Results tagged “Christianity” from Bill's Words

Yeah, ‘cause he just knows.

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He is risen, indeed!

Here’s a “Sermon Starter,” an idea that I hope proves to be useful to someone in his or her quest to arrive at material for next Sunday morning’s sermon. I’ve occasionally had thoughts—fractional ideas, really—which I have thought would make the basis for a great sermon. But having no pulpit and having not one iota of theological talent, I’m unable to deliver on the goods. So here is a Sermon Starter. Feel free to use it in your message, and don’t hesitate to write your source into your notes.

When I need help, I try to trust God to provide for my needs. I say try because I’m not so good at it. It does help me, however, to remember that

• God’s power is infinite and
• God is everywhere at every time,

at least from a Christian’s viewpoint.

Given these two thoughts, I conclude that even the teeniest, tiniest part of God’s power is still infinite and that His infinite power can help li’l ol’ me out.

How’s that for cool? It doesn’t matter how many times you divide His power and His attention, you still have the infinite power of God working for you!

A while back, one of my friends wrote in his Facebook status that he was having a hard time overcoming his cultural programming which poo-poos the use of “I” and “Jesus” in the same sentence. A few of his friends replied with smart-aleck comments that had something to do with a Mexican.

Yeah, I was one of those smart-alecks. But I also knew exactly what he meant.

His mother, a friend of mine as well, took a bit of umbrage at the update. Her reply, which made a lot of sense, essentially said, “Screw talking. Actions are more powerful than words. (And I thought I taught you better.)” She’s right, of course.

But I still identified with his initial comment.

Because in spite of the fact that over 75% of the population of this country calls itself “Christian,” many Christians, for some reason, get particularly uncomfortable when we try to talk about Jesus (not the Mexican), even to each other. Certainly, as she correctly pointed out, there are plenty of people who say “I am Christian” but aren’t really. So that’s a part of the 75% which just won’t quite get it. But what about talking about Jesus is particularly difficult, even among believers?

Quite frankly, I really don’t know. I am still trying to understand that myself.

I’ll let you know if I figure it out, but I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you.

[A note: I feel really, really sophomoric when I write this kind of entry, about Christianity or faith or something. I’m new enough in my faith (three years of “really knowing”) that I realize that I have a lot to learn, and the more I find out, the more I realize I don’t know. I guess that’s the “wise” part of “wise foolishness.” At any rate, I’m going to continue to put these kinds of entry out there, and if you find some flaw in my logic, reasoning, or faith, please point it out to me. As I already said, I have a lot to learn, and need all the help I can get. /Bill]

This morning, our pastor gave a great sermon (it will appear here in a while, for a while). His point bears repeating, but I’m going to expand on it in a “You know when” way because it helps me see the light, so to speak.

You know when you walk into a room at night, with the lights on, and you can’t see the light on the ceiling from the streetlight outside? Or you know when you walk outdoors at night and there’s a full moon so you can’t really see the stars around it? Oh, sure, you might be able to see some of the light or some of the stars, but…

But if you take the primary source of the light away, either by turning off the lights or repeating the activity with a new moon, you can see those lights on the ceiling or the stars in the sky. And suddenly, what was once a dim light on the ceiling or a faint dot in the sky becomes a brilliant light, enough to keep you awake at night or enough to see constellations you didn’t even know existed. That dim light, though certainly still there, was overpowered by the light from another source.

In this vein, Pastor Hakason’s message boils down to a fairly simple point: We are currently in a dark time, but in the darkness, our light shines all that much the brighter.

One more time just to make sure you got it: In the darkness, we shine all that much brighter.

He quoted a fair amount from Isaiah because, as he put it, the prophets weren’t really all that into telling a whole lot about the future that was all goodness and light. Indeed, Isaiah does a great job of being pretty gloomy. There are certainly exceptions, Isaiah 40:31, for example, and Pastor Hakason pointed out others, but essentially, he said, “Look, Isaiah was talking to us in this gloomy, dark time. But he also says that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.” Yeah, that is a very, very loose paraphrase of what he said, but it’s true to his point.

