They Pay People to Do That!
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” – Genesis 1:26-28
“They pay people to do that!“
I’m embarrassed to say those words came out of my mouth. But they did. I’ll ask you to forgive me. This was before I was a pastor, before I went to seminary, and before I was even baptized. Still, I should have known better. But I said those words and worse, I said them to my beautiful wife Cassie on our third date. Thankfully, she didn’t dump me. We had just gone to see Bridget Jones Diary and like any good date at the movies, I bought soda and popcorn to share. At the end of the show, I left them behind. Now, I didn’t dump them on the floor or anything. I left the soda in the cup holder and the popcorn on the floor, but Cassie came behind me and picked it up. I turned to her and said, “You don’t have to pick that up. They pay people do to that.” Again, lucky she didn’t dump me. Cassie just thought it was wrong to make other people do the work she could and should do herself. Sure, we pay people to do that, but think of the opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is what is lost when you choose one option over another. If the theater didn’t have to hire so many people to clean up after us, we would have quicker service at the concession stand. They might be able to invest in better technology. They might be able to upgrade their system to give you a better viewing experience. All because we pick up after ourselves instead of making other people do it for us. I have never left my trash behind in a theater ever since.
Our choices have long-term consequences.
Something we are learning about right now. And I don’t mean tomorrow or next week or next year. What we do today can have a lasting impact over time that affects the next generation and the next and the next. Our selfish actions now are hurting our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And that only makes me think about what God said to us in the Ten Commandments, that our sins carry over from generation to generation, but that our love does, too.[1] The choices we make decide what kind of impact we have not just on our own lives, but the lives of people long after we are gone. It’s all about choice. So what choices are you making today? Earlier we shared the companion passage to this one about God’s creation and how God has tasked us to take care of the Earth. God said, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Some translations have “rule” as “have dominion over,” but both fall short of God’s expectations. Instead, some Biblical scholars have looked at the root meaning of the word “radah” and have determined we’ve misinterpreted it, and actually it means something similar to “center of strength.” [2]Can you imagine how we would view our role in the world if we saw it from THAT lens? If we read that passage as “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and be the center of strength for it.” How different our world would look. And we find that to be consistent with our passage this morning.
8 Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. 9 The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin[d] and onyx are also there.) 13 The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush.[e] 14 The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. – Genesis 2:8-15
Human beings were entrusted by God with the care of creation.
In both readings of the story of creation, God puts humanity at the heart of it. In this passage, we find out that there is a river flowing through the Garden of Eden and God entrusts Adam to care for the Garden. This river then becomes four rivers which flow forth to nourish the known land: the Pishon, the Gihon, the Tigris and Euphrates, so this one river flowing through the Garden of Eden is the “center of strength” for all of creation and humanity is put in charge of caring for it. God makes it clear that creation care is our responsibility. But sadly, we are doing a poor job of it. In our consumer culture, fast fashion is not just a moral problem (forced and child labor) but is already a vast environmental problem as well. In order to invent new trends and keep up with fashion wants, the fast fashion industry pumps out as much as it can at affordable prices, and the way they do it is by employing cheap labor in countries with lax environmental protections and using inferior materials so they can get it to market cheaper and faster than their competitors. For you to buy these products at Zara, H&M, Forever 21, and Uniqlo (four of the biggest culprits of fast fashion[3]), all we have to do is sacrifice the earth. It’s estimated that every second a garbage truck of clothes is either dumped into a landfill or incinerated, which makes sense considering by 2015 we bought 60% more clothes than we did at the turn of the century, and we would throw them away in half the time.[4] But impacting our landfills and our air pollution isn’t the only byproduct. According to the United Nations, “nearly 95 trillion gallons of wastewater are produced every year – roughly the equivalent of 41 years of drinking water for the entire human population.”[5] Of that wastewater, 20% is produced by the fashion industry – “more than the aviation and shipping sectors combined.”[6] And 80% of that goes untreated and even less is recycled.[7] The dyeing process used to make your clothes is responsible for 17 to 20 percent of industrial water pollution.[8] As if that wasn’t enough, the fashion industry is also responsible for an estimated 35% of the microplastics that litter the ocean.[9] Those microplastics can cause harm in a variety of ways, both known and suspected.
You may have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
It’s one of five areas in the world’s oceans where these plastics and microplastics gather. In 2018, it was estimated that the GPGP contains at least 79,000 tonnes of ocean plastic and covers an area nearly three times the size of the country of France![10] What is so insidious is that you can’t easily see it. Although we like to imagine a literal island of plastic garbage floating in the ocean, most of it doesn’t appear as anything but a “murky soup.”[11] The actual mass of it is largely composed of fishing nets and other ocean fishing equipment, but the majority of pieces (94%) are due to microplastics. Many of the negative effects of microplastics are still being studied, but one of the biggest concerns for humans is the ingestion of these microplastics through consumption of fish, oysters, sardines, and other marine life. We know consumption of microplastics can cause disease, disability and contribute to premature death, and because toxic chemicals bind easily to microplastics, it’s hypothesized that it can also lead to other diseases like cancer, can cause inflammation, damage to the colon and small intestine, and the immune system.[12] While it’s still being studied it’s hard not to believe that a bunch of plastic floating in the ocean caused by human waste won’t have a negative effect on us in multiple ways.
We simply have to do a better job of caring for our planet.
The choices we make have an impact. What we wear, what we eat, how we eat it – they all make an impact on the environment around us. We can and should make choices every day to make the world a better place. We will make mistakes and we won’t be perfect, but if all made an effort and did a little bit more, made things last a little bit longer, we could transform the world. Just look at what happened during the height of the pandemic. People stopped driving. People stopped producing massive amounts of goods. And fast fashion came to a standstill.[13] Clothing was the least of our concerns and factories all over the world slowed or stopped production. And the land started to heal. But now, we are right back to where we were and maybe we shouldn’t be. Maybe we could do things a different way. The opportunity cost of a throwaway culture is a damaged Earth. Let’s take the opportunity instead to invest more time to do things right. Recycle more. Throw away less. Make things last longer. And perhaps we can help to save our planet. After all, it’s exactly what God wants us to do.
[1] Derived from Exodus 20:5-6. In that passage, we have translated it as “punish” and “jealous” but what God is telling us is that our sins have consequences that go beyond just ourselves but affect those around us. Our love does too. And the positive consequences of our actions can ALSO be felt by future generations.
[2] http://www.christiantoday.com/article/dominion.over.the.earth.comes.with.responsibility.christians.learn/25635.htm http://www.unitingearthweb.org.au/explore/a-radical-new-look-at-dominion-in-genesis
[3] According to Earth.org these are just some of the fast fashion companies responsible for these effects: https://earth.org/fast-fashion-companies/
[4] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/environmental-costs-fast-fashion
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/21/middleeast/textile-wastewater-pollutant-cleaner-hnk-scn-spc-intl/index.html
[6] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/06/10/why-fashion-needs-to-be-more-sustainable/
[7] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/21/middleeast/textile-wastewater-pollutant-cleaner-hnk-scn-spc-intl/index.html
[8] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/06/10/why-fashion-needs-to-be-more-sustainable/
[9] Ibid
[10] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240115-visualising-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch
[11] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240115-visualising-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch
[12] https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/geh_newsletter/2023/8/articles/new_research_highlights_the_problem_of_microplastic_pollution
[13] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/06/10/why-fashion-needs-to-be-more-sustainable/
Good People Don’t Go to Heaven
How good is “good enough?”
How good do you have to be to get into Heaven? What’s the bare minimum we have to do to sneak into the pearly gates? We believe in a good God, so it’s easy for us to believe in the Good Person Theory – that all you have to do to make it to Heaven is BE a good person. But as we’ve come to discover, there are some serious problems with that theory. There isn’t a standard or rubric God has given us to know how good you have to be or how we can calculate how good we are. Our internal barometer of good and bad isn’t reliable and changes from culture-to-culture and from time-to-time. And the only standard we DO have is to be perfect as Christ is perfect, which is too high a bar for any human being. But Andy Stanley had an answer to this, and it’s one I think we kind of know on some level: “Good people don’t go to heaven. Forgiven people do.”
What does it mean to be a forgiven people?
To showcase this standard of forgiveness and to give us some understanding of the forgiveness of God, we’re going to read a passage from Matthew’s account of the gospel. Right before our passage, Matthew recounts Jesus telling the disciples about resolving conflict with one another. He talks about how important it is to heal those relationships and Jesus gives a step-by-step guideline for how to do that – confront one another personally, bring a friend to help resolve the conflict, bring the matter before the church. Jesus says we must do what we can to bring healing to our relationships. But this gets Peter thinking. And that’s always trouble. He asks Jesus, “Seriously, though. How often do I need to forgive someone? I mean, isn’t there a limit when we just write the guy off?” And that’s where we pick up Matthew’s account of what happened between the disciples and Jesus next.
