Filed under: Worship
After a week or two in Korea, I was able to make out the elementary expressions which all foreigners must learn, regardless of their country of sojourn. “Please” (juseyo), “yes” (neh). By far the most important, however, was “thank you” (kan sa mi da).
Saying “thank you” to the local people was an important grace, which went a long way with them. It is possible to get around without much or any Korean, but “kan sa mi da” is essential.
God has done great things in Korea, spreading his gospel like crazy. Fifty one percent of the population are Christian. Korea is rabid for missions. Korean missionaries have been martyred in the middle east and other parts of the world. Their zeal has earned them some contempt in their own country, already. Some, no doubt, is earned, since all Christians earn a little of the contempt which comes our way. Most, I pray, is unjust.
In my town I have been unable to find an English worship service which occurs during my free time. However, late one Sunday afternoon, I did walk into one of the many congregations which are scattered throughout the town. I heard singing and preaching, so I walked in. A friendly man in a suit greeted me and, though no doubt puzzled by my attending a Korean language service, was happy to seat me. He was a hospitable Christian, as we all should be.
The praise music was led by an energetic man, accompanied by a choir of elementary school kids. It was exuberant and boisterous. I could make out “Yesu Christ” throughout the choruses, but little else. That by itself was quite enough to bring me into the assembly of the saints, and give glory to God, even if in a different language.
After the singing, a distinguished elder began to preach. I remained, though unable to understand him. However, as soon as he began his first prayer, a familiar group of syllables leaped out…
“sa mi da”…
“sa mi da”…
The pastor was saying “thank you” to the Lord, and he was saying it repeatedly, interspersed with his petitions. Each time he said it, I repeated it in my own mind. “Yes Lord, thank you”.
Thank you for giving me this work to do, in this country. Thank you for bringing me to this assembly of saints, where I can know the joy you give to us all, even if I cannot understand the message. Thank you for putting thanksgiving in my heart.
Filed under: Worship
Almost ten years ago, I joined the first ship of my career. Tomorrow, I leave her for good, and go to join another.
A chief engineer I once knew said it well at his retirement barbecue. “I won’t miss these steel ships, but I will miss these men.” My sentiment is the same. Seamen do have affection for their ships, but it doesn’t approach the affection we have for our crew mates. These are the people who we get to know and love. Some of them we aren’t necessarily fond of, but the necessities of life in close quarters makes us be kind to them, even if we aren’t fond of them.
In ten years, I have gotten married, had a son, gotten divorced, and gotten remarried. Crew mates have heard my stories and prayed for me through it all. In turn, I have prayed for them as they lost mothers, fathers, sons, or wives.
In ten years, I have struggled with sins. God has delivered me from a few of them. Some still cling, and I still fight, and pray.
God has seen fit to bless me bountifully over ten years. I have a wife who loves him, and sons who love him. I have much to praise him for.
God has also seen fit to bring me through many tears. He has worked yeast through me, and given me suffering, much of which I deserved. But he is not angry forever, and his discipline is loving, not harsh.
Lord, preserve me as I begin my second ten years at sea. Bless me, challenge me, and humble me, so that I can bear witness to your love, and worship your son. Make haste to help my wife, and my family, who is lonely when I am gone. Let your peace be with me wherever you take me. I ask this favor in your son’s name. Amen.
Filed under: Worship
Ever since the days of James and John, Jesus’s followers have made a pastime of scrapping with one another. I believe these contentions are often the result of decoys placed by our enemy, Satan. I believe that he knows exactly how to provoke us so that we speak and act beyond our understanding or authority. When we bite on these traps, we throw stones among the flock, scattering them, wounding them.
What makes this tactic so dastardly is that it mimics a legitimate kind of judgment from the Holy Spirit. We know the Holy Spirit has to disturb the sheep from time to time for their own good, so that the whole flock will not be led astray. We even know that legitimate culling goes on, and that false sheep do prowl. However, I believe we find it far too easy to take strong stands on certain topics, believing ourselves to be performing this legitimate kind of pastoral judgment, when in fact we fool ourselves, and are actually standing far out on a limb which scripture cannot justify.
