Category: Christian

The Danger of Getting What We Want

We often choose earthly treasures that we can’t keep over eternal treasures that we can’t lose.

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Tim Keller paraphrased and quoted a columnist back in the 1980’s who knew quite a few celebrities personally. According to Keller, the columnist said:

“I knew them when they were working behind the counter the cosmetic counter at Macy’s, and I knew them when they were bouncers at the village clubs, and all that, and then they became famous, and they became movie stars, and then they became more unhappy then they were before.

“That giant thing they were striving for, that ‘fame thing’ that was going to make everything OK, that was going to make their lives bearable, that was going to provide them personal fulfillment and with ‘ha ha happiness’, it had happened and nothing changed. They were still them. The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable.

“If God really wants to play a rotten practical joke on us, He grants your deepest wish and then giggles merrily as you suddenly realize you want to kill yourself.”

This is quite the candid, though skeptical, observation. It’s as if the columnist wanted the celebrities to find a slice of heaven in their stars because that would mean the same heaven was possible for the columnist.

But, alas, no. It is a cruel joke. The thing we want to be our nirvana turns out to lack the substance we want it to have. If the celebrities that everyone yearns to be have been “there” and found it wanting, what hope is there for the rest of us?!

What, then is the answer? We yearn for Eden, but the things we desperately believe will take us there leave us disappointed and wanting. We believe in the pursuit of happiness, but the happiness we seek alludes us – even as we reach to close our hands around it.

The columnist impliedly blamed God for the joke, but Scripture tells us the human condition is no joke. The real problem with the human condition is that God made us for Himself. Thus, nothing else will satisfy us.

The desire for more is the thing that causes us to seek, but what we really seek is Him. When we follow after other things, instead of Him, we find them empty. Thus, when we turn to God and find that He is our fulfillment, we know that we have found what we were looking for.

I write this on the heels of an article in which I reflected on celebrity Christianity. More accurately, celebrities who have recently become Christians. In the article, I also reflected on “celebrity” Christians, people who were thrust into the Christian limelight at an early age, before a firm foundation of spiritual growth and relationship with God was established.

And I wonder how those celebrities turning to Christianity will fair in the future. They are used to the warm (and sometimes harsh) light of public celebrity. That is where they live, but what they need is the nutrient rich soil of God’s word, prayer, relationship to God, fellowship and all the things God must do in us in the dark recesses of our hearts, well out of the light of public life.

Like the rich young ruler who was searching, but found it too difficult to leave behind all his wealth to which he had become accustomed, celebrity, fame, and fortune may be difficult to give up. Even though it doesn’t satisfy the deepest longings of the soul, it is still everything most people think we want, and we can be stubborn in seeking what we want.

Riches, and celebrity, and comfort, and recognition become a trap. We are lured in. Our own desires propel us hard in the direction of the sunlight. We strain our whole lives with all our effort. All our thoughts, hopes, and dreams carry us along, and the things we gain along the way, even if they turn to dust in our hands, are difficult to give up…. If it was all we wanted.

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Celebrity Christianity

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LOS ANGELES, CA. November 9, 2016: Actor Brad Pitt at a special fan screening for “Allied” at the Regency Village Theatre, Westwood.

Following on the heels of public “deconstruction” stories (like Joshua Harris and Marty Sampson) and the suicide of a well-known pastor, Jarrid Wilson, come the stories about newfound faith in God by public figures like Kanye West, Demi Lovato and now Brad Pitt. I feel like we need to be careful here.

Our faith shouldn’t rise or fall on the stories of public figures. The human tendency to follow and be interested in people we admire (or even idolize) is strong. A little perspective should be maintained, though.

God is no respecter of persons.

Though we put stock in what other people do or say, people are not the standard. God, alone, is the standard, and we should be careful to focus on Him. As big and bold as a person might seem, he or she is as finite as we are, flawed by sin and limited by our individual perspectives, influenced by any number of factors, many of which we may not completely appreciate (or even be aware).

One writer surmises that our reactions to celebrities becoming Christians (or renouncing Christianity) says more about us than them.

“We live in a celebrity culture in which fame equals validation and significance. When we hear news about a celebrity conversion, we usually don’t picture the lone individual standing before almighty God—stripped of all earthly trinkets and worldly success—on the same level as you and me and everyone else. We still see them in their celebrity form, as the avatar created by their promotional machine. And once someone professes faith, we tend to slip into the same worldly assessment of their significance.”

