something that is not God to bring about your personal well-being. And lastly, remember that willful sins are always done in the service of false gods. 

Interestingly enough, as we peel back the layers of idolatry, we see the how deep it really goes.  It may seem to you that a dream home has become an idol in your heart, but really, the deeper desire is not the house, but the status or comfort it will provide.  And status we seek might really be about obtaining the love and respect we never received as children.  But no matter what the surface idol may be, underneath it all, at the bedrock of every idol, we find the worship of self.  Idolatry is nothing more than selfishness and pride!

It is no wonder that families fall apart when idols are at the center!  When everyone in the family is really worshiping themselves and laboring to protect their own interests, what other result could there be?  Even parents who make an idol of their own children do it for themselves, not for their children.  But they are so blinded and buried under their idolatry that they could never see it.  The only way to ensure that you love your family well and do what is best for them is to make God first in your own life.  When you put God above your wife or your husband, you love them even better than you would have if you idolized them.  When you prioritize God over your children, you bring them up in an environment where they can thrive in the soil of true, agape love. 

The story of Jacob in Genesis illustrates this well.  He had lived in the land of Harran with his wives, children and extended family for many years.  Their life was filled with idols and family gods.  It was normal life.  The family was full of deception, greed, back-biting and jealousy.  When Jacob brought his family back into the Promised Land, they brought their gods with them—the physical idols of wood and stone as well as the idols that controlled their hearts.  In Genesis 35 they make it back to Bethel—the place where Jacob had had a vision of God on the stairway to heaven.  In the vision, God had promised to bring Jacob back safely to this place, and now Jacob had finally come back.  He had left Bethel with nothing and he came back with family and wealth and he knew that the God of Bethel had made it happen. 

So, Jacob told his family to bring him all of their idols and the jewelry that showed their devotion to those gods.  He took it all—the idols that defined who they were and what they were about.  He took them and he buried them under a great oak tree at Bethel.  It was a powerfully symbolic act. By burying the family idols at Bethel, Jacob was declaring that God was now the only God they would serve and worship.  He was putting their family’s old life and old ways to death and making a fresh start as the people of God. 

Sometimes we need to do exactly what Jacob did for the sake of our families.  We need to take those things that have defined us and our family through the generations—the preoccupation with money, the obsession with appearance or reputation, the hunger for success, the addiction to pleasure—we need to take those idols and bury them in the sight of our whole family.  When Joshua led the Israelites back into the Promised Land, they were instructed to break down the altars of the Canaanites and burn all their Asherah poles.  What are the altars and idols that you need to break down and burn so that you no longer make sacrifices to them? 

But it is important to know that idols cannot just be removed.  They must be replaced.  In order to successfully root out an idol from your heart and from the center of your family, it must be dethroned by a higher power, a more captivating vision, a more precious treasure.  Usually the reason people make good things into ultimate things is not because they love and appreciate those good things too much.  The real issue is that they love and appreciate God too little.  He is not big enough in their eyes.  If we really knew God as he is—his power, his beauty, his love, his riches and kingdom—we would not be caught up in the worship of lesser things. 

I read once that if the distance between the sun and the earth (93 million miles) were the thickness of one sheet of paper, then the distance between earth and the next closest star would be a stack of paper 70 feet high, and the distance across our galaxy would be a stack of paper 310 miles high.  And our galaxy is but a speck of dust among the billions of galaxies that make up the universe! Yet God spoke it all into existence with a word.  He’s a God whose size you literally cannot exaggerate!” 

But that is not the most impressive thing about God.  God is not only big in his abilities and power, but he is big in love.  God has created billions of people throughout history for the express purpose of loving them.  He knows each of our names.  The Bible says that God knows every hair on our head and thought of our mind.  His love is so great that Jesus—the person for whom and through whom everything in the universe exists—let himself be humiliated and murdered on a cross so that you would come to know God and live life with him. This God is really the only thing big enough to be the center of our lives.  He is big enough and loving enough to contain everything that we are and everything that we long for.

Worship, then, is the key to replacing our idols.  We must first break them down and bury them, then we must replace them by worshiping the true God.  Singing and praise is an important part of worship, but it is only one part.  In both Hebrew and Greek there are two words for worship.  One has the meaning of bowing down and humbling oneself before God and the other has to do with performing acts of service to him.  “Worship is to engage ourselves with, dwell upon, and express the greatness, beauty, and goodness of God through thought and the use of words, rituals, and symbols” (Willard).

