God According to Adam Clarke

06 Sep , 2010 No Comments

Adam Clarke“[God is] the eternal, independent, and self existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.”

Adam Clarke, 1762-1832

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What the Dog Saw

04 Sep , 2010 No Comments

What the Dog Saw - Malcolm GladwellI just finished my last of Malcom Gladwell’s books called “What the Dog Saw.” It is a collection of essays that he has written for the New Yorker Magazine. Each chapter is a completely different topic, so there isn’t much connection or flow overall, and one of the chapters seemed to contradict his points in a couple of other ones. Nonetheless, it is an intriguing read by a guy that has quickly become one of my favorite authors. Here are some of the quotes that stood out to me:

“The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do. Our instinct as humans, after all, is to assume that mot things are not interesting.”

“Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference. But that makes it easy to forget that sometimes happiness can be found in having what we’ve always had and everyone else is having.”

“But there is nothing like being an NFL quarterback except being an NFL quarterback. A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice.”

“We associate the willingness to risk great failure — and the ability to climb back from catastrophe — with courage. But in this we are wrong. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.”

“They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.”

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Creeping Determinism

01 Sep , 2010 No Comments

“[Psycologist Baruch] Fischoff calls this phenomenon ‘creeping determinism’ — the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable — and the chief effect of creeping determinism, he points out, is that it turns unexpected events into expected events.” Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw

The idea of creeping determinism explains the expression “hindsight is 20/20.” When we look back on events, it always seems so obvious that things would turn out the way they did. But that is only because we have had the chance to connect the dots in a way that is unnatural and impossible when we are in the moment.

If you are like me, you often kick yourself for making stupid decisions after you have looked back to see the big picture of how things turned out. (Why did I buy a house before the market completely dropped; why did I not choose to take advantage of some other opportunity; etc). And while we may want to challenge ourselves with the idea that next time we won’t make the same kind of mistake, the reality is that we probably will.

But it also reminds me that we need to live each moment to the full, inviting God’s Spirit to be the driving force of what we are doing, and stop worrying about how things will ultimately turn out. The critics will always look back and analyze the mistakes made, but the real action is living in the moment, accepting its inherent limitations, and being one of the people affecting the future. We can choose to shape our kingdoms, the things that we have influence and control over, to build the Kingdom of God, even if we can’t foresee what that will look like in the future.

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The Smell of Jesus

28 Aug , 2010 No Comments

“For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are an aroma that brings death; to the other, an aroma that brings life.” 2 Corinthians 2:15-16a

Some of you may know that I had a very interesting job in high school. I sold cologne at the mall. Yes, I was that guy that sprayed cards and handed them to you as you walked by. It was an odd job, but I absolutely loved it.

Nautica Competition CologneYou quickly learn how subjective our sense of smell is. I was selling the cologne from Nautica. One person would tell me that they absolutely loved a fragrance, and the very next person would gag at the smell of it. Apart from the sales/persuasion part of it, I learned that there isn’t a “best” smell out there that everyone can agree on.

So what a powerful analogy that Paul compares Christians as the “pleasing aroma of Christ.” To some, we are the smell of life. And that is an intriguing idea when you are bogged down in the stench of the sinful world. But to others, we are an “aroma that brings death.” We are a reminder that there is Truth, and that God is in control no matter how people choose to disregard Him.

But in all of this, I think the most dangerous people are Christians with no aroma at all. Self described “Christians” who either don’t have their own relationship with God, who don’t have His Spirit filling their lives, and as a result they don’t even smell like Christ. Or, it could be Christians who have so accepted other smells from the world that it overrides the smell of Christ in their life. These people tell the world that Christ doesn’t smell any different than anything else, and people thus conclude that He must be irrelevant for their lives.

What does your life smell like?

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Divine Conspiracy – Ch. 2

23 Aug , 2010 No Comments

Here are some of my favorite ideas from chapter 2 of Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy.

“But, to be quite frank, grace is cheap from the point of view of those who need it.”

“Helmut Thielicke points out that we often wonder if the celebrities who advertise foods and beverages actually consume what they are selling. He goes on to say that this is the very question most pressing for those of us who speak for Christ. Surely something has gone wrong when moral failures are so massive and widespread among us. Perhaps we are not eating what we are selling. More likely, I think, what we are ‘selling’ is irrelevant to our real existence and without power over daily life.”

“But we get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of the heavens now–the eternal kind of life–as the target. The words and acts of Jesus naturally suggest that this is indeed salvation, with discipleship, forgiveness, and heaven to come as natural parts.”

“Right at the heart of this alienation lies the absence of Jesus the teacher from our lives. Strangely, we seem prepared to learn how to live from almost anyone but him.”

“We who profess Christianity will believe what is constantly presented to us as gospel. If gospels of sin management are preached, they are what Christians will believe. And those in the wider world who reject those gospels will believe that what they have rejected is the gospel of Jesus Christ himself–when, in fact, they haven’t yet heard it.”

“We must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can naturally become his students or apprentices. We can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now.”

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The Red Letters Project

17 Aug , 2010 No Comments

Recently I was given a copy of the Red Letters Project to review on my blog. I’ll admit, I was a bit perplexed by the idea of it. It is all of Jesus’ words in the book of Matthew put to music. They describe it this way: “an ambitious and eclectic 3-disc performance based on the ‘red letter’ words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew. Drawn word-for-word from the New Living Translation, it’s a real listening experience, featuring 40 tracks, both sung and narrated.”

Red Letters ProjectIt is three CDs with different singers throughout the project. As I listened to them the one word that kept coming to mind was “weird.” Truthfully, most of it is painfully bad. To be fair though, they are tackling a daunting challenge. Much of it sounds like cheesy Christian music with forced lyrics (because they are). But there were three of the songs that I genuinely liked. And I noticed that they were all the same singer. Then I realized that he sounded a lot like a band that I used to be into called Ra. So I looked up the info in the CD case and was blown away to realize that it IS the singer from the band Ra. I didn’t know he was a believer (still don’t I guess, but at least he likes the Bible).

So I guess 3 out of 40 songs isn’t a very good ratio of approval, but it was an interesting process if nothing else. The one thing that I can confidently say is that it truly is a “real listening experience.” Kudos to them for the idea but I don’t think it worked.

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