Worn Down

By David Barshinger

A week after I heard the first reports of swine flu in April, I came down with influenza type A myself. While the specialists never confirmed I had swine because they stopped testing non-hospitalized type A cases, my doctor was pretty certain I had contracted the H1N1 virus.

It came at a rather inopportune time, at the end of my semester. My school required everyone who had symptoms or tested positive to "isolate" themselves, so the illness forced me to miss my last week of classes.

The timing of the flu felt severely ironic because my previous semester had ended with pneumonia. The schedule I was keeping was wearing me down. It was obvious that I literally couldn't keep up with my calendar, that I was stretching myself beyond my limitations.

The Sky's the Limit?

"You can be anything you want if you just apply yourself." I grew up hearing that American slogan, and we relish it in part because, well, who doesn't love an underdog attaining great things through hard work?

And how can you criticize hard work anyway? God surely wants us to be diligent, working to please the Lord and not people (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:58 and Col 3:23). And it's clear he despises laziness (e.g., Prov. 19:15, Eccl. 10:18, Matt. 25:26).

But I've found that behind the maxim lurks a lie that we often miss: Limitations. The truth is, I can't be anything I want. God created me as a finite human being, which means I may have strengths, but I also have weaknesses, and limits.

Of course, God often uses our weaknesses to display his power (2 Cor. 12:9). We've heard the testimonies of people like Moses, the bumbler who became the great leader of Israel, confronting the mighty Pharaoh and guiding the Israelites out of bondage through the Sinai desert. But while God stretches us and empowers us to do things we thought we could never do, he has also created us with limitations.

The reality of my limitations is complicated by the pressures I face in a competitive marketplace. It's one thing to do my best and another to try to be better than everyone else.

Living in an economy where we can't take jobs for granted encourages such comparison and competition. A limited number of professorships awaits me and the many other doctoral students around the country when we graduate. Competition can sharpen us, but it can also stir up worry and workaholism.

What I forget is that this competitive world rests in the palm of its Creator who exists outside of time, our sovereign Father who knows my fears and my future and watches over me.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:25-27:

... do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?

Instead, Christ calls for orienting our lives around faithfulness to God, around right living, around the moral code Jesus lays out in the Sermon on the Mount. And when we do this, when we "seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness," we learn faith, to trust in the God who provides for our needs (Matt. 6:33).

Christ concludes, "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble" (Matt. 6:34). In other words, a life driven by worry about the future, consumed by competition and fears and driving myself into the ground ‹ that's not a life of faith.

The life of faith recognizes that I have limits and am ultimately not in control. The life of faith works diligently but rests in the sovereign, limitless God.

Anxious Toil vs. Sleep

When I was recovering from my bout of pneumonia, I found a passage of Scripture that convicted me about my strenuous schedule and challenged me to shift my perspective on work.

Psalm 127:1 says, "Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain." Those who labor out of fear without trusting in Yahweh will never find the satisfaction they desire. If they don't live their life with the solid foundation of God's presence, their house will crumble.

And Psalm 127:2 really hits it home. It begins saying, "It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil."

I had been burning the midnight oil and getting up early, to the point it was damaging my health. And what is anxious toil but the competitive lifestyle that works me ragged out of fear that it won't be enough, out of worry that someone else will get ahead? Yet such a haggard lifestyle ultimately amounts to naught.

Why is it in vain? Verse 2 explains, "for he gives to his beloved sleep." And here we discover the beauty of a life lived with God at the foundation. It's not vain to rise up early, but to both rise early and go late to bed. Why? Because it forsakes faith in God.

The one who works diligently and entrusts himself to the Lord is the one who receives sleep. He is the object of God's love, and God grants him that sweet rest that fortifies and heals his body and soul. He can sleep at night without life's worries consuming him because he trusts in the Lord's faithfulness.

The subversive, freeing message of the gospel itself says we can't do it ‹ we need God. That reality doesn't evaporate after salvation. As limited, finite beings, we will always need God's grace and provision.

We see this truth in how God built into creation the need for rest. God gave us this model when he labored six days in creation, but "rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done," making that day holy (Gen. 2:2­3). And thus the fourth commandment, based on the model of creation, says, "Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work ..." (Exo. 20:9­10a).

Here we see a model of faithful labor: six days of work with a full day set aside for rest. Constant work wears us down, it certainly wore me down at the end of my past two semesters. We are finite beings, and we need to remember that God calls us to be diligent, not divine.

Realizing That Sweet Rest

Though I had meditated on Psalm 127 after my pneumonia, my recent recurrence of an end-of-the-semester illness indicates I haven't learned the lesson very well. It shows how much we are creatures of habit and how important it is to implement healthy disciplines in our lives.

How do we do that? Here are a few ways I'm trying to employ these principles from Scripture.

1. Balance responsibility and health. My ability to perform well in my work depends largely on the health of my body. An attuned physique yields a sharp mind. It's pertinent to discipline myself both to get sufficient sleep and to exercise regularly. That means cutting out time from work to go for a run and forcing myself to go to bed at a decent hour.
2. Be more disciplined and diligent with the time I spend working. This may mean surfing the Web a bit less when I should concentrate on the tasks at hand, or setting a timer for an hour of focused efforts before letting myself check e-mail. And this makes my time away from work all the better because I'm satisfied with my hard labor and thus free to engage others.
3. Develop greater dependence on God. I need to remember my mortality and throw myself on God's incorruptibility. He is God, and I am not. A key way to nurture dependence is disciplining myself to rest. For example, setting Sundays apart as a day to put aside all work, even when everyone else I'm competing against is logging in time, teaches me to depend on God.

The Scriptures make it clear that God wants to free us from anxious toil and grant us rest. Anxious toil robs us of the peace that comes from depending on the Lord.

God instead commands us to work hard, but acknowledge our limits and ultimately trust him to bless our labor and provide for our needs. And out of that frame of mind comes the freedom from worry and competition that makes God's rest so satisfying, so sweet.

From Boundless Webzine

"Where Do All The Colors Go At Night?"

By Albert Mohler

One of the most lamentable aspects of modern life is the disappearance of silence. Throughout most of human history, silence has been a part of life. Many individuals lived a significant portion of their lives in silence, working in solitude and untroubled by the intrusion of constant noise.

Historians often point to the Industrial Revolution as a great turning point in the human experience of environmental sound and constant noise. The arrival of the factory and the concentration of human populations in cities brought a transformation that was accompanied by increased noise and the displaced silence. Today, the problem of noise pollution is a matter of concern to many of us, who find our lives frequently interrupted by unwanted sounds and constant noise.

Our culture now assumes noise and the constant availability of music, electronic chatter, and entertainment. In many homes, there is virtually no silence -- at least during waking hours. In some homes, family members live in isolated environments of independent sound, with iPods, televisions, radios, and any number of other technologies providing a customized experience of noise.

All this takes a toll upon the soul. Psychologists argue that the development of individual identity requires extended periods of solitude, reflection, and silence. The Christian tradition has honored silence as a matter of spiritual discipline and an intentional effort to flee the noise of everyday life in order to hear what noise cannot supply.

If this is true for adults, it is perhaps even more true for children. But today's children are often subjected to a constant barrage of noise. Many are raised to the soundtrack of the television or other forms of entertainment. Some parents seem to fear silence and do their best to make certain that children are never without some form of sound.

Writing in the June issue of Standpoint, Susan Hill argues that our children are being impoverished by being deprived of silence. We have betrayed children, she asserts, by "confiscating their silence." As she explains:

But so difficult has it become to find such oases of silence, that many children never experience it. In adapting to constant noise, we seem to have become afraid of silence. Why? Are we afraid of what we will discover when we come face to face with ourselves there? Perhaps there will be nothing but a great void, nothing within us, and nothing outside of us either. Terrifying. Let's drown our fears out with some noise, quickly.

Most of us will quickly realize the truth contained in her assessment. It seems that many of us are, to a greater or lesser degree, almost afraid of silence. Our children quickly inherit the same fear.

In "Silence, Please," Susan Hill describes the delights of silence in a way that beautifully captures what so many have lost:

In a quiet library, the turning of a page, the scratch of pencil on paper, are separate, distinctive, sounds. They identify themselves to us, they have a personality. They are beautiful. It is not only natural sounds that gain a richness set in the context of silence — all sounds do. To deprive ourselves and our children of the ability to distinguish such aural detail is to diminish our sensory life.

As Susan Hill acknowledges, complete silence is very difficult to achieve. Her goal is not to see children experience an artificial silence, but instead to see children experience the natural sounds that come as gifts -- sounds that require turning off the television to hear.