This leads us to put too much emphasis (and faith) in the celebrity who becomes Christian, and that is dangerous for our faith – and theirs. We are quick to hold them up as examples and leaders, but faith, redemption, sanctification and growth in the knowledge and grace of God is a process. It takes time.

Joshua Harris wrote a book, Kiss Dating Goodbye, that catapulted him into the Christian limelight at the age of 21. Marty Sampson, the once Christian songwriter, became a worship leader for the megachurch Hillsong at the age of 20. Talent and fickle fame are not substitutes for depth and strength of character and faith.

We need to be careful not too put too much emphasis in the newfound faith of celebrities. We should not expect them to become overnight spiritual leaders. Neither should we be overly skeptical. They need room to grow and mature in Christ, like anyone else, and I fear that celebrity is not fertile soil for Christian growth.

Think of the rich young ruler.

Jesus described the way to follow him. It looks like taking up a cross. It involves learning the value of being last and adopting a servant of all perspective. Paul warns us that no one should think more highly of himself than he ought. Neither should we think too highly of others – for their sakes and ours.

“Our rush to establish a celebrity as a leader in matters of faith does injustice to both the celebrity and also the church, requiring a sped-up sanctification process on behalf of the celebrity (because they’re already seen as a leader) and setting the church up for letdown when the movie star disappoints.“

With said, I celebrate the newfound faith of any person, celebrity or commoner, like me. Let us pray for them and keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and perfecter of their faith and ours.

Christians On Social Media

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Peter said, “but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense [apologia; apologetics] to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” (1 Peter 3:15)

This is the tenor and main point of the article, CHRISTIANS ARGUING WITH CHRISTIANS ON SOCIAL MEDIA: A REAL INTEREST IN THE SALVATION OF THE LOST?…. I encourage you to read it. I put it here so people would read it, and so I would be reminded of it and read it again myself.

It’s far too easy to say things on social media that we wouldn’t think of saying face to face in conversation with someone. If we don’t respond to people with gentleness and respect, as Peter urges us, we are not responding in love. We might as well not respond at all.

We live in a reactionary world like never before, exasperated by social media that gives us the instant gratification of an immediate response for every thought that crosses our minds. Don’t do it!

Social media is designed for instant gratification. The algorithms are purposely designed to evoke an immediate response. Social media marketing is aimed at stirring up your emotions to get you to respond, good or bad (they don’t care). Our knee-jerk reactions, especially to contentious comments and posts, are often unkind, judgmental, harsh or worse.

We need to be more self controlled than that. We need to be more self-sacrificial, resisting that desire for immediate gratification for the good of the Gospel. We can pick up our crosses and follow Jesus in this social media age by dying to that desire for the instant response.

We need to be salt and light. Salt accentuates the taste of food, but it does that subtly. Too much salt overwhelms and destroys the flavor of the food. Just the right amount accents and brings out the flavor. People are much more apt to take notice of what we say and take it to heart if we say it with gentleness and respect, as Peter admonishes us.

Light illuminates. Too often we demonstrate heat without a great deal of light. It isn’t our job to convict people of their sin or even to convince them of the rightness of our positions. The Holy Spirit is well-equipped to do the convicting in peoples’ hearts. We just need to be faithful to speak the truth, but we need to do it in love – always in love.

God’s word does not go out and come back void, but our idea of how people should respond and what it means that God’s word does not come back void may not be accurate. We may want every post to be a mic-drop moment, but God doesn’t always work that way.

When Isaiah was given the commission to speak God’s word to the people, he was told they wouldn’t listen. It wasn’t Isaiah’s responsibility to make sure they listened. It was his responsibility simply to speak and to let God do His work. If nobody listened, still Isaiah was being faithful in what God called him to do.

Are we always speaking God’s word? We are finite beings. We might not always have it right. We should have the humility to realize that.

Our love for other people, on the other hand, is always “true”. How we treat people will always shine through and have an impact. Our greatest apologetic is the love of God. Love covers a multitude of sins.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” 1 Corinthians 13:1-3

Questioning the Skepticism about Some of Paul’s Letters

A little skepticism of the skeptics might be in order in questioning the rejection of the authorship of some of the “questionable” Pauline epistles.