I believe the most critical example of this error today occurs within the context of the American Evangelical movement’s notion of how God uses scripture for his purposes. Believers everywhere and in every time have uniformly trusted the Hebrew and Greek scriptures for bearing witness to the true God’s mind, and for training in righteousness, exactly as Paul describes in his letters. This is a hallmark which seems worth dividing over, as far as it goes. (more…)
Filed under: Art
How proud is God? How should God’s people uphold his honor? How exactly should the gospel transform human society?
These questions lie at the heart of Silence. Written in the wake of World War two by the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo, Silence tells the story of the persecution of Christians in seventeenth century Japan.
Although proselytizing efforts by Francis Xavier had been successful in the previous century, the 1600s brought about ecclesiastical quarrels between Roman catholic and protestant missionaries. These squabbles often went hand in hand with political and military shenanigans between competing European powers in Japan. Japan’s leadership came to view Christianity as an essential part of this distasteful western mess, and severe persecution quickly became standard fare for the newly budded Japanese church.
Endo’s protagonist, the young Portugese priest Sebastian Rodrigues, enters Japan secretly in the midst of these persecutions, along with a monastic colleague, Francis Garrpe. They encounter crude but strong faithfulness among the Japanese believers, who undertake great sacrifice in order to protect the padres from the authorities.
Eventually, however, they are betrayed by a weak-willed Japanese Christian, and their trials begin in earnest. Rodrigues’s faith is tested to limits which comfortable modern western Christians may never be able to properly understand. His captors torture him psychologically in order to make him renounce his faith. This is not a simple temptation or test of honor; it is not Rodrigues’s mere conscience at stake. If he submits to the authorities by trampling on Christ’s portrait, his peasant flock goes free. If he does not, they will be tortured to death.
This test is one of the most soul-churning passages of literature I have read. What will Rodrigues do? Will he apostatize? How important is his honor? How important is God’s? As the pastor of these simple peasants, is it better to renounce his faith to save their lives, or better to embrace martyrdom and doom them?
Initially, I found myself cheering for Rodrigues’s perseverance and martyrdom, but by the novel’s end, I was shaken and unsure. In the West, Christendom has a long and hallowed tradition of persecution stories, from the early believers in Jerusalem, to the church in Rome, and in various places throughout the centuries. Although Christ gives approbation to those who are persecuted for his sake, human sinfulness, such as it is, can even distort the meaning and value of martyrdom. Even the brightest lights in Christian history sometimes succumb to an unspiritual triumphalism. With the benefit of time, we often come to see some of Christendom’s triumphs as accreted with sin and pride.
The first believers in Japan did not have this cultural background narrative to inform their consciences. They had only an immediate pagan background confronted with the fresh, non-accreted startling news that God has suffered, endured shame and humiliation, and forgiven their sins. This gospel surely would have motivated them to endure great persecution, but at the same time, the gospel is the story of a man who suffered in order to release his friends from condemnation. In that light, martyrdom for its own sake is dubious at best.
What is true religion? The bible maintains that true religion consists in looking after orphans and widows in their distress, and keeping oneself from being stained by the world. Those two mandates, it seems to me, should never be at odds with one another. If Rodrigues had refused to trample on the fumie (the term for the sacred image of Christ), he would definitely not have been looking after orphans and widows, but rather sending them to certain doom. However, would his simple act constitute “being stained by the world?” Would he be a Judas and an enemy of the gospel? There is a prominent strain of Christianity, very much in the tradition of the western theology of glory, which says “yes”. Endo’s answer, more in tune with the theology of the cross, is “no”.
I am inclined to agree with the latter.
Filed under: Worship
Scripture has all along warned that what looks random to us is still under the Lord’s control (Prov. 16:33). The proper theistic response to the charge that there doesn’t appear to be a plan behind evolutionary history is not to try to show one, but to say that knowing there is such a plan depends on first knowing God. For us, as for Adam, it is only by encountering God’s covenantal word that we can come to know him and, in consequence, to read nature rightly. -Roy Clouser: Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives, Ed. Rob Pennock. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 513–536.The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. -the HOLY SPIRIT, via Paul of Tarsus: the first pastoral epistle to the ekklesia at Corinth
Filed under: Cries
…I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers… -the LORD, via Paul of Tarsus
I was betrayed once, by someone very close to me. At the heart of the betrayal was a ghastly denial of everything Jesus Christ lived and died for. I pleaded, as best I was able, with my betrayer, to repent and believe. She did not, and has not.