"Our children are too rarely given that opportunity or taught that the contrast between noise and quietness, like the parallel one between being in company and being alone, is vital to the growth and maturity of the individual," she explains. This growth and maturity, cultivated by silence, is essential to education -- both of the mind and the soul. Reading, writing, analysis, and reflection require some level of silence. Many children, particularly teenagers, are shortchanging their education by developing a dependence on noise, even when studying (or what they call studying).

The life of the mind and the shaping of the soul require the ability to hear, recognize, and understand what would be lost in a cacophony of sound. She expresses this beautifully:

If children do not learn to focus and concentrate in a pool of quietness, their minds become fragmented and their temperaments irritable, their ability to absorb knowledge and sift it, grade it and evaluate it do not develop fully. Reading a book quietly, watching a raindrop slide slowly down a windowpane or a ladybird crawl up a leaf, trying to hear the sound of a cat breathing when it is asleep, asking strange questions, such as, "Where do all the colors go at night?" and speculating about the possible answers — all of these are best done in silence where the imagination can flourish and the intricate minutiae of the world around us can be examined with the greatest concentration.

Where do all the colors go at night? All of us, what ever our age, need the gift of silence so that we can ponder such questions -- and hear what constant noise denies us.

From Al Mohler's Blog

How I Got Comfortable Shouting To God

by Mark Altrogge on June 3rd, 2009

Shout for joy in the Lord, O you righteous!
Praise befits the upright. PS 33.1

I’m not a particularly emotional person. At football games I’ve never shouted and high-fived. I never danced or moshed or sang along or held up my lighter at concerts. And I was raised in a church in which the most expressive thing we did in worship was exchange the sign of peace with our neighbor - my brother and I would give each other a sideways glance and a smirk, then give each other the peace sign.

When Jesus saved me, I became convinced from preaching and the Word that God desires expressive worship. But for me to raise my hands or shout to God or sing with gusto was like telling me to do an Irish step dance at an opera.

But I wanted to become more expressive in my worship. I only had to overcome my fear of man.

I read about a man who conquered his self-consciousness by going out in the woods and shouting praises to the Lord. So I decided to try this. I lived on a farm at the time, so I tramped across a cow pasture to a stand of woods where I knew no one would hear me.

I looked around, raised my hands, and shouted, somewhat meekly, “Halleluiah!” I did it again, a little bit louder. I felt weird. What if someone heard me or saw me? Looking around, I shouted again, “Halleluiah!” I kept shouting over and over again, until I began to get used to it. I did this for about 15 or 20 minutes, then trudged back through the field to my apartment over the garage on the farm.

The next time I worshiped with the church, when the leader exhorted us to raise our hands and shout to the Lord, with the Lord’s help, I overcame my fear of what others thought of me and shouted my praises to Jesus.

30 years later, I still battle the fear of man at times during worship. But whenever it’s appropriate during our times of corporate worship, I love to shout my praise to the Lord. It feels good.

It feels good, because praise befits the upright.

From The Blazing Center

The Stone Chair

The Stone Chair

by Tim Challies

In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien writes about a kingdom called Gondor which for many years has had no king. While waiting for the rightful heir to come and claim his throne, a series of stewards has been placed in charge of the land. The steward in charge at the time of the events described in the book is named Denethor and he has two sons, Boromir and Faramir, both of whom figure prominently in the story (and subsequently, in the movie). As steward of the land, Denethor had the power of the king but without the title and without the full measure of honor. He was able to make decisions and to pass judgment. He received the respect and admiration of the people of the land. His primary task was to do whatever was best for the land in the absence of its rightful ruler. In all he did he was to remember his position—to remember that he was not and never would be the king. As a constant reminder of his temporary position he was forbidden to rule from the king’s throne.

“…awe fell upon him as he looked down that avenue of kings long dead. At the far end upon a dais of many steps was set a throne under a canopy of marble shaped like a crowned helm; behind it was carved upon the wall and set with gems an image of a tree in flower. But the throne was empty. At the foot of the dais, upon the lowest step which was broad and deep, there was a stone chair, black and unadorned, and on it sat an old man gazing at his lap.”

That man, of course, was the steward. Where the king was allowed the full honor of sitting upon the throne, surrounded by splendor, the steward was consigned to rule from a plain, unadorned chair that sat at the foot of the throne.

Denethor was not a very good steward. He dreaded the day the king would return, for he knew that with the return of the king would come his own return to obscurity. He jealously guarded the power that had been given him and did not look forward to the day when he will have to relinquish the kingdom to its rightful owner. This attitude affected his every decision, and he often ruled based on his own desire for preservation rather than on the basis of what would be best for the kingdom he was sworn to protect. We find him saying:

“…the Lord of Gondor is not to be made the tool of other men’s purposes, however worthy. And to him there is no purpose higher in the world as it now stands than the good of Gondor; and the rule of Gondor, my lord, is mine and no other man’s, unless the king should come again.” To this Gandalf replied “Unless the king should come again? Well, my lord Steward, it is your task to keep some kingdom against that even, which few now look to see.”

The steward was failing in his duty to properly care for what had been entrusted to him. We learn later that he had been going beyond the care of his office and had become corrupted by the enemy. His abuse of what had been entrusted to him led to his own corruption.

This concept of stewardship is one that has been largely lost to our time and our culture. We understand ownership, borrowing, leasing and mortgaging but have little knowledge of stewardship. Yet it is a crucial concept in the Bible. Scripture tells us that we are to regard all that God gives us as if we are stewards, not owners (See, for example, Luke 12). This is true of wealth; it is true of talents; it is true of opportunities and children and spouses and property and businesses and everything else. Where God has given richly, much is expected in return. At no time does God give us full and final ownership of what He has given us. He gives us but the opportunity to be stewards of his gifts.

Stewardship is more difficult than we may think. How tightly we like to cling to those things that we regard as ours. How tightly we cling to our money and how quick we are to set our hope in the uncertainty of riches (1 Timothy 6:17). How difficult it is to release our children to the care of God, knowing that we are but stewards of them for the short time God grants them to us. How prone we are to hold fast to all of the wrong things. How hard it is for us to understand that we do not occupy the throne. No, we are those who sit in the steward’s unadorned stone chair, far below, in the shadow of the throne.

Denethor held fast to the wrong things. Drunk with corruption and power and unwilling to hand over the kingdom, Denethor, steward of Gondor, eventually took his own life, ending his years of poor stewardship. He would rather die than give up the power that he thought was his. He would rather die than humble himself before the king.

Denethor’s son, Faramir, took his father’s place as the next in a long line of stewards. And no sooner did he do this than Aragorn, the heir to the throne, returned to Gondor. Faramir was faced with all that was so important to his father. Would Faramir be like his father? Or would he be a faithful steward?

“Faramir met Aragorn in the midst of those there assembled, and he knelt, and said: “The last steward of Gondor begs leave to surrender his office.”…Then Faramir stood up and spoke in a clear voice: “Men of Gondor, hear now the Steward of this realm! Behold! One has come to claim the kingship again at last. Here is Aragorn son of Arathorn…Shall he be king and enter into the city and dwell there?” And all the host and all the people cried yea with one voice.”

Moments later, when the new king has been crowned, it is Faramir who leads the cries of “Behold the king!”

Faramir was everything his father was not. He was a good and faithful steward who looked forward to the return of his king and who was willing and ready to hand what had been entrusted to him to its rightful owner. Faramir proved his character.

It is said that Queen Victoria, who reigned over England for over 63 years said, “I wish Jesus would come back in my lifetime. I would lay my crown at His feet.” Would you do the same? Will you lead the chorus of “Behold the King!”?

From Boundless.org.

The Crisis of Manliness

The Crisis of Manliness

by Waller R. Newell

Fatherhood and manliness have always been closely connected, not only because fathering a child is a palpable proof of manhood, but also because fathers are supposed to provide their sons with a model of what to become. And yet, as a culture, we have never been more conflicted about what we mean by manhood.

In the Gen-X novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, a group of men in their 20s, stuck in jobs as office temps and couriers, relieve their boredom by meeting in the basement of a bar after hours and beating one another senseless. Sometimes they show up for work with black eyes and stitches as a warrior's badge of honor.

Aside from their jobs — white-collar, but holding out no clear career prospects — what these young men have in common is that they are under-fathered, the product of divorce and of fathers who had no time for them. "I'm a 30 year old boy," says the novel's protagonist. "I knew my dad for about six years, but I don't remember anything.... What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women."

In the absence of a clear idea from their distant, distracted fathers of what it means to be a man, these frustrated youths react against their antiseptic jobs by reverting to the crudest "macho" violence. The club's founder, Tyler, progresses from consenting violence among buddies to murder, a slacker Raskolnikov. The novel is chillingly insightful about the unmapped psyche of today's young males.

