“Love is the first mark of a true and living church and truth is the second, because the Scriptures hold love and truth together in balance. Some Christians are so resolved to make love paramount, that they forget the sacredness of revealed truth. ‘Let us drown our doctrinal differences,’ they urge, ‘in the ocean of brotherly love!’ Others are equally mistaken in their pursuit of truth at the expense of love. So dogged is their zeal for God's Word that they become harsh, bitter and unloving. Love becomes sentimental if it is not strengthened by truth, and truth becomes hard if it is not softened by love. We need to preserve the balance of the Bible which tells us to hold the truth in love, to love others in the truth, and to grow not only in love but in discernment.”

 

[From Authentic Christianity by John Stott (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press) p. 265.]

On my 12th visit to Israel, I finally had my baptism by traffic accident. I was sitting at a red light, when a bus turning the corner honked at me to back up. When I did, I scraped the fender of the car behind me.

 

The driver — a young, hip-looking, alt-rocker dude — came running out of the car in a fury. He ran up to the bus driver and got into a ferocious screaming match. Then he came up to me graciously and kindly. We were brothers in the war against bus drivers. Then, as we were filling out our paperwork, another bus happened by and honked. The rocker ran out into the street and got into another ferocious screaming match with this driver. Then he came back to me all smiles and warmth.

 

Israel is a country held together by argument. Public culture is one long cacophony of criticism. The politicians go at each other with a fury we can’t even fathom in the U.S. At news conferences, Israeli journalists ridicule and abuse their national leaders. Subordinates in companies feel free to correct their superiors. People who move here from Britain or the States talk about going through a period of adjustment as they learn to toughen up and talk back.

 

Ethan Bronner, The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, notes that Israelis don’t observe the distinction between the public and private realms. They treat strangers as if they were their brothers-in-law and feel perfectly comfortable giving them advice on how to live.

 

One Israeli acquaintance recounts the time he was depositing money into his savings account and everybody else behind him in line got into an argument about whether he should really be putting his money somewhere else. Another friend tells of the time he called directory assistance to get a phone number for a restaurant. The operator responded, “You don’t want to eat there,” and proceeded to give him the numbers of some other restaurants she thought were better.

 

You can read Mr. Brooks complete column, “A Loud and Promised Land” (New York Times; April 17, 2009) here.

Dave Barry on travel:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

 

It was not as the flowers,

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled

eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His flesh: ours.

 

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then

regathered out of enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

 

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

 

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow

grinding of time will eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day.

 

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,

opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

 

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.

 

~John Updike

 

Have a blessed Easter.

Christ is Risen!

 

(Many thanks to my good friend, Steve Froehlich for sending me this poem.)

 

When St Paul said, “we see in a mirror dimly,” he was not referring to the difficulty we have in understanding esoteric, abstract notions that have little apparent value for daily life. He was referring to the deepest things that matter most: to knowing God and being known by Him, an understanding that is the foundation for all knowing, all living, all meaning.

 

Today many doubt the possibility of such truth. That’s fine, I would respond, let’s begin a conversation. We can talk about it—no holds barred—but know my invitation is to be together. Sit in my living room, eat at my table, and watch how we live. Watch our relationships, our lives together as a small community of people who take delight in life, wanting somehow to bring a measure of healing, of redemption into the brokenness. Watch—and see if any of it demonstrates the truth of which we speak. Not perfectly of course, but really.

 

Know too that among Christians today truth is often sadly up for grabs. “Christianity lays great emphasis on the importance of knowledge,” John Stott said, “rebukes anti-intellectualism for the negative, paralyzing thing it is, and traces many of our problems to our ignorance. Whenever the heart is full and the head is empty, dangerous fanaticisms arise.” They never seem like fanaticisms when they first appear, of course, which is why so many good people get swept away by them.

 

True Christianity involves full hearts, full heads, and vibrant imaginations lived in a community in which love is exhibited as faith and hope are celebrated.

 

 

Source: St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13; John Stott in Authentic Christianity (InterVarsity Press) p. 256.

 

I recently published a superb article, “‘A Few Like You:’ Will the Church be the Church for Homosexual Christians?” by a good friend, Wes Hill, which you can read here.

