I can't stand some people . . .

You know what I can't stand? People who seem like they have no
problems. They are always smiling and laughing and . . . well I want
to go kick them in the shins but I'm afraid they would start laughing,
I would shrivel up into nothing and die! But it is the truth: these
people are messed up in the brain. I mean maybe like some people have
brown eyes God made some people to have a few wires loose upstairs so
that the glass is always full even when there is no glass! You know
the type of people I am talking about don't you? And if you don't, go
look in the mirror and try and frown--bet you can't do it because you
ARE one of them!

I cannot be around these people because I thought this is what it
meant to be a Christian. For one reason or another I thought that you
had to smile and say things like 'it is okay' or 'it could be worse'
when you just got diagnosed with cancer. I thought that you had to be
SO delighted with Jesus that you (not only shouldn't) but COULDN'T
appear to be unhappy lest you ruin your witness! I thought that you
had to act like everything was okay when your entire life looked like
a pile of . . . well something not good.

Boy was I happy when I discovered that Jesus suffered greatly and
wasn't smiling the whole time. I do not know where some people get
this idea that since there is fullness of joy in God we are oblivious
and immune to pain and suffering and the blues. But if I ever did find
out I'd go to that place and knock some heads around.

Listen, if you are a Christian it is okay to mourn--and not just over
your terrible sins! It is okay to feel annoyed when you have the flu;
it is okay to uncontrollably cry for a time when you have a
miscarriage; it is okay to feel really unhappy not eat a few days when your spouse dies;it is okay to feel glum when you just failed your test; it is okay to
feel bad and sad and even mad sometimes. You know why? Because Jesus
lets us. He was, the bible tells us, a man of SORROWS and ACQUAINTED
WITH MUCH GRIEF. You remember what Jesus was doing before he was
betrayed by one of his followers? He was grinding his teeth and
begging God for another way. He was so into it he was sweating drops
of blood instead of salty water. He was in agony. I guarantee you if
someone within a thousand miles of him tried to smile at that moment
they couldn't. He ground his teeth which means the agony within was so
real it made his outsides go yonkers.

If you're one of those whacks who thinks that when you're a Christian
you have to be happy all the time, you need to get your brain checked
or you're not a Christian because Christians are human. Life is hard
and sometimes unbearable Yea, there is
hope. Yes, there is joy. Of course, you can smile if you need to. But
don't go thinking that when you get hurt or harmed you have to 'put on
a happy face!' Go be sad for a little while and soon enough you will
remember that Jesus is there with you, being sad right along side with
you

he gives us so much

2 Peter 1.3 says, 'God's divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.'

I don't know if you have ever seen a fighter jet in flight. It is amazing. They move much faster and with more precision than anything else in the air. They make airline jets look like a flying snail. These fighter jets can do amazing things. They can only do amazing things though if they have a pilot guiding them who knows what these machines are capable of and ALSO how to properly use the great machine. If the pilot is useless the whole vessel is useless.

We have the fighter jet spiritually. God has given us everything we need. This comes through Jesus. As someone has said, we don't need to learn how to jump higher we need to fly and only the Gospel of Jesus dying on sinner's behalf, sinners like myself, can make us fly. We have the jet.

Why is it then that we seem to flounder around? We seem to keep doing the same sins over and over. We seem to not trust God. We become anxious. We think we are made for happiness only. We could go on. If 1 Peter 1.3 is true, why are these other things true?

It is NOT that the cockpit of the fighter jet is complex and confusing and we just need to learn more and more before we can fly. No. I think it is that we don't believe the jet. We don't believe the Gospel. It seems too good to be true. If the Bible means what it says . . . no, we have learned better: if something is too good to be true than it probably is [too good and not true].

I understand. But here is the deal: it is either real and seemingly too good or it is nothing. There is no between. You're either barrel rolling in an F-16 or trying to jump a few more inches.

No matter what your upbringing tells you, the Gospel is real. The Bible means what it says in ALL its fullness. No matter what your life has looked like in the past and no matter how you may fall in the future, if you go to Jesus, needing Jesus and trusting Jesus you are Jesus' brother, you are a child of the God who created the galaxies and the gardenias in the yard. It is all true.

So what do you say we step in the jet again and stop jumping?

Monday is for Morons: 10-31-2011

Jesus was just beaten to a bloody and disgusting mess. He was being called names and maligned. After the long nails went through his hands and he was stapled down to the cross. They, without concern of smoothness or being ginger, flopped the cross upright in the hole in the ground. The joking and final flop of the cross into the hole further ripped skin and stretched tendons. There Jesus hung. A picture of poverty portrayed, paradoxically to save.

Then the guy next to him and an 'ahah!' moment. Maybe he saw Jesus earlier in his life; as he was walking around the city heard of Jesus' claims, saw a miracle or two. Or maybe he had never met him before but,picking up on the jeers, discerned who Jesus was. Regardless, here he is suffocating along side the Son of God. 'Jesus,' he whispers out between breaths 'remember me in paradise.' Can you believe it?! I mean this guy was feeling sorry for himself, for at his 'death bed' he realized what an idiot he had been his whole life. I mean people steal because they don't work, right? Sure, live your whole life like you want then at the end whine like a baby and seek repentance, what a moron!

But wait. The disfigured face of Jesus clearly claws out a sentence, 'Today, you will be with me in paradise.' WHAT!?!

The truth of it all is that Jesus' mercy and grace and love and compassion and patience are far greater, far more shocking and scandalous than we could ever have imagined. It does not take a life-time of good deeds and bible reading to enter to bliss of Christ's presence forever. It takes the realization that all your friends already know, you're a rotten to the core sinner. But Heaven is stock full of rotten apples like you! What's one more? There is no sin too large that God, like Gallagher, won't obliterate to bits! Smashing it to that it covers the earth as they life at the sin's triviality.

