God In the Dark

We don’t expect to find God in our darkest places, and yet He is there.

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Jess Lester, journalist writing for Christian Premiere Magazine out of the UK, told her story recently on the Unbelievable podcast in an interview with Justin Brierley. She is Jewish by descent and culture, but she attended a Christian school in her youth. Her parents are no-practicing Jews, but her grandparents were observant.

She grew up with exposure to the Judeo-Christian world, but God was more of an intellectual idea to her than a personal reality. As a teenager, however, she consciously turned her back on God when her very good friend suffered a brain hemorrhage that left her unable to speak. Jess spent several days a week in the hospital with her friend trying to help her speak again, only to experience her friend suffer another brain hemorrhage that left her brain dead.

After her friend’s parents took her off life support, Jess was devastated. She poured herself into her friend’s recovery and prayed along with the family for healing, and God didn’t deliver. God took her friend, she thought, and it angered her. Why would He do that to such a good person?! This experience led Jess to reject God openly and consciously. Following her friend’s death, Jess lived in open rebellion and defiance toward God.

Over the next few years, things went from bad to worse for Jess. She drank, did drugs and slept around in open hostility to the God she thought took her friend from her. She also fell into depression to the point where she had suicidal thoughts and even planned her own demise.  She got desperate, admitting to her mother that she needed help, but the turning point came in a very unlikely place.

Jess attended a concert where a favorite band of hers, the 1975s, were performing. They sang a song that that was defiant toward God. She had played it a dozen times a day and knew the lyrics well. It wasn’t a Christian song in any sense of the term, but she found herself crying out in the middle of the concert these lyrics: “Jesus, Jesus show yourself to me!”

While the lyrics are meant more as a taunt than a plea, she made it her plea from her heart. Looking back now, she says this is when God responded. Subtly at first, it became more apparent to her as time went on that God was with her in her dark times, and He was reaching out to her. I won’t recount the details, here, but they are well worth listening to, along with the other guests that were interviewed for the Christmas Special – Dean Mayes, Jess Lester and Rupert Shortt Share Their Stories.

This story reminds me that we do not always find God in the pious, religious places where we might expect Him. God is everywhere, and that means He is with us in our darkest times and in the darkest of places. While the song that prompted Jess Lester to cry out was actually anti-Christian in its intended meaning, God used that song that Jess knew well as the vehicle by which she connected with Him.

Jess makes the point in telling her story that things men might mean for evil God is able to use for good. That idea of God using bad things for good purposes comes from the Old Testament story of Joseph, who was left for dead in the bottom of a well by his own brothers and taken off into slavery.

Continue reading “God In the Dark” →

The Top 10 Blog Posts on Navigating By Faith in 2019

Thank you, everyone who visited in 2019, and I hope you have a wonderful, faith-filled 2020.

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I started writing Navigating by Faith at the end of 2012 after a stretch of some gentle nagging in my heart and mind. I believed then that writing is what God wanted me to do, so I set out to write.

By the statistics, I haven’t taken the Internet by storm. At just over 10,000 views the last two years, I haven’t gotten close to the views some people get on a single post or video, and this year is the first in which I had fewer views than the year before. Pretty humble numbers.

While I look at the numbers (who doesn’t), I don’t write for the numbers. It wasn’t my motivation in the beginning, and I am reminded often that I write simply because I feel God has prompted me to write. I don’t really know the reason. I trust God will do what He will with it. I’m not sure it is for me to know.

I struggle at times to write. I don’t feel particularly insightful much of the time. When I do have some nuanced ideas coursing through my mind, the act of getting those ideas through a keyboard out onto a screen often seems to result in the dissipation of them. I find the subtlest and most poignant ideas sometimes elude me as I try to capture them in print. Almost inevitably, the ideas I begin with morph as I try to get them out.

I try to listen to the Holy Spirit and be inspired and guided by Him. For this reason, I don’t often plan what I write. Almost never. My writing is an extension of the things I am reading, thinking about and very often praying about as I meditate on God and what He seems to be saying in my inner being.

