Accessible Success

I have met you and I have heard your story, but I do not know you well. I do know that you are not alone. I felt your pain, and there was so much I wanted to say but could not find the words. So, I wrote them down, and I pray that you and all of those who suffer with you will see and understand.

What can I say? Are there any words that would make a difference? How can I, living as I say that all should live and yet rarely joyful, claim that I know the path to peace, fulfillment, and happiness? I know that if I hold back because of my own imperfection, I will never be able to share what little wisdom God has allowed me. So, with open acknowledgement that I have not yet managed to fully apply the truth I know, I try to pass it along.

Should I dare to speak to someone whose life and experience are so different than mine? I have certainly known the pain of loss, but each loss is different. I know what betrayal feels like, but not on the scale that some have seen it. In truth my life has been good. That I cannot see well is sometimes a source of frustration, but I wouldn’t trade the life I’ve been given to gain the ability to see. What is that against the love of a good family and most of all the love of God? If I can point to tragedy in my life, it has been that of my own making, and even there, God has spared me. I was brought up in the Truth, and that kept me from much that destroys life.

Maybe it is only this that I can offer. I have hope in God. There is no hope in religious ritual. It may provide the solace of the familiar, but there is no life in it. True worshipers may exist within its context, but in itself it does not promote true worship. Church, as most of us define it, is no church at all. The church is comprised of true followers of Jesus, not of congregants in a particular building, group, or denomination. It is among such true believers that one may hope to find a small sample of the love that God intended for us to share. These people are much rarer than the shrinking numbers of church attendees would indicate. Once discovered, they too will fail us at times, because they like us are flawed. The only one in whom we may have unshakable trust is Yahweh, the God of the Bible.

But He designed us to operate in community. We were not meant to function in isolation. Alone, we cannot receive His love through His people, nor can we give it. The latter is crucial. When we give Jesus our lives and are thus reborn, we have within us His nature and are compelled to act as He would. We cannot be healthy unless we are doing what He does. As I live my life, I become more and more convinced that the only path to consistent and lasting joy is in service to others, which is service to God. WE love Him by loving each other.

Those are pretty words, but they seem to crumble to dust upon the slightest brush with reality. The best of us fail and most of us are not the best of us. We tend to be selfish, ungrateful, spiteful, and without real love. To love and give of oneself only to have more demanded without so much as a word of gratitude seems to pull that joy I spoke of well out of reach. This is why we need others around us. We need a community of godly people who will stand with us. It is more blessed to give than to receive, but if one never receives, he runs out of anything to give. I for one would rather that everything I need come straight from God. He’s the one who will never fail. But God means for His people to be conduits for His love. By denying others the opportunity to give to me, I deny them the opportunity to be blessed by the giving and act out God’s nature in their own lives. This is tough when trust has been often betrayed, but there is healing in it.

I also hurt for those who choose to reject God’s best for them. What can I say that would help you understand? The love you seek cannot be found in a relationship devoid of commitment. The pain you hope to soothe will only grow worse as your soul becomes further divided among partners who themselves have no notion of love beyond what pleases them or seems to fill their own emptiness. What will you do if you should find true love and discover that you have too little left to share? God does not wish to take love away from you. He wishes to give it to you. He is not out to take all joy from your life, but to show you the way to more joy than you imagine possible. Loving Father that He is, he guides us away from the things that will hurt us and toward that which is best for us. He is also just, and though He would not have it so, He must eventually judge those who will not listen to the truth. This above all I would spare you, for there is no greater sorrow than to be separated forever from the lover who would never have left you. Come to Him. He does not seek religious rituals. He cares little which label you wear. I think He would prefer that you wear no label at all. He wants your heart. If you give yourself to Him, He will guide you to the love you are looking for. He is known as Jesus, the god of the universe made flesh to die so that you can live. He is Yahweh, the eternal Father who loved you enough to sacrifice His own son to have you. There is no greater love.

