Tag Archives: Church

Mentoring

Does the Christian life involve taking the initiative and executing plans?

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Does God expect us to make plans and achieve goals?
Does God expect us to make plans and achieve goals?

I’ve noticed a disturbing view that many Christians seem to absorb who grow up in the church. Basically, the church view says that life is so unpredictable and unknowable that it’s pointless for Christians to make plans to achieve goals. In fact, the only thing that Christians can do, on this view, is to wait for God to provide whatever he’s going to provide, without the person having to know or do anything that they don’t feel like knowing or doing. On this view, it’s best not to know too much about how the world really works, because what God wants from us is not to produce a return on our talents, but for us to just muddle through on our prayers, intuitions and feelings.

Well, which view is right? Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason has an opinion on this question.

Excerpt:

In Matthew Jesus talks about prayer and says, “Ask and it shall be given to you.” But Jesus didn’t stop there. He went on to say, “Ask and it shall be given to you. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened.” So it’s not just asking, there’s seeking and knocking as well. In the same passage Jesus gives us this famous promise. He tells us not to worry about food and clothing because food and clothing will be provided by Him. He says, Look at the lilies of the field, they don’t toil or weave. Look at the birds in the field, they don’t plant and harvest. The Father takes care of them. He’ll take care of you as well.

Now, are we going to read that verse and conclude that God doesn’t expect us to weave or till the soil? Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 3, “Anyone who does not work ought not eat.” It seems to me we could say to Paul, “Why should we work? Jesus has promised to take care of us.” We all understand that in a verse like there is a corporate effort. God has promised to take care of us, but we have to couple that command with other commands that God has given us to toil and weave, as well. To work, as well. And, I would say, to try and find ways to get pregnant that are morally acceptable. The same thing with dating and getting married. We have the liberty to find a mate, and I don’t see in any way, shape or form that that’s not trusting God.

Now, in any of these things there may be a sense of franticness in getting a job, or getting pregnant, or getting a mate that represents an attitude that’s wrong. It can be taken to extremes, but then our Christian ethic would inform our attitudes. The very act of taking the initiative in itself is not unbiblical.

In fact, the way I would put it is that it’s 100% God and 100% man. What does that mean? It means that God, even though He is in control and we must look to Him, still delegates a portion of active responsibility to us so that He can see to it that we’re fed and clothed, but it’s our responsibility to go out and look. You can do the act of looking with confidence that God will provide. I think that that obtains in all of these other circumstances, as well.

So there’s is not this sharp dichotomy between God working and our working. They go hand in hand. If God expects our initiative in the area of food and clothing, though He has promised to provide, by what standard do we disqualify taking initiative in the ares of reproductive technology and dating? It appears that He’s in control here, too.

I think that there are three places where the fatalistic view is most likely to creep up. Those are: 1) romantic relationships, 2) parenting and 3) money management. I think people really want to be free to do whatever “feels good” in those areas. Praying about these matters is a way of stealing God’s blessing for a decision that we are making based on feelings, because we don’t want to be bothered to take the initiative and do what we have reasons to believe will work. We don’t want to have to put in the work to study something and then bind our will to what our investigation shows is the most prudent course – even if it’s more difficult.

Some things aren’t going to work whether we pray about them or not, because of the way the world works. For example, buying lottery tickets instead of stocks as our retirement plan or marrying the buxom blonde stripper. Praying about a bad idea isn’t going to make it work, because our feelings don’t change the universe in any way. The universe is the way it is. My advice is to set specific goals, find out how the world really works, and then make informed decisions to achieve those goals. At the very least, don’t think that praying about something morally wrong gives you permission to do it.

I really recommend that people consider reading “Decision Making and the Will of God“. And, if you are male and you like fiction, then read “Rifleman Dodd“. In case you missed my previous post on decision making and the will of God, you should definitely click through and read it.

Mentoring

Frank Turek interviews William Lane Craig about Christian apologetics and debate

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This interview is getting good reviews on Facebook. I would say it is a must-see, because it will change your view of what we should be emphasizing as Christians. Please watch the lecture and then mail this post to all of your friends – we need to be challenged by this man William Lane Craig.

(H/T BirdieUpon)

This interview occured after William Lane Craig’s debate tour of the UK, and they talk a lot about it. I think the lesson for us is that apologetics is the best evangelistic tool that Christians have, and people really do show up by the thousands to see these debates. Maybe we should do more of them? And maybe we should be encouraging young people to follow Craig’s path and become solid philosophers and debaters? And are we going to take seriously the duty to sponsor events like this? We have to ask ourselves these tough questions, and be practical and effective about defending God’s honor when it’s called into question. Having a relationship with God is not just about us getting what we want. There are things that we need to be doing to hold up our end of the relationship. Hard things. Self-sacrificial things. Things that we may not like at all. Things that work.

In Intellectual Neutral

Here’s an article that I think might be appropriate for this interview.