The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
“Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
“The servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go. But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded. His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’
“But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.” – Matthew 18:21-25
Forgiveness is powerful.
Think about a time when you’ve been forgiven when you didn’t deserve it, when a simple, “I’m sorry” was able to mend a relationship. More than anything, you probably remember the feeling of gratitude you had when it happened. Because forgiveness is powerful. It can change your life. When I was young, we used to go to Shi’s Fish Market every week right after Japanese school. My parents would go to shop for Japanese groceries and to talk to friends, but I was in it for the Star Wars cards behind the counter. I would spend my chore money every week filling up on those treasured pieces of cardboard and then would borrow money from my mom to get extra packs, $1.00 here and there. As I got older, my allowance grew bigger but so did the cost of everything else. By then I was collecting comic books, going out with friends to the football game, playing arcade games at the bowling alley, and over and over again I’d “borrow” from my parents. By the time I graduated from high school, I had amassed a debt of about $700 dollars. My first summer job at Disneyland would mean I was basically working for free to pay back my mom. Which also meant the big end of summer trip my friends had planned was something I wasn’t going to be able to go on. I was pretty bummed, but I didn’t see any way out. After all, I promised my mom to pay her back and I hadn’t for way too long. Then one day, my mom calls me over to her desk and asks me when she’s going to see the money I owe her. I tell her I’m working on it but only have about half so far. She looks up at me and says, “That’s okay. You keep it. Consider it a graduation gift from me and dad.” I was SO grateful! By every measure, my mom deserved to get that money. She had every reason to ask for me to repay it. And there was no way I could argue. But she forgave my debt anyway. As a kid, $700 seemed like a vast fortune of money, especially for me. But that debt was gone in an instant. I’m still grateful to her for that tremendous gift.
Naturally, when I read this parable from Jesus, it struck a chord with me.
How similar Jesus’ message was for the disciples as was my mother’s act of forgiveness for me. Peter starts off by asking how many times are we to forgive someone? Seven times? He must be thinking, “Seven? That’s pretty generous.” You can imagine Peter was surprised at Jesus’ answer, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” Not seven times but seventy-seven times! In fact, some translations say “seventy TIMES seven times.” (For you math whizzes, that’s 490 times – way more than 77). And then Jesus tells them the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant where God is like a king who forgives his servant’s debt of 10,000 talents. But instead of being grateful, instead of being merciful and forgiving like the king was to him, the servant goes out and squeezes someone else who owes him a pittance in comparison and ends up throwing the other guy in jail. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it gets worse when you consider what a “talent” is worth. The king had forgiven the servant the equivalent of $9 BILLION dollars today. Imagine that. Nine BILLION dollars. Forgiven. Just like that. The king knows, as God knows, the servant could NEVER pay back that money and in an act of kindness forgives him his debt, as God forgives us our sins. But instead of remembering the mercy and forgiveness the king just showed him, the servant instead goes out and immediately pesters a fellow servant for what amounts to $40,000. Compare that. Nine BILLION. $40,000. And that’s why God is so angered at the servant. Was the man owed that money? Sure. But given the debt he had just been forgiven, the king was angered the servant couldn’t show the same mercy to a fellow human being. That’s what it looks like to God when we can’t forgive those around us. We look like this unmerciful servant who quickly forgets how much we have been forgiven and we fail to forgive those who need it.
We don’t “deserve” to go to Heaven.
That would be saying somehow we can earn it. But as this parable points out, we have done more to separate ourselves from God than we can ever make up. Like the $9 billion dollars the king forgave the servant, it is really because of God’s grace, mercy, and forgiveness we are able to repair that broken relationship. Without it, we would be lost. We tend to think as long as we aren’t doing anything TOO bad, it’s not a big deal, but we nickel and dime our sins and rack up an unpayable debt sooner than we realize. And we know when we are doing something wrong because we sit there and justify our actions to anyone who will listen. With my mom, that debt hung over me like a weight. I knew I had not done right by her. Whenever the issue of money was brought up, even if it wasn’t about the debt I owed, there was this pang of guilt I felt each and every time. It felt uncomfortable and made me anxious. I needed her forgiveness to make it right. And that’s what happens to us when we turn toward God and ask for forgiveness. God repairs that broken relationship and makes it right so that we can be close to him again. And God calls on us to do the same thing with others. We need to forgive those around us. Whether it’s something small and insignificant or large and difficult, God calls on us to be a forgiving people in the way he has been forgiving toward us. The challenge for us this week is to forgive someone who does something against us. To really let it go. Maybe it’s something small like when your kids forget to put their clothes in the hamper. Maybe it’s something you’ve complained about over and over again like leaving the toilet seat down in the bathroom. Or maybe it’s something big. An argument you had with a sister or brother. A fight you had with a close friend that left you not talking to each other. This week I want to challenge you to let go of the small stuff and forgive all of these minor transgressions like socks and toilets. And I want you to pray about forgiving the big stuff. Because when we fail to forgive, we harbor bitterness, and bitterness grows like a disease. And the longer it grows the harder it is to let go of, and none of us need that in our lives. When we wonder if we have the strength to do that, to forgive as God has forgiven us, remember this story Jesus told us about the unmerciful servant and be reminded of the grace and goodness of a God who has already forgiven you. Because remember, “Good people don’t go to Heaven, forgiven people do.”
God’s Bell Curve
The world came to an end on December 21st, 2012.
At least it was supposed to. Once again, we avoided a long-prophesied disaster! How do we keep doing it? There are tons of doomsday prophecies out there, but this one got some serious attention. They even made a movie about it. According to the legend, December 21st, 2012 coincided with the end of the Mayan calendar which was going to trigger a massive apocalypse. Many different theories emerged about how that was going to happen. Some believed the gravitational effects of an alignment between the Sun and a massive super black hole would rip the earth apart. Some believed the Earth’s magnetic poles would suddenly be reversed, releasing energy equal to 100 billion atomic bombs. And some believed the mysterious planet Nibiru would come crashing into our planet.[1] Needless to say, none of those things happened. “End of the world” hypotheses are a dime a dozen. Everyone from Pat Robertson to Pope Innocent III back in 1284 has predicted the Earth’s demise. Even Sir Isaac Newton, the gravity guy, predicted the end of the Earth in the year 2060.[2] The end of the world has special significance for Christians because it’s linked to the return of Christ. Some believe prior to Jesus’ return, God’s chosen people will be taken up to Heaven in an event called the Rapture where literally people will simply disappear. There was even a service that would take care of your pets in case you were taken. It was called Eternal Earthbound Pets USA and they were a group of loving atheists who, for the small fee of $135 dollars to cover travel costs, would take care of your pet in case of rapture.[3] You know, in case God didn’t take pets. You could rest easy knowing your pet would be well taken care of by a loving atheist.[4] Unfortunately, the business was a hoax. But it does make us ponder the question “Where will you go and how do you know?[5]”
We don’t often like to think about death.
Maybe because we are afraid. Maybe because we don’t have a lot of answers. And maybe because we are pretty confident about where we are headed. According to an ABC News poll done in 2005, about 89% of people believe in Heaven and 85% of people believe they are going there.[6] Why are they so sure? It’s because we cling to the belief that good people go to Heaven and most of us believe we are good people. And to be honest, it’s a premise that makes sense. I mean if you live a good life and you do good things and we believe in a good God, then you’ve earned a good spot, right? We tend to believe that rule applies to just about everyone, whether or not they are Christian. We figure the answer to the question, “Where will you go and how do you know?” is pretty simple. We’re going to heaven. But maybe we shouldn’t be so confident in that assessment.
First of all, how good is good enough?
That’s the question Andy Stanley asks in his book of the same title. How good is good enough? What level do we need to achieve to make it into Heaven? Believe it or not God doesn’t tell us. You would think for something as important as this, God would have told somebody or written it down somewhere, but nowhere does God tell us what qualifies as “good enough.” In our heads we have a cosmic balance sheet going on with a running total of good things we’ve done and bad things we’ve done, and we feel that as long as we’re in the plus column, we’ll be okay. But is that true? I mean, what’s the percentage? Do you have to be 51% good, you know just barely tip the scales in your favor? Or is it higher, because on most tests 51% would be a failing grade. Is it 70%? If you’re good 70% of the time do you pass? And if we’re all bad anyway, does God grade on a curve? I mean maybe 70% is too hard for most of us to achieve. “Okay, everyone above this percentage, you all get in. Sorry 59%. The cut off was 60%.” When you take a test at the DMV you know they’re not letting you behind the wheel with a score lower than 70% and considering how bad some drivers are on the road, maybe they should raise that score. Seems 70% is too lax. But at least you know. Surely God is fairer than the DMV. But he doesn’t tell us anywhere how “good” we have to be.
Some would argue God gives us an internal barometer of right and wrong.
