"To Justify The Ways Of God To Man" (quoted from John Milton)

"Expect Great Things From God; Attempt Great Things For God." --William Carey, father of modern missions in a sermon.

John Milton penned Paradise Lost to defend God's veracity and justice in His dealings with mankind.  This was an attempt to reach out to many who would not otherwise want to hear any type of apologetics from a Christian and had many audiences:  the skeptic, the cynic, the doubter, the contra-Christian, the fence sitter, the newborn believer, the adolescent believer, the mature believer, the backslider, the pagan, the nihilist, the earnest seeker or searcher of truth or the so-called answer, the sophisticated, the naive, the cultured, the Bohemian, and even the curiosity seeker.

We must realize that we don't always know who will read our Christian writings, and should be open to the idea of feeding them despite their identity or affiliation. Know the audience!   Did you know that William Shakespeare was a devoted Christian who mentioned Jesus Christ in his will?  We can recognize and verify this by his hundreds of direct quotes and allusions to the Bible in his plays, sonnets, and poems.  If you remove the Bible from his works, they seem to be empty and aimless.  He had a Christian worldview and probably felt that his mission was to reach out to the lost.  Many people have doubtless come to faith in Christ by first being softened in the heart by Shakespeare's biblical references.

Many people and students of literature don't realize that our Christian heritage in Western Civilization has been dominated or greatly influenced by Christian literature: Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy) , John Bunyan (Pilgrim's Progress is perhaps the most famous and popular allegory every written), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Robert Browning, Victorian poet with famed wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet laureate (In Memoriam), Robert L. Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped), Charles Dickens, Victorian author (A Christmas Carol), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German Shakespeare, (Faust), not to mention countless unsung heroes of literature.  In fact, the very first novel published in the English language, Robinson Crusoe, was most likely meant as an outreach because one can tell by his biblical references drilled into the conscious and unconscious by illustration and repetition.  I remember the one verse that stuck out in my mind that changed my way of thinking about literature with the impression only the Bible could make ( cf. Psalm 50:15, HCSB):  "Call on Me in a day of trouble; I will rescue you, and you will honor Me."  This verse is made real because we see it fulfilled in the storyline and one sees it so often that one is impressed. I may have already been a believer, but this verse brought conviction and God's Word doesn't come back void according to Isaiah 55:11.

There are twentieth-century authors who have greatly influenced literature and the unbelieving masses.   J. R. R. Tolkien, who wrote The Hobbit trilogy and C. S. Lewis, author of the classic children's series, The Chronicles of Narnia, have been seen as movie productions, plays, and the subject of literature courses at schools of higher learning, as well as high school English classes.  These novels use imagery and metaphoric language to portray Christ.  Did you know that it was Tolkien who converted Lewis by telling him that Christianity is the great myth that has come true?

It is a great ambition to want to reach the lost for Christ in new ways such as writing fiction/fantasy, and many analogies and metaphors can be used.  But it is vital that one knows one's audience and not forget who you are targeting and keep in mind who to reach out to and you want to resonate with and strike a chord with that will indeed vibrate for eternity. He knows where his audience is and where they should be and want to be.  It is a sad commentary on our decaying secularizing culture that it is the best-selling authors who are shaping the values, morals, and ethics and even faith of our society.

But we need not give up the world to the pagans and lose by default and concede everything away without a fight; for Christianity has always survived because it has out-thought, out-lived, and "out-died,"  the competition. Basically, we are referring to the discipline of apologetics when we defend our faith and try to make it palatable to the unbeliever and this can even be in the format of literary apologetics like that of Tolkien and Lewis.  We need more authors to compete with the secular world and welcome any effort by a writer who feels called or gifted to enter this endeavor or discipline.
Soli Deo Gloria!

Throwing The Book At Believers

"Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes.  He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God"  (1 Cor. 4:5, NIV).

"Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters.  One person's faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. ... Who are you to judge someone else's servant?  To their own master, servants stand or fall.  And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand" (Rom. 14:1,4, NIV).

"...[B]ut my people know not the rules of the LORD" (Jer. 8:7, ESV).

"[F]or they do not know the way of the LORD..." (Jer. 5:4, ESV).

