Honor Above and Below

I've been thinking more and more lately about the concept of honor and how is is similar yet very different from respect.  Honor is important not only to our relationships but to our faith, and seen and practiced well gives us an opportunity to make our relationships healthier, our faith stronger, and even allows God opportunities to shower us with blessings.  We live in a culture where we are encouraged to treat others with the level of respect we feel they have earned, nothing more, nothing less.  What this means is that people we don't know shouldn't get any respect, people who have hurt or disappointed us surely don't get it, and people who don't respect us shouldn't be given respect in response.  If there is someone above us in authority it is no longer necessarily essential to treat them with respect, if anything it makes you a bigger target for disrespect today.  If someone is below us in authority we can use our power to force obedience, but there is no need to do it in a respectful way.  If someone is beside us in authority then it is fine to see them as competition in need of being squashed so that we can get ahead while they lag behind.  All of this runs contrary to what following Christ actually looks like, it's rather just following our culture.

Phillipians 2 is a great chapter describing how Jesus lowered himself to take on the form of man rather than lording his power and authority over others.  Jesus encouraged paying taxes to Caesar and supporting the authorities we have been placed under with honor and respect.  I would say that how you handle power and whom you are willing to honor may be the most insightful peek into your heart possible.  How do you choose to act towards those you feel like you don't need, how do you care for those underneath of your authority, how willing are you to submit to the authorities you are under?  These are the questions that reveal your real character, not just the polished exterior you present to the world.  If you are only kind, giving, and respectful to people you feel you need or can benefit you in some way then you aren't loving, you are exchanging or manipulating.  You either wait for them to do something beneficial for you then honor them and therefore pay them for their services or you do for them with strings tied, expecting a payout down the road, and therefore are manipulating them to get what you want.  How well do you treat those under your authority or whom you have more power?  Do you lord your power over them expecting perfection or do you use your position to display grace when they mess up, compassion when they struggle to meet demands, and forgiveness when they wrong you?  What about the authorities over you, do you submit to them as unto the Lord, do you openly defy them with flagrance, or do you sneak around trying to get away with as much as you can without being caught? Do you feel like you can pick and choose who is in authority over you or do you believe what the Bible says about government leaders being established by God, children needing to honor their parents, husbands and wives needing to submit to each other but the husband being appointed as the head, employees (slaves) needing to obey their bosses (masters)?  Often we decide that since I didn't vote for the current president I have the right to criticize, demean, and defame him privately and publicly - yes we have the American right of free speech, but if we claim to be a Christ-follower we are called to a higher standard of honor.  Often we decide that when our spouses don't meet our expectations then we have the right to criticize them openly to anyone who will listen rather than honoring them with our hearts, minds, words, and actions.  Children who pick and choose what they will or will not obey of their parents will develop the hearts that rebel against God's authority.  Children who see their parents berate their teachers for daring to expect compliance from their child are being taught that authority figures are to be challenged and that honor and submission are signs of weakness rather than Christ-likeness.  Children who see their moms criticize their dads learn that either mom is the true highest authority in the house or that there really is no authority and everyone gets to just decide on their own.  We need to model humility, honor, and submission to authority to our children if we ever expect them to respect our authority or to ever be able to bow their own selfish will to God's authority over them.  Because that is what it comes down to when it comes to honoring and submitting to those in authority over us - if we feed the rebellious, stiff-necked, selfish, unable to be corrected spirit within ourselves by dishonoring those in authority over us it just reveals our true heart towards God, that we'll listen as long as we agree but then do whatever we really want behind closed doors.  I heard a woman married over 55 years telling her best advice for how to have a loving, long-lasting marriage and she said: be able to forgive well and be able to receive correction well.  Both of those are power and authority issues - who has the right to tell me what to do and what will I do to someone I feel wronged by and therefore have power over.

One area I see this coming out often in counseling is the clashing of my generation with the one that came before mine (I am 35 if that helps).  Both generations have erred when it comes to honor and the differences create major conflict as we interact as adults.  The generation of my parents were raised in a society that taught that children were to be seen and not heard and that elders were to be catered to and always given deference.  My generation was raised in a society that said that children were to be the most important people in the house and elders should cater to them.  Put them together and you have parents who spent a great portion of their lives placating and pandering to a bunch of adults that treated them like a nuisance at best or cattle at worst.  They grow to become older and expect that their investment will now be paid back with the generation below them placating and pandering to them now.  This is met by my generation's narcissistic response that old people are great if they are doing stuff for us, but otherwise are just a nuisance - the reverse of the seen but not heard principle.  Put it all together and both sides expect to be catered to and feel slighted that the other isn't doing what society promised them.  The solution is honor; when you honor those below you, above you, and beside you not just with lip service but in response to the love and honor God has poured out for us then we all have life breathed into us.  When we choose dishonor it not only hardens our hearts but limits God from being able to fully bless us the way he would like.  If you feel like you just aren't making strides in your walk with Christ it's worth asking yourself; do I have any unconfessed sin, do I have any bitterness from not forgiving others, or is there anywhere that I am not honoring those above or below me in authority?  God opposes the proud, he despises when bullies use their power to harm rather than enhance, but he also can only do so much with people that rebel against authority, that can't be corrected, and who are unteachable.

