Getting It Right (Focus on Grace, January 2013)

Posted on May 25, 2014 by DHawthorne

Picture, if you will, a man. He is young, still somewhat idealistic, passionate and energetic. His friends, if asked to describe him with one word, would say things like, “faithful,” “devout,” and “intense,” and they would mean those things in the best possible way. He is utterly devoted to his god … he prays daily, he never misses a worship service, and his participation is fervent and sincere. His charitable acts are well-known. He is held up as a good example in his community. And one day, incensed with the wickedness he sees in the world, he straps a bomb around his waist and blows up a local cafe.

Up until that last line, I could have been describing a believer. And most reading this might think, OK, it’s a Muslin extremist. But what if I changed that line to say, “And one day, incensed with the wickedness he sees in the world, he picks up his rifle and waits outside an abortion clinic until the doctor appears, who he then shoots to death”?

Extremism is not limited to any particular religious or ideological group. In fact, it is often indistinguishable from true devotion to a casual observer, until that moment when it expresses itself in an action no right-minded person would condone. But it doesn’t have to be some overt act or horrifying behavior; sometimes it’s an attitude that flies below everyone’s radar. It might be a subtle disapproval of anyone who doesn’t do exactly as they do. It might be a condescending air, or condemning spirit that people can see, but brush off as a character quirk. It might be nothing visible at all to others.

But there is one thing all extremists of any degree share, and that is the absolute conviction that they are right. They have formed their ideals, however they have formed them, and they reject with prejudice every thought that opposes what they have decided to be true. Often, in fact, almost always, they can back their position up with whatever they consider scripture, even though others who use the same scriptures disagree. Even some who diligently study the Bible can get things wrong, and their actions show quite clearly that their understanding of the Bible is different from other people’s, who have studied it just as much.

There are two major difficulties I can see with this particular state of mind, putting aside when it devolves into full-blown-crazy extremism. The first is when a person is utterly convinced they are right about something, yet they are wrong; and second is when they are utterly convinced they are right, and they truly are, but they hold to it for the wrong reasons. And I’m not at all certain the latter is any better than the former.

Hebrews 11:6 states that without faith, it is impossible to please God. But a great many people, Christians included, think that faith and conviction are the same thing. A solid faith might lead to conviction, but it is still possible to be convinced of error. But the Bible also teaches us what faith really is: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” (Hebrews 11:1). In other words, faith is the recognition of a truth outside yourself that is not evident to your own senses. If I say to you, “I have an office chair in my living room,” it takes no faith at all on my part: I’m sitting in it as I write this, and both my sight and my tactile senses confirm it exists. But if you are confident in my trustworthiness, and take my word that this chair exists, then you have faith in what I have said. You believe me, and you too are convinced I have an office chair in my living room. If you heard the same thing from another person, let’s say, someone who has only been in my home once, there could be some doubt about the chair. Maybe they misremember it, or maybe I got rid of it since they visited. Can you see the point? Your faith is only as good as the person you have faith in. And I think this is exactly what pleases God: faith in Him. Not faith in what others say of Him, and not whatever ideas you have come up with on your own about Him, but the recognition and understanding of Him that comes from God Himself.

Of course, this requires that God speaks to us, and it requires that we recognize His voice, and we understand Him. He speaks to us through the Bible … which is precisely why we call it the Word of God. But how can we have any confidence we understand the Bible correctly? And how can we be sure we are not drifting towards an extremism that’s based on our own understanding, and not the Lord’s truth?

Look again at Hebrews 11:6, with some emphasis on the second half of the verse –
“… for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” God is not going to leave us dangling, He will reward us if we seek Him.
John 16:8-13 – “And when He has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they do not believe in Me; of righteousness, because I go to My Father and you see Me no more; of judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come.” God has left the Holy Spirit specifically to help us understand Him, His Word, and what is right.

John 1:18 – “No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.” This is an integral part of the gospel; Christ came to show us who the Father is, and one of the ways that He showed us was by dying to pay the price for our sins. With such a loving God, can we really be afraid that we will get it utterly wrong? Yes, we will sometimes make mistakes. Yes, we will sometimes take another’s word for spiritual things and get them wrong. But we can be assured that for as long as we are diligently seeking Him, we will find Him (Matt. 7:7-8).

So then, if we desire to please God, we must earnestly seek to know Him. And we must be diligent to rightly understand the Bible (2 Tim. 2:15), as the Holy Spirit guides us (John 16:13). We cannot simply accept what we have been told without seeking to understand it rightly ourselves, and we cannot quickly latch on to any concept that pops into our heads without prayerfully considering it in the light of God’s word.

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Experiencing Church (Focus on Grace, November 2012)

Posted on May 18, 2014 by DHawthorne

Author’s Note: this article was written more than a year and a half prior to my last post, “Playing Church,” but looks at the same issue through a slightly different lens. I actually hadn’t realized I was picking up on a theme I had already visited, but I thought it would be a good thing to re-publish the original anyway.

