Crave Something More

There are two types of people in the world:  those who categorize others into types, and those who don’t.

My friend Sarah is one of these types of people.  Over Saturday dinner, she shared with our group her perspective on 4 types of people—particularly in how we react to them in relationships.

1. Look Good.  Look Gooders care most about what others think about them.  Their reputation is king, and they will accept emotional turmoil within so long as no one else knows about it.  Honesty is the bain of Look Gooders.
2. Feel Good.  Feel Gooders care most about how they feel.  They are emotionally-driven and reactive to situations, willing to change who they are or how they relate to others as long as they feel comfortable.  Courage is the bain of Feel Gooders.
3. Be Right.  Be Righters care most about being right.  They will sacrifice relationships in the name of truth (or perceived truth).  Arguments and debates are comfortable arenas with them, because these are forums to wield their sabres of wit and words.  Humility is the bain of Be Righters.
4. Be In Control.  Be In Controllers care most about controlling situations, or at worst, controlling others.  They will manipulate with words or emotions, sometimes without even knowing they’re doing so.  Trust is the bain of Be In Controllers.

I always find it interesting to see how people categorize others, in part because there is often some truth to it.  And Sarah’s framework is likely quite right.  And if you pay care attention, you will notice something of significance about each type of person here:  each one is self-centered.

The reason we want to look good in front of others is because we value ourselves more than we value someone else.

The reason we want to feel good about ourselves is because we value ourselves more than we value someone else.

The reason we want to be right is because we value ourselves more than we value someone else.

The reason we want to be in control is because we value ourselves more than we value someone else.

This particular framework is useful in uncovering our own particular strain of self-centeredness, because we’re all plagued with this disease.  Practically, we are born into a state of need, and we spend the rest of our lives concerned first and foremost with ourselves.  Theologically, we are born into a state of sin, and we spend the rest of our lives in opposition to the preeminence of Christ in all things.

The cure for all these strains of self-centeredness is the same:  a humbled, repentant, faith-filled, hopeful heart, mind, and spirit which desires to see and savor the glory of God as seen in the supremacy of Christ above all things.  Or to say this another way:  people who value God more than they value the comforts of sin.

I am a Look Gooder (and to some degree, all four), but I have asked God to destroy this disease within me.  I want to be more concerned about God and His glory than I am about justifying myself and making sure others justify me as well.  I want to love God and love others, so that He will bear fruit in me that furthers His kingdom.  And I want to be ultimately be the type of person who participates joyfully and expectantly in being made more and more like Jesus.

Question:  Which type of person are you?

I am a father, but I have yet to meet my child. I almost wrote “I am going to be a father,” because that is how I tend to think about my wife’s pregnancy.  My wife, Anna, is 12 weeks along, and we’ve just announced this great news to our friends and family.  You are part of that extended network, so I wanted you to know as well and to ask for your help.

When I say I tend to think about my wife’s pregnancy a certain way, I mean to say that I find it hard to put my mind around this miracle before I can put my hands around this miracle.  Fatherhood is not yet part of my identity, and I wonder at this great act of God:  How can nothing become something?  Or to ask the question another way:  How can it be that God would use us in His very act of creating something from nothing?

Our child, who was once nothing, is now an immortal soul who will spend eternity in or out of God’s blessed presence.  And that is a life-changing, mind-blowing, soul-stunning reality.  This new person has been made for the glory of God, and we pray already that this child will be formed into a vessel for God’s mercy.  By God’s grace, we will raise this child in a covenant community that is committed to instruction in the way of the Lord, and we recognize that we may plant or water, but God will give the growth.

Since all of life exists for Jesus, we can see the picture being painted over this chapter of our lives.  God is now working by grace to prepare this child for the day of birth; so too does God’s Spirit work to prepare our hearts for spiritual birth.  In six months, this child’s eyes will be opened to the bright wonders of a new reality; so too are our eyes opened to the brilliance of new life in Christ.  So we embrace the wonder of the deeper meaning behind the joy of this present reality.

