Why Christ: a question of love

We are loving the feedback, and continued discussion on the "Why Christ" post last week. So much so that I thought it would be cool to highlight a really good question someone asked. There are other questions and comments which were amazing on the "Why Christ" post, and while we can't address all of them in new posts, I encourage all of you to check them out and chime in. CLICK HERE if you would like to check out more comments on "Why Christ".


Great Question:
"If love is universal couldn't people of all religions be experiencing the same love 'Christians' do, but just have mis-interpreted the origin?"

My Lowly Response:
Good question, I guess it depends on the premises of your question. What exactly does “universal love” mean or look like? I think that you would get different answers depending on your perspective and religion.

Now, from a “Christian” perspective, I can tell you that I believe God’s love is real, holds no boundaries, transcends culture and race, and, among many other things, is not conditional on works. This love that “Christians” speak of, is the love in which Jesus Christ gave his life up sacrificially for all people.

I am certain that many people have seen acts of Christ’s love through many different kinds of amazing acts, done for many ordinary and different people. But I believe these are acts of love, and not the actual source of love which “Christians” hold onto. (The source of love being a relationship with God)

So to answer your question: sure, many people have experienced acts of love. But I believe that to fully experience God’s love, one must have a relationship with God.

And if you want to know what a relationship with God is all about, or a “Christian” perspective on a relationship with God, I would love to share that with you. Perhaps those of us at R.O.A.R. could even write a post about it?


thoughts, comments, responses, views? please share!

E*Rock's Playlist

So, I was messing around with this music website called imeem (or something like that) and I found out that you can make a music playlist and embed it in a blog or something. Which got me thinking, "why don't I post a playlist of the music that I am listening to right now?" Not that any of you care what's bangin' in my stereo, car, or headphones; but if for some odd reason you did care, now you can know what I'm listening too. And perhaps I can enlighten you on some new songs and artists you haven't heard of; and then maybe you could holla at me some songs you like and I can check out.... ANYWAYZ.... Here is my playlist for now, enjoy! (Yes, I do like more than just rap music, thats just what I'm listening to right now)

E*Rocks Playlist

A Message from God, through Grandpa

I want to share with you a dream I had.  It is a dream I had on the morning that my Grandpa Garrison died, February 4, 2008.  The night before was a great night.  I stayed up with fifty or so other guys on my floor at Taylor University to watch the New York Giants pluck what seemed to be fate, right out of the arms of the New England Patriots.  It was a fantastic evening, after celebrating, and taunting some Patriots fans of the Brotherhood (my floor), I went to bed.  Early the next morning I had a pretty intense dream.  First, a little background.

Late in 2007, around Thanksgiving I think, my Grandpa was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Over the next few months we watched, as he slowly got worse.  We visited him as often as we could, although being in college it wasn't as often as it should have been I guess.  He always had lots of advice on how to life your life and things he'd learned in his life.  He was also very happy when we visited him over the last few months.  He seemed at peace with going to be with Jesus.

Anyway, after the Super Bowl that night I went back to my dorm room and to bed for the night.  Early that next morning I had a dream.  In the dream I went over to my Grandparent's house to visit Grandpa.  In real life the last couple times I'd visited him he was bed ridden and couldn't talk very well, obviously nearing the end.  In the dream I walked in the garage door and up the stairs to find the hospital bed gone and Grandpa sitting on the couch in the living room reading his Bible.  

I walked in and went over to Grandpa, sat down next to him and asked how he was feeling.  His only response to me was, "Jesus Christ lives Joe!" with a huge smile on his face.  I looked at him and said, I know Grandpa."  At that very moment my cell phone rang and woke me up.  I looked at the caller ID and it said, "Dad."  I think it was sometime between 6am and 7am, I knew what the call was about.  I answered the phone and Dad told me that Grandpa had just passed away.

It took me a second but then I realized the weight of the dream I had just had.  Now I don't know whether you believe in God giving you messages through dreams or not.  I typically don't, as I had never had anything like this happen to me, but I couldn't help but think that this was a message from God.  I mean, what are the chances that at the VERY MOMENT my Grandpa died, that I would have a dream that he was completely healed and professing that Christ lives? 

Coincidence...maybe...maybe not.  You decide.  I know that this is something I will never forget.

Why Christ?

A series of random events and conversation in my life has led me to unorthodoxly address why one should believe in Christ, or for that matter Christianity. Now obviously this is not an easy task, nor a short one, but I hope to address a few of the questions which people might have about Christ or Christianity. Feel free to chime in, argue with, or enlighten us on your views on the subject.

