“Devotions”: Times we especially focus on God.

DEVOTIONS di'voʊ.ʃənz noun. Prayers, religious observances, or worship.

[Devotional di'voʊ.ʃən.əl adjective.]

It’s a really good idea for Christians to block off several minutes of time, every single day, solely for the purpose of connecting with God. A little bible, a little prayer, a little meditation or contemplation. Something which helps us focus our lives on God.

’Cause life is busy. Or it’s not really, but we just suck at time management, so we never make the time for God. You know how there are certain friends and family members you just never hear from?—they’re either way too busy, or time with you frankly isn’t one of their priorities? Well, for a lot of Christians, we’re in danger of having that kind of relationship with God. One where we sorta take him for granted in our lives, but when’s the last time we really sat down with him and talked?

So, devotional time.

Part of your average Christian’s struggle with devotions, comes from the fact they really don’t know what to do with themselves during this time. What should we pray? What should we read, and meditate on?

That was my struggle as a teenager and young adult: Nobody had properly taught me how to have my own devotional time. They talked about having one. “I sit down with my coffee and my bible, and read, and pray, and have my quiet time.” Okay; what d’you read? How many chapters?—or do you read a paragraph and spend the rest of the time meditating on it? What d’you pray?—and how do you pray for 15-minute stretches when you only have two minutes’ worth of material?

Whenever I was at youth functions, the youth pastors would lead the devotional times. But I’m gonna be blunt: Those weren’t proper devotional times. Those were mini-lectures disguised as worship. Pastor’d discuss the dumb things we kids did, or might do, and how we oughta think about such things, and lead us to pray, “Lord Jesus, help me behave like the pastor was talking about,” even if deep down we didn’t really care.

Some of the adults I knew were dependent on devotional books and magazines. (“Devotionals,” for short.) One of the more popular devotional magazines at my church was Our Daily Bread. I still know plenty of folks who make a point of reading through Oswald Chambers’ 365-day devotional, My Utmost for His Highest, every year. I own a few devotional books: Brief writings by clever Christian authors, arranged in 365 clips for my convenience, with a bible passage to read for edification, and a brief prayer in case I can’t think of anything to tell God.

I get why people use the canned material: They don’t know where to start. The problem? That’s not your relationship with God. That’s you reading about Oswald Chambers’s relationship with God; or about the relationship of whoever wrote the devotional you’re using this year. Praying their prayers instead of your own. Meditating on their ideas instead of the scriptures. Yeah, some of ’em have good ideas, but still: Ever call up a friend on the phone, then read somebody else’s letters to them? It’s kinda like that.

No, I’m not saying ditch the devotional books. Keep ’em if you like ’em. But don’t confuse them for proper devotions. It’s gotta consist of you and the Holy Spirit. Any facilitators have gotta be temporary, there till you get the hang of doing this on your own.

The Nashville Statement, and sexism.

Last Tuesday, 29 August, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood released a manifesto they titled the Nashville Statement. Likely they balked at calling it the Nashville Creed, ’cause even though the creeds predate Catholicism, there’s still a sizable number of anti-Catholic Protestants that figure everything which took place before 1510 is “Catholic” and therefore wrong. But I digress.

In short, the statement is a declaration against homosexuality and transsexuality. Supposedly it presents the “biblical” view on these subjects, although if you read it y’might notice it neither quotes, nor provides references to, the bible. Whatsoever.

Nor does it refer to the Holy Spirit. Whatsoever. Supposedly any repentance and transformation is gonna be achieved by “the grace of God in Christ,” i.e. the force of God’s loving attitude, as opposed to the person of the trinity who empowers change and applies grace. You’ll see in a bit why this significant lapse in trinitarian thinking oughta raise some eyebrows.

Obviously the Statement’s been getting pushback from pagans who wanna know where on earth these guys get off condemning them. And of course from theologically liberal Christians who feel it’s graceless to condemn people for an issue which they believe is not entirely settled. And of course from gay Christians.

I’m not theologically liberal. (Though people who consider me more liberal than they are, will certainly take issue with that statement.) Nor am I gay. Nonetheless I have two issues with the Statement which prevent me from signing off on it, much less signing it.

The most obvious, and the one that’s not gonna need a lot of commentary from me, is its divisive intent. Like I said, it’s an attempt at a creed: This is how they figure all true Christians should believe, and if you agree you’re orthodox, and if you don’t you’re heretic. The Statement draws a pretty obvious line in the sand, and expects people to choose a side. But divisiveness, need I remind you, is a work of the flesh. Ga 5.20 Instead of loving our neighbor as ourselves, this Statement is gonna make us bite and devour one another, Ga 5.14-15 and do nothing to further God’s kingdom.