Given these signals from the culture, confirmed every day by real acts of mayhem, some hold that we should try to get rid of manliness altogether and make more rigorous efforts to create a genderless personality free of male violence. The horrific shooting in the Arkansas schoolyard, with little-boy killers waiting in their army fatigues to ambush their classmates and teachers, might suggest that they are right. Add to this the fact that the majority of violent crimes are committed by young men between the ages of 15 and 25, and there seems good reason for discouraging male children from embracing any notion of manly pride.

But it is not so simple. The last 40 years have witnessed a prolonged effort at social engineering throughout our public and educational institutions. Its purpose is to eradicate any psychological and emotional differences between men and women, and the grounds that any concept of manliness inevitably leads to arrogance and violence towards women and to rigid hierarchies that exclude the marginalized and powerless.

This experiment was meant to reduce violence and tensions between the sexes. And yet, during this same period, "macho" violence and stress between men and women may well have increased. Recent crime statistics suggest as much in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom — the countries where the feminist social experiment stigmatizing manliness has had the greatest latitude to prove itself.

As the book by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead confirmed, absent fathers are one of the strongest predictors of violence among young men in the United States, at least as important as poverty, lack of education, or minority status. The ease with which men of my baby-boomer generation have abdicated our roles as fathers is undoubtedly connected with feminism and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Boomers were told that we shouldn't be hung up about providing masculine role models for children and should do whatever made us happiest, including escape an unsatisfying marriage. After all, to hold things together for the sake of the children would restrict both men and women to old-fashioned "patriarchal" responsibilities.

The results of this hard, bright credo of selfishness are today's under-fathered young men, many of them from broken homes, prone to identify their maleness with aggression because they have no better model to go by.

This generation's experience is summed up in a brilliant, pathetic scene from Atom Egoyan's film Family Viewing. The central character, a teenage boy, drifts in and out of his divorced father's house. The father is totally preoccupied with his relationship with a younger woman. The boy's only solid human contact is with his dying grandmother, shunted to a nursing home lest she spoil the father's swinging lifestyle.

One day the boy digs out some family videos. At first, he sees a backyard barbecue with happy children and his parents when they were still together. Suddenly, the film jumps to the father and his new girlfriend having sex. The father simply taped over the family movies, literally erasing his son's connection with the only secure part of his childhood.

It seems plain enough that we are missing the boat about manliness; for there are forms of pride and honor that would be good to impart to young males. Indeed, manly honor, and shame at failing to live up to it, are the surest means of promoting respect for women.

Equally, manly anger and combativeness can provide energy for a just cause. Horrified as we are by the cult of warrior violence in the Balkans or Rwanda or Darfur, we may have gone too far toward the opposite extreme in the Western democracies. As Michael Kelly recently observed, "There are fewer and fewer people, and they are older and older people, who accept what every 12-year-old in Bihac knows: that there are some things worth dying and killing for."

Abolitionism in the ante-bellum United States, the Allies' defeat of Nazi Germany, and the civil-rights movement of the '60s would never have succeeded without the legitimate expression of anger against injustice. The point is not to eradicate honor and pride from the male character, but to re-channel those energies from the nihilistic violence of Fight Club or the Arkansas schoolyard to some constructive moral purpose.

To do this, we must recover a sense of what it means to be manly — honorable, brave, self-restrained, zealous in behalf of a good cause, with feelings of delicacy and respect toward loved ones. For if young men are cut off from this positive tradition of manly pride, their manliness will reemerge in crude and retrograde forms.

Some 40 years ago, the Rolling Stones recorded a misogynist rant called "Under My Thumb." Today, it is one of the songs that fans most frequently request of these aging shamans of adolescent attitudinizing. In three decades, tension between men and women not only has not disappeared but may actually have intensified, and we must wonder whether the experiment in social engineering itself is one reason why.

For hostility towards women is an aberration of male behavior. If, as the prevailing orthodoxy contends, the male gender were intrinsically aggressive, hegemonic and intolerant, then by definition male behavior could never improve. The message young males receive from feminist reasoning is not, You should be ashamed of liking "Under My Thumb," but, That's the way your gender thinks about women.

So the first step toward a sensible debate about manly pride is to rescue the positive tradition of manliness from three decades of stereotyping that conflates masculinity with violence, hegemony, and aggression. We have to recognize that men and women are moral equals, that decent and worthy men have always known this, and that, while men and women share the most important human virtues, vices and aptitudes, they also have psychological traits that incline them toward some different activities.

According to the regnant orthodoxy, men and women should have exactly the same kinds of capacities and ambitions. They should be equally interested in becoming tycoons, winning battles, driving tractors and nurturing children.

But this is not reality. In general, men don't want to work in day-care centers or teach kindergarten, and women don't want to be truck drivers or join the military.

Moreover, women are far more likely than men to leave successful jobs to devote time to families, and women under 30 are more eager for lasting marriages and numerous children than women of their parents' generation (doubtless yearning for what their parents denied them).

We should recognize at last that, as long as women are guaranteed an equal opportunity to pursue whatever occupation they want, it does not matter that men and women on the whole still choose different vocations. Remaining injustices should be addressed by procedural liberalism, which has always brought the most solid progress. We should stop trying to reengineer the human soul to prevent boys from being boyish, while encouraging all forms of self-expression in girls.

All that 40 years of behavioral conditioning has done is drive maleness underground and distort it by severing it from traditional sources of masculine restraint and civility. The gurus of sensitivity have tried to convince men to become open, fluid, non-hegemonic and genderless beings who are unafraid to cry. But little boys still want to play war and shoot up the living room with plastic howitzers, and we can't give them all Ritalin. Psychologists have begun to express concern about our educational institutions' readiness to pathologize what once would have been regarded as boyish high spirits — rough-housing, "hating" girls, locker-room language — and to treat ordinary immaturity with powerful drugs.

Again, the point is to channel these energies into the development of character. Boys and young men still want to be heroes, and the way to educate them to treat girls and women with respect is to appeal to their heroism, not to try to blot it out.

Look at those kids performing daring flips on their skateboards, or sailing on their Rollerblades into the heaviest downtown traffic like warriors contemptuous of danger. They are almost always males. Look at that squeegee kid with his shaved head and horsehair plume, decked out like some road-warrior Achilles. Walk into one of those high-voltage computer emporiums, selling our century's most potent icon for the extension of human mastery over the cosmos. Who are the salesmen? Almost always cocky young men, celebrities-in-waiting in dark suits and moussed hair, hooked on the sheer power of it all.

Channel surf on your television late at night and sample the rock videos. Nearly all the bands in those rock videos are male, snarling or plaintive over the world's confusions and their erotic frustrations, oozing belligerence alternating with Byronic alienation and a puppyish longing for attention. Their names (e.g., Goo Goo Dolls) and attitudes (e.g., the lead singer of radiohead wheeled around a supermarket in a giant shopping cart curled up like an overgrown 5-year-old) combine an infantile longing to return to childhood with in-your-face suspicion and distrust.

And what else would one expect, since so many of the families into which they were born ended in divorce? By denying and repressing their natural inclination to manliness, we run the risk of abandoning them to such infantile posturing. When they pierce their bodies, it is because they want to experience moral and erotic constraint. Having failed to find an authority they can respect, someone to guide them from boyish impetuosity to a mature and manly vigor of judgment, they confuse authority with oppression.

Still, cast adrift in a world without any limitations, they want there to be a price to pay for their hedonism. Since no one will lead them back to the great ethical and religious traditions that set these limits on the highest intellectual and spiritual level, they pierce their bodies in a crude simulacrum of traditional restraint. And, in that, they reveal not only the wondrous capacity of spirited young people to see through the aridity of the governing orthodoxies but also the potential for an ennobling transformation.

It is precisely in a traditional understanding of manly pride and honor that we will find the only sure basis for respect between men and women. The best way of convincing young men to treat women with respect is to educate them in the traditional virtues, which make it a disgrace to treat anyone basely, dishonestly or exploitatively.

Moreover, the surest way of raising young men to treat young women as friends rather than as objects for sexual exploitation is to appeal to their natural longing to be honored and esteemed by the young women to whom they are attracted. When our erotic attraction to another is properly directed, it leads us to cultivate the virtues of moderation, honest, gratitude and compassion that make us worthy of love in the eyes of the beloved.

We try to be virtuous because we want to be worthy of being loved.

One thing is sure: Given our current confusion over the meaning of manliness, we have nothing to lose by re-opening the issue. If academic feminism is correct that violence toward women stems from traditional patriarchal attitudes, our grandparents' lives must have been a hell of aggression and fear. Yet, if anything impresses us about our forebears, judging from their lives, letters and diaries, it is the refinement of their affections for one another — and of men's esteem for women in particular. Perhaps we cannot return to that world. But boys and young men today need re-introducing to this tradition of manly civility.