Some law enforcement officials like to throw the book at hardened criminals because they never seem to learn and could be repeat offenders and need an incentive to go straight.  Some overzealous police officers like to go for the maximum penalty for criminals they are offended by and they tend to get personally involved in.  We must seek to be like God who in wrath remembers mercy!  Jesus didn't exactly throw the book at the Pharisees but condemned their hypocrisy in obeying the letter of the law and ignoring the Spirit of the law.  We must never be so obsessed with minor points or the little things that we lose track of the main focus and issue of our faith, to love God and our fellow man through the power of the Spirit.

This is everyone's problem:  we don't always see our own sin.  We all have the tendency to overlook our own faults and be offended by the sins of others when we should be offended by our own sins!  The faith had degenerated into merely an externalism and Jesus intended to make it a matter of the heart and something that starts from the inside and becomes real and sincere, not just for show. 

The Jewish faith had devolved into externalism of certain favorite practices:  circumcision, fasting, Sabbath observance, tithing, dietary laws, hand-washing, and various sacrifices.  They certainly didn't impress Jesus with their religiosity and neither do we with our legalism and of going through the motions and memorizing the Dance of the Pious.  The Pharisees were rules-obsessed and also wondered what they had to do to earn salvation as if there was some merited work involved.  Jesus answered that the work of God is to believe in His Son!

Even today we still have the issue of legalism in our churches which does nothing but strike a wrong impression of our faith and create a paralysis of spirituality.  It is a parody of the real thing or life in the Spirit, walking with God.  Some Christians seem to reduce the faith to just following the rules and are just converted to the program, not to Christ Himself--they haven't yet realized the fullness of the Spirit in their lives and what it means to walk with God like Enoch, Noah, and Moses did.  According to the record in Genesis, Noah was a "just man, perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God."  That's would look good on anyone's resume!  We have the resident Holy Spirit and the full revelation of Scripture and have no excuse for not doing likewise.  

Yes, we can become friends with God and know Him as our Father in our faith.  This is the Christian privilege and we ought to make our faith real and demonstrate or prove it by our good deeds or works of faith. After all, the faith you have is the faith you show!  Without any works, our faith is suspect; our faith must be validated by works and works must spring from faith!  The Reformers had the simple formula for our salvation of being saved by faith alone in this rallying cry:  Salvation is "by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone!"

An example of the legalism of the Pharisees was their fetish about the Sabbath Day.  There really wasn't any hard-and-fast rule as to what constituted work, but they concocted 39 additional definitions or categories to be construed as work or forbidden activities to do on the Sabbath.  Observance became a burden rather than the joy it was meant to be.  Jesus warned them that they missed the point of the intent of the holy day: in that, it was made for man, not man for it (cf. Mark 2:27).  We must not reduce our faith to simply following the rules or enforcing a code of conduct, for it's a relationship and way of a new, fulfilling, abundant life in Christ.  

Only Christians are truly free, the unbeliever is a slave to sin.  Christians are those whom Christ has set free--not free to live as we want but as we ought.  We may be free from the law but not from God's will!  The law was given to convince us we don't keep it according to D. James Kennedy.  It was never meant as a way of salvation but as a measure of a man and to show him where he falls short of God's standards.  Those who rely on the law are under a curse (cf. Gal. 3:13).

We must not be so confused with works and do-goodery that we lose track of the ultimate goal of our faith; i.e., enjoying fellowship with Him and getting to know God, the aim of our salvation.  In fact, being saved can be seen simply as knowing Jesus and making Him known!  We must not feel we have to do good deeds to impress others or show off like wearing our religion on our sleeves and flaunt it, nor should we privatize it; however, we ought to grow in our faith and make it real by a life that is honoring to our Lord and worthy of Him--free of all hypocrisy; for we don't need perfect, doubtless faith but only sincere, unfeigned faith.  We must realize that hypocrisy is what offends God, not a person who says, "I believe, help mine unbelief!"

The only thing that interferes with our fellowship with God is sin in the camp or sin in our behavior and conduct.  We must keep short accounts of our sins and confess them as soon as we get convicted and realize them, not letting them stack up until we feel like making a confession.  Note that our fellowship isn't merely with the Father and the Son, but also with our fellow believers!  We cannot and must not become Lone Ranger Christians or go, rogue, because no man is an island and we all need each other in the body--no individual has all the spiritual gifts, but they are all given for the benefit of the body.

