To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg's device displaced remembering.
...if we as individual Christians, and as the church, act on less than a personal relationship to other men, where is the demonstration that God our Creator is personal?
...As Christians we are not to fellowship with false doctrine. But in the midst of the very battle against false teaching, we must not forget the proper personal relationship.
In the midst of being right, if self is exalted, my fellowship with God can be destroyed...
...how careful I must be, every time I see a situation where I am right and another man is wrong, not to use it as an excuse to scramble into a superior position over that man, rather than remembering the proper relationship of fellow creatures before God.
The medieval knight brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate toward one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop.
So preaching that aims to produce true evangelical remorse and contrition must devote itself to making God and His holiness look alluringly attractive and satisfying, so that, by the grace of regeneration and illumination, people will come to love it so much that they feel intense remorse over falling short of it. In other words, we must preach for joy in the glory of God if we would produce true grief over falling short of the glory of God. Evangelical repentance is grounded in an appealing sight of the holiness of God. That is why I say, brothers, pursue their repentance through their pleasure.
The apostle John's vision of eternity suggests what's in store for all the saints: "The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads …. And they will reign forever and ever" (Rev. 22:3-5).I don't know exactly what our service in that city will involve, nor can I be specific about how we will assist in reigning. But those tasks sound like they may have a bit more significance than most careers we pursue in our current lifetime.Could it be that when I finally start the most significant service of my life, I'll find that this is what I was truly created for? I may find that the reason I was created was not for anything I accomplish on earth, but the role I'm to fulfill forever.I realized that my earlier question had been answered.Why did God create a child to live two minutes?He didn't.He didn't create Toby to live two minutes or Mandy to live two years. He didn't create me to live 40 years (or whatever number he may choose to extend my days in this world).God created Toby for eternity. He created each of us for eternity, where we may be surprised to find our true calling, which always seemed just out of reach here on earth.
But when I am a creature in the presence of God, and I see that the last relationship is with an infinite God, and these human relationships are among equals, I can take from a human relationship what God meant it to provide, without putting the whole structure under an intolerable burden. More than this, when I acknowledge that none of us are perfect in this life, I can enjoy that which is beautiful in a relationship, without expecting it to be perfect.
But most of all, I must recognise that no human relationships are going to be finally sufficient. The finally sufficient relationship must be with God Himself.
The command is to love Him, not just to think about Him or to do things for Him...Saying this we can see that much evangelism is not only sub-Christian, but subhuman - legalistic and impersonal.
The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it’s to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they’re valued. So it’s much more about creating climates. I think it’s a big shift for a lot of people.
Rowling did not create the truth of the Eliade thesis, that novels satisfy a spiritual hunger in a secular culture. But her saga has confirmed it spectacularly. Harry Potter revealed rather than created the great spiritual hunger of our time. The publishing industry and Hollywood are responding to this by delivering stories that borrow Rowling's model. The industry simply cannot ignore the Potter-Twilight elephants in the accounting room.
...because God is infinite he can deal with each one of us personally as though each one was the only man who existed...
Prayer is always to be seen as a person-to-person communication, not merely a devotional exercise. Indeed, when prayer becomes only a devotional exercise, it is no longer biblical prayer...
If I refuse my place as creature before the Creator and do not commit myself to Him for His use, this is sin. And anything else is also misery. How can you enjoy God on any other level than what you are, and in this present situation? Anything else will bring misery, a torturing of the poor, divided personality we are since the Fall. To live moment by moment through faith on the basis of the blood of Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit is the only really integrated way to live. This is the only way to be at rest with myself, for only in this way am I not trying to carry what I cannot. To do otherwise is to throw away my own place of rest, the substantial psychological advance I as a Christian can have in this present life.
But present communion with God requires bowing in both the intellect and the will. Without bowing in the intellect, in thinking after God; without acting on the finished work of Christ in my present life; and without bowing in the will in practice, as the waves of the present life break over me, there is no sufficient communion with God. Without these things I am not in my place as the creature in a fallen and abnormal world. These three things are absolutely necessary if there is to be real and sufficient communion with God in the present life. In the proportion that these things are so, then a person-to-person relationship to God is in place...
The integration point is God Himself. It is possible even for Christians to put always more intellectual questions between them and the reality of communion with God. Even right doctrine can be the false integration point...
