Bliss

I don’t think this is what Mr Bellamy had in mind when he wrote this song, but here’s what I’m thinking about as I listen to it:

Everything about you is how I’d want to be…

“My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” – Philippians 1:23

“we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” – 1 John 3:2

Everything about you resonates happiness, now I won’t settle for less.

“in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures for evermore.” – Psalm 16:11

“Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.” – Psalm 73:25

Everything about you is so easy to love…

“My beloved… is altogether lovely” – Song of Solomon 5:10-16

Give me all the peace and joy in your mind.

“You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you” – Isaiah 26:3

“Restore to me the joy of your salvation” – Psalm 51:12

How God’s Grace Makes Us Just

In Matthew 22, a lawyer asked Jesus a question to test him: “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Last time I did one of these, some of you may remember, I reviewed John Piper’s Desiring God. I don’t know whether it came across as I intended, but the main point about that book that made me want to recommend it to you was that it made me want to devote my whole life to worshiping God. Looking back on it now, I would summarise by saying it encouraged me to really try to obey that first great commandment.

I used to think loving God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength was only for the really super-spiritual Christians, it was unrealistic for just an ordinary person like me; but God used John Piper to change my view of His law, to see loving and obeying God as a joyful thing to do, and to see that my joy in God glorifies Him, and this gave me a new motivation for taking the first great commandment seriously and aiming for a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. Obviously I still fall far short of His glory, and I’m continuously becoming more and more aware that I’m justified solely by His grace, but my greater awareness of how unworthy I am just reveals more of how amazing God’s grace really is. So now, instead of attempting the impossible, thinking I should try to repay God for the favour he’s done for me by forgiving my sin, I’ve been inspired to really try to love God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength, just for the pleasure of glorifying Him.

Now the book I’m recommending today is, I think, a logical progression from Desiring God, because this book did a similar thing for me with the second great commandment: to love my neighbour as myself. It’s by Tim Keller, and it’s called Generous Justice, which has the subtitle How God’s Grace Makes Us Just.

So to start with, a little bit about the author:

Tim Keller was born in Pennsylvania, in the United States, in 1950. He studied at Westminster Seminary, and was pastor of a church in Virginia for 9 years before he moved to Manhattan in New York with his wife and children, and there he founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Now obviously, we don’t judge a church by the number of attendees, but hopefully it’s encouraging and exciting to hear about places where God is at work, bringing people into His church. So, in early 1989 (while Ed Collier was writing to Aunty Rachel), there were 15 people meeting weekly to pray about planting a new church in Manhattan. They held their first worship service on the evening of the 9^th of April that year; by Christmas, the regular attendance at their morning and evening services was about 250. By early 1993, they were holding 4 services every Sunday, but they had still outgrown the building they had been using, which seated nearly 400. In 2007, they added a 5^th (!) service, and the average weekly attendance is now about 4,500. Plus they’ve planted a number of other churches, so Redeemer has sister churches, daughter churches, and granddaughter churches on several continents.

The first time I came across Tim Keller was through Sarah, who comes to our church while she’s in Bath to study at the university. She was reading his popular apologetics book The Reason for God on a Sunday afternoon. However, the first of his books that I read that really got my attention is called The Prodigal God, which I bought mainly just because I was intrigued by the title (it turns out the word ‘prodigal’ doesn’t actually mean what I thought it meant). I strongly recommend that book too. It’s a very short book on Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith.

At this point I’ll just give a very quick mention to another book I read before Generous Justice, which also played a significant role in making me want to love others as Jesus loved me: Francis Chan’s Crazy Love made me want to give everything I have to display God’s love to the world. It made me think about how I spend my time and money. I mean, what do I want money for? There are so many people who need it so much more than I do, and it’s not like I’m going to need it in heaven! And what am I doing with my time? There are so many people in the world that need help in some way, and I only have a few years on this planet to try and serve them in whatever way I can.

I’ll also mention another book by Tim Keller, which is quite similar to Generous Justice: Ministries of Mercy, gets more into suggested practical steps for carrying out justice, and includes an introduction with a lot of statistics, which are interesting, but things have changed a bit since the book was published in 1989, plus the statistics are from the U.S., so they’re not all relevant to us in the UK. Generous Justice focuses more on the universal timeless principles.

So, Generous Justice. I think it’ll be useful to start in the introduction, where Keller explains why he wrote the book: He says:

“Most people know that Jesus came to bring forgiveness and grace. Less well known is the Biblical teaching that a true experience of the grace of Jesus Christ inevitably motivates a man or woman to seek justice in the world.”

And apparently while he was writing this book, lots of people asked him “who are you writing this book for?”

So Keller explains that he had four groups of people in mind when he wrote this book:

1. Firstly, people who are Christians, and have a concern for social justice, but don’t necessarily see a connection between the two.

2. Secondly, (and this is the group I was in,) it’s for Christians who approach the idea of “doing justice” with suspicion, because, he says:

In the twentieth century the American church divided between the liberal mainline that stressed social justice and the fundamentalist churches that emphasized personal salvation.

Because the liberals’ emphasis on social justice was often accompanied by a shift in theology, including rejection of the traditional doctrines of Scripture and atonement,

In the minds of many orthodox Christians… “doing justice” is inextricably linked with the loss of sound doctrine…

3. And the third group Keller wrote this book for is those people in the liberal camp who do emphasise justice at the expense of sound Biblical doctrine, and he argues that you don’t have to change classic Biblical evangelical teaching to do ministry to the poor. On the contrary, such ministry flows directly out of that teaching. He says:

When the Spirit enables us to understand what Christ has done for us, the result is a life poured out in deeds of justice and compassion for the poor.

