Month: December 2018

Finding Quiet in the Holiday Noise

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wooden cabin and christmas tree

Another Holiday season is almost past tense. We anticipate it all year, all the more as we rush through Halloween and turn the corner at Thanksgiving, as we careen toward Christmas, and then a mad dash to New Year’s Eve, before skidding to a sudden, unwelcome stop on the day after New Year’s day. So the Holidays can seem.

The Holidays can be a great time in the midst of the busyness for quiet reflection, but many a Holiday season has come and gone that I wish I had taken that time to reflect.

We need that time to reflect, not just in the Holiday season, but throughout the year on a regular basis. God ever urges us to be still, to seek Him in the quiet of our hearts when the clamor of more insistent voices is kept at bay.

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The Christian world rushes head long into another holiday season. The horses were straining at the gate weeks ago. Christmas sales were advertised before we threw out the pumpkins. The turkey population has been reduced to survivors. The holiday season has been in full on assault. It will climax at midnight on New Year’s Eve.

How many holiday seasons have I experienced that came at me like a garish parade and left me with nothing but the sound of ringing in my ears? Too many.

My sincere hope is not to miss the deep meaning of our celebration this holiday as the clamor fades into the cold quiet of winter. The trite but true “meaning of Christmas” is not found in the holiday rush, but in warm quiet reflection on what hope arose with the birth of Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace, Lord of…

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The Innate Sin within Us

We are all innately sinful. That is what the story of the fall teaches us.

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I find something incredibly refreshing in the stories of gay and lesbian brothers and sisters in Christ. Dr. Rosario Butterfield, David Bennett, Sam Alberry and others have had truly inspirational journeys in their Christian faith. I find unique comfort and encouragement in their stories.

With that said, I’m going to be unusually candid in this piece: I’m a heterosexual male. But that is not the candid part. I have struggled all my Christian life with heterosexual lust. That’s the candid part.

By the time I became a believer and committed myself to Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in my very late teens and early twenties, I was very much a product of a society that objectifies sex, obsesses about sex and worships sex.

But, to be honest, I am not just a product of my environment. Attraction to women is innate in me. All of my life, as far back as I can remember, I have been attracted to girls. My first crushes are some of my earliest memories going back to even to preschool and kindergarten.

When I became a Christian, I began to recognize that the extent of the attraction, and the extent to which I fed the attraction, was unhealthy. In fact, it was sinful at the core. Jesus says if we even look at a woman lustfully, we have sinned.

The sin of sexual lust was ingrained deep within me. I can’t wholly blame the environment in which I grew up for the sinful lust that grew within me, though it was provoked and fed by that environment. The root of that sin grew deeply and innately from the core of my being.

I can only imagine a similar experience with same sex attraction. I understand Lady Gaga’s song, Born This Way, though I didn’t always understand it. While my heterosexual attraction is accepted and even celebrated in the world in which I grew up, my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters have had to labor under a general societal distaste and disdain for their same sex attraction.

When I first heard the assertion that people are born with same sex attraction, I didn’t believe it. It defied biology. It didn’t make common sense to me. I figured it is a deviation from the way things are supposed to be. It’s nuts and bolts.

I have come to realize that maybe people really are “born that way” – like me having an innate attraction to girls as far back as I can remember. I didn’t choose it. It is the way it is.

The thing is that any unhealthy attraction that is over-indulged and idolized is sin. Any inner urging that invites me to think and act contrary to conscience and what I know and understand to be God’s desire for me, if I indulge it or act on it, is sinful. I fight the struggle every day.

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Top 10 Navigating By Faith Articles in 2018

Thank you for reading. Please feel free to comment. Have a great 2019.

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Another year is in the books for Navigating by Faith. I started this blog in 2012 in response to an inner conviction that I should use whatever writing and analytical skills I have developed as an English Major, law student and attorney for over two decades in the service of God, exploring and testing the boundaries of faith and its relation to the world in which we live. As the name of this blog suggests, the endeavor has been a journey.

The most popular (which is a relative term I realize) blog post in 2012 did not focus on faith, but on politics, following the election of Barack Obama to his second term as president. (Political Decompression) That article was cathartic in shedding the slough of my skepticism about the value of our two-party system (something I have not been completely able to shed to this day), but it affirmed my faith in the sovereignty of God – something in which I continue to find solace.

The number of readers has never been my focus, though it is one measure of success in fulfilling whatever purpose God might infuse into my writing and thinking. From 287 views in 2012 to 1093 views in 2013 to over 11,000 views in 2018, the readership has grown, albeit modestly.