...And almost all modern liberal theology is just a game; it is pure gamesmanship...
There is always the possibility of a truly new start within a totally rational framework. Thank God that there is always this possibility, upon the basis of the infinite value of the blood of Jesus Christ...
...When by the grace of God I think after God, I can have intellectual integration. I no longer have to play games of hide and seek with the facts that I dare not face...
And nothing less will integrate the whole me, because that is what I was made for: to love God with all my heart, soul, mind. Being in any other relationship is not enough. There are parts of me that are not encompassed by any other relationship.
But the solution for the Christian is that there never need be a fear of the impersonal, because the personal-infinite God is really there...
..."you do not have to be afraid because God is here." This is a profound truth, not just for children. Indeed it is the glory of the Christian faith that the little things are profound and the profound things are overwhelmingly simple.
The basic psychological problem is trying to be what we are not, and trying to carry what we cannot carry. Most of all, is not being willing to be the creatures we are before the Creator...there is nothing complicated about it; he is squashed trying to bear what no one except God Himself can bear because only God is infinite...
...Since the Fall we have points of weakness. With some of us it tends to be physical; with some it tends to be psychological. If we carry what we cannot, the blowout will come and it will come at the place of our inherent weakness...We refuse to acknowledge the existence of God, or - even though acknowledging his existence intellectually - in practice we refuse to bow before Him in the midst of our moment by moment lives.
...we lose the 'substantially' [substantial healing] in beating ourselves to bits trying to be what we cannot be...I am not to set myself at the centre of the universe and insist that everything bend to the standards that I have set upon my own superiority. I am not to say "I must be thus," and if it is not thus, there is nothing but psychological despair. Some people are totally caught in this, but all of us have something of it within ourselves, swinging pendulum-like between conceit and despair.
This is not true only in the psychological area, of course; it is true in all relationships of life...married couples who refuse to have what they can have , because they have set for themselves a false standard of superiority. They have set up a romanticism, either on the romantic side of love or the physical side, and if their marriage does not measure up to their own standards of superiority, they smash everything to the ground...You suddenly see a marriage smashed - everything gone to bits, people walking away from each other, destroying something really beautiful and possible...
Then it is reasonably, truly, and objectively dealt with in Christ's infinite substitutionary work. Now I can say to my conscience, "Be still!" The real guilt is gone and I know that anything that is left is my psychological guilt. This can be faced, not i confusion, but to be seen as part of the misery of fallen man...
A very practical thing for ourselves and for those whom we would help is that it is not always possible to sort out true guilt from psychological guilt...When someone comes to you in a psychological storm, and he is really torn up, it is not only unreasonable but it is also cruel to ask him in every case to sort out what is true guilt and what is psychological guilt...
...My part is to function in what which is above the surface, and to ask God to help me to be honest. My part is to cry to God for the part of the iceberg that is above the surface and confess whatever I know is true guilt there, bringing it under the infinite, finished work of Jesus Christ...
How is it that psychologists who act as if God is there, but merely pragmatically, like Carl Gustav Jung, are able to help their patients to some degree? I think it is because that which really helps is always in the direction of what reality is...Not bowing, they do not acknowledge Him, and yet pragmatically they find they must act as if He is there.
True doctrine is an idea revealed by God in the Bible...and can be fed back through man's body into his thought-world and there acted upon. the battle for man is centrally in the world of thought...the spiritual battle, the loss of victory, is always in the thought-world.
So this is where true spirituality in the Christian life rests: in the realm of my thought-life...
...the reverse of this: the blows of the battle from the external world of man fall upon me outwardly. The blows fall in many ways...All of them come upon me in the external world, but if they stayed in the external world of the body, as though it were a machine, they would being no tears to me. Instead they flow through my sense, my body, into that which I am in the thought-world. And as the blows come to my thought-world, I either say "Thank you" to God, as we have already considered, or I rebel against Him. In either case the result is soon seen in the external world...
...That is even after I am a Christian I can be a death-producing machine; though I have life, eternal life, if I yield myself to Satan instead of to Christ, I can be an instrument of death to this external world. How sublime to be a man, made in the image of God! But how sobering, that I can bring forth out of my thought-world into the external world either that which leads to life or that which produces death in other men.