Before we start, I must note that this may be an extensive post. It will be VERY long, and I encourage you to read the entire post, or simply skip over it. I say this because of the continuity of the logic in this post. In basic terms, you wont understand what is being said unless you read the post in its entirity... aka: dont skip around, cause you might get lost... and you may become lost anyways. Sound like fun?! Lets go...

In my life I have experienced many people who take religion to separate, unhealthy extremes. I have met Chritians throughout my life who I would define as "legalistic" in philosophy. When I say legalistic I mean they are too focused on the specific rules of Christianity without regard to the grace and freedom with have in Christ. Many of us have been hurt by Christians who seem to be so consumed with rules that they may forget to see their own downfalls until its too late. Thus many times people label Christians as hypocritical individuals. It is sad, but many times we think of "legalistic" Christians when we hear of christians being cast as hypocrits in the national news. Our perspective on Christianity becomes dark and gloomy, because we have this thought that Christians must be perfect.

The other side of this unhealthy extreme which I would like to talk about, is the growing amount of individuals who believe that all religions point to our true creator, and therefor we need to open our minds to accepting all religions on holding absolute truth. I try not to be stereotypical in my descriptions, but this is the persons who would argue that in many ways Christ was a great man, but nonetheless just a good moral teacher to help us see God; similar to that of Muhutma Ghandi, Muhummand, and others.

Which brings me to the question I intend to provide some sort of clearity to: Why believe in Christ only? If the Jews, Muslims, and Christians all serve the same God, why cant we find some moral ground to serve the same God? Let us focus on that question. We can come back to pantheistic world views later (i.e. Hindu, Buddhism, Greek philosophy), right now lets focus on Allah, God, Jehovah, Yahweh, the God that seems from the outside to be the same in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

And I know of no better way to answer this question than to look at a few pages from C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity." I foundationally believe this excerpt is one of the most powerful passeges of apologetics ever written, and my thought is "why re-write something as powerful as this." Keep in mind that this man writting this passage, Lewis, was an athiest for much if not most of his life. I will spare you the exciting details of C.S. Lewis for another time, but here is response to "Why Christ":

"God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gas, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended-civilisations are built up--excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.

And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and by his death, has somehow given new life to men. Thirdly, He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was--that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process.

Then come the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Hindus, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

One part of the claim tends to slip past us unnoticed because we have heard it so often that we no longer see what it amounts to. I mean the claim to forgive sins: any sins. Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toe and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men's toes and stealing other men's money? Asinine fatuity is the kindest description we should give of his conduct. Yet this is what Jesus did. He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This makes sense only if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less so unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is 'humble and meek' and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

Thoughts, comments, questions?




*Points of Interest in Scripture:

"Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division." Luke 12:51

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it." Matthew 7:13-14

Get Over Ourselves!!!

Myself...Me...someone I struggle with all of the time...the biggest obstacle between me and Jesus Christ.  When I sit down and take stock of my faith, and what is holding me back from being a better follower of Christ, I must say that my biggest hold up is myself.

Much like the rest of you I'm sure, I get in the way of my faith in Christ more than anything or anyone else.  Most of us tend to think about ourselves before we think about others and before we think about Christ.  The things in our lives that hold us back from fully and whole heartedly following Christ are usually situations that we have put into life and not something that Jesus has thrown in there.  

My biggest hold up is the "head trash" (as John Dinwiddie used to always talk about in Sunday school) that I am not worthy to even look at my Bible and too disgusting to even think about speaking to Jesus.

This type of thinking is the complete opposite of what Jesus Christ tells us through His Word.  We read that Jesus came for the broken people, the sinners, the meek, the poor;  the ones who were too down and out and too caught up in sin to believe that they were worthy of even the table scraps of the "religious" people of their day, let alone the one and only Son of God.

This is the same way of thinking that a lot of us, myself included, get caught up in.  We believe that we aren't worthy, or not good enough, to go to church, to read the Bible, to speak to Jesus.  So we avoid Him at all costs, hoping that He doesn't see the mess that we have created for ourselves.  This is when Satan steps in and uses that little voice in our head to whisper in our ear, "You aren't worthy, Jesus could never love you."  But He does!

Jesus does love us!! ESPECIALLY at that very moment, when we are caught up overwhelmingly in sin, believing that he can't possibly love us or have any use for us.  Jesus takes us by the hand and rips us out of that life.