 

When I say it is a superb article I mean it is well written, discerning, winsome, and true—true to life and biblically orthodox. I was pleased to publish it, am pleased it is on our web site, and am convinced it contains a simple yet important point that must be faced by the church. The point is not original to Wes, but was stated clearly, for example, by Francis Schaeffer:

 

If a person who has homophile tendencies, or even has practiced homosexuality, is helped in a deep way, then they may marry. On the other hand, there are a certain number of cases who are real homophiles. In this case they must face the dilemma of a life without sexual fulfillment. We may cry with them concerning this, but we must not let the self-pity get too deep, because the unmarried girl who has strong sexual desires, and no one asks her to marry has the same problem. In both cases this is surely a part of the abnormality of the fallen world. And in both cases what is needed is people’s understanding while the church, in compassion and understanding, helps the individual in every way possible.

 

What Wes achieves in his piece is to explain how faithful Christians whose homosexuality is not transformed by regeneration face a life of deep loneliness. And he asks—properly—whether the church will be the church for these believers. This is hardly a radical position, nor should Wes’ piece be unsettling to those who take the Scriptures seriously. He is not asking for compromise; on the contrary Wes submits to God’s Word, even at personal cost. He is not asking that we dumb down our understanding of the faith; on the contrary Wes champions Christian orthodoxy.

 

I am happy to report that all the letters and emails—without exception—that we have received in response to Wes’ piece in Critique have been positive. That hasn’t been the case, however, on some blogs that have noted Wes’ article.

 

I’ve spent some time on those blogs, reading the various posts, and would like to record a few reflections here. This is not intended to be exhaustive nor is it meant to be a sufficient response to all the issues that have been raised. It is, instead, a few general reflections that I hope will be of some help to Christians wanting to think and live in distinctly Christian ways.

 

Reflection #1: Rhetoric matters. Be careful to say things with winsome compassion. Responding to blogs can undercut that aspect of faithfulness, so be cautious. Write out your response but don’t post it immediately. Wait a day. Or two. Remember that without love, the most you have on your hands is a clanging gong.

 

Reflection #2: Listen (read) carefully. Some posted responses are so unfair to what Wes actually wrote that the only fully godly response would be to say, “Shut up. Read Proverbs 18:13.”

 

Reflection #3: Conformity is not righteousness. Some seem to insist that orthodoxy requires conformity in how things are expressed, what terms are used, and how Christians express their own experience. And some even go so far as to insist this about experiences they themselves do not share. I find it difficult not to see this as arrogance.

 

Reflection #4: Be content with biblical revelation. Some have gone so far as to insist that anyone that holds Wes’ position is unqualified to minister God’s word as a preacher or teacher. They are not able to sustain their conclusion by biblical exposition, of course, for the simple reason that the Scriptures do not support their conclusion. It does not honor God to try to be more righteous than he. That was the error of the Pharisees.

 

Reflection #5: Be honest. All these tangents, all these red herrings, sadly, answer the good question that Wes has raised. Sadly, much of the church will not be the church. It is too committed to the reigning political ideologies of our secular age. At least have the integrity to say so, instead of trying to confuse the issue with all sorts of side issues.

 

Reflection #6: Be teachable. How many of you know someone like Wes? Have the honor of friendship, sharing the lovely fellowship of warm hospitality, unhurried conversation, and a kinship of spirit that comes from a deep commitment to the truth of the gospel in Christ? I need to learn from Wes, and am eager to do so. He is a man in whom the glory of God is evident. Perhaps all those commenting on the blogs are not like me in this regard, but I hope it is not hubris to say I doubt it.

 

 

Source: Letters of Francis A. Schaeffer, Lane T. Dennis, ed., (Westchester, Il., Crossway Books, 1985). To read more on this topic, see Mardi Keyes’ piece, “Homosexuality: Speaking the Truth in Love,” which you can read here.

 

“As world leaders gather in London for the Group of 20 summit meeting,” Nicholas Kristof reports, “the most wrenching statistic is this: According to World Bank estimates, the global economic crisis will cause an additional 22 children to die per hour, throughout all of 2009. And that’s the best-case scenario. The World Bank says it’s possible the toll will be twice that: an additional 400,000 child deaths, or an extra child dying every 79 seconds. ‘In London, Washington and Paris, people talk of bonuses or no bonuses,’ Robert Zoellick, the World Bank president, said this week. ‘In parts of Africa, South Asia and Latin America, the struggle is for food or no food.’”

 

It’s easy to lose sight of the poor. They tend to be marginalized, with no voice in the marketplace unless someone speaks for them. That was the role the 1^st century church assumed.

 

Here is an interesting experiment: Bring up the financial crisis at the next church meeting you attend and keep track of how many people mention Wall Street, bonuses, government bailouts, and the world’s poor.