We are called to be the light of the world. And now, in the gloom and doom, we’re being given an opportunity to shine brighter without doing a darned thing! That’s right, when all is “goodness and light” in the world, when the world “outshines” us, most of us are just like the stars around the moon: dim, hard to see, faint. But now that the “goodness and light” of the world (careful how much goodness you ascribe to the world’s light!) is, in many, many people’s opinion, fading fast, we are being given the opportunity to provide a path through the darkness, to show what the light of Christ can do.

If there were ever a time to let your light so shine before all the world that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father, who is in Heaven, this would be it.

I’ve often wondered, If God knows everything that’s going to happen, because it’s going to happen, why pray?

The other day, I heard a really good answer on the pocast of R.C. Sproul of Ligonier Ministries. It essentially was, Well, God knows you’re going to pray about it, and allows you to participate in the process. And on another podcast, to the question, Can our prayer have an effect?, Dr. Sproul reminds us that even Jesus prayed a fervent prayer that his crucifixion wouldn’t happen. If the Son of God thinks that prayer is a good idea, we should probably think it’s a good idea, too. And that sounded pretty cool to me.

The other night as the fam and I were going somewhere, I realized that I was tapping my feet to the music in the car, kinda’ slapping along to the bass line, and feeling really good about it. But why? Terry and the kids certainly didn’t get anything out of my impromptu performance, and I doubt James Taylor did, either, what with his performance being on a CD and all.

But musicians on stage… well, that’s another matter entirely! I have to think that there’s an energy that rises from the crowd to the stage, that the performer really does get something back from the crowd. As the performers play, they feel that vibe and enjoy it, I’m sure. Moreover, the crowd gets to enjoy the show and participate, to a limited extent, in the show itself by inserting into their own minds the rhythms associated with their clapping, tapping, and dancing, playing and performing right along with the performers. Sometimes, they even boo the performer. And unless there’s a bit of improvisation to be done, or unless the playlist isn’t set in advance, the show goes on pretty much as planned.

So I wondered out loud if our praying wasn’t sort of like going to a concert that God gives, where life is the playlist and we’re clapping, tapping, dancing—praying—along to the music. The show is going to go on, so to speak, but God gets that vibe back from us as we pray, and I’m sure He enjoys it. We, too, can enjoy the show more if we participate in it, knowing that God is enjoying our participation. Even when our prayers are prayers of anguish, it’s good to remember that not all songs are happy songs either and that God hears and appreciates our earnest and heartfelt prayers, that the sad songs make Him cry, too.

Anyway, although Dr. Sproul’s answers are just fine, I like to put it into my terms and know that as I say my prayers, God’s up on stage, seeing me in the crowd, feeling what I feel as life is performed, because I am singing, dancing, crying, clapping and tapping through life. And though we certainly know that God has everything planned out from the beginning through the end, I also think we can know that God is really into audience participation.

The Premise

77% of the citizens of this country call themselves Christians. I’ll save you the trouble of clicking on the link. That’s a US Government Census Bureau report I’m linking to.

Seventy-seven.

That’s a solid, real majority. It’s not even close to a minority. It’s so far in the majority category that, well, let’s put it this way: 25% more adults identify themselves as Christians than those who voted for Barak Obama, and he’s our new president elect. (Sidebar: McCain didn’t lose by a lot. He got 46% of the popular vote, and that’s cool.)

This 77% of the adult population of this country hold beliefs, the major tenet of which is succinctly stated by John 3:16:

For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. (NLT)

Guess what that “believes in him” involves? Believing that Jesus died and rose from the dead. That bit is nicely summarized in the Apostles’ Creed, fifth line in:

The third day he rose again from the dead…

So, to summarize: 77% of Americans call themselves Christians, so 77% of Americans believe that a man died and was raised from the dead, as in came back to life.

When was the last time you saw that? I mean, this is not the kind of event that you see on ER, where some docs with some paddles yell “Clear!” and jumpstart a heart. This guy Jesus was dead for three days—stuck in a big hole in the rocks for three days, stinking, rotting, being more and more dead by the second.

