R3blog.net

Some people don’t believe in God.  I know, I know, you’re shocked by that, right?  People give lots of reasons for not believing.  But for today I want to focus on just one: religion is not science.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently.  You hear arguments left and right about how science is objective, religion isn’t.  The reasoning goes that because you can “prove” science, then it’s free from bias.

As I watch the whole Global Warming is man made story begin to unravel in the news, I’m reminded that science may be free from bias, but humans are not.  It is becoming increasingly apparent that much of the research supporting global warming was made up at worst, or “manipulated” at best.

But this isn’t the first time someone has made up research.  And it won’t be the last time.

Now this isn’t a post about Global Warming and how we should respond.  God very clearly calls us to be good stewards for the planet, and I don’t think any Christian, regardless of their political leanings, can claim that we’re getting an A+ on that one.

What this post is about is human folly.  The fact that our pride can so blind us that we can’t even see our own hypocrisy.  Of course we don’t need a scientific scandal to prove that.  We’re pretty good at being hypocrites on a daily basis.

Sin impacts everything we do.  Whether it’s loving our families or conducting scientific research.  None of us are immune to sin.

Help spread the revolution. Consider sharing...

It’s hard to believe that R3 is entering its 4^th year!  (well technically “calendar year,” R3’s anniversary is in a few months).  I never dreamed that I had enough to say to generate three posts a week.  I find it amazing that I can do that.  But that’s not the only thing that makes this 4^th year so remarkable.  It wasn’t that long ago that blogging didn’t exist.

Think about that one for a while!

The internet has been a great technology for growing people’s relationships with God.  There is no other technology that allows someone to write in their spare time in Kansas but influence Christians in Australia, Indonesia, or even China.  Or someone from Africa to influence people in Europe or America.  The internet has had a profound impact on living a life of faith.

While religion blogging is dominated by several “big name” bloggers there has been more than enough room for smaller writers to develop a community.  There are so many talented writers that I could spend an entire day simply surfing the internet reading.  Now if only someone would pay me to do that…

But blogging isn’t the only change.

How we study the Bible has also changed.  I can easily pull up Bible verses and do keyword searches online.  If you own an iPhone you can download Bible apps and get the same thing.  Never before has the Bible been so easy to access.  While I still read a paper version of the Bible every day, I rarely use it for quick searches or to look things up.  It just takes too long.  Digital is the way to go.

And still there is more change.

Even the way we do Bible studies is different.  There are online studies on hundreds of topics.  Churches are giving away much of their own materials away for free.  And now there are “social sites” popping up like EXAMEN.me.  All dedicated to providing high quality Bible studies and devotionals.

There has never been a better time to learn about living out a life of faith.  There has never been a time where so much has been available to so many.  And I, for one, can’t wait to see what the future holds.

As we go into the New Year, here is my challenge to you: find a new way to study the Bible and follow it for the next 30 days.  As you go through it, come back here and let us know how it’s going (I’m opening up the comments).  Did it work?  Was it a disaster?  Did it revolutionize your life?

Help spread the revolution. Consider sharing...

As we begin to wind down 2009, I want the last few posts of the year to be a bit light-hearted. Life is stressful. We all tend to work long hours. We have hundreds (seemingly) of things going on all the time. We rarely get days off (if you’re lucky enough to have a job).

Everything seems to move at warp speed.

So for this Christmas I encourage you to spend quality, focused, time with your friends and family. Enjoy their company and the community you have. Use this as an opportunity to show what it means to live a life of faith, not by preaching Bible verses, but by being there when they need you.

In the meantime, check out this video. I think we can all wish this was our house growing up…

Help spread the revolution. Consider sharing...

……….

Never think that God won’t ask you to do something hard.

In fact, that seems to be God’s favorite thing to do.  He never seems to say, “You know what, if you go on vacation to this exclusive resort, that will really get the people believing in me!”

Instead he says things like “love your enemies” and “turn the other cheek”.  Or if you are like Hosea, he tells you to marry a prostitute.

Ouch.

A while back I wrote that God never gives us more than we can handle.  It’s one of the most popular posts on R3.  People have a hard time understanding why a “loving God” gives us hard things to do.  We don’t really want a God; we want a super powerful Santa Claus.  But taking an easy path in life isn’t always the best way to go about living.  I think God knows this.  He knows that sometimes the most growth happens when we have to struggle.  He knows that some people will be held in bondage unless we act.  He knows that evil won’t stop, just because we don’t want to get involved.

Sometimes the only way to advance the Kingdom is to push.

The more I struggle to understand what it means to be a parent, the more I realize just what God goes through.  When I look at my own parents I realize they held me to high expectations, not because they were being “controlling” or “demanding” but because they knew I had more potential in me then even I realized.