After a period of trust and penance, God brought me mercy with the salve of a believing, gracious wife. The painful memories of the past are now only a repository of valuable lessons. The grief for that betrayal is gone. My forgiveness is complete. God’s blood has covered it.
Now, my only feelings toward the betrayer are like those of Paul for his brothers. I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart for this person who has so thoroughly tried to establish her own righteousness, rather than revel in the righteousness of God.
I lay in my bunk reading scripture the other night, and was overcome with grief for the sheer terror which awaits such as her. Unless she repents and believes the gospel, she will not know the discipline of the LORD, but only his judgment.
I thought of the sheer terror which awaits her, and ones like her, someday. I thought of the animalistic panic; the impulse to run and hide; the sure knowledge of destruction; the hammering heart; all of the horrible sensations which accompany judgment.
Oh, God, have mercy on those who have hated you. Have mercy, as you have had mercy on I, who so frequently despise you. Be kind to the evil and ungrateful.
Let me tell of your salvation, and of your faithfulness. Let my lips tell of your saving Word, and may sinners hear it and trust in you.
I have made their widows more in number than the sand of the seas; I have brought against the mothers of young men a destroyer at noonday; I have made anguish and terror fall upon them suddenly. -the LORD, via Jeremiah
Filed under: Marriage
One of the most irritating features of Christian theological debate is the all-too-common tendency toward out-of-proportion rhetoric.
In Christian circles, there is currently a big fracas between complementarians and egalitarians. Complementarians argue for a marked differentiation in sexual roles in church and society, whereas egalitarians argue for little differentiation between those roles–at least in the church, if not in society.
I have found myself fairly well convinced by the standard arsenal of complementarian arguments, while retaining some sympathy for a few of the egalitarian ones. Overall, I’d say I am a pretty firm complementarian.
However, what really makes me roll my eyes are the frequent overblown hysterics which both parties tend to throw at each other.
For instance, it is common to hear egalitarians claim that complementarians are single handedly responsible for all of the domestic abuse in Christendom, or that they are suppressing the spread of the gospel by quenching the Spirit.
Complementarians like to return the over-the-top favor by accusing egalitarians of promoting rank unbelief, disobedience, and mockery of holy scripture, and for generally being responsible for most of the ills of postmodern society.
The sorry thing about all this is that, though there are quite a few amateurs, some of the teachers who say these kinds of things are really mature, first-rate Christians in other areas–people who have taught me greatly in the faith. But they really ought to know better.
Ironically, this embarrassing realization is helping me to firm up my trust in the authority of scripture. For one thing, the biblical authors must have been inspired, compared to some of these modern guys.
Well… there was that Paul fella, with his overblown rhetoric. But his insults make a lot more sense to me than some of these modern ones. At least he was defending the idea of justification by faith, rather than second-order teaching. Now that’s something that justifies a little name-calling.
One thing bothers me, however. A major institution which defends the complementarity view has published two very articulate pieces by well-known men, both of which purport to answer the egalitarian objection “why don’t you follow the head covering teachings in Paul?”
Astonishingly, neither of these pieces actually explain why. One of them completely sidesteps the issue, talking instead about the “inner beauty” passage. The other just kind of shrugs it off and doesn’t give an answer.
I wonder why this is?
My suspicion is this: these men have devoted themselves to the overblown rhetoric that egalitarians are being radically and knowingly disobedient to God. I think that, at this particular juncture, they are sensitive to the fact that they, themselves, are not obeying the clear teaching of scripture, and could easily be open to the same accusation by those Christians who do practice headcoverings.
Ergo the deafening silence on this issue.
And that, methinks, is the wages of using overblown rhetoric. Throw those kinds of accusations around too lightly, and one might become afraid that what comes around, goes around.