Basically it is a matter of our thoughts. The external is the expression, the results. Moral battles are not won in the external world first. They are always a result flowing naturally from a cause, and the cause is in the internal world of one's thoughts [for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh - MT.12:34]
There are those who would make a distinction here and regard the "heart" as more than just thoughts, but even if one held this view, the important fact is simply that we are dealing with the internal world. What Jesus is saying is that if the internal condition is not right, one cannot bring forth proper results.
[MT.5:21-22 & 1JN.3:15 - anger and hate is murder]
So far we have taken three steps:
First: the internal is first;
Second: the internal causes the external;
Third: morally, the internal is central
But whatever evil may be above the surface, the portion that we do comprehend is sin, and that portion must be taken with honesty before God who knows our whole being, and we must say to Him, "Father, I have sinned." There must be real sorrow for the sin that I know, that is above the surface of myself...
...if we have sinned, it is wonderful consciously to say, "Thank you for a completed work," after we have brought that specific sin under the finished work of Christ...
If we have sin in our lives, and we go on, and God does not put His hand in loving chastisement upon us, then we are not children of God. God loves us too much for that. He loves us tremendously. He loves us as adopted children.
...God the Father's chastening is to cause us to acknowledge that specific sin is sin...
...Christ is speaking as a true man, and He speaks the absolute reverse of Adam and Eve in the Garden of the Fall, when He says, "Not my will, but Thine be done." I, too, must say with meaningfulness, "Not my will but Thine be done," at the point of that specific sin; not just a general statement, "I want your will" but "I want your will in reference to this thing that I acknowledge to be sin."
If we say that we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth. (1John1:6)
There is no such thing as to continually walk in darkness and to have an open fellowship with Him who is only light and holiness. This is simply not possible...
Here is something that is the antithesis not only of God's external law, but of His Character and what he is. How can we say we have fellowship with Him if we deliberately walk in that which is the antithesis of Himself?
For some reason my moment-by-moment belief in God falters - a fondness for some specific sin has caused me at that point not to draw in faith upon the fact of a restored relationship with the Trinity. The reality of the practice of True Spirituality suddenly slips from me. I look up some morning, some afternoon, some night - and something is gone, something I have known; my quietness and peace are gone. It is not that I am lost again, because justification is once for all. But as far as man can see, or even I myself, at this point there is no exhibition of the victory of Christ upon the cross. Looking at me at this point, men would see not demonstration that God's creation of moral rational creatures is not a complete failure, or even that God exists. Because God still holds me fast, I do not have the separation of lostness, but I do have the separation from my Father in the parent-child relationship. And I remember what I had.
To the extent that I am thinking about my sanctification, there is no real sanctification. I must see it always as Jesus Christ's.
...If I look to Jesus Christ and His victory for my entrance into a future heaven, dare I deny to him what that victory should produce in the battles of this present life - the battles before men and angels and the supernatural world? What an awful thought!
To miss the grand narrative of Scripture is a serious matter; it is not simply a matter of misinterpreting parts of Scripture. It is a matter of being oblivious to which story is shaping our lives. Some story will shape our lives. When the bible is broken up into little bits and chunks - theological, devotional spiritual, moral, or worldview bits and chunks - then these bits can be nicely fitted into the reigning story of our own culture with all its idols! One can be theologically orthodox, devotionally pious, morally upright, or maybe even have one's worldview categories straight, and yet be shaped by the idolatrous Western story. The Bible loses its forceful and formative power by being absorbed into a more encompassing secular story.
The reality of living by faith as though we were already dead, of living by faith in open communion with God, and then stepping back into the external world, as though we are already raised from the dead, this is not once for all, it is a matter of moment-by-moment faith, and living moment-by-moment. This morning's faith will never do for this noon...of noon for suppertime..of suppertime for going to bed...of midnight for the next morning. Thank God for the reality for which we were created, a moment-by-moment communication with God Himself. We should indeed be thankful because the moment-by-moment quality brings the whole thing to the size which we are, as God has made us.
...when we were created we were created for a purpose. And the purpose of creation, in which all our subsidiary purposes fit, is to be in a personal relationship to God, in communion with Him, in love, by choice, the creature before the Creator.
So what is needed is the knowledge of the meaning of the work of Christ in our present life, for our present life, and then for us to act upon it in faith.
However, we may know the doctrine by mental assent without making the doctrine ours, and that is the other reason we do not bring forth the fruit we should. In the last analysis it is never doctrine alone that is important. It is always doctrine appropriated that counts...