It’s the same with God.  He knows how much we can grow.  How much we can handle.  And sometimes to bring out our full potential, we need to work really hard.

There are things more important to God than giving us an easy life.

This is clearly seen in the Bible.  God has always been more interested in our relationship with him than in our sacrifices (for Jews) or following a bunch of rules (for Christians).  But we can’t seem to get that through our heads.  We keep trying “harder” to please God, when that misses the whole point.

When God gives us something hard to do (like telling Hosea to marry a prostitute) we change not just ourselves, but the world.

You can’t find a story in the Bible where something amazing wasn’t experienced when hard tasks were done.  You can’t find a friend who has been obedient to God, who hasn’t grown.  You can’t find lives changed when we, as Christians, do the hard thing.

What else can you make that claim about?

So when God comes to you and says, “I have something hard for you to do.”  Don’t fight him.  Instead, say, “how can I do it?”  And then go and do it.

Help spread the revolution. Consider sharing...

“His successor will send out a tax collector to maintain the royal splendor.  In a few years, however, he will be destroyed, yet not in anger or in battle.” (Daniel 11:20)

Why is it that the weekend flies by, but the work week takes forever?  Why do we find sitting through a lecture painful, but watching a movie easy?  Why does vacation come and go when our daily commute takes so long?

Unless someone has mastered time travel (if so, please let me know) then all of these things can be explained by one simple word: perception.

Perception is that finicky thing that changes our reality.  It makes us believe something has happened when it hasn’t.  It makes us hot when we should be cold, and cold when we should be hot (this is why you say “boy it’s hot” when it’s 50 degrees outside in February, but not when it’s 50 in August).

Perception can be a major obstacle to our faith.

Perception may tell us that we can never change, that nothing good will ever happen, and we will be stuck “here” forever.

We are most vulnerable to these tricks when we are suffering.  We somehow know that “all good things must come to an end” and “it’s too good to last”.  We even have clichés devoted to them.  But when it comes to pain and suffering we often forget that those things don’t last either.

This was true in Israel’s case.

After centuries of not listening to God, Israel finally found themselves overwhelmed by a powerful enemy (Babylon).  As part of their punishment for losing the war, many of their most highly educated men were taken captive to become slaves (this is what happened to Daniel).  While most of the women and children were just outright murdered.

Many Jews simply couldn’t believe this was happening.  They were God’s chosen people.  They had been set free from captivity already.  How could they be going back?!  They never really thought God would let something like this happen to them.  Although if they had paid attention to prophets like Jeremiah, they would have figured it out.

But nothing lasts forever.  At least not in this world.

And I think God was reminding them of this.  In the story of Daniel, God simply slipped two sentences into the conversation.  Gently saying, “you will see tax collectors gathering money for a powerful kingdom, but even in the midst of that, their country will fall apart.”

Not even captivity lasts forever.

That was a lesson that the Jews needed to remember.  Because they were going to spend a long, long time in captivity.  They had to know that there was hope.  They had to remember who to hope in.  Those were things they had forgotten.

Bad things don’t last forever.  Maybe we need to remember that from time to time.

Help spread the revolution. Consider sharing...

……….

“One day I realized there was no God, no one behind reality, no life after death. I realized existence is a meaningless accident, begun by chance and destined for oblivion, and it changed my life. I used to be addicted to alcohol but now the ‘law of natural selection’ has set me free. I used to be greedy, but now the story of the Big Bang has made me generous. I used to be afraid, but now random chance has made me brave.” - John Ortberg, Faith and Doubt

This, tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek quote from John Ortberg illustrates something I’ve been thinking about the last couple of weeks: reasoned thinking.  I recognize this isn’t any great revelation, but as a society we have seemingly abandoned reason and logic.  On the one hand this can be good.  Pure reason and pure logic can lead us to cold and unmerciful decisions.  Playing the “odds” can dehumanize problems.  It can take human suffering and tragedy and make it a statistical anomaly.  Isn’t that the point of the Borg in Star Trek?

But I think there is more to logic and reason.

I’ve been a fan of Greg Koukl and Stand to Reason for a few years now.  Their biggest teaching effort is in “clear thinking.”  By that they mean teaching people to think logically about problems.  And since I’ve been listening to the Stand to Reason podcast, I am utterly shocked at how few world views really apply logic across their beliefs.

There are perhaps no worse places for this then watching children’s TV shows.  Which, I suppose, is another post all together!

Stories are powerful movers to a human.  How many of you immediately picked up on my Borg reference?  Did it not create an immediately concrete image in what it means for logic to run amuck?  It’s not a coincidence that politicians spend a lot of time, energy, and money trying to create a story for the public to hear.  TV ads don’t sell facts to us, they sell experiences and lifestyles.  We, as people, fall for stories.  And that can be a good thing.  Even God uses stories to illustrate what it means to live out a life of faith.  It’s called the Bible.