I regularly drive past a big billboard on Rt. 287 near Piscataway that is an advertisement for an area church. I don’t know a thing about this church, and it may be a wonderful, solid, God-honoring congregation … and maybe it’s not. But the billboard has a prominent slogan on it that says, “Come Rediscover Church!” Not “Discover Christ,” nor “Rediscover Christ,” but “Rediscover Church,” as if church was merely a way of life that some people get out of the habit of, and they need to get back into it.

When I was a teenager, I was a great fan of C. S. Lewis. I belonged to a mail-order Christian book club, and when they featured an author who was a “protege” of Lewis’, I felt I had to get it. It was Sheldon Vanauken’s “A Severe Mercy,” and the main point of the non-fiction work was how much and how strongly Vanauken loved and cherished his wife, how they both came to the Lord, and how God took her home. The title summed up how Vanauken made sense of her death: their relationship was approaching idolatry, and God took her from him so he would love God more. It was God’s mercy that he separated them, so that their relationship to each other would not become more important than their relationship to God. It was a heart-wrenching story, and I must have read that book a dozen times. It formed my ideas about what love really is, and to what extent God will work in our lives to bring us closer to Him. Vanauken’s later works were never featured in that book club, and there was no Internet to look them up, and decades passed before I thought to see what else he had been up to. To my sadness, I found that he too had passed away … but to my horror I also discovered that after his first book was published, after all the wonderful, godly lessons I though he had learned, he decided to join the Roman Catholic church. Even more to my horror, he stated his reason not as doctrinal, or spiritual in any manner. He simply enjoyed the Catholic liturgy; he thought it was beautiful, and therefore closest to the heart of God.

Seeing that billboard on Rt. 287 reminded me a lot of Vanauken. Again, I can’t state too strongly, that I do not know this particular church, or what they believe, but that billboard gives me the impression they are making Vanauken’s mistake: that the experience of going to church, and belonging to a particular church, is more important than the actual worship and service to God done there.

There are three primary ways that the modern American Christian uses the word “church.” The first, and the one most closely related to the way the word “church” is used in the Bible, refers to the members of the church, and the body they comprise. This includes all believers in Christ, without regard to denomination or local congregation (1 Cor. 12:12,13 ;Matt. 16:18; Acts 20:28). The second refers to the local congregation, or the local gathering of Christ’s Body. The word “church” is also used this way in Scripture (Acts 11:12, 13:1; Romans 16:5; for a few examples).

But the third way we use the word “church” is the one I’m going to focus on here, and that is the worship service that believers attend. The Bible does speak of believers getting together for various acts of worship (Acts 20:7; Col. 3:15; 1 Cor. 11:20; 1 Cor. 16:1,2), but the references are remarkably few and indirect. The closest reference at all to what we call “church” in the sense of getting together regularly is in Hebrews 10:25; it’s a powerful reference, but even there, what is done in such gatherings is not spelled out. We can infer from the other passages I’ve listed that various acts of worship and edification are to take place in such gatherings, but my point is that the Bible does not teach a specific liturgy, like what attracted Vanauken, and neither does it promote those gatherings as a lifestyle in and of themselves. Believers met for a purpose.

To understand that purpose, we have to get back to our first use of the word “church.” Take a closer look at Ephesians 1:22 & 23: “And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all,” and Ephesians 5:30: “For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.” People have a tendency to get all mystical about passages like those, but what exactly does your fleshy body do? It carries out the actions and the purpose that you want it to do. Barring some physiological or psychological dysfunction, your body is an instrument of your will. Even when you feel like you have no choice but to act in a certain way, you choose it because you don’t want to suffer the consequence of not acting that way.

Likewise, we the church are instruments of Christ’s will on this earth. Just like my eyes see the computer on which my hands type, so that my thoughts can be shared with my readers, members of Christ’s body see needs in this world, make those needs known to others who can fill them, and so His work gets done. Usually, the chain is far more complex than that; every ministry, which is to say, every action done on the behalf of Christ, requires the involvement of many believers. Even the simple act of sharing your faith with your neighbor means that someone taught you how to share what you believe, someone wrote the materials you used to support that sharing (which includes putting it in a language you and your neighbor both understand), and someone built you up and encouraged you to be able to do such a thing. Examine it carefully, and you will see many, many members of the body of Christ working together in any godly act. And that is what the church is really about. It’s not a weekly experience; it’s a daily act of submission to Christ, that we might be His hands, His feet, and His mouth to the world.

We can value the experience we call church, when we speak of the community, the rituals, and the ways we worship. It can be, and often is, an essential part of doing Christ’s will. But we must remember, it is a means to an end, and not the end itself.

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Playing Church

Posted on May 11, 2014 by DHawthorne

When I was a teenager, I attended a church that seemed, to my youthful perceptions, to have a core group of people that never changed. Members outside this group came and went, but this core group always seemed to stay intact … several of them were there when I started attending, and were still there when I left. So I was very much surprised, years later, when I spoke to one of those people and he told me that he had left too. And, while we were talking, he shared with me that many other of those I thought would never leave had left as well. The reason? The music changed from traditional hymns to largely contemporary Christian music, and they didn’t care for it. It wasn’t a matter of doctrine: the culture of the church moved away from what they were comfortable with. And the change was enough that they felt they could no longer worship there.