So how can you make your home a place of worship so that God becomes central in our own lives and in our family?  We will need to make some practical changes in the way we live.   

  1. The Scriptures often talk about giving your first fruits to God—the first and best part of your crops.  We can put God first in our lives by willingly giving him the first fruits of our time.  Devote the best part of your day (whatever that might be) to prayer, Bible reading and worship.  The first fruits of your money.  Before you spend on your wants and even on your needs, set aside money for the poor and for the work of the Kingdom and do not change your mind to use it for yourself. If at all possible, give in secret. And the first fruits of your energy.  The older we get, the less energy we have.  But we can devote the best part of what energy we have to doing what is good and serving others.  We can use the rest of our energy for the other things we enjoy doing or have to do.
  2. Find ways to display God’s goodness and beauty in your home.  What will draw him to your mind?  Paintings, verses on the wall, music playing from the radio, a garden for prayer and meditation? 
  3. We cannot forget about prayer and personal Bible reading.  Prayer re-centers the mind upon God and Bible reading reminds of who God is, what he has done, and what he requires of us.  Try reading a small Gospel story every night at family dinner or praying before bed with your spouse. 

If idolatry ruins the humanity and the family, what might the worship of the true God do to heal and restore it?  When we worship God and serve him rather than our idols, the light of the Master is shone in our faces and we reflect his beauty and glory like the moon reflects the sun.  The beautiful secret is that God is not found idols of wood and stone, but of flesh and bone.  We are made in God’s image—in other words, we are his idols!  We reflect the glory back to the only God when we are worship the Creator rather than created things.    

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Feeling Misunderstood? You’re Not Alone

Posted on May 15, 2021 by salooper57

According to a Pew Research Center survey from 2020, nearly 6 out of 10 Americans feel misunderstood. This figure holds across racial and ethnic lines, with 58 percent of black, 55 percent of Hispanic, and 61 percent of white Americans all saying that they are misunderstood.

The Pew survey categorized these misunderstandings under the headings: misperceptions about political views, social and economic class, personal interests, and personal characteristics. The study found that Americans over 50 are most likely to think it is their politics that are misunderstood. People under 50 are most likely to think that others misunderstand their personal interests and characteristics.

What effect does the sense of being misunderstood have on personal contentment and social stability? And it is not as if the misunderstanding is limited to people of other races and ethnicities. Younger Americans feel misunderstood by older Americans and vice-versa. Employees feel misunderstood by management. Men feel misunderstood by women and women by men. Religious people feel misunderstood by the irreligious and vice-versa.

To be misunderstood can cause significant pain. To be misunderstood continually can lead to despair. Many marriages have ended and work relationships crumbled because one (or both) of the partners felt misunderstood.

In an article for Harvard Business Review, Heidi Grant states bluntly: “We’re all terrible at understanding each other.” The trouble is that most of us don’t know it. We assume that we understand other people, including those with whom we are in conflict, yet we conclude that they do not understand us.

There are many reasons for this. We always understand people within a context, and that context is frequently framed around what we desire to happen. Because of this, we can approach a person as either an instrument or an obstacle in achieving a goal. When we do this, we only understand as much as we need to understand to accomplish our objective, which is never enough to understand the person.

Grant, a social psychologist at Columbia Business School, says that people, when asked to describe themselves, list different traits from those their friends ascribe to them. There is a gap between who we think we are and who others, including those who know us best, think us to be. Because we don’t notice that gap, we can easily stumble in our attempts to communicate.

Misunderstandings are exacerbated by our tendency to enshrine our first impressions of a person, even though they were inexact, incomplete, or plain mistaken. People are far too complex to be correctly understood by a first impression. Everyone we know is bigger on the inside than on the outside.

Our bodies are too limited to express all our thoughts and feelings precisely. Our limited repertoire of words and expressions are obliged to handle the vast score of our feelings and thoughts like a keyboard’s 88 keys are required to handle a transcription of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings for piano. The same gestures must express dissatisfaction, displeasure, and deliberation, the way the same keys are needed to represent the violin, viola, and cello. This too can lead to misunderstandings.

We have all been misunderstood. We are in good company. The Bible frequently represents Jesus as misunderstood. The Gospel of John records that his own brothers misjudged him. The religious authorities deemed him a heretic. The political authorities regarded him as an agitator.

Even his friends misunderstood him. After one such misunderstanding, many of his followers left him. In a scene filled with pathos – or am I misunderstanding? – Jesus asked those who remained if they also intended to leave. I suspect that one of the “Man of Sorrows” chief sorrows was being misjudged and misunderstood by those he came to help.