Anna and I have all of the questions new parents must have as well as all the insecurities.  We don’t feel prepared and know we likely never feel ready for this great stewardship.  But we are unabashedly overjoyed about meeting this new soul God deemed fit to create and lend to our care while we have breath.

We also both recognize we are part of a global community of believers who worship the one true God, and we join with the untold millions who have walked before us in life and faith and raised children to bring glory to our God.  Would that we had the ability to weigh all of the collective wisdom of this great remnant to prepare our hearts, souls, and minds for this great undertaking.  So we thought we would start with you.

My question for you is simple:  What advice would you offer us in raising this child to love the Lord?

Please pass this question along to others as well.  May God grant us great measures of wisdom through all who respond!

My wife and I are part of this great community group in Nova through our church.  Tomorrow night, we’ll be facilitating the group’s study and discussion of 1 Corinthians 13–the famous love chapter in the Bible.  I’ve posed the following questions to the group.  But then I remembered this whole online thing is about community in a different way, so I thought I’d pose these to you as well.

If you will, pick a question, ask God for guidance, and give us your best answer!

1. What is a Biblical definition of love?
2. What is important about the Bible saying “God is love?”
3. Is it our job to love others, or is it the Spirit’s job to others through us?  Or neither, or both?
4. Is it loving to think of others as more important than us, or as important than us?
5. Why does God go to such lengths to define the attributes of love?
6. What’s the significance of the similarities between the characteristics of love in 1 Cor 13 and the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23?
7. Is there a difference in how men and women should respond to the command: “Love one another”?  Or does obedience in this way look the same regardless of gender?
8. What does this verse mean:  “We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19)?
9. Why is love the “greatest of these” (1 Cor 13:13)?
10. Is it possible to overemphasize love?  If so, how?

Words without definitions are not worth much.  Perhaps they might have some artistic value in form, but they fail to convey any meaningful information unless we actually know what the words mean.  Words with definitions, however, hold great potential.  They can be the means to change our thoughts which in turn can change our actions.  Words forming ideas can be means to change the world—or even the destiny of a man’s soul.

One word I’ve heard many times is the word sanctification.  And I thought I knew what it meant.  I was talking with my dad recently about this word, and he said something I found interesting.  He said that he had always heard sanctification taught as meaning “to be set apart or holy,” but that over the years, he’s hearing more and more is being referred to as a “process of growing in our faith.”  So this question has been stuck in my mind recently:  What does sanctification really mean?

I asked this question on Twitter, and a number of kind souls weighed in.  Each response had similar elements, but there were some nuanced differences to each.  So this makes me wonder how others understand this important truth about our faith.  I’ll weigh in later this week in an effort to understand how the Bible addresses this concept in full, but for now, I’ll ask you:

What is sanctification?  And why does it matter?

Last week, I asked the question:  “Can we overemphasize the gospel?”  Hundreds have considered this question, and a number have weighed in on the issue.  One reader in particular, Russ, ended his comments by asking:  “What is the gospel scripturally meant to be?”  I posed the question back to him, and here’s what he said:

I do not know in full.  The scriptures you provided were a good and proper start.  I think that in some sense, the gospel is to function as our everything.  Or to borrow from Tim Keller, the gospel should function as a complete worldview.  I have recently been affected by the all-encompassing tone of Paul’s self reflection in Philippians 3:7-15, a text where Paul essentially seems to say that he wants to know the gospel well.  We usually focus on the “knowing Christ” aspect of the passage, but Paul seems to include other aspects of the Gospel as personal and effecting, or at least as informing the dynamic of His relationship with Christ.

I feel that the underlying concern here has more to do with the heart than with language or a movement.  I think your post could stand with using the exact same reasoning but could address an over-emphasizing of the terms “Jesus” or “Glory of God” in an unedifying polarity just as well.

The punditry with movements can be good a thing, especially to preserve and refine them, but I also feel that there is really only one true movement:  Christ moved from heaven to earth, from the cross to the grave for our sins, and victoriously back to the Father, and so now we move in that reality.

Personally, I am not very far removed from the error which we wish to avoid here.  So what is my hope?

