"Humility" Defined

(Monroe County)

John Dickson defines "humility":

"Humility is the noble choice to forgo your status, deploy your resources or use your influence for the good of others before yourself. More simply, you could say the humble person is marked by a willingness to hold power in service of others." (Dickson, Humilitas: A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership, Kindle Locations 167-169)

This definition has the following three ideas.

1. Humility presupposes your dignity. "The one being humble acts from a height, so to speak, as the “lowering” etymology makes clear. True humility assumes the dignity or strength of the one possessing the virtue, which is why it should not be confused with having low self-esteem or being a doormat for others." (Kindle Locations 170-172) It i impossible to be humble without a healthy sense of self-worth. 
2. Humility is willing. "It is a choice. Otherwise it is humiliation. (K 172)
3. Humility is social. "It is not a private act of self-deprecation—banishing proud thoughts, refusing to talk about your achievements and so on. I would call this simple “modesty". But humility is about redirecting of your powers, whether physical, intellectual, financial or structural, for the sake of others." (Kindle Locations 179-181)

Hearing God: The Precondition of Humility

(Bicyclists on North Custer in Monroe)

For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, 

and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

Jesus, Matthew 23:12

Prayer is talking with God about what we (God and I) are doing together. Praying involves both speaking and listening. Over the years the balance of my prayer life has shifted to listening. 

The precondition for listening is humility.

A humble heart is a necessary condition for hearing God. Dallas Willard writes: "Humility is a quality that opens the way for God to work because God resists the proud (1 Pet 5:5)." (Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God, p. 52) 

Psalm 29:5 says, of God: He guides the humble in what is right  and teaches them his way. From this it follows that God does not guide the proud.

A proud heart is unguidable.

Willard writes:

"God will gladly give humility to us if, trusting and waiting on him to act, we refrain from pretending we are what we know we are not, from presuming a favorable position for ourselves and from pushing or trying to override the will of others. (This is a fail-safe recipe for humility. Try it for one month. Money-back guarantee if it doesn’t work.)" (Ib., pp. 52-53)

The Bible - Read Slowly, Go Deep

 

                                                        (Levi and family in our backyard.)

I am a reader.

A slow reader. 

I read meditatively, even the newspaper.

I slow-read the Bible. In brief pieces.

I have always done it this way, over my fifty-three years as a follower of Jesus.

I have never been able to "read the Bible in one year." I would never keep up! I am the tortoise, not the hare. Which means I get there, slowly, and for me deeply, over time.

I have found that this slow, meditative reading of the Word builds something solid in my soul, over time. God-knowledge accrues. 

Dallas Willard writes, "If you read the Bible, desiring that God’s revealed will should be true for you, do not try to read a great deal at once." (Willard, Dallas. Hearing God Through the Year: A 365-Day Devotional, p. 242)

How to Communicate When In Conflict

Art on a building in Columbus, Ohio

(I am reposting this to keep it in play.)

One of the blessings Linda and I have had is to know and be taught by David Augsburger. We were in a couples group with David and Nancy for two years. We dog-sat for them (they had Irish Setters). David was one of my seminary professors.  After hanging around him in these contexts, I felt I could be helped by meeting with him. David was kind enough to meet privately and counsel me. At the time I did not understand his counseling approach. Only years later did some of this activate in me.

David is one of Christianity's great scholars on understanding anger and conflict, and ways to work through these things. Linda and I still use his book Caring Enough to Confront. David takes Ephesians 4:15 and develops a template we use to this day: Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.

How should we communicate with others when we are in conflict? Ephesians provides two actions we are to take:

1. Speak truthfully

2. Speak lovingly

Both are needed. 

If we only speak truthfully, we can blow people away. I could tell you the truth in unloving ways. Speaking truth without love can injure people.

If we only speak lovingly, we may never address the truth. This can leave issues undealt with. It feels warm and fuzzy for a while, but the bleeding has not been stopped.

Instead, says Paul, we are to speak the truth in love. The formula is: Truth + Love. That sounds like Jesus, right? Jesus asserted the truth, always in love.

Practically, says Augsburger, it looks like this.