4. And fourthly, the book is for people who think religion poisons everything, that all religion does is divide people into tribes and start wars. And obviously Keller hopes to show that that’s not the case.

Now I usually find it helpful, when I start reading a book, to look through the contents to get a rough idea of where we’re going, so the chapter headings of Generous Justice are: 1: ‘What Is Doing Justice?’, 2: ‘Justice and The Old Testament’, 3: ‘What did Jesus Say About Justice?‘, 4: ‘Justice and Your Neighbour’, 5: ‘Why Should We Do Justice?’, 6: ‘How Should We Do Justice?’, 7: ‘Doing Justice In The Public Square’, and 8: ‘Peace, Beauty and Justice’.

So in Chapter 1 Keller explains what he means by “justice”, using texts like Psalm 146 verses 7 to 9:

He executes justice for the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets prisoners free, the LORD gives sight to the blind, he lifts up those who are bowed down, the LORD loves those who live justly. The LORD watches over the immigrant and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.

Then Chapter 2, on Justice in the Old Testament, starts with a couple of verses from everyone at my church’s new favourite book of the Bible, Deuteronomy, chapter 15 verses 4 & 5:

There should be no poor among you, for in the land the LORD your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the LORD your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today.

And this Chapter includes some thoughts on what the Bible says are the causes of poverty, and I should probably be careful mentioning the ‘p’ word, but I will say that my political views have shifted a bit as a result of this and other books I’ve read in the last year. Keller says:

One of the main reasons we cannot fit the Bible’s approach into a liberal or conservative economic model is the Scripture’s highly nuanced understanding of the causes of poverty. Liberal theorists believe that the “root causes” of poverty are always social forces beyond the control of the poor, such as racial prejudice, economic deprivation, joblessness, and other inequities. Conservative theorists put the blame on the breakdown of the family, the loss of character qualities such as self-control and discipline, and other habits and practices of the poor themselves. By contrast, the causes of poverty as put forth in the Bible are remarkably balanced.

Next we hear what Jesus had to say about justice, including Luke 14 verses 12 & 13:

When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbours; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind…

Then Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan gets its own chapter. I started off this review with Matthew 22 and the first and second great commandments. In Luke 10 there’s something very similar, as Jesus is asked

“What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” [Jesus] said to him, “What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?” So he answered and said, “’You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbour as yourself’” And [Jesus] said to him, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.” But he, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?”

And most of my readers are probably pretty familiar with Jesus’ answer to that question (if not, you can read the parable of the Good Samaritan here), but Keller makes a very convicting point:

The lawyer wanted to justify himself. He was hoping Jesus would interpret the law in a way that would allow him to feel like he was obeying the law well enough that God would be pleased with him. He hoped that, as long as he kept to a certain standard of loving people which was higher than most people could manage, God would let him off loving that one really annoying person. Because we all know there are some people who are really difficult to love, and God understands; don’t worry, as long as you love the people who love you back, that will be good enough. But obviously that’s not what Jesus says. He doesn’t let us get away with that. He seriously means for us to love even the filthy Samaritans as much as we love ourselves.

He also borrows from a Jonathan Edwards’ sermon called “The Duty of Charity to the Poor” to answer some objections that people raise against the idea of doing social justice. Two of the objections he deals with are that a) the poor person is not grateful for the help I’ve given them, and b) it’s his own fault that he’s in that state. I’m sure we’ve all thought of both of these reasons not to help someone at some point. Well, Edwards defeats these objections by pointing out that:

Christ loved us, and was kind to us, and was willing to relieve us, though we were very hateful persons, of an evil disposition, not deserving of any good… so we should be willing to be kind to those who are… very undeserving.

The rules of the gospel direct us to forgive them… [for] Christ hath loved us, pitied us, and greatly laid out himself to relieve us from that want and misery which we brought on ourselves by our own folly and wickedness.

Then, in case you haven’t heard enough reasons yet, we reach the chapter that asks “Why should we do justice?”

I particularly liked his quote from a sermon by Robert Murray M’Cheyne, who said:

Some of you pray night and day to be branches of the true vine; you pray to be made all over in the image of Christ… Oh, my dear Christians! If you would be like Christ, give much, give often, give freely, to the vile and poor, the thankless and the undeserving. Christ is glorious and happy and so will you be. It is not your money I want, but your happiness. Remember his own word, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

And I think I could sum up the effect of this book on me by saying that God’s used it to make me really believe that that’s true; that it really is better to give than to receive.

Then we get on to how we should do justice.

And in this chapter Keller makes it absolutely clear that doing social justice should not replace evangelism, but he claims that doing justice works together with preaching the gospel to show Christ to be attractive. He says:

If we confuse evangelism and social justice we lose what is the single most unique service that Christians can offer the world. Others, alongside believers, can feed the hungry. But Christians have the gospel of Jesus by which men and women can be born again into the certain hope of eternal life. No one else can make such an invitation. However, many Christians who care intensely about evangelism see the work of doing justice as a distraction for Christians that detracts from the mission of evangelism. That is also a grave error.

When a city perceives a church as existing strictly and only for itself and its own members, the preaching of that church will not resonate with outsiders. But if neighbours see church members loving their city through astonishing, sacrificial deeds of compassion, they will be much more open to the church’s message. Deeds of mercy and justice should be done out of love, not simply as a means to the end of evangelism. And yet there is no better way for Christians to lay a foundation for evangelism than by doing justice.

Then the Chapter on Justice in the Public Square discusses how we should interact with the world as we seek to bring about justice.

And we finish with Peace, Beauty & Justice.