We seem to instinctively know what is good and what is bad. But how reliable is that barometer? Some things are obvious. Everyone knows it’s wrong to cheat, steal, lie, and kill. But is that an all-encompassing rule? We tell “white lies” to save someone’s feelings. We kill animals for food but which animals are okay to kill and which are not varies from culture to culture. And these concepts of right and wrong change not just between different cultures, but over time. We’ve labeled everything from being a woman, to being dark-skinned, to being left-handed as bad, evil, or wrong at some point. In the 2000 years Christianity has been around it was only in the last 50 interracial marriage became widely acceptable, and still there are hold outs who haven’t come around. When I was living in Georgia, my friend Jon mentioned he didn’t go to church anymore and it was the “anymore” that caught my attention. I asked him about it and he looked at me, pointed to a mixed race couple sitting a few tables away from us and said, “If they walked into your church and asked you to marry them, what would you say?” I told him, “I’d say that was fine. Why wouldn’t I?” But I already suspected the answer. He told me a friend of his who was black wanted to marry a woman who was white. When they went to her pastor to ask him to perform the ceremony, he told her he wouldn’t do it because it was “an abomination in God’s eyes.” Jon said, “And after that, I wouldn’t step foot in a church.” What we believe is right and wrong isn’t even consistent within cultures let alone between cultures or across time. So how reliable is our internal barometer?
You might say, “Well, at least we can rely on the Bible to tell us what God considers good.”
But let’s look at what God says about us and about his standard of being good. In his letter to the Romans, Paul addresses a perception among the Jewish Christians that they are somehow a step up or more advantaged than the Gentiles because of their heritage and Paul brings them back down to Earth. He tells them because they ARE Jewish not only do they not have a step up, but they have a greater responsibility toward the law than the Gentiles do. He tells them that just because by birth they are part of God’s chosen people does not make them any different than the Gentiles who have accepted Christ as their savior because both are equally unrighteous. And that’s where we pick up in our reading today.
What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. 10 As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. 12 All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”
13 “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
14 “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know.”
18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” – Romans 3:9-18
There is no one righteous. Not even one.
Not Jewish or Roman or Greek. Not Mother Theresa. Not Billy Graham. Not the Pope. Paul is trying to impress upon us we are flawed. None of us can escape the fact we are sinners. At one time or another each of us has done something that would disappoint God and that something drives a wedge between us and God. You might think, “Yeah, but I’ve never done anything THAT bad. Sure I might not be perfect, but it’s not like I’m a killer or anything.” But that is God’s standard. Perfection. Jesus tells us himself in the Sermon on the Mount. He tells the crowds, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48).” That’s why no one can live up to the standard that good people go to Heaven because the standard is just too tough.
So how do we know?
How do we know how good is good enough? If we can’t tell from God’s word, if we can’t use our own internal compass or barometer, and if we can’t even use the Bible, then how do we know how good is good enough? And that’s what God is challenging us to think about today. Despite all the predictions, the world isn’t likely to end any time soon, but we should still keep in mind those two eternal questions – where do you go and how do you know? As we talked about today, the assumption good people go to heaven is riddled with difficulty. So, what can we believe in then? Here’s something else Andy Stanley wrote, “Good people don’t go to Heaven. Forgiven people do.” We’ll talk more about that next week. But for today, let us come to the realization no matter how “good” we are, we are not perfect. We all need forgiveness. Thankfully we worship a forgiving God who gives us hope in Christ for something more than this life.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon#Planet_X.2FNibiru
[2] https://isaac-newton.org/statement-on-the-date-2060/
[3] http://eternal-earthbound-pets.com/
[4] Unfortunately, they didn’t get enough business and had to close up shop.
[5] I’m pretty sure I heard Andy Stanley share this phrase either in his sermon or his book How Good Is Good Enough?
Imagine…
One little spark…
Of inspiration, is at the heart of all creation. Right at the start of everything that’s new, one little spark lights up for you!
That’s how Journey Into Imagination at EPCOT begins.
The song celebrates the power of imagination and introduces us to the character of Figment – a “figment” of our imagination. But those words could also describe God and the creation of the universe. Think about what kind of imagination would be needed to make all of this! What level of brilliance would you need to create the thousands of different types of living beings on this planet? From blue whales to the common housefly, God created it as well as every variation we see within each species. It’s fascinating to think about how creation is woven together, but to have the genius to envision the millions of species and variations within species is even more remarkable. And not just living things. Even snowflakes are all unique. Who thinks of all the different ways you can make a snowflake? A while ago, I was at a conference listening to pastor Erwin McManus talking about faith, and he told us about a guy who asked, “Why is it we grow up believing in lots of imaginary beings but as we grow up we stop believing in them, but we still hold on to God?” And Erwin’s response was, “How do you know it wasn’t God who created imagination?”
God created imagination.
The power to be able to envision things we can’t see or touch – that is a gift from God. And it is through this gift we are able to know God. Imagination is what fuels faith and is what enables us to comprehend the incomprehensible. God is so far beyond human understanding even his own name is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”[1] When Moses asked God to tell him his name, God said “I AM WHO I AM.” I don’t think God was being evasive or cagey. It’s just that “Bob” doesn’t summarize the essence of God. No word or words really can. Instead, we have to experience God to know God. It’s why the Apostle John wrote in his first letter to the church, “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” It’s through love and faith that we come to know the creator of the universe. Our imagination, the thing that fuels our faith, also helps us to bridge the gap between what is seen and what is unseen.
But as we grow older, we tend to drive out imagination.
We start to become “realists.” We rely only on what we see and what we know. But worse, we start being limited by it. We stop reaching for the stars and instead set our sights on what we think we can achieve. As Andy Stanley once said, We begin to replace the “wow” with “how.” Meaning we become so fixated on the “how” that we shove the “wow” right out.[2] In our faith, we question the virgin birth, the resurrection, Heaven and even God. But that’s not the people God created us to be. He gave us imagination so we could bring to life a world of possibilities that exceeded our reality. That we could achieve things others would think were impossible. The, the airplane, landing on the moon. People thought these things at one time would never happen, but people who weren’t limited by “reality” chased their dreams and succeeded against the odds. It’s imagination that powers those dreams. As Robert Kennedy once said, “Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?”[3] At this point in Jesus’ life where our reading begins, the Pharisees start to feel threatened by this upstart. Jesus now has a group of dedicated disciples and he has been teaching in the synagogues and miraculously healing people. Obviously, there is something different about this man that draws attention to him, and the Pharisees don’t like it. They won’t admit it, but Jesus is drawing power and authority away from them and they are desperate to get it back. They keep picking on him every chance they get. They try to find ways to discredit him and his teachings. And even though it goes against everything God commands of them, they plot to get rid of him, to break the Ten Commandments and kill him. That’s where we pick up today. The Pharisees already accused Jesus of breaking the law by picking grain on the Sabbath and now they are at it again.
6 On another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled. 7 The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal on the Sabbath. 8 But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Get up and stand in front of everyone.” So he got up and stood there.
9 Then Jesus said to them, “I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?”
10 He looked around at them all, and then said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He did so, and his hand was completely restored. 11 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus. – Luke 6:6-11
“What they might do to Jesus…”
Sounds ominous because it is. This is just another way of saying they were plotting to kill him, and they try to justify it by saying they are doing it in God’s name. But that’s a twisted view of the Bible. Even any casual reading of either the Old or New Testament would show they were fooling themselves. And because they are blinded by their desire for power, they can’t see what is right in front of them – Jesus the Messiah, the one promised long ago. They can’t imagine this man could be the Messiah because that would mean changing their entire world. So even though they see this man do miracles right in front of them, even though they are witnesses to things no man could possibly do, they haven’t even thought he could be the promised messiah. In John 11, we read about how Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. Now, if you had actually seen this miracle, if you knew it was real and there were tons of witnesses, you would think that would be enough to convince anyone. But that’s how hard it is for us to escape from our fixed point of view. We will hold onto false beliefs. We will deny reality. We will even embrace hypocrisy for the sake ouf our point of view. People become so fixated on their own reality, they often miss the miracles right in front of them. The Pharisees call a meeting of all the Jewish leaders and they say, “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.” And Caiaphas, the high priest, says, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” He even prophesied “that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one (John 11:47-52).”. Although they were doing it for their own selfish reasons, they ended up helping Jesus fulfill the prophecies that would do exactly that.
How amazing would it have been to know you were walking with God!