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Old Engraving of the Conversion of Paul

I first learned that some of the “Pauline epistles” were not written by Paul in my religion courses in college. That was the scholarly consensus then, as it is now, among the elite New Testament scholars in colleges and universities around the world. This consensus grows out of the “school of higher criticism” that began in the 19th Century in Tubingen, Germany.

The so-called “school of higher criticism” is textual criticism with a heavy emphasis on the text. (I will explain that comment below.) Not that textual criticism, itself, should be suspect. Textual criticism is “a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books…. The objective of the textual critic’s work is to provide a better understanding of the creation and historical transmission of the text and its variants.” (Wikipedia)

And by the way, there are differences among the New Testament manuscripts. Many differences. That fact shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone in this information rich age. If you aren’t aware of that fact, you would do well to consider the work of Daniel Wallace on the subject. I have addressed this issue before (Can We Trust the Bible?). But, I digress….

I have no issue with textual criticism applied to the Scriptures. We have learned much about the Bible from the method of study called textual criticism. “Criticism” here doesn’t mean, necessarily, rejection or doubt, but is more of a method of study that recognizes textual differences between manuscripts and attempts to identify the text that is most true to the original text, among other things.

Because we have so many manuscripts, well over 25,000 of them in various languages, there are variants that need to be addressed and understood. Textual criticism helps us with this understanding. (I should add that we have such a high degree of certainty about what the original text says precisely because we have so many manuscripts. If you want to dig in to the topic of textual criticism as applied to the Bible, I recommend The Basics of New Testament Textual Criticism.)

Some people take the fact that there are many differences among the manuscripts as a reason to reject the New Testament as Scripture, believing it to be inherently unreliable, questing whether we even know what the original authors wrote. This is an extreme view, in my opinion, though one that skeptical intellectuals seem to like. Perhaps, their fondness of this view is that it eliminates the need to take Scripture seriously or to apply it to their lives (to apply a little skepticism to the skeptics).

The fact is that we have such a wealth of New Testament manuscripts (5800 Greek, 10,000 Latin and 9800 Syriac, Coptic, etc.) that we can know with a very high degree of accuracy precisely what the original text was (like 98.5% per Dr. Wallace). Even if we didn’t have a single manuscript left, there are some 36,000 quotations of New Testament text by the early church leaders. Wallace observes that we could assemble the entire New Testament from those quotations alone, without the need for a single manuscript of the text.

But, I digress. Only a little. The point is that we should be as skeptical of the skeptics as they are skeptical of the text. In fact, Skepticism is the hallmark of the higher school of criticism. Skepticism is their starting place. They assume a skeptical approach. They don’t just wipe the slate clean, and start from neutral; they assume that the plain meaning of the text, the authenticity of the text and the reliability of the text has the burden of proof. And for this reason, we have good reason to be skeptical.

This form of skepticism is the flip side of what some might call blind faith. There is a danger in being skeptical that will not admit a positive result. There is a commitment to skepticism that is counterfactual. We can be as “committed” to skepticism as we are to belief to the exclusion of the facts and reality. I believe this is the case with the Pauline epistles that scholars reject.

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Significance in the Way Christianity Spreads

Islam rivals Christianity in its “travel” around the world. But the spread of Islam looked different than the spread of Christianity.

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Os Guinness talks about differences between Christianity and other religions in an interview with Justin Brierley a few years ago. He made a statement that Christianity is the only “traveling religion”.

He observed that Hinduism began in India and remains primarily in India. Buddhism began in India and remains primarily in India and Eastern Asia. Islam began in the Middle East and remains primarily in the Middle East. Christianity, however, began in the Middle East. Then it moved to Europe; and then it moved to North America; and now Christianity is growing fastest in Africa and Latin America and Asia.

While I think Guinness overstates the case little bit, he got me thinking about the how the major world religions have spread. For instance, Islam, which rivals Christianity in numbers, grew very rapidly during the life and immediately after the death of Muhammad. It spread throughout the centuries into Europe and down into Africa and more recently across Southern Asia.

Islam rivals Christianity in its “travel” around the world, but the spread of Islam happened very differently than the spread of Christianity. This is the significant fact, in my opinion – not so much that Christianity has traveled through all the world like no other religion. (Though it has.)

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