Why Are We Such a Bored People?

If you have raced with men on foot, and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses? Jeremiah 12:5

"The puzzle is why so many people live so badly. Not so wickedly, but so inanely. Not so cruelly, but so stupidly." This is how Eugene Peterson opens his wonderfully enlightening book, "Run With The Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best." He quotes Tom Howard:

"Modern man is a bleak business. To our chagrin we discover that the declaration of autonomy has issued not in a race of free, masterly men, but rather in a race that can be described by its poets and dramatists only as a bored, vexed, frantic, embittered, and sniffling" (Chance or Dance, p. 104).

Peterson points out that this is true and has caused many in our culture to perform all manner of evil just to get attention--even if bad attention! Now, that's living a trivial, non-sensical life. I myself have heard actors/actresses say that they tire of "good" roles, preferring instead the wicked person because they are more interesting! That must be true in our culture. Newspapers know that good news does not sell. And you certainly don't see, as Peterson says, good people becoming the focus of TV specials. "No Oscars are given for integrity. At year's end no one compiles a list of the ten best-lived lives." OUCH!

SCRIPTURE MAY SURPRISE US

"One of the first things that strikes us about the men and women in Scripture is that they were disappointingly nonheroic. We do not find splendid moral examples. We do not find impeccably virtuous models. That always comes as a shock to newcomers to Scripture: Abraham lied; Jacob cheated; Moses murdered and complained; David committed adultery; Peter blasphemed."

MAYBE WE SHOULDN'T LOOK FOR HEROES

We read on and begin to suspect intention: a consistent strategy to demonstrate that the great, significant figures in the life of faith were fashioned from the same clay as the rest of us. We find the Scripture is sparing in the information that it gives on people while it is lavish in what it tells us about God. It refuses to feed our lust for hero worship. It will not pander to our adolescent desire to join a fan club. The reason is, I think, clear enough. Fan clubs encourage secondhand living. Through pictures and memorabilia, autographs and tourist visits, we associate with someone whose life is (we think) more exciting and glamorous than our own. We find diversion from our own humdrum existence by riding on the coattails of someone exotic.

LIVE ZESTFULLY!

We counter this mind-numbing humdrum of an existence "by plunging into a life of faith, participating in what God initiates in each life, exploring what God is doing in each event. The persons we meet on the pages of Scripture are remarkable for the intensity with which they live Godwards, the thoroughness in which all the details of their lives are included in God's word to them, in God's action in them." And here, Peterson makes a solid observation: "It is these persons, who are conscious of participating in what God is saying and doing, who are most human, most alive." Indeed. So, let us "run with the horses" . . . by faith!

WE SIN BECAUSE WE THINK TOO small!

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in the slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

--C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Ineptness in the Pulpit, Not Length, Creates Yawns in the Pew!

That's right. I just heard Dr. Timothy Dwyer, Associate Professor of Bible and Ministry from Northeastern Seminary in Rochester say as much. I believe that he is right. People will stay with you IF you have something worthwhile to say. For the last two decades I have heard repeated that 20-somethings are leaving the superficial, frothy, glitzy kinds of churches to find ones that actually say something profound. They want MORE, in other words. The problems mankind faces demand answers they've not been receiving. Well, to return to Why Johnny Can't Preach from the last two posts, let me quote T. David Gordon's take on preaching that makes a difference. See what you think . . .

What would make a difference would be Christian proclamation that is consequential, that is concerned less with current events than with the history-encompassing events of creation, fall, and redemption. What would makes a difference would be Christian proclamation that did not panic every time a court rendered a decision on some pet geopolitical concern, but called our attention instead to the certain judgment of God, with whom we have to do. What would make a difference would be Christian proclamation that was less concerned with "how-to" and more concerned with "why-to," why humans are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God. What might make a difference would be Christian proclamation that was less concerned with the latest news from the Beltway, and more concerned with the stunning and perennial good news that God in Christ is reconciling sinners to himself. But any one of these preferred alternatives requires a sensibility for the significant; a capacity to distinguish the weighty from the light, and the consequential from the trivial. [emphases mine]

Gordon is not arguing that there isn't a place for some of these things, but he IS arguing that comparatively, God's truth trumps all else. And where else must that truth be broadcast more than in the Christian pulpit? That is a legitimate concern.