Jesus came back to life. And a lot of us believe that.

The Question

So if Jesus came back to life because his father, God, willed it to be so, why is it so hard to believe the rest of the Bible?

As an engineer, I had a hard time with the rest of the Bible because I had to have explanations for everything. I was OK with Jesus’ being raised from the dead without explanation, but it just didn’t work for me that, say, the Red Sea was parted without some sort of explanation as to how God did it. Winds, volcanoes, whatever—I had to have an explanation. I am, after all, an engineer, and we don’t believe jack without an explanation.

But I got over that hurdle one day when I recognized that (a) I am not God (well, I knew that before “one day”), (b) I will never fully understand why God does things, and (c) I will never fully understand how God does things.

For (a), I think that revelation explains itself. I don’t have to do a whole lot of soul searching to recognize that I am not God. Heck, I’m so human that if I were any more human I’d be… well, just more myself.

For (b), I know that I will not ever understand fully why God does things because really, really awful things happen in this world and we do not find answers in the Bible, in prayer, or in any other God-given knowledgebase. I have pondered the words of a lot of well-respected authors and teachers, and they have reached the same conclusion: We just don’t know why God lets bad things happen. To us, in our limited ability to perceive His reasons, they just happen. I have had to learn to accept that recently, especially in light of the afore-linked recent awful event.

So I make the leap to (c) because if I can’t fully know why things happen, then I find it a lot easier not to know everything about how things happen. I mean, what do we really know? After all of our digging, our research, our attempts to explain the phenomena of this world, we find that the more we find out, the less we know.

Think back to Newton’s days when the pinnacle of knowledge about physics was explained in relatively simple equations such as F=ma and the like. Not content to accept that as fact, we kept digging and ended up discovering that it’s not quite right, that it’s a bit off in certain situations, that it has some limitations. And we started digging into the Why? of that limitation. Pretty soon, we’re building a giant ring of superconducting magnets and are looking for particles which defy explanation, and all sanity and reason as Newton knew them are out the door.

Now, I’m not saying that we may never understand something at its most basic elemental level, but I’m saying that we’re going to work very long and very hard to do so, and it still won’t come close to touching the either the how or why of God. I’m now OK with that because I already accept that I can’t know everything, that I can’t understand everything, that I have limitations because of what I am and who I am.

Once over that hurdle, I’ll put it bluntly: I’m lazy. It’s a lot easier to accept the Bible’s explanation because usually the simplest explanation is the correct explanation. The Bible’s explanation is very, very simple.

God did it.

Against that, you might argue that scientists are doing experiments and providing explanations and the Bible is just a theory and you can’t do experiments against that particular theory. True enough, but remember The Premise? What you’re arguing, in essence, is that while you are willing to accept one “impossible” part of the Bible, you’re completely discounting some or all of the other “impossible” parts of the Bible. Are these other “impossible” parts of the Bible any more impossible than that one part that you do accept?

Impossible is impossible is impossible. There aren’t varying degrees of impossibility. It either is or it isn’t impossible.

So back to the question: Can you accept other parts of the Bible at face value and take them on faith?

Yes I Can

I can safely say, Yes.

Yes I can. Yes I can take all of that on faith, and no more.

I hope you can, too.

So… Now What?

That’s where I am. I, an engineer, am taking the Bible on faith, and faith alone. I know that some of what the Bible is true because I’ve seen it firsthand, but I’ve not seen enough in my short career here on Earth to conclusively prove that rest of it is true. Thus it’s on faith that I accept the rest of the Bible is true.

And that is OK.

So if you’re an engineer and are wondering if it’s OK to believe such far-fetched ideas as creationism, miracles and other supposed nonsense, yeah, it’s OK. At least, God thinks so. And it’s all about Him, now, isn’t it?

So why not dive right in? Explore your newfound faith! It’s refreshing and I think you’ll love it—I know I have.