As I look back at my first blog post (In the Beginning Was the Word), I am reminded the guiding principal that has been with me since the beginning is the idea that God’s word does not return to Him empty; it will accomplish that which He purposes, and it will succeed in the thing for which He sent it (from Isaiah 55:10-11).  I am not sure how often I am able to channel the Holy Spirit when I write, but my hope is that I sometimes do.

To the extent that I have been able to speak God’s word (not scripture, but prophetic utterance), I have done what I believe God has given for me to do. The rest is up to Him.

I find it easier to write “intellectual” pieces (rather than inspirational or creative pieces). I find it much more difficult to be creative. In fact, it’s downright work. Trying to string together a series of blog posts on one difficult subject is also work.

If anyone has read my blog over time and has any insight into which types of writings seem to be most effective for me, or resonate most with you as a reader, I would appreciate the insight. Constructive criticism is welcome.

With that said, here are the ten most viewed blog posts for 2019 at Navigating by Faith in descending order:

It’s interesting to me that the oldest blog article on the top ten list for 2019 was also the most viewed in 2019. The writing of the old hymn, It is well with My Soul, is a true story that obviously resonates. In a chaotic and troubled world, I guess we need to know that God can be our rock that protects us from the wind and waves.

I am not surprised that an article on Donald Trump is in the top ten (second in fact). I don’t relish writing about him (or about politics for that matter). As Christians, I believe we are to respect the authorities in place, but we shouldn’t idolize them. No one has divided the world, the United States and the Church like Donald Trump.

I spend a lot of my time on the intellectual bases of faith. At least four top ten articles fall in this category. At number 3, an article on the earliest creeds tracks the great work of Gary Habermas that shows how the first followers of Jesus began to spread the word that Jesus rose from the dead right from the beginning. Habermas shows in this way that the resurrection isn’t a legendary development that arose generations after Jesus died. The resurrection was communicated as if it were a fact from the beginning.

Two of the apologetic articles are on the same subject: the Ebla Tablets. These tablets are Sumerian writings that date to the 3rd Century BCE and confirm many people, places and things found in the biblical writings. The contribution of archaeology in proving the reliability of Scripture as historical writings can’t be overstated.

Meanwhile, reflections on the death of Stephen Hawking, inspired by the words of John Lennox, who knew him, also has an apologetic bent to it. I continue to find it intriguing that nonbelievers and believers are counted among the smartest people in the world. It tells us that faith makes sense even to some of the smartest people, but faith is accessible to anyone.

Three of the top ten blog posts in 2019 were also in the top five blog posts for each of the last four years: It Is Well with My Soul: The Story; the Ebla Tablets Confirm Biblical Accounts; and C.S. Lewis on Individualism, Equality and the Church. They also stand as the top three blog posts of the blog going back to the beginning.

In fact, all of the top ten but two from the beginning are in the top ten for 2019. The exceptions are The Hobby Case Summarized (most views of which remain from the year it was published) and A Message in a Manger (maybe because I didn’t repost it in 2019 as I have in most years). They were ousted by Reflections on the Influence if Stephen Hawking and The Ebla Tablets Revisited in the 2019 top ten.

The top ten blog posts over the life of Navigating by Faith are as follows:

Thank you, everyone who has read this post looking back at 2019 and over the life of Navigating By Faith, and thank you everyone who has visited the blog, read the articles and posted comments. I appreciate the feedback. I hope you got something out of what I have done. Have a wonderful, faith-filled 2020.

The End of White Christian America?

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The headline reads: White Christian America ended in the 2010s.[1] As a white evangelical (and male), the first reaction to such a headline, I admit, is to cringe. We hear so much about the white privilege, white evangelicals and white Christians, generally, and none of it with “white” in the description is positive.