Faith Looks at the Bridge, Not the Chasm

When it comes right down to it, how do we end up trusting--really trusting--in Jesus when the going gets rough? This is a question of true faith. T. David Gordon recounts a story that may open our eyes to the answer. In his wonderful little book, Why Johnny Can't Preach, Gordon is dealing with the need for us preachers to be sure that we don't just challenge people to have faith, or tell them ways to be more moral (which turns the focus inward to self), or by "taking potshots at what is wrong with our culture." Rather, as he says, "faith is built by careful, thorough exposition of the person, character, and work of Christ."

A Very Helpful Letter After the Civil War

About 25 years after the Civil War, the Southern Presbyterian, Robert Lewis Dabney moved from Virginia to Austin, Texas. "In his latter years he became blind and weak, and knew his death was near. He wrote to his old friend [Clement Read] Vaughn, wondering whether he would have strong enough faith to face his impending death, and Vaughn's reply was as theologically trenchant as it was pastorally lovely. He wrote back to Dabney and asked Dabney what a traveler would do if he came to a chasm over which a bridge was spanned":

What does he do to breed confidence in the bridge? He looks at the bridge; he gets down and examines it. He don't [sic] stand at the bridge-head and turn his thoughts curiously in on his own mind to see if he has confidence in the bridge. If his examination of the bridge gives him a certain amount of confidence, and yet he wants more, how does he make his faith grow? Why, in the same way; he still continues to examine the bridge. Now, my dear old man, let your faith take care of itself for awhile, and you just think of what you are allowed to trust in. Think of the Master's power, think of his love; think how he is interested in the soul that searches for him, and will not be comforted until he finds him. Think of what he has done, his work. That blood of his is mightier than all the sins of all the sinners that ever lived. Don't you think it will master yours?

Now, dear old friend, I have done to you just what I would want you to do to me if I were lying in your place. The great theologian, after all, is just like any other one of God's children, and the simple gospel talked to him is just as essential to his comfort as it is to a milk-maid or to a plow-boy. May God give you grace, not to lay too much stress on your faith, but to grasp the great ground of confidence, Christ, and all his work and all his personal fitness to be a sinner's refuge. Faith is only an eye to see him. I have been praying that God would quiet your pains as you advance, and enable you to see the gladness of the gospel at every step. Good-bye. God be with you as he will. Think of the Bridge!

Your brother,

C. R. V.

"MUNDANENESS" Is Ruining the Ministry & Churches

Why? Because the habits of our culture have promoted the banal and encouraged the trivial. As a result, it is nigh on to impossible for many ministers today to think deeply about the text of Scripture. If they cannot think deeply then they'll not be able to preach deeply either. Listen to what T. David Gordon says about this in his very important recent book, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers--

Our inability to read texts [he means to ponder deeply the implications therein] is a direct result of the presence of electronic media. The sheer pace of an electronic media-dominated culture is entirely too fast. . . . We become acclimated to distraction, to multitasking, to giving part of our attention to many things at once, while almost never devoting the entire attention of the entire soul to anything. The close reading of texts would be an antidote to such a pace because such reading is time-consuming and requires the concentration of the entire person. . . .

When the poet stares at that which the rest of us merely glance at, he invites us to take a longer look along with him. It is precisely this longer look that is necessary to cultivate a sensibility for the significant.

Here, the shift of dominant cultural media has been profound, because television, in contrast to poetry, is essentially trivial. Because its pictures must move (and indeed, even camera angles must move, on average less than every three seconds), it captures best those things that are kinetic, that have motion. Yet few of the more significant aspects of life involve much motion: love, humility, faith, repentance, prayer, friendship, worship, affection, fear, hope, self-control. Most of what is significant about life takes place between the ears, as we make sense of life, of our place in it, and of our failures and successes, our joys, our sorrows, our fears, our loves. This world of the mind and soul is essentially a linguistic world, a nonkinetic world; a different world from the world of rapidly changing images.

I think Gordon was right when he offered that "Mundaneness is . . . part of the curse of Genesis 3." We have to fight the pull of culture through self-discipline, the discipline to rule out those influences which war against our soul, which demean the profound, which even prejudice our hearts and minds against anything deep and most beneficial. Faster is not better in most areas of life.

Look tomorrow for what Gordon says would make a difference?

