Winning Ways: Agents for Peace in a Diverse World

"COEXIST"

That's one of Austin's favorite bumper stickers, using the symbols of the world's major religions to spell the word. The Muslim crescent moon, for example, becomes the "C," the Star of David serves as the "X" and the cross stands in for the "T."

The decal preaches the conviction that no one religion can corner the market on truth. "You have your way of perceiving God and I have my way," the sticker seems to say. "We're all just taking different paths up the same mountain, so I'll see you at the top."

That's why this Sunday's study is one of the most important in our "Explore God" series. We'll seek to answer the question, "Is Christianity too narrow?"

The concern behind the question is how to be charitable in our diverse world. Won't a belief that Jesus is the only way to God only lead to ill will in our schools, workplaces, and communities?

But within the Christian message are resources that can make its followers agents for peace on earth. I can think of three.

Common Grace: We know there are basic values self-evident to everyone, not just Bible readers. So, we can work together with people of other faiths--and no faith--to build decent communities.

Saving Grace: The gospel teaches that our salvation comes by grace alone. God drew us to himself not because of our nationality or our ethnicity or our moral self-discipline. It wasn’t that we were smarter or had a greater moral sensitivity. It’s all of grace. So we can relate to others who don’t get it because there was a time when we didn’t get it.

The Example of Jesus: At the very heart of the Christian story is a man who died for his enemies, praying for their forgiveness. Reflection on this can only lead to a radically different way of dealing with those who are different from us.

So the gospel message, even with its exclusive claims about Jesus, has the resources to make believers agents for peace. Sadly, Christians don't always put these resources into practice in their relationships in the world. But the more we understand the gospel we believe, the more we can communicate the exclusive claims of Jesus in a manner that builds relationships, even with those who don’t accept our claims.

Join us this Sunday at 10 to dig deeper into this topic!

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Links to Your World, Tuesday September 24

Funny stuff worship leaders accidentally say. It's tough to talk and do key changes between songs.

 

"You don’t want to be that guy at the party who’s crazy and angry and ranting in the corner — it’s the same for Twitter or Facebook." Best quote from a story as to why social media is driving the spread of positive stories. I've got some folks on my social media feeds that haven't got the memo yet.

Wacky Puritan Names, including If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned. Son of Praise-God Barebones.

 

Why is Zambia So Poor?

 

CT: "Evangelical, fundamentalist, or born-again Christians (48 percent) agree prayer and Scripture study alone can overcome mental illness." Thus furthering the misunderstanding and stigma. Whatever the illness, let's thank God for prayer, Scripture, AND medicine. Ed Stetzer has more to say on the survey here.

Rick Warren reflects on the CNN interview Piers Morgan conducted with Warren and his wife, Kay, about their son's mental illness and suicide.

 

Rod Dreher: "As someone who strongly believes that Israel has a right to exist, it nevertheless offends me that so many of my fellow American Christians spend so much time and effort defending the interests of Israeli Jews — as we should, given how friendless they are, and how important Israel is morally and strategically — but treat their fellow Christians in the Middle East as an afterthought, if they think of them at all."

 

We've all heard reports on declining church attendance among young adults. Thankfully, it's just not true.

 

Terrorists Target Christians in Nairobi Shopping Mall, Killing 68

Suicide Attack on Pakistani Church Kills 78

"They've told him many times that they would free him and allow him to return to our family, the kids and I, if he would deny his Christian faith, and he's stood strong in that prison. He's led many, many - over 30 people - to Christ in that prison." Saeed Abedini's wife, Naghmeh, recently spoke to students at Liberty University. I will be attending a special worldwide prayer vigil for American Pastor Saeed Thursday, Sept. 26 -- the one-year anniversary of his imprisonment in Iran.

 

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Winning Ways: A Broken World and a Good God

Have you had a "but even so" moment yet?

Kobayashi Issa was an 18th century haiku master. In my favorite of his poems he wrote:

The world of dew is, yes,

a world of dew,

but even so

As a lay Buddhist priest, Issa believed that the best response to suffering was stoic detachment, freeing oneself from the impulse to cling possessively to impermanent things. In his haiku, then, he acknowledged the way he was taught to see the world--as ephemeral dew. And yet with that last line he pushed back against this worldview at the same time.

Given his experience with suffering, the pushback is understandable. As Pico Iyer recently wrote in the New York Times:

Issa had seen his mother die when he was 2, his first son die, his father contract typhoid fever, his next son and a beloved daughter die. He knew that suffering was a fact of life, he might have been saying in his short verse; he knew that impermanence is our home and loss the law of the world. But how could he not wish, when his 1-year-old daughter contracted smallpox, and expired, that it be otherwise?