Filed under: Worship
“Evolution says that God works through death. That’s impossible! God would NEVER work through death!” -spoken by a godly Christian teacher
There are actually two fallacies in the above statement. The first fallacy is a misrepresentation of science. The only thing that classic evolutionary theory says about death is that populations which are lesser suited to survive an environment will tend toward extinction, while better suited populations will tend toward longevity.
This is a common fallacy, and for many reasons, an understandable one. We live in an age in which arrogant unbelievers take pride in scoffing at the God of the bible. Some of them even like to make quasi-religious claims about their beloved theories, ascribing a sort of deity to the processes themselves. They act exactly as Paul describes–worshiping created things (i.e. the earth itself, or human learning) rather than the Creator–who is responsible for both the earth and human learning.
Because of these arrogant statements, it is easy to succumb to the temptation to fight back. But it always helps to understand the bible first.
The second fallacy is much less understandable. In fact, it’s a huge whopper, considering that God planned the slaying of his son, Jesus Christ, from before the foundation of the world–for our sakes.
In other words, if God never works through death, then our debt for our sinfulness is not paid.
Jesus and the apostles frequently make it clear that dying is the way of discipleship. Martyrdom, or “witnessing”, always involves real bodily death. Sometimes it involves getting killed. Sometimes it just involves dying well in old age. It always involves spiritual violence; i.e. “putting to death” the “old man”.
This is not to say that God takes some kind of perverse pleasure in death. However, it is clear that God works through death in ways which glorify himself. This is a spiritual truth, and hard to understand. But it is true nonetheless. In fact, it is one of the Christian’s greatest comforts in this life.
All too often, we paint a picture of God as a creator who scrambles to put together a “plan B” in order to undo Satan’s mess. But his ways are not our ways.
No matter what your exegesis says about death, all Christians can agree: God is faithful to us always, to the point of death–and beyond.
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” -the HOLY SPIRIT, via Paul of Tarsus
Filed under: Worship
Another task along the road to recovery is learning to love and forgive yourself. Loving yourself means that you know yourself well enough to be aware of who you are, i.e. your thoughts and feelings in the moment without judgment attached. By our very nature as human beings, we are imperfect and yet each of us wants to be loved and accepted unconditionally. Your capacity to forgive others is closely related to your capacity to forgive yourself. Although it may take awhile to fully embrace this stage of recovery, it is the most critical stage in your recovery. -material from a “parenting class” ordered by courts for divorcing parents
This is an excellent example of how to lie. The Enemy assumes several truths, to which the scriptures all attest. For example:
We love ourselves
People will be lovers of self. -Paul’s second letter to Timothy
We crave love
She shall pursue her lovers but not overtake them, and she shall seek them but shall not find them. -Hosea
We are imperfect
All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. -Isaiah
Using those important facts as a springboard, he then goes on to twist one very crucial fact: our capacity to forgive others is based not on how good we forgive ourselves, but rather, on how the LORD has forgiven us.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. -the LORD, who never trespassed, yet took upon himself the trespasses of us all
Filed under: Worship
One mistake Christians frequently make is to assume everything “the world” says is 100% false, and everything that “Christian sources” say is 100% trustworthy.
This mistaken idea attributes way too much power to Satan. Satan is incapable of concocting total lies, because there is no such thing as a total lie. There is only Truth (uncreated Christ, in the flesh), and, subsequent to Him, things that created beings say, all of which fall short of Him in some fashion.
Therefore, whenever the Enemy tells a lie, he never just invents something from scratch. He simply takes true facts, but purposefully exaggerates or minimizes something in them, so that they become lies, engineered to mislead and discourage trust of God, or to falsely accuse a sinner.
Christians who adopt this fearful stance are actually guilty of the same thing as the Canaanite recon squad, who spread panic among the Israelites. They said “the grapes are alright, but those guys are big and scary!” This was technically true, but they purposefully misdirected their brethren’s attention from how big and juicy those grapes really were. Therefore, they caused their brethren to cower, and caused them not to trust God, and God was very displeased with them for it. And because of their bad report, and the people’s foul suspicion of God’s promise, God’s people were judged and defeated.
