Most people, despite their religious beliefs, are practical atheists. They can make plans without him, meet their needs without him, live the essence of their lives without him. Their prayers give them away. They cheerfully talk to God as if they didn’t really need anything. They may pray for God to heal a sick friend, but in their hearts, prayer is secondary to medicine and not really important at all. When sickness strikes home and medicine doesn’t stop it, their actions may begin to line up with their doctrines. Then their prayers might become prayers of desperation, the kind God can answer. At last they mean what they pray.

Religious people are accused of harping on fire, brimstone and damnation. They don’t usually. It’s rare to hear about such subjects in most religious gatherings. After all, talking about hell makes church people uncomfortable too, unless you’re talking about people going there whom they don’t know. They may believe in hell, theoretically, but it’s extremely rare to find anybody willing to apply such warnings to themselves. Everybody listening thinks they are already “in.”
Continue reading “All ye in come free”

Some of the most refreshing people to spend time with are converted murderers and recovered terminal patients. Someone who used to kill people has no illusions about what a nice guy he is, or what he would be like without God. Someone who was given six months to live has no illusions that he will live forever, or where his life comes from. Neither kind of person wastes as much time on themselves as the rest of us who haven’t yet come to the end of ourselves.

Agnostics and others tell me that I need to be more open-minded about religion. Okay. Will this prayer help?

“O God, I praise you. Show me if you’re not there. Make your nonexistence real to me. Thank you, God. I love you.”

The farther from God that you realize yourself to be, the closer you really become. Redemption is not a strain for him, as if you were helping him out by giving him fewer things to redeem. Being one of God’s people is not a matter of finding natural virtues in yourself and displaying them instead of your natural weaknesses. Continue reading “Defending yourself against God”

Consider this: if your fiancee loved you as much as you love God, would you break off the engagement? Soon God’s people will become his bride, though you don’t have to take part in that. Once the marriage takes place, if not before, his people will do nothing but worship him and praise him. Does that thought disturb you, of never ceasing to praise God? Do you have a hard time doing it now? Does the thought make heaven seem enslaving or boring? You don’t have to take part in that either. However, you may not like the alternative. There will be no alternative in heaven.

Why worry about the state of your soul? Why seek more from God? Well, why seek more from your marriage? The Bible compares God’s loving relationship to his people to a husband’s relationship to his wife. However, since love for God and love for spouse have both grown cold, it becomes ever harder for us to understand what God meant, or to even care. For some couples, it’s hard to imagine wanting to die for each other. For some Christians, it’s hard to believe (as opposed to mentally assent) that Jesus wanted to die for them. But when you were first falling in love, was a visit to your loved one an obligation, or was it joy? Did Romeo spend regular time beneath Juliet’s window to keep her from getting mad at him, or because nothing could have kept him away? Continue reading “I’m no Romeo.”

Did you know that your toothbrush is also an excellent tool for cleaning around the toilet? Except that once you use it that way, you’ll find it less effective and less pleasant in your mouth. That’s all that holiness really means. God wants to set you apart, sanctify you, make you holy (all mean the same thing) for his purposes. Yes, the mind, body and will that God made for his own purposes will also serve well for other purposes. God made them well. But, like a fine woodworker’s tools, the more you use them for something for which they weren’t intended, the more trouble you’ll have when you try to use them for the right purpose. A person who wants to be holy isn’t nitpicking or negative or arrogant or legalistic, any more than a person who wants to defend his toothbrush from me.

You can look through your glasses, but you can’t look at your glasses at the same time. Your perspective is the same way. Only God and your brothers and sisters can give you any different perspective. That’s why you don’t see your needs. We need community, a closer community than most have ever experienced, in order to break free and be healed. In most of our religious organizations, we don’t get close enough to really see each other’s needs, let alone really help them. It’s as if your cancer surgeon greeted you warmly, pointed to the tumor bulging through your skin, waved his scalpel with a smile, but never began operating. The scalpel has to get close enough to cut before it does any good.

Sociologists decry the weaknesses of single-parent families, but how many of them speak out against the socially-acceptable sins that made them common? Historically, repentance and conversion, not social programs, have been the only effective solution for a myriad of problems such as child abuse, child exploitation, poor working conditions, low incomes, high unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse and teen pregnancy. God helps a father to stop drinking and start working, God helps the father’s employer to provide job training and increase wages, God helps the employer’s teenaged daughter to seek love from himself instead of boys. Social scientists have even coined a term for the phenomenon: “redemption and lift.”