It's All Good

If you asked your average Christian what the single greatest threat to Christianity was you'd likely get answers ranging from Islam to Obama, to a Muslim Obama.  We usually think of the worst threats being external and either religious or political, when I believe the greatest threat to the future of Christianity in America really is a cultural issue that has been sneaking within.  Just because certain other religions disagree with us doesn't mean they are the real competition, and I believe Satan is happy as can be having major world religions just look at each other squabbling while religion itself is eroded away.  I also think vilifying either side of the political spectrum with religious arguments just contributes to the problem by making Christians look small-minded and focused more on agendas than a life changed by their savior.
Keep in mind that I believe enough in the sovereignty of God to think that Christianity itself can be killed off or that it is actually in danger, we aren't that powerful to screw it up.  What I'm talking about is on an individual level and especially for our children to pass on an authentic faith that will serve them as adults rather than weak superstition, rigid dogma, or assuming they have it all figured out when they don't have a clue.  I'm more interested in how to engage a teenager about faith or how to discuss my faith with someone who just doesn't see it as all that important.  What it comes down to is the term "Christian" has really come to lose a lot of its meaning, we can't just assume that when the term is used that people actually know what it means.  Its like the word "love," which can be used to mean anything from "I passionately love my wife and children" to "I really love chocolate ice cream."  Now people refer to themselves as "Christian" if they sometimes go to church, or kind of believe there might be a god out there somewhere, or if their parents are Christians, or if they just happen to be an American.  This makes it kind of hard for me as a counselor because I often have clients state right out of the gate that they are a Christian and for me that has a set of presuppositions that often aren't what they were implying.  It also means that talking to teenagers and young adults about faith involves a verbal jujitsu to get them to consider God at all much less allow themselves to be pinned down by any label or categorization.  


For me it helps to have a starting point of what it is that someone actually believes rather than me making random assumptions one way or the other, but it seemed like it kept coming back to one coherent set of beliefs that really weren't Christian but couldn't be otherwise categorized.  Finally the great University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill produced a sociologist named Christian Smith who has written a book that has defined exactly this set of beliefs I keep running into.  In Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Eyes of American Teenagers he writes about a concept he refers to as moralistic therapeutic deism which to me helps elucidate the belief system that our culture serves up in heaping doses through every form of media until it becomes just the atmosphere we walk around in.  Maybe the saddest part of the study revealed that for most teenagers the interviewer was the first adult in their lives to ever ask them questions about or engage them in discussion about matters of belief.  Most parents rely on church, youth group, or their own sterling example to be sufficient for helping their teens know everything they need to know about faith.  The belief system of Moralistic Theological Deism (MTD) can best be understood by the following five belief statements:

1. "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth."

2. "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."

3. "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself."

4. "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem."

5. "Good people go to heaven when they die."

Now some of you may read those and think, "well that's pretty much what I believe," or "what is so wrong with that?"  It isn't a problem except that it isn't even close to Christianity even though as my religion professor referred to it, "It tastes like chicken" meaning it is close enough to resemble orthodoxy to make its way inside the church and gain widespread acceptance.  When most teens, along with most public figures and celebrities talk about Christianity, this is what they are talking about.  It would take way too long to break down exactly what the theological differences are but I'll hit some of the high points.  MTD sees God as "something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist: he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, professionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process." Some major things are missing or perhaps purposely excluded because they make us as Americans uncomfortable, like the depravity of humanity.  If the only people who make it to heaven when they die are "good" people then we are all in trouble, because Jesus will be standing there all alone.  We like to use the term good, because then it is up to us and we can just send Jeffrey Dahmer, Bin Laden, and our ex-husband to Hell while we and all our friends and family get to be good as determined by us.  If however we think we can really be "good" then it follows that God would want us to be that, except that the cross is a blaring reminder that we are all screw ups in need of mercy and grace rather than rock stars getting cheered on by a god who just wishes he were as awesome as us.
MTD also assumes that everything in this world is all about us as humans, whatever makes us happy, while Christianity says that the entire created world is about God and his glory and honor.  We like to rewrite things with us as the central focus, but in Christianity there is no room for that - God isn't focused on our happiness that comes and goes, if anything he cares more about our holiness, but ultimately he is focused on everyone experiencing just how huge he is and being humbled in the process.  There are great benefits we receive when we see God accurately but the cost is having to see ourselves accurately as well, because if it is all about God and not us then he gets to decide reality and not us, he gets to judge and not us, and he gets to decide when and how he involves himself in our world.  He isn't a genie to be rubbed so we can get bailed out of crises but ignored when we think we are good, he is the King of kings and Lord of lords to be worshiped and obeyed.