These people missed out on the opportunity of a thousand lifetimes because they had lost the “wow” and had been focused on the “how.” Miracles were being performed right in front of them and they couldn’t see it! Instead, they were laser-focused on the ramifications of allowing this man to continue teaching and saw it as a threat instead of a blessing. But before we become too judgmental about the Pharisees and the Jewish leaders, can we really say we are all that different? Do we really keep our eyes open for the ways in which God works in our own lives? True, we may not have seen someone rise from the dead, but it’s still so easy to miss the “wow.” When I was going to UCLA, I worked two summers up in the dorms. The pay wasn’t great, but they covered room and board and it beat having to move back home just for the summer. At night, all of us working on campus would hang out and I remember this guy who said he didn’t believe in love. Having experienced love many times myself – or at least what I thought was love – I was shocked. I said, “You’re telling me you don’t think love exists?” And he said, “Nope. It’s just a chemical reaction within your body that stimulates different hormones to make you think you’re feeling something we call ‘love’ but that’s all it really is. It’s just a chemical reaction.” I asked him why this chemical reaction only happened between certain people and not just everyone we met, and he told me it was based on certain physical and mental stimuli hard-wired into our brains as we grew up. Is there some truth to what he said? Sure. Love does create chemical reactions within our bodies that causes us to react in different ways. Are we influenced by our environment and how we grew up? Sure, our choices are always affected by our experiences. But does that mean love doesn’t exist? Talk about taking the “wow” out of life.
But to some degree we all do that.
We forget we live in a world where God came to earth for the salvation of all humanity. For 51 weeks out of the year we forget Jesus was resurrected after being hung on a cross, stabbed in the side of his body, and his dead body placed inside a stone tomb it took multiple men to seal. If we constantly lived in the mindset that we walked with a God who could do these amazing things, maybe we would be more open to the possibilities that are right in front of us. Maybe we would be more open to the work of the Holy Spirit within us. And maybe we could truly be the children of God we were always meant to be. I love going to a Disney theme park because they make you feel like you’re walking into a different world – a world that COULD exist. A world of possibilities. It’s a reminder that we are only limited by what we dare to achieve and that we are meant to create a better world. Fifty years ago, Walt Disney World opened its gates for the first time to the public. And on opening day one person commented, “Isn’t it too bad Walt didn’t live to see this?” To which another replied, “He did. That’s why it’s here.”[4] Embrace the gift of imagination that God has given you and see where it can take you. Live a life that embraces the possibilities! After all, we live in a world where Jesus lived, died, and rose again. Anything is possible.
[1] A quote by Winston Churchill describing Russia after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. (Library of Congress)
[2] From a talk I attended at a conference where Andy was speaking.
[3] https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rfkreclaimingemoralvision.htm Actually RFK was paraphrasing a quote by George Bernard Shaw in a speech at the University of Kansas.
[4] Craig Groeschel, It: How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It, (Zondervan, 2008) p. 48
Unanswered Prayers
Does prayer work?
If you ask around you’re sure to get a variety of answers and not all of them consistent, logical, or with sound theology behind it. Whether or not prayer works often is in the eye of the beholder. The devout follower will undoubtedly tell prayer works. The skeptic will tell you they aren’t sure. And the unbeliever will tell you prayer is a fairy tale people tell themselves to feel better about living in a random and meaningless world. Science doesn’t help much here either. For as many studies that prove the benefits of prayer there are those that show they don’t matter at all and there was even one study where the subjects did worse when they knew they were the object of people’s prayers.[1] All of these results might seem confusing and lead us to conclude… absolutely nothing. It’s hard to know if prayer works when we get inconsistent answers. At least from our point of view. And perhaps that’s the real problem. We don’t know how to measure the effectiveness of prayer. The problem isn’t so much if prayer works as it is how do we measure the effectiveness of prayer. Dr. Candy Brown from Indiana University in Bloomington wrote that most researchers study prayer as they would any other phenomenon. They set up studies, they do double-blind trials, they set up a control group and an experimental group, and then they compare results.[2] But maybe that’s part of the problem right there. Maybe you can’t measure the effects of prayer simply by doing blind trials. As Brown noted, “…when people actually pray for healing, they usually get up close to someone they know, touch the person and empathize with their sufferings… Double-blinded, controlled trials are not the only — or even the best — way to gauge the effects of this kind of prayer practice.”[3]
We might also wonder, “How long should we give God to respond?”
How long is long enough to say that a prayer didn’t work? The problem with testing God in this way is we expect God to keep to our timetable. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But can we accurately gauge the success or failure of our prayers based on that alone? There’s a song by Garth Brooks called “Unanswered Prayers” that speaks to this point in particular. In that song, Garth points out that in his youth he kept praying and praying for God to help him get into a relationship with a girl in school that he liked. But God didn’t answer that prayer. At least not in the way he wanted. It ended up because he wasn’t in a relationship at the time, he met the woman who would one day become his wife who he loved more than anything. How different might his life been if God had indeed granted that one prayer. He sums it up in the chorus, “Just because he doesn’t answer, doesn’t mean he don’t care. Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.” We’re going to read about one of those unanswered prayers in our reading today.
Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” 37 He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. 38 Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”
39 Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”
40 Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked Peter. 41 “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
42 He went away a second time and prayed, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.”
43 When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. 44 So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing.
45 Then he returned to the disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? Look, the hour has come, and the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners. 46 Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!”
Next to the Lord’s Prayer, this is probably the most famous prayer in the Bible.
Jesus, in the moments before he is arrested and taken away, goes off into the garden at Gethsemane to pray to God. He tells God how overwhelmed he is with sorrow and he asks God if he can avoid what he is being asked to do. He knows what’s coming. He knows he is about to be put to death on a cross. He knows how painful and horrible that death is. And he begs God to let him off the hook. But God doesn’t do it. God doesn’t take away Jesus’ pain. God doesn’t save Jesus from a death most would consider cruel and evil. Instead, God lets it happen. If it were anyone other than Jesus, I think we would be upset about it. We would think of all people in the world, God should have saved Jesus. After all, Jesus is blameless, without sin, and a miracle worker. Of all the people ever born on Earth, Jesus had the closest direct pipeline to God. And yet, God didn’t even save him. Why wouldn’t God answer this one prayer for Jesus? The thing is God answered many of Jesus’ prayers. Pretty much all of them except this one. He healed the man born blind, he fed the 5000, he healed the centurion’s son, he healed the man who was lowered through the roof of the house, he turned water into wine, and he even brought back Lazarus from the dead. And that’s the short list. But this one prayer God did not answer. We know why because we are at the other end of history, but at the time Jesus was mocked for God’s inaction. They ridiculed him. Dared him to save himself. Put a crown of thorns on his head and a sign above him saying “King of the Jews.” If there was ever any evidence that prayer didn’t work, this was it! Except that God had something else in mind.
We know the end of this story.
We know Christ died for us. But at that time it must have been hard to swallow. Look at Peter. He denied even knowing Jesus. Hardly any of the apostles came to watch him being crucified. Jesus was left alone by almost everyone. But we know how the story ends. We know Christ rose from the dead. We know because of his willingness to trust in the Lord, we have been forgiven for our sins. And we know God had something greater in mind than what we could possibly imagine. We have such a limited idea of who God is that we judge him based on our criteria. And if God fails to live up to our expectations, we tend to think he must not care, or he must not have heard, or he must not exist. But God operates on a whole different level than we do. The concepts of time and space are not the same for him as they are for us. And a being who lives in a reality so different from ours cannot and should not be judged by our standards. And this is where trust comes in. We need to trust God hears our prayers. Our prayers are not falling on deaf ears, but on the ears of someone who loves us intensely. And just because we don’t get the response we’re looking for doesn’t mean God doesn’t care.
I do believe God answers prayers.
Why he answers some and not others, I don’t really know. I don’t know if he actually doesn’t answer them or if we’re just not looking for the right response. It could be God answers every prayer in his own time, in his own way. Some prayers seem to get an immediate response and some never even seem to get a number in the queue. Sometimes it takes years to see a prayer get answered, even decades. I am still struck by the story of a man I was able to baptize much later in his life. I believe he was in his 60s or late 50s. Either way, God caught up to him and struck him in a powerful way. He told me that pretty much his entire adult life his mother had been praying for him to come to know God, to be baptized and accept Jesus in his heart. And for decades that prayer went unanswered. Finally, he came around and only about a week or two after he was baptized, she passed away. He hadn’t been baptized just to please his mom’s dying wish because her death was unexpected. She was older to be sure, but had no indication she was close to passing on. It was hard for me to hear this story and not think she was holding on just long enough to make sure her son was alright before letting go.
Does prayer work?
It does. Scientists may not be able to prove a direct correlation between prayer and healing but they can’t disprove it either. Again maybe we have a far too limiting way of looking at prayer. When we pray for healing that healing can occur spiritually or emotionally instead of just physically. So when we attempt to measure the effectiveness of prayer, maybe we’re looking in the wrong place. Maybe instead of the body we should be looking for healing of the heart or the mind. Maybe the healing that takes place isn’t in the person but the people around them. God’s idea of healing might just very well be different than ours. Or perhaps the problem is judging God by measuring what we want to see. Is it only healing if God meets X, Y, and Z criteria? Or could healing happen in different ways and in different times? If the apostles had their way, Jesus wouldn’t have died in the first place. But it was because he died we know Christ today. They just couldn’t see it that way at the time. Maybe our vision is too narrow.