Somewhat contrary to my intuition, the most popular writings in each year are not always the “timeless” ones. The most popular article in 2012 focused on the 2012 presidential election. The most popular article in 2013 (The Face of Evil) was about the Boston Marathon bombing. The most popular article in 2014 was a summary of the Hobby Lobby case. Finally, in 2015, the most popular article focused on something a little more eternal – The Bible That Makes You a Scholar – though it is about a new Bible, rich in its resources to aid in the study of that ancient collection of writings.

I suppose the popularity of writings that focus on current happenings is revealing of our preoccupation with our current circumstances that pull us away from more eternal things. One of the very purposes with which I write is to encourage a bigger view of life, to see the forest in spite of the trees, to lift up the gaze from the feet in front of us to the heavens above to reflect on God and His Kingdom as it intersects with our daily lives.

In the last two years (2016 and 2017), the top three (3) blog articles were exactly the same in exactly the same order. They were The Ebla Tablets Confirm Biblical Accounts (written in 2015), It is Well with My Soul: The Story (written in 2014) and C. S. Lewis on Individualism, Equality and the Church (written in 2015). Remarkably, those blog articles are still three (3) of the top four (4) most popular articles in 2018, though in different order.

Without more introduction, here are the top ten (10) blog articles on Navigating by Faith in order beginning with the most popular: Continue reading “Top 10 Navigating By Faith Articles in 2018” →

The Intersectionality of Jesus Christ

Intersectionality is the focus of my Christmas thoughts this morning.

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A recent podcast hosted by Justin Brierley, Debating the Statement on Social Justice – Jarrod McKenna and James White, sparks my thinking this morning. One might wonder what social justice has to do with Christmas Eve that I should be thinking about it. Quite a lot actually.

Before tying up that loose end, though, I feel the need to comment on the discussion. James White was a drafter of the Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel. The express purpose of the Statement is to clarify the meaning of the Gospel in order to guard against false teachings creeping into the Church through modern “sociological, psychological, and political theories”. Certainly, concern over false teachings and false gospels is a theme we find as far back as the Gospels, themselves, and the Pauline letters. We are right o be concerned.

On the other hand, as I listened to the discussion, another concern occurred to me. Yes, we are not of the world, but we are in the world, and the world is our mission field. Jesus left the 99 to search for the one lost sheep. Paul was a Jew to the Jews and a Greek to the Greeks, becoming all things to all people so that he could reach them with the Gospel. (1 Corinthians 9:19-23) Though Paul was concerned about false gospels creeping into the Church, he was also concerned about relating to the lost world.

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Where in the World is God?

Our western view of God, heaven and the earth may get in the way of understanding where in the world is God.

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I have been listening with some relish to the new podcast, Ask NT Wright Anything, with Justin Brierley the host of Unbelievable! podcast fame. NT Wright is currently the Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St. Mary’s College in the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. (Wikipedia) He is a renowned scholar and prolific writer and speaker.

In listening to the first few episodes of the new podcast, I have become interested in NT Wright’s view the kingdom of God, the ascension and what it means that someday Jesus will “come again on the clouds”.  calls westerners “innate Epicureans” who believe that “heaven is a long way away”. Thus, when we think of something like the ascension of Jesus, we imagine him rising up to heaven far away where He “sits at the right hand of the Father”.

This image of Jesus in heaven far away seems to be suggested in the passages from which we have coined the term ascension. The Gospel of Luke describes it this way: “While [Jesus] was blessing them, He parted from them [left them] and was carried up [taken up] into heaven”. (Luke 24:51 (NASB/ESV)) In Acts, the description is that “He was lifted up while they were looking on [taken up before their very eyes], and a cloud hid him [received Him] from their sight [out of their sight].” (Acts 1:9 NASB/ESV)

In Luke, the phrase, “parted and was carried” is a translation of the one Greek word, diístēmi, meaning literally “to set apart, to intervene, make interval” and translated as carried, parted and/or passed.[i] In the Greek, it appears (to me) that some interpretation is apparent in the English verb tenses used: “He parted and was carried [taken]”. The first phrase conveys action on the part of Jesus, and the second phrase conveys some action asserted upon Jesus, presumably from the Father.

The phrase is inserted as the interpretation of a single word so who undertook the action is really not implicitly expressed. It’s an interpretation (it seems to me). Further, the descriptor, “up” is added. That descriptor is not inherent in the Greek word, diístēmi. Rather, it seems to be a common sense addition to connect with the word translated “heaven”, which is ouranós. But is that an accurate translation?

After hearing NT Wright, I think not. Our western worldview filter may be to blame, and removing this worldview filter opens up a more accurate view, perhaps, of what the kingdom of God is, the ascension, and the second coming of Jesus.

Continue reading “Where in the World is God?” →