If we are Christians, we have understood and acted upon the finished work of Christ once for all at our justification, and our guilt is gone forever. Now let us understand and act upon the practice of that same work moment by moment in our present lives...
So we must believe God's promises at this one moment in which we are. Consequently in believing God's promises we apply them - the present meaning of the work of Christ for the Christian - for and in this one moment. If you only can see that, everything changes. As we believe God for this moment, the Holy Spirit is not quenched. And through His agency, the risen and glorified Christ, as the Bridegroom of the bride, the Vine, brings forth His fruit through us at this moment. This is the practice of active passivity. And it is the only way anybody can live; there is no other way to live but moment by moment.
The Holy Spirit is the agent of the whole Trinity. He is the agent of the crucified, raised, the glorified Christ. If I am bringing forth something other than the fruit of the Spirit, the only reason is that I have grieved the Holy Spirit who is our divine guest....
...when we grieve Him, we push aside the one who is the agent to us of the work of Christ for our present life. On the basis of the finished, passive work of Christ - that is, His suffering on the cross - and on the basis of the active obedience of Christ - that is, keeping the law perfectly through His life - the fruits are there. They are there to flow out through the agency of the Holy Spirit through us to the external world. The fruits are normal; not to have them is not to have the Christian life which should be considered usual. There are oceans of grace that wait. Orchard upon orchard waits, vineyard upon vineyard waits. There is only one reason why they do not flow out through the Christian's life, and that is the instrumentality of faith is not being used. This is to quench the Holy Spirit. When we sin in this sense, we sin twice: we sin in the sin, and this is terrible, as it is against the law and character of God Himself, our Father; but at the same time we sin by omission, because we have not raised the empty hands of faith for the gift that is there.
In the light of the structure of the total universe, In the light of our calling to exhibit the existence and character of God between the Ascension and the Second Coming, In the light of the terrible price f the cross, whereby all the present and future benefits of salvation were purchased on our behalf - In the light of all this, the real sin of the Christian is not to possess his possessions by faith. This is the real sin.
This passage points out our high calling, to put ourselves by choice in the arms of our rightful lover, our bridegroom, in order to bring forth his fruit in the external world. But it also warns us that it is possible, even after we are Christians, to put ourselves into the arms of someone else and bring forth his fruit in the world....if I....am not bringing forth the fruit that one would expect, the fruit of Christ, there is spiritual unfaithfulness on my part...so the word faithless has a very pointed meaning. If I do not have faith toward Christ, I am unfaithful toward him, and this is faithlessness.
On the basis of the finished work of Christ, a moment by moment life of faith is "the victory"...
There is the same base (Christ's work) and the same instrument (faith); the only difference is that one [justification] is once-for-all and the other is moment-by-moment. The whole unity of biblical teaching stands solid at this place. If we try to live the Christian life in our own strength we will have sorrow, but if we live in this way, we will not only serve the Lord, but in the place of sorrow He will be our song. That is the difference. The how of the Christian life is the power of the crucified and risen Lord, through the agency of the indwelling Holy Spirit, by faith, moment by moment.
"Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 15:13). This is our calling, through the agency of the Holy Spirit. We are not called to serve God just any way, but to know joy and peace in believing.
..."What is the purpose of man - if man has any purpose?" And to that question the 20th century returns a great silence. But the Bible says man has the purpose of loving God with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his mind. And this "loving" is not meant to be vague or "religious", in the modern sense, but a genuine communication with God: the finite person, thinking and acting and feeling, being in relationship with the infinite - not a bare infinite, but an infinite who is a personal God, and therefore communication is possible...
Thus now, in the present life, if I am justified, I am in a personal relationship with each of the members of the Trinity. God the Father is my Father; I am in union with the Son; and I am indwelt by the Holy Spirit. This is not just meant to be doctrinal; it is what I have now.
God has always intended that Christians should be the evidence, the demonstration, of Christ's victory on the cross...Whatever is not an exhibition that God exists misses the whole purpose of the Christian's life now on earth...
What Paul is saying here is that the preaching of the gospel to simple or more "complicated" men fails in both cases if it does not include a demonstration of the Christian life, if it does not include the work of the Holy Spirit...
...Doctrine is important, but it is not an end in itself. There is to be an experiential reality, moment by moment...