Now there are certainly gray areas or matters of personal conscience (and we all should be convinced in our own minds) and we are not to judge our brother nor flaunt our liberty and ruin their conscience or make them stumble (cf. 1 Cor. 8:12). We must not judge our brother in matters of conscience and no one has the right to lord it over another.  The weaker brother needs to grow in knowledge, while the stronger one needs to improve in his love and understanding or sympathy.  We may have the right to do something but it's not always the right thing to do nor does it benefit.  

As Paul said in 1 Cor. 10:23, HCSB, "'Everything is permissible,' but not everything is helpful.  'Everything is permissible,' but not very thing builds up."  The important thing about our liberty in Christ, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (cf. 2 Cor. 3:17) is that we must not let anything control us or make us its slave.  As Romans 6:16 says, we are slaves to the power we choose to obey.

We all have a duty to obey our conscience, and to go against it is neither safe nor right according to Luther, though it can be wrong, it should be enlightened by the Word of God.    Jiminy Cricket told us to always let our conscience be our guide, but this is only valid if it's enlightened and informed by Scripture.  We must bear in mind that the old nature knows no law, while the new nature needs no law--we do what is right naturally and God convicts us when we go astray from the straight and narrow or the fellowship of God.

We must put aside the pointing of the finger and playing the blame game (cf. Isa. 58:9), for we only seem to condemn or judge in others what we are guilty of or is our weakness or area of pride.  What most offends us, we tend to look down on others for and we may have been guilty of it ourselves.  We must always give God the glory in our defeat of sin and of having a victorious Christian life--we can not walk with God in the energy of the flesh or without newness of life in Christ.  In the final analysis, I believe that man is religious by nature and tends towards legalism because he's incurably addicted to doing something for salvation as if it's a quid pro quo.

It's the job description of the Holy Spirit to convict of sin and we should never attempt to try this ourselves because He does it good enough without our help using the Word of God.  It is said that if we live in a glasshouse, we should not throw bricks and Jesus also said that he who is without sin cast the first stone.  We need to stop being so offended by the sins of others and look within at our own hypocrisy and how repugnant our sins are to God and should be offending us.  We must always make allowance for each others' faults and realize that we are all works in progress and God isn't finished with us yet (cf. Phil. 1:6)!

NB:  Christians are not under the law as the Old Testament saints, but we have a higher law to submit to--the law of love! The law of love can never be satisfied or fulfilled, for we will always be in God's debt.  Grace does mean this:  we cannot pay it back, don't deserve it, and cannot earn it!   We have the privilege as believer-priests to go directly to God and seek restoration and continued ongoing fellowship.     Soli Deo Gloria!

Liking Someone On One's Spiritual Book

"And I pray this:  that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment" (Eph. 1:9, HCSB).
"... People without discernment are doomed [ruined]" (Hosea 4:14, HCSB).

We don't just "like" someone on Facebook, but also in everyday life as we choose for ourselves who we want to look up to and emulate or even just feel a natural affection for.  We don't have to "like" anyone, not even on Facebook!  Of course, this doesn't mean we don't have to love our enemies, our neighbors, and brethren in Christ, but this is agape love from God and is a choice of the will, not a matter of feelings.  Loving and liking are not synonymous! 

It has been pointed out that we must love our enemies (I believe this means personal ones, not enemies of the state, for example) as well as our neighbors (those in our orbit or association and those who need us) and even friends because often we cannot tell the difference; they may be the same person!  We cannot always control our feelings and have the God-given right to exercise affection to whom we will. There is usually a natural affection for our family and kin and this isn't something demanded or commanded either.  We must love with all discernment and insight and not without discrimination.

Note that the Bible doesn't command us to like our parents nor for wives to like their husbands, but to respect and honor them which is different.  The point is that you can love someone without liking them and you may not feel much affection toward a baby who needs changing, but your love doesn't waver. Love is basically a choice and an attitude, not a warm, touchy-feely, fuzzy feeling.   Love takes many forms and I do not mean to over-generalize and make it seem like it's natural or okay to dislike everyone like we're everyone's judge and critic.

But practically speaking, one may not like one's political leaders though one believes in rendering respect and honor to whom it is due; but when a politician is evil and corrupt that entitlement may be precarious and lost because of our higher allegiances to principles and God.  That doesn't mean we don't obey our leaders when giving a law or legitimate order or command, but even in the military one may dislike one's commanding officer and yet show due respect by obeying, saluting, and even saying "Yes, sir!" when necessary.