Yeah, I know. Many a Christian will insist the kingdom’s gotta be pure. By which they mean as little sin in it as possible. I agree. How do we go about doing that? Discipleship. We encourage people to follow Jesus’s teachings and the Holy Spirit’s leading. It’s the Spirit’s job to sort all that stuff out. Jn 16.8 It’s not a manifesto’s job. It’s not our job either: Our job is to love our neighbors and lead them to Jesus.

The reason Christians swap the job of loving our neighbors, for the job of denouncing sin? Obviously they hate sin. Less obviously, they don’t so much care for their neighbors. The neighbors sin, and they hate sin. Their “good news,” which is no longer so good, becomes about how the neighbors are sinning, and the world is perishing. The only bright spot is how Jesus saves us from perishing, Jn 3.16 but the rest of the preaching? Death, hellfire, and damnation.

Well, enough about that. The other issue I have is how the Nashville Statement is a subtle declaration against egalitarianism, the belief that women are priests, teachers, and ministers in the church, same as men. And that’s the particular axe I’m gonna grind today.

“Tough love”: Anger disguised as love.

TOUGH LOVE təf ləv noun. Promotion of a person’s welfare by enforcing certain constraints on them, or demanding they take responsibility for their actions.

2. Restrictions on government benefits, designed to encourage self-help.

When I wrote about love, I mentioned there are plenty more things our culture calls “love.” C.S. Lewis listed four, though he was looking at classical antiquity. Your dictionary’s gonna have way more than four; I bunched ’em into eight categories.

I also pointed out it’s important for us Christians, whenever we’re talking about love, to stick with Paul and Sosthenes’s definition as closely as possible:

1 Corinthians 13.4-8 KWL

4 Love has patience. Love behaves kindly. It doesn’t act with uncontrolled emotion.

It doesn’t draw attention to how great it is. It doesn’t exaggerate.

5 It doesn’t ignore others’ considerations. It doesn’t look out for itself. It doesn’t provoke behavior.

It doesn’t plot evil. 6 It doesn’t delight in doing wrong: It delights in truth.

7 It puts up with everything, puts trust in everything,

puts hope in everything, survives everything. 8 Love never falls down.

Because from time to time people, including Christians, are gonna try to slip another thing our culture calls “love” past us, and claim we’ve gotta practice that. Usually it’ll be hospitality, which looks like love but is totally conditional. Whereas charitable love, the stuff the apostles described in 1 Corinthians, doesn’t keep track.

Another way we know we’re talking authentic charitable love, and not one of the other varieties of love, is by the way charitable love never contradicts the other fruit of the Spirit. Love isn’t joyless, impatient, unkind, evil, unfaithful, emotionally wild, or out-of-control.

Hence “tough love,” a popular form of “love” our culture tries to pass off as the real thing, would be a really good example of fruitless, inauthentic love. Because tough love is unkind.

The justification for tough love is that there’s love behind it: We want what’s best for ’em, and that’s love, isn’t it? And in the long run, that’s what they’ll have. But in the short term, in order to get us to the goal, we’ve gotta be unloving to these people. Contrary to the 1 Corinthians 13 passage, we gotta be impatient and unkind. Gotta get angry. Gotta emphasize, “This is because I love you, and it’s for your own good.” Gotta ignore their pleas for help, compassion, generosity, or grace—those things aren’t doing ’em any good! Gotta worry about yourself, and notice how their awful behavior is affecting you. Gotta stop putting up with them, stop trusting them, stop hoping they’ll get better, stop. Quit enabling. Just quit.

The justification is that the ends justify the means. It’s okay to be awful if it’ll all work out in the end. As William Shakespeare put it in Hamlet’s mouth, “I must be cruel only to be kind.” 3.4.178

But despite our good intentions, we’re justifying cruelty. We’re plotting evil. Which ain’t love, 1Co 13.7 no matter how thin you slice the bologna.

Same-gender marriage in the United States.

Depending on your politics, same-gender marriage is either a done deal or a huge issue.