You have a sack full for God to smash? That's okay, he has both the time and the power for it. 'But these are some really big ones!' you reply. He has it covered, he'll just bring out a bigger hammer. Hurry, find your forgiveness in Jesus' work, go now, before you feel so guilty again that you think he could never forgive you.

Tried Hands

Monday is for Morons: 10-24-2011

Sometimes Mondays can feel like an unhappy awakening from an otherwise fanciful life that you were living. I'm willing to say that the guy who invented sliced bread did so on the weekend, woke up on Monday and was still bummed. And sometimes it seems it would be more pleasant to listen to an entire album of nails on the chalkboard then to roll out of bed. This is life . . . but not all of it, thank God.

There is a verse in the Bible's Old Testament, the book of Psalms, which was often the only reason my work chair stayed occupied: 'Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy!' Think of that in an agrarian culture; if you did not sow the seed for your crops at the appropriate time, come harvest season you'd be looking at the ground going 'crap,' because nothing has come for you and your family to eat or sell. So a point here, the one which was helpful to me, is that your labor today is somehow helpful to you or will be. It is maybe part of a stepping stone in your career or maybe your life; maybe it is as simple as being productive and useful; for most it is a means to place food on the table, heat in the house and toilet paper on the roll.

Today may be the worst day in the world, but keep hope. For the Christian there is hope. Work is not JUST work. And sadness will not remain forever. Remember the Gospel of Jesus. He did not come to make you a perfect being with no flaws while on earth. He came to save you because you, because all of us, are a bunch of idiots who very frequently forget that God is god and we are not god. 'I have sinned!' you say. I have too. all of us have. Now let us together remember that Jesus, if we believe in him, what he did, if we entrust ourselves to him (lots of words here but it is not hard) we are forgiven forever. And that is a long time.

Monday is for Morons

What makes you a Christian--if you claim to be one? Is it all the good or admirable things you have done . . . or thought about doing? Mmmmm, no. Maybe it is your sincerity in whatever you do end up doing. That's kind of dumb--sorry. Ugh, maybe you are a Christian because you were baptized, or you say your prayers; OH! You are a Christian because your parents are, and they still go to church sometimes. You DO have that tattoo that could be interpreted as spiritual, and Christianity is spiritual.

Okay. That is weak. Let's see . . .


Maybe you are pretty good. You read your bible a lot. You pray not only for yourself but for other people. You even (watch out now) GIVE MONEY TO THE CHURCH!

When I became a Christian and started trusting Jesus I knew next to nothing. I knew what the bible was and could misquote you some funny sounding bible verses--'eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow will be like today or far better!'--I liked that one. I did not know big confusing sounding words like theology, soteriology, ecclesiology, blah blah blah. While these big words are helpful, they did not save me.

Somewhere along the line of life after my salvation I began understanding some more things in the bible. I read some thick books. I started learning those big words. As this happened a terrible and stupid OTHER thing happened as well: I started believing that other people were not REAL Christians until they knew the things I knew. Can you believe it!? I just tried to disqualify my own salvation. What a goof I was. Thankfully God softly back-handed me in the face and allowed me to see how silly I was thinking about things.

You need not be some scholar sporting a sweater vest and a mean beard. You do not even need to know one verse in the bible by memory! You do not need to have all your stuff together. You do not need to clean up your act. You do not need to do anything really.

Jesus says he came to save people who knew well that they needed saving. They knew they were SOL without someone helping them. Don't put your hope of salvation in your actions or thoughts or a scale--I did not do too much bad stuff. Put your hope in Jesus again. He is probably the only one who truly and completely and with empathy knows all you're going through and still loves you fully.

Imagination and Revelation

Here at Living in a Larger Universe, from time to time, we like to observe and think using the reasoning and logic and observation God has given us.

Clive Staples Lewis, (yes, someone named their son that, I too would just use the letters and not spell it out) was a fascinating mind. He wrote books of profound impact about God and man, about nature and miracles, love and pain; but to me what is exemplary was his ability to write about all those things and package it in a children's book; and not just a crummy and confusing children's book but perhaps the most popular of its kind in modern history.

I have heard it said that the real examination a pastor should have to go through in order to become a preacher and minister in a church is to explain the Gospel of Jesus and the larger story of the bible in a way that a five-year-old could grasp it. I often am applauding the scientist or the philosopher or the theologian who I am sure is brilliant . . . if I could only understand the words he is using. But those who can swim in the depths of complexity and difficulty but come back and clearly and concisely explain what they just experienced, that is someone special.

God gave all of us the ability to imagine. Each person has the gift to think outside the laws of nature, and inside the broader scope of reason--here I am thinking of the Professor's argument for what the word 'logical' means in the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

There are some Christians who fear the unsure and preposterous. It makes no sense for someone like this to understand, for example, the book of Revelation as a book mainly describing history past. The book was written for people who were about to die for what they believed, I'm not so sure where John--the author of Revelation--would have been going in encouraging these death-row saints by telling them things that mattered not to them.

Imagination helps us to see. For something to be IMpossible that thing or idea must have absolute zero chance of ever occurring at any time in any place anywhere . . . ever! Imagination says, what if. What if this happened; what if things were this way. god has given us the ability to step into a world that is different but plausible compared to ours.

The book of Hebrews states that 'faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not yet seen.' Faith is not imaginative as in fictional or untrue or implausible or even impossible; no, faith is imagining what WILL be. Imagination come true according to the Christian bible, this is how the Christian hopes.