Humans Are the X-Factor: God’s Biggest Risk?

Posted on March 5, 2019 by salooper57

God has painted on a very big canvas. But do you know what the centerpiece of his creative genius is? It’s you and I, and the people around us. As far as we know (though there is much we don’t know), the stars and nebula and galaxies are all backdrop. He created seas and skies and plants and beasts, but the crown of his creation was man.

Humans are the X-factor; they were (from our perspective, at least) creation’s biggest risk, and its biggest reward. No one can fault God for thinking small. He had great plans for the humans – great plans for us – and he still does. The story is still unfolding, and we have a part to play.

Because people bear the image of God, they are tremendously valuable. The potential for humans – whether newborn child, world’s oldest man, or inmate serving a life sentence – is inestimable. Every person you know is priceless: the phone solicitor who calls at dinner time, the dentist, the restaurant server, the genius, and the person with intellectual disabilities, all are infinitely worthwhile.

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The Difference Between Failure and Success: Learning to Pay Attention

Posted on March 2, 2019 by salooper57

I was driving on a primary north-south route before dawn. A half-mile away I could see a car coming toward me with his bright lights on. When he went down a hill and disappeared from sight, I turned my bright lights on hoping that, when we got closer, he would see me turn mine off and would get the message to turn his off, too.

As we approached each other, I turned off my brights, but the other driver didn’t get the message. So I flashed my lights at him. He still didn’t turn off his bright lights. I didn’t know if he was being stubborn or if he just didn’t notice.

I frequently drive the country roads after dark or before dawn and I have notice that approaching drivers frequently forget to switch off their brights. I flash my lights at them as a reminder, but some – maybe a third – still don’t turn theirs off. Are they being stubborn? I doubt it. I think they simply don’t notice.

But how can you not notice a car approaching you at fifty-five miles per hour, flashing its lights? What could the other driver possibly be doing? Is he talking on his cell phone, or changing CDs or adjusting the heat? Is he dozing? Or is he just lost in his own thoughts? (It is a little disquieting to think that three out of ten drivers are so distracted that they do not notice when someone flashes lights at them.)

When it comes to driving a vehicle, paying attention could mean the difference between a safe arrival and an accident. When it comes to one’s spiritual journey, the same holds true. I think many of us crash in our spiritual journey simply because we are not paying attention. God is flashing his lights at us, so to speak, but we don’t notice. 

As there are rules in driving, so there are rules in the spiritual life. As there are skills in driving, there are skills in the life of faith. But knowing the rules or mastering the skills is not enough to guarantee success, whether one is on the road or following the spiritual path. We must also pay attention.

As a pastor, I have met people who know all the rules. They can quote them at length. Ask them a question – for example, “What does the Bible say about forgiveness?” – and they will give you three rules, all with biblical support.

Other people have the skills down pat. They read the Bible every day and understand what they read. They pray. They meet with others weekly to worship. They know how to use the Bible as a map to lead someone to faith in Christ.

Some people know the rules and have developed the skills, but miss a satisfying life with God, nonetheless. Why? Because they aren’t paying attention to him. They are lost in their own thoughts, pursuing their own agendas, or playing with their newest toys. And, because they are not paying attention, they keep having “accidents.” Their words damage others, they miss God’s will, and they drive their life through various barricades, right into temptation.

What is the difference between the person who pays attention and the one who does not? One decides that paying attention is important, intends to do so, then acts on his intention. The other does not. Most people who don’t pay attention to God never intended to. They think of this life as their own, and God as an option to which they can attend or not.

Paying attention – to the road or to God – is a habit and, like any habit, can be formed. We can get into the habit of paying attention to God by devoting time daily to listen to what God has to say, especially through the Bible. We can talk – and listen – to God at specified times during the day. We can adopt a posture like this: “Lord, I am listening. Speak to me today through the Bible, through other Christians, and even through chance meetings. Speak to me through what I read and the circumstances around me.”

The difference between failure and success is sometimes a simple matter of paying attention.

