Monday, November 22, 2010
C.S Lewis Quote
"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." -C. S. Lewis(The Weight of Glory)
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Shauna Niequist Quote
"I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don't want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift."
— Shauna Niequist (Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life)
— Shauna Niequist (Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life)
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Customer Quote of the Week July 8, 2010
"I would love to get them, but my cousin is subconscious of her toes."
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Some Thoughts on Enemy Love
I guess one of the more prominent reasons I started a blog is in hopes of perhaps stumbling across likeminded people, or finding them in current friends. I have spent a long time searching and praying for those people. Pacifism has been the great divide lately. I have so quickly come to a place where I cannot tolerate violence, and especially in Christians. I cannot understand how people can claim to follow the Christ, who is portrayed as a slaughtered lamb, while taking up arms. The problem is that there are good, Christian people that I know who somehow live this way.
I used to laugh at pacifists. I used to refer to them as “crazy liberals.” I used to be able to read the Bible without seeing a contradiction between the serving the state and serving God.
Now I can’t imagine how.
Now my entire life is built around the idea that we Christians, at least until Christ comes back, are still in the era of reattaching the ears of those who are about to kill us. Healing, not wounding, is our call.
I believe that the Bible teaches that Christians are an entirely different type of people. 1 Peter 2:9 says it simply enough. Those who have been called by God out of the darkness of this world are a chosen people, a holy nation. We are an entirely different type of people. We are not Americans, not Asians, not Africans, not Europeans. We are a people not bound by borders. Why then should any of us swear oaths of allegiance to the men who govern the bordered lands? We Christians have known our entire lives that “no one can serve two masters,”(Matthew 6:24), and we all struggle to maintain the purity of our service. However that is what we are called to. We are called to be servants of God, and only God, never of the state. We, as Christians are supposed to look and act entirely different than the rest of the world. Among our strange attributes is that we love our enemies. This is by far the most unique, most scandalous and most holy trait of this odd people made up of the followers of Jesus Christ. I also think it is the most essential (we all know 1 Corinthians 13:13, 1 Peter 4:8, and how the greatest two commandments are about love in Matthew 22, Luke 10, etc).
Most of the time we Christians make “love your enemies” a very vanilla statement, about loving bullies on playgrounds or if we really want to be racy, we say we love criminals, or gay people. We Christians have lost the scandal of enemy-love. Living in the United States of America I have seen the pride of a strong young man or young woman taking up the flag, swearing allegiance and vanquishing evil. In my own church building I have heard the praises of the heroism, the sacrifice, and the service of military people. They risk their lives for a cause greater than themselves. They fight for freedom and destroy those who make it their goal in life to oppress and kill. And if I should stand up and say that they are not serving God in this, that protecting the innocent people by slaughtering their captors is not the work of God, wouldn’t that be a scandal? Let me tell you, I have and it is. But I pray that I have the opportunity to take it farther. So far just my voicing that to be a follower of Christ involves not only clearly identifying who is on the Lord’s side and who is his enemy, but also includes praying for and loving them both equally, has been enough to insult, hurt and scandalize even people within my own family. I hope I get a chance to live it out, though. I hope that God blesses me with many encounters with my enemies, so that he might love them through me.
Biblically, I cannot get over the idea of loving enemies. Christ said to do it, and I cannot see any way of justifying any other behavior, especially not oaths made to men who govern lines on maps replacing commandments given by God himself. Nor can I see ideological differences making it appropriate to justify not loving an enemy. Not even the hideous crimes of an enemy can change the loving approach I am told to take with him. After all, it is in the very nature of enemies to be evil, right? Or else they would not be enemies. So nothing they do should change the way I, as a follower and imitator of Christ, interact with them.
I think that the reason I am so taken by this facet of my faith is a little more personal than wars and good guys vs. bad guys. This is about me. The older I get, the more I find, to my horror and dismay, that I identify more and more in the Bible with the pictures of “the wicked,” and not “the righteous.” I read in the Scriptures about how the righteous man delights in the Word of the LORD, and how the righteous man listens to wisdom, how the righteous man dedicates his days and nights to doing the LORD’s will and meditating on the LORD’s laws. Then I read about the wicked man, and how he speaks lies, hurts people who have never wronged him, how he sins. At my very best I look like the wicked, at my most faithful I think and act like the enemy of God. God’s love for me is scandalous, friends. Although in my soul I want to live in harmony with the Creator, in my flesh I am against him. And he loves me. He loves so much that he would die, be tortured, and every day watch me ignore that sacrifice, whorring away from him every chance that I get, and still take joy in me when I turn to him. God’s love for me is scandalous. All I wish to do is love people in a manner that reflects some small picture of the scandal. And that requires loving my enemies, the ones who hate me, because even the tax collectors love the ones that love them.