Despite recent caricatures of the Western tradition as one long justification for the oppression of women, our greatest poets and thinkers from Homer to Rousseau have explored the delicate interplay of love and self-perfection.

In Homer's Odyssey, Telemachus, son of the great war hero Odysseus, embarks on a journey to find his missing father and thereby save his mother from the oppressive noblemen who want her to give up her husband for dead and marry one of them. As he searches for his father in an adventure parallel to Odysseus' own search for a way home to his long-lost wife and child, Telemachus is educated by his adventures and grows from a boy into a man, guided by the wise goddess Athena, who is also his father's best friend among the gods. Telemachus' search for his missing father, guided by the goddess, in effect provides him with the upbringing that Odysseus was not able to give him, although he still inspires it from afar because the boy learns during his travels of his father's exploits and wants to prove himself the hero's worthy son.

When I depict Telemachus as a boy from a broken home, forced at a too-early age to be his mother's protector from oppressive men, who has to bring himself up in a way that he hopes his absent father would be proud of, the young men in my undergraduate classes tend to become very quiet and reflective.

They are Telemachus.

From Boundless.org

The Quiet Time Performance

by Tim Challies

Like all Christians, I love my quiet time. I am always thrilled at the prospect of sitting down for a few quiet moments before a busy day to spend some time alone with God—a few moments one-on-one with my Creator. I love to open the Bible and to carefully and systematically read the Word of God, allowing it to penetrate my heart. I love to sit and think deeply and meditatively about the Scriptures and to seek ways that I can apply God’s word to my heart. I love to pray to God, pouring out my heart in confession, praise, thanksgiving and petition. It is always the best and greatest part of my day. I couldn’t live without my quiet time.

But that’s not reality, is it?

I sometimes love my quiet time. I am sometimes thrilled at the prospect of sitting down to spend some time with God; too often, though, I dread it. I’d rather catch up on the news or spend some time writing or reading a good book or find out how badly the Blue Jays beat the A’s the day before. My quiet time is often invaded by little children, demanding my time and attention. Too often I hate to make my way through a difficult book of the Bible and dread spending another day reading through the prophecies of Isaiah. Thinking requires more time and effort than I am willing to give and it usually seems that a quick, cursory prayer is enough to make me feel that I’ve done my duty and asked God to bless my day and to forgive me for being a jerk with my kids the night before. I skim Scripture, breathe a prayer, and settle down to my breakfast.

That’s a little closer to reality, right?

In The Discipline of Grace, Jerry Bridges provides two scenarios and then a question. In the first, he describes a good day. “You get up promptly when your alarm goes off and have a refreshing and profitable quiet time as you read your Bible and pray. Your plans for the day generally fall into place, and you somehow sense that presence of God with you. To top it off, you unexpectedly have an opportunity to share the gospel with someone who is truly searching. As you talk with the person, you silently pray for the Holy Spirit to help you and to also work in your friend’s heart.” We’ve all had days like that. But we’ve also all had days like this: “You don’t arise at the first ring of your alarm. Instead, you shut it off and go back to sleep. When you awaken, it’s too late to have a quiet time. You hurriedly gulp down some breakfast and rush off to the day’s activities. You feel guilty about oversleeping and missing your quiet time, and things just generally go wrong all day. You become more and more irritable as the day wears on, and you certainly don’t sense God’s presence in your life. That evening, however, you unexpectedly have an opportunity to share the gospel with someone who is really interested in receiving Christ as Savior.” Bridges then asks if you would enter into those two witnessing opportunities with a different degree of confidence. Think about it for a moment. If you’re like most Christians, I suspect you would feel less confident about witnessing on a bad day then on a good day. You would feel less confidence that God would speak in and through you and that you would be able to share your faith forcefully and with conviction.

Why is it that we tend to think this way? According to Bridges, we’ve come to believe that God’s blessing on our lives is somehow conditional upon our spiritual performance. In other words, if we’ve performed well and done our quiet time as we ought to have done, we have put ourselves in a place where God can bless us. We may not consciously articulate this, but we prove that we believe it when we have a bad day and are certain that on this day we are absolutely unworthy of God’s blessings. This attitude “reveals an all-too-common misconception of the Christian life: the thinking that, although we are saved by grace, we earn or forfeit God’s blessings in our daily lives by our performance.”

Perhaps you, like me, have too often turned quiet time into a performance. If you perform well for God, you enter your day filled with confidence that God will bless you, and that He will have to bless you. You feel that your performance has earned you the right to have a day filled with His presence, filled with blessings, and filled with confidence. And, of course, when you turn in a poor performance, you feel that God is in heaven booing you and heaving proverbial rotten vegetables in the form of removing His presence and, in the words of a friend, “dishing out bummers.”

Quiet time becomes tyrannical when you understand it as a performance. Bridges provides a pearl of wisdom. “Your worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God’s grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God’s grace.” Whether you are having a good day or a bad day, the basis of your relationship with is not your performance, for even your best efforts are but filthy rags. Instead, your relationship is based on grace. Grace does not just save you and then leave you alone. No, grace saves you and then sustains you and equips you and motivates you. You are saved by grace and you then live by grace. Whether in the midst of a good day or bad, God does not base His relationship with you on performance, but on whether or not you are trusting in His Son.

Greg Johnson of St. Louis Center for Christian Study wrote an interesting tract entitled “Freedom from Quiet Time Guilt.” Johnson wrote about something I had only recently realized myself. “That half hour every morning of Scriptural study and prayer is not actually commanded in the Bible.” Imagine that. He goes on to say, “As a theologian, I can remind us that to bind the conscience where Scripture leaves freedom is a very, very serious crime. It’s legalism rearing its ugly little head again. We’ve become legalistic about a legalistic command. This is serious.” We have somehow allowed our quiet time, in its length, depth or consistency, to become the measure of our relationship with God. But “your relationship with God—or, as I prefer to say, God’s relationship with you—is your whole life: your job, your family, your sleep, your play, your relationships, your driving, your everything. The real irony here is that we’ve become accustomed to pigeonholing our entire relationship with God into a brief devotional exercise that is not even commanded in the Bible.” So what, then, does Scripture command? It commands that the Word of God be constantly upon your heart. You are to pray, to read the Scripture and to meditate upon it, but you are to do so from a joyful desire, and not mere performance-based duty. You are to do so throughout your whole life, and not merely for a few minutes each morning. Like Johnson, you will come to realize that the “goal isn’t that we pray and read the Bible less, but that we do so more—and with a free and needy heart.”

So do not allow quiet time to become performance. View it as a chance to grow in grace. Begin with an expression of your dependency upon God’s grace, and end with an affirmation of His grace. Acknowledge that you have no right to approach God directly, but can approach Him only through the work of His Son. Focus on the gospel as the message of grace that both saves and sustains. And allow quiet time to become a gift of worship you present to God, and a gift of grace you receive from Him.

From Challies.com

Giving Up on Atheism

From Boundless Webzine:

Giving Up on Atheism

by Robert Velarde

While riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle on the way to the zoo, C.S. Lewis became a Christian. He later described the experience as not being particularly emotional: "It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake."¹

The great Christian thinker Augustine heard a child singing, "Pick it up and read." After picking up Paul's letter to the Romans and reading a passage, Augustine committed his life to Christ.

On the way to Damascus, Saul saw a bright light, heard the voice of Jesus and ultimately became a dedicated follower of Christ. Saul later became known as the Apostle Paul.

Conversion stories fascinate me. C.S. Lewis came to faith via a journey that led him through, among other beliefs, atheism, pantheism and theism.² Augustine grew up in a home with an alcoholic father and a devoted Christian mother. Like many young adults, Augustine rebelled. He eventually left home and joined a cult. Paul was a Jew and, therefore, a theist, but was anti-Christian, spearheading early persecution of the Christian church and its members. His conversion was so powerful and dramatic that this one man literally changed the spiritual face of every place he visited.

The Road to Atheism

My own journey to Christianity had a lot of twists and turns. Having been raised in a nominally theistic home, I had a basic but undeveloped sense of God. Since my family never regularly attended church, I had only some vague idea of "God." Eventually this turned into deism — the belief that God exists, but is distant from creation and has nothing to do with day to day events, much less an interest in people as a whole or individuals in particular. By its very nature, deism rejects the possibility of miracles, as well as the main theme of Christianity — the Incarnation.

During my second year of high school I seriously began questioning the reality of God. Any theistic leanings I had diminished and eventually faded — smothered, really, by my exposure to atheistic literature of an existentialist bent such as the writings of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. I also reveled in the nihilistic follies and despair of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Douglas Adams.