Ravi Zacharias has commented that if stories are powerful on their own, think of the power they have as a culture.

Every day we are given competing world views.  Every day we are told that the way to happiness lies through sex, drugs, wealth, and power.  That’s a view that is logically inconsistent with what God teaches.  Someone has to be wrong.  Both world views can’t be right.

This brings us back to Ortberg’s quote from his book Faith and Doubt.  Why is it, that you don’t hear quotes like this from naturalists?  If there is no life after death, and there is only randomness and chance, how do we ever have hope in anything?  How can we believe that something good can happen?  How do we break free from the grips of alcoholism if it ultimately doesn’t matter?

I believe it goes back to logical consistency.  Most of us don’t want to follow the logical consequences of our beliefs.  Atheists want morality because it’s convenient and offers protection.  But morality is impossible to explain if there is no God.  Because you’ll never be able to overcome the argument of “might makes right.”

Believer want the blessing, protection and hope that God provides.  Yet we often aren’t willing to count the cost.  We don’t want to follow the logic of what it means to live out a life of faith.

The world is filled with world views that don’t make sense.  We are inundated with views that contradict themselves but no one seems to notice.  No one is immune to problems of logic.

But what good is a world view if you don’t apply it consistently?  What good is believing in God if you don’t live that way?

Help spread the revolution. Consider sharing...

……….

I love football.  That’s pretty obvious if you’ve spent any time rummaging around R3 or ever glance at my twitter feed.  It’s in pretty much every conversation I have from August to February.  Yet I’ve noticed a problem – I can be obsessed.  I love football so much that a loss by the Steelers can derail my entire week.  I can be in a bad mood just because of one bad play.

And you know what?  I hate it.  I hate that football has that much impact on me.  It’s just a game.  But in my heart I know I often treat it as more than just a game.  Sometimes I tell myself, “don’t get so worked up”  However I can’t escape the fact that if football doesn’t have much of an impact on me, it’s not really worth watching, is it?

So I am caught in this love-hate relationship with the greatest game ever devised.

Here’s the thing though, the closer I get to God, the more I dislike these things in my life.  I don’t want anything to impact my mood except God.  I want him to be the center of who I am, not whether the Steelers win or lose.

Over the last year or two I’ve made great progress with having football as an idol.  I’ve learned to let a lot of frustration go and just enjoy the game for what it is – a game.  But at the same time, in the moment I have yet to fully control that emotion.  Now I don’t believe that God cares if I get excited about football or not.  But I do believe he cares about the way I project my relationship with him.  I can hardly call myself a Christian if I go off on someone because the Steelers lose.  That’s not exactly Christ-like behavior.

To me, football is an idol.  And that’s something I need to wrestle with each week.

Idols are dangerous.  They seep into our lives.  Stealing much of the joy in life with promises of a “better” or more “exciting” life.  Those are lies though because they seem so believable.  But they are lies none the less.  Only God provides true freedom and true  life.  Everything else is just a shallow imitation.

Even football.

Help spread the revolution. Consider sharing...

……….

Leadership.  Each of us has an opinion about what makes a leader.  Some people will argue that leadership is all about your genetics – it’s what you’re born with.  Others will argue that leadership is something you can learn.  Or maybe that it’s about the situation you are in.  While we can’t always articulate what leadership really is, we tend to give the old cliche “I know it when I see it.”

But what does the Bible have to say about leadership?  Is there such a thing as Biblical leadership?  The short answer is “yes.”  The Bible makes a strong case for what leadership should look like.  And it looks a lot like sacrifice.

Does that surprise you?

It should.

Because it goes against almost everything we’re told about leadership today.  Most leaders have people who are willing to die for them.  That’s the whole idea behind the Secret Service or a body guard.  The idea is that the leader is so important that he (or she) can not die.  Therefore someone else must be willing to sacrifice their own life to protect the leader.  In other words we die for the King.

In the Bible, however, leadership looks a whole lot like the King dying for us.

The Newsboys capture this in the song You Are My King.  The song says, “Amazing love how can it be?  That you, my King, should die for me”

The world tells us that we need to lay down our lives for our King.  That our lives are less important than the King’s.  Yet the Bible is the reverse.  The King should lay down his life for us, the servants.  Jesus had everything he needed.  He didn’t need to die for us.  He chose to die for us.  The one person who should not have to suffer chose to suffer.  To save people who don’t want to be saved.  That, my friends, really is Amazing Love.  That is revolution.