Where is the good news in all of this?  MTD leaves you feeling self-righteous, important, and good enough but ultimately unfulfilled because it is hollow.  We all want something to devote our lives to that is bigger than ourselves because at the core we all know we really aren't that important and even when we define good for ourselves we don't live up to our own standards. All the conflict in our lives stems from seeing ourselves as the most important thing, it is outrage that we aren't being treated the way we feel we deserve because of our greatness.  Without a God that forgives us exactly because we can't make it right on our own and are hopeless without his mercy we will never be able to truly forgive another person - unless you know what it is like to be forgiven the best you can do is ignore or try and rationalize the harms against you.  Without a God who is greater than us and the collective opinion of others we'll never develop a stable sense of worth and value.  And if we don't understand God's unconditional one-sided love that benefits us while we have absolutely nothing to offer him we'll manipulate every relationship we have trying to get what we want and expect from people.  


So maybe rather than asking stupid questions of our kids, coworkers, and friends like "Are you a Christian?" we can begin asking what their thoughts and beliefs are on God and what he wants in their life.  We need to stop blithely accepting labels thrown out that have no meaning and actually engage in real dialogue or we'll both be nodding and have no idea how far apart we really are.  I think one reason we avoid the deeper conversations is we don't feel confident in what we believe because our entire culture presents a different picture.  It's OK to talk about a loving God who wants you to be happy that is there for you in a pinch but knows when to scram so you don't ever have to feel bad.  But popping someone's bubble and letting them know that they aren't their own God, that the world religions have vastly different and mutually exclusive belief systems, and that trying hard to be good just polishes the facade and  you invite criticism and ridicule.  Laying out the beliefs of MTD should help us engage our culture in a relevant way, open up dialogue, and provide hope for people who as try as they might can't squeeze fulfillment and purpose out of a false gospel.  

Thorn In Your Flesh

I have found that most people tend to struggle with the same frustrating weaknesses over and over in their lives and no matter how hard they try they can't seem to make them better.  I know this sounds like blasphemy coming from a Christian counselor whose career is based on helping people get out of stuck patterns and getting to a state of increased healthiness, but it is often the case.  There is definitely a sanctification process where we as believers are transformed by God over the course of our lifetimes being shaped more into His image, and there are insights and tools that counseling can provide that facilitate this process, but often there is a point where no matter how hard I work as a counselor or how hard my client works the weakness doesn't seem to go away.  The young man who is afraid he might actually lose his job soon if his business finds out he regularly surfs for porn during work hours, who works extremely hard to institute changes, does everything I tell him to do, and fervently begs God to take the temptation away from him.  The woman who has been in counseling for decades and studies scripture daily looking for God to lift her depression that even medication doesn't seem to touch.  The spouse that tries and works their tail off trying to transform their marriage and years later continue to get nothing in return.  There seems to be cases where people work hard and get better and cases where people work hard and don't get better, but rarely if ever are there times where people are irresponsible and put forth no effort but they are magically transformed by God.  So maybe the two necessary components for significant life change are a determination to put forth effort and take responsibility paired with the transforming power of God, where one without the other is ineffective.  Don't get me wrong, I believe Non-Christians can improve their marriages and become less anxious, they just have to do all the work on their own and have to fight an uphill battle against their own sin nature to which they are a slave.  I also believe that God is sovereign and could choose to transform a person without them doing a thing, I just more often observe in counseling as well as scripture that God seems to like for us to invest in the process rather than sitting back and waiting on the magic.

So this post isn't expressly for those who just don't have a relationship with Christ, or for those who just aren't interested in doing the work of getting better, but rather those who are crying out desperately to God to rescue them from their sinful flesh and are doing everything in their power to take responsibility but consistently see no change.  Paul says this, and we can all relate:

2 Corinthians 12:7b-10

New International Version (NIV)

⁷ Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.⁸ Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. ⁹ But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. ¹⁰ That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

The relationship between man and sin, before and after salvation is a deep and theologically rich topic which can't be fully fleshed out here but the basics I am working from are these: God could have chose to create a world without choice and therefore no sin but it would have also been mindless automatons devoid of the ability to really love.  He also could have set it up to where when we accept Christ we are not only forgiven of our past but allowed to move forward without ever sinning again, but that seems to not be the case.  And while many believers experience the supernatural deliverance from their sin, weakness, or affliction there are many more that, like Paul, never seem to catch a break.