First published by Gatehouse Media

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The Artist

Posted on February 28, 2019 by salooper57

Over sixty times in Scripture, God is either said to have created or is referred to as the Creator. The biblical writers clearly thought that God’s role as creator should be kept in mind. He is sculptor, painter and composer, and the universe is his block of marble, his canvass, and his staff paper.

His “Creation Symphony” is the archetype for every form of musical expression, from Bach to Dylan to Eminem. Every composer since has merely drawn from his material. Every composition since has been but a “Variation on a Theme.” He made birds and streams sing, waves and waterfalls crash. The wind croons; the oceans roar; the leaves on a billion trees dance, and all his creatures keep time to the music.

God is the most daring, most imaginative artist in the universe. He has filled the seas with creatures of every shape and size and brilliant color. He paints his birds and fish and sunsets with hues so vivid and lines so bold that our most Avant Garde painters seem tame by comparison.

I have a book titled Galaxies by the science writer, Timothy Ferris. It includes photos taken from observatories around the world, and they are stunning. There is the Horsehead Nebula, draped like a king’s charger in royal reddish-purple, raring up at the stars forever. The Orion nebula looks as if it exploded a moment ago, when our heads were turned. Then there is the reddish orange Eagle Nebula, blazing like an astronomical forest fire, and measuring 70 light years in diameter. Since one light year is approximately 6 trillion miles, the Eagle Nebula measures about 420 trillion miles from side to side. God paints on a big canvas. Our own average-sized galaxy is bigger yet, and it is only one of an estimated 350 billion such galaxies in the universe. That is a big, big canvas.

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Playing Favorites (Sermon from James 2:1-13)

Posted on February 27, 2019 by salooper57

Here is a link to the latest sermon from the James series titled Wise Up. (Total run time is 24:35.)

http://clovermedia.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/store/79806b0d-0c80-4d63-83ea-040d8666d19a/7b390a18cb/audio.mp3

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A Key to Understanding Difficult Bible Passages

Posted on February 23, 2019 by salooper57

As one ages, the constant trickle of time grows into a torrent. The past nips at the heels of the present, always threatening to devour it. A. W. Tozer says, “Those who are in Christ share with him all the riches of limitless time and endless years. Only to know this is to quiet our spirits and relax our nerves.” But, he continues, “For those outside Christ, time is a devouring beast.”

The relationship to time – both ours and God’s – is fascinating. Prior to Einstein, it was assumed that time was simply there. Today’s scientific orthodoxy denies that, claiming that time itself came into being with the “Big Bang.” But St. Augustine beat scientists to the punch. 1500 years earlier, he argued that time has not always existed: God created it. He is not within it, but it is within him. As Tozer put it, “Eternal years lie in his heart. For him, time does not pass, it remains; God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which he must work.”

If God is not in time, but rather is outside it, visiting it when and where he will, then he is present not only in all places but in all times. The respective theological terms are “omnipresent” (present everywhere) and “eternal” (present every time). Something like this lies behind Jesus’s promise to be with his disciples always. The Greek word for “always” is made up of two roots: “every” and “when” – “everywhen.” God, the theologians tell us, is present everywhere and everywhen.

This idea sheds light on a variety of important biblical texts. Passages that seem paradoxical or mere legal fictions begin to make sense when seen in the light of God’s eternity. The author of Hebrews, for example, writes that “by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.” This seems, at first blush, to be self-contradicting. If someone is made perfect forever, how can it be that he is yet being made holy? Being made holy is a process while being made perfect forever is an accomplished fact. A person who has been made perfect forever has no need to be made holy.

The confusion clears before the truth of God’s eternity. He is not in time. He is with all those who belong to him in such a way (or at such a time) as to see them perfect forever. Surprisingly, “being made holy” turns out to be the most convincing evidence that one has been “made perfect forever.”