Excerpt:

You may see, perhaps for the first time in your life, that here is a need in your life and as a result resolve to become intellectually engaged as a Christian. This is a momentous decision. It is a step that is desperately needed in the lives of millions of American Christians today. No one has issued the challenge to become intellectually engaged more forcefully than did Charles Malik, in his inaugural address at the dedication of the Billy Graham Center on this campus. He emphasized that we as Christians face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church, he said, is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. Listen to what he says:

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideas? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.

These words hit like a hammer. Evangelicals really have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. The average Christian doesn’t realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and the professional journals and the scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as irrational or bigoted, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders, have absorbed this viewpoint.

This is a war which we cannot afford to lose. As J. Gresham Machen warned in his article, “Christianity and Culture” in the Princeton Theological Review of 1913, on the even of the Fundamentalist Controversy, if we lose this intellectual war, then our evangelism will be immeasurably more difficult in the next generation. He wrote,

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.

You can get the video and audio from a later version of this talk from Apologetics 315. I was present in the Wheaton College chapel when he gave the talk I excerpted above. It was moving.

We need a three part approach. We need to be intellectually engaged ourselves. We need to be intentional about marrying well and raising up young people who are intellectually engaged. And we need to study hard subjects so we can be good earners, and support the right kinds of operations. We can’t just do whatever makes us feel good, willy-nilly, and then hope that things will work out – we have to work at this.

News

UK police force man not to display Bible DVDs in his cafe

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From UK Daily Mail. (H/T Adina via Mary)

Excerpt:

The Salt and Light cafe in Blackpool has for years repeatedly played the entire 26-hour-long Watchword Bible, a 15-DVD set produced in America in which a narrator reads the whole of the New Testament, on a small flatscreen TV on the back wall.

The sound is turned down but the words flash on to the screen against a series of images.

[…]Mr Murray said the two uniformed officers from Lancashire Constabulary arrived at lunchtime on Monday, the cafe’s busiest time of day. WPC June Dorrian, the community beat manager, told him there had been a complaint and he was breaching the Public Order Act 1986.

Mr Murray said: ‘I told them that all that appeared on the screen were the words of the New Testament. There is no sound, just the words on the screen and simple images in the background of sheep grazing or candles burning. I thought there might be some mix-up but they said they were here to explain the law to me and how I had broken it.

‘I said, “Are you really telling me that I am facing arrest for playing the Bible?” and the WPC fixed me with a stare and said, “If you broadcast material that causes offence under the Public Order Act then we will have to take matters further. You cannot break the law.” ’

Mr Murray, who worked in a homeless shelter for five years before taking over the cafe three months ago, said he realised the only way to appease the police was to pull the plug on the Bible.

‘I was worried about being handcuffed and led out of the shop in front of my customers. It wouldn’t have looked good so I thought it was better to comply. It felt like a betrayal. They left the shop and told me they would continue to monitor if we were displaying inflammatory material. At no stage had they spoken to me like I was a law-abiding citizen trying to earn a living. I felt like a criminal.’

[…]Lancashire Police said they had received a complaint on Saturday afternoon from a female customer who was ‘deeply offended’ by the words she had seen on the screen.

A spokesman said they were ‘duty bound’ to respond to the complaint and had concluded the cafe could be in breach of Section 29E of the Public Order Act, which warns that people who play images or sounds that stir up hatred against homosexuals could be guilty of an offence.

However, it also says criticism of sexual conduct ‘shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred’.

I think that if I went in to most Christian churches today and asked them whether Christianity was more about telling people the truth or about making people feel good, that they would think it was the latter.In fact, I can believe that the woman who complained was probably a straight Christians who had simply reinterpreted Christianity to mean “the voice of God speaking in my head” or “my emotions and intuitions”. I have seen many Christian women deny offensive Bible verses, deny Hell, and deny other passages, and yet still claim to be Christians. We aren’t doing a good enough job of separating out the moral claims of the Bible and setting them against our emotions, intuitions and feelings. And I think the reason why this happens is because the church presents the Bible in a feminized way – Christianity as personal preference, Christianity as life enhancement. Instead of presenting the words of the Bible, and then the evidence from outside the Bible. E.g. – the words against same-sex marriage, then the evidence against same-sex marriage. The words against abortion, then the evidence against abortion. The words for capital punishment and then the evidence for capital punishment.

How about showing this instead:

Or this?

Those should be real winners in the UK, because the bad guys are both British.

Sometimes, I think that Christians have their heads so stuck in Christian culture that they are unaware of how to present Christianity to non-Christians. Throwing Bible verses in someone’s face is not the right way to go. Instead of showing Bible verses, the cafe owner should switch to showing debates about God’s existence, the resurrection, the reliability of the Bible, abortion, and same-sex marriage. That would be more practical, and would be less inflammatory that Romans 1, since it concentrates on claims of fact and evidence.