This experiential result, however, is not just a bare experience of supernaturalism, without content, without our being able to describe and communicate it. It is a much more. It is a moment by moment, increasing, experiential relationship to Christ and the whole Trinity. The doors are open now - the intellectual doors, and also the doors to reality.
In the light of the unity of the Bible's teaching in regard to the supernatural nature of the universe, the how is the power of the crucified and the risen Christ, through the agency of the indwelling Holy Spirit, by faith.
From the Christian viewpoint, no man has ever been so naive, nor so ignorant of the universe, as 20th century man...
The Christian life means living in the two halves of reality: the supernatural and the natural parts. I would suggest that it is perfectly possible for a Christian to be so infiltrated by 20th century thinking that he lives most of his life as though the supernatural were not there. Indeed I would suggest all of us do this to some extent...Nothing could be further from the Biblical view. Being a Christian means living in the supernatural now - not only theoretically but in practice...
...this is the emphasis of Scripture, that the supernatural world is not far off, but very, very close indeed.
The Hebrew name "Mahanaim" means "two hosts" or "two camps". And one camp is as real as the other. One is not a shadow and fiction, a product of Jacob's mind...
The only difference was that the young man's eyes had to be opened to see what Elisha already saw. The supernatural was not something far off, it was there...
It's the idea of theatre; we are on a stage being observed. He says here that the supernatural universe is not far off, and that while the real battle is in the heavenlies, our part is not unimportant at all, because it is being observed by the unseen world. It is a like a one-way mirror. We are under observation.
As soon as this happens, Christians begin to lose the reality of their Christian lives...
...we have said that we are to love God enough to say "Thank you," even for the difficult things. We must immediately understand, as we say this, that this has no meaning whatsoever unless we live in a personal universe in which there is a personal God who objectively exists.
...the teaching that Christ is the bridegroom will bring forth fruit through me, ceases to be strange. The Bible insists that we live in reality in a supernatural universe...
The true Bible believing Christian is the one who lives in practice in this supernatural world.
Now picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It’s a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It's about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons. That flywheel is your company. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible, because momentum—mass times velocity—is what will generate superior economic results over time.
Right now, the flywheel is at a standstill. To get it moving, you make a tremendous effort. You push with all your might, and finally you get the flywheel to inch forward. After two or three days of sustained effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster. It takes a lot of work, but at last the flywheel makes a second rotation. You keep pushing steadily. It makes three turns, four turns, five, six. With each turn, it moves faster, and then—at some point, you can’'t say exactly when—you break through. The momentum of the heavy wheel kicks in your favor. It spins faster and faster, with its own weight propelling it. You aren't pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum building, its speed increasing.
This is the Flywheel Effect. It's what it feels like when you’re inside a company that makes the transition from good to great. Take Kroger, for example. How do you get a company with more than 50,000 people to embrace a new strategy that will eventually change every aspect of every grocery store? You don’t. At least not with one big change program.
Instead, you put your shoulder to the flywheel. That’s what Jim Herring, the leader who initiated the transformation of Kroger, told us. He stayed away from change programs and motivational stunts. He and his team began turning the flywheel gradually, consistently—building tangible evidence that their plans made sense and would deliver results.
“We presented what we were doing in such a way that people saw our accomplishments,”Herring says. “We tried to bring our plans to successful conclusions step by step, so that the mass of people would gain confidence from the successes, not just the words.”
Think about it for one minute. Why do most overhyped change programs ultimately fail? Because they lack accountability, they fail to achieve credibility, and they have no authenticity. It’s the opposite of the Flywheel Effect; it's the Doom Loop.
Companies that fall into the Doom Loop genuinely want to effect change—but they lack the quiet discipline that produces the Flywheel Effect. Instead, they launch change programs with huge fanfare, hoping to “enlist the troops.” They start down one path, only to change direction. After years of lurching back and forth, these companies discover that they’ve failed to build any sustained momentum. Instead of turning the flywheel, they've fallen into a Doom Loop: Disappointing results lead to reaction without understanding, which leads to a new direction—a new leader, a new program—which leads to no momentum, which leads to disappointing results. It’s a steady, downward spiral. Those who have experienced a Doom Loop know how it drains the spirit right out of a company.