What this indicates to me about the heart and character of God is that he seems to be more interested in us relying on him in humility and dependence, regardless of what kind of benefit we get from it, far more than he is interested in us becoming more and more perfect and sinless according to the law.  It seems that the work of sanctification, where we are rescued from the bondage of sin and able to live more in the image of God, is a work that we are powerless to do in and of ourselves.  But it is also a process in which God likes for us to do our part, to struggle and fight, to make responsible choices, and to step out in audacious faith - kind of like my kids cleaning up the playroom on a much grander scale.  I know I will be doing the vast majority of the picking up of toys and that by the end I am lucky to get a toy or two a piece cleaned up from my boys but I want them to take ownership and engage in the process even though I could lock them in there for days and they could never get it exactly perfect, but would more likely just create a bigger mess.

I think this is important for people to remember for several reasons, one of which is that it reminds us that if we aren't seeing significant reduction in our sinfulness and we can't easily just acknowledge our own lack of responsibility that maybe God teaches us just as much from allowing us to stay in our sinfulness as he does from rescuing us out of it.  It's really just our stubborn humanness that convinces us that the chief goal of life is to stringently stick to a set of laws and work towards becoming more and more perfect.  The Bible, however, is chock full of stories and injunctions that suggest us focusing on being more and more sinless is not the correct focus as it ultimately is on us and our elevation instead of God and his glory.  God flat out tells Abraham to commit the worst kind of sin, killing his own son, just to make the point that we are to be about listening to his voice and obeying rather than blindly following dogma.  In Micah 6:8, God indicates that our acts of sacrifice, trying to become more and more perfect, are worthless compared to a heart of humility and mercy, broken and contrite.  It seems keeping us weak and helpless gives God the richest, fertile ground for these things.  If you can just get it in your mind to kick a sin and you do it then it becomes hard to stay humble.  If you never have to struggle with something far beyond your own power and steely resolve then it is much easier to interact with others based on judgement rather than mercy.  And Paul speaks clearly when he says God's power is made perfect in our weakness.  I believe God prefers a dependent person over a sinless person any day, someone who knows his frailness and desperate ongoing need for not just a far off savior but a daily strength to get through the day.  Someone who knows that they don't have the power to stand toe-to-toe with temptation, that they'd lose 10 times out of 10, and that their only hope is to run full speed away from sin's tempting influence and into the arms of God.

Maybe your weakness is a mouth that can't help but gossip, slander, and judge whenever you are around your friends.  Maybe for you it is a nagging sense of never feeling good enough that keeps you working late and disappointing your wife once again.  Maybe there are weeks on end where it takes the effort of climbing Mt. Everest to get you out of bed in the morning and reading your Bible just feels like ash in your mouth.  Maybe you weep while praying that today when your wife leaves to go to work you won't be haunted by urges to surf for porn or get out your stash of whiskey she doesn't know about.  All I know is that over the years I have met many men and women of every age that deeply love Christ and desperately cry out to him to be delivered from their weaknesses only to hear that God's grace is sufficient.  These are also the humblest, least judgmental, pious, and Christ-like people I've had the pleasure of knowing.  God likes to use weak people, prone to sinfulness, and flawed in every way because when he does great things in and through us the watching world has no other logical recourse than to see the handiwork of an powerful and praiseworthy God.  God chose a murdering adulterer to bear the title of a man after his own heart, used a fanatical murderer of Christians to spread the gospel further than any other man, and he uses weak, recurrently sinful, and hopelessly dependent me to counsel broken people because I am and always will be one too.

Apples and Oranges

When it comes to the Christian faith there is how Christians see themselves and how they are seen by those on the outside, and rarely are those the same.  Often we focus on trying to either be or at least portray ourselves as being perfect hoping that others will want some of the good stuff we have, when really all they see is hypocrisy.  Sometimes in this pursuit of looking perfect we also present the idea that we know everything, and that saying "I don't know" somehow threatens the truth behind what we do know.  If I walked into a McDonalds and said "Hey, those fries are amazing, how do you make them taste so good?" the employee would likely tell me he opens up a bag, puts it in a fryer and when it beeps he puts the salt on, but does he really know?  Is it some special kind of salt, or magical potatoes farmed by Grimace himself?  We may never know, we just know they are good, and we don't look down on the employee for not having all the answers.