The end result was agnosticism on my part — that is, I claimed that the existence of God could neither be proven nor disproven. "We just don't know," was my attitude toward anything religious.

By the time I reached college, I considered myself a skeptic. On a good day I would see myself as an agnostic, while on a bad one I'd view myself as an atheist. In either case, I lived my life as though God did not exist. In that sense, I was what I'd call a functional atheist.

In retrospect I realize that my rejection of Christianity stemmed from what Josh McDowell considers the three most common excuses for rejecting Christ: pride, moral problems and ignorance. I did not want to yield to anything, preferring myself as the ultimate authority in my life. Morally, I didn't want any cosmic interferer telling me what was right and wrong. And, frankly, I was ignorant about Christianity on many fronts, especially when it came to the truth of its teachings and the evidence behind it.

The Arguments

Although many of my arguments against Christianity were of the "straw man" variety,³ several were legitimate arguments that have existed for ages past and will continue to exist. I will limit my comments to two of the most significant issues I had: First, I did not believe in the existence of God; second, I believed the problem of evil and suffering was one that theism could not overcome.

Positive arguments for the existence of God that influenced my conversion included the argument from the existence of the universe (cosmological), the argument from being (ontological), the argument from design (teleological), and the argument from morality (axiological). It wasn't until a while after my conversion that I learned there are not only many variations of each of these arguments, but that there are also a great number of additional arguments for the existence of God.⁴

In short, the cosmological argument claims that everything that has a beginning has a cause. Since the universe had a beginning, it must have had a cause. The best explanation of this cause is a powerful and personal being (i.e., God). The much-maligned ontological argument, first explored by Anselm, is actually quite clever. Unfortunately, I don't have the space to get into its nuances here. It essentially argues for God on the basis of the idea of God.

The argument from design influenced me more than the previous two arguments. This argument claims that anything exhibiting qualities of intelligent design must have been designed. Since the universe exhibits signs of intelligent design, there must be an Intelligent Designer.

Finally, the moral argument influenced me significantly. One of my main objections against Christianity was that I could not reconcile the idea of a loving, all-powerful God with the reality of evil and suffering.

It was while I was reading Mere Christianity that I encountered a real difficulty in my argument. How had I gotten this idea of evil? In order to claim something is evil, one must have a standard of good. As C.S. Lewis put it, "A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line."⁵

The problem of evil, then, requires an acknowledgment that good and evil exist. Atheists are left with what some philosophers call the problem of good. How can an atheist call anything good or evil on the basis of a worldview that excludes absolute standards?

Ultimately, I acknowledged that atheism was not a viable worldview. Although I turned away from atheism, I had yet to embrace theism, much less Christianity.⁶

The People

In addition to rational arguments and evidence, encounters with people also played an important role in my conversion. The New Testament writers introduced me to the person of Jesus Christ. I had made fun of Christianity and Christians — taunting them with insults generally directed at their presumably inferior intellects — but when I began to read the Gospels and encountered these powerful records of the life of Jesus, I found more than I bargained for. When I began reading Mere Christianity, as I mentioned earlier, my precarious worldview became even more endangered.

I first became acquainted with C.S. Lewis when a Christian friend of mine gave me a copy of Mere Christianity. As I read it, I encountered a paradox. Here was an obviously intelligent, witty and articulate person who was also a Christian. How could this be?

Of course, it wasn't only dead writers who influenced me. There were living, breathing Christians who, in various ways, nudged me closer to truth. Their patience and prayers most certainly played a part in my conversion to Christianity.

The Truth

In the end, every worldview I had either embraced or studied could not stand the test of coherency. They all broke down in significant areas — all, that is, except Christianity. I was cornered. I could either defy the reality of Christianity and remain, inexplicably, an agnostic or atheist, or I could acknowledge the truth of Christianity. I chose, grudgingly at first, the latter option.

It's been 17 years since my conversion to Christianity and the more I learn about worldviews, the more I am convinced that Christ is indeed "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6, NIV).

While Christian conversion varies from person to person — whether it occurs in the sidecar of a motorcycle or as the result of a powerful vision on the road to Damascus — one thing is certain: People do experience significant worldview shifts in the direction of Christianity.

As a Christian apologist and philosopher, I believe conversion to Christianity is grounded in truth — in the validity of an intellectually robust worldview that offers the best explanation of reality. And that, combined with a variety of factors, is why I gave up on atheism.

* * *

NOTES

1. Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, 1956), p. 237.
2. Atheism denies the existence of God, while pantheism sees everything as divine. Theists believe in a personal, transcendent God.
3. In logic, a straw man fallacy occurs when one argues against a position that does not truly represent the position one is arguing against. Instead, the position set forth is often caricatured and presented as easier to refute than it really is.
4. Two helpful resources providing overviews of arguments for the existence of God include Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli (InterVarsity) and 20 Compelling Evidences That God Exists by Kenneth Boa and Robert Bowman, Jr. (River Oak). For an excellent critique of atheism see I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek (Crossway).
5. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p. 45.
6. Still, I had a sense of longing for something more. After more spiritual and intellectual wanderings, I ended up embracing pantheism, resulting in my affinities for what was then known as the New Age movement. Here was something that promised spiritual fulfillment without the demands of the God of theism. But eventually I found pantheism as unlivable as atheism. Among other things, it too had the problem of the good, as well as evil.

Crisis Prep 101

Crisis Prep 101

by Carolyn McCulley

It's not easy to follow our national news these days. There's a free-floating sense of dread in these reports: Will the various bailouts work? How can we afford them? Will the economy recover — or collapse entirely? How many jobs will be lost before we hit bottom? Whose will be among them?

Peppered among the higher-profile financial stories are reports of increased opposition to Christian activity or beliefs. A pastor is arrested for praying outside an abortion clinic. A military chaplain is not allowed to pray in the name of Jesus. A little girl is reprimanded for talking about her pro-life beliefs in class. A church service is interrupted by obscene protesters.

At first glance, these kinds of reports may not seem to be related. But both lead to some kind of loss — loss of fortune or loss of freedom. Faced with the possibility of loss in either category, believing Christians can panic ... or we can prepare.

Preparing for difficulties might seem odd, but it is a biblical concept (Luke 21:34-36). Throughout history and even in many nations today, Christians face loss and persecution for their beliefs. American Christianity's recent history of prosperity and comfort may be the exception, not the rule. In fact, the apostle Paul warned Timothy that "everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted" (2 Tim. 3:12). As theologian Iain Duguid notes:

Believers around the world know this from experience, yet here in the prosperous and supposedly tolerant West we have come to expect our lives as Christians to run smoothly and successfully, at least if we are faithfully following the Lord. We think that the slogan "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life" means that our lives should be protected by God from any form of unpleasantness. This is a false belief, however. Persecution comes to us in a variety of forms and from a variety of directions, yet it is something that we should expect constantly to mark out our lives in a fallen world. It may come in the form of mockery and isolation at school, or conflict or trouble at work, or simply being regarded as peculiar and strange people, but one way or another we should expect to suffer abuse for the sake of Christ.¹

I've heard many wise pastors say that the time to prepare for a crisis is before it happens. When faced with a sobering diagnosis, the loss of a job, the rejection of an unbelieving friend, the criticism of a non-Christian culture — these are not the times you want to dig deep into your faith only to discover shallow roots.

Crisis management is not the time to do an in-depth study on God's character, lovingkindness, and sovereignty over our lives. You have to have that kind of knowledge ready on tap for the day of crisis.

The Roots of Endurance

Many believers who have gone before us have done this kind of preparation by studying God's Word in depth before trouble comes. They rooted themselves and their families in the biblical essentials in order to stand fast and endure to the end. They steeped themselves in God's perspective and promises so that no one would say of them, "Oh, ye of little faith."

I particularly like how Reformation activist Martin Luther prepared his wife for widowhood. Not only did he make financial arrangements for her, he also tended to her soul. A friend of Luther's made this comment after Luther's death:

I often wondered why Doctor Martin Luther had his wife, Kate, memorize the 31st Psalm when she was still young, alert, and carefree and did not yet know how pleasing and comforting this Psalm could be. But her husband did not encourage her to do this without a reason. He knew that after his death she would be a sorrowful and pitiable woman, very much in need of the comfort that the 31st Psalm had to offer.²

One biographer of Luther's wife added:

Over the years the Luthers had received expressions of kindness, love, and sympathy from friends and neighbors. Luther also knew the ingratitude of people, the forgetfulness of rulers, the opportunism of bureaucrats, the jealousy of colleagues and wives, and the spitefulness of enemies, who from the moment of [her] arrival at Wittenberg had cruelly slandered her and gossiped about her. Luther also anticipated that after his death such thankless treatment of Kate would only increase. That is why he encouraged her with these powerful words in Psalm 31: "In Thee, O LORD, do I seek refuge; let me never be put to shame; in Thy righteousness deliver me! ... Yea, Thou art my rock and my fortress" (31:1, 3).³

The same gospel-centered perspective enabled William Wilberforce to persevere faithfully until his last days. Popular accounts paint Wilberforce as a man driven by the immorality of slavery, but that's an incomplete picture. Though the abolition of slavery and the slave trade may have been Wilberforce's crowning achievement, he was a man who championed many causes that today we would collect under the banner of "social justice."