Many of us are familiar with Jesus’ statement that we must enter His kingdom like a child if we are to enter it at all. We describe it as having a childlike faith, but is that what He said? Certainly, we should trust in our Heavenly Father in the same way that a young child trusts in his earthly father, but in the passages we reference, Jesus said nothing of faith. In each instance, the theme is humility. The disciples weren’t getting it. They were arguing among themselves as to which of them would be the greatest in the kingdom. Presumably, based on the question they asked Him even after His resurrection (Acts 1:6,) they were imagining an earthly kingdom in which favors would be handed out to the closest associates of the new leader. Jesus is letting them know that’s not how His kingdom works. One cannot enter it on his own merit in pursuit of his own glory. One must enter it in humility, looking to God just as a little child looks to his parents.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and said, “Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And He called a child to Himself and set him before them, and said, “Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

Matthew 18:1-4 NASB 1995

This is one way we get misled. The idea of a childlike faith is not without merit, but here many of us have assumed a scriptural support for a concept that is actually something entirely different. We have missed the main point and thereby promoted a teaching that I believe is actually harmful to our faith. We promote faith without reason. We are encouraged to turn off our minds and just believe. Yes, it is possible to accept and believe without understanding. The true faith of a child is no less true because he cannot fully understand what he believes, but we advise him never to grow up!

Children are trusting, but they are also naive. We cringe at the thought of a child approached by a stranger who says, “Your daddy said to come with me.” We teach them as soon as we can not to go with strangers. We are not preparing new believers in the same way. Often, we inadvertently encourage them instead to pursue the stranger. Any time we listen to someone else tell us what God said and do not confirm for ourselves that He did indeed say it, we risk following a stranger into danger. Just as it has become common for parents to give children a code word so that if they do need to go with someone new, they will have a token of the parent’s authority, we have God’s word in the Bible. Everything we hear should be checked against the Bible before we accept it as truth. And remember, even Satan quotes scripture. One isolated reference does not constitute proof. The Bible is a big book. It can be made to say just about anything if one picks just the right fragment.

Trust in God as a child may trust a father but accept no impostor. Have a child’s humility but have a mature faith. (See 1 Corinthians 3:1-3, Hebrews 5:12)

If I could have only one thing out of life, it would be to know pure love. There are many reasons why I say that. I don’t know if all of them are good, but I will share one of them here. I’m not sure I know myself well enough to say which is truly the strongest motivation for me, but I know what it should be. To know love is to know God.

I know a statement like that will bother some Christians. They rightly decry movements in the modern church that emphasize God’s love to the exclusion of His wrath and judgment and our need for repentance. These things are not at odds. In fact, they require each other to exist. God is holy and just because He is love, not in spite of it. John 4:8 says that God is love. Does that mean He can be nothing else? We are all many things at the same time.

When we use a noun to describe a person, we usually affix a singular article to it. We would say that john is a man. We would not say that Jon is man. The latter implies that Jon is the standard by which We can judge whether anyone is a man or not. If we want another way to describe John in more general terms as belonging to the class of men, we will say that he is male, using an adjective rather than a noun.

The Bible tells us that God is love. To say that he is a love would not make much sense. We don’t use the word that way, though we might, since there are four words translated as love from the Greek. He is associated with the root word “agapé”, which is by far the most used. To say that He is loving is true, but He means to communicate something more powerful here. God defines love. He is the standard by which love is proven. John writes: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8 NASB 1995) This is why I say that to know love is to know God.

This may still be hard to swallow unless we have some understanding of what love really is. I don’t think it’s an accident that the word has fallen into vulgar usage. We apply the same word to everything from the height of ecstasy to a preference for popcorn. I too am guilty, though no longer without regret, of using the word lightly. When God uses the word, it’s definitely not shallow. Just look at what He did for love.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”

John 3:16

For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:7-8

When Jesus talks about the kind of love we should have for each other (John 13:34-35) and even about the kind of love we should have for our enemies (Matt 5:43-48,) the writers use the same Greek word that is used in the passages above. It is a love willing to sacrifice itself even for those who pay it back with hate. I have to ask myself, is this really the kind of love I want to know? It is freely given, but it is not free. You can have it for nothing, but it will cost you everything. My flesh cringes, but my heart says “YES!”

Ever since reading 1 John out of my Braille New Testament at seventeen, I have longed to understand and know this kind of love. For all of that, I can’t say that I do. As I look at the notes from the times I have taught on the subject, I see a very academic presentation, full of facts and lacking feeling. The truth is still the truth and God may use it to bring life, but where is the life in me? I feel like a hypocrite explaining to you something that I do not understand myself. Yet I believe in it. Love puts everything else in context. That is why Satan has worked so hard to corrupt and destroy it. I will continue to pursue it, and I will keep calling for you to join me. The One who loves us best will be found, and He will show us what it means.

No study of love is complete without reference to a couple of other key passages from the Bible. One that we may not usually associate with the topic is this.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

Galatians 5:22-23

Speaking of grammar, look at the structure of this sentence. Often, we see somewhat cumbersome structure in the Bible due to the fact that we are translating from another language with different syntax rules, so consider that the word “fruit” is singular, then reread the sentence with a period after the word “love.” Love is the fruit of the Spirit. The words that follow describe love. I’ll leave you to read 1 Corinthians 13 for yourself. Join me on the journey.