And we return to Jonathan Edwards, who argued in his book ‘The Nature of True Virtue’ that:

human beings will only be drawn out of themselves into unselfish acts of service to others when they see God as supremely beautiful. Here’s an example to illustrate what he means. If you listen to Bach because you want people to think you are cultured (or because you want to think it of yourself), then the music is only a means to achieve some other end, namely the enhancement of your reputation. But if you play Bach because you find it not just useful but beautiful, then you are listening to it as satisfying in and of itself.

Edwards taught that if, through an experience of God’s grace, you come to find him beautiful, then you do not serve the poor because you want to think well of yourself, or in order to get a good reputation… You do it because serving the poor honours and pleases God, and honouring and pleasing God is a delight to you in and of itself.

So, whether you read any of these books I’ve recommended or not, I hope I’m doing a little bit to make the thought of loving God, and loving other people, and acting that love out in practice, sound like a delightful thing for you to do.

Now, it’s likely that the better you know me, the more you’re thinking “what a hypocrite!” I mean, I’m saying these books I’ve read have made me want to use every penny in my bank account and every second of every day to glorify God by serving those in need, and implying that you should do the same, but really, you can’t see that it’s made any visible difference to my life at all… and to be honest, I kind of have to agree. The more I think about this task, the more I’m aware of my failure to carry it out. As I was preparing this book review, I was thinking that, to prove how good this book is, I should go out and do something really big that I could point to and say “look how much I’ve done for the poor since I read this book”, and I do think my lack of action has meant I’m failing to recommend this book in the way it deserves, but at the same time, I don’t want you to look to me as an example of how to live; I want you to look to Jesus for your example. If I waited to talk about this until I felt that I was living it out well enough that I’d be a good example for you to follow, well, we’d be waiting a long time, let’s put it that way. So instead, I hope you’ll read this book and we can encourage each other to live it out in practice, and follow Jesus’ example more closely.

Hate Religion, Love Jesus

You may have seen this video in the last few days:

Perhaps you also saw The Amazing Atheist’s response (contains bad language):

I sent the guy the following message; perhaps others might find it interesting too.

Hi,

I think you’re right that Bethke isn’t very clear about the difference between Jesus and religion.
I think you’d probably already made your mind up that it was a load of rubbish before you watched it, but in case you’re actually an honest enquirer, I’d like to have a go at explaining a bit more clearly what I think Bethke was trying to get across.

You summed up Christianity as follows: “the only way to redeem yourself is… you gotta go to church, and there’s this book called the Bible, it’s full of a lot of neat stuff, you gotta believe all that, and then you can go to heaven”.

Bethke was trying to say that actually, going to heaven does not depend on how often you go to church, or how much time you spend reading the Bible. The key line is “religion says do; Jesus says done.”

God doesn’t want you to do anything. He wants to demonstrate His immense love by the things He does for you.

You rightly point out that Jesus isn’t just a pal to play Xbox with. He does want us to love Him more than our mother and father. If He was just a random guy who lived in the desert 2000 years ago, it would be an outrageous demand. C.S. Lewis would be pleased that you haven’t fallen into the common mistake of calling Jesus a good teacher, but nothing more. If Jesus wasn’t the Son of God, he was either evil or crazy (or both).

However, if you could, try to imagine for a moment that God does actually exist, and that He gave you everything you enjoy in this world. Perhaps you could imagine Him like a father who gives his children loads of great gifts. Let’s say a man gave his son an iPad for Christmas (not as valuable as the loving family God’s given you, but still a fairly decent present). If the kid loved the iPad more than the dad who gave it to him, to the point where the dad asks the kid to put the iPad down and spend some time with his old man and the kid’s response is to tell his dad to go f*** himself, I think you’d agree the dad would be justified in being a bit annoyed.

So, if that’s your response to God, do you think it’s unfair that He might eventually say enough is enough and cut you off? (Note: I think the traditional picture of hell is a bit distorted from what the Bible teaches; no one will be punished more than they deserve, but justice does dictate that there is a price to pay for our rebellion against our creator.)

The difference between religion and Jesus is that religion says we have to try to earn forgiveness from God, but Jesus says no, I want to show off the amount of love I have for you, I will take the cost of forgiving you. I just ask that you will accept it as a free gift.

Hope this helps.

Is It All In My Head?

Thanks to Derren Brown and Russell Crowe, I’ve recently been looking at Christianity differently than I ever have before.

At the time I watched Derren Brown’s Miracles For Sale (in which he trained someone to be a convincing faith healer), I only thought of it applying to the so-called Christians who manipulate people’s emotions to get money out of them in return for supposed miracles. Since my church background is not charismatic (i.e. you won’t see “healings” or people getting “slain in the spirit” or “speaking in tongues” at our services), I didn’t really see much connection between what he was talking about and my beliefs.

Then I watched the film A Beautiful Mind.

If you haven’t seen the film and don’t want any spoilers, you probably shouldn’t read beyond this paragraph, but please come back after you’ve seen it. Or maybe up to now you’ve had no interest in seeing it; in which case, perhaps the following will make you more interested.

A couple of things about the film led me to start really analysing whether the God of Christianity is just as imaginary as Parcher, Charles and Marcee.

For example, there’s the idea that Marcee doesn’t get any older, from which Nash worked out that she couldn’t be real. Obviously, unlike humans, God’s not supposed to age, so that specific line of reasoning doesn’t apply to Him, but this got me thinking about the attributes that God is supposed to have, that could work equally well, or perhaps better, for an imaginary friend.