Also, maybe our definition of “works” is too narrow.
Science definitely proves there are benefits to prayer. Prayer has been shown to improve self-control, to make you nicer, to help you be more forgiving, to increase your trust, and offset the negative effects of stress.[4] Pretty awesome benefits. I would think that anything that give you more self-control, makes you nicer, more forgiving, trusting, and less stressed out definitely “works!” I want you to give prayer a chance. If you don’t already pray regularly, try doing so. Pray every day even if it’s just a little bit each day. Don’t worry about saying the “right” prayer. If you haven’t prayed much, believe me I think God will be happy with incremental steps. But just pray. And don’t go looking for monumental results right off the bat. If they happen, great! But if not, remember that doesn’t mean God isn’t listening. Maybe we just need better ears to hear. And if you do pray regularly, try spending at least as much time listening as asking. Sometimes God works in the silence far better than in the noise. But more prayer is something we could all benefit from. Does prayer bringing healing to a person every time, the way we want it to, when we want it to? No. Does prayer guarantee bad things won’t happen to you? No. But does prayer work? Most definitely, yes!
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/candy-gunther-brown-phd/testing-prayer-science-of-healing_b_1299915.html
[3] Ibid
[4] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/more-mortal/201406/5-scientifically-supported-benefits-prayer
Do Dogs Go To Heaven?
Do dogs go to Heaven when they die?
My oldest daughter, Eve asked me this question on our way to the bus stop one morning. She was about 7 or 8 years old at the time and this was when we were living in Georgia. I was carrying Emma in my arms as we were heading down the hill to the corner where the bus would come and take her to school when the question popped out. “Do dogs go to Heaven when they die?” I wasn’t completely surprised. Just the night before, we found out the cute little dog across the street got hit by a car and didn’t survive. I’m sure that’s how many kids first experience these thoughts about “what happens next.” But the number of questions only grow as we get older. I remember when I was eight years old and my grandmother died, my mom told me she had gone to Heaven and the first question I had in mind was, “How did she get there?” Did she catch a bus? How did she know where to go? Can I visit? Life can be pretty literal when you’re young, and I was looking for concrete answers about a topic that had none.
But every question we ask about death revolves around one central question:
What happens when we die? It’s a question that stays with us because so few people can tell us the answer. Jesus would know best, having done it himself, but he never shared much about it. Lazarus likewise never said a word. Elijah and Moses came back briefly, but didn’t say anything either. The closest we get to answers in the Bible is through John who had a vision of life in the spiritual world. He wrote it down in what we would call the Book of Revelation, but it was so intense and so beyond human understanding that it’s still the hardest book in the Bible to interpret – concepts and images that go beyond human understanding. Now, every once in a while we hear an amazing story like that of Colton Burpo, the young boy whose life inspired the movie and the book Heaven is for Real. And reading stories like that give us hope and allow us to point to something tangible to hold onto. But for every story like Colton’s, there are others who have come back and said there was nothing but darkness and cold and you wonder if we are any closer to an answer.
We’ve tried to prove or disprove the existence of an afterlife using logic and reason.
Which seems weird since logic and reason are based on our knowledge and experience and we simply don’t have enough of either when it comes to the hereafter. Most of these arguments revolve around the existence of God, because if we can prove God exists, it logically follows that all the rest of it is true, including the afterlife. On the other hand, some atheists like to use evolution as an argument against the existence of God which doesn’t make sense because evolution and God are not contradictory beliefs. So, it’s ironic that a popular argument in favor of God comes from an atheist. You probably don’t know the name Fred Hoyle, but you probably do know the theory he came up with – The Big Bang Theory (not to be confused with the TV show of the same name). Interestingly, Hoyle didn’t believe in the Big Bang Theory either. But he also didn’t believe in evolution as Darwin had originally posited.[1] Instead he believed in intelligent design, a concept that something greater than ourselves must have guided the development or even creation of humanity. He didn’t believe in God as we understand God, and might be offended to hear his argument being used in God’s defense. But what he said in defending intelligent design was, “The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way (through evolution) is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”[2] That’s how infinitesimally small the odds are of human beings ever being created simply by chance. Now there are tons of people who would argue with Hoyle and argue that his analogy was too simple or came at it the wrong way, but Hoyle’s point was simply that it made more sense to believe in a creator than it did to think we happened by accident.
One doctor tried to prove the human body had a soul by weighing patients as they died.
You’ve probably heard this story before. Dr. Duncan MacDougall posited the theory that human beings have souls and that it could be proved at the point of death. He took six dying patients and weighed them right before death and immediately afterward, and he claimed that after the body had ceased functioning, the human body suddenly lost weight that could not be accounted for by normal means. He said that through his experiments, he calculated the human soul weighs ¾ of an ounce or as it is more popularly known today: 21 grams.[3] 21 grams, Dr. MacDougall said, was how much the soul weighed. But the truth is his results over this incredibly small sample varied widely and none of them had a consistency of weight loss. Just one person recorded an actual loss of 21 grams and the rest had completely different results.[4] But MacDougall’s efforts is testimony to our desire to learn about the afterlife.
Scholars have poured over the Bible to find clues to what we can expect when we die.
Jesus tells us God has a house for us in Heaven with many rooms and there is a room reserved there for each of us who believe in Him. John tells us when God creates the New Jerusalem at the end of the age it will have streets of gold and walls of jasper and foundations made of gemstones. But for me, my favorite image in the Bible comes from Revelation 7:9-12. The passage we’re reading is from John’s vision of the end of days before the creation of the New Heaven and New Jerusalem. Now this isn’t an image of the New Heaven, but an image of what John sees as we approach the day of final judgment when God will determine what happens to each of us. And even though this isn’t exactly an image of the New Heaven, to me this is a glimpse of what we can expect when we get there.
9 After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice:
“Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”
11 All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, 12 saying: “Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!” – Revelation 7:9-12
This is often how I imagine Heaven to be.
Filled with people of every type from every nation. A multitude of every race, color, gender, age, and size. A crowd so large they cannot be counted. A place where all of God’s children live in unity with one another. And I think the reason we debate so much about what Heaven looks like and how you get there and what we can expect is because we are not sure if we are going to be there. Our beliefs about Heaven are often exclusive to our belief in God. Catholics believe that it is a combination of faith and good works that earn you a place in Heaven. Mormons believe Heaven consists of three levels and only believers of the Mormon faith get into the best level to be with God. And Jehovah’s Witnesses believe it all doesn’t matter. God has already picked out the 144,000 that will be joining him and too bad for the rest of humanity. Presbyterians and other Calvanist faiths believe we are predestined, kind of like the Jehovah’s Witnesses but with fewer limitations. And so the debate about who is right becomes more important than ever because it involves our eternal destiny. That’s why we worry so much about this stuff. But maybe instead of worrying about how to get into Heaven we should focus instead on living a life that honors Christ.
Sometimes we focus on the wrong things.
If we really want to get into Heaven the last thing we should be worrying about is getting into Heaven. Because worrying about it won’t get us there. There isn’t some magic formula where if you do “X” number of good things you get in. There isn’t some cosmic scale of justice that says if our total good guy points outweigh our bad guy points, we’re in. The only thing that truly matters is our heart for God. Just listen to the words of Jesus himself. He told his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?… 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” The solution is simple. Put God first. Trust in God and free yourself from worry. The rest will fall into place on its own.
Harvey West is one of the best pastors I know.
He was my senior pastor when I was attending Alpharetta First UMC back in Georgia and I was fortunate enough to take a Bible study class with him. During that class one of the people asked, “How do you know you are saved?” And Harvey said, “I don’t.” That stunned all of us right there. But then he continued. “But I have faith in God and in his Son Jesus Christ. And I believe that faith will save me. And so I don’t worry about it. Instead I focus on trying to live a life that best honors Christ’s sacrifice for me.” Those words have continued to guide me every day of my life and I hope they guide yours as well. And as for the question, “Do dogs go to Heaven?” I think they do. When we read the Scripture we hear from God through the prophet Isaiah that “the wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain.” If God will provide space for the wolf and the lamb, the lion and the ox, and even the serpent, surely my former neighbor’s dog is resting comfortably somewhere up there waiting for his human. But either way, I trust in God enough to believe God knows best and no matter what my vision of Heaven is or how we get there, God’s vision will always be better.
[1] http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/fred-hoyle-an-atheist-for-id/
[2]http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_MacDougall_%28doctor%29#In_popular_culture
Born This Way
“Beatrice Zinker always did her best thinking upside down.”
What a great way to start a book. Disney used to send me tons of books to review and one of them in particular caught my eye: Beatrice Zinker, Upside Down Thinker. Somehow, I knew it was going to be good. First-time author Shelley Johannes wrote this endearing story about a girl who was “different.” She dresses different, she acts different, she even EATS different – dessert first! Of course, her favorite is pineapple upside-down cake (one of mine, too)! But what makes Beatrice fun and unique is she EMBRACES her difference. She doesn’t have any angst about being herself. Despite peer pressure (and there’s plenty of it), she doesn’t try to be someone she isn’t. Even when she is criticized or misunderstood, she is always true to herself and instead turns these moments into ways to connect with others in new ways.