One biographer noted that at one point he was involved in 69 different initiatives, including child labor conditions, prison reform, the prevention of cruelty to animals, and even the tyrannies of the caste system in India.

Yet, these were not general do-good efforts. According to John Piper's account of his life, Wilberforce's work was so effective because it was rooted in a gospel-centered perspective. By studying the doctrine of justification, Wilberforce had a tool, if you will, to withstand criticism and even self-doubt in the numerous years he dedicated to the cause of abolition.

It is a stunning thing that a politician and a man with no formal theological education should not only know the workings of God in justification and sanctification, but consider them so utterly essential for Christian living and public virtue. Many public people say that changing society requires changing people, but few show the depth of understanding Wilberforce did concerning how that comes about. For him, the right grasp of the central doctrine of justification and its relation to sanctification — an emerging Christlikeness in private and public — were essential to his own endurance and for the reformation of the morals of England.

This was why he wrote A Practical View of Christianity. The "bulk" of Christians in his day were "nominal," he observed, and what was the root difference between the nominal and the real? It was this: The nominal pursued morality (holiness, sanctification) without first relying utterly on the free gift of justification and reconciliation by faith alone based on Christ's blood and righteousness.⁴

After studying the life of Wilberforce, Piper analyzed our generation:

Is it not remarkable that one of the greatest politicians of Britain and one of the most persevering public warriors for social justice should elevate doctrine so highly? Perhaps this is why the impact of the church today is as weak as it is. Those who are most passionate about being practical for the public good are often the least doctrinally interested or informed. Wilberforce would say: You can't endure in bearing fruit if you sever the root.⁵

Security's Source

If we Americans have come to assume that prosperity and ease are our birthrights, the dawning years of the 21st century should sober us. From 9/11 to this deepening global recession, our assumptions of security have been shaken.

The question before us now is from where do we draw this security? If it is in our circumstances, we will crumble in the face of hardship — indulging self-pity and marshaling our coping strategies in such an all-consuming way that we will not have time or energy left to serve others or share the gospel. Let us not be those who hoard in national crises or personal emergencies. Let us not be those who forget to rejoice in our salvation if and when the waves of persecution reach our shores or bubble up from within.

I have to do the same crisis preparation. I've been tested already in a variety of ways and have found myself lacking. I like my material comfort, I enjoy respect for my faith and beliefs, and I suspect I am not ready for any true opposition. But I know that Luther and Wilberforce were in the same position at one time in their lives, too. I don't take comfort in their personal journeys, but in the fact we all love the same faithful Savior. My prayer is that I will not grow slack in my knowledge and worship of His character and promises, no matter what the future holds.

So for now, crisis preparation 101 means practicing generosity to those in need even when my own budget is tight, studying the character and promises of God, and storing up for myself riches in heaven rather than riches on earth. It means reminding myself that this earth is not my home and that I'm only a pilgrim passing through. But I'm a pilgrim following the One who assures a victorious conclusion.

Above all, crisis prep means being convinced of the source of true peace — something that transcends circumstances. Jesus assured us we have peace in Him: "These things I have spoken to you so that in Me you may have peace. In this world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world" (John 16:33). This precious truth is one to study over and over again as I prepare for whatever the Lord has ordained for my future.

NOTES

1. Duguid, Iain, Daniel: Reformed Expository Commentary (Philipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008), p. 93.
2. Markwald, Rudolf K. and Markwald, Marilynn Morris, Katharina Von Bora: A Reformation Life (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2002), p. 177.
3. Ibid., pp. 177-178.
4. Piper, John, The Roots of Endurance, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002), p. 158.
5. Ibid., pp. 159-160.

From Boundless Webzine

The Posture of Prayer

From Tim Challies' blog:

The Posture of Prayer

In the past week or two I have been thinking a lot about my times of personal devotion, trying to see where I have allowed them to become just the “same old”—where I may have fallen into bad habits or lazy customs. I have been thinking about what I can do to make these times that will serve to help me grow in godliness while at the same ensuring that they are opportunities to bring worship to God. This is something I find that I need to do on a regular basis. My reflections on prayer coincided with reading 1 Timothy in my times of personal worship. In 1 Timothy we read Paul’s command that “in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling.” This set me to thinking about the posture of prayer. The chapter has quite a few things to say about the content of prayer (e.g. “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people…”) but it also includes these words about posture, the actions of a person’s body in prayer. I began to think about how I pray; not just the words, but also the posture.

Of course we need to affirm that God is far more concerned with the content of our prayers than the posture of our prayers. It is far more important to examine the heart than to examine the feet or the hands. At the same time, there is no doubt that our bodies can be an expression of our hearts (as you see when you shake your fist at the car that cut you off or when you clap your hands at the end of an inspired performance). And so it is useful, I think, to examine what the Bible says about our bodies during prayer.

I turned to Philip Ryken’s excellent commentary on 1 Timothy and found that he highlights several of the ways the Bible tells us to pray. I will summarize them just briefly, hoping that you find it useful, as I have.

Bowing
The Bible, and the Psalms especially, describe bowing during prayer. This is a posture we often use today and one we teach our children when we tell them to bow their heads (out of respect) and to fold their hands (probably out of respect and so they do not fidget!). Psalm 5 says “I will bow down toward your holy temple in the fear of you” while Psalm 95:6 says “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!” Bowing is a sign of respect and honor. Even today we may bow toward a king or dignitary, expressing in that action our respect for that person.

Kneeling
The Bible mentions several people who knelt during prayer, among them Daniel (Daniel 6:10) and Stephen (Acts 7:60). And of course Jesus himself knelt to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane. He “withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed” (Luke 22:41). Kneeling is a sign of humility and a sign of dependence. A person might kneel in the presence of a king or queen and he would do so as a sign of his deference to that person. It is difficult to be proud when kneeling before another. And so kneeling is a very natural posture for the Christian as he prays to the Lord. It seems a very natural position for bringing petitions to God, acknowledging God’s superiority and our utter dependence on him.

Standing
The Bible often mentions people standing to pray in public worship. When Solomon dedicated the temple, he knelt before God to pray while all the people stood (Chronicles 6:3, 13). In the same vein, Jehoshaphat “stood in the assembly of Judah and Jerusalem, in the house of the Lord” (2 Chronicles 20:5). It became customary for Jewish people to stand for prayer while in their synagogues. Such posture has roots in the Christian faith as well. Ryken shows that Justin Martyr, Origen, Jerome and Augustine all wrote of standing for public prayer. Today we stand in the presence of a judge when he enters his court room. Until recently students would stand when their professor entered the room. And, until recent days, many churches encouraged people to stand during prayer. Standing is, of course, a sign of respect. We stand in the presence of those we respect (or at least as a sign of our respect for their position or their authority). And so standing for prayer is a natural position especially for times of corporate prayer as the people stand in God’s presence out of respect for his authority.

Lying Prostrate
Scripture also mentions people praying flat on the ground with their faces pressed to the earth. Moses fell in the presence of the Lord (Numbers 16:22, 20:6) as did Joshua (Joshua 5:14). Job fell to the ground and worshiped when he was in the depths of his despair. And, of course, the angels and elders who pray before God’s heavenly throne fall on their faces. “And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”” (Revelation 7:11). This is a sign of utter respect. A man may fall to the ground before another person when that other person has absolute power of life or death. To do so is to acknowledge one’s absolute unworthiness and to beg the grace of the other person. And so in prayer laying prostrate is a natural position for those who are overwhelmed either by trouble and woe or by a sense of the glory and majesty of God (or both!).

Hands Raised
And Scripture describes those who raise their hands in prayer. This was the way the priests worshiped in the temple (Psalm 134, 141, etc). And from extra-Scriptural sources we know that raising hands in prayer was customary in the early church. Ryken quotes Tertullian who said, “We Christians pray for all emperors, &c., looking up to heaven, with our hands stretched out, because guiltless; with our heads uncovered, because we are not ashamed.” Early Christian artwork often portrays those who prayed doing so with their hands raised. Such a posture signifies praise. Think today of a rock concert where people may raise their hands toward the stage in what looks almost like an act of praise and worship. And, of course, many Christians raise their hands when they sing, using this as a physical manifestation of their praise. Raising hands is appropriate in prayer especially during times of praising God. Ryken says “This posture is especially appropriate for the minister who leads in public prayer. When he stands in God’s presence to offer prayer on behalf of God’s people, he may raise his hands to show that the church’s prayers are offered to God as a sacrifice of praise.”