Also, Nash found Parcher appealing because he gave his life a perceived purpose which it didn’t otherwise have. It seems that Nash’s brain created its own fictional purpose for existence to make up for the pointlessness of his real life. This got me analysing the way Christianity gives our lives an objective purpose that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

I don’t think any of the following is evidence that God doesn’t exist, but perhaps there really are plausible alternative explanations for a lot of Christian experiences.

So here are some of the questions that have been swirling around in my head recently:

God’s Guidance

One of the things I’ve learnt recently about Christian living is about getting guidance from God. Basically what I found from various sources was that, when making a decision, God doesn’t want you to just sit around and wait for Him to send a lightning bolt from heaven, you’re supposed to kind of knock on doors and see which ones He opens… Basically (once you’ve consulted the Bible) do what you want, and then find out whether God approves or not by your success or failure.

I’m starting to understand why unbelievers don’t want to spoil religion for those people who get “inner strength” from their belief in God. God gives them boldness to go out and do whatever they want – pursue their dreams! – armed with the knowledge that they’ve got an omnipotent friend to make things happen, instead of just their poor little selves trying to do it all on their own. At the same time, they can tell themselves it’s not their fault if things don’t go as they’d hoped; it was obviously not what God wanted for them. Is it possible that God could be totally imaginary and still perform the same function?

God In Control Of Everything

Then there’s the things that happen to us and other people around the world. God apparently works all things, both the good and the seemingly bad, for His purposes. We may not be able to see how, but everything will work out for the best; if not in this life, then in the next. We attribute the good stuff that happens to us as God’s goodness, and we attribute the bad stuff to God teaching us to depend on Him, or testing us or something. But what if we’re just kidding ourselves, and actually, things just happen… some good, and some bad?

Communicating With God

When we pray, are we just talking to ourselves? This is something that bugged me before I saw either of the films mentioned above.

Does God really answer prayer, or is that belief just a result of the confirmation biases of people who want it to be true?

An example of a belief based on a confirmation bias is Murphy’s Law, which states that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Obviously it’s not really true that everything that could go wrong in our lives does actually go wrong; it’s all about our perception. We notice when things go wrong; we don’t notice when things work as normal. The things that go wrong stand out. They seem more significant than they really are, so much so that we almost start to believe that whatever can go wrong really does go wrong. With prayer, when we apparently get a clear, positive answer, it’s very noticeable. When we don’t get an immediate answer, or we get a negative answer, we can write it off as “not God’s will” and perhaps these negative occurrences become much less significant than the positive answers, encouraging our belief that God really does answer prayer.

Why Pray?

Since God doesn’t change His mind, the point of praying can’t be to try to convince Him to do things he wouldn’t have done otherwise. He already knows exactly how things are going to work out. In this way I consider myself to have something in common with Deists, or maybe it’s determinists… anyway, what I mean is: I believe God had all of history (including miracles and “answers to prayer”) planned out before creation started, so in a way you could say he doesn’t really intervene any more; everything’s going exactly according to plan, so why would He intervene? So I’m not sure in what way He could be said to answer prayer. The only prayers He appears to answer are the ones that match what He already had planned.

So what is the point of prayer? We’re told that God likes to hear us ask for things, but surely the point must be, not that we convince Him to give us stuff, but that we somehow learn from the process of prayer. We learn to depend on God for things, we learn patience when He doesn’t answer our prayers immediately, or we learn to submit to His will when He doesn’t answer our prayers in the way we hoped. But in reality, could all those things work in the basically the same way if God is not really there and we’re just talking to ourselves? Sometimes things go our way and sometimes they don’t. Believing that God is listening to their prayers could usefully teach people patience and help them move on in life when things don’t go as they hoped, even if God didn’t actually exist.

On Paper

A while ago one of the blogs I follow shared this post about how fantasies regarding men and women appearing in printed media compare with real relationships with people we actually know, and who know us. He talks specifically about how Christians relate to their favourite authors compared with how they get on with their local pastors, and notes the similarities with a man’s relationships with women in real life compared to pornography.

I’m pretty sure fantasy relationships don’t need to be based on paper forms, I reckon it works just as well – if not better – with TV, movies, song lyrics, and facebook… and images certainly don’t have to be pornographic; the people in them don’t even need to be physically attractive. In fact, I think the fictional personalities of TV and movie characters have the potential to cause even more problems than their looks… and I’m certain it’s not just men that have this sort of problem. How many women complain that “there’s no really nice guys out there”?* Could it be that unrealistic standards have been set by the men in Rom-coms? Is it surprising that real-life men don’t live up to those standards?

*Do women really complain that much about a lack of nice guys? Or have I just got that impression based on women I’ve seen on TV? :S

I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent there, but does a similar thing happen with God?

We’re told that God, like the paper men and women described above, is unchanging (EDIT: I haven’t explained it very well, it’ll make more sense if you go and read the article yourself). I wonder if we’re convinced that God is unchanging because our knowledge of Him is based on a book that hasn’t changed in the last 1900 years. Do we impose our own thoughts and ideas and desires on a text that is perhaps in a lot of ways more ambiguous than we think? I don’t have anything particular in mind here, but (even in a Sola Scriptura-minded church) I do wonder how much of my understanding of God’s character is actually directly from the Bible, and how much depends on interpretation. Derren Brown demonstrated how to use mood lighting, arm-waving, shouting and emotionally-charged music to manipulate people, but I think a church can influence people just as powerfully without putting on that sort of show; when I read the Bible, how much does my understanding of it depend on what was originally written, and how much does it depend on what I’ve been told it means? And in private too, how much does my understanding of the Bible depend on what’s going on in my head at the time as I read a particular passage?

