Everyone Else Thinks You're ...

I’m sorry — I can’t help it. The bumper sticker just caught me in such a way that I can’t stop thinking about it. It said:

Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you’re a jerk!

I am sure that the bumper sticker was an attempt at a wry twist on other bumper stickers of Christians trying to share the Gospel with a message of “Jesus loves you.” People who think that those Christian bumper stickers are silly would certainly delight in this dig.

I wonder, however, whether the driver of that car realizes that he is actually advancing the Christian message! (See Philippians 1:17-18.) Even if everyone else thinks you’re a jerk, Jesus does love you. The Lord loves the unlovable.

In fact, for the opposite case, Jesus says, “Woe to you when all people speak well of you, for that is what they did to the false prophets” (Luke 6:26). If everyone thinks you’re great from a worldly perspective, you’re probably not living a God-pleasing life. (See also Luke 6:22-23.) You’re also likely to trust your own righteousness instead of confessing the sin that you do have in your life and seeking God’s forgiveness.

On the other hand, if everyone thinks you’re a jerk, you’re probably not living by the Golden Rule. You should treat others the way you would want to be treated. But Jesus still loves you. Biblical love is more about what you can give rather than what you can get; it desires the best for someone, regardless of feelings.

The Lord loves you and wants the best for you. “The best” includes giving up selfish ways that are alienating others. But even if it feels like the whole world is against you no matter how hard you try, know that Jesus gave His life for you so that you could live forever with Him, and it doesn’t depend on what you do, but on what He has done for you.

This Valentine’s Day and always, there’s no better love than that!

If Evolution Is True

Assume for the moment that evolution is true. Then, ironically, it has produced a result — homo sapiens — that innately believes in supernaturalism. Over the course of thousands of generations, spanning hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, natural selection has favored those hominids (the most intelligent of the primates) who believed that the world is larger than what the senses can perceive. According to evolution’s own tenets, there must have been some survival advantage in living one’s life as though actions had consequences through unseen forces, since every group of human beings on the planet has had some form of religion, mythology, animism, or superstition.

Thus adherents to evolution should not expect our species to give up belief in supernaturalism so quickly. It has been only 150 years since Darwin’s Origin of Species — much less than what is routinely described in textbooks as “the blink of an eye in geologic time.” This is hardwired in our genes! If it is to be eradicated, then belief in naturalism will have to provide some survival advantage over supernaturalism: “survival of the fittest.” And there has been nowhere near enough time for random mutations to overpower the genes that have been selected through the millennia.

Or are we bound to our genes? A survey published just in time for today’s 200^th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin revealed that only 39% of Americans believe in evolution; apparently 25% disbelieve it, and fully 36% stated no opinion. When correlated to education, the pollsters found that the more education you have, the more likely you believe in evolution. The strong implication: smart people believe in evolution; you’d have to be dumb not to. I offer an alternate explanation: since evolution is the only thing taught in school, the longer you are exposed to it, the more likely you are to accept it. Thus, even if we are hardwired to believe in the supernatural, enough conditioning can overcome it. (So much for the “born that way” argument!)

But even if we could convince the whole world that evolution is true, should we? Can the human race survive such knowledge? Do we want a society in which the weak and sick are cast aside as “unfit” and in which “only the strong survive”? Does not a conscience and a fear of divine retribution (or “karma,” or whatever it may be called) provide a necessary check against the unbridled oppression of the weak by the strong? Can we remove these restraints of the “animal instincts” of human behavior without suffering grave consequences? Or have we not grown so powerful as a species that we would destroy ourselves if we were allowed to believe that there is no higher authority to which we are accountable?

But I began by assuming that evolution is true. If evolution is true, it has created us to believe that it is not true, and it forces us to live as though it is not true. If, on the other hand, God has created us in His image, then He has made us to acknowledge this, and He desires that we live as though He does exist and is important. I submit that only one of these positions is internally consistent and coherent.

Happy New Year!

I hope 2009 is going well for you so far.

There are two things wrong with getting a fresh start each January 1. First is that you have to wait an entire year in between, and second, it might not seem like a fresh start. Can you really put the past behind you? Even if you're in school and have begun (or will begin) a new semester, can you really put the past behind you?

The good news is that our Savior offers us a fresh start every day! Since Christ died to take away our sin, all the junk of our lives is really gone in God's eyes. It might not seem like it to us, but we need to learn to see ourselves from God's perspective. He makes us new in Christ and gives us a fresh start! (See 2 Corinthians 5:17.)

Questions to think about:

1. What is something from your past that you'd like to forget about?

2. How does Christ's death on the cross make a difference?

3. Now that you have a fresh start, what would you like to strive for?

Portals of Prayer for the New Year

from the January 2009 “Herald”

What a great way to start the new year! Forget your typical resolutions, and just pick up this little Portals of Prayer booklet once a day. A copy is being sent to every household in the congregation for 2009.

The beauty of this devotional is that you can use it a little or a lot, because the name Portals of Prayer is very accurate: It is a daily “portal,” or gateway. It’s easy to do the minimum, which is to read each day’s Bible verse (printed at the top of the page), followed by the brief devotion and short prayer. But if you want to step through the portal, you can do more: There is a suggested reading that you can look up in your Bible, perhaps a few paragraphs long. There are additional prayers given for each day of the week and for special needs and observances. There’s even a brief order of service that could be used for a family or small-group devotion.

Don’t feel that you have to use every resource every day, but these resources are there when you need them. If you keep the booklet within easy reach in a common area of your home, then you can easily keep up with the rest of the members of our congregation, who will be going through this booklet together in 2009. (It is a quarterly publication, so you’ll receive a new issue every three months.) Expect to hear references to the devotions in sermons and Bible studies to reinforce the themes and to underscore that we are doing this together; it will be a common, shared experience.