Sandel...says that the most familiar liberal argument for abortion rights "claims to resolve the abortion question on the basis of neutrality and freedom of choice, without entering into the moral and religious controversy." Abortion rights supporters charge that their pro-life opponents are trying to impose a particular set of moral and religious views on society but that pro-choice people are not. They are simply arguing for freedom of choice. Sandel retorts:
"But this argument does not succeed. For if it's true that the developing fetus is morally equivalent to a child, then abortion is morally equivalent to infanticide. And few would maintain that government should let parents decide for themselves whether to kill their children. So the "pro-choice" position on the abortion debate is not really neutral on the underlying moral and theological question; it implicitly rests on the assumption that the Catholic Church's teaching on the moral status of the fetus...is false."
...the case for permitting abortion is no more neutral than the case for banning it. Both positions presupposesome answer to the underlying moral and religious controversy.
If we are to bring forth fruit in the Christian life, or rather, if Christ is to bring forth this fruit through us by the agency of the Holy Spirit, there must be a constant act of faith, of thinking: Upon the basis of your promises I am looking for you to fulfil them, O my Jesus Christ; bring forth your fruit through me into this poor world.
So now we stand before two streams of reality: those who died and are with Christ now; and we, who have the earnest of the Holy Spirit now and so, upon the reality of the finished work of Christ, have access - not in theory, but in reality - to the power of the crucified, risen, and glorified Christ, by the agency of the Holy Spirit.
True spirituality is not achieved in our own energy. The "how" of the kind of life we have spoken of, the true Christian life, true spirituality, is Romans 6:11 "Reckon ye also yourselves [there is the faith; then the negative aspect] to be dead indeed unto sin, [but then the positive] but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord." This is the "how" and there is no other. It is the power of the crucified, risen, and glorified Christ, through the agency of the Holy Spirit by faith.
In Romans 1-8 at the end of the section on the development of the Christian's sanctification, the work of the Holy Spirit, the agent of the whole Trinity, is brought into full force in the eighth chapter. In Romans 8:13 this is drawn together in this great central chapter of the work of the Holy Spirit to and for the Christian: "For [because] if you live after the flesh ye shall die; but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live." The Holy Spirit is specifically introduced to us here as the agent of the power and the person of the glorified Christ...
...we find in the early church not a group if strong men labouring together, but the work of the Holy Spirit bringing to them the power of the crucified and glorified Christ. It must also be for us.
...how: it is not to be done simply in our own strength. Neither is it only acting in practice upon the reality in God's sight [of rejected-slain-risen etc] ... But it is more than acting on this fact, even though it is so wonderful and should fill us with adoration. It is much more. The how is that the glorified Christ will do it through us. There is an active ingredient: He will be the doer.
...there is the agency of the Holy Spirit: "And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost [Spirit] which is given unto us" (Romans 5:5) What he is saying here is that you will not be ashamed experientially when you begin to act upon the reality, upon the teaching, as it has been presented. Why? "because the love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given to us."
...What makes the difference? This is the Holy Spirit, not just a 'new idea'. It is not to be in our own strength. There is a Holy Spirit who has been given to us to make this service possible.
...the doctrine of the mystical union of the church (those living now and those who have died) but I am not here thinking of it as a doctrine. I am thinking of the reality: that God ties us in the present time to the reality of those who are already in the other situation. They are there, they see Christ face-to-face, they are dead, and we have the earnest of the Holy Spirit...
[Galatians 2:20 -]
Here we are told that Christ really lives in me if I have accepted Christ as my Savior. In other words we have the words of Jesus to the thief on the cross, "Today shalt thou be with me in paradise." (Luke 23:43)...and mean it. To die is to be with the Lord. It is not just an idea; it is a reality. But at the same time Christ, the same Christ, gives the promise just as definitely that when I have accepted Christ as my Saviour, He lives in me. They are equal reality. They are two streams of present reality, both equally promised. The Christian dead are really with Christ now, and Christ really lives in the Christian. Christ lives in me. The Christ who was crucified - the Christ whose work is finished, the Christ who is glorified now - has promised (John 15) to bring forth fruit in the Christian, just as the sap of the vine brings forth fruit in the branch.
When God tells us to live as though we had died, gone to heaven, seen the truth there, and come back to this world, He is not asking us merely to act on some psychological motivation, but on what really is...Thus I am to live now by faith, rooted in the things which have been, such as Christ's death and resurrection; what is, such as second stream of reality in the unseen now; and what will be, such as my bodily resurrection and return with Christ...It is not just a case of accepting, there is to be an activeness in our passivity. We are to be creatures because that is what we are - creatures. But in Christ we are presented with an opportunity, a calling, to be a creature by choice, to be creatures glorified.