I think we can figure out which camp you’re in, based on what you call it. I’m gonna describe it as same-gender marriage, ’cause that’s what it is. Conservatives seem to prefer “same-sex marriage” and “gay marriage,” and of course cruder terms. Progressives frequently use the term “marriage equality,” ’cause they’re trying to emphasize how, as they see it, it’s no more nor less than marriage—so why add adjectives?

Me, I know a lot of conservatives. To their minds, same-gender marriage is gonna be the ruin of the United States.

Mostly that’s because their beliefs consist of a combination of replacement theology and civic idolatry. Replacement theology presumes Christianity has taken the place of ancient Israel, and all the LORD’s promises to Moses and the Hebrews in the wilderness, now apply to us present-day Christians and our nations. Civic idolatry presumes this is especially true of the United States; that because of our Christian forebears, and indicated by God’s blessings of abundant wealth and military supremacy, America is God’s primary Christian nation. Americans will grudgingly accept some other nations are sorta Christian… but nobody’s as Christian as we are. (Now cue the chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!”)

The catch: If the United States has superseded Israel, and likewise has a special covenant with the LORD, when Americans violate his will, the cycle’s gonna kick in and God’ll let our enemies smite us. Or he’ll personally smite us himself with hurricanes. Either way.

I should point out if replacement theology were in any way not rubbish, God would’ve started smiting Americans long before we declared our independence. ’Cause slavery. True, there’s slavery in the bible, and God even had commands about how the Hebrews were to make and treat slaves. But by those commands’ metric, American slavery was a ghastly abomination. It wasn’t a penitentiary system. It was kidnapping, dehumanization, and torture. If the Civil War was, as Abraham Lincoln believed, God’s judgment upon American slavery, we got off so lightly.

Need I mention all the other violations of God’s covenant with the Hebrews which Americans—including “good Christians”—violate hourly? We’d be here a while.

Same-gender marriage zeroes in on only one command of the 613: The command prohibiting male-on-male sexual activity. Lv 18.22 It’s not one of the 10 commandments, nor one of Jesus’s top two, but conservative Christians have elevated it to maybe number 13. To them, it offends God like no other.

The real problem? It offends them like no other. They personally find homosexuality distasteful. That’s why they can’t “live and let live,” like they do with all the other commands they ignore. Or even themselves commit, like coveting and Sabbath-breaking. This one captures their attention because it creeps ’em out. Hence their quickness to condemn it, and everything relating to it… as they look the other way at snobbery, lying, injustice, evil schemes, and all the stuff God’s truly outraged by. Pr 6.16-19 Their priorities take precedence.

Do you trust your church’s leadership?

Either you trust your pastor and your church’s leadership structure, or you really don’t. Ain’t no third option.

You may claim there is so a third option; that I’ve made this sound like a black-and-white issue when there are plenty of shades of gray. Y’see, we trust everyone up to a point—because everyone but Jesus is fallible. So we trust the leadership of our church to a point. After all, the devil’s constantly on the prowl, 1Pe 5.8 tempting church leaders to fumble and fail, so we gotta be on our guard constantly, lest we crash and burn right along with ’em.

Okay, in principle I have no issue with this reason. Makes sense. Seems consistent with the Christian principle of testing everything. 1Th 5.21

But in practice, it becomes an excuse for holding a church at arm’s length. In practice, it’s not that Christians trust their leaders for the time being, yet stay vigilant lest they slip up: They stay disconnected. Uncommitted. Ready to bail at the first sign of trouble. Heck, at the first sign of discomfort.

Sometimes for good reason. If you’ve been burned by church before, I don’t blame you at all for being slow to trust your new church. But just as often it’s for entirely selfish reasons: We don’t wanna recognize any church leader’s authority in our lives. We don’t wanna be accountable to anyone. We don’t wanna submit to one another out of reverence for Christ Jesus. Ep 5.21 Easier to never recognize ’em as authorities in the first place, and disguise our fear of commitment as “discernment.” Well, I call rubbish.

How to annoy people. Or not.

When I first got into the newspaper business, I regularly wrote opinion pieces. Got my own column in a few different papers. I would, on occasion, deliberately try to bug people.

My justification for it was:

• Really good writing pushes people’s buttons.
• So they get angry. At least they’re reading.
• I have every right to express my opinions.
• Those who get outraged by this stuff? Cranks.
• It’s all in good fun.

Yeah, I was a real jerk about it. I’d write really obnoxious stuff sometimes.

