Jason's Blog

This weekend I spoke a little about our hope that we have in Christ.  I had several people come up and share how the message of Ephesians has lifted their spirits and shaped their prayer life.  Chapter one does include such a powerful testimony to the power of the Spirit– the deposit that guarantees our inheritance.Here are some words from Jürgen Moltmann on the Holy Spirit as a source of life.  They seem so true to me.

“The gift and presence of the Holy Spirit is the greatest and most wonderful thing which we can experience – we ourselves, the human community, all living things and this earth.  For with the Holy Spirit, it is not just one random spirit that is present, among all the many good and evil spirits that there are.  It is God himself, the creative and life-giving, redeeming and saving God.  Where the Holy Spirit is present, God is present in a special way, and we experience God through our lives, which become wholly living from within.  We experience whole, full, healed, and redeemed life, experience it with all our senses.  We feel and taste, we touch and see our life in God and God in our life.”  Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life (Fortress, 1997): 10.

 

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Tonight we discussed John 8:31-32.  The Truth really can set us free.  The Jews of Jesus day couldn’t hear about freedom because they were imprisoned to a religious system.  They didn’t even know that they were slaves. 

Below is a video that challenges us to see our own blinders.  What would it be like if Starbucks marketed like the church?  Enjoy!  

The #1 club in the atheist tool bag is the problem of evil.  “You say there is a god, but I see all sorts of evil everywhere.  How can a good god permit all of these terrible things to happen?  This was the topic of class yesterday, and we want to discuss this in more detail next Sunday (the 23^rd).  If you have a question, let me encourage you to post a comment here.

I argued yesterday that it is not evil for evil to exist.  In fact, I believe that God would not be good if he did not create a context where people could reject him.  We only love when we freely give ourselves to someone, and for love to be free there must be the real possiblity that we might hate or despise another person.

Answering questions about evil requires us to ask lots of probing questions—about the nature of good, about what it means for God to be all-powerful, about what evil really is at its core.

 

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I read an interesting  article today, “Paranoia is on the Rise.”  The article ends with a comment by Dennis Combs, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Tyler:  ”In a world full of threat, it may be kind of beneficial for people to be on guard. It’s good to be looking around and see who’s following you and what’s happening.  Not everybody is trying to get you, but some people may be.” So there you have it– paranoia might be good for you.

More seriously though, I was reading Philip Yancey, and he gives this great definition of faith as paranoia in reverse.”A faithful person organizes his or her life around a common perspective of trust, not fear.  Bedrock faith convinces me that despite the apparent chaos of the present moment, God truly does reign; that regardless of how cast off I may feel, I matter, truly matter to a God of love; that no pain lasts forever and no evil triumphs in the end.  Faith sees even the darkest deed of all history, the death of God’s Son, as a necessary prelude to the brightest.  Faith allows me to live under the reign of God even on a planet ruled by a sinister force known as the “god of this world.”  (Philip Yancey, Finding God in Unexpected Places, Revised edition (Doubleday, 2005): 242-243).

The big problem with paranoia is that trust is completely out of the question.  Do you live out of fear or faith?  Do you believe that God is control and despite how bad things might be that all will be well? Hopeful and faithful people bring God’s reality into shape.  We are not weighed down by gloomy economic forecasts or wars.  Our hope is not in the bottom line; it is in the one Truth– Jesus Christ a Savior for all who will follow Him.