Expect also to have a renewed and increased appreciation for the Word of God, especially if this is your first foray into daily devotions. A common saying for church signs goes, “Seven days without prayer makes one weak.” Overly punny, perhaps, but it’s a good thought. Instead of going Sunday to Sunday, enter the portals of prayer and the Word of God on a daily basis, and have a great 2009!

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On the Web. These two web sites will give the current day's devotion only; there is no way to browse past or future devotions.

• Portals of Prayer (text)
• Portals of Prayer (audio)

Merry Christmas!

I recently sent the following message to my young adult and high school friends on facebook and thought it was worth posting to the blog:

I hope you're able to enjoy this festive season!

What's your favorite thing about Christmas? (Music? Traditions?)

What do you *dislike* most about Christmas? (Consumerism? Superficiality?) What is something specific you would do to help fix it, if you could?

How does knowing that God became a human being (and started out in a feeding trough!) make a difference?

Come by OSLC on Christmas Eve if you can! Traditional candlelight services at 8 & 11 p.m. — crazy family service at 5 p.m.

For me, music ranks very high on the list of favorites. I recently put a bunch of Christmas music on my MP3 player. (I also discovered that if you choose to Play All just before stepping into the shower without also selecting Shuffle, alphabetical order will dictate that you hear five different versions of “Angels We Have Heard on High” in a row!)

At first, I would probably say that traditions are not as important to me, but as I think about it, I am very big into taking pictures and video of the kids as we cut our Christmas tree out at the tree farm or open presents on Christmas morning.

When it comes to what I dislike, it’s very easy to say consumerism and materialism, but I also dislike what I would call a certain superficiality. What I mean is, why do people say, “Let’s help the needy because it’s the holidays”? Shouldn’t we be doing that year-round? If you’re only kind or generous or cheerful for one month out of the year, it strikes me as rather insincere. Still, I suppose it’s better than nothing!

But I guess that's why the birth of God in human form makes all the difference. Apart from Christ, all of the “holiday cheer” seems very empty to me — like a street of nothing but building facades constructed for a movie set. It is Jesus Christ who puts something of substance behind that facade so that we can enter into those buildings and inhabit them. Then God’s love is a way of life instead of seasonal show.

What about you? What are your thoughts?

Nothing Merry about “Chris-mess”?

from the December 2008 “Herald”

Chris is having a bad year:

“It’s bad enough that gas prices were so high, and it was harder than ever to cover all my expenses and pay the bills, but on top of that, my boss has been hassling me about something that wasn’t even my fault. Now there’s also family trouble, and I’m caught in the middle once again. It seems there’s no end. With the holidays coming up, that’s just one more source of stress. There’s nothing merry about Christmas, because my life is just one big ‘Chris-mess’!”

Whether you picture Chris as a man or woman might depend on how much you identify this individual with yourself or someone close to you. In fact, there is no single person named Chris whose life is described above, but his or her experiences are representative of all of us. Maybe you don’t relate to everything Chris said, or maybe you have different troubles like health concerns or marital struggles, but each of us has our own “mess” that we won’t be able to avoid, even as we try to celebrate the holidays.

It is because of this mess, however, that Jesus came to earth in the first place. Into a world of pain and suffering, of sin and injustice, Christ came to bear our transgressions and give us the hope of eternal life. Even if your name isn’t Christopher or Christine, your name is “Christian,” and Jesus came for you, to take your “Chris-mess” and turn it around.

On December 25, you might see some visible “mess” that is a result of Christmas, such as piles of wrapping paper torn from presents or stacks of dirty dishes from a big holiday meal. “Such a mess!” you might say. But remember that Jesus is not responsible for the mess; instead, He is the one who can take all the“Chris-messes” of your life and clean them up, just as you are washed clean in Baptism. The festival of Jesus’ birth reminds us that He came on a rescue mission that would not end before He had died on the cross and risen to life, so that we could live life in Him! So have a Merry Christmas, Christian!

You Call That Support?

Can you "support" something without making a commitment? This thought occurred when I saw a Facebook newsfeed item that a friend of mine had joined a certain "cause." This cause has 2,306,274 members as of this morning and has raised a total of $28,825.

Now I don't want to disparage other, non-financial ways of supporting a cause, which could include raising awareness by word of mouth, volunteer efforts, and even prayer. But for more than 2 million people to have raised less than 30 thousand dollars means that each supporter contributed an average of 1.25 cents. Or the same amount would have been raised if 99% of the members of the cause contributed nothing, and the remaining 1% contributed a whopping $1.25.

I also understand that a lot of people on Facebook are in high school or college and maybe don't have a lot of extra money, but if you really care about something, couldn't you go without a soda for one day and contribute $1.50? Or skip going to the movie theater and donate the $8.50 to this cause? If each member contributed only ten dollars, there would be a total of $23 million raised. If each member contributed only one dollar, it would still be almost one hundred times what it is now.

Thanksgiving is this week, and I know something about giving to charitable causes. In order to meet the annual budget of our congregation, we need offerings of nearly $7,000 per week, which comes to about $30 for every man, woman, and child in attendance. Most people don't give nearly that much — which I can understand, because everybody's situation is unique — but that means that a small percentage of church members are contributing much more than their "fair share," and for that, I am thankful.

You don't have to put $30 in the offering plate when you're at church on Sunday, but I hope that when you consider all that the Lord has given to you, you'll give more than 1.25 cents.