At the same time—more of my youthful and spiritual immaturity coming out—I was also under the misbelief that opinion pieces actually could change people’s minds over to my way of thinking. They don‘t work that way. Only fools read the op/ed pages to learn what to think. Most of ’em read to learn what others think, but for the most part they already have their minds made up. They’d either discover I agreed with them, and feel vindicated; or discover I believed otherwise, and feel annoyed. And if I annoyed them often enough, most would quit reading.

So when I tried to a rise out of people, I wasn’t as successful as I expected. I’d try to be super annoying, and my fans would cheer me on, and everyone else would dismiss me. (And rightly so.)

The outraged responses always came from the stuff I never expected.

Fr’instance, I once used the word “crap” in a newspaper column. As profanities go, that one’s really tame, so I used it and thought nothing more of it.

But we had this one regular nut-mail contributor. Some old guy who contributed to every local newspaper. Frequently he’d mix up his newspapers, and write to one paper to comment about something he read in another. And every time he found a word he considered inappropriate, he’d demand the paper fire the writer. That was his only solution to any problem: Fire people. He suggested I be fired many times. Naturally nobody took him seriously.

So, “crap” drew his ire. But none of my deliberate attempts at outrage got people to respond. It’s like I was waving red flags to the color-blind.

Eventually the Holy Spirit convinced me this was rotten Christian behavior. If I found it fun, it was evil fun. There’s no good excuse for it; it doesn’t promote God’s kingdom whatsoever; it had to go. So I repented and cut it out.

Still occasionally, unintentionally, offended people, though. Still do.

Again, it’s all for the stuff I never expect. I get misunderstood. Or somebody’s looking for offenses, and take me out of context. Or a story’s going round that bends my words till they’re unrecognizable; gossip’s evil like that.

Paradise: The nicer part of the afterlife.

PARADISE 'pɛr.ə.daɪs noun. In the afterlife, the place of the blessed. [Usually equated with heaven.]

2. The garden of Eden.

3. An ideal, happy, peaceful, or picturesque place or state.

[Paradisal pɛr.ə'daɪz.əl adjective.]

Perdís was an ancient Persian word for “a park.” Persian parks were particularly known for their decorative, ornamental gardens.

Both Hebrew and Greek borrowed the word. Late Biblical Hebrew turned it into pardés, which is found in the bible thrice. Sg 4.13, Ec 2.5, Ne 2.8 Ancient Greek turned it into parádeisos, also found thrice. Lk 23.43, 2Co 12.4, Rv 2.7 It’s where we get our English word paradise.

Of course in English a paradise refers to any nice place. I tend to hear it describe tropical beaches, which are hardly garden-like. But the Pharisees grew to use it primarily to describe Eden, the place of the first humans. And the afterlife.

Like Ecclesiastes commented, nobody really knew what happened to a human’s spirit after death. Ec 3.21 But they speculated. To them, once the body was in sh’ól/“the grave,” once the neféš/“soul, lifeforce” was extinguished, the spirit would go elsewhere and await resurrection. In the Old Testament, “elsewhere” was the same for both the righteous and the wicked. Ec 9.10 They didn’t imagine it as a place of reward nor punishment. It was simply where the dead went.

No, that’s not a pleasant idea. That’s why over time the Pharisees came to believe God sorted people in the “elsewhere” for reward and punishment, before resurrection. Different parts of the afterlife. A restful part, and a hellish part.

Y’know that story Jesus told of Lazarus and the rich man? Lk 16.19-31 Like that. The rich man’s torment, the Pharisees designated ge-Henna, after the burning landfill outside Jerusalem. Lazarus’s comfort, in contrast, was designated paradise, as if the LORD had teleported Eden into the afterlife, and let the ghosts of the deceased wander around there. (Not sure what they’d do with the fruit trees, though.) Yeah, both these terms are metaphors. Torment wasn’t literally a burning garbage fire, although it was mighty bad. Comfort wasn’t literally Eden.

Now, here’s the problem: Is this what our afterlife is gonna consist of? ’Cause for most Christians, this simply won’t be good enough. Our preachers promised us mansions in heaven. We want that. We don’t wanna lounge around with Abraham and await Jesus’s return; we wanna see our dead relatives and friends, then find Jesus and give him a big ol’ hug (and maybe weep on his toga for a bit), then run into the fields and play with our childhood pets which died years ago. We don’t just want comfort; we want our eternal reward. Right away.

So we wanna hear Jesus has significantly changed things since bible times. Here’s the problem: Bible doesn’t say he’s changed a thing. But Christian mythology sure does, and that’s the story Christians prefer.