• I care about our relationship & I feel deeply about the issue at stake

• I want to hear your view & I want to clearly express mine

• I want to respect your insights & I want respect for mine

• I trust you to be able to handle my honest feelings & I want you to trust me with yours

• I promise to stay with the discussion until we reach an understanding & I want you to stay with me until we've reached an understanding

• I will not trick, pressure, manipulate, or distort the differences & I want your unpressured, clear, honest views of our differences

• I give you my loving, honest respect & I want your caring-confronting response

These are attitudes Linda and I learned and practice. These teachings have been so important to us! As a young married couple we saw, lived-out before our eyes and ears, how to be loving and truthful even when you don’t like each other at the moment. Even when you are angry.

Speak the truth in love to one another.

That is the way out of what sometime seem like irreconcilable differences.

***
Two of my books are:

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God(May 2016)

Leading the Presence-Driven Church (January 2018).

The Genetic Fallacy

(I'm re-posting this for my Apologetics class.)

A common student response to the God-discussions in my philosophy of religion classes is to reason that how beliefs are acquired is relevant to the truth of those beliefs. If one can establish that, e.g., John was taught to believe in God by his parents, then somehow this casts doubt on the existence of God. In logic this kind of false reasoning is known as committing the genetic fallacy.

The genetic fallacy is an informal logical fallacy in which the origin of a belief, claim, or theory is confused with its justification. This fallacy is more often used to discredit a belief, though it may also be used to support one.

For example: "You only believe in God because your parents taught you to. So your belief must be false."

This kind of thinking is fallacious because the origin of the claim has no logical relation to its truth or falsity. The origin of a belief (how we acquired the belief) is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of that belief.

Another example is: "You only believe Christianity because you were indoctrinated by your parents and culture. If you came from a Hindu family and culture you would be a Hindu," with the spoken or unspoken impression "Thus, Christianity need not be preferred over Hinduism."

These are sociological, statistical claims.  Nothing can be inferred about the truth of Christianity from reasons as to where Christian belief originated.

Logic, and philosophy of religion studies, care nothing for sociological, socio-cultural, anthropological, and psychological explanations of the formation and transmission of beliefs. This is because such studies are irrelevant to the truth of beliefs.

Further note that, were genetic fallacy reasoning valid, then we ought to question everything we have learned from our parents, to include "1+1=2," "The earth is not flat," and "Milk comes from cows."

Logic is concerned with whether or not statements of belief are TRUE. or FALSE

CONSIDER:
· Christianity – An omni-God exists
· Atheism – no omni-God exists
· Hinduism – there are 330 million “gods”
· Buddhism – everything that is, is metaphysically One.
· Pantheism – everything is God
· Agnosticism – we can’t know whether or not an omni-God exists
· Skepticism – there are so many alternatives we can’t possibly know which one is true.

The origins of these beliefs have nothing to do with logical truth-claims.

Philosophers look at these statements individually and ask: Is this statement true or is it false? For example, is the statement God does not exist true? How one came to believe that God does or does not exist is irrelevant to the issue of truth.

One more example.

1. I behave this way because I was born this way.

2. Therefore, this way is good/right/to be affirmed?

Really?

Inference To the Best Explanation

(I'm re-posting this for my Apologetics class.)

The text I use to instruct my MCCC Logic students is The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims, by Lewis Vaughn (Oxford). It is excellent, creative, colorful, contains many excellent and relevant explanations, and is clearly written. And, it contains a chapter on "Inference To the Best Explanation." This is the first logic text I have seen that explains this. 

Inference to the best explanation (IBE), also called abductive reasoning, is important for Christian theologians to understand. For example, Alister McGrath's new work on the fine-tuning argument for God's existence in his A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology depends on it. An understanding of inference as to the best explanation is helpful in adjudicating between competing metanarratives. (On abductive reasoning as IBE, see Atocha Aliseda, Abductive reasoning: logical investigations into discovery and explanation, pp. 134 ff.)

What, exactly, is IBE? Vaughn writes: "In inference to the best explanation, we reason from premises about a state of affairs to an explanation of that state of affairs. The premises are statements about observations or other evidence to be explained. The explanation is a claim about why the state of affairs is the way it is. The key question that this type of inference tries to answer is, What is the best explanation for the existence or nature of this state of affairs? The best explanation is the one most likely to be true, even though there is no guarantee of its truth as there is in deductive inference." (344)

Inference as to the best explanation has this pattern:

1. Phenomenon Q.

2. E provides the best explanation for Q.

3. Therefore, it is probable that E is true.

As an example of IBE in action I teach, in my Philosophy of Religion courses, Robin Collins's fine-tuning argument for the existence of God. Collins calls IBE "the prime principle of confirmation." This is: whenever we are considering two competing hypotheses, an observation counts as evidence in favor of the hypothesis under which the observation has the highest probability (or is the least improbable). For example, suppose I walk out in the hall after class and a hundred pennies are on the ground, spelling “John, call home now.”
The prime principle of confirmation (IBE) tells me that this did not happen by chance. Some causal agent probably did this. Therefore it is probable that this happened by design. The fine-tuning evidences are like this, only much more so. (For more see here.)