What we need to realize is that it is not about us.  It is about Jesus.  We need to stop thinking about ourselves, get our egos out of our way, and turn to Christ.  I am my own biggest obstacle to a life lived for Jesus Christ, and I am willing to bet that you are your own biggest obstacle as well.

"You see, just at the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.  While we were STILL sinners, Christ died for US." ---Romans 5:6,8---

"Jesus is not repelled by us, no matter how messy we are, regardless of how incomplete we are.  When we recognize that Jesus is not discouraged by our humanity, is not turned off by our messiness, and simply doggedly pursues us in the face of it all, what else can we do but give in to his outrageous, indiscriminate love?" ---Mike Yaconelli - Messy Spirituality---

Kings

"I hope he doesn't talk about God again; God's not too popular these days."
"He will talk about God, the king doesn't care if he is popular or not."

Those were the first two lines from NBC's new show, "Kings," a drama based on the story of David, Saul, and Samuel in the bible (1 Samuel). The major twist of the show is that the show is set in present day.

After watching the pilot episode last Sunday, I'm honestly pretty hooked on this show. My expectations were that Kings was going to be a show which very loosely (if not barely) followed scripture. I thought, "well, maybe they'll mention God or something." I was wrong.

The main plot of the story really does follow closely to scripture. Samuel, David, and Saul are all represented in this show by the characters The Reverend, David, and Silas (respectively). There seems to be a battle for the Kingdom, a struggle to follow God, a desire for love, and many deceitful subplots.

While the main plot of the story strongly resembles 1 Samuel, there are many minor aspects of the show which stray far from scripture. For some reason butterflies hold some sort of spiritual symbolism for "God's Anointing." Also, I believe the son of the King is gay and hates David (neither one happened in the bible, in fact him and David were best friends). The King appears to only have one daughter (that we know of), but she is falling in love with David (which does happen with one of the king's daughters and David).

There are also some cool/interesting interpretations to make this story "modern." David slays Goliath, which happens to be an unbeatable tank instead of a giant. David plays the piano instead of the harp. And of course there are the different names of people and countries.

All in all, I am very interested to see where this series takes us. Whether it continues to somewhat follow scripture, or if it will stray completely off. If nothing else I am impressed that a show on primetime tv even allows the talk of God or faith. And more than anything, I am interested to use the tv show as a way to talk about the bible, and where it differs from the show. Who knows, perhaps this show can open up ways of sharing Christ with others.

Let me know what you think about the show, the story of David, or what you think about the article.

Usama Bin Laden Reconciled to the United States

Yesterday I attended a service at Oxford Bible Fellowship here in Oxford, OH.  We had a guest speaker yesterday on account of the senior pastor having gone back home to Indiana for the weekend and the University being on spring break.

Overall the guest speaker was alright.  One thing he said definitely made me think.  He came up with an interesting analogy that I wanted to share with all of you.  He said (paraphrased)...

Imagine that, after the events of 9/11, and the War on Terror that followed that the U.S. found Usama Bin Laden.  After being captured he met with President Barack Obama and reconciled himself with the President and was forgiven of all his crimes.  After being reconciled with Obama, he is appointed Ambassador to Afghanistan to try and reconcile other known terrorists with the United States.

Now, depending on your point of view, this may seem ridiculous to some of you.  If you are like me, you are thinking, "Yeah Right, UBL should die a horrible and painful long and drawn out death for what he did to this country, its citizens and others around the world!!"  I mean come on!!  He killed over 2000 U.S. citizens on 9/11 and his people have been responsible for thousands of citizen and military deaths around the world since!!

After the speaker gave us that scenario he then applied it to God and us as Christians.  At one point we were UBL in that story.  We were the ones sinning uncontrollably and doing anything we could to damage God's purpose on this earth (whether that's how we viewed our sin or not).  Then, God captured our hearts, forgave us, reconciling us to Him and then appointed us as his ambassador to the world, to our country, and our communities.  Even though we deserve to "die a horrible and painful, long and drawn out death," God saved us and wants to use us as His ambassador to His people.  We were just as bad as Usama Bin Laden was to America until we were saved and reconciled to God.  

Anyway, that just made me think for a minute and I thought I would pass it along.  

***With all of our posts, feel free to respond in the comment blocks below each post with comments or disagreements or anything that comes to your mind. Thanks***