I wrote the majority of this back in November of 2017, but now having seen my own book published and struggling for attention, it really hits home.

I was scrutinizing the text of 2 Corinthians in an effort to understand a verse in context. I was thinking about the density of thought and concept contained in Paul’s letters. Every line weaves together ideas and principles to build the points he makes. I considered the difference between studying 2 Corinthians and reading an average online article or even the latest book from a respected author. There is no comparison. Few people write at that level of complexity, and few will make the effort to understand them if they do. That is why I tried to make my writing “accessible.”

There are a couple of things to note here. First, the Bible is God’s written communication meant to facilitate the salvation and sanctification of humanity for millennia. One should expect that kind of work to be packed with a little more meat than anything else one might choose to read. Second, it is a collection of writings translated from old languages that are no longer spoken in the form that they were written in if spoken at all. We should expect to struggle a little to follow the thought process. The level of clarity that we do have is itself a testament to God’s hand at work throughout the ages.

Now here’s the other contributing factor that I think explains the difference. You see it in the overall quality of literature through time. I’m hardly a qualified critic. Just ask my English teachers. But I will make these observations. It takes time for a book to mature into a classic. It has to be read a lot, be unusually well written, and touch us in some deep place that most cannot reach. How hard will it be then, in a world overrun with words, to find those few that are worthy of extraordinary notice?

In basic economics, the more there is of something, the less value it has. The easier something is to produce, the more of it we will have. Words today are cheaper than ever in history. It might take me as much as an hour to edit this blog post depending on how careful I am about what goes into it. Yet with one click it becomes potentially available for the entire world to read. Anyone with a computer and a few extra dollars can self-publish their own book. The world is flooded with words. That is why I made an effort to find a publishing company to improve my chances of getting noticed.

Compare that to the effort required in centuries past. When the works that eventually became the Bible were produced, every stroke was done by hand with crude writing instruments. Every copy had to be painstakingly written out the same way. Whether it be a letter to a friend or an epic story, care was required to make every word count.

It is no wonder to me that even in the pages of writing from the past century we can find a level of depth and nuance rarely seen in anything you pick up today. We had the printing press, then eventually the typewriter, but it still required considerable investment of time and effort to get one’s words into print and in front of an audience. Now, words are cheap. It takes little effort to produce them and even less to publish them for all to see. We’re all a-twitter and saying little more than the birds from which we get the term.

I’ve been a science fiction fan all my life.  I enjoy the imaginative places it can take us, the speculations on what might be.  Creative juices can flow free as ever more improbable alien worlds unfold along with futures both terrifying and delightful. As a child I imagined myself in those worlds, furtively exploring like a stowaway aboard one of the many space vessels warping through my ever-expanding universe as I read anything I could get.

But as I grew older, I began to see the fatal flaws in these fantastic fables.  Most of them launch from an unstable platform.  There is no foundation.  The gravity is artificial, and it can’t hold anything together.  God is either missing or he’s some kind of powerful alien, thus not really God at all.

I still enjoy it, but now with a tinge of sadness, because there is no life in most of it.  There is room for Christians to explore some of its themes and I have read a few authors who have done so, but I have yet to find anyone doing it as well as I think it could be done.

Recently I had a new thought about it.  I’m sure it is only a new thought to me, because it seems an obvious conclusion for anyone who believes that we are creations of Yahweh, intended for relationship with Him.  Much of science fiction expresses humanity’s desire for something greater than itself.  We crave relationship.  We recognize the insufficiency of other people to meet that need, so we look to the stars.

If there is no God, then surely there must be something.  We cannot possibly be alone in this great big universe.  If probability alone dictates our existence, then we ourselves should not exist, but that does not keep us from hoping that there is something more and imagining what it might be.

There it is. I call it the black hole in science fiction.  No construct survives it, because the truth of God cannot be denied.  It is appropriate that science fiction is often grouped in the same category as fantasy. The alien most likely belongs with the elf and the fairy, the ghost and the goblin.

Might God have created other worlds and other-worldly creatures to inhabit them?  If so, it raises some interesting theological questions.  What we are learning about the universe seems to make that unlikely, but despite what I’ve just written I would hesitate to say that he has not done so.  He is certainly capable of operating in realms and in ways that are beyond our understanding.