We could use all use a little of Beatrice inside of us.
I remember as a young kid in elementary school, standing in line for recess when some boy came up and taunted me with that horrible rhyme, “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!” Looking back now, it makes me livid with anger that this kid thought it was funny. But then… I don’t know why, but I cried. Even though I had no reason to be ashamed of my Japanese heritage, it still hurts to be singled out, to be told you don’t belong. It’s tough to stay true to yourself when people around you – whether at school or work or church – belittle, insult, or make fun of you simply for being who you are. I’ve been made fun of for being fat, for wearing glasses, for laughing funny (interestingly you should NEVER make fun of someone’s laugh – it’s not something they can help), and probably for more that I just can’t think of right now. I’m sure you’ve been made fun of, too, and didn’t it feel awful? What I love about Shelley’s book is not just that Beatrice remains true to herself, but Shelley recognizes it isn’t always easy to do. She doesn’t paint some Pollyanna picture of Beatrice’s life where everything works out perfectly. She shows the struggle Beatrice goes through in trying to find out how to do it. Which only makes Beatrice that much more of a hero!
It’s probably why the story of Gideon is one of my favorites in the Bible.
The Bible is full of stories about people, like Beatrice, who don’t fit the mold of what society would consider “normal.” Jesus himself didn’t live up to expectations. Everyone thought the savior of the Israeli people would be a mighty warrior like Captain America or Iron Man or Thor, a capable leader who would defeat all those who would stand up to God’s chosen people. But instead God sent a Jewish carpenter who gave up his own life rather than take the life of another. He rode in on a donkey instead of a horse. He talked about the value of women and children when no one else gave them a thought. But God was doing that all the time, breaking the mold of our expectations, taking people who are “different” and making them into shining examples of the very best of who we are capable of being. Gideon is one of those people. Let’s share together in his story, a different kind of guy who God believed in.
11 The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites. 12 When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”
13 “Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.”
14 The Lord turned to him and said, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?”
15 “Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.”
16 The Lord answered, “I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites, leaving none alive.” – Judges 6:11-16
We worry a lot about “optics” these days.
We’re so worried about how things look, sometimes we fail to see what God has always known – it’s what’s inside that counts. It’s your heart. It’s your compassion, your thoughtfulness, your faith that matters the most. Not whether you look the part. Look at Gideon. Gideon was anything but the perfect leader. If God was looking for a commander to protect the people of Israel, even Gideon thought God was crazy. Verse 15 is my favorite. “Pardon me, my lord, but how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.” But God tells him, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand.” That line is so powerful and key. “Go in the strength you have…” God isn’t calling on Gideon to be someone he’s not. He’s calling on him to be the person he was created to be. And that is enough.
Sometimes it can be a challenge to embrace your differences.
But it’s those very differences that set you apart. “Go in the strength you have…” Such powerful words, but also encouraging. They tell us that we are enough in God’s eyes. We have gifts of our own to contribute. Shelley told me a quote from director and writer Joss Whedon inspired her to chase her dreams. Joss said, “Whatever makes you weird is probably your greatest asset.” She thought her “weirdness” was her creativity! Her love of writing and drawing is what might very well be her greatest asset. All her life she loved writing and drawing, but she wasn’t sure if those things had value. Her creativity felt like a flaw instead of something to be celebrated. Certainly nothing you could make into a career, but she realized perhaps it was not the flaw she had imagined, but instead her gift and her strength. She told me, “I had to come to grips with that. My brain was intuitive. I thought intuitively, not chronologically. I wasn’t ‘wrong.’ My brain was just different.” Shelley wanted to share that celebration of differences with every child to encourage them to embrace their differences, too. And that’s how Beatrice Zinker was born.
Shelley’s story reminds me of my own life.
When I was a kid, I talked a lot. If you asked my family today, I think they’d say things haven’t changed. My voice was always loud and booming. My parents could hear me from virtually anywhere in the house. I remember one time we went to the doctor and my mom even asked if there was anything they could do to curb my talking and I’ll never forget my pediatrician Dr. Thom told her that talking was a sign of intelligence. My mom probably thought if that was true then I must be a certified genius! All the time growing up, people would tell me my voice carried or that I was too loud and I became pretty self-conscious about it. But that was good because I learned how to control it and keep it “normal” when I needed to and allow it free reign when it was warranted. Still, I always wondered what someone could do with a loud voice and a penchant for talking. Then I started doing this. Instead of being “too loud” people told me from the beginning that they loved my voice. They liked that it carried, that I was easy to hear, and it felt like for the first time this thing that made me stand out did so in a way that was a real blessing.
We try so hard to be “normal.”
But what is “normal” anyway? We’re all “different” in some way and the trick is to turn those differences into something useful, to find out how being “weird” might be your greatest asset. God wants you to use your gifts in your own unique way. Not to shy away from them, but to find out how they can build us up together and give us the chance to be the best version of oursleves that God created us to be. If we truly believe God created us in his image (not literally in his image or we would all look like clones, but in his character), then we must believe we have gifts God meant for us to use to make this world a better, a more loving place. We are not mistakes. We have the chance to contribute to the world around us. Kids are not encouraged often enough to be the best version of themselves, but instead the best version of what the world expects. We celebrate when children do things the world labels as valuable instead of the gifts and personality they already have. That impacts our whole lives. If you have kids or grandkids, help celebrate not who you think they should be but who they are. Encourage them to seek out their own gifts and how that might make a lasting contribution to their lives and the world around them. And I want to encourage you to do the same for yourselves. At every age and every stage our gifts grow and change. Where and who we are when we are 20 is far different from where we are supposed to be when we are 40 or 60 or 100. So pray about it and seek out what makes you different NOW and see how God might want you to use that to be your best self. “Go in the strength you have,” and know it is enough for God.
Love Is A Verb
Have you ever heard of the seven stages of the married cold?
It’s one of those stories that’s been floating around for years, but it keeps coming back because it’s both funny and unfortunately true.[1]
In your 1st year of marriage, if your loving spouse gets sick, you say with all sincerity – “Oh, sweetie pie, I’m really worried about those nasty sniffles you have! There’s no telling what that could turn into with all the strep that’s been going around. I’m going to take you right down to the hospital and have you admitted for a couple days of rest. I know the food is lousy there, so I’m going to bring you takeout from your favorite restaurant. I’ve already arranged it with the head nurse.”
In your 2nd year of marriage, if your spouse gets sick, you still show much loving concern – “Listen, honey, I don’t like the sound of that cough. I called the doc and he’s going to stop by here and take a look at you. Why don’t you just go on to bed and get the rest you need?”
In the 3rd year, you say – “Maybe you better go lie down, darling. When you feel lousy you need the rest. I’ll bring you something. Do we have any canned soup around here?”
By the 4th year, you say with love – “No sense wearing yourself out when you’re under the weather. When you finish those dishes and the kids’ baths and get them to bed, you ought to go to bed yourself!”
5th year – “Why don’t you take a couple aspirin?”
6th year – “You oughta go gargle or something, instead of sitting around barking like a dog!”
And by the 7th year, you turn to the love of your life and say – “For Pete’s sake, stop sneezing. Are you trying to give me pneumonia? You’d better pick up some tissues while you’re at the store.”
If this isn’t you and your spouse, odds are you probably know someone like this. Most of us consider this to be the natural progression of a love relationship. As we spend more and more time together, we tend to lose not only the fire and passion of our early days, but also that “other-centered” focus that is typical at the beginning. But have you ever wished it wasn’t that way? Have you ever wondered if you could rekindle that intimacy? More time doesn’t have to equal less passion. How we treat each other is a choice we make everyday. It comes naturally at the beginning to be so “other-centered” because we are desperately trying to convince the other person we are worth putting in the time. We are more sensitive, more thoughtful, and more willing to compromise. It’s like those two gophers in the Warner Bros. cartoons who are so deferential to each other and so polite. That’s how we act in a new relationship. But once we have been together for a while all those things seem to fade. And when the relationship starts to get a little dull around the edges, when it isn’t so sparkly new and shining bright, we tend to dump it instead of work on it. In our disposable lifestyles, we tend to have disposable relationships.
Why do you think that is?