In the course of my Christian life, I’ve attended a fair number of churches. I’ve found that, outside of doctrinal differences, it’s the church culture that makes people comfortable or not. There are many churches with good preaching and acceptable doctrine that do things in very different ways, and most of those variations in the style of worship are still worshipful. Some people are naturally going to be more comfortable with one style over another, and they will be more productive as a member of the church whose culture most closely matches their own. And that’s all right. As long as the Lord is truly being worshiped, and people are truly growing in Him, those kind of differences don’t matter.

But another thing I have seen, with alarming frequency, is when a church’s culture becomes more important to its members than the church’s purpose. Now, put simply, what I believe the purpose of a local church to be is to provide a place to worship God, learn about Him, and fellowship with those of like mind; it is a place where Christians meet together for strengthening and encouragement in their faith, and to be ministered to by both the Holy Spirit and each other, so that they may become more like Christ. Implicit in the idea of becoming more like Christ is learning how to minister to others as well. And all of this can be accomplished within various church cultures. Where it falls apart is when the participants are just playing at church: they do and approve of the things their favored church culture does, and they frown at everything outside it. Christ, and Christ-likeness are no longer the center, the culture is.

Let’s consider the friend I mentioned at the start, and move to the hypothetical. He never said anything to me that led me to believe it was anything but a matter of personal taste that led him to leave his church and worship elsewhere, so I assume his was a valid decision. But let’s say he thought the church’s move to contemporary music was a sign that church was no longer walking with the Lord and had become heretical (let me be very clear, this is hypothetical, he said no such thing). That would be an example of what I mean by people playing church. True worship is not the main criteria considered, but how the worship is conducted. There is a judgment on style and method that presumes one way is right, and another is wrong. This attitude is common in American churches today.

And more frequently than not, the attitude is subtle. There isn’t exactly a censure of different styles, but there is an air of disapproval. Churches that don’t line up with the favored church culture are looked down upon … not overtly shunned, but anyone who would go to a church like that couldn’t possibly be a “good” Christian. And it happens within churches too. “Good” Christians sprinkle “praise the Lord!” within all their conversations. “Good” Christians don’t watch secular movies, or read “non-Christian” books. “Good” Christians read their Bible every day, or that’s all they read. “Good” Christians have regular “quiet times” (which, interestingly, are not always defined). There is a mindset that takes a human view of what a Christian really is, and puts that mindset above and beyond what Scriptures say a Christian really is. The things approved are not necessarily wrong, and can in fact be very good things, but the focus is on those things themselves, and not the goals they are meant to attain. And a person within a church that doesn’t engage in all those things, or behaves in a way not included by them, is looked down upon. They are targeted for correctional talks and shunted out of positions of influence and prominence. Often, it is couched in terms of sin and disobedience. It boils down to, “if you don’t act the way we think you ought to, you must be in sin.” In those cases it doesn’t matter if the area of disagreement is something that a Biblical argument could be made for either viewpoint; it only matters if the side of the argument you fall down on agrees with their accepted version of Christianity. If you don’t play church the way they play church, you must be in error.

Even Christ had to deal with this kind of attitude, and He didn’t have anything good to say about it. In Matt. 12:1-8, we read a story when Christ and His disciples were walking through a field on the Sabbath, and helped themselves to some of the grain because they were hungry. That was a perfectly acceptable thing to do in their time and culture normally, but the Pharisees had something to say about it because they did so on the Sabbath. In their particular version of godly culture, a good Jew would never “work” by separating grain by hand on the Sabbath. So they considered this action a sin. Christ threw it back at them by saying not only was their precedent in the Life of David, but He was the Lord of the Sabbath anyway, and their zeal was misplaced. He went on to do several more things that offended their sensibilities, and they claimed He must be operating in the power of the ruler of demons (Matt. 12:24). Their insistence on putting their human concept of godliness before true godliness actually led them into a far, far greater error than the one they were trying to correct.

And that is the real problem with playing church. It’s not a harmless affectation, it’s a genuinely dangerous attitude. And if a Christian really wants to be like Christ, he or she needs to lay that attitude down permanently. As Paul wrote, we must “… not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is,” (Eph 5:17). It is far easier to “play” church than to truly be godly and Christ-like. Being human, we gravitate towards easier solutions. And part of “being wise” needs to be an awareness of this tendency. Christians must stop playing at being Christians, or we run the risk of not being like Christ at all. Historically, it has happened many times. This is precisely why there are so many denominations that call themselves Christian, but are not. This is precisely why many people of our world curse the name of Christianity, and organized churches. They have been ostracized and even persecuted in the name of a church culture that was only playing church, and not really doing what a church should do. There is a link to the name of Christ, but no connection at all to His real commandments and purposes. It is an insidious and deadly spiritual trap because in it’s beginnings, it looks like proper zeal. But in the end, it’s the very mouth of Hell.