 

“I’m just back from Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” Kristof continues, “where I saw the impact of the crisis firsthand. In the Haitian slum of Cité Soleil, ravenous children tore at some corncobs that my guide had brought; it was their first food that day. In a slum hospital, where admissions for malnutrition have doubled since September, I met a woman who used to sell shoes on the street. Shoe sales dropped with the sagging economy, so the woman was forced to use her sales revenue to buy food for her child instead of to replace inventory. Now she has no more merchandise to sell, no food to eat and the child she cradled was half dead with starvation…

 

“One of the most preposterous ideas floating about is that the world’s poor feel ‘entitled’ to assistance. Entitled? Wall Street plutocrats display a sense of entitlement when they demand billions for bailouts. But whether at home or abroad, the poor typically suffer invisibly and silently. Oxfam has calculated that financial firms around the world have already received or been promised $8.4 trillion in bailouts. Just a week’s worth of interest on that sum while it’s waiting to be deployed would be enough to save most of the half-million women who die in childbirth each year in poor countries.

 

“The 500 richest people in the world, according to a U.N. calculation a few years ago, earned more than the 416 million poorest people. It’s worth bearing in mind that the first group bears a measure of responsibility for the global economic mess but will get by just fine, while the latter group has no responsibility and will suffer the worst consequences.”

 

Kristof (and others) have floated ideas of what the G20 nations can do, “with negligible sums,” as they discuss bailouts totaling trillions of dollars. If this is to be a reality, however, the world’s poorest citizens must have those who care about them give them a voice in the public square. The church needs to step up to its responsibility.

 

You can read Nicholas Kristof’s thoughtful piece, “At Stake are More Than Banks,” here. It appeared in the New York Times (April 1, 2009).

 

A few thoughts on time, energy, busyness, and the fact we are finite, limited creatures who were made to live and work in 24 hour days, 7 day weeks, with one full day in each week set aside for rest. (God called this arrangement “good,” by the way.)

 

From bnet business network:

Dr Richard Swenson, a physician who does a lot of work on margin and burnout, is fond of reminding people of Lazlo’s Chinese Relativity Axiom: No matter how great your accomplishments or how tragic your defeats, approximately 1 billion Chinese don’t know and couldn’t care less.”

 

From lifevesting.com:

“Stress makes people stupid. Burnout reveals it to the world.”

Three suggestions about how to increase stress, reduce margin, and move towards burnout:

1.) Run on fumes for extended periods of time. Keep saying ‘yes’ to every request, demand, or suggestion that is hurled at you. Skip vacations and days off. Keep going with inadequate sleep. Over commit, believing that somehow, someday your boss and family with notice and reward you. Always be available to offer concern and help, but never place yourself in the position of accepting it.

2.) Continue to spend yourself in ways you aren’t talented or gifted. Keep doing extroverted things with your introverted personality, or vice versa. Neglect what you are passionate about in order to make a living. Never admit your limits or that you suck at some things—keep trying to improve.

3.) Eliminate all margin or gaps from your life. Have two phone numbers, text messaging and email, and keep on top of them all. Keep some sort of noise—TV, music, anything—in the background at all times. Always rush, and always arrive late. Put off everything until you absolutely have to do them.

If you decide to follow these three suggestions, please do the rest of us a favor and pin a note on your shirt where to send the body.

 

If you are like me you’ve found that media reports concerning the economic crisis include dollar amounts that stagger the imagination. So, to get a better handle on what the figures mean, I surfed the Internet for some help. Here are two attempts at helping us grasp what $1 trillion dollars looks like.

 

Visualization #1:

“If you had gone into business on the day Jesus was born, and your business lost a million dollars a day, day in and day out, 365 days a year, it would have taken you until October 2737 to lose a trillion dollars, or a little over two thousand seven hundred years.”

            Source: http://www.herald-review.com/blogs/letterstotheeditor/?p=1269

 

Visualization #2:

In order to make (a little more) sense of a trillion dollars, begin imagining a hundred dollar bill:

  

Now, imagine a bundle of one hundred $100 bills, which would total $10,000 and be about one half inch think:

  

Next imagine standing next to a pile of one hundred packets of $10,000, which would total $1 million dollars (it would fit in a grocery sack):

  

Now imagine increasing the number of packets until you have a total of $100 million dollars, which would fit on a wooden pallet:

  

Then imagine standing next to the number of pallets required to contain $1 billion dollars in the same packets of one hundred $100 bills:

  

And finally, this is what you would look like standing next to $1 trillion dollars (that’s a $1 followed by twelve zeros)—note the pallets are now double stacked with the same bundles of $100 bills:

  

            Source: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html