When you ask a Christian questions about science we often feel like we need to answer them with our favorite science textbook - the Bible.  What is the origin of the universe?  Are homosexuals biologically predisposed towards their sexual attraction?  How old is the Earth?  What is the most effective medical treatment of anxiety?  At what point in gestation does a child develop rights?  How far away is the nearest star?  What caused dinosaur bones in the ground?  We feel like if someone asks us any question in the universe then we should be able to answer it with a Bible and maybe a concordance, when maybe it was never written to serve as a science book, a carpentry manual, surgical guide, or an exhaustive historical account of everything that happened before 100 AD.  Maybe it serves exactly the purpose it was inspired to serve rather than purposes ascribed to it over time by people with agendas.  If I had intense pain in my side and right before an appendectomy my surgeon walks out with a Bible and says, "Listen, I'm a Christian surgeon, so that means the Bible is my authoritative text for life, not those worldly medical texts presuming they know what is inside of humans" I would run, and fast.  If right before takeoff my pilot said, "Let me say a quick prayer before we take off, God directs all of my actions so no need for me to understand how planes work.  If we hit turbulence or at any point need to land I'll just consult my Bible and we will be just fine," I would get off the plane as quick as possible.  But when we go to a pastor for "counseling" and he tells us everything we need to have a good marriage, be good parents, cure our depression, or get off of drugs is to read your Bible and pray more, we believe it and figure if we fail it was just a lack of faith.  When we sit in science class and learn about evolution, or that if the Earth was only 6000 years old then it must have been created with fossils already in it and lights travelling through space that give the illusion of a star being millions of light years from Earth then we freak out.  We throw the Bible out as the authoritative text on science and in the process make ourselves feel better but look more silly to those on the outside.  We look like the McDonalds employee who answers our above question with, "Well, the employee manual says the fries come from the freezer and the salt from the large sack so we must believe that is where the good taste comes from - the kitchen."  What about the truck that brings the ingredients, or that french fries come from potatoes which must grow in the ground?  These questions must be ignored to maintain the employee's perfect image and supreme knowledge of the universe.

Why does this debate matter for me - three reasons.  First I believe the best method for counseling marriages and families, for treating mental illness, and helping people achieve full healthiness can't be found exclusively within the Bible, but must be supported and reinforced by solid research, quality scientific knowledge, and years and years of clinical understandings of the way people work.  Second is I don't want Christianity to be relegated by our culture as irrelevant because Christians define themselves by standing in opposition to science - who said the two were even fighting so we had to pick sides.  Maybe it's apples and oranges and the questions asked by religion and science are different and can't well be answered by each other.  If so then we won't find ourselves in the all too familiar spot of bundling Christianity with beliefs about the physical world that science goes on to disprove.  I have no idea how the church was able to recover after the whole "The Earth is the center of the universe" fiasco, and I don't like to think of the damage it would do if Evolution was ever able to be proven.  Do I know whether the Big Bang happened or if we evolved from a lower species, or how old the Earth is?  Nope, and I'm OK with that because my faith doesn't rest on it and I'm OK not having all the answers.

The third reason this is important to me is because on a regular basis I have clients that question their faith as their scientific knowledge increases and not getting answers from the Bible makes them question the whole deal.  What do I know?  The same thing we all really know - what I have personally experienced - A God who has revealed himself to me over and over again in minor and major ways, often through the Bible, often in relationships, and even in nature.  So if needing to know all of the answers is necessary for you to accept God's free gift of grace or to continue allowing him to guide and direct your life then it just ain't going to happen - because we just don't have all the answers and we never will.  So then they will say - just the answers to the really important questions, then they can believe, and they usually boil down to one of two questions.  Theodicy - or the question of how do you reconcile an all-good and all-powerful God with a world that has pain and evil is a question that I'll hit in a later post but even then won't answer.  The other is refusing to put on blinders of scientific ignorance and needing to reconcile the creation narrative within the Bible with modern scientific knowledge.  For this question there are also others far more qualified to answer this than I, but my simple answer is that maybe they don't contradict.  Believe in a literal reading of the creation account and say evolution is a bunch of junk, that's fine, it is just a theory and has yet to be proven.  Believe in the Big Bang, evolution, the whole deal, that's fine, it can be reconciled with the creation narrative in a myriad of ways.  Why is this?  Because the Bible is more concerned with letting us know that the fries are really tasty than how they are made - that there is a great and wonderful God that has been at work in our world from the very beginning and He wants to join with us in our lives to recreate them into something better than what was there before he got involved.  Seven literal days, seven periods of time, or maybe that portion of Genesis was written in poetic format much like psalms and proverbs so really wasn't trying to read like a history or science textbook.  Was Adam the first human created, or like early Jewish readers would have read it was he the first Jew set aside to found his chosen people, or was he the first ruler over creation meant to bring God's order to a people already in chaos, or was he the first Homo Sapiens evolved from the other neanderthals ready for God to use in mighty ways?  Lots of theories are out there but most serious biblical scholars will tell you the more you know the more you realize what you don't know, so humility and grace for the interpretations of others are the way to go.

So the Bible is great for wisdom, a revelation of God's plan for his creation, and contains the greatest gift mankind will ever see, the free gift of a reconciled relationship with their creator, but it is as useful for a science or history book as it is for a cookbook or boat-building schematics.  If you have big questions and you think being a Christian just means pretending they don't have answers then you are cheating yourself - get a Bible Commentary, a Systematic Theology, or a scholarly book on whatever your big questions are rather than just burying your head in the sand.  You'll expand your own view of a God we'll never fully grasp as well as helping the Body of Christ become more knowledgeable and informed.  Good Systematic Theology - Millard Erickson's - nice and balanced and short.  Good blog entry on the Adam and Eve debate - Storied Theology - http://www.jrdkirk.com/2011/08/10/trajectories-challenges-ethics/.