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What Is Your Opinion Worth? (Focus on Grace, October 2012)

Posted on May 4, 2014 by DHawthorne

I’ve always been somewhat baffled by protests. I don’t mean the earnest, sometimes violent, types of protests, like I grew up with in the sixties, or the kinds that have been storming the Arab world this past year. Those kinds of protests include action, and they are often effective in making changes. The types of protests that bemuse me are the pure opinion rants. PETA, for example, held a “Save the Seals” protest on the online game World of Warcraft in 2009. They got some players to start killing baby seals in the game, then invited other players to try to stop them. I don’t know how it turned out – it made news when they planned it, and precious little has been said since. One comment I saw summed it up pretty well: “Uhmmm how about we actually help the REAL baby seals?!?” I’ve been hearing about seal-saving protests since I was in grade school, and yet the practice continues, because killing seals for their fur is a very profitable venture. And the only thing that has made a dent in the practice has been boycotts. In other words, loudly stating your opinion en-mass doesn’t impress the industry very much. But start cutting into their profits, and that’s another story.

In America, we’ve been conditioned to believe people care about our opinions, and we’ve been encouraged to share them. We’ve come to feel empowered by our freedom of speech, and most Americans will vehemently defend that right. But what most seem to forget is that sharing the opinion itself is not what matters … it’s how that opinion makes you act. Most politicians don’t care how you stand on an issue, they care how you will vote. Manufacturers aren’t moved by knowing what your favorite flavor is, they’ll make the ones they know they can sell. If they can’t sell enough to turn a profit, they won’t make it, no matter just how strongly, or how often, you tell them that you want something different. Opinions only matter to others to the degree they change the way you live, and what you do speaks far more eloquently to the world than what you say.

And your opinions do, in fact, very much change the way you live.

The Bible tells us to “Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it spring the issues of life” (Pro. 4:23). On the surface, that verse seems to be a simple injunction not to let your heart turn to evil, but look at the rest of the chapter. It’s all about living righteously, and not living in an evil manner. Why then this reference to the heart? Because it matters to how you will live. Good people will sometimes do wicked things, and wicked people will sometimes do good things; but to change everyday life, to alter the very fabric of how you behave, requires changing your heart. Your heart contains the total of all the opinions you hold to yourself to be true. There are numerous psalms and proverbs that tell us to meditate on the Law of the Lord (which is to say, His Word), and the goal of that is to change your heart … that your actions and life might also be changed as you grow to know Him better.

One of the trickier aspects of this dynamic is that in order for our opinions to change our heart to what is right and good, our opinions need to be correct. When it’s a surface issue, it’s relatively simple to deal with; if we hear something wrong, or learn it wrong, then we find out it was in error, we can correct it and move on. More insidious are the things we have taken in so deeply they are already lodged in our heart. I knew a gentle, godly, and well-respected Christian who once mourned to me that he felt awful about himself, because he has “lost his first love.” Anyone who spent ten minutes with him could tell he clearly loved the Lord … so what did he mean by that? He was upset that he was no longer as excited about his faith as he was as a new believer. His faith had grown stronger, fuller, and deeper, but he held the opinion that it was a flaw that he no longer felt like dancing in the streets over it and this mistaken opinion made him sorrowful and stood in the way of his walk with the Lord.

The Bible has an answer to this kind of problem as well: “And by this we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before Him. For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things,” (1 John 3:19-20). Add to that what Paul wrote in Romans 14:4, “Who are you to judge another’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. Indeed, he will be made to stand, for God is able to make him stand,” and 2 Tim. 1:12, “… for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day.” What it boils down to, is that God is doing a work in us, and we need to be confident that it will be a perfect and complete work, and what He has done already is well and truly done.

So, what is your opinion worth? Is it just noise, empty words you toss out to the world to no effect … or is it a life-changing opinion, founded on the Word of God and nurtured by His grace and Spirit?

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Taking a Wider View (Focus On Grace, September 2012)

Posted on April 27, 2014 by DHawthorne

I had a physics teacher when I was in high school who had a reputation for being brilliant. He held patents for manufacturing some of the first solid-state electronic components (selenium rectifiers), and he worked on the Manhattan Project when the atomic bomb was first being created.

It was, to put it mildly, an interesting class. We calculated the speed and movement of bowling balls bobbing up and down on springs; we learned to do Fourier analysis longhand with a slide-rule; we did experiments in thermodynamics and electronics … far deeper than most high school physics classes ever delved.

But one particular thing we studied made a big impression on me, not for what we learned, but for a mistake our over-qualified teacher made. A problem presented to us was: how would an engineer determine what grade of steel was needed in the trusses that hold a bridge up? He drew us a diagram of the truss structure, told us how much weight it needed to carry, and provided the dimensions, and at what points it rested on the ground. Our task was to calculate how much weight was on each steel segment. It was a complicated and fussy calculation, that went through pages and pages of math. It took days before we students even had a grasp on the procedure involved, but we slogged through, and we learned it. And then it got real interesting.

You see, once we had a grasp on the technique, the teacher started varying the designs. And, as we got more comfortable with it, we added our own variations in how we went about solving it. And we started getting different answers. Part of the class would get one solution, and others would get another, but when the teacher went through the solutions, he discovered both parties did everything correctly. It turned out that it mattered which support point you started your calculations from. The teacher didn’t have a satisfactory resolution to this. He confessed it was not his area of expertise, but he was confident in the theory, and from then on, he simply specified whether to work from left to right or vice versa. We went along with it, because we all knew we were in way over our heads anyway.