Why are we willing to dump something just because it isn’t working the way we expect it too?[2] Obviously, if you decide to get married, you don’t sit there with the intention it’s going to end. Most people think of marriage as a lifelong commitment otherwise why bother? Yet somehow, we chuck it all out the window pretty quickly. Don’t get me wrong, there are DEFINITELY relationships that NEED to end. There are times when staying together isn’t just unhealthy for us, but can be dangerous. I’m not advocating for staying together no matter what, but instead to give things a chance before chucking it out the window. Like anything worthwhile, a love that lasts a lifetime takes work and time and effort. It may not be that fiery, passionate love we had at the beginning, but can become a love that nourishes us and envelopes us with security and hope. And sometimes still with that fiery passion, too. Andy Stanley put it succinctly, “Falling in love requires a pulse, but staying in love requires a plan.” And guess what? God has a plan. In this letter to the church at Philippi, Paul is writing to them to give them encouragement to keep on growing in Christ. Apparently, Paul had spent a lot of time in Philippi and now that he’s been thrown in prison, he’s worried that they’ll forget the lessons of Christ as they think about what will happen to them so he’s writing this to bolster their confidence and to remind them of how Christ would have them behave toward one another. This model of behavior isn’t just for churches, but for our everyday lives and in our marriages as well and this is where we pick up in our Bible.
1 Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. 3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.
5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in very natureGod,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross! – Philippians 2:1-8
This is God’s recipe for a healthy relationship.
Take equal parts humility and equal parts concern for others and mix it together and you have the perfect recipe. Paul reminds us that even Jesus, Jesus who is by his nature God on Earth, even Jesus didn’t take advantage of who he was to make us bend to his will. Instead, Jesus, the creator and most powerful person in the universe, took on the attitude of a servant because he wanted to model for us the kind of life we could live if we just listened to God. God gives us these life lessons to make our lives better. But it takes faith to do it. Faith not only in God that what he says is true, but faith in one another. It takes conscious effort. It’s not something that comes naturally to us, so we have to actively do these things. We have to actively act in humility, to think of our partner more than ourselves, to react not in haste but in kindness, to take the attitude of a servant. To use another Andy quote, we have to learn to make love a verb. Love is a choice we make every day and if we ignore that choice we will see the seven stages of the married cold become a reality in our relationships. But if we DO actively choose to love one another, to think of them before ourselves, we can have the healthy, loving relationship we desire.
There is always a gap between our expectations and our reality.
It’s how we fill that gap that makes all the difference in the world. The most successful couples, the ones who report the most happiness, are the ones who fill that gap with the best of expectations.[3] They believe the best about their spouses, even when they are wrong. They CHOOSE to believe the best even though it’s likely not to be true. It’s that positive attitude that ends up inspiring their significant other to become the best partner they can be and in turn give them the relationship they always hoped for. There’s a book I’ve read that has some great ideas how you can put your spouse or significant other above yourself. It’s called The Love Dare. Some of you may have heard of it. It was a big deal about ten years ago, but the lessons and suggestions it has are still relevant today. But you don’t need a book to do this. All you need is the willingness to put others’ needs before your own. Think of how incredible of a world this would be if everyone thought of other people’s needs more than their own. Challenge yourself this week to do something unexpected for those that you love. Put their needs, their wants, and their desires above your own and see how that can brighten up their day. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] Found in different sermon illustrations and on the Internet.
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-single/201702/what-is-the-divorce-rate-really
[3] From Andy Stanley’s Staying In Love sermon series
Wired for Community
I am a self-made man.
Nobody has ever helped me. Why just this morning, I cooked two eggs and bacon for breakfast from chickens that I raised and a pig that I butchered myself. I cooked it in a pan that I made from steel that I forged in a blacksmith shop I created. I put on shoes that I sewed together from the skin of that same pig I got the bacon from, and then I laced them up from cotton I grew in my backyard that I harvested and spun into thread. I walked to the church on pavement that I put down myself and a sidewalk I formed by laying down concrete that I mixed on my own. I did this because I taught myself everything I know without anyone ever helping me. Yes, sir, I am a self-made man.
We all know that isn’t true.
Nobody could do all those things without help from not just somebody but a whole bunch of somebodies. How would I have been able to cook my own meals as a baby, let alone as a full-grown man without somebody somewhere helping me? How often when we give thanks for our meal do we stop to think about the farmer who grew the vegetables on our plate or the rancher who raised the animals that provided the meat. How often do we think of the people who package our food and the truck drivers who take it to market so we can buy it? How often do we give thanks for the army of people who make it possible for our lives to keep moving forward every single day? Probably not often. Whenever we complain about life, we talk about “those people” who are ruining things for us. Whether “those people” are Democrats or Republicans, Christians or Muslims, Dodgers fans and Giants fans – there always seems to be a “those people.” But the truth is, there isn’t “those people.” There’s just us.
We live in community because we are wired for community. Literally.
Amy Banks, a doctor and an instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School said, “Neuroscience is confirming that our nervous systems want us to connect with other human beings.”[1] There was a study done on metastatic breast cancer patients back in 1989 where one group was placed in a supportive group environment and the other was given the standard care all patients received and what they found was that those placed in a supportive environment lived twice as long! Twice! There are truly tangible benefits of being part of a community. We talked last week about the children left in Romanian state care and how that sadly affected their lives, but there was also a study done with monkeys where they placed two “substitute mothers” in with them. One was a wire mother and one was a cloth mother. The wire mother had a bottle to feed the monkeys and the cloth mother did not. Yet the monkeys preferred spending time with the cloth mother despite the fact that the wire mother had food. Sadly, these monkeys – with no real mother to care for them – developed autistic tendencies just like the Romanian children did. There is more to life than just things like food, water, and air. As important as those are, living in community is just as important as these studies keep showing us.
That’s because God wired us for community.
Without community we cannot be the people God created us to be. But more than that, we need community because none of us are completely self-sufficient. We need others to help us. Not just with our physical needs, but our emotional and intellectual needs, too. We provide pieces of the puzzle to life that no one of us has by ourselves. And that’s how Paul described it in his letter to the church at Corinth. He talked about us being the body of Christ together and despite our protests otherwise, we cannot ignore that fact.
12 Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. 14 Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.
15 Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? 18 But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. 19 If they were all one part, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many parts, but one body. – 1 Corinthians 12:12-20
The Body of Christ is like Voltron.
When I was growing up, there was an anime on TV about the pilots of five giant robot lions. These five lions had the ability to join together to form one giant robot named Voltron. In virtually every episode, there was a bad guy who threatened ALL of humanity, and at first they would try to beat him with just the lions. But ultimately, the only way to win was to form Voltron. The lions would connect to form the giant robot and they would defeat the bad guy! I always wondered why they didn’t just form Voltron right at the beginning of every battle except it would make for a very short show. But that’s the image that comes to mind for me when I read this passage. That we are like Voltron. Together we can do just about anything. Apart, we are only as good as a hand or an eye or a foot. Important, but only part of a whole. Sometimes I wonder if we are the cause of many of our own problems because we choose not to work together, to find the value in each person’s gifts.
It makes sense God created us for community.
After all we worship a God who is a community all by himself. God the Father. God the Son. God the Holy Spirit. Together but distinct. We refer to the Holy Trinity as the 3-in-1. And if we believe that we are formed in God’s image like it says in Genesis, it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe we are made to live in community like God. God seems to reward being in community. In our passage from Ecclesiastes, Solomon extols the virtues of supporting one another. Jesus told us anytime two or three are gathered in his name he is there (Matthew 18:19-20). And the writer of Hebrews encourages us to come together regularly to build one another up and support each other in our faith (Hebrews 10:24-25). But even if you didn’t believe a word of the Bible, the scientific evidence points the same way. Community is our natural state.
John Donne once penned a famous piece of writing called Meditation XVII.
You probably know the famous ending because it’s the title of a very famous Hemmingway book, For Whom the Bell Tolls. But Donne’s piece is much more than that one title. He wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”[2] Because we are all connected, when something happens to one of us, in a sense it happens to all of us. When any of us are diminished, whether it be by death or loss or persecution, it takes away from all we could be.[3] No man is an island. We are all part of the main. Or as we might say in the language of faith, we are all part of the body of Christ. God made us that way. All with different gifts, but united in the Spirit. Watching the news, listening to the radio, reading articles on the Internet or in print, it has become obvious we are less and less willing to live in community. In some bizarre way we are not willing to compromise. We are not willing to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. Instead, we dig a trench. We jump in. And we refuse to budge. But that is not how we were created. We were not meant to be divided. We are meant to find a way to live together in community so that we can make each other better people. We are meant to find a way to live in community so we can learn and grow from each other. We were not meant to be as divisive and divided as we have become. And just as we would not be able to easily just cut off our hand or leg or any body part, we should also treat our brothers and sisters in Christ with honor and love and grace. Instead of continuing to fracture ourselves based on our own personal likes and dislikes, interpretations and understandings, we should find ways to keep coming back to the table that represents what Christ gave for us all.
God wired humanity a specific way.