If the greatest communicator of all, the one referred to as “The Word,” was misunderstood, where does that leave the rest of us? It leaves us certain that we will be misunderstood yet praying, as did St. Francis, that we might “seek rather … to understand, than to be understood.”

And, like Jesus, it leaves us comforted by the truth that the heavenly Father understands us. For he, understanding us as he does – the good and the bad – loves us anyway.

(First published by Gannett.)

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Handling Anger: Tapping into the potential of the spiritual life.

Posted on May 14, 2021 by salooper57

(Part 4 in a 4-part series on handling anger.)

We cannot manage anger in isolation. We must deal with the entire package. I’m not saying we won’t need to be intentional about getting rid of anger. We will – but that is not where we start. We start by upgrading to the “new self” package.

To do that, we’re going to need (verse 22) “to put off the old self.” This is not a piecemeal improvement program. The aorist tense verb Paul uses suggests a clear and decisive act. He’s not talking about slow progress in the right direction but a radical choice to change. This is only possible if we have faith in Jesus.

We cannot take off the old self without something taking its place, which is why we need, verse 24, to “put on the new self.” This new self is the real you, the one God had in mind when he made you. That fretful, whining, angry self that pretends to be god is not you – not the real you. The real you is patterned on God himself (created to be like God, verse 24) and is the you you’ve always longed to be: free, easy, fulfilled, loving.

Again St. Paul uses an aorist tense verb. Putting on the new self is also a decisive action. I choose to be the person God made me to be, to stay connected to the Programmer so I can continually receive his critical updates. With this new self we are capable of doing things we couldn’t do before (verse 32): to be kind (to our kids, for example); to be compassionate (to those in need); to forgive (those who injure us).

Think of Corrie Ten Boom forgiving the Nazi guard who tormented her in the concentration camp, or Mrs. Calata, the South African woman who forgave the policeman who burned her husband alive and murdered her son in a drunken, bigoted rage. Where does forgiveness like that come from? It comes from God and it is in you too if you belong to Jesus and have been given his Spirit. (However, if you have not come to God through Jesus, you don’t qualify for the new self package and will not have access to it.)

It is true that putting off the old self is not a matter of slow progress and neither is putting on the new self. These are decisive actions. We don’t drift into them. But once we have decided and acted, the slow (sometimes painfully so) progress begins, as we learn how to actually use what God has given us.

Most of us haven’t learned to use a tenth of the potential embedded in our Office 365 software or our phones. There is so much more that could be done with them than we are doing. But that’s nothing compared to the mind-boggling potential God has placed in the new self.

I mentioned that an early step is to put off the old self – decisively choosing not to live out of that old programming. A later step is to put on the new self – another decisive act. But there is a critical step in between that mustn’t be missed: we must, verse 23, be renewed in the attitude of our minds.

“Renewed” is a passive mood verb. That means we cannot renew our own minds. They must be renewed from outside – rather like the critical updates renew our computer’s operating system. But if we can’t do it, why command it? Because the renewal of the mind only happens as we connect and cooperate with God. How do we do that?

There are many ways to do that. I will concentrate on those that make use of the Scriptures. Join a small group that studies the Bible. This has been shown to make Bible study more effective. Join a Sunday School class at church or take a course online or from a good school. But the single best thing you can do is read the Bible prayerfully which is to say, read it while connected to God. If you don’t know how to connect to God while reading the Scripture, ask someone whose spiritual life not only impresses you but also encourages you if they have any suggestions.

If you have been controlled by anger, confession will be an important help in putting off the old self and putting on the new. When we admit to a spouse (or former spouse), to children, or friends that our anger has hurt them and that we have sinned against them, change can happen. Maybe not in the relationship – this is not a manipulative tactic (and don’t make it one) – but certainly in us.

This is biblically sound and powerfully transformative. We should humbly ask for forgiveness (not merely say we are sorry); but we cannot demand or even expect forgiveness. The person may withhold it – that’s up to them.

Even if they do withhold it, God will not – that’s up to him. He will be with us. He will change us. Failure cannot stop us. Only staying away from God can do that. Don’t stay away.

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Anger: Part of an Integrated Package

Posted on May 13, 2021 by salooper57

(Part 3 in a short series of posts on handling anger responsibly.)

Let’s say you are ready to change. You are done making excuses. You admit that you have an anger problem. Great! You are ready to ask forgiveness from those you have hurt and make amends where possible. I commend you. And now you are ready to go toe to toe with your anger, face it head-on, and use your willpower to become a calm and peaceful person.