When it comes to decision making based on our understanding of the Bible, on one level we might think we’re obeying God, but in reality, do our thoughts about what God wants actually always suit our mood, our needs, our wants (or what others have taught us we should want)?

I wonder if I’ve sometimes tricked myself into thinking I’m submitting to God, when really I’m just doing what I want to do (or what I’ve been brought up to think is the right thing to do). I suppose at least with Christian Hedonism, you don’t pretend you’re not doing things to make yourself happy, but still, is God just a kind of sophisticated psychological tool for motivating ourselves?

Like paper pastors, and unlike the humans we speak to literally face-to-face, God always has time for us, He’s available 24/7, anywhere we like, at our whim, and we always have His full attention. He’s willing to listen to all our moaning, He never has to rush off to another appointment, He’s never ill, and – as far as we know – He’s never in a bad mood when we’re speaking to Him; He understands exactly how we feel, and almost certainly agrees with our conclusions. He also keeps His distance when we don’t want to hear from Him. We can just shut the book and think about something else and stop listening to Him. Just like you can turn the TV off or skip a few pages in your paper pastor’s latest book when it makes you a little bit uncomfortable.

To be continued…

Since I have more of an open mind than ever before, I thought it would be a good time to read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, so at some point I’ll get a review posted on here.

In the mean time, in case you’ve read this far thinking all this is evidence that God is not real:

Also, I reckon the film Horton Hears A Who! is worth a watch.

How To Find Ultimate Joy

Last Sunday morning (17th April), I reviewed a book for my church’s Bible Study session. Here’s what I said about it:

I’m going to be reviewing Desiring God, by John Piper. This book, along with others that I’ve read recently, has made a big difference to my understanding of my relationship to God. It’s possible that all of you will think what I’ve learned is really obvious, but to me it’s new and exciting. I hope, even if it’s not new to you, it is still exciting. And in some ways I hope it’s not new, because I hope it’s biblical.

If I were to say I hope you’ll read this book and be inspired to take a more God-centred view of life, I reckon you’d probably all approve. If I said instead that I hope you’ll read it and be inspired to more eagerly seek your own pleasure, I expect there’d be a few raised eyebrows. Well, I’m actually going for both at the same time. Hopefully that will make more sense by the time I’ve finished.

John Piper is pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. He’s written loads of books, but I first came across him in a YouTube video, addressing Barack Obama’s views on abortion. Then I started watching his Desiring God videos where he answers questions from viewers on a wide range of subjects, such as ‘Can I enjoy art produced by unbelievers and glorify God?’, ‘How should you boast only in Christ when job hunting?’, ‘Is it sin to dislike the doctrine of election…?’

Then, before Blair went back to America, he gave me Piper’s book God Is The Gospel. Just the introduction to that book blew me away. I’ve sometimes described its effect on me as a kind of re-conversion. Before, I saw the whole point of Christianity as being salvation from hell, but God Is The Gospel showed me that salvation is just the means to an end, the end being for us to spend eternity glorifying God and enjoying getting to know Him. Forgiveness of sins is of course an essential prerequisite for us to have a relationship with God, but it’s just the beginning, and that book gave me a new hunger to know God more and more… which led me onto Desiring God and a heap of other books. I wasn’t a big reader before, so if you’re thinking “these book reviews are all well and good for people who like reading, but that’s just not for me”, think again; thanks to God Is The Gospel, I’ve probably read more books so far in 2011 than the previous couple of years put together.

But I’m reviewing Desiring God. Piper says about this book that:

“This is a serious book about being happy in God. It’s about happiness because that is what our creator commands: “Delight yourself in the Lord” (Psalm 34:7). And it is a serious book because, as Jeremy Taylor said, “God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy.””

The subtitle of the book is ‘Meditations of a Christian Hedonist’. (Apologies if I pronounce it wrong at any point. It looks like it should be pronounced ‘heddonism’ to me, but apparently ‘heedonism’ is the correct pronunciation.)

I think I should probably explain what he means by Christian Hedonism, because the whole book is based on that foundation, so I can’t really say anything else about the book unless you understand that bit. I don’t want to say too much, because I’m trying to persuade you to read the book for yourselves, but if I don’t say enough, you probably won’t have a clue what I’m on about.

Firstly, do people know what hedonism is?
A dictionary definition of it is “devotion to pleasure as a way of life.”
Now you might say Christianity is devotion to God as a way of life, so how can you be a Christian and a Hedonist? Aren’t the two contradictory?

I’ve tried to avoid just reading long chunks from the book, but I will use a few quotes to explain this Christian Hedonism idea.

Firstly though, a little bit of audience participation for you:

“What is the chief end of man?”

Answer:

“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”

Good. Now I would open up my follow-up question for anyone to answer, but I’m worried someone might throw me a real curveball that I don’t know how to deal with, so I think it’s safer to just tell you what I used to think, and then go on explain to what I think now.

My question is: If my chief end is to glorify God, how do I glorify God?

6 months ago – before I read God Is The Gospel or Desiring God – I would’ve said something like “by living as He intends”, or “by serving Him and keeping His commandments”… Of course, we are told in Romans 1 to “present [our] bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is [our] reasonable service.” And Jesus said in John 14 verse 15: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments”, but is our obedience and service really what glorifies God?

I will come back to this in a minute, but for now, notice that man’s chief end (singular) is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. It doesn’t say “man’s chief ends are…”; it says “man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”

Does that mean “sometimes you glorify God and sometimes you enjoy Him? Sometimes He gets the glory, sometimes you get joy?” Piper explains that each part works best when the other is happening at the same time!

So in Piper’s words

“The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.”