To use a simple example, it is often argues that corporal punishment violates the rights and human dignity of a child, and therefore should be illegal. Smith [The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse] that there is no secular, scientific basis for the idea of human dignity, or that human beings are valuable and inviolable. Historian Carl L. Becker famously said that, from a strictly scientific viewpoint, human beings must be viewed as "little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the world, carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn." Scientist Stephen Hawking agrees that " the human race is just chemical scum on a moderate size planet" and most recently Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker wrote an essay entitled "The Stupidity of Dignity". The prominent philosopher John Gray, who teaches at the London School of Economics, writes in his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and other Animals of the self-deception of those who embrace science and still hold to the tenets of liberal humanism, such as belief in human dignity and rights.
So, concluded Smith, to say that corporal punishment violates a child's dignity and rights seems more objective than to say "I think corporal punishment of children is morally offensive", but the latter statement is a more frank expression of how you reached your conclusion.
Sandel [in Three Kinds of Justice] lays out three current views of justice, which he calls "maximising welfare", "respecting freedom", and "promoting virtue". According to one framework, the most just action is that which brings the greatest good to the greatest number of people. According to the second, the most just action is that which respects the freedom and rights of each individual to live as he or she chooses. According to the last view, justice is served when people are acting as they ought to, in accord with morality and virtue. These views lead to sharply different conclusions about what is just in particular cases.
Why do we have such gridlock in our society over justice? Underneath all the notions of justice is a set of faith assumptions that are essentially religious and these are often not acknowledged...
Can't you imagine this man as he came back from heaven? He had seen it as a propositional truth, as a brute fact. He had been there, and looked at it, and then had come back. Would anything have ever looked the same to him again? It is as though he had died. It is as though he had been raised from the dead...the constant pressure to conform to the world about us, the social pressure and every other kind of pressure of our day - surely it would have been broken...All things would look different.
But Romans 6 does not leave us here, as though we were merely projecting our imaginations. There is more to it than this. "For in that He died, He died unto sin once for all; but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God" (Romans 6:10). Jesus Christ lives indeed in the presence of the Father. This is where we are called to live. We are to be dead in this present life! Dead both to good and bad, in order to be alive to the presence of God...
This is what it means now, as I wrote earlier, to love God enough to be contented, to love Him enough in the present world to say thank you in all the ebb and flow of life. When I am dead both to good and bad, I have my face turned towards God. And this is the place in which, by faith at the present moment of history, I am to be. When I am there, what am I? I am then the creature in the presence of the Creator, acknowledging that He is my Creator, and I am only a creature and nothing more. It is as though I am already in the grave and already before the face of God.
As Jesus died in history, and once for all was dead to sin, so now we are called in faith to count ourselves dead, in practice, at this present moment of history; not in some far-off world of religious ideas, but at this moment on the clock. By faith we are to live now as though we have already died...
...So the sixth point is that we are to live by faith now, in the present history, as though we had already been raised from death...
Now what does this mean in practice, so that it will not just be words going over our heads? First of all, it certainly means this: that in our thoughts and lives now we are to live as though we had already died, been to heaven and come back again as risen.
There is a lot of talk about how unjust or unfair this is—that finite decisions can have eternal consequences. To me, some of that talk sounds like a teenager rebelling against having to do homework or chores. Philosophical rebellion is respectable in our culture, but when we rebel against the very conditions of our existence, I'm not sure what to say: That God should have created a different world with different conditions?
Our objection to the inevitability of eternity, of course, is one sided. We like the idea that good finite decisions might have happy eternal consequences. But of course, this is just as unfair as its opposite. Why should a finite decision be rewarded with infinite rewards? Maybe the universalist gets this when he postulates that what eternity is about is learning to make an infinite number of right decisions that will be awarded a life of infinitude.
I for one find this a dreary and hopeless scenario. What I know about myself is this: I am unable to make right decisions and to perform right actions, certainly not to the degree that they merit an infinity of reward. What I know about myself is this:For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. (Rom. 7:18-20, ESV)
If I'm going to be a disciple of Jesus then I'm going to be dying...if I'm not dying that will be clear over time. But if I'm not dying and I'm going to continue to think of myself as a disciple, I'll need to be self-deceived either about the call of a disciple to die or about the fact that I'm not dying...