Don’t be fooled though.  Biblical leadership isn’t something reserved for an “elite few.”  It’s supposed to be lived out by everyone who has a relationship with Jesus.  It happens when you live out a life of faith.  When you chose to sacrifice to protect someone weaker than yourself.  When you chose to give something up so that someone else can have something more.  When you lay your own life down, and pick up the cross that God hands you.  That’s living out a life of faith.  That’s Biblical leadership.

That’s a revolution.

Where are you supposed to take leadership in your life?  Who are you to lay your life down for?  Who are you to sacrifice for?  Your wife?  Your boyfriend?  Your kids?  A stranger?

Where will you display Biblical leadership?

Help spread the revolution. Consider sharing...

……….

It appears that the NBA is headed to a lockout.  The referees and the NBA can’t come to an agreement.  It may not be the only sport that suffers a lockout.  The NFL, the world’s most successful league, is on the verge of a labor dispute which may result in a lockout.  All of this follows on the heels of the NFL’s labor dispute from a few years ago.  And just recently was the 15 year anniversary of the MLB labor dispute.

Four major sports, 4 lockouts all within recent memory.

Why?

Part of it is greed.  Greed of owners, greed of players, greed of fans, greed of our hearts.  But part of it is just the nature of the world we live in.  We have bought into the idea that money is the answer to all our problems.  Yet the more money we get, the more we fight over it.

In the case of the NFL, neither the players nor the owners have ever had it better.  Yet both want bigger pieces of the pie.  It’s hard for most of us to relate to these arguments because many of us would gladly do their jobs for free, let alone millions of dollars!

Yet for most of us, we can understand being consumed by money and things.  We get angry that we don’t get a raise.  We become jealous when our friends get cooler things than we have.  The hardest thing for me, about being unemployed, is seeing things I want, and not being able to get them.

If we aren’t careful, greed and money pave the way for us to think that we should always get it “my way.”  That somehow just because it’s “my way” makes it right.  The irony is, “my way” is often a path towards failure and defeat.

If the NBA and the NFL have labor issues, maybe they will recover.  But maybe not .  In either case, they will display, for all of us, just what happens when you allow greed to become synonymous with “my way.”

Help spread the revolution. Consider sharing...

……….

Have you ever noticed how everything in the world is geared towards justifying our choices, our actions, and our decisions?  We live in a world obsessed with finding excuses, reasons, and explanations for why our behavior should be the exception.

“Well officer, I didn’t mean to speed, I just had to go to the bathroom.”
“I’d love to play with you tonight son, but I had a hard day at work.”
“Everyone else is doing it…”

We are always looking for loopholes.  Always looking for an out.

I find it interesting that God is just the opposite.

God closed the loopholes.  No, scratch that.  He doesn’t “close” loopholes, he slams them shut, nails the door, and moves a giant bolder in front of it.  God does not accept “well I just wasn’t paying attention.”  God does not accept excuses and justifications.

Is there anything more revolution, more counter-cultural than that?

We often have this impression of Jesus as a “nice guy” who was in complete contrast to the “big, mean” God of the Old Testament.  But that’s not the case.  Both treated sin in a very-counter cultural way.  And yes, it was counter-cultural 2,000 years ago.   Much to the shock of the Jews of the day, Jesus ramps up the intensity of the 10 commandments:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5: 17-20)

If that’s not enough.  Consider what Jesus said about murder.  “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.”

Wow.

I don’t know about you, but that’s terrifying.  Hating someone is the same as murdering them?  God doesn’t see shades of gray?  You can be condemned to Hell for that?!  Talk about closing the loopholes!

Why was Jesus like this?

I believe it’s because God knows how we operate.  He knows that we’re always looking for loopholes.  He knows that if there was any wiggle room we’d be asking, “how close to the line can I get?”

That’s what Israel did.  In fact that was their entire history.  They were constantly trying to get as close to the line as they could without crossing.  And you know where that led?  To hardened hearts.  To spiritual death.  And to a life lived not in faith, but a life lived in mindless obedience to minute laws.  A place where there was no room left for God.

There is good news though.  While you and I can never live up to Jesus’ standards.  That doesn’t matter.  Jesus took the punishment that we deserved.  He suffered where we should be suffering.  He paid the price that was ours to bear.  That’s what’s so amazing about God.  At the very moment he was closing all loopholes, he was opening up the front door.  No more sneaking around, we could boldly and confidently walk in the front door.  As Michael W. Smith says in Come To The Cross, “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, everyone can come to the cross.”

If God has closed the loopholes should we still be seeking to justify all of our actions?  Should we still be trying to avoid trouble by wiggling our way free?  Or should we boldly move forward and simply ask God to forgive us?  Jesus may have closed the loopholes, but by doing so he made it easier to enter Heaven, not harder.

I ask you this week – where are the loopholes in your life?  And what are you going to do to close them?

A life of faith is guided by God, not controlled by loopholes.

Help spread the revolution. Consider sharing...