No matter how neatly we arrange our worldview, suffering scrambles it. This is true whether we're founding life on Buddhist principles or secular sensibilities or any other persuasion.

And it's true of Christian convictions, too. What does the Christian do with her belief in an all-powerful, all-loving God when heartbreak crashes in?

This may be the toughest of the Seven Big Questions in our "Explore God" series. It's certainly the most personal.

I read a fascinating report in Wired about a study in pain management. In experiments, scientists found that we survive pain better if our minds are occupied with thoughts of someone we deeply love.

Exactly so.

In the Christian worldview, we process suffering by focusing on the One who suffered for us. Of all the world's religions, only one describes God as experiencing the ruin of the world as a man. But on the cross he was doing more than just identifying with the ruin of the world: He was carrying away the sin that ruined the world so that he could begin the process of making all things new.

Are you in pain? We'll help you focus on the Beloved this Sunday.

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Links to Your World, Tuesday September 17

After a feature on NBC news, a blog post by Kim Hall, the Director of Women’s ministry at All Saints Presbyterian in Austin, Texas went viral. The topic? Girls who take suggestive selfies and boys who can't un-see them. (HT: Wednesday Link List)

 

The Real Housewives of Duck Dynasty

 

WestboroMingle: Where Hate and Love Come Together:

 

NYT: "Schizophrenic patients early in the course of their disease are acutely aware that they are losing their grip on the stable life they once had; they are like the sparrow from Dr. Montross’s childhood that dies in the struggle to free itself from the netting on her grandmother’s blueberry bushes. The bird 'must have understood how the more it moved, the more tangled its feathers would become.'" Touching. Heartbreaking.

 

10 People Who Switched Carrers After 50 (And Thrived)

 

Sermon Illustration Alert: Let E-Scapegoat Take Your Sins Away

 

"I don’t think we need to go to church every week. Why don’t we just wait until there’s something new to learn?" Good post about the point of church attendance.

 

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Winning Ways: We Came to Believe

 

God-deprived hearts, like oxygen-deprived heads, can't think clearly enough to accept the obvious.

Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air documents the consequences of oxygen-deprived heads. It's a book about the ill-fated expedition to Mount Everest during the spring of 1996. Ascending Everest is, of course, a risky venture, but it was human error that caused some to lose their lives on that climb.

For example, there was Andy Harris, one of the expedition leaders. Harris was in dire need of oxygen during his descent, but he died holding oxygen canisters in his hand. They had been left for him along the trail down. Those who had already passed the canisters on their own return to base camp knew that the canisters were full. But when Harris radioed the base camp of his crisis, they could not convince him that the canisters were full and that he should use them. Disoriented from his lack of oxygen, he insisted that they were empty and were of no use.

He held all the containers of oxygen he needed to survive but -- now follow me here -- what he held in his hand was so thin in his head that he could not recognize what he held in his hand was what his head needed.

Got it?

I've just described life before God. It's the very lack of God that makes us unable to see that what we lack is what we need! And so we keep doing life on our own and making a mess of things.

But many of us can testify: "We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." That phrase should be familiar to anyone in a Twelve Step program. But even if we've never needed an addiction recovery group, many of us could say that the Second Step perfectly describes how we awakened to our need for God.

We came to believe.

First, "we came" -- we attended a church service, we read a book about faith that a friend loaned us, we joined a Bible study.

Then, "we came to" -- that is, we woke up to spiritual reality.

Finally, "we came to believe" -- that is, we decided that this God-talk made sense and we accepted it.

This week, come. Maybe you'll even come to. Or, best of all, maybe you'll come to believe! Our "Explore God" series continues this week with my lesson at 10 and discussion groups at 11.

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Links to Your World, Tuesday September 10

What does the fox say? Wired says the viral video isn't totally wrong.

 

How texting turns us into liars.

 

Well, why didn't you just say so? Doug Wilson's one-sentence summary of the Syrian thing: "I want Congress to authorize something I don’t believe they need to authorize, and which I reserve the right to do anyway whether or not they authorize it, in order that I might defend the credibility of a red line I didn’t actually draw, so that I may take decisive action that will not in any way affect the momentum of the Syrian civil war or, if it accidentally does, al-Qaeda will the stronger for it, in order that I might have a chance to do what I have spent a decade yelling about other people doing."

 

Be prepared or trust God?

 

In high school I considered a career in genetics while uncertain about my call to ministry. So, this article fascinated me: "Scientists have known for decades that genes can vary their level of activity, as if controlled by dimmer switches....This variable gene activity, called gene expression, is how your body does most of its work....Our social lives can change our gene expression with a rapidity, breadth, and depth previously overlooked....'You can’t change your genes. But if we’re even half right about all this, you can change the way your genes behave—which is almost the same thing.'" Some real implications here for the science-level debate over free will, lessons on the effects of social isolation, and some caution on the over-simplified argument that, "Baby, you were born this way."