Nowhere does the Bible command us that we must set our bodies in one position or another during prayer. Yet it does describe a variety of positions that each have their own significance. You may find it useful to practice some of these postures in your times of private prayer, allowing that posture to be a reflection of your heart, whether it is a heart overwhelmed with the cares of life, a heart rejoicing in the majesty of God or a heart quieted in humble obedience to God.

Humbly Rejoicing in the Goodness of Others, by Tim Challies

From http://www.challies.com/archives/articles/quotes/humbly-rejoicing-in-the-goodness-of-others.php:

As I read John Piper’s book Finally Alive I came across a lot of godly wisdom. But there was one quote that, more than the others, jumped out at me. I thought I’d share it with you today…

*****

This is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. (1 John 3:11-14)

Now this specific form of love in verse 12 may seem to you to be totally unneeded. “Don’t be like Cain who murdered his brother.” Am I really concerned that there will be a spate of murders among Christians? No. And I don’t think John feared that either, though it does happen. He doesn’t focus on the murder. He asks in verse 12, “And why did he murder him?” That’s John’s concern. There is something about Cain’s motive that he thinks will be relevant to the way believers love each other.

He answers at the end of verse 12: “Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.” What John is saying here is not merely that love doesn’t kill a brother, but that love doesn’t feel resentful when a brother is superior in some spiritual or moral way. Cain didn’t kill Abel simply because Cain was evil. He killed him because the contrast between Abel’s goodness and Cain’s evil made Cain angry. It made him feel guilty. Abel didn’t have to say anything; Abel’s goodness was a constant reminder to Cain that he was evil. And instead of dealing with his own evil by repentance and change, he got rid of Abel. If you don’t like what you see in the mirror, shoot the mirror.

So what would it be like for any of us to be like Cain? It would mean that anytime some weakness or bad habit in our lives is exposed by contrast to someone else’s goodness, instead of dealing with the weakness or the bad habit, we keep away from those whose lives make us feel defective. We don’t kill them. We avoid them. Or worse, we find ways to criticize them so as to neutralize the part of their lives that was making us feel convicted. We feel like the best way to nullify someone’s good point is to draw attention to their bad point. And so we protect ourselves from whatever good they might be or us.

But John’s point is: Love doesn’t act like that. Love is glad when our brothers and sisters are making progress in good habits or good attitudes or good behavior. Love rejoices in this growth. And if it happens to be faster than our own growth, then love is humble and rejoices with those who rejoice.

So the lesson for us is: Everywhere you see some growth, some virtue, some, spiritual discipline, some good habit, or good attitude, rejoice in it. Give thanks for it. Compliment it. Don’t resent it. Don’t be like Cain. Respond the opposite from Cain. Be inspired by other people’s goodness.

Love is humble. Love delights in other people’s good. Love doesn’t protect its own flaws. Love takes steps to change them. What a beautiful fellowship where everyone is rejoicing in each other’s strengths, not resenting them! This is what the love of God looks like when the new birth gives it life in the people of God.

Like Love, by Tim Challies

From http://www.challies.com/archives/articles/personal-reflections/like-love.php:

I’ve been to my share of conferences in the past few years and quite a few of these have been geared toward pastors. There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed at the beginning of these events. In many cases these conferences are an opportunity for old friends to reconnect. Many times pastors have been attending the same conference year after year and have met new friends there or have reconnected with old friends from their college or seminary days. This is a once-per-year opportunity to spend a little bit of time together and to play catch-up.

I suppose there must have been a time when people carried printed photos in their wallets. Today, though, people carry photos on their cell phones or on their iPods. So often, when these men meet after the passing of yet another year, I see them embracing and then immediately digging out their phones or their iPods to show off the pictures of their children or grandchildren. And it is interesting to hear them talk; to hear them share proudly about the children they’ve already begun to miss even after only one day apart. As you listen to these pastors tell about their children, you notice that they dwell on the things that make them proud. “Brian’s nine. He loves basketball and leads his team in scoring. He’s getting so tall! His head comes up to my chest now and he eats like there’s no tomorrow. And here’s Rebecca. She’s fourteen. You can see she looks just like her mom. She loves cameras and says she wants to be a photographer…” Of course you know as you hear this that the last year has not been free of conflict. You know that mom and dad are probably working hard to maintain boundaries around Rebecca who is already acting out as a rebellious teen and that they are working hard to make Brian respect authority. It may well be that the night before he left, dad had to invoke some discipline and left the house only after making Rebecca promise that she would obey her mother. But when dad gets together with his friends, these things are not at the front of his mind. He loves his children, he is proud of his children, and he wants to tell others about them.

I thought about this a short time ago when I was considering how God feels about us, how he feels about me, how he feels about all of his children. I guess I often go through life thinking that God is generally displeased with me. I see my sin, I see my failings, I see my heart. At the same time I see from Scripture God’s majesty, his holiness, his perfection. And when I put these together I suppose that God must be looking at me with at least some level of disgust. He must regard me as I regard myself so much of the time; as a person who may try to do what’s right, but as a person who is just an abject failure when it comes to holiness. At the end of the day, I do love him, but I also love sin. At the end of it all, I pledge allegiance to him, but prove allegiance to myself seemingly just as often. So what could there be for him to love here?

But I’m starting to think that I’ve had this all wrong. I don’t know that there is a single Bible passage I would point to. But more and more, as I study God’s Word and as I learn about who he is, I see that he is a loving Father who is lavish with his love. Maybe it was my recent studies in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Maybe it was my reading through the prophets, seeing how God hates sin but loves his people. Maybe it was just talking to my mother who came to this realization, I think, long before I did. But somehow I am starting to see that God hates my sin but that he loves me. God despises the evil that lurks within me, but is extravagant in his grace. He actually, really loves me.

And maybe in that way God isn’t so different from the pastors I see at conferences. He loves us. He loves me. And more than that, he’s proud of me. He isn’t petty, filling his mind with all those things I’ve done wrong, but rather he is gracious, seeing all those evidences of his grace in my life. And, you know, I think this is one of the reasons that The Shack has done so well and has sold so many copies. It presents a God who not only loves people, but who also likes them and who is proud of them. Maybe we can be so careful in (rightly) understanding God’s hatred for sin and his desire for holiness that we forget about his great love for us despite the sin that still pollutes us. Maybe we forget that God truly does regard as children—children he not only loves but children he also genuinely likes. And there’s a difference between the two, isn’t there?

A Prayer for Year's End

From The Valley of Vision Devotional:

O Love beyond Compare,
Thou art good when thou givest,
when thou takest away,
when the sun shines upon me,
when night gathers over me.
Thou hast loved me before the foundation of the world,
and in love didst redeem my soul;
Thou dost love me still,
in spite of my hard heart, ingratitude, distrust.
Thy goodness has been with me another year,
leading me through a twisting wilderness,
in retreat helping me to advance,
when beaten back making sure headway.
Thy goodness will be with me in the year ahead;
I hoist sail and draw up anchor,
With thee as the blessed pilot of my future as of my past.
I bless thee that thou hast veiled my eyes to the waters ahead.
If thou hast appointed storms of tribulation,
thou wilt be with me in them;
If I have to pass through tempests of persecution and temptation,
I shall not drown;
If I am to die,
I shall see thy face the sooner;
If a painful end is to be my lot,
grant me grace that my faith fail not;
If I am to be cast aside from the service I love,
I can make no stipulation;
Only glorify thyself in me whether in comfort or trial,
as a chosen vessel meet always for thy use.

Yawning With Purpose

Ever wondered why we yawn, and why it seems so contagious? Read on!

From ICR.org:

Yawning With a Purpose

by Brian Thomas, M.S.*

All vertebrates yawn, but why they do it has long been a mystery. Recent research suggests that yawning may be a cooling mechanism for the brain.

In their study set for publication in the journal Animal Behaviour, Binghamton University biologists tested the hypothesis that “as ambient temperature increases and approaches (but does not exceed) body temperature, yawning should increase as a consequence.”¹ In other words, as the surrounding temperature rises closer to the body’s warmer temperature, yawning should result. The parakeets they tested yawned as predicted, thus confirming the researchers’ temperature-based hypothesis.

