The rest of this week’s post can be found at the site I share with Peter Mead.  Please continue, if you like, at www.cordeo.org.uk/getting-repentance-right/

This promise sets out a dramatic opportunity for us to gain a stronger connection with God, but first we need to know, what is humility?  In human-to-human terms is it mainly behavioral—our waiting for others to celebrate our successes while we keep quiet?  Or is it an attitude of self-abasement—of thinking and acting as if we’re insignificant?  Or, in a more positive direction, is it a selfless devotion to others?  And how is humility best expressed to God, let alone to humans?

In James’ statement he treated pride as the negative counterpoint to humility.  That’s a clue to be followed.  Pride is something we readily sniff out in each other.  Proud people are selfish, narcissistic, arrogant, and careless towards others—hard to be around!  Pride is something I struggle with myself.  I’ve started to learn that when I take on the I’m-proud-of-myself attitude, the room starts to empty in a hurry.  So if pride and humility are eternally antithetical to each other we might do well to find the basis for our pride and then identify humility in whatever we see as its opposite.

And yet almost all of us have learned early on that pride is treated as a good quality; and that humility can be viewed as a weakness.  As children, for instance, we were often told, “I’m so proud of you!”  Or, “Be sure to take pride in your work!”  And, with that, “Stand up for your rights—don’t be a doormat!”

One question to consider is whether God himself is proud; or humble; or both; or neither.  As a starting point in asking this we find God calling people in both the Old and New Testaments to “be holy for I am holy.”  But I don’t recall his ever saying “Be humble for I am humble” or “be proud for I am proud.”

Yet there is certainly some connection between our own attitude and God’s stance in these issues.  Is it, perhaps, that God alone can be proud—given his incomparable greatness—and that we as his creation are by comparison utterly insignificant?  That seems to be a common answer, especially among those who portray God as ultimately motivated by receiving our glory.

This connection, I suspect, then sets up answers to our question of what humility is and what its evil opposite of pride is: pride is our act of being self-devoted while humility is to be God-devoted.  In this view only God is to be properly self-devoted; and we are to become more Godly by becoming the opposite of what God is!

Yet I quickly realize that this seems to be very different to what holiness calls for: that we are to be holy because God is holy.  Aren’t we meant to imitate Christ?  And isn’t it the humility of Christ that we were called to embrace in Philippians 2 where “in humility” we’re to “count others more significant than yourselves” by having “this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant” even to the point of death on the cross for our sakes.

The proper answer, then, is not to adopt a quality of character that is the opposite to God—that is, to his presumed self-absorption.  Instead we are invited to Christ’s quality of character where we discover God’s own humility.

Here’s the bottom line: as we come to grips with God’s Triune oneness we realize that when Jesus told Phillip (in John 14) that “when you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father” we also find the answer to our questions.  In Christ we see a God bold enough to embrace humility.  The Son’s crucifixion is the venue for the Father’s love to be made available to us.  The Father gave the Son over to death.  It was the Father who, in that sense, humbled himself for our sakes by sharing in the humility of the Son within their unending union and communion.  And from this came the glory of a plan that allows us to enter into this unending union and communion of the Godhead ourselves.

The sole gateway to God, we find, is to become like him even to the extent that we embrace our own crucifixion.  We no longer live for ourselves, but for him—the Triune God—who loves us even to the point of death.  How jealous is God for our spirits?  Jealous enough to die for our sakes.  What should our response be?  An awed and holy confidence that such love invites; and with that, a complete and selfless devotion in return.  We draw near to God because he first drew near to us; and then he embraces us ever more fondly as we draw even nearer to him in response.  And on and on and on.

The full post has been published in the Cor Deo website and may be seen at www.cordeo.org.uk/a-passionate-god 

Why?  Because each year in Patristic Theology I would explain Augustine’s view of the will in his debate with Pelagius.  Then in my Reformation course we reviewed the claims in Luther’s Bondage of the Will—where he drew on Augustine’s claims—over against Erasmus who promoted the primacy of the will.  In teaching Ethics my denial of a free will set up “faith ethics”—the approach to the spiritual life and morality I see offered in the Bible.  It was a common theme for me then and it remains a drumbeat now.

That’s not to say I ever expect that making the case will be easy or the claim quickly received by first time listeners.  It always calls for long discussions while they read and reread the Bible, along with some doses of church history; and even then many are still unpersuaded.