Wherever you fall in any of the various interpretations just don't get too comfortable - Christianity is about a relationship with a real person not a book or set of beliefs, so when He moves in your heart, reveals a little more of himself, or gives you a different way of viewing things it is just to keep you dependent on him.  And when you think you have it all figured out and are judging the ludicrous views of others, all you really know is those fries are fantastic.

Marriage - Horrific Prison or Best Tool Ever?

Have you ever wondered who came up with the concept of marriage anyway? An institution that seems to be entirely contrary to the natural bend of the human heart could only have been introduced by God. No man sat around thinking "Wouldn't it be great to only have sex with one person for the rest of my life, and only when I haven't done anything too wrong that day to stave off a barrage of criticism and comparisons would I be given the opportunity?" And no woman one day decided, "I know, I'll take this guy who is currently wooing me and offer him a deal where he has me for life regardless of whether he continues to deserve me; he can completely quit and turn into a lazy selfish couch potato and I just have to be happy when he grunts in my direction!"

So why did God come up with marriage? Here are some theories. One is that he is just one big fun Nazi in the sky doing the best he can to ruin any sense of enjoyment we may ever get out of life. Another is that he just loves the sheer entertainment value of watching millions of simultaneous reality shows where men and women flounder around trying to make a relationship work. Our culture proposes that the goal of marriage is to make us happy - just find somebody who makes you happy, marry them and keep staying married until they stop making you happy - hence the current divorce rate. In the book, Sacred Marriage by Gary Chapman, an alternate theory is proposed - maybe God designed marriage to make us holy rather than happy?

It really makes more sense if you think about it - I mean if God wanted to create marriage to make us happy it probably would have been designed quite differently. Marriage is very tough work just to survive much less the effort it takes to accomplish a great marriage that you look forward to coming home to. Maybe marriage is an opportunity for two totally different people to be made better for having to kill their selfishness and pride so that they can become one unified entity that reflects the image of God better than anything else possible. In marriage growth and selfishness are inversely proportional - either your selfishness grows and your marriage dies or your marriage grows and your selfishness dies. So we can allow our marriage to shape us more and more into the image of Christ or we can skip off to someone else who will temporarily under the anesthesia of romantic love make us happy, or we can work tirelessly trying to fix our spouse into something that better suits our selfishness. So under this model it really isn't about finding the perfect person to marry but really just picking any old sinful, flawed human being. It isn't about assessing your mate to determine if you really are soul mates or if they are good enough for you. It isn't about trying desperately to please our spouse hoping they will be happy with us. It's about choosing to love our spouse not how they deserve to be loved, but in response to how God has loved us. God's job requirements will always be more stringent than your husband or wife's.

So when we look at marriage we can easily think it was designed by Satan to torment us but really it is a gift to address our greatest needs. the need to get past our own immature selfishness and learn to care about someone else more than ourselves. the need to be confident and secure enough to really be ourselves without fear that we will lose our spouse the second we stop being perfect. The need to constantly be given a challenge to greater and greater possibilities that can never be taken away - our spouse can reject us and leave, they can take us for granted, but the character and confidence that are developed when we die to ourselves and give our all toward a great calling is never wasted. But if there are two of us really doing this we have the ability to really create something amazing that stands out when others look at us, because rather than reflecting our culture we are actually reflecting the image of God.

But what if you have a really horrible spouse, does that give you a free pass? Short of extreme cases like abuse, adultery, addictions, and such then you are really being given a gift when you get a lazy shiftless husband or a nagging queen of the harpies wife. Because the greater the struggle it is to live with a person the more potential character that can be developed - the greater the challenge the greater the payoff. It's true in weightlifting, education, careers, and every other area of life, why wouldn't it be true in marriage. So if your spouse is a colossal pain in your butt then send out a quick prayer of Thanks to God for the opportunity He has given you to be better shaped into his image.

This viewpoint has the ability to totally shift your perspective on marriage so you stop berating a sinful flawed human being for being imperfect and start looking for how they can help you become more patient, loving, kind, forgiving, and accepting. Marriage is no longer a concentration camp where death is inevitable and you can only hope to jump the walls, it can become an incredibly effective tool to chisel away the parts of you that aren't holy so you can be revealed for the potential you have within. Given this tool should probably be investigated by the Geneva Convention as being cruel and unusual, but I am guessing the big lump of rock wasn't too thrilled about the vicious hammering and chiseling that transformed it into the statue work of art.