So that’s kind of the basic principle (I hope you’re following so far), but I think it’s worth taking a little bit more from the introductory section called ‘How I became a Christian Hedonist’ to explain a bit further how it works.

Piper says:

“When I was in college, I had a vague pervasive notion that if I did something good because it would make me happy, I would ruin its goodness. I figured that the goodness of my moral action was lessened to the degree that I was motivated by a desire for my own pleasure… to be motivated by a desire for happiness or pleasure when I volunteered for Christian service or went to church – that seemed selfish, utilitarian, mercenary. This was a problem for me because I found in myself… a tremendously powerful impulse to seek pleasure, yet at every point of moral decision I said to myself that this impulse should have no influence.
One of the most frustrating areas was that of worship and praise. My vague notion that the higher the activity, the less there must be of self-interest in it caused me to think of worship almost solely in terms of duty. And that cuts the heart out of it…
Then I came to see that it is unbiblical and arrogant to try to worship God for any other reason than the pleasure to be had in Him. (Don’t miss those last two words: in Him. Not His gifts… Not ourselves, but Him)”

So how did Piper come to this realisation? Among others, he quotes C.S. Lewis from a sermon called The Weight of Glory:

“If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? … The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

So basically, he’s saying that the problem is not that we seek pleasure; it’s that we seek our pleasure in the wrong places. The things we find pleasure in might not be inherently bad, but if there’s no reference to God as the source of the pleasure, then we’re not glorifying God as we should; we’re honouring the gifts rather than the giver.

But also, if we claim God is all that satisfies us, why would we want to seek pleasure anywhere else? I’m thinking mainly of myself here, if I watch something on TV, or a film, or sport, or listen to music, and it doesn’t in any way lead me to worship God, why am I doing it?

If I really believed God to be the ultimate source of all real joy, I wouldn’t just want to go to church on a Sunday, prayer meeting during the week, maybe spend a few minutes reading the Bible and praying each day, and then use the rest of my time for secular work and pleasure. I’d want to spend all my time enjoying Him, and like everything else I enjoy I wouldn’t be able to stop myself constantly praising Him. I mean, when we say things like “I love this song!” or “What a great goal!” or “Look at that view!” it’s an involuntary reaction to something glorious, so why should praising God feel like a duty?

We must worship God because we are commanded to, but to quote Edward John Carnell:

“Suppose a husband asks his wife if he must kiss her good night. Her answer is, “You must, but not that kind of a must.” What she means is this: “Unless a spontaneous affection for my person motivates you, your overtures are stripped of all moral value.””

This new, real heartfelt understanding of God as the ultimate source of joy, rather than just focusing on what He’s done for me in His work of salvation, is what I mean by having a more God-centred, rather than self-centred, view of life. But I’m also more eagerly seeking my own pleasure, in God.

So once Piper has explained what Christian Hedonism is, he goes on to apply it to a range of different areas of life. There’s Worship: The Feast of Christian Hedonism, Love: The Labour of Christian Hedonism, Scripture: Kindling for Christian Hedonism, Prayer: The Power of Christian Hedonism, then chapters on money, marriage, missions, and suffering.

I’ve already briefly mentioned the hedonistic principle of worship, how it should be a joy rather than just a duty. The other chapter that particularly stood out for me was the one on prayer. I think it’s key to understanding how we glorify God by enjoying Him forever.

Piper refers to John 14 verse 13:

“Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the father may be glorified in the Son.”

He then uses an illustration to show how we should glorify God:

Suppose you’re totally paralysed and can do nothing for yourself but talk. And suppose a strong and reliable friend promised to live with you and do whatever you needed done. If someone came to visit you, how would you show them how great your friend is? Would you try to get out of bed and start doing things for them? Surely the best way for your visitor to see your friend’s generosity and strength would instead be for him to see for himself what your friend does for you?

He quotes Spurgeon’s explanation of Psalm 50 verse 15, which says:

“call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.”

Spurgeon says:

“God and the praying man take shares… first here is your share: “Call upon me in the day of trouble.” Secondly, here is God’s share: “I will deliver thee.” Again, you take a share – for you shall be delivered. And then again it is the Lord’s turn – “Thou shalt glorify me.” Here is… a covenant that God enters into with you who pray to him, and whom he helps. He says, “You shall have the deliverance, but I must have the glory…” Here is a delightful partnership: we obtain that which we so greatly need, and all that God getteth is the glory which is due unto his name.”

So we need to be careful about trying to serve God. Of course, we are called to be God’s servants, but when we serve God, who gets the glory?

Mark 10:45 says: “the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve.”

And the image of Christ’s return in Luke 12:37 is actually quite shocking:

“Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will dress himself for service and have them recline at table, and he will come and serve them.”

Clearly we need to be careful not to start thinking we’re above God, but He glorifies Himself by giving of His infinite riches, not by taking anything from us. So the way for us to glorify Him is not to try to do things for Him, as though he needs anything from us, but to enjoy what He gives us, and make sure to give Him all the credit.

So to sum up, God Is The Gospel gave me a new hunger to know God, and to use John MacArthur’s words off the back cover of Desiring God it’s “a soul-stirring celebration of the pleasures of knowing God… a must-read for every Christian, and a feast for the spiritually hungry.”

Perhaps you already have an intense hunger to know God more, in which case, this is a feast for you. But if you don’t feel you have such a hunger, I think Piper’s desire for God is infectious, so read this book and I’ll be very surprised if you don’t have more of a hunger by the time you finish it.

In case I haven’t conveyed my enthusiasm for this book as well as I hoped, to show how keen I am for you to read this, I’ve bought an extra copy of both Desiring God and God Is The Gospel just to lend out to people, and I’ll be very disappointed if no one asks to borrow them.