Vaughn writes: "Notice that an inference to the best explanation always goes "beyond the evidence" - it tries to explain facts but does so by positing a theory that is not derived entirely from those facts. It tries to understand the known by putting forth - through inference and imagination - a theoretical pattern that encompasses both the known and the unknown. It proposes a plausible pattern that expands our understanding. The fact that there are best explanations, of course, implies that not all explanations for a state of affairs are created equal." (344-345)

And...

McGrath on Inference to the Best Explanation

Our backyard

For any Christian theist who is interested in the relationship (if any) between science and religion Alister McGrath's Science and Religion: A New Introduction is essential reading.

McGrath, who has a Ph.D in biochemistry and another Ph.D in theology, is big on "inference to the best explanation." (See also McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology.) In my MCCC logic text Lewis Vaughn has an entire chapter (uniquely so) dedicated to inference to the best explanation (IBE).

Here's McGrath on the increasing relevance of IBE as related to the fading approach to scientific verificationism as exemplied by, e.g., Richard Dawkins. McGrath writes:

"Recent years have seen a growing interest within the philosophy of science in the idea of“inference to the best explanation. ” This represents a decisive move away from older positivist understandings of the scientific method, still occasionally encountered in popular accounts of the relation of science and religion, which holds that science is able to – and therefore ought to  – offer evidentially and inferentially infallible evidence for its theories. This approach, found at many points in the writings of Richard Dawkins, is now realized to be deeply problematic. It is particularly important to note that scientific data are capable of being interpreted in many ways, each of which has evidential support. In contrast, positivism tended to argue that there was a single unambiguous interpretation of the evidence, which any right -minded observer would discover." (Science and Religion, 52)

Nice. And helpful.

Resources to Help Understand Our Secular Age

 

                                                                (Somewhere in Ohio)

In 2007 I purchased Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's massive, definitive A Secular Age. Since then, I have returned to Taylor-studies. His work is simply that important to understand our culture.

Tonight, late Sunday, I listened to this podcast, "How Charles Taylor Helps Us Understand Our Secular Age." It's excellent!

For more Taylor Reading, see...

Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity

The Ethics of Authenticity (After reading this you can forget most of what you think 'authenticity' means.)

The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Esp. interesting to me since my doctoral dissertation was on metaphor theory.)

How Not to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, by James K. A. Smith

Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor, by Collin Hansen

 

Just as I Am?

 

                                                                (Monroe County)

Does Jesus invite me to come to him "just as I am?" Thank God, yes!

When I follow Jesus will I stay "just as I am?" Thank God, no!

The book of Galatians explains both statements.

The first statement is about justification. Justification means being made right with God.

There was a teaching floating around in the early church that what Christ accomplished on the cross was not enough to justify us. More was needed, taught the Judaizers. In addition to Christ's atoning sacrificial death, one must also become a Jew, and, if male, be circumcised, and follow the Mosaic law and the dietary laws and keep the Jewish holy days. 

To this, Paul gives a resounding "NO!" That is a "different gospel - really, no gospel at all." (Gal. 1:6-7). Such teachings "pervert" the gospel of Christ.

But once we come to Jesus, just as we are, and are justified, are we then to stay just as we are? To that idea, Paul gives a resounding "No!" To explain this, Paul contrasts the works of the "flesh" (sinful inclinations) with the works of the Spirit. Works of the flesh include,

sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 

20 idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, 

fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 

21 and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. 

I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

The works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit are contrary to each other, are in conflict with each other. Paul's beautiful prayer for these new Christians was that they be "formed into Christlikeness," by the power of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 4:19).

Now, in Christ, we are new creations. God has put his Spirit in us. We are to walk in the Spirit, keep in step with the Spirit, say "Yes" to the leadings of the Spirit. As we do this, the Holy Spirit grows "fruit of the Spirit" in us, which includes...

love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 2

3 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 

24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh 

with its passions and desires. 