It gets old for me, if I am being honest. I am human after all. But, if this time really spells the end of “white Christian America”, however that might actually be defined, then so be it.  Truth is truth. Reality is reality.

Of course, the headline in the NY Times in 1966 reading that God is Dead[2] proved to be a bit exaggerated. Thus, I don’t necessarily concede that white Christian America ended in the 2010s. I am skeptical of statistics and statisticians. I am skeptical of sweeping statements. I am skeptical of the biases that inform the conclusions we reach.

Further, the statement implies that we can identify white Christian America (and agree on a definition). I don’t identify with the stereotypes that appear to be informing the article. As an example, my wife and I decided to live in a city and allow our children to go to public school in which white folks like us are minorities. We made that decision for the sake of giving them the experience of diversity. We embrace diversity.

That’s the problem with broad, sweeping generalizations. I feel that most of the white Christians I know view the world more like me than the article suggests. Maybe I’m wrong, but some significant segment, at least, of the white Christian population is mischaracterized in the assumptions.

I don’t associate white with Christian. No educated person could (or should) associate Christian with white (European) people globally. Not anymore.

“White Christian” Europe is a ghost of what it was. Europe and Canada are decidedly “post-Christian”, and the United States is following. Meanwhile, Christianity in Latin and South America is growing at a record pace, as is Christianity in China and Iran, even amidst increasing oppression and persecution. Jesus was a Middle Eastern “man of color”, and most Christians in the world are non-white.

Still, the numbers in the United States tell a story. I am just not sure we are very good at reading and understanding the story they tell. I would argue that the story these numbers tell is more about a seismic shift in the predominant worldviews that drive societal change in the United States than a racial divide – not that there is no racial divide.

Though I am skeptical about the story this article tells, the numbers suggest that something is going on. Some shift has occurred over the last decade or two that is revealed in these numbers, and it is a shift away from a politically conservative, Christian position (white, black, brown or other).

The predominantly white, evangelical movement that has rallied around Trump as a political savior is a last ditch, desperate and ill-conceived attempt (in my opinion) at clinging to a position of societal influence. It’s an attempt to exert human wisdom and strength into a flawed human system. I am not sure how much of that effort is inspired by faith in the sovereignty of God and how much of it is inspired by “the will of man”.

Yes, God establishes authorities, like Donald Trump, and that means God establishes the authority of other leaders, like Barack Obama (or any other leader, for that matter).[3] If we believe God establishes any authority, we have to believe He establishes all of them (even the ones we don’t like, the ones that we feel are a threat to us). We can’t say with any degree of integrity that God only establishes certain authorities that we favor, and not others.

Frankly, we need to reconsider how to interpret Romans 13 on that score, starting with the fact that Paul spoke those words to the Romans who suffered greatly under a harsh and hostile Roman world that worshiped Caesar and put to death those who would not bow down to him. It can’t mean what we popularly think it means in the United States.

We also need to be careful about putting our confidence in kings. Our confidence should be grounded in God, alone. God established Saul as king when the people wanted a king (like the other nations), but that wasn’t actually a blessing; it was actually a rejection of reliance on God.[4]

God gave the people what they wanted, though they were rejecting God in the process. God used that circumstance, as He uses all things, to accomplish His purposes, of course. But that doesn’t mean that the people who championed a king were on the right side of that equation.

We have to remember that our ultimate destiny isn’t in this world, but in the life to come. If the numbers and the trends they reveal suggest anything, they suggest that we will need an eternal perspective all the more as we lose hold of our significance among the powers and influences of this modern world. This is no less true in the United States.

And if the world hates us (for the right reasons – because we are God’s people, not because we have power or privilege), we shouldn’t be surprised. The world hated Jesus too. Our best response isn’t to cling to worldly power, but to die on the cross that God has shaped for us.

God is strong in our weakness. In this time in which Christians seem to be losing our foothold in the national power structure, we need to look to God for our strength. That isn’t a bad thing, in my opinion. That’s where we should be looking for our strength in all circumstances. It’s easier, though, to lean on God’s strength when we are weak.

And, assuming that is the case, it’s going to be easier for us to lean on God as time goes on. Not necessarily because we want to, or because that is our natural inclination (because it isn’t), but because we will have no other choice. And if that is the case, then so be it.

I won’t rue the end of white America, though I would gladly trade the white part for the Christian part. The white part will continue to color. It’s inevitable, and frankly I think for the best in a world that is increasingly global and diverse. Every tribe and tongue is represented in Revelations, so why would Christians do anything but applaud the increasing diversity of the United States?

As for Christianity, I would gladly lose cultural (American) Christianity for real spiritual renewal.  Maybe God is stripping away the impurities to expose the gold. If that is the case, we have a long way to go, and the fire is going to get hotter.

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[1] White Christian America ended in the 2010s, by Robert P. Jones, the CEO and founder of PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) and the author of “The End of White Christian America,” which won the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. His forthcoming book is “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity”, published at NBCnews.com Dec. 27, 2019.

[2] God is dead, and religion dying, remembered by James Finn in the New York Times April 19, 1970

[3] For an excellent expose on the way we cite Romans 13 to support our own bias, see Misusing Romans 13 To Embrace Theocracy, by Stephen Mattson at sojo.net December 10, 2019.

[4] See Is Donald Trump the King We Wanted? at Navigatingbyfaith.com November 17, 2019.

A Discussion about the Influence of Christianity on Western Civilization by Two Non-Believers

What is the the impact of Christianity on the values and assumptions of western civilization?

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Dionysus Bacchus Wine statue portrait

In my college English classes, I recall the attitude that Tom Holland conveys in a recent interview of he and AC Grayling by Justin Brierley on the Unbelievable? podcast: Did Christianity give us our human values? Neither Holland nor Grayling are believing Christians, so I was intrigued to listen to what they had to say.

Holland explained that he was raised in the Anglican church, but he found Christianity to be “dull” at an early age. He was much more drawn to the ancient, classical world in the same way he was drawn to dinosaurs when he was younger. “It was big; it was fierce; and it was extinct. To be honest, I was very much on the side of Pontius Pilate: the eagles, the togas, the glamour of it. Jesus becomes slightly dull in comparison. He was a loser, really.”

Tom Holland says there wasn’t a dramatic moment in which he lost his faith. It was more like his faith was a dimmer switch dialing down. He says, “My faith was essentially blotted out by the sun of my fascination with the classical world.”

This was more or less the attitude I remember in the education of my youth. In my high school Latin class, we celebrated Roman society, even dressing in togas one day for some kind of classroom party. In 1978, just before I set off for college, the movie, Animal House, practically turned the toga party into a curricular activity.

I remember distinctly a professor explaining through an entire class on Milton’s Paradise Lost why Satan is the most appealing character in that classical work. The theme of naïve innocence and initiation into the world of knowledge that brings with it the thrill of discovery and loss of innocence runs through all of English literature.

The loss of innocence is a rite of passage. The world of knowledge, being equated with that loss of innocence, is more fun, interesting and downright exciting than the pious world that is inevitably left behind. “Religion” (Christianity) was viewed as a desperate attempt to hold on to that naiveté, even as the proverbial horses of lust, titillation and wonder about the forbidden world are escaping the barn.

Tom Holland, like my worldly professors in college, gladly left the “dull” world of Christianity behind.  When he set out to write history, he was drawn to write about the Greeks and Romans of his youthful fascination. This journey, though, eventually led him to a surprising conclusion. He says,

“I found the experience of living in the minds of people like Caesar, … people I had deeply admired as a child, almost hero worshiped … increasingly unsettling.”

The disconnect increased the more he dug into it. If the values of the ancient Greco-Roman world are foreign to modern, western values, what was the source of his modern, western values?  What were the real roots of his western values if they are not Greco Roman?