And for those of you reading this on my blog, you can download a free pdf of Desiring God for your Kindle or whatever from here, and God Is The Gospel here.

Valentine’s Day, Schmalentine’s Day

The Carpenters once sang, “the best love songs are written with a broken heart”; I think this song (still unknown in the UK, I believe) is pretty strong evidence in support of that theory:

Anyway, changing the subject… despite what Paul wrote to Christians in Corinth (1 Cor 7),  in my experience, Christians are worse than non-Christians for assuming everyone should get married.

Admittedly that could be because many non-Christians aren’t worried about getting married before having sex, but if, as we Christians claim, God satisfies all our desires, why does it seem like The Pussycat Dolls have something we don’t when they’re able to sing “I don’t need a ring around my finger to make me feel complete”?

Or how about Natasha Bedingfield:

Richard Dawkins admits the possibility that life on Earth was Intelligently Designed?

I recently watched Ben Stein’s film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

The basic point of the movie is to show how scientists who believe we may have been intelligently designed are expelled from the community of “real scientists”.

There were a few things I didn’t like about the film. For example, Stein portrayed himself as an unbiased investigator, and even being on the side of ID myself, I have to say this film was blatantly biased against Dawkins & Co. from the start. I wasn’t surprised to read afterwards that certain people interviewed for the film felt they’d been misled, and that quotes had been carefully edited to fit what the producers wanted them to say. Scientific American has Six Things That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You To Know.

I also think Hitler should have been left out of a film about the scientific validity of Intelligent Design. Whether the Nazis based their principles on natural selection or not has no bearing on the accuracy of Darwin’s theory. It is also pointed out that the notion that life was intelligently designed and the acceptance of the theory of evolution are not mutually exclusive.

I can also understand that using the idea of Intelligent Design to just say “this is complicated, God must’ve done it”, is not really very useful science, so some concerns are about allowing ID-ers into the realm of serious science are understandable. However, many people seem to be under the impression that anyone who believes in God is completely incapable of doing anything useful in science. If that’s true, then I guess we should abandon everything Newton and Einstein did.

Anyway, onto the part my title is referring to. Dawkins said that, while he cannot believe in the God or gods of the world’s various religions, there is a possibility, albeit very unlikely, that life on our planet is a result of ‘directed panspermia’, i.e. that life was designed by beings of higher intelligence elsewhere in the universe, although those beings would of course have had to evolve by chance themselves. He said it’s possible there could be some design signature observable in the world around us that would point to this conclusion. (Sorry I can’t be bothered to watch the film again to get exact quotes, but I don’t think I’m bearing false witness to what he said.)

Now, if there’s even the slightest chance that we could find evidence that life was designed (even if it was by aliens), why is science currently outlawing any suggestion that it was anything but the result of chance? What if that evidence is there, but you’re ruling out the possibility of ever finding it because of your obstinate faith in the creative powers of chance?

Nobel Prize-winner Fred Hoyle likened the possibility of life starting by chance to the chance of a tornado blowing through a junkyard and producing a 747 jet ready for take-off… “even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe” (Source: ICR). I know the argument that, given infinite time and possibly and infinite number of universes, it was bound to happen eventually, but there’s certainly no more evidence for universes other than our own than there is for a designer.

In conclusion, I don’t think it’s unreasonable that you evolutionists should allow those with alternative theories to put forward their ideas for serious consideration. You talk about how oppressed people like Darwin and Galileo were when they came out with radical theories that challenged the understanding of established scientists, and yet the current science establishment seems no better at allowing free-thinkers to get their theories considered. If the evidence for evolution purely by chance is really that overwhelming, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of in debating with these nutters, because all sane people will be able to see who’s got the evidence to back up their theories.

It Breaks My Heart (well, that may be exaggerating slightly…)

So, Steve, how do you feel about having to leave Bath CU soon?

I’d say the song Prague (preferably the Muse version found below) gives a reasonable idea of my thoughts on that prospect.

Ok maybe it’s not quite like that, it’s more that I just like the song more every time I listen to it

However, while I do sometimes struggle to feel properly united, the CU is still easily my favourite part of my uni life, and I am gonna miss it a lot.

[[Warning: This post could possibly be described as a bit 'feelings-y'. It's pretty much just me thinking out loud (or on a keyboard) about where my life is going, which is probably not very interesting to read.]]

I assumed when I started uni that 5 years would be long enough to work out what to do afterwards, but apparently not. In fact, while I’ve progressed at the same rate as my course mates, I’ve got to know new freshers in the CU each year. And particularly this year, this has meant that despite my own first year being a distant memory, I still kind of feel like I’m just getting started, when actually, in a couple of months it’ll all be over.

In some ways it’s ok, even quite exciting, that I don’t know what’s next, because God knows… but I would still like to have some idea. Until now, my route through education has pretty much come about without me having to think about it. I now need to go out and find something to do next, but don’t know what I want, or what God wants. At the moment it kind of feels like my life is being cleared out, and I’m intrigued to see what’s going to replace the things that are being taken away.

It’s not exactly making me more pleased to leave the CU that people have recently been thanking me for being so helpful and encouraging. These comments, ranging from the somewhat believeable “just the fact you’re at pretty much every event is really encouraging”, to the plain ridiculous “you’re an amazing man of God”, remind me of something Joel Beeke said at the Aber conference last year:

Joel’s son wrote about his dad for a school report, saying that, while he has flaws, “he loves Jesus more than anyone I know”. Joel admitted that when he read this, he “wept like a baby”, because he feels like he loves the Lord so little.