25 Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. 

All who have come to Christ, to include myself, were a hot mess. Yet we could come "Just as I am." That's justification. Thank God for it!

Then, all who abide in Christ and worship Him become different creations. That's sanctification. Thank God for it!

Here's the idea, again, from the apostle Paul.

Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral 

nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men 

10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers 

nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. 

11 And that is what some of you were. 

But you were washed, you were sanctified, 

you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ 

and by the Spirit of our God.

***

Want to dig deeper into the book of Galatians? I recommend...  

Craig Keener - Galatians: A Commentary

Ben Witherington - Grace in Galatia: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Galatians

Scot McKnight - Galatians: The NIV Application Commentary

N. T. Wright - Galatians

Tim Keller - Galatians for You

John Piippo - The Intended Christian Life

A Wedding Is a Welding

(I re-post this periodically.) 

Marriage is different, in essence, from co-habiting. Marriage requires more than just living together.

What is marriage?

In Matthew 19:1-9 we see large crowds of people coming to Jesus, and Jesus healing them. After this happens “some Pharisees came to test him. They asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?’”

This was one of the most controversial questions of that time. It refers to Deuteronomy 24:1-4, where we read that a husband can divorce his wife if he finds “something indecent about her.” The debate was – what does “something indecent” mean?

There were two schools of thought about that. The school of the rabbi Shammai said, “something indecent” means "adultery." The school of the rabbi Hillel taught that “something indecent” means anything, even something so trivial as burning your husband’s bagel. “So, what do you think about this,” the Pharisees asked Jesus? Jesus’ response is brilliant. Instead of dealing with Deuteronomy 24 he takes them back to Genesis 1 & 2.

"Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." A very cool response by Jesus. Why?

Because Deuteronomy 24:1-4 is about troubleshooting. Genesis 1 & 2 is the heart of the owner’s manual. Yes, there is a time for troubleshooting. But Jesus asks, don’t you remember what "marriage" really is? It’s male and female, united in marriage, becoming one flesh, whom God has “joined together.”

It’s this “joined together” thing that’s especially important. The word means, literally, “welded together.” New Testament scholar R.T. France says, “It would be hard to imagine a more powerful metaphor of permanent attachment.” A wedding is a welding, done by God the Master Welder.

I asked a friend who welds to give me a definition of welding. Welding, he said, is a fabrication process that joins materials, usually metals or thermoplastics, by causing coalescence. “Coalescence” is the process by which two or more droplets of metal form a single droplet and become one continuous solid. No wonder they call it “wedlock!”

Jesus is saying to the Pharisees, “Don’t you remember what God said about a husband and wife? God has weld-locked them together. Don’t let any person try to separate them!"

Instead of saying he’s for or against divorce, Jesus lifts up marriage. The Pharisees seem to have thought that the very legislation about divorce, within the law of Moses, meant that Moses was quite happy for it to take place. Since there's a law to tell you how to do it, that must mean it's OK to do. That would be like seeing a sign that says “In case there’s a fire, take this emergency exit,” and then concluding “It must be OK to start a fire in this building.”

Jesus shows the flaw in their thinking by pointing back to God's original intention. Marriage was meant to be a partnership of one man and one woman... for life. Marriage was not meant to be something that could be split up and reassembled whenever one person wanted to end it.

This summer it was 50 years ago that Linda and I got welded, wed-locked, together. The result is that a lot of her has gotten into me and a lot of me has gotten into her. I am deeply influenced by her, and her by me. God fused us together into “one flesh.” What a great idea! You can’t get that by cohabiting.

I remember the bond.

I remember when God welded us together.

***

My books are:

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship

Deconstructing Progressive Christianity

31 Letters to the Church on Praying

Encounters with the Holy Spirit (Co-edited with Janice Trigg)

View People as Persons, Not as Problems

(In Eldoret, Kenya)

Pastors have their own problems. I know I do. I am so grateful for people in my church family who show me grace and love in spite of myself.

Some of my inner struggles have been healed. Gone! As regards those infirmities, I am free. 

Some of my shortcomings have gotten better, but I'm not all the way there yet.

I am unaware, oblivious, to other, perhaps many, of my faults. God, in his mercy, has not shown them all to me at once, since I would fall apart and be undone.