Please don’t. That will only make you angrier. You need to go about this God’s way, with him in charge, not you. And you need to understand what is involved.

So, here is one thing we need to understand. Anger is integrated into the system – your system. You can’t go and pull it out while leaving everything else in place. When I was a kid, TVs had vacuum tubes. On Thursday, when your TV stopped working, you took off the back, pulled the tubes, went down to the drug store (where they had a tube tester), found the bad one, replaced it, and were watching My Three Sons that evening.

We might think that we can do the same thing with anger: just pull it out of our lives like one of those tubes. We want to stop being angry but we don’t want anything else to change. But that won’t work. Here’s why.

Anger is one component in a package deal. It is integrated into the system. It isn’t isolatable – we are not wired like that. It is not enough to deal with anger; you have to deal with you – the whole package – and, more importantly, you have to deal with God.

I recently ordered a new computer and, when I get it, I will install Microsoft Office. That means I’ll get PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Publisher, and One Note, which are integrated into one package and share common files. Now here is what we need to understand: Anger is part of the “old self” package, mentioned in verse 22: “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires…” Call it “Old Self 365,” which comes with various programs included: an orientation to sensuality (verse 19), falsehood (verse 25), anger (verse 26), stealing (verse 27), and inappropriate comments (verse 29). These programs all share files (verse 31): rage, anger, brawling (the word refers to loud talk or shouting) and slander (which could be translated as insults), with malice.

You can try to isolate one component – like anger – and delete it, but the system makes backup copies. You are programmed, so to speak, to automatically restore the old settings. If you really want to change the way anger works in your life, you need to change the entire operating system. In other words, you cannot stay the same person, only without the anger.

We’ve tried that … and it hasn’t worked. We delete files but were automatically reset to the restore point of bitterness, rage, and anger. This happens because we have ignored the Programmer. Alienated from God (verse 18), we enter the world with the “old self” package pre-installed. And the diabolical Hacker can use anger as a backdoor through which to gain access to our interior life. Hence Paul’s warning: Do not give the devil a foothold.

That is the bad news. Here is the good news. There is a “new self” package available. It, too, is an integrated system. Some of its components are listed here as well: It comes with a righteousness and holiness orientation (verse 24), and includes truthfulness (verse 25), altruism (verse 28), grace (verse 29, where the phrase, “benefit those who listen,” is literally, “give grace to those who listen) and runs on a platform (verse 32) of kindness, compassion and forgiveness. It, too, is a package deal.

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Handling Anger: The Beachhead

Posted on May 12, 2021 by salooper57

(This is part 2 in a short series of posts on handling anger responsibly.)

Anger has a wide blast radius. All of us are affected by it and some of us are controlled by it. It causes us to do and say things we would never do and say if anger weren’t present. That makes us anger’s slaves. Others of us have been controlled by someone else’s anger. We refrain from doing what we should because anger is present. That’s another form of slavery.

Some of us have gone beyond being controlled by anger and have become addicted to it. We need it. It enables us to feel. It motivates us to act. Anger is our drug of choice. We want it to course through us. It makes us feel righteous and powerful. It assures us that we are not witless sheep or frightened slaves … even as we bleat in unison with anger and jump to obey its commands.

Being dependent on anger is like living on a houseboat just upstream of Niagara Falls … without an anchor. Unless you do something quickly, you’re going over. Making excuses is not doing something, nor is blaming others for our anger. We need to stop making excuses and start taking steps.

Step one: Understand what expressing anger wrongly does: it rolls out the red carpet and invites the devil to take up residence in your life and home. This is Ephesians 4:26-27: “‘In your anger do not sin’: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.”

The word the NIV translates as “foothold” has a military feel in this context. The idea is that the devil is looking to establish a beachhead from which he can launch attacks against us and our families.

Anger provides that beachhead. And when anger continues over time, it gives the devil a veritable base of operations in our lives. To yield to anger, to sin in anger, gives the devil place.

But there is another side to this that we need to understand. When we refrain from sinful expressions of anger, we give God place. Listen to Romans 12:19, where Paul uses the same Greek word that is translated “foothold” here: “Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room (give place) for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” When we are angry but don’t sin, we give God a place from which to launch his campaign on our behalf. The place of anger and temptation can becomes the site of God’s operations in our lives. Turning to God when we are angry can be one of life’s most important turning points.