My hope ultimately is Christ.  But how can I hope on Him and His grace?  I have come to learn only through the gospel alone. I am looking for God to tend to my heart, but I am expecting that to happen only through a deeper realization of the gospel.

So I ask you the same question Russ asked me:  “What is the gospel meant to be?”

*Comments have been edited for form and not content (emphasis added by editor)

Why…

Write?

Create?

Speak?

Sing?

Paint?

Draw?

Film?

Shape?

We ______ to express ourselves.

Why should we express ourselves?

Because we want to share with the world what we value most.

Why should we share with the world what we value most?

Because it fulfills our unique sense of purpose.

Why should we seek our sense of purpose?

Because we are “created in Christ Jesus for good works…that we should walk in them” (Eph 2:10).

Why should we walk in these good works?

So that “whatever [we] do, [we] do it all for the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31).

Asking the “why” question always leads back to the One who gave us the ability to ask the question.  Maybe that’s the point.

Question:  Why do you ______?

Non-exhaustive answers to hard and relevant questions—From the Ask a Smart Guy or Gal Series…

Question:  Are Science and Religion At Odds?

A friend asked for my thoughts on “God, the Big Bang, Creation, Age of the Earth, and Genesis,” all minor questions, right?  I sent him a quick response, outlining three things to think about:  1) The ultimate question to address is first cause, 2) Creationists need not fear science, and 3) Creationists and Naturalists both apply bias to the facts they observe.

But there’s more to say on this subject.  Much more.  And I’m not the one to say it, because I haven’t studied this issue like I should.  So I found someone who has (my brother), and I asked him to share his thoughts.  And I think you’ll find it to be a worthwhile read:

For starters, it’s important to note the limits of knowledge and the limits of science.  People who describe themselves as scientists are not always forthcoming about what science really is.  Science can mean simply knowledge or, in more modern times, it can mean knowledge gained through use of the scientific method.

You may remember this from high school, but the scientific method starts with a hypothesis to explain phenomena, then tests that hypothesis in ways that are repeatable and verifiable.  When we ask questions about the universe’s origins, it’s worth noting that modern science cannot, by definition, tell us anything about it.  The reason is simple:  we can’t repeat and verify how the universe began.  What this kind of science can do is make speculations based on available information, which is what the philosopher or theologian does as well.  This is why the war between Religion and Science is really a false war; the competition is actually between Theism and Naturalism.

We can take cosmology (study of the universe) as an example.  Most people believe in the Big Bang or creation by some sort of God.  But it’s misleading to really call Big Bang cosmology science in the same way we call Biology or Chemistry science.  It’s actually more akin to philosophy or metaphysics.  Cosmology states beliefs, not facts.  But don’t take my word for it.  George F.R. Ellis, a Fellow of the Royal Society, co-author with Stephen Hawking of Cambridge of The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, and a physicist considered to be one of the world’s leading theorists in cosmology, states:

“People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations….For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations….You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds.  In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that.  What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.” (W. Wayt Gibbs, “Profile: George F. R. Ellis,” Scientific American, October 1995, Vol. 273, No.4, p. 55., as quoted on www.big-bang-theory.com)

But cosmology is no outlier.  Much of modern science tells the same tale.  When we hear there is broad consensus from leading scientists, we tend to believe them, because they seem a lot smarter than we are.  But consensus isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  In years past, there was consensus that the earth was the center of the solar system; that one didn’t work out too well.  In the early 20^th Century, there was consensus that an invisible “aether” filled space; we now know this is nonsense.  Ultimately, if you look back 200 years, very little of what we knew to be true scientifically was actually right. Theories are discarded or replaced over time as more discoveries are made.  This should give us pause today as we examine scientific evidence and make conclusions that are pronounced as gospel truth.