Resistance is natural, after all, when free will seems obvious in our daily experience: on any given day we make decisions about what to eat, who to meet, when to travel, and what to say.  Each of these activities is perceived to be a spontaneous and perfectly free—non-coerced—decision.  This experience makes the reality of a free will so obvious that any counterclaims seem bizarre.  And what’s more, the will of God is often cited in the Bible, so our own will is the proper yet human counterpart to God’s will.

And today the autonomous free will is treated as a bedrock reality wherever we turn: I think of the court judgments in favor of the “freedom to choose” in cases of abortion, gay marriage, and more.  It was embedded in the United States by Deist forefathers such as Thomas Jefferson who set out the aspirations of personal autonomy (another label for free will) by affirming life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as our greatest and most noble aspirations.  Free will, it seems, is seen today to be the lynchpin of human identity.  God forbid that anyone should deny it!

Yet God himself denies it.  Again and again the Bible makes it clear that we’re shaped by sin as it rules our hearts—a vulnerability rooted in our actual identity as those made to love God but who have loved our world and ourselves instead.  Our heart—the affective and response-based center of the soul—always directs us.  Thus Proverbs 4:23, “Guard your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life”; Mark 7:21, “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts . . .”; Ephesians 4:18, “They are darkened  in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.”

God made us to be heart-based responders because God’s own Triune eternal union and communion exists in mutual initiative and delight.  Turning away from our proper love—as rooted in the relational image of God—makes us vulnerable to other loves.  And even in repentance our release from slavery to sin only comes about by our becoming slaves to righteousness in Christ (see Romans 6 on this). 

Paul couldn’t have stated our enslavement to death and sin more sharply than in texts like Romans 3:9-18 and Ephesians 2:1-3.  And even Satan, in tempting Jesus, gloated about his control over all the nations—a claim Jesus didn’t deny.  So, in sum, the Bible treats us not as people who have free wills, but as slaves to sin.  Only salvation changes this.  And even after salvation we still struggle until the day we get to be at home at last (see Romans 5-8).

Maybe we should take this up in more positive terms.  I’ll be brief and invite readers to bring their own reflections to the conversation.

I believe in real freedom.  That is, in a heart-based freedom to either respond to God’s love or to resist it.  This is apparent throughout the Bible.  God so loved the world that he gave his beloved Son to save as many as would respond to him in trusting faith; but most people have ignored that offer because they love darkness rather than light because their choices are evil.  The battle is always one of affection versus affection—of an inward sampling of what we “want” the most.

When we turn to Christ we love him because he first loved us and drew us to himself—so it was not by the will of the flesh nor by the will of man, but by God that we gain an affection for him that breaks the power of old affections.  So only God can overcome our self-love, and that only in some: it isn’t guaranteed to all.  How, then, is the selection made.  It seems that most often he woos the poor, the weak, the despised, and other sorts of social nonentities who find his love attractive.  The proud, the strong-willed, and the mighty, on the other hand, are given over to what they love the most: their freedom to ignore God.

“But judging by the behavior of most Christians, they’ve become secularists. And the sea of hypocrisy between Christian beliefs and actions is driving Americans away from the institutional church in record numbers.”

The bottom line of the article is that too many professing Christians today—despite Christ’s prayer in John 17—are both “in the world” and “of the world.”  The distinction between followers of Christ and those who don’t know Christ is blurred to the point of being lost.

The full article has been posted at the Cor Deo website: http://www.cordeo.org.uk/called-to-christs-likeness

Rick Warren recently offered a strategy for keeping congregations involved in lengthy sermons, as they display increasingly shorter attention spans. His advice is practical and would probably work in most churches. Therein lies the problem. He writes:

In an upcoming book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, writer Michael Carr suggests the Internet is shrinking our attention spans. It’s not a new argument. And it’s not universally agreed upon either. But even President Obama recently got into the debate saying information can become a distraction because of our fascination with “iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations.”

But regardless of why, most people would agree that attention spans are shrinking. That means the people you and I preach to each week are less likely to sit and focus as long as congregations could a generation ago. We can complain about it and we can let it frustrate us. But we can’t change it.