All of those impulses, all of those deep desires, all of those longings of the heart – for relationships, for love, for meaning, even for God – are because that’s how God made you. One of the most profound questions in life we all ask is “Who am I?” And the answer is the person God made you to be. Like it says in Psalm 139, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” But you are also shaped by your beliefs, your environment, and the people around you and that can change us both positively and negatively. Sometimes those things turn us away from seeing God or distracting us from a meaningful chance to know God. And when that happens we are less than what God intended for us to be. The world can be a harsh place. Not because of God but because of us. But these cravings of the human spirit were always meant to bring us back to him. That’s why we linger on them so much. That’s why we wonder about the meaning of life and if there is a purpose and if there is a God. Because God created us in such a way that no matter how far away you are from him in your spiritual life, there will always be a door open for you to come back, if you decide to pursue it. If you already have a deep faith in Christ, then I hope you think more about the incredible way God put us together and give thanks to Him for loving us so much that he would think about these things long before we ever did. And if you have doubts about God and where he is in your life, I hope you will decide to pursue it. I hope you will take the time to find out if it was God who really made you this way. I think you’ll be astonished by what you find.
[1] All of the examples in this section come from the article: http://www.theunlost.com/relationships/science-confirms-love-is-all-you-need-except-for-food-stuff/
[2] http://www.online-literature.com/donne/409/
[3] https://interestingliterature.com/2021/08/never-send-for-whom-the-bell-tolls-it-tolls-for-thee-meaning-analysis/# – Fun Fact: Donne wasn’t just a literary person but was Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral! Faith was very important to him and this writing was done toward the end of his life as he reflected on the meaning of it all. Read the article for more info. It’s quite fascinating.
Wired for Love
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. – 1 John 4:7-12
I was sure I finally found “the one.”
At the tender age of six years old, I thought I found her. Her name was Kari Covey. She had long blond hair that she wore in ponytails on either side of her head and I thought she was great. When I was pencil monitor, I would save the newest, sharpest pencil for her. When I was paper monitor, I would give her a piece of paper first and then go back and hand it out to everyone else. It was pretty obvious how much I liked her. The best thing was, I think she liked me too. I invited her and a bunch of my classmates to my birthday party when I turned six and at some point during the party, she started to chase me all around the house. I ended up trapped in my sister’s room and in front of all of my friends, Kari kissed me full on the lips. That was a great day! But alas it was not meant to be. That summer, Kari moved away. I didn’t even know until the beginning of the next school year when I couldn’t find her. One of her neighbors said her parents moved to Utah. I hope it wasn’t because of me. But it was okay, because I fell in love many, many more times after that. And each time I fell in love, I was sure she was the one.
When I was younger, I was worried about that. Worried about finding “the one.”
I remember making the comment to my friend Lance, “What if my one lives in China and we never meet? Or what if by the time we meet she’s already married because she couldn’t wait any longer?” The idea that there is only one person out there who is your soul mate is everywhere in our culture. It’s on TV, in movies, in books, in pretty much every storytelling medium there is. Even in video games! After all Mario had his Princess Peach, Pac Man had Ms. Pac Man. And Space Ace had Daphne. This idea of “the one” is everywhere. With just three words I think Tom Cruise ruined a generation of youth looking for love when he said to Renee Zellweger, “You complete me.” Now, I’m as much a romantic as anybody and I loved the movie Jerry Maguire, but this idea that there is only one human being out there we are searching for who can make us whole just isn’t true. The odds of anybody finding their “one” would be astronomical. That idea of love is too restrictive and doesn’t give credit to all the different ways God created for us to experience and give love – the love of friends, the love of family, parental love, and even love of humanity.
We are wired for love.
It is an essential part of who we are. We literally NEED love in our lives. That’s why we search so hard for it. Love is essential for life. Study after study has proven that. John Bowlby’s work on attachment theory[1], Rene Spitz’ work on maternal deprivation[2], and the awful condition of the children in Romanian orphanages gave ample evidence that love is an essential component of our lives.[3] It is one of the saddest stories of our time. Over 100,000 children were living in Romanian government institutions, the victims of a series of failed policies by the Romanian government who kept them in horrible conditions with poorly trained attendants. Even after the atrocious conditions were uncovered Romanian orphans still received only 5 to 6 minutes of attention per day.[4] Could you imagine a baby laying in his crib and only having human contact for 5 to 6 minutes a day? The New York Times reported, “Attendants still loll in the corridors, smoking and drinking coffee, leaving the children to rock in their cots.”[5] They estimated that 10% of all of these children will develop so poorly mentally and emotionally they will end their lives in a psychiatric institution.[6] They found that it wasn’t a lack of food or healthcare that was stunting their development, it was a lack of attention. A lack of love. Medically speaking the lack of contact, the lack of interaction, the lack of comfort and security made these children mentally deficient. Their brains were literally smaller than other children their age. We are wired for love.
Interestingly, we are not only wired to be loved, but we are also wired TO love.
An article by Psychology Today stated our need TO love is as strong as our desire to BE loved.[7] Dr. Raj Raghunathan wrote that being generous in our care and love for others does three things for us.[8] One, it encourages others to be generous to us. When we do nice things for people they often feel the desire and even the need to do something nice back. Two, something called homophily happens. Homophily is the propensity to attract like-minded people. So if you are a generous person, you tend to attract generous people in your life which is far better than being surrounded by selfish, self-centered people. And three, when we are generous, we are subconsciously saying to ourselves we are fulfilled. In fact, we have extra and our generosity stems from the overflow of our well-being. When we are stingy, we tell ourselves we don’t have enough and we need more – whether or not that’s true. We approach life from a “need” perspective and it not only colors our behavior but how we see ourselves. All of these reasons point to the idea that we are wired to love and be loved.
To fully love others, we need to know God’s love in our own lives.
It’s like those safety videos on an airplane where they tell you in case of an emergency to first put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on your child. As a parent, your first instinct is to protect your child, but the truth is the best way to help your child is to help yourself first. That way, you are clear-minded and in the best possible situation to make sure your child is okay. In the same way, we can’t fully love others until we realize we are fully loved ourselves. When we feel loved, when our love tank is full, it’s so much easier for us to love others in a way that fills them up too. So if we know in our hearts that there is a God who loves us, who has given so much for us, who loves us unconditionally and is constantly reaching out to us; when we internalize THAT and make that part of who we are, it frees us to be loving to others. Like it says in verse 10-11, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us… since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” God first loved us. Not that we loved God first, but he first loved us and because he loved us he taught us how to love one another. The key to a successful loving relationship is to first know and understand that you are loved and to know that God loves you abundantly. When you realize that, when you know that you are loved by the God of all love, you can enter into a loving relationship with confidence ready to give love out of the excess of what God has given you. But if you don’t feel that security of God’s love, if you enter into a relationship without the sureness of the love of God, you’re not able to fully give of yourself and you rob yourself of having the kind of love relationship God wants for you to have. Not just with your significant other, but with all of those around you.
That doesn’t mean that people who don’t believe in God don’t experience love.
Of course they do. Everyone has the capacity to experience love. It’s not only the way God made us, but the primary way he reaches out to us. God hopes that through love you will come to know him and believe in him. But you can experience love and never know where it comes from. It’s just that in that case, it’s going be like seeing a 3D movie and forgetting the glasses. You can still see the movie, but it’s a little out of focus most of the time. Not knowing or not believing that love comes from God robs you of the assurance that comes from his love. There is a strength in knowing that no matter what happens, you are loved by someone tremendously and unconditionally. Knowing that frees us from the pitfalls of the Jerry Maguire Syndrome – always searching for someone to complete us. Let’s face it, we can’t rely on other people to make us whole. We need to have that kind of self-assurance BEFORE we go out into the world so that we’re equipped to love someone else. So we can love from our overflow.
Don’t look to me as an expert.
I’ve made plenty of mistakes. And I haven’t always come from a place of self-assurance. Just ask Cassie. I’m far from perfect in this category. I struggle with doubts and when I’m hurting it’s not easy for me to remember I’m loved by God. But I do know God’s love has made me a stronger person. God’s love has helped to see me through some pretty difficult times. And knowing God loves me gives me the strength to love Cassie and Emma the way I hope they deserve to be loved. I still make mistakes. I still sometimes succumb to my own internal doubts and fears. But having God in my life has helped me to overcome those doubts and fears and to be a stronger person. I hope God will do that for you, too. I hope that in your own doubts and fears, in those times when you feel distant from God or you resort to your own inner weaknesses, that you’ll remember these words and gain strength from them. I hope you’ll realize that you don’t need someone to “complete” you because God loves you completely already. And that in your times of doubt, you’ll think about how you are made to love and be loved and that gift comes from God.
[1] http://www.simplypsychology.org/bowlby.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Spitz
[3] http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/02/20/280237833/orphans-lonely-beginnings-reveal-how-parents-shape-a-childs-brain
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/25/world/romanian-orphans-prisoners-of-their-cribs.html?_r=0
[5] ibid
[6] ibid
[7] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sapient-nature/201401/the-need-love
[8] Each of these are found in the above article
Craig's Corner 