There is redeeming social value in everyone due to the image of God in them, though this image is tarnished but being renewed after salvation. The point is that no one is totally evil nor utterly corrupt, but they are radically corrupt before salvation (we are as bad off as can be but not as bad as we can be due to God's restraints) and every aspect of their character and person is affected by the fall.   But overall, we have a right to like whom we choose to like! We all must have standards and not "like" indiscriminately without discernment. 

However, even if my enemy needed me, I would respond in a loving manner no matter what I thought of his personality or character.  I think that there is more danger in saying one really likes a perceived evil ruler rather than saying he doesn't--I would wonder if he's taken leave of his senses and lacks any discernment.  Likewise, we don't have to show respect or deference to everyone either, besides not violating their person or as being fellow human beings in the image of God with personal rights and dignity--we show respect to whom it's due!

In summation, we may feel we like certain people especially and befriend them--this is an honor, not a demand--we have a right to choose our friends but not our relatives whom we must accept and tolerate, not necessarily even like.  We aren't everyone's friend either!

NB:  The terminology of liking and loving someone is overused and misused in the English language and often we need to define terms or elaborate on what exactly we intend to say like Voltaire said, "If you want to discourse with me, define your terms."   Soli Deo Gloria!

Our "Aha!" Moment

"Open my eyes to see the wonderful truths in your instructions" (Psalm 119:18, NIV).

Some believers experience "Bible fatigue" (the verses lose their pazzazz or zing) i.e. when they're over-familiar with passages and need a fresh perspective or cup of discernment.  A good panacea for this is to explore various translations because there is more than one good translation no matter what methodology they use.  However, we all need a spiritual wake-up call to our calling and Christian purpose and gifts in our walk.  

Many Christians experience God in the Scriptures on a regular basis with an existential encounter with God known as an "Aha!" moment in the Word--which may be a sudden awakening or enlightenment due to the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit to open our spiritual eyes.  When we feel God is speaking to our hearts and we are hearing specifically from God in the Word, this may be seen as an "Aha!" moment also.  There should always be something in the Word that we want to "Amen!" as it opens our eyes to the spiritual.

I can remember as a youth fleeing from my girlfriend because she was trying to seduce me--that was the first time I made a moral choice to obey my conscience.  My revelation from God in the Word came when I realized that we cannot lose our salvation, known as eternal security, but, when we sin, Jesus intercedes for us and the Father disciplines us to bring us back into the fold.  That's when the Bible was opened to me and everything seems to fall into place, I practically went through the complete New Testament to see what would happen if there was no eternal security--there could be no assurance of salvation either, for they go hand in hand and can only be distinguished but not separated.  This doctrine of the perseverance of the saints was the one I cut my spiritual teeth on and now I read the Bible through the lens of sound doctrine, opening up a new dimension.  The next "Aha!" moment I had was when I realized my spiritual gift and where I was to fit in the body of Christ.

Other believers such as Peter had his personal "Aha!" moment when he realized that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God.  Paul had one on the road to Damascus when he realized he was kicking against the goads or fighting God's will.  Even pagan Socrates had his "Aha!" moment when he awoke from his dogmatic slumber and began to teach with effectiveness to such a degree of success that he got in trouble with the authorities for his strange lessons that seemed to ridicule the Greek pantheon and had to take hemlock for his punishment in corrupting the youth and speaking against the gods.

We all need to confess our faith and to share it to make it ours--the only way to keep it is to give it away!   The point is that if we relate things God has taught and shown us, He'll give us more insights, but if we ignore the light He gives, it may be withdrawn.  Some people need to learn in the school of hard knocks before they get their "Aha!" moment, but those who are able to learn via the Bible are the blessed ones in God's estimation.

The point is that everyone is entitled to an "Aha!" moment and God will try to reach everyone, even if they reject Him.  It is true that we reject Christ an average of 7.6 times before accepting His lordship over our lives and trusting Him as our Savior.   The whole world is blinded by the devil and walks in darkness according to the prince of this world and is under the power of the devil until they are set free in Christ.  If we make a positive choice, one that leans in God's direction or comes to the light, God will show us more light (give us more "insight for living")--He is no man's debtor. If we refuse light, it's withdrawn.      Soli Deo Gloria!