The dirty little secret about evolution is that it is a theory like many of those that have come and gone throughout history.  Again, we can go to the theory’s leading voices to make the point.  You have probably heard of Richard Dawkins, a renowned Oxford zoologist and well-known apologist for Darwinian evolution.  Dr. Dawkins has openly stated both on film and in writing that “nobody knows how life got started on earth. We know what kind of event it was:  the origin of the first self-replicating molecule…”  When the lead apologist says nobody knows how the most important event to evolutionary theory happened, that should trigger a flag for us:  we’re no longer in the realm of science.  We’re now dealing with philosophy or metaphysics, where presupposition, not evidence, is the key driver.

If the scientific community that studies origins is comprised largely of Naturalists rather than Theists, then we shouldn’t be surprised to find their conclusions have natural, rather than supernatural, explanations.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t in their own right to observe the evidence and make calculated speculation about questions about origins; it just means we critique their conclusions, even consensus-driven ones, on philosophical grounds.

Ultimately, if we treat the science that says the earth is 4.5 billion years old like the science that gives us the ability to make a rocket that can go to the moon, we do a disservice to both science and philosophy.  This should raise many questions, and we’ll address some of them here in the future.  In fact, if you have any big ones you’d like to see discussed, you can share them here.  But as you consider these thoughts, realize science will take us to the point where faith must begin, and this is true whether you believe in God or not.

Non-exhaustive answers to hard and relevant questions…

Question:  Did Jesus Really Claim To Be God?

Lots of people believe Jesus is God (I am one of them).  And lots of people believe He isn’t (Richard Dawkins is one of them).  There are plenty of people on my side, and there are plenty of people on his side.  One thing is for sure:  we aren’t both right.  Jesus is either God or He isn’t; there’s no middle ground on this question.

There are a number of authorities to which we can appeal to answer this question.  We can appeal to faith, because God has opened our eyes to see the reality and truth that Jesus is God, eternally existent as the Son and equal in nature and essence with the Father and the Spirit.  We can appeal to tradition, pointing to a counter-cultural movement that began with an unlikely band of deserters-turned-apostles which grew into the world’s largest religion.  Or we can appeal to the Bible, which surely makes the case for the divinity of Jesus.

You will search in vain for an explicit declaration of divinity from Jesus’ lips, at least one that will clearly silence His critics.  And this is not cause for alarm:  Jesus Himself was intentional about this as He spoke, and God the Spirit was intentional about this as He inspired the writing of the Scriptures.  So how can we be sure He is who we claim Him to be?

The claim is there is you’re willing to see it.  Or perhaps more accurately, the claim is there if God opens your eyes to see it.  We can look at several passages to give us the chance to test our sight.

1. In John 8:58, Jesus responds to the religious leaders who are questioning whether or not He considered Himself to be greater than their father, Abraham.  Here, Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”  This may seem innocent enough to us, but the Jews picked up stones to kill Him for this statement, because they heard the connection He made to Exodus 3:14, where God gives His name to Abraham:  “I Am Who I Am.”
2. In John 10:30, Jesus responds again to the Jewish leaders who are questioning Him.  They ask Him:  “If you are the Christ, tell us plainly” (vs 24).  Jesus answers them:  “My Father…is greater than all…[and] I and the Father are one.”  This must have created some drama for monotheists who daily recited the Shema:  “Hear, O Israel:  The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4).  And it was:  they picked up stones to kill Him once more.
3. In John 20:29, Jesus had His best chance to clarify his lack of deity if He wanted to do so.  Thomas, who had doubted the risen Christ even after his closest friends told him about Jesus’ appearance to them, finally lays his own eyes on the wounds in Jesus’ hands and side.  He says, “My Lord and my God!” (vs 28), and Jesus, rather than correcting him, accepts the statement and makes a teaching point of faith.

Jesus had many opportunities to simply say, “I am God,” but He chose not to.  Perhaps this has to do with God’s design:  “…their ears can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them” (Matthew 13:15).  Whatever the reason, He was nuanced in His responses on purpose, which may lead people like Richard Dawkins into darkness, but He means for us to declare the light of this truth to the world, that God took on flesh to do what we could not do ourselves:  pay the price for our sins.

There are many other passages in Scripture that point to Jesus’ divinity.  Where else do you see the Bible pointing to Jesus as God?