Three Sources of Worth

Back in college there were a number of classes that I had to take that met requirements but seemed pretty worthless at the time - I place Anthropology in the list of worthless classes but Film Appreciation was awesome. In my UNC-Chapel Hill class, Introduction to Ethics, we can assume Christianity wouldn't be the accepted cultural worldview, so one goofy question caught me off guard when I was asked to argue it.  Why is it that killing and eating animals is all right but killing or especially eating people is not, is it not just species bias that makes us think we are better than animals?  If you take belief in a God who created humans in His image out of the picture then it becomes pretty tough to come up with a valid reason why chickens and humans shouldn't have equal rights.  You can't even go with the argument that we are stronger and smarter or we have to say aliens should have the right to kill and eat us if they are smarter, or that killing babies, mentally retarded people, or anyone less strong or intelligent must be OK.  So why are we as humans better than any other animals in creation?  Well, we are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God, with infinite worth and value because of the spark of the divine within us - period.

If we take this to be true then it keeps us from finding our worth, value, or acceptability in anything other than His image - our race, our possessions, our status, our education, our job, our family, etc.  Anything else we could base our worth and value in can be taken from us, as the storms come and destroy the house built on the sand, only the strong foundation of our Imago Dei can withstand the trials and tribulations of life.  What happens when we get let go from the job we gave our best to for thirty years, when our last child heads off to college and we are no longer just a Mom, when Alzheimer's threatens to steal what we have stored up in the treasury of our minds - our very identities are threatened unless the foundation was seeing ourselves as God see's us.

Problem is most of us buy this for everyone else in the world, just not us.  You would never kill or even intentionally hurt another person because you see others as having worth and value just for being a human being created in the image of God.  It's just us, we are somehow inferior to others and don't have the same worth and value.  If the above viewpoint is the truth then there are two lies that threaten to steal our worth and value in our own eyes.  The first lie is Ascribed Value - we are only as valuable as what other people say about us.  Gold has value because people decide that it has value, not because it is particularly useful - it's too malleable to make any decent tool out of but we pay tons of money for it and fearful Americans are pouring their life savings into it.  But what if tomorrow we just decided gold wasn't all that great?  It would cease to have value.  If that is our view of ourselves then we need to do everything we can to sway the opinions of those around us - please as many people as possible, have as little conflict as possible, and work hard to get people to like us.  Our view of ourselves will be a roller coaster depending on who we are around - in one group we are valued and deemed worthy but around someone else we are nearly worthless, our value is like the stock market, constantly in flux.

The second lie we could believe is that of Utilitarian Value - that we are only as valuable as what we are able to do.  Like a shovel we have value because we can be used to do stuff for people, so the more we accomplish, the more we do for others, the more value we have.  But what if we are going through a busy or difficult time and can not do as much for other people, do we feel bad and lose worth?  If we are in a car accident and are paralyzed and can never do anything for anyone or even ourselves, do we cease to have value?  We become human doers, not human beings, constantly striving to do enough to be deemed worthy in our own eyes, but we can never do enough.  Ultimately this was the lie of the Nazi's, that in order to create a better nation you must only kill off any humans who can't make it stronger, anyone considered weak.  So maybe you start with the physically and mentally disabled, those considered inferior like Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies, and eventually just the Aryan race is left.

We don't have worth and value because other people say so, we don't have it because of what we are able to do, we have worth and value because we are human beings and humans were created unique and special by God to bear his image and accomplish great things in his name.  This applies to all humans, even you.  The only way our worth can be static and defined is if humans, those around us or ourselves, don't get to decide our value - God does.

Ambition, Culture, and Influence

For my first real blog I figured I'd give insight into what prompted me to start blogging as well as how it may encourage you.  It was staff meeting here at Carolinas Counseling Group and it was Linda McGrew, one of the founding partners', turn to share with the group.  I have been here over nine months and have effectively dodged having to present anything to the group as of yet - mostly because I feel like an elementary school student being asked to present to a bunch of Nobel prize scientists my science fair project volcano.  She spoke about the most recent conference she went to sponsored by the CS Lewis foundation where she went to Cambridge and Oxford for like 10 days and got to do cool stuff like eat in the big dining hall from Harry Potter, though she claims candles did not float and ghosts did not speak to her.  There were numerous speakers like Os Guiness and Chuck Colsen, and the theme was Paradigms of Hope: Transcending Chaos and Transforming Culture.  The gist I got from it that was pretty interesting is that we usually think of culture as what the majority of people in a given population think and feel, and that if these beliefs are good and godly we will have a good culture, or not.  That a few major important people influence culture and that most of the power to transform culture lies within elected government officials.  So as Christians we should just convince as many people as we can to believe like we do, vote good Christian people into office, and sit back and watch our nation's culture transform into a Christian utopia.  Problem is that most all of that is complete bunk.    In the 60's 98% of the population claimed to believe in God, currently it is still at 88% yet our culture is increasingly secular - so maybe the majority really doesn't rule.  The Jewish race has never made up more than 3% of the American population yet Jewish-Americans have had a hugely disproportionate impact on American culture it's entire history - films, art, science, entertainment, education, etc.  Homosexuals only constitute about 1.4% of the American population, and while I am no conspiracy theorist about some sort of an agenda, it is clear that our culture is saturated with references to homosexuality.  Most of the major political, legal, and cultural victories for homosexuals were gained during the Reagan and Bush administrations, so apparently just electing conservative leaders doesn't create a conservative culture.