C. S. Lewis--The Decline of Religion is a Good Thing!

In the mid-1940s, there was a cry that religion was in decline. But was this such a bad thing? C. S. Lewis in his essay in God in the Dock, entitled, "The Decline of Religion," points out that if the kind of religion that sported large numbers was forced upon the populace, then it would be hard to tell who was there because they really wanted God. An example he cites was the requisite chapel attendance at Oxford around 1900, which by 1946 had shrunk, as it turns out, at "the precise moment when chapel ceased to be compulsory." This was typical all over England, he claims. This change, he further claims, has been taken to indicate that the nation as a whole has "passed from a Christian to a secular outlook." But he points out that if one were to derive any clue from the novels of the late 19th century, one would discover that they were as secular then as during the mid-1900's.

Again--Is This A Bad Thing?

Lewis would say, "No." Why? As he said,

". . . The religion which has declined was not Christianity. It was a vague Theism with a strong and virile ethical code, which, far from standing over against the 'World', was absorbed into the whole fabric of English institutions and sentiment and therefore demanded church-going as (at best) a part of loyalty and good manners as (at worst) a proof of respectability. Hence a social pressure, like the withdrawal of the compulsion, did not create a new situation. The new freedom first allowed accurate observation to be made. When no man goes to church except because he seeks Christ the number of actual believers can at last be discovered. . . . The decline of 'religion', thus understood, seems to me in some ways was a blessing. At the very worst it makes the issue clear. . . . When the Round Table is broken every man must follow either Galahad or Mordred: middle things are gone (emphases mine).

Thus, false believers were no longer forced to hide beneath a cloak of conformity. Their true colors were allowed to show. Legalistic churches still do this in mass numbers, allowing people to pay lip-service to God while denying the very heart which he requires of all true followers! That needs to be exposed and repented of in the church.

It is not so good for the world. As Lewis avers, there is a sense in which such a decline is worse for the 'World', in that religion tends in some degree to purify a country, aids in the "comparative humanity of her police, and the possibility of some mutual respect and kindness between political opponents." But, as he adds, "I am not clear that it makes conversions to Christianity rarer or more difficult: rather the reverse. It makes the choice more unescapable."

Conquering The Church's Reductionistic Faith

I am pondering true love for God. It seems a rare thing even among Christians. Bring up some feelings for God and people sort of lose interest. Now, it were one thing if it were done in a weird or obnoxious way. But one can be careful and introduce the topic slowly, thoughtfully within normal Christian conversation. It still seems love for God has been edged out (or kicked out) by religious and even not so religious solutions to man’s problems. To find someone who’d bless our soul with sweet recollections of Jesus’ love would be a FIND! And I must hasten to add that though writing this, I myself may not leave another believer feeling it either. It is possible to identify a problem and still not evince the solution. My wife and I talk about these matters. So much talk is about God, around religion, involving church. Yet, it seems to circumnavigate the Person. It’s reductionistic in nature. And it is the “air” we breathe. Do we fight it? Is that to be our modus operandi? Yet, we must believe that seeing it is part way to resolving the problem.

Enter Deuteronomy 29:4 . . .

This blew my away this morning. Let me give the context with the preceding two verses:

2 And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them: “You have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, 3 the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs, and those great wonders.

Moses reminds them of God’s powerful grace exhibited toward them. These are the historical record of God’s dealings with man, and they deserve recognition. More, they demand worship! He is grounding their being, their existence, yes, even their future prospects as the holy people of God (abundant life), in the certainty of God’s previous and clear mercies. In short, there is very good reason to trust God, to adore God! Saying that does not accomplish it, as we know.

Next, and here is an astonishing statement:

4 But to this day the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.

It’s as if He were saying, “You have the history, the evidence and it’s etched in your memory. It is documented as a legacy, passed down orally as well as in written form! But, so far you do not have the accompanying and necessary heart to rightly understand and appreciate that history.”

So, it’s one thing to read what God has done, quite another to relate to it. Question is, does God always give this kind of heart to his creatures? Are we not commanded to hear and understand? Forty years had passed as they wandered through the desert, the older and generally faithless generation dying off in the process due to their unbelief. Still, even those remaining and left to hear Moses’ sermons in preparation to enter the promised land, even they had not been given a “heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.” They had something to be sure! They evidently believed more than their forbears; they were allowed to live and enter the land!

So, what is the meaning of this “heart” and “eyes” and “ears?” And are we all waiting on God to give us these? Is there anything we can do to promote such a knowledge? Does the New Testament unveil a new way? If so, why is it still that seemingly so few enjoy such an "interior" life? Oh, let us ask these questions. It is THIS kind of knowledge to which Jesus as referring in salvation: "This is eternal life that they KNOW you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (John 17:3). Please, give us a "heart to understand, eyes to see, ears to hear."