It’s encouraging to hear that people can see things like that, even if we can’t see it in ourselves, and it’s nice to find that people are encouraged by me even though I feel like I’m doing very little that’s useful.

So in conclusion, to quote the Foo Fighters: “I wish you only knew how good it is to CU.”

…ok, so the actual words are “See You”, but this is how I hear it

A Creation Fairytale

Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong? (click image to be taken to iPlayer)

You don’t like the existing descriptions of how the universe came to be. It’s time to write a new one.

It looks like the universe is expanding, so clearly there’s no other possible explanation than that it used to all be compressed into a very small space, before it exploded.

Cool, so the universe started with a big bang, that explains everything.

…

Hang on, all normal explosions lead to random lumpy debris that’s really hot in some places, but cooler in others. How do we explain why our universe is really smooth and all the same temperature? I guess we could say it started off expanding slowly, so it got smoothed out while it was still small, then it suddenly inflated really quickly for some reason to get to the sort of size it is now. No idea how or why that would’ve happened, but it means we can stick to the big bang story, so we’ll go with it.

…

Those galaxies don’t look right. The stars at the edge should be moving slower than the ones in the middle, like the planets in our solar system, but they’re going the same speed. How can we fix that? I’ve got an idea. How about if there was a load of extra mass that we can’t see? If there was enough of the stuff, the physics would work. How much do we need? 5 times as much of this dark stuff as the matter we can see?! That seems like we’re relying pretty heavily on something we invented without being able to detect it, but it’s the simplest explanation I can think of, it’ll have to do.

…

Um, guys… why is the expansion of the universe accelerating?

Could there be a load of energy we can’t see, too? Yeah, call it dark energy and we won’t have to prove it exists by detecting it or anything silly like that; people will just have to accept it ‘cos we’re the clever people and we can’t come up with anything better.

…

Dark flow? Mate, is it just me, or is the whole idea that the present can tell us everything we need to know about the past becoming less and less convincing?

And, fun as it might be to have a go at those religious nuts who use a scientifically unobservable God to explain where we came from; taking an honest look at what us scientists are putting our faith in, it’s not really any more sensible. And if we judge a theory’s success by how well it resists people trying to rip it apart, those guys have a bit of a head start.

Like that whole Jesus rising from the dead thing, it’s actually surprisingly well supported by historical evidence. Is there really a scientific reason we can say for certain that miracles like that could never happen? I mean the whole point of a miracle is that it’s not a normal event, so we probably shouldn’t expect to be able to apply the normal rules of science. And if he actually rose from the dead, he probably deserves to be listened to…

…

So God wants everyone to be perfect like him, I guess that’s fair enough, but no one lives up to that, do they? What are we supposed to do?

Nothing? Just trust that God took the punishment I deserve on himself? That’s too easy, I want to earn my forgiveness…

…

Ok yeah, that’s not gonna work…

So it’s really all been done for me? That’s actually unbelievably awesome.

Christianity’s Civil War

I just watched Ann Widdecombe’s episode on the Reformation from the Channel 4 series Christianity: A History.

She has an interesting perspective on the whole thing having been brought up in the Church of England but converted to Catholicism about 15 years ago.

In case anyone reading this has no idea what the reformation was, basically a 16th Century German monk called Martin Luther realised that a lot of what the Catholic Church practiced contradicted the Bible. One of the main corrupt practices was the sale of indulgences; these allowed people to buy forgiveness from the Pope so they could go to heaven. Luther posted 95 theses on the door of a church, and worked on translating the Bible into German to allow many more people to read it, rather than just priests and scholars, so everyone could see that the way to salvation was by faith, not works.

Widdecombe acknowledged that the church needed reforming, but wasn’t happy with the chaos that followed, and I have to say, watching this gave me some sympathy for those who argue that religion causes a lot more problems than it solves.

If people believe they are doing God’s will, it turns out they are capable of doing some horrible things, and the Catholics weren’t going to give up their power over the population of Europe without a fight. A five day massacre of protestants in Paris turned the Seine red with blood. And while I don’t remember anything being mentioned that was on the same scale aimed at Catholics, protestants can’t claim to be completely innocent. The attitude towards Catholics can be seen in the tradition that continues in the town of Lewes every Fireworks Night (one of the five best places to see fireworks – alongside the mighty Broughton Gifford – as chosen by The Times) where they blow up an effegy of the Pope. Now I’d say I’m as anti-Pope as your average Bible-believer, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the correct Christian response to people who don’t agree with you.

They say God works in mysterious ways. ‘They’ didn’t get that from the Bible, it’s from a hymn by William Cowper, but it seems proven true in the way the reformation came to England. Henry VIII was named a Defender of the Faith by Pope Leo X after writing a book defending Catholicism. The trouble was he wanted a male heir, and his first wife Catherine of Aragon wasn’t producing one, so he wanted to divorce her. The Pope (quite rightly in this instance) wasn’t happy with this idea, so Henry decided to put himself in charge of the church in England instead. So Catholicism was booted out and Reformed teaching was able to infiltrate Britain thanks to the lust and greed of one of its kings.

Widdecombe explains that she left the Church of England because it had abandoned it’s roots and seemed immersed in liberalism and political correctness. Ok so far, but why become a Catholic? I don’t reckon there’s any perfect church out there, but why not at least look for a church that bases its teaching on God’s Word rather than the Pope’s?

EDIT: I don’t mean to criticise everyone in the Church of England or all Roman Catholics. If people believe in Jesus Christ as their Saviour, Lord and God, and seek in their thoughts and actions to be ruled by the teaching of the Bible, then they’re my brothers and sisters.