Before I went to India I talked with a friend who had been there several times. I told him the name of the airline I would be taking on the flight from Mumbai to Hyderabad. He said, "They hold those planes together with baling wire."

What holds me together is the love, mercy, and grace of God. God loves me, his mercies are new every morning, and his grace is abundant and overflowing. I am God's child. God views me, not as a problem, but as a person made in his image.

View people as persons, not as problems. 

Sympathize with, not criticize, their weaknesses. 

Under-stand them. Stand below, not above, them.

Love them, show mercy to them, be gracious unto them.

Help them, as you have been helped.

Forgive them, as you have been forgiven.

Set boundaries as needed.

See the "weight of glory" upon them. 

Faith and Grace

 

The person stood in my office, looked at all the books on my shelf, and said, "I live by faith, not by knowledge."

I responded, "The opposite of faith is not knowledge. It's "living by sight.""

Another person, in another time and place, said, "I live by grace, not by effort."

I responded, "The opposite of grace is not effort. It's "earning.""

Dallas Willard writes,

"To put these ideas together, then, we make an effort to “work out [our] salvation with fear and trembling,” but in grace “it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” (Philippians 2:12-13). It’s right that we are to make the effort to “get understanding” (Proverbs 4:5, 7), yet it is by grace that “the LORD gives wisdom, and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding” (2:6)."

(In Willard, Hearing God Through the Year, p. 297)

Does My Life Have Meaning?

(Sunset, Monroe County Community College)

Does my life have meaning?

Let's look at the meaning of "meaning." (See this, for some linguistic fun.)

I define "meaning" as: fitness in a coherent context. For example, I understand what a certain joke means if I understand the socio-linguistic context. And, that context must be coherent and narratival. 

I understand the meaning of a pawn in the coherent, narratival context of the game of chess. But a chess pawn standing on a tennis court is meaningless, because it has no "fitness" there. The pawn has no fit in the narrative of tennis. For there to be meaning, there must be fitness within a coherent context.

The movie Mad Max: Fury Road takes place in a land called "Wasteland." Max sums up the meaning of his life with these words: "My world is fire and blood" where everything "is reduced to a single instinct: survive." The movie longs for redemption as a woman named Inperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) smuggles five women out of Wasteland, hoping to take them to a destination called "the green place." Context affects meaning; meaning changes relative to context. If there is no coherent context in which we fit, then life is meaningless, and nihilism prevails. "Mad Max is about a road that goes nowhere but exists only for itself. It's meaningless mayhem." ("Mad Max: Fury Road - Finding a forgotten Eden in the midst of post-apocalyptic anarchy") 

The film ends with these words, as a epigram:

Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland,

in search of our better selves.

Where can we go to find the meaning of our lives? The options are:

1. An incoherent context where nothing fits.
2. A coherent context where I do not fit.
3. A coherent context where I fit.

Option 1 is atheism and nihilism, ultimately and logically.

Option 2 is the kingdoms of this world which, as a Jesus-follower, I was not made for. I don't really belong, I don't really fit in, to the form and pattern of this world.

Option 3 is the kingdom of God, which, as Jesus said, is "not of this world."

In the pre-modern, existentialist biblical book of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher weighs the meaning-options and finds them all wanting. Except for one. 

He looks for the meaning to life in nature (Eccl. 1:5-9). But nature is a closed system of cause and effect, an endless circling of sunshine, wind, and rain. The answer, the key, is not in Nature. 

He looks for the key to life's meaning in mankind (1:3-4), and humanity's efforts and accomplishments. But this yields only an endless seeking for happiness through this and that, but to no avail.

He looks for an answer in human wisdom (1:12-17; 2:13-17). But even the most brilliant are only learned ignoramuses (cf. Jose Ortega y Gasset), who fail to make sense of it all.

He looks for the meaning of life in pleasure and sensual delight (2:1-11), but finds the same reality: it's all nothing but "vanity and striving after the wind. (Here it feels like Bertrand Russell's atheism has borrowed from Ecclesiastes - see Russell's "A Free Man's Worship.")

The answer? Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 concludes:

Now all has been heard;

    here is the conclusion of the matter:

Fear God and keep his commandments,

    for this is the duty of all mankind.

¹⁴ For God will bring every deed into judgment,

    including every hidden thing,

    whether it is good or evil.

To answer the question of life's meaning we must first answer these two questions:

Who, or what, made me?