The assertion of Os Guiness at the conference is that culture can better be seen as a resource that is produced and used as a source of power much like money.  This, of course, reminds me of the video game series Civilization where your options for conquering the world are military, economic, scientific, or cultural victories - where towns produce culture based on great people, wonders, etc and this culture is quantified and seen as a source of power.  From this model a college degree doesn't make you any smarter than a person without a degree but it does give you more cultural capital and therefore more ability to impact american culture.  A degree from Harvard may not be quantitatively better than a degree from NC State, but it grants a lot more cultural capital.  Kirk Cameron may do a much finer job acting in Fireproof than Growing Pains, but the one on nationally syndicated television impacts our culture more.  So culture is produced by institutions, is represented by famous people, and is powered by a strong financial base - Billy Graham is a great evangelist but it is the network formed around him and the initial financial backing of William Randolph Hurst that propelled him from backwoods preacher to cultural icon.

What does this mean for me or for you?  The ability to really change our world doesn't actually lie in supporting another politician or party or agenda, but to do our individual bests to leverage our cultural capital for God's kingdom.  Having the right beliefs and voting for the right people do not equate to changing the world, but rather using the gifts God has given us in the positions he has placed us while accruing as much cultural capital as possible has the ability to impact the world.  So why do we as Christians not do this?  We avoid power, influence, and notoriety because we see them as bad or worldly - we even openly criticize and mock Christian leaders who attempt to accomplish big things and become a part of culture.  We criticize pastors for promoting their church through advertising, or for having a large church budget, or for attempting to invade and infect American culture.  We encourage intelligent Christian students to stay close to home or go to small Christian schools rather than encouraging them to apply to Harvard.  We applaud people who remove their kid's from society and insulate them in a bubble for as long as possible.  We fear that culture and power are evil and will corrupt us when we as Christians possess the hope of the world and the power of the resurrection within us so if we believe God is more powerful that the world why do we work so hard to keep him out of it?

I would argue that the creation of a separate and distinct Christian subculture in America has done far more to secularize America than any evil cultural icon we could blame.  By creating our own music, films, clothing, schools, etc we have shot ourselves in the foot for being able to truly impact culture.  We become obsolete, isolationist, and an afterthought while secular influences are the only ones left in the only institutions that really matter when it comes to shaping our world.  It was years ago, I think at a Catalyst conference, where I first heard the concept that maybe if we really want to help shape America into more of a Christian nation then rather than isolating ourselves in a Christian ghetto we would do better to try and be the next Stephen Spielberg or Dr. Phil or Oprah - because they and the institutions behind them are what is truly shaping America.

So maybe it is false humility for me or you to think we have no platform, nothing to say, and no power.  I could easily just be a loving and devoted father and husband and miss out on the opportunities God gives me to impact the world.  So thus a blog - I will begin impacting people virtually and who knows where it may lead - I may get my doctorate or write a book or some other way to penetrate our culture.  The same can be said for you - how can you be like Esther or Joseph or Moses or the many other Biblical examples of people who leveraged their cultural capital and power to be used by God in big and powerful ways.

Starting my very own blog...

Over the years I have had several people ask me if I have a blog or suggest I start one, but I have always scoffed at the idea for two main reasons.  One is that I have always feared that if I started one I could never keep up with it - I really admire the people who can daily or weekly update their blog and always have something useful, insightful, or challenging to say and in my black and white view I either wanted to do it right or not bother - hence years of not bothering.  The second main reason is I feel like I would run out of interesting stuff to say and the only blogs more annoying to me that the ones where people post once a year on average are the ones that post daily but without anything of substance.

So here is my solution - to the best of my ability I will try to keep up with this and be both consistent and follow through across time, but I will also only post if I think I have something relevant, helpful, and purposeful to post.  I won't presuppose that my musings on life or what I had for breakfast would constitute something anyone would bother to read so I will use what I have to try to help others - Good or bad I am a walking encyclopedia of information - most useless but some actually helpful, and most all of it pilfered from others more brilliant than I am.  Even when I think I have come up with something brilliant and original it usually is just me forgetting where I read it or who I heard it from.  Hence the title of my blog - pilfered wisdom - if it seems to have value and the information has the potential to help people that can't actually pay to come see me for counseling then hopefully this can be a platform for lives to be enhanced.

It may be current or former clients reading, friends, family, or just random people who have my blog suggested to them through something like facebook, but whoever checks it out I hope it is helpful.  So there you go, I just completed my first blog entry and had nothing of substance within it, but at least I am ready to start posting!