Other troubling enigmas begin to clear in the light of God’s relationship to time. Consider the Apostle Paul’s claim that “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” I don’t feel raised up and seated with Christ. If it has happened, why can I not see it? Or is it true in a metaphorical, but not in a literal, sense? We must choose one or the other – unless we recall God’s eternity. He knows that I have been, quite literally, raised with Christ and seated in heavenly places. He is with me there – but I am not consciously with him now. I take it by faith (which is not blind at all but sees reality through the corrective lens of God’s greatness).

So with many other passages that we often think sound nice but lack practical significance. “You died with Christ and your life is hid with him in God.” That’s a nice way to look at it, we think. But God, who transcends our timeline, knows it is more than nice; it is true. The repeated assertion, “You died to sin” is another example. It is a reality, not a legal fiction, but we must take it, for the time being, by faith.

The time will come when the times will be full. When we enter into that confluence of time, God will bring “all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.” Then the old order of things will pass away and we will hear the words, “Behold, I make all things new.” Even now the echo of those words reaches the one “who has ears to hear.”

First published by Gatehouse Media, 2/23/2019

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The Old Suitcase

Posted on February 21, 2019 by salooper57
Onderwijsgek [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D

I have a very old suitcase in the attic, stuffed with pictures. In one of those pictures, taken around 1902, I find my grandfather – my dad’s dad – at thirteen-years-old, sitting on a horse. In another, I find my mother at twenty-three, posing in front of a palm tree in a skimpy (for 1950) bathing suit. Then there are pictures of my brother and me in our infancy and childhood. There are also pictures of people I have never met and whose names I don’t know. The photographs are in no discernible order. Some are from a hundred years ago, some are much more recent.

Many people come to the Bible the way I go to that suitcase. They rummage through it, looking for anything interesting or anyone they might recognize. They see no order in it, no connecting links. They treat the Bible like a jumble of unrelated snapshots – one theological, one moral, another liturgical. But the Bible is much more like a 360-degree, long-exposure shot that provides a unified picture of God as he pursues his purposes in the world.

When we explore the Scriptures with a wide-angle lens, we discover that the Bible – from Genesis to Revelation – tells one story. Its pages unfold to reveal various aspects of an enormous panorama, too large to take in at a single setting – or a hundred settings. Whenever we open the book and turn the pages, we find that the picture extends further than we had imagined, from Creation to New Creation, from the Beginning to an Ending that never ends.

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Panorama

Posted on February 19, 2019 by salooper57

I have a picture from 1917 or ’18 of my grandfather’s army company. It’s a panoramic photo that, because of the limits of the technology of the time, was taken in numerous exposures then seamlessly joined together in the darkroom at a later time. Because of the way these pictures were taken, it was possible for a man on one end of that long row of soldiers to sprint to the other end and have his picture taken a second time. So, in some of these old photos, you will find the same soldier on both ends of a row at what looks to be the same time. I suppose it would be possible to find the same soldier in one of these panoramic pictures on both ends and in the middle.

It’s like that when we take a panoramic look at the Scriptures. We look to the beginning, to creation, and then turn our gaze to the end, to the judgment and beyond, and at both the beginning and the end, we find the same figure. In the middle, we find him again. In fact, he’s everywhere we look! Throughout the great story that runs through the Scriptures, we find Jesus Christ. He is “the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” And he is there in the middle, too.

God’s story is as seamless as one of those old panoramic pictures, and everywhere we look we find His Son. Sometimes, when we’re reading the Scriptures, we get the idea that God’s story has been interrupted, started, and stopped, or that the theme has changed. It’s not so. It is one story from beginning to end. It is the story of what God has done and is doing, how he rights what has been wronged in his creation. It is the story of his love and faithfulness or, as the Scripture often puts it, his righteousness.

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Love a Spouse Can Trust

Posted on February 16, 2019 by salooper57
Love is from God (1 John 4:7)

The radio and television host Larry King was asked in an interview about his marriages. He has been married eight times to seven different women. So he must be an expert, right?

King answered, “Questions about my marriages and divorces always take me to the same place. I once asked Stephen Hawking, the smartest guy in the world, what he didn’t understand. He said, ‘Women.’ If the smartest guy in the world couldn’t understand them, what do you expect from me?”

Then King said, “The three greatest words in the English language are not: ‘I love you.’ That’s second. The first are: ‘Leave me alone.’”

No wonder he’s been married eight times. Larry King didn’t need wives. He needed tropical fish. He needed something pretty that didn’t talk back, didn’t demand his attention.

One doesn’t need to be the smartest guy in the world to understand that a wife needs to trust her husband’s love. She needs to know that he would give his life for her. That makes us think of giving up one’s seat on the lifeboat or giving away the last sip of water in the canteen while lost in the desert. But instead of sharks and deserts, we’d do better to think of giving up one’s preferred way of doing things, or even of giving up the remote control. People rarely go from giving up nothing to giving up everything. They start by giving up their time, their attention, their diversions. A husband who won’t sacrifice a diversion for his wife certainly won’t sacrifice himself.

The kind of love a wife needs looks remarkably like the kind Jesus gave, as St. Paul described it. There’s good reason for that: Jesus knew how to help people learn to love. This is what so many people don’t understand. The kind of marriage the Bible suggests is possible – rich, extravagantly loving, daringly vulnerable – is not just the result of two compatible personalities finding one another; it is a religious experience.

The beautiful marriage the Bible describes is never just between two people; it always involves three. A braid of hair provides an analogy. To look at it, one would think there are only two strands wrapped around each other, but two strands won’t hold together; there must be at least three.

In the beautiful marriage the Bible pictures, one first sees a husband and a wife wrapped around each other. But between them there is always a third person present, tying them together. He lives within the marriage, and the marriage is about him, which is why, near the heart of the Bible’s longest passage on spiritual life in marriage, the apostle unexpectedly says, “but I am actually speaking with reference to Christ and the church.”

St. Paul urges husbands to be like Christ and give up their lives for their wives. He understood that there is no love without sacrifice. Many husbands are like the guy who says he would die for his wife and means it: he’d wrestle a shark for her, give his life in one great sacrifice. He’s ready to die for her but not to live for her. He would give her everything, he just won’t give her anything that requires day by day sacrifices.

But that is precisely what sacrifice looks like in marriage. It looks like going to the family reunion rather than having the guys over to watch the hockey finals. It looks like doing dishes rather than sitting in front of the TV. It looks like listening rather than tuning out. These are not gigantic sacrifices. They are little things; daily things. But that is what real love looks like in daily life.

Jesus was up front about all this: he told his followers they would lose their lives but, in that loss, would find their true selves. What is lost, usually slowly and incrementally, is selfishness, which must be lost to make possible the experience of joy. Marriage provides an extended opportunity to practice being, in St. Paul’s vivid expression, “a living sacrifice.” Marriage is a school – one of many, but surely one of the best – in which people can learn to live and love the Jesus way.

First published by Gatehouse Media, 2/16/2019

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Slow to Anger (James 1:19-21)

Posted on February 15, 2019 by salooper57

Is anger negatively impacting your life? This 26-minute sermon may help. Just click and listen. http://clovermedia.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/store/79806b0d-0c80-4d63-83ea-040d8666d19a/5830061f93/audio.mp3

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Wide Angle

Posted on February 14, 2019 by salooper57

On the plains of Peru there is a network of strange lines made by an ancient people known as the Nazea. Some of these lines cover as many as ten square miles. For years archeologists assumed that the lines were what remained of ancient irrigation ditches.

Then in 1939, Dr. Paul Kosok of Long Island University, discovered what they really were. He flew over those plains and, from an aerial view he could see that the ancient lines that seemed so random at ground level were in fact enormous drawings – like pictographs – of birds and animals and insects.

Just so, from one perspective, the stories of the Bible seem detached and unrelated. But as we survey them from a wider angle, we suddenly see how one line leads to another to form one great picture of God’s redemptive purpose – from Genesis to the Revelation. And while there are many great men and women in the Bible, we discover that there really is only one protagonist, the lead actor throughout, and that is the Lord God himself.  

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