If on the other hand we are dying to self, we will find that the need for self-deception dissipates over time. We'll not need to deceive ourselves about the call of the disciple to die to self, since we'll have heeded that call. We'll not need to deceive ourselves to the degree to which we are not yet dead, since we'll also be aware of the degree to which we have in fact died.
So let's not merely use the spiritual language of the cross and self-mortification. Let's adopt proven and effective plans for putting to death the various addictions that prevent us from moving more fully into the life of Jesus. Let us move out of the darkness and into the light with respect to our sin. The less we have to hide from ourselves and others, the less we'll be moved into the direction of self-deception.
The order - rejected, slain, raised -is also the order of the Christian life of true spirituality; there is no other...
...if we forget the relationship of this order to us as Christians, then we will have a sterile orthodoxy, and we have no true Christian life. Christian life will wither and die; spirituality in any true Biblical sense, will come to an end...
...so I must ask, very gently: how much thought does the necessity of death by choice provoke...how much prayer do we make for our children and those we love that they may indeed be willing to walk, by the grace of God, through the steps of rejection and being slain? ... We must not think that we can rush on to the last step without the reality of being rejected and slain, not just at that point in our lives when we become Christians but as a continuing situation in our lives.
[Badger: I wonder how much truth to this is indicated by my own instinctive hope that we can get through this bit and onto the the more positive, really spiritual stuff? And by how I was struck at his list of verses concerning our need to die to self? He clearly states there are huge positives next to such verses, but:]
We must walk through the first half ("knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Him") before we can get on to the second half (" that the body of sin might be destroyed that henceforth we should not serve sin"). I think I perceive that most Christians even read the first half of those verses faster, in order to get to the second, "happy" part of the verses, but this is a mistake. We love to skip along, but one does not get on the other side of the door without going through it, and we do not get to the second joyous part of these verses without passing through the first part.
I am to face the cross of Christ in every part of my life and with the whole man. The cross of Christ is to be a reality to me not only once for all at my conversion, but all through my life as a Christian. True spirituality does not stop at the negative, but without the negative - in comprehension and practice - we are not ready to go.
True Spirituality, pp 22, 23, 25, 26.
This is why the lifestyle in the next stratum up from wherever you are situated will look to you as though it teeters on the edge of exorbitance and gross materialism - but it won't look so to those situated there. For them it will be the strata above them that satisfies that description. We surround ourselves with those willing to ignore the questions with respect to our particular standard of living. In so doing, we make possible a blindness not otherwise possible to the grip of materialism. The last thing a rich man wants to do is accuse his rich neighbour of being too rich.
Concern is a convenient disguise for anger, since 'concern' for someone is a perfectly legitimate sentiment, and it seems to justify many of the behaviours one would expect from someone who's just plain hurt and mad.
...I am to love God enough to be contented...
If the contentment goes and the giving of thanks goes, we are not loving God as we should, and proper desire has become coveting against God. This inward area is the first place of loss of true spirituality. The outward is always just a result of it.
Often, after a person is born again and asks "What shall I do next?" he is given a list of things, usually of a limited nature and primarily negative...
...there almost always comes into being another group of Christians that rises up and begins to work against such a list of taboos; thus there is a tendency toward a struggle in Christian circles between those who set up a certain list of taboos and those who, feeling there is something wrong with this, say "Away with all taboos, away with all lists." Both of these groups can be right and both can be wrong, depending on how they approach the matter....
...when I take hold of [a list of negatives] and say "This is too superficial", and I push it aside, I must see what I am doing. I am not confronted with a libertine concept, but I am confronted with the whole Ten Commandments and with the law of Love. So even if we are dealing only with outward commands, we have not moved into a looser life; we have moved into something much more profound and heart-searching. As a matter of fact, when we have done with our honest wrestling before God, we will find we will be observing at least some of the taboos on these lists. But having gone deeper, we find that we will be observing them for a completely different reason. Curiously enough we often come around in a circle through our liberty, through the study of the deeper teaching, and we find we do want to keep these things. But now not for the same reason - that of social pressure. It is no longer merely a matter of holding to an accepted list in order that Christians think well of us.