What was I made for?

The answers to these questions will lead you to either Option 1, Option 2, or Option 3.

I've opted for 3. By experience, and by reason. My life's meaning and purpose are found in these words of Jesus:

You shall love the Lord your God

with all your heart,

with all your soul,

with all your mind,

and with all your strength.

And you shall

love your neighbor as yourself.

The Trouble with People Who are Not Like Me

(My back yard)

In the days of my greater immaturity I sang in a college choir. I am a baritone, and I can hold a tune. I can stay on pitch. But X, who sang in the baritone section next to me, could not.

I grew to despise him for this. 

Not only was X tone deaf, he could sing louder than anyone in the choir. X's tone deafness overwhelmed the rest of us. He was an eighth of a tone flat, all the time. Just slightly off pitch. To be slightly off pitch in a choir, and loudly so, is a great sin, for it works to drag everyone else down to its atonal level.

To make matters worse, X always had a smile on his face. I can see his broad smile now, fifty years later. X was upbeat, chipper, as he miserably bellowed. This angered me even more. 

X did not see how this was affecting me. My only relief was to share my grief with others, to spread my pain far and wide. I was everyone, and everyone talked about X. "X is ruining our choir." "X can't sing." "Just what does X think he is doing?" "X makes my life miserable."

"My life would be better if X were not in my life."

But that last statement, of course, is false. And immature. My trouble with X brought out my trouble with me. I, not X (or Y or Z or...), am my greatest problem. Unless I come to see the truth of that, I will be forever miserable.

C.S. Lewis, in a beautiful little piece called "The Trouble with X," wrote:

"Even if you became a millionaire, your husband would still be a bully, or your wife would still nag, or your son would still drink, or you'd still have to have your mother-in-law live with you.

It is a great step forward to realize that this is so; to face up to the fact that even if all external things went right, real happiness would still depend on the character of the people you have to live with--and that you can't alter their characters. And now comes the point. When you have seen this you have, for the first time, had a glimpse of what it must be like for God. For of course, this is (in one way) just what God Himself is up against. He has provided a rich, beautiful world for people to live in. He has given them intelligence to show them how it ought to be used. He has contrived that the things they need for their biological life (food, drink, rest, sleep, exercise) should be positively delightful to them. And, having done all this, He then sees all His plans spoiled--just as our little plans are spoiled--by the crookedness of the people themselves. All the things He has given them to be happy with they turn into occasions for quarreling and jealousy, and excess and hoarding, and tomfoolery..." (C.S. Lewis, "The Trouble with X")

But God's view is different from my view, or from your view. "He sees one more person of the same kind--the one you never do see. I mean, of course, yourself. That is the next great step in wisdom--to realize that you also are just that sort of person. You also have a fatal flaw in your character. All the hopes and plans of others have again and again shipwrecked on your character just as your hopes and plans have shipwrecked on theirs."

God sees me. To God, I am X. And surely, I am X to some people. "It is important to realize that there is some really fatal flaw in you: something which gives others the same feeling of despair which their flaws give you. And it is almost certainly something you don't know about."

There is a second way God is different from me. I don't love X, but God does. God "loves the people in spite of their faults. He goes on loving. He does not let go. Don't say, "It's all very well for Him. He hasn't got to live with them." He has. He is inside them as well as outside them. He is with them far more intimately and closely and incessantly that we can ever be. Every vile thought within their minds (and ours), every moment of spite, envy, arrogance, greed, and self-conceit comes right up against His patient and longing love, and grieves His Spirit more than it grieves ours."

Today, when I think of my attitude towards X, I am saddened. Surely X knew I couldn't stand him. The thought of X knowing that, and still smiling as he sang with all his off-tuned heart, sickens me. Who am I, before God, to treat anyone that way? And who are you to do the same? Lewis writes:

"Be sure that there is something inside you which, unless it is altered, will put it out of God's power to prevent your being eternally miserable. While that something remains, there can be no Heaven for you, just as there can be no sweet smells for a man with a cold in the nose, and no music for a man who is deaf. It's not a question of God "sending" us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud. The matter is serious: let us put ourselves in His hands at once--this very day, this hour."

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My books are...

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God (May 2016).

Leading the Presence-Driven Church.

Deconstructing Progressive Christianity.

(with Janice Trigg) Encounters with the Holy Spirit.

31 Letters to the Church on Praying

31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship