Our Universal Diagnosis: A Vacuum

"We grasp at every passing straw, and even as we clutch it disappears." --Billy Graham
"... Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God" (Matt 4:4, NIV).
"All the days of my hard service I will wait for my renewal to come" (Job 14:14, NIV).

Man without God is unfulfilled and on a universal quest for ultimate truth, meaning, and purpose.  The Dalai Lama said that "Emptiness is the ultimate truth."  Billy Graham says that man is the only creature capable of becoming bored.  "Nature abhors a vacuum," says Billy Graham.  It was Blaise Pascal who said man has a vacuum only God can fill.  Augustine of Hippo likewise wrote that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God.  Man is searching for that missing ingredient and is on a frantic search for happiness.

Seek the Answerer!    This is true, we can become bored with life or of ourselves, despite the environment and entertainment opportunities.  That's why we have millions seeking psychiatric counsel and meds to solve their personal problems and unresolved issues.  Most of man's emotional problems are basically curable by the truth, and that is one reason truth sets us free.  Carl Jung, the protege of Sigmund Freud, said that " the central neurosis of our time is emptiness."  We all sense something is wrong with us, regardless of faith, and are on a Great Quest (Billy Graham's terminology) to find THE answer.

Man has been called Homo divinus and even Homo religiosus, or that man is, by nature, divine and religious, respectfully, seeking spiritual answers and fulfillment, rather than a secular solution. The anthropological proof of God is that there is a universal belief in God in some manner.   Have you ever observed an ape building a chapel?  We alone seek metaphysical answers to physical and emotional or spiritual problems--we must realize that many so-called religions seem to work and do have an element of truth, for man seeks truth by nature (enough to inoculate from the real thing), but that doesn't mean they are true.  Christianity isn't true because it works, but it works because it's true--viva la difference!

Man longs for relationships, and being in the image of God, we are personal beings seeking meaningful relationships--God is personal and wants to get personal with us!  We must reciprocate and return the favor.  We can try political freedom, education, materialism or higher standards of living, experiments with drugs or fee sex, but man only becomes worse off by seeking other means of satisfaction other than what we are meant for; ignoring design breaks faith with the Designer--for instance, we are hard-wired for work, not a life of leisure or pleasure seeking.

Christians need to preach that they have found it, the answers in the Answerer!  The proof of the pudding is in the eating, they say!  Solomon tried virtually every area of endeavor only to declare it all vanity, but his wisdom caught up with him at last and realized the only fulfillment was in doing our duty to God, obeying Him, our Maker.  A square peg cannot fit into a round hole and many people are doing that, attempting to be something or do something they were not meant to be or do.  If Einstein had been condemned to a life at the Swiss patent office, he might not have realized his full potential and would've had low self-esteem as unfulfilled.  We must pursue our passions without discouragement and realize our calling in life.

Man is not an animal in heat, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, despite protests that there is no right or wrong, only pleasure, and pain.  We must not just follow our heart, but not our whims, we must not arbitrarily seek for needles in haystacks.  Man is meant to be on a mission, full of meaning and purpose with a mind thinking the thoughts of Christ, or having a Christian worldview of the world, not to be influenced by the secularization of society, but remaining salt and light.      Soli Deo Gloria!

The Goal Of Our Christian Life

"Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them" (John 13:17, NIV). 
"A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still." --famous proverb 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer equated belief and obedience:  "Only he who believes is obedient; only he who is obedient believes."  They go hand in hand and one must not divorce faith and faithfulness either, and the result, which is obedience (cf. Heb. 3:1-19). Unbelievers are called "sons of disobedience" in Eph. 2:2. Christians are to be eager to live for the Lord and to live a life pleasing to Him.  Discipleship implies obedience because we are following on to know the Lord (cf. Hos. 6:3) in His steps. Good deeds are the fruit of salvation, not the means; if there is no fruit our salvation is suspect.

And we are not given a list of dos and don'ts and the Bible isn't a handbook on rules or catalog of regulations, but a key to personally know the Lord.  Yes, the goal is not to obey but this is a byproduct of our love, which is expressed in obedience (to love Him is to obey His commandments).  The believer yearns to obey, even if he falls short of his ideal.  The second part of the Great Commission is to teach us to obey, and it doesn't just stipulate that we obey one rule or what to obey, but the principle of obedience and to obey all things commanded by Christ.

The principle of obedience per se is to be taught, not just to authorities and the rules of the Lord (cf. Jer. 5:4; 8:7; Micah 4:12) but to the will of God.  There is no such thing as disobedient believers per Bonhoeffer--they can disobey, but all believers have surrendered to the lordship of Christ (cf. Rom. 12:1) and have obeyed the gospel, to receive the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 5:39).  God's commands are not burdensome, for His yoke is easy (cf. Matt. 11:29) and He grants us the strength to obey (cf. Phil. 2:13). 

But we are not just goody-goodies who appear as shallow seeking the approbation of men, but those people who know the Lord, doing the work of the Lord from the heart--for we are a people "eager to do good works" (cf. Titus 2:14).  We increase in the knowledge of the Lord by applying what we know in good works as Col. 1:10, NIV, says, "[B]earing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God."  Note that 2 Pet. 3:18 commands us to grow in the knowledge of our Lord as we increase in grace.   To know Him is to love Him!  We can only boast if we know Him (cf. Jer. 9:24).

It is said that Christ didn't come to make bad men good, but dead men alive!  We are raised from the dead when we get saved, for Christ is still in the resurrection business.  Obedience is for our own good, for God knows what's best for us and the way to life as we are called to trust in His will.  We must realize that the Pharisees were externalists, going through the motions and memorizing the Dance of the Pious, but had no inward reality! As it says in 1 Sam. 15:22, "to obey is better than sacrifice," it follows that we must have an inward reality and not just be paying lip service (cf. Jer. 12:2).  The Pharisees were experts at the Law of Moses and were legalists' thinking that obedience without a right heart could please God (cf. Matt. 15:8).

What really pleases God is faith and we cannot please Him without it (cf. Heb. 11:6), and expressing this faith through love is all that counts (cf. Gal. 5:6), as Mother Teresa of Calcutta has said, "True holiness consists in doing the will of God with a smile."  Our ultimate goal is to have a fulfilling, loving relationship with our Lord, and this is done by knowing Him and applying what we know.  Richard of Chichester's prayer was "to know Jesus Christ more clearly, to love him more dearly, and to follow him more nearly. 

All knowledge is merely a byproduct and not the end itself in our life, it is merely a means to an end of knowing Him, and we don't want our knowledge to be second-hand knowledge only but from our own experience.  It doesn't just stop at head knowledge but is to be applied to our lives (cf. Job 5:27).

Many believers pride themselves on being right and have separated from fellow Christians over nonessential issues; they are content just to be doctrinally correct and impeccable, even splitting hairs, or worse yet to be politically correct, saying "my way or the highway."  We must learn to defend the truth and stand up for the truth, but remember that our relationships are more important than our stands; at our judgment, God will not ask us if we were a Democrat or Republican, for instance, or a Calvinist or Arminian, but whether we loved our opponents.

However, we are never called to be argumentative, contentious, divisive, or judgmental, but to build bridges not make walls in relationships.  It is said that we must not be disagreeable, but learn to agree to disagree, and the Bible says that God's servants must not be quarrelsome (cf. 2 Tim. 2:24) or argue over the meaning of words (cf. 1 Tim. 6:4).  "If anyone teaches otherwise and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching they are conceited and understand nothing..." (1 Tim. 6:3-4, NIV).

In sum, we must never lose focus on the twin goals of our faith:  orthodoxy and orthopraxy, or to believe right and live right as its consequence; in other words, making disciples doesn't just mean bringing people about to our way of thinking or our school of thought, but turning our creeds into deeds and living it out as a witness to the world.    Soli Deo Gloria!