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A post script: You won’t catch me trying to infer from the Bible how dinosaurs and humans may or may not have coexisted on the Earth at the same time. Nope, not me. I have my own theory which is that God can make things look however He wants ‘em to look, and He takes a great deal of pleasure in watching us solve things, figure them out, and discover, much like we do with our own children. He could have made everything on Earth look only 6,000 years old, if He’d wanted to. But He didn’t. Why not? I don’t know.

Or at least that’s the way I see it. Care to disagree? That’s OK, too.

Last night, during prayer time, I did my best to explain to W. and O. that sometimes we just don’t know why bad things happen, but that we know and must have faith that God is using the bad things to do something good. We may never know what that something is, but we know, because the Bible tells us, that He’s up to something good, even when it’s a bad thing that’s involved.

I had a hard time holding back the tears as I explained. Rather, I failed miserably. The sadness I felt for the Biziljs is heart-wrenching.

But I’m not the only one. O. said to me, “Dad, if you hear me crying, don’t worry.”

God, please comfort the Biziljs. Grant them peace. Cry with them, support them, love them. And, if at all possible, bless them with understanding.

In Christ’s name I pray,

Amen.

How come I’ve never seen these two stickers on the same car?

And how come there isn’t a “Christians for Obama” sticker available on Obama’s website?

There’s one for Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, First Americans (?!), women, gays, lesbians, Catholics, Hebrews, Veterans and even Republicans…

Article here on HuffingtonPost.com. (Surprise! Not the Daily Koz!)

And in completely unrelated news,

Scientist Uncovers Miscalculation In Geological Undersea Record.

Huh. Scientists make mistakes (and that includes me, too). Whaddaya’ know.

Funny thing, though:

82% of the population are Christians, meaning that they adhere to beliefs which specify that a man rose from the dead.

One more time for extra-added emphasis:

82% of the population believes that a man rose from the dead.

Dead.

But then not dead.

And all according to some words written in a book. A very old book. Just words. No proof. No evidence. Just words. Written. Words.

And yet somehow they have a hard time believing that the earth is only 6,000 years old, according to that very same book. And its words.

We ridicule people who believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Openly ridicule them. Throw in dinosaurs and you become a laughingstock.

…

Don’t you think that the God who raised a man from the dead could possibly… just maybe… make the universe? In however long He felt like? And, more to the point, make it look however old He might want it to look?

Just askin’.

I continue to see websites (blog entries, news items, etc.) on Digg which make me wonder, Where are all the Christians?

I got to digging around in the 2004 census data (an interesting read, by the way) and discovered that about 75% of adults in this country are self-described Christians (Item #67).

So when I see Digg link after link after link after link… you get the point… about Mike Huckabee, who is standing firmly on his belief in a benevolent God who created the world in seven literal days and sacrificed His own Son to save us from ourselves (loose interpretation), I have to wonder, where are all these supposed Christians? Why aren’t there any articles getting “Dugg up” about how there’s a presidential candidate who is standing up for the beliefs of the vast majority of Americans?

Are you one of the silent majority? Have you read the Big Instruction Book (you know the one) and thought, I wish someone would stand up for what’s in here? And even if you disagree with Huckabee in some area (evolution/creation, for example), can you find enough that is right with him that you could defend him to the loud, vocal minority?

Your political affiliation doesn’t matter here: whether you align yourself with Democrats or Republicans or something else, this isn’t about how you’ll vote this coming November. Rather, this is about one of many candidates who is very forthcoming regarding his faith and religion. And it’s time for you, silent majority, to stand up and ask the other candidates the tough question: What are they doing to represent the vast majority of their fellow countrymen, that 75% of our country who believe in God and His Son, who aren’t offended by prayers at public events, who enjoy seeing nativities at Christmas, and who wish everybody a “merry Christmas?”

I’ll bet that their carefully-crafted-so-as-not-to-offend answer boils down to one word: Nothing.

In a country that professed from its very inception to be one nation under God—and not just God, but Jesus Himself!— it’s time to stand up for what you believe, to become vocal, to shout it from the rooftops, We are Americans, and we believe in God!