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Handling Anger: The Begotten Consumes the Begetter

Posted on May 11, 2021 by salooper57

(This is the first of several posts regarding anger and what to do with it.)

I believe we were living through a pandemic before any of us had heard of COVID-19. Like COVID, this malady is communicated from person to person. It devastates families, harms economies, impacts businesses, and creates mental health problems. It has taken untold lives and has torn the social fabric at every level, from families to nations.

This calamity has affected everyone; it is truly pandemic. It has been estimated that COVID-19 will cost the world economy 21 trillion dollars. I suspect that is pocket change compared to what this other pandemic has cost the world.

What is it? It is anger.

Anger is not a nameless, faceless woe. For millions of people, anger has a name: dad. For millions of people, anger has a face: mom’s. Anger can even be embodied – God help us – in our own bodies.

What would you think of a person with COVID-19 who knowingly went into a setting where vulnerable people lived, say a nursing home, and began transmitting the virus? You would be horrified. But when it comes to anger, that happens every day as people knowingly spread it to their families and friends.

Perhaps you don’t think that anger is that bad. After all, the Bible doesn’t say that anger is a sin. So what if I get angry? Everyone gets angry from time to time. It is the human condition.

I couldn’t agree more. Everyone gets angry. It is no more a sin to get angry than it is to get COVID. But to knowingly spread that anger to your family and friends, to infect them – that is another matter.

COVID-19 is airborne; it spreads through talking, coughing, and singing while in close proximity to others. Anger spreads in a different way: through words (both spoken and printed), gestures, profanity, condemnation, and contempt. Anger is so contagious that it doesn’t even require personal contact. Ground Zero for an anger event can be thousands of miles away. It spreads over bandwidth, through text, email, Facebook, and the (so called) news media.

We’ve all heard of people and corporations making money from COVID. Guess what? People peddle anger for the same reason. Many talk radio folks, media stars, writers, and news personalities are experts at making money from anger. They spread it intentionally to fund their extravagant lifestyles. May God have mercy on their souls.

Jesus warned about anger and made it clear that, if we ignore his warning, we will face serious consequences. Because he knew anger is transmitted through contempt, he prohibited it categorically. Calling someone names – idiot, fool, stupid – is comparable to going into the nursing home with the coronavirus and coughing on all the residents.

Maybe you think I am exaggerating. Anger isn’t as bad as all that. Years of being positioned to see into families and seeing the fallout from harmful (sinful) expressions of anger – the brokenness, anxiety, depression, division, hatred, mental illness, and more – has taught me otherwise.

Anger has a wide blast radius. The one person who is always injured in the blast is the angry person himself, who suffers physically, emotionally, and spiritually – anger gets in the way of knowing God. Anger is frequently devastating to the person who is its object. It can even affect bystanders who witness it. Anger leads to two familiar ends: the reproduction of anger and the generation of fear.

Anger is self-perpetuating. Over the years, people have admitted to me that they have an anger problem (usually after serious damage has already been done). Nearly always, the person whose anger has damaged relationships and ruined lives had an angry parent. Anger begets anger – and it’s reproduction rate is out of sight.

And when it comes to anger, the begotten sometimes consumes the begetter. I have known parents whose anger bred anger in their children, and now the children’s anger is eating the parents alive. And of course those children have children – and the cycle goes on.

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You Can’t Argue with That

Posted on May 8, 2021 by salooper57

In years past, I would occasionally tune into The McLaughlin Group on PBS. The show featured John McLaughlin and four fellow-journalists, two of whom were politically liberal and two who were politically conservative. McLaughlin sat in the center, tossing questions to the panel like a skipper throwing chum to bait sharks.

Then the battle would begin, panelists interrupting each other, voices growing louder and more belligerent. McLaughlin himself would frequently bark, “You’re wrong,” at a panelist with whom he disagreed, assuming that his own reasoning was incontrovertible and his conclusions self-evident.

More than once, my wife asked me, “Why do you watch this? All they do is yell at each other.” Channeling John McLaughlin, I bluntly disagreed. But she had a point.

In my own experience, nothing has ever been settled and no one convinced because I raised my voice. Facts are good. Arguments are not. Arguments spawn arguers, not answers.

If that is so, our nation is in a bad place because nearly everyone is raising their voice. We are the most argumentative people in generations. We now have technological pillboxes from which we, unseen, can send a volley of argumentation at our opponents while remaining shielded from their counterarguments. At the same time, there are fewer listening posts than ever before—and most of those we do have are abandoned. We simply never have to hear what our opponents are saying.