Years later, I figured it out. What our teacher had missed was that all the possible answers were really incorrect, taken by themselves. If, by working from point A you calculated truss 1 was holding a ton, and working from point B, truss 1 was holding a half ton, it was really holding a ton and a half. You had to calculate the stresses from every resting point, and then combine them to determine exactly what each segment was holding up. But, as I said, our teacher’s theory was perfectly sound, and utterly logical. It was even correct as far as it went; the trouble was it didn’t go far enough. His view was too narrow, and he missed the truth because he was focusing too much on details … to the exclusion of other facts that mattered. In real world application, it mattered enough to possibly make the difference between whether the users of that bridge went for a drive or a swim.

This is a real danger when it comes to spiritual things, because we’ll often hear a thing, and if we trust or like the person we heard it from, we’ll agree with it … sometimes without questioning it at all. A lot of the time, it’s even correct. But what happens in those cases when it is not? Look how the Bereans handled a new bit of information in Acts 17:11; “… they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.” These were people who were hearing the gospel for the first time, and they examined the Scriptures in depth (because you don’t search the Scriptures daily if it’s a casual search). They made sure what they were being taught lined up with the Word of God. They took a wider view.

I was reminded of this in another way not so long ago, when I saw a picture of a protest rally, and one of the protesters was holding up a sign that said, “Don’t Judge Me!” It’s a fairly clear reference to Matthew 7:1, where Jesus said, “Judge not, that you be not judged.” But the protester only thought of the first two words of that statement, and didn’t think of the rest of it at all … and the clincher is in verse 5, where Jesus says, in essence, fix your own problems so you can see clearly enough to fix someone else’s, which absolutely requires making a judgment of some sort. Jesus wasn’t saying, “never judge,” He was saying, judge rightly, and don’t forget you have issues too. In John 7:4, he actually instructs his hearers to judge others, though once again He emphasizes that they do it the right way. So you see, the narrow view this protester took caused him to make a very big error. If he understood the Scripture he was using properly, he never would have dared use it at all. But you can see where a mistake like that may have happened, and for me at least, it makes me want to review many things I think I understand, and make certain that all of the Bible backs up my understanding.

Paul, when speaking of his ministry to the elders of the church in Ephesus, spoke of declaring the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). That is exactly the wider view we all need to have: learning and proclaiming all of God’s Word, that all the truth be known by those who hear us.

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The Law of Love (Focus on Grace, August 2012)

Posted on April 20, 2014 by DHawthorne

People love laws.

I can almost hear the protests from here … examples of the many, many rule-breakers, rebels, and otherwise lawless types; everyone has a story, an example of just how wrong that opening statement is.

Let me tell you a story of my own. I know a man who grew up in a place he only ever referred to as “The Projects.” Drug deals, gang wars, rape and assault were commonplace events there, if not everyday, the way he tells it. If he walked into a stairwell, and something was going on, he turned around and went another way, or he just didn’t go wherever he was headed, even if it was to his own home. Police didn’t enter the buildings alone, and rarely went there at all. In fact, if people their had a problem with someone, they didn’t call the police. They might get a few friends together and beat the person up in one of those stairwells, and hard-core trouble makers might wind up dead in the same place, but the authorities didn’t get involved until after the fact. You see, the Project residents had a code: you did things a certain way, you proved yourself, you respected others, you looked out for your friends and family. It wasn’t that they there had no law, it was that they had a law of their own that had nothing to do with the law of the land, or even the rules of behavior in more genteel societies. Their rules, their law, was their own.

And I would like to suggest that every rule-breaker, rebel, or lawless type operates the same way. They might despise and disregard authority and rules imposed on them by others, but deep inside, they live by a set of rules they have adopted and developed themselves. Rules define behavior … they tell a person what to do in a given situation. No one is comfortable in a place where they don’t know the rules, because they don’t know what to do, and they don’t know what’s expected of them. Everyone whose had even a passing acquaintance with children knows that they grow up constantly challenging the rules set down by their parents; they always trying to see just how much they can get away with. It’s not that they are simply out to break those rules … they’re trying to figure out what their parents’ rules really are, what the limits are, and how much they are going to accept as their own personal set of rules. There is something in the human psyche that seems to be hard-wired that way: figure out how life works, make yourself a set of rules about how to respond to it, and then live that way.

And what is law, but a defined set of rules? Some law is official, and enforced by various authorities. Some is unofficial, an accepted way of living that, if you transgress it, causes others to be unhappy with you, maybe even to the point of violence. The pattern is the same: if you live by the rules, the accepted law, all is well; and if you break it, there will be punishment and consequences.

And the Bible is full of rules. There are 613 commandments in the Old Testament (Judaism 101: A List of the 613 Mitzah) alone, and God handed down some very explicit rules for His people to follow. But take a good, close look at Galatians 3. I would suggest you carefully read the entire chapter, but I’m going to highlight just this one part: “Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor,” (Galatians 3:24-25). Though the Old Testament Law was in fact a set of rules God’s people were expected to live by, that was not the reason God imposed them. His reason, as spelled out very clearly in Galatians, was to teach people how to live a godly life, and to illustrate the principles of God to His people. By the Law, if there was sin, there was a blood sacrifice to made to atone for it. In Christ, the blood of the very Son of God was shed to atone for sin. The Law serves as an illustration, and in fact a very important one, for no lesson is as well learned as the one that guides the very way you live. But according to Galatians 3:25 … the rules God laid down may have been intended to teach us about godliness, but He no longer expects us to live by them.