Oral and nasal passages are very close to the brain, as those who have experienced “brain freeze” when swallowing ice cream too quickly can attest, and it makes sense that the increased air movement through those passages would aid in cooling. Vertebrate brains, which contain billions of delicate, heat-generating biochemical reactions occurring every minute, operate best within a certain cool temperature range. Further, “the new findings also explain why tired individuals often yawn, since both exhaustion and sleep deprivation have been shown to increase deep brain temperatures.”²

Thus, the pre-programmed instinct to yawn may serve the purpose of cooling, but it only does so because of the location of specifically-shaped airways near the deep brain.³ Remarkably, both the physical equipment and the metaphysical instinct (information or programming) to use it are found fully integrated “in all classes of vertebrates.”¹ How did this come to be?

Lead author Andrew Gallup asserts that yawning “evolved to allow maximum cooling of the brain,”¹ though he offers no evidence to support the concept that a long series of adaptations in response to differing environments led to the development of yawning—nor does he explain how this feature was retained by all seven vertebrate classes throughout their hypothetically long history of development from a common ancestor. Much less faith is required to believe that a Creator specifically integrated this system to maintain brain temperature, and that “in his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”⁴

References

1. Gallup, A. , M. L. Miller and A. B. Clark. 2009. Yawning and thermoregulation in budgerigars, Melopsittacus undulatus. Animal Behaviour. 77 (1): 109-113.
2. Viegas, J. The Yawn Explained: It Cools Your Brain. Discovery Channel News. Posted on discovery.com December 15, 2008.
3. Thomas, B. 2008. The Amazing Design of the Human Nose. Acts & Facts. 37 (8): 14.
4. Job 12:10.

Musical Train-Wrecks for the Glory of God

If you have ever been to church, you've probably seen or been involved with the musical worship portion at some point. This clip, from Bob Kauflin's Sovereign Grace Ministries church in Gaithersburg, Maryland shows what happens when worship goes wrong. Hilariously wrong.

Beloved Unlovely, by Brenna Kate Simonds

From http://www.boundless.org:

It was the summer of 2000, if I remember correctly. Even though I'd only been serving God for a year and a half, I was zealous for God's Word and heartbroken for those who didn't know Him.

I had shared my desire to take my music to the streets with a friend, and as we prayed, she asked, "What's stopping you?" So I went. It was my first day of playing guitar out in the park. It was a very busy weekend in Boston, as there was a big tourist attraction in town, and there were literally thousands of people walking through the park.

I was ready to take on the world for Christ. Or so I thought.

I was unsure of whether or not God had really led me to sing in the park that day, and I wanted His confirmation. As I began to strum my guitar, I closed my eyes to sing some lines of a Delirious song:

Lead me to the cross
Where we first met
Draw me to my knees
So we can talk
Let me feel your breath
Let me know you're here with me

When I opened my eyes, there was a man standing in front of me. He was visibly intoxicated, and he reeked of mouth wash (I later found out sometimes alcoholics drink a certain brand of mouth wash when they can't get hold of alcohol). He was dirty, smelly and scary.

I was speechless.

And then he spoke. "I was headed in the other direction down the path when God told me to come over here and talk to you."

I didn't know whether I should be praising God for this confirmation or running for the hills.

I grew up with an alcoholic parent. I don't drink, and haven't for years. In fact, I can't stand the smell of alcohol. If I'm in the proximity of someone who has had a drink in the past 24 hours, I can probably tell just by standing 5 feet away. And I can't stand it.

Yet here was this man, standing in front of me, claiming that God had sent him to talk to me. I didn't know how to respond, so I asked him to sit on the bench next to me.

* * *

I was out of my comfort zone. God was having me share His love with the "unlovely." The thing is, Jesus was one of the original lovers of the "unlovely"; out of the many examples of this in the Gospels, a story in John 8 sticks out to me.

Jesus was teaching one morning, when the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees brought a woman to Jesus who had been caught committing adultery. They asked Jesus if she should be stoned, as Mosaic law required. After a lengthy pause, Jesus responded, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

Many people walk away from this passage and think that this statement from Jesus is the key moral of the story. And maybe it is. It just strikes me slightly differently. Personally, I rarely have to remind myself that I'm a sinner. I could have written the words from Psalm 51: "For I recognize my rebellion; it haunts me day and night." I was once the woman caught in adultery. I also was ungrateful, bitter, self-righteous and proud. I'm generally very aware that I'm still many of these things, but I have to wonder if the majority of the Church can see themselves this clearly. Indeed, as Scripture says, if we think we are without sin, we are lying to ourselves. Even as believers who are no longer bound by the laws of sin and death, we still sin.

I knew a homeless woman who went by the name of Friend. We attended the same church for a year or so. Since she didn't have a place to live, she had nowhere to store her things. Every Sunday, she carried two huge pieces of luggage full of her stuff, big duffel bags that she threw over her shoulders, down into the basement sanctuary of our church.

That year, the associate pastor got engaged and invited everyone in the church to attend the wedding ceremony, which would be held in another, more traditional church in town. Friend showed up to the wedding with all of her stuff in tow. She was dirty, and she probably smelled, but she wanted to attend her pastor's wedding. I was shocked when I saw the looks of disgust on people's faces as she walked down the aisle — people whom I knew were Christians.

I honestly wanted to punch a few of them, evidence of my own unlovely attitudes surfacing.

For me, John 8 is about how Jesus deals with sinners, sinners like me. It's not only about how He dealt with the unlovely people, but also the unlovely attitudes that live in all of our hearts. How would Jesus respond to the man who smells like body odor and mouth wash? The homeless woman who carries two bags of her stuff into a church wedding? Or whichever unlovely person He might come in contact with? How did He deal with this woman, caught knee-deep in her sinfulness?

To help me resolve these questions, I turned to German theologian Helmut Thielicke:

When Jesus loved a guilt-laden person and helped him, He saw in him an erring child of God. He saw in him a human being who His Father loved and grieved over because he was going wrong. He saw him as God originally designed and meant him to be, and therefore, He saw through the surface layer of grime and dirt to the real man underneath. Jesus did not identify the person with his sin, but rather saw in this sin something alien, something that did not really belong to him, something that merely chained and mastered him and from which he would free him and bring him back to his real self. Jesus was able to love men because He loved them right through the layer of mud.1

All of the accusers left. Jesus illuminated their unlovely attitudes. But the woman stayed. Was she waiting to see if Jesus would accept her? Was the hope in her heart that Jesus would be able to love her, that He would see right through her layer of mud?

Jesus did not condemn her, nor did He shy away from commanding her to "Go now and leave your life of sin." I see Jesus' admonition here as a general admonition, not a specific one. Even if she stopped the specific sin that got her into this situation in the first place, she would not be in any better position than she was in before. She would still be a sinner, in need of a savior.

I've noticed that Jesus often refused to point out people's specific sin struggles to them. Instead, He pointed out the overall sinful condition of people's hearts and their need for a savior. He loved this woman caught in adultery and extended His grace to her, just as He does to us, and just as He asks us to do for others.

* * *

I wish I could find a written account of my encounter with the man in the park. I can't even remember his name. But I do remember how God worked in my heart, and in his, that day. I talked with him, as scared as I was, and I shared God's love with him as best as I could in my own brokenness.

He eventually consented for me to pray for him. I put my hand on his shoulder as I talked to God on his behalf, and he wept so hard he was shaking and snot was unabashedly running out of his nose. I struggled in that moment with my own unloveliness as I looked around and wondered what people were thinking about me, if they were noticing me and the snot, and looking down on me.

When I finished praying, his face was genuinely different, his entire demeanor lighter. He asked me to play "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore," which I faked my way through. He sang passionately, at the top of his lungs, for all to hear. By that point, I had gotten over myself and I sang out loud with him. Eventually, we parted and I said goodbye, letting him know I'd pray for him.

I don't know what happened to him after that. I never did see him again, though I would often look for him in that park, the same park where I would sometimes meet up with Friend for lunch. I know I was changed in that encounter, and I still pray that he was, too.

In the years that followed that day in the park, there have been many times that I've felt very unlovely, times when I was sure no one could handle seeing my brokenness or hearing about my unloveliness. I know that in the times when I've let my guard down and shared my struggles with someone, I've most often found compassion and acceptance, and rarely rejection. I find comfort in knowing that I have a high priest, Jesus, who sits at the right hand of God, interceding for me, a high priest who has been tempted in every way, who, when I confess my struggles, can honestly say to God the Father, "I know exactly what that feels like."

I sometimes wonder how we, as believers, might do a better job of loving the unlovely, people covered with the filth of sin. How we might love them right through "their layer of mud." How we can extend the message of grace and love to those who so clearly need it. And I sometimes wonder how willing I am to come face to face with my own unloveliness.

* * *

NOTES

1. Philip Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace?, p. 175.