 

"Our understanding of the biology of mental disorders has been slow in coming, but recent advances like these have shown us that mental disorders are biological in nature, that people are not responsible for having schizophrenia or depression, and that individual biology and genetics make significant contributions." NYT

 

What’s Schizophrenia Like? A Woman Who Hears Voices Explains It Beautifully:

 

 

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Winning Ways: Why You Exist

(cross-posted at Get Anchored)

Does life have any purpose? If so, what is it?

That's the first of Seven Big Questions we'll start with this Sunday. It's part of our citywide "Explore God" campaign. Bring somebody at 10 for my talk, and then encourage them to stay at 11 to discuss it with your small group.

The reigning worldview is that life has no purpose. It's a bleak claim, but anyone who questions it loses cultural cache. Just ask acclaimed philosopher Thomas Nagel. He suggested in his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos, that natural observation should lead anyone to see that there is intention to the world. He's still an atheist who won't attribute that evidence of design to a personal God. But just his suggestion that there is some sort of unfolding plan to the universe led to vicious attacks by many fellow academics.

But you don't have to read elite scholars to run into the question of life's purpose. The issue arises for most people simply through the weariness and dissatisfaction of daily living. In his award-winning entry, "Repetition," spoken-word poet Phil Kaye said:

My mother taught me this trick, If you repeat something over and over again, it loses its meaning....Our existence, she said, is the same way. You watch the sunset too often, and it just becomes 6pm. You make the same mistake over and over, you’ll stop calling it a mistake. If you just wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up one day you’ll forget why.

Have you forgotten why?

I suggest a single word for the purpose of life.

Love.

To discover you are loved by the Creator. To trust that everything you experience is filtered through his loving intentions. To gladly respond to his commands knowing that they are for your good. To enjoy his creation in accordance with his instructions. To relate to men and women around you as those God also cherishes.

Love is the reason there is something and not nothing.

Live out of this truth at the center, and it changes everything. Let's talk more about it this Sunday @ 10. Send this to a friend with an invitation to join you for the worship service and your small group!

(For an excellent review of Nagel's book, check out Alvin Plantinga's article in the New Republic.)

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Links to Your World, Tuesday September 3

Glad to see Baylor's standing. Behold college football's "Grid of Shame"

 

Bugs: It's what's for dinner.

 

Sermon illustration alert: "Worrying about making ends meet, it seems, can occupy enough of the brain‘s finite thinking power that it makes it difficult to think clearly" (Time article).

 

"Poised to be the biggest cable show of all time, Duck Dynasty is the highest rated show on TV to consistently portray a family that is unapologetic about their Christian faith and their affection for one another. The pop culture phenomenon is making it harder for television executives to ignore the demand for shows that portray families who put God first in their lives." 9 (More) Things You Should Know About Duck Dynasty

 

"American pastor Saeed Abedini is losing hope for leaving the most notorious prison in Iran." American pastor, y'all.

 

"Miley [Cyrus] has a history of following Jesus and church membership....But as her recent antics demonstrate, the Bible’s command to continue meeting with other believers is for our own good. It’s the place where our internal compass gets reset after the world’s constant pull off course. When a person is constantly surrounded by people with compasses pointing away from Jesus, they will find it incredibly difficult to remain focused on True North. Over time, that person will become indistinguishable from their peer group." Link

 

"Somewhere along the line we evangelical Christians have gotten it into our heads that our neighbors, peers, and most Americans don't like us, and that they like us less every year. I've heard this idea stated in sermons and everyday conversation; I've read it in books and articles. There's a problem, though. It doesn't appear to be true." Bradley Wright provides a needed corrective.

 

"If you look at the layout of the number buttons on a phone -- smart, cell, landline, what have you -- the number buttons will feature, almost inevitably, a uniform layout. Ten digits, laid out on a three-by-three grid, with the tenth tacked on on the bottom. The numbers ascending from left to right, and from top to bottom." But this article highlights the 17 design choices that Bell considered before settling on what has become our standard.

 

The Presbyterian Church (USA) rejected the popular Getty song, "In Christ Alone," because they didn't like the line about the wrath of God being satisfied at the cross. For the Washington Post, Russell Moore explains why we need to sing about God's wrath as well as God's love.

 

When I finally get around to writing that novel, I'll hope for this one-line endorsement Stephen King gave to Elmore Leonard's 1985 "Glitz": "This is the kind of book that if you get up to see if there are any chocolate chip cookies left, you take it with you so you won’t miss anything."

 

 

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