The reason is, by now we should have learned those lessons. Christ took the penalty of sin away, and by doing so set us free from the the guilt of breaking those rules (Romans 6:6,7); yet, the expectation of godly living still remains (Romans 6:2). The primary difference is not how we live, but why we live that way. Take a look at Romans 13:8-10: “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY,’ ‘YOU SHALL NOT MURDER,’ ‘YOU SHALL NOT STEAL,’ ‘YOU SHALL NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS,’ ‘YOU SHALL NOT COVET,’ and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’ Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” It’s not adherence to a set of rules that God wants from us. It’s a heart-deep change in the very persons that we are. And if we are godly persons on the inside, we will live in a godly way … and nothing quite expresses the nature of God like true Biblical love (I John 4:7-8).

God even cautions against allowing rules to be the primary principle in how we live (Colossians 2:20-23). Because ultimately, living according to a set of rules is a strictly human effort, and living in the power of the flesh, cannot please God (Romans 8:8). For it to be true godliness, it must be in the power of a life changed by the Holy Spirit, and it must be behavior that flows out of that changed life. Nothing less will do.

And the biggest danger we face in this regard is our very love for creating our own rules and trying to live by them. Most Christians have no real trouble accepting that God no longer requires us to sacrifice animals for our sin, but many still take, for example, the lists of do’s and dont’s you can find at the end of the epistles, and turn them into a new set of rules. Many also will key in on a single verse of instruction, and claim it an inviolate command. And very often, the behavior that results is absolutely correct; those lists are there for a reason, and every verse of instruction is there to instruct us. But if we are obeying the Scriptures just to satisfy the rules, we are not satisfying God, because He wants us to be changed, and He wants us to be like Him. And if we are like Him on the inside, the way we live will make it evident on the outside. In Romans 12:2, we are told to be transformed by the renewing of our minds … not by external obedience to laws and rules. The Pharisees of Christ’s day were very good at keeping the rules, and look what Jesus had to say about them: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness, (Matthew 23:27).”

So then, we should make it our goal to live according to the Law of love, and not according to the love of Law.

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Color Blind (Focus On Grace, July, 2012)

Posted on April 13, 2014 by DHawthorne

I had a helper at work some years ago who was color blind. He couldn’t tell the difference between red and green; the only way he knew whether to stop or go at a traffic light was by whether the top or bottom light was lit. If you put a red something alongside a green something, he could usually puzzle out which was which, but if he saw one, by itself, he didn’t know what color it was. The phrase, “color blind” is typically a misnomer, because in the vast majority of cases, it really means color deficiency: that is, a person has trouble seeing a particular color or distinguishing it from other colors. The most common type is the inability to tell red from green, like my helper, and 7-10% of the men in the world have this trouble … but those who can see no colors at all are in the 0.00001% range. 1

But let’s consider what it would be like if those numbers were flipped. What if most of us only saw our world in glorious black-and-white, and the number of people who could see in color were vanishingly small? How could those few people describe to the rest of us what they were seeing? How do you describe colors without knowing what the words represent? If one of the rare color-seeing people pointed a few things out and said, “the trunk of that tree is brown, and its leaves are green, but the sky is blue,” we would nod sagely, maybe take some notes, and every time we saw something of those particular shades of gray, we would assume they were brown and green and blue. But we wouldn’t quite be sure. And in the Autumn, if our color-sighted person wasn’t still around, we might look at those leaves and and still think they were green, but maybe the lighting was playing tricks on us to make them look a different shade of gray. Or maybe we could read in a book that leaves change colors in the fall, and we’d have to guess what colors they were … but if we didn’t know what set of colors the leaves used, we might guess wildly, and think, “well, those leaves are a shade of blue, because they look a lot like the sky,” when in fact the sky was gray that day with clouds, and the leaves were actually yellow. Unless we were scientists running around with spectroscopes, that would be the best we could do, guess at colors by reference and comparison. Some might get it right more than others, but no one who didn’t actually see them would really know. And even knowing the right words, we still wouldn’t know what those colors really were, not the way a color-sighted person would.

And this is very much like the way the natural human perceives eternal things. In our present state, we are eternal souls in a temporal body, earthen vessels (2 Corinthians 4:6-7), in which the knowledge of Christ has been poured. But the vessel itself is still just clay, and will be until the day we are raised up in Christ. If we didn’t have the Word of God to point out to us the truths of God, we wouldn’t recognize them when we saw them. Think of what the average unbeliever believes love to be: they think strong physical attraction and lust are love; they think infatuation is love; they think obsession with another person is love; they think giving someone everything they desire is love. Someone may have pointed out real, true love, and they picked up on some of the characteristics of it, but they don’t truly understand the real thing. But how does the Bible describe love? “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins,” (1 John 4:10); and, “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves Him who begot also loves him who is begotten of Him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome,”(1 John 5:1-3); and, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love,”(1 John 4:7-8). Those verses describe love in a way that someone who has never seen the Bible will ever fully grasp; it’s not simple sentiment, it’s a self-sacrificial care and devotion, it’s obedience, and it’s something only the godly can truly know.