Contrast that with the Emperor Antonius, adoptive father to the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. He was said not only to tolerate frank opposition, but to be “pleased if somebody could point to a better course of action.” Such openness to reason has always been uncommon. In today’s climate, it is astonishing.

My wise attorney friend John Lewis recently shared with me a warning a theology professor once gave his class: It is rare for someone to change their minds about any theological position for which they have argued. What is true in theology is true in any discipline, whether economics, politics, or nutritional studies.

Something happens to us psychologically whenever we argue for a position. A switch is thrown, as it were, which closes the door on new information. It is not merely that we can no longer cross over to the other side; we can’t even adjust our position on our own side. The switch that closed the door has locked us into place.

This is why we should be careful not to argue. Should we find that we cannot do otherwise, we must at least put ourselves in a place where we are forced to listen to our opponents’ arguments and understand their positions. The proverb is right: “The one who gives an answer before he listens—that is his folly and his shame.” It is also a sign of intellectual cowardice.

This is not to say we should not have convictions – far from it. And we can, and sometimes should, make those convictions known. But we don’t need to argue to do so. We need to clearly articulate our positions and explain our reasons for holding them. Society needs more than reasoned arguments. It needs reasonable people.

I write this as a recovering – and sometimes lapsing – debater. What vodka is to an alcoholic, a good debate is to me, though debates are a stimulant, not a depressant. They wake me up, get me going, give me energy. They don’t dull my senses; they sharpen them. Unfortunately, they also sharpen my tongue. Arguments, like alcohol, can destroy relationships.

I’ve come to think that people are not talked into the truth. Occasionally, though, they can be listened into it. That never happens when we argue.

Because I am a recovering debater, I taped a quote from the 19th century Scottish churchman Alexander Whyte on my pulpit desk: “Eschew controversy, my brethren, as you would eschew the entrance to hell itself! Let them have it their own way. Let them talk, let them write, let them correct you, let them traduce you. Let them judge and condemn you, let them slay you … You have not enough of the Divine nature in you to be a controversialist.”

I can’t argue with that.

(First published by Gannett.)

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My Sheep Follow My Voice

Posted on May 6, 2021 by salooper57

In John 10:6, Jesus uses a “figure of speech” (Greek, ) one that requires insight to understand the point. We may miss that point, perhaps not from lack of insight, but from lack of cultural familiarity. Jesus’ teaching here is clothed in a figure of speech, but it was very familiar clothing to Jewish people of the first century. It is not to us.

For one thing, it is about sheep, and everyone there and then – unlike here and now – knew something about sheep. For another, Jesus talks about shepherds, and not only did everyone know about shepherds, the Old Testament often used the word shepherd to refer to teachers and national and religious leaders. In this figure of speech, the sheep represent people like us, the robbers represent the religious leaders of the day, and the Good Shepherd represents Jesus.

I would rather be classified among the sheep than the robbers. It is not, however, a compliment to be compared to a sheep. I remember an old truck driver telling me that sheep are about the most stupid animals he had ever hauled. If allowed, he said, the sheep will congregate so tightly in a corner of the truck trailer that some of them will be suffocated.

The old Scot preacher, Andrew Bonar, once told how sheep in the Scottish Highlands wander off into the rocks and get into places from which they cannot escape. The grass on those mountains was sweet and the sheep would sometimes jump down ten or twelve feet to reach it, and then be unable to get back out. They would stay there until they had eaten all the grass. Then the shepherd would hear them bleating in distress. But he would have to wait until they were so faint that they could not stand, and then he would put a rope around himself, and go down and pull the sheep up out of the jaws of death.

Someone asked, “Why don’t they go down when the sheep first gets stuck?” And Bonar answered, “The sheep are so foolish they would dash right over the precipice and be killed!”[1]

Being compared to a sheep is not a compliment, and yet, are we not like them? How often people won’t go to God until they have lost everything and have no friends left. Before he can bring us back to himself, the Good Shepherd must wait until we have given up trying to save ourselves and are finally willing to let Him save us in His own way.

Jesus says that his sheep know and follow his voice. And note that word follow in verses four and five. The shepherd does not merely speak to us; he leads us.  e is going somewhere, and he wants us to go with him. We may think that the Good Shepherd only speaks to us while we are sitting stationary in church. Certainly he may speak to us then, but his intent is that we follow him into the world, into action, into service and noble sacrifice. He does not call us to vegetate in comfort but to follow in obedience.

[1] D. L. Moody shared this story

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