Through the process of researching and writing history, Holland came to realize that the present values of humanism, secularism and liberalism that are prized in western society find their roots in Christianity. The realization of the impact of Christianity on the values and assumptions of Western civilization was “sharpened” for him in the process of writing a book on the history of Islam.

Holland recalls that he found himself coming to the conclusion that “[much of what] Muslims believe about the origins of Islam are actually mythic, are back projections”. Muslim critics repeatedly complained of the book he wrote on the Islam, challenging him that he wouldn’t dream of subjecting his own beliefs and values to the same critical review. Thus, Holland says, the book he wrote most recently, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, began as an attempt to subject the origins of his own cultural values to the same standard of critical review.

He says that the book was his effort to take the criticism to heart and to trace the thread of his own humanist, liberal values back to see “where it leads through the labyrinth”.  Speaking of that effort, the culmination of which is now in print, he says,

“Ultimately, it leads back to Christianity, and I’ve come to the conclusion that, in almost all of the essentials, myself, my friends, the society in which I live, the whole of the west is so saturated in Christian assumptions that it is almost impossible to remove ourselves from them.”

This is not the post-modern, post-Christian narrative that I have heard elsewhere. Indeed, AC Grayling, the other guest on the podcast that inspires this blog today, takes a different view. That is the subject of the interview. The interview is worth a listen, whether you might side with Grayling or with Holland. The fact that Holland comes out of the atheist camp to announce what he has determined from his research is noteworthy. Therefore, I publish this short blog post and invite you to listen along to this interesting discussion.

God’s Work Within Us

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CS Lewis wrote the following bit in a letter written approximately one year before the end of his life:

“The whole problem of our life was neatly expressed by John the Baptist when he said (John, chap 3, v. 30) ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’ This you [may] have realised. But you [may be]  expecting it to happen suddenly: and also expecting that you should be clearly aware when it does. But neither of these is usual. We are doing well enough if the slow process of being more in Christ and less in ourselves has made a decent beginning in a long life (it will be completed only in the next world). Nor can we observe it happening. All our reports on ourselves are unbelievable, even in worldly matters (no one really hears his own voice as others do, or sees his own face). Much more in spiritual matters. God sees us, and we don’t see ourselves. And by trying too hard to do so, we only get the fidgets and become either too complacent or too much the other way.
“Your question what to do is already answered. Go on (as you apparently are going on) doing all your duties. And, in all lawful ways, go on enjoying all that can be enjoyed—your friends, your music, your books. Remember we are told to ‘rejoice’ [Philippians 4:4]. Sometimes when you are wondering what God wants you to do, He really wants to give you something.
“As to your spiritual state, try my plan. I pray ‘Lord, show me just so much (neither more nor less) about myself as I need for doing thy will now.’”[1]

I cite CS Lewis often in what I write. He seems to capture so much of what it means to be human in God’s world, illuminating God’s grace in us and in the world as God works out our salvation, the author and perfecter of our faith.

These words Lewis wrote are so much more poignant that they were written toward the end of his life. Gone is the impetuous, tottering confidence of youth in working salvation out, replaced by the steady, trusting confidence of old age that God is working within.

As I survey a thousand times I have failed God in working out my salvation, I find solace in the hope and faith that God is working within me. I don’t always see it. Sometimes my sin overshadows any light I see in me, but God’s gentle light always shines through that darkness… when I turn to Him.

Often my inclination is to turn away. I fear His wrath. I am disappointed in myself. I think I should be better than that. I don’t want to bow at His feet. Yet again. How many times? How many times!

And I recall that nothing is hidden from God. Nothing. We stand, sit, lie, walk at all times under the gaze of an infinite God. Nowhere I can go, even into the deep recesses of my own heart, away from God. Even if I block myself from the inner chambers of my own heart, yet God is there.

God, save me from myself! I can only hope and trust that You will, as You have said, because I am utterly unable.

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[1] CS Lewis in a letter to Keith Manship from The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III (September 13, 1962)