I used to laugh at pacifists. I used to refer to them as “crazy liberals.” I used to be able to read the Bible without seeing a contradiction between the serving the state and serving God.
Now I can’t imagine how.
Now my entire life is built around the idea that we Christians, at least until Christ comes back, are still in the era of reattaching the ears of those who are about to kill us. Healing, not wounding, is our call.
I believe that the Bible teaches that Christians are an entirely different type of people. 1 Peter 2:9 says it simply enough. Those who have been called by God out of the darkness of this world are a chosen people, a holy nation. We are an entirely different type of people. We are not Americans, not Asians, not Africans, not Europeans. We are a people not bound by borders. Why then should any of us swear oaths of allegiance to the men who govern the bordered lands? We Christians have known our entire lives that “no one can serve two masters,”(Matthew 6:24), and we all struggle to maintain the purity of our service. However that is what we are called to. We are called to be servants of God, and only God, never of the state. We, as Christians are supposed to look and act entirely different than the rest of the world. Among our strange attributes is that we love our enemies. This is by far the most unique, most scandalous and most holy trait of this odd people made up of the followers of Jesus Christ. I also think it is the most essential (we all know 1 Corinthians 13:13, 1 Peter 4:8, and how the greatest two commandments are about love in Matthew 22, Luke 10, etc).
Most of the time we Christians make “love your enemies” a very vanilla statement, about loving bullies on playgrounds or if we really want to be racy, we say we love criminals, or gay people. We Christians have lost the scandal of enemy-love. Living in the United States of America I have seen the pride of a strong young man or young woman taking up the flag, swearing allegiance and vanquishing evil. In my own church building I have heard the praises of the heroism, the sacrifice, and the service of military people. They risk their lives for a cause greater than themselves. They fight for freedom and destroy those who make it their goal in life to oppress and kill. And if I should stand up and say that they are not serving God in this, that protecting the innocent people by slaughtering their captors is not the work of God, wouldn’t that be a scandal? Let me tell you, I have and it is. But I pray that I have the opportunity to take it farther. So far just my voicing that to be a follower of Christ involves not only clearly identifying who is on the Lord’s side and who is his enemy, but also includes praying for and loving them both equally, has been enough to insult, hurt and scandalize even people within my own family. I hope I get a chance to live it out, though. I hope that God blesses me with many encounters with my enemies, so that he might love them through me.
Biblically, I cannot get over the idea of loving enemies. Christ said to do it, and I cannot see any way of justifying any other behavior, especially not oaths made to men who govern lines on maps replacing commandments given by God himself. Nor can I see ideological differences making it appropriate to justify not loving an enemy. Not even the hideous crimes of an enemy can change the loving approach I am told to take with him. After all, it is in the very nature of enemies to be evil, right? Or else they would not be enemies. So nothing they do should change the way I, as a follower and imitator of Christ, interact with them.
I think that the reason I am so taken by this facet of my faith is a little more personal than wars and good guys vs. bad guys. This is about me. The older I get, the more I find, to my horror and dismay, that I identify more and more in the Bible with the pictures of “the wicked,” and not “the righteous.” I read in the Scriptures about how the righteous man delights in the Word of the LORD, and how the righteous man listens to wisdom, how the righteous man dedicates his days and nights to doing the LORD’s will and meditating on the LORD’s laws. Then I read about the wicked man, and how he speaks lies, hurts people who have never wronged him, how he sins. At my very best I look like the wicked, at my most faithful I think and act like the enemy of God. God’s love for me is scandalous, friends. Although in my soul I want to live in harmony with the Creator, in my flesh I am against him. And he loves me. He loves so much that he would die, be tortured, and every day watch me ignore that sacrifice, whorring away from him every chance that I get, and still take joy in me when I turn to him. God’s love for me is scandalous. All I wish to do is love people in a manner that reflects some small picture of the scandal. And that requires loving my enemies, the ones who hate me, because even the tax collectors love the ones that love them.
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