And this is because people are color blind. Spiritual things are hidden from them, and in many cases, so obscured they cannot perceive them at all. In even the best of cases, they only have a glimpse, a description from someone else’s lips that they must interpret for themselves and compare to what they do know … and they often get it wrong. Some things God has pointed out in His creation of the world (Rom. 1:20), and sometimes people deliberately ignore this so they can have their own way (Rom. 1:21). But the Bible teaches us that when we are in Christ, these hidden things are revealed (Eph. 2:3-5, and Eph. 2:8-9), and that it is the work of the Holy Spirit to open our eyes (John 16:7-8). God has provided a way that we can see Him, and we can know Him. It starts with creation, and finishes in revelation, which is to say, the Bible. But it also requires us, who have seen the work of God, to point things out:

“For ‘WHOEVER CALLS ON THE NAME OF THE LORD SHALL BE SAVED.’How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: ‘HOW BEAUTIFUL ARE THE FEET OF THOSE WHO PREACH THE GOSPEL OF PEACE, WHO BRING GLAD TIDINGS OF GOOD THINGS!'” (Romans 10:13-15)

God has given us life in Christ, and in doing so, He has opened our eyes to the things of the spirit. Our vision is not perfect, not yet (1 Cor. 13:12), but we do see spiritual things. And like my hypothetical color-seeing person in a color blind world, it’s up to us to love and obey God in the sight of the world, point at it, and say, “this is what the things of God look like.”

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Accepting God’s Will (Focus on Grace, December 2011)

Posted on March 30, 2014 by DHawthorne

Every Christian agrees that it’s important to do God’s will. As the old hymn says, “trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus …” But that only covers the things we choose to do either in obedience or disobedience. Yet there is another aspect of God’s will that we all have to deal with every day, and many times it directs our actions as much as, or sometimes even more than, His actual commands.

This is most often referred to as His “sovereign” will. Very simply, it means that God is ultimately responsible for every event and circumstance, because He is the Lord of all (Psalm 135:5-6, Acts 10:36, John 16:15). Sometimes things happens because God directly causes them to happen, and sometimes things happen (even terrible things) because He allows them too … but nothing happens that God doesn’t know of it, and hasn’t worked it onto His plan for the world, and for His children (Rom. 8:28). How this works out for the believer is that we often find that events and circumstances that are not of our own making, and not of our own choice, place us in situations that we simply have to deal with, and have to deal with in a godly way. I may choose, in obedience to God, to go to a worship meeting, but if my car breaks down, or a family member is injured or sick, that circumstance may prevent me from worship that morning. And that is God’s will just as much as His direct command.

There have been books written on why God causes or allows things to happen, and others on how one ought to respond. What I’m going to look at, very briefly, is the Christian’s attitude when God’s sovereign will overrides our choices and our desires. It’s easy enough when God’s sovereign will fully agrees with our own – but what happens when it does not?

The very first reaction many Christians have is, “this is Satan trying to discourage me, and I must resist.” We have ample precedence in the book of Job to know that Satan does evil things to God’s people, and that God allows it for His own glory. Sometimes something very neutral, or even good-seeming, can get in the way of what a person believes God wants for them too, and it isn’t always an obvious temptation or “bad thing.” For example, if a couple is all set to go on the mission field, then unexpectedly discovers they are going to have a baby, is it Satan that whispers in their ear, “you can’t be a missionary now,” or “how are you ever going to raise additional support, you barely have enough now?” If that’s the case, such whisperings clearly must be resisted, and God’s way through it sought diligently with prayer. But what, instead, if it’s a gentle prod from the Lord that He really wants you to go another way? Many times, Christians simply press forward no matter what. They believe their cause to be just and righteous, and they cannot accept God might want something else. In that case, it’s not acceptance of God’s will at all, it’s blatant resistance, and in the end, disobedience. We need to be very careful not to assume a roadblock is from the Devil or his ilk, because sometimes it’s from the Lord Himself.

Another common reaction to contrary circumstance is just the opposite: “Woe is me, God has closed the door … it is my lot in life to suffer for His sake.” This is particularly pernicious, because it feeds on a Christian’s feelings of unworthiness, it taps into latent guilty, both real and imagined, and it reinforces genuine awareness of real inadequacies. Frankly, it often “feels right,” to assume God simply wants a person in a place of discomfort or suffering. There is a great deal of merit in suffering for God’s sake, or the sake of righteousness, but there is none at all in suffering for its own sake. Yet believers often confuse them; they think they are being humble before the Lord, they think misery is a part of godliness. All too often, they are really being self-indulgent. God does call us to suffer for His sake (1 Peter 3:14-17), but He has made it clear that as Christians we are to have life and to have it abundantly (John 10:10). It’s not the suffering He seeks to produce in us, it’s the fruit of that suffering: whether it is for our personal growth (2 Cor. 7:9), for the edification of others (2 Cor. 1:4), or for His own glory (1 Peter 4:14). So, to lie back and let circumstance run right over you because “it’s the will of God,” in it’s way is as bad as trying to force your own will over top of the Lord’s.

So what is the right response to God’s sovereign will when it collides with your own? Sometimes it is to press on regardless, sometimes it’s just to stay where you are and deal with the circumstances as they come; sometimes it’s a combination of both. But it is always to accept God’s will in all meekness, humility and hope (Col. 3:12, Rom. 12:12). And the first thing that has got to go is self. Note that in the two types of responses I have written about, there are proper times for each of them. But in all the cases they are the wrong response, is when self has come to the fore. When you push forward despite God sending a circumstance to redirect you, it’s self-will. When you roll over and let circumstance dictate everything you do, it’s also self-will, in the form of self-pity or self-indulgence. So what you need to immediately say to yourself and to the Lord is, “Not my will, but thine,” (Luke 22:42). And after that you need to remember that He loves you (Rom. 8:38-39), and all things work together for good (Rom. 8:28). Let’s live like we believe those things, and so glorify Him in our obedience, and in placing His will above our own.

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Paradigm Shift

Posted on March 4, 2014 by DHawthorne

I started this blog years ago for two reasons: to teaching myself how to install, set up and customize blogs on my web site, and to provide a place to practice writing. I never advertised it much, except for the pings built in to the blogging software and the occasional trackback. It was a private party, and only myself was invited (though a few others did show up and were welcomed). I did entertain thoughts of going public once I had amassed a significant number of posts, but I never did, and the posts fell off as well. But while I was writing with that in mind, I tried to keep my posts non-controversial and somewhat religion-neutral. Eventually, I thought I would be done playing with it, and would just take it down.

Sometime last year, I switched the pretty-much-defunct blog from a Moveable Type platform to WordPress. Again, I was experimenting; but in the process, I had to look over my old posts. And I decided that though I had been ready just to pull the plug altogether, I didn’t really want to consign those posts to oblivion. I wanted to give it another try. So I started posting again. Not very much, but more than I had been.  But I was lacking motivation, and I had a lot of other things on my plate. It was looking like round two was going to end a lot like round one did.

But something changed. I had been writing columns for my church newsletter, and that venue went away. But I didn’t want to give the column writing up. So, I decided I will revive this blog once again. I will be shifting from religion neutral to speaking about issues of faith and my own beliefs. I’m going to start that process by advertising the blog and letting people look over my older posts. Then, I will begin re-posting some of my newsletter columns. I have a few years worth, but I’m not going to flood the blog with them all at once; I will, however start putting selected columns up at a regular pace, and will mix in newer material as well.

Chances are, many of you who are reading this post came as a result of my advertisements. I welcome you, and invite you to register and comment on the existing material, and the things I post in the future.

I hope you enjoy my musings.

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The Death of Democracy

Posted on August 20, 2013 by DHawthorne

A remarkable thing has happened … for the first time in over 35 years, former president Jimmy Carter has said something I agree with. In a speech at the meeting of “The Atlantic Bridge” in Atlanta, Georgia, he said, “America no longer has a functioning Democracy.” I have also found it remarkable how difficult it has proven to be to find a full transcript of his speech; most references are to an article in the German publication Der Spiegel and even those seems to be a passing reference. So I can’t say I agree with his reasoning or the premises he based it on. But I have to agree with the conclusion.

The main difficulty, it seems to me, is that, as a people, Americans have become intellectually lazy. Very few bother to study issues and events; instead, they swallow entirely the cursory coverage mass media gives them. Said media outlets focus on the superficial and the sensational. They do not seek to educate – their goal is to entertain, and to keep people interested only long enough to satisfy their advertisers. The result is that people are very passionate about issues they barely understand. The problem magnifies itself over the back fence and at the water cooler, as half-baked opinions mingled with sentiment reinforce each other and snowball into an avalanche of ignorant passions. And, of course, this just gives the media outlets an excuse to fan the fire … after all, people are already invested in it, covering the hype means more exposure and more sponsorship, and, more money.

But these people are voters. And not only do they echo these opinions at the polls, they rally and they protest so others will do the same. Our so-called democracy is a game of Pied Piper. It’s not a matter of an educated population thoughtfully debating and forming an intelligent consensus. It’s a matter of who can sway the most opinions, mainly on the basis of emotion and superficial gut reaction. But laws are being passed, and public policy set by these same opinions. Is that how a real democracy is supposed to function?

And sadly, it’s not just the media outlets. Politicians are fully aware that they hold their power not because the voters know them fully and trust them to do what is best for the entire community; they hold it based on who can best capture public sentiment, and get the most people to dance to their song. Is that how a real democracy is supposed to function?

The end result, though we call it democracy, is mob rule. The only reason our culture hasn’t collapsed under the weight of it isn’t because we have an enlightened and superior system, but because there are still enough intelligent and decent people active enough to hold it up. But that is fading fast, with each new generation composed of more people selfishly out for their own gain, and more swayed by the knee-jerk reaction than by careful thought. And such are fed and nurtured by those they put in power, so they can stay in power. It’s not sustainable; and I shudder to think what will grow in its place when it all comes crashing down.

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