Yet, that doesn’t mean we have to preach shorter and shorter sermons. That sounds counterintuitive, right? Shorter attention spans should mean shorter sermons. But for years I’ve been preaching an average of 45 minutes per sermon. I’d preach longer if it wouldn’t cause parking chaos at Saddleback!

That’s why I use what I call sermon features, which are special segments you add into your sermon to capture the attention of your listeners. I’ve found you can hold people’s attention much longer when you interweave a variety of features into your sermon.

I don’t know Rick Warren, but I remember meeting him when Saddleback was about a thousand people meeting weekly in a rented high school gym. My wife and I visited a few times. Rick preached clearly, biblically, and with a very engaging style. I liked him a lot. I still do.

But I think he’s wrong in his post, and I think the solution to the problem he describes cannot be based on a tacit acceptance of the cultural phenomenon he describes—increasingly shorter attention spans. The problem with Rick’s solution is his implicit surrender to his assumption that Christians share a lack of appetite for any preaching of considerable length that is not laced with entertaining features.

Clearly we live in a society dominated by distractions. Depending on whose research you believe, the average American daily views somewhere between 300 and 3000 commercial messages. These are the unwelcome ads we largely ignore. When you add the media-rich messages we welcome to our PDAs, laptops, iPods, iPads, the total is staggering.

We’ve been conditioned to consume huge amounts of disparate content at a blistering pace. Warren’s assertion that we struggle with longer and less entertaining sermons certainly passes the sniff test, but I believe the shorter attention spans he describes are indicative of something much worse than the cultural conditioning of the digital age. They indicate a lack of appetite for God and His Word. In short, we want Him less than other things.

A good friend sums up his theological position by quoting a Hagar cartoon. Sitting in a tavern Hagar pondered a question with his buddy about why he stayed out late each night, drinking. His sidekick answered with another question: “Because you want to?” Hagar sighed, “Yah, that’s why”.

So, we do what we do because we want to. In other words, our affections determine out actions, and any psychological experience we have that we’re making a rational choice is really a decision motivated by what we could call “love.” For example, we may love honor more than life and perform heroically. Or we may love football more than God’s Word and be itching to get back to our big screen when a sermon runs long. We don’t have shorter attention spans, we have more of an appetite for being entertained than we do for a deep and lingering encounter with God in His Word.

The Bible bears witness to this when it speaks of the heart as the wellspring of our lives. Jesus understands this when he says we are to love God with all that we are, so that anything else we might do will issue from that love and be pleasing to Him. Jesus offers support for this in the Sermon on the Mount where He gives us a description of the realized Kingdom. He ups the ante on sin significantly, tethering it to our heart’s affections. For example, if I longingly dwell in my heart on a woman, lusting after her, then I have commit adultery. I haven’t just considered adultery. I’ve actually sinned. Jesus teaches that the motivations of the heart are prior to and more foundational than any behavior.

He also makes it clear that if I do religious things in order to accrue status, then I already have my heart’s desire, my “reward”. But, if I do these things in secret—within the context of intimate communion with my Father solely in order to please Him—then the One who sees in secret will reward me. Giving, praying, or fasting—any and all of these amount to little more then prideful adornments without the right motivation of the heart.

And so I take Jesus to mean, when He speaks of the tares growing up with the wheat, that those who attend church do so for competing motives. The tares care little for God, and the wheat love God. They have an appetite for Him and His Word. The interest, or lack of, in a lengthy sermon points not to a universal cultural drift that impacts God-lovers and God-haters alike, but to differing appetites, or affections, of the heart that separate imposters from true children of God.

Will the cultural accommodation Warren suggests result in congregations less itchy for the door? Will they appear more “engaged”? Absolutely. But are they really drawn to the things of God or simply more entertained? If you have $300 million and the CGI artistry of a James Cameron or a Peter Jackson, you can get people to sit and pay attention for several hours on end, but you won’t change their hearts. Only the Spirit, birthing a living faith in Christ through the preaching of his Word can do that.

So what are we to do? How do we attack the problem Warren accurately describes? Head on. It is not the length of preaching that’s at issue. I believe it is the depth of preaching that is lacking. A friend of mine blogs on this very topic, and his views are well worth considering. In one post he references “thin-blooded” sermons, quoting Michael Quicke. Quicke maintains that one can preach attractive, even exegetically defensible sermons that do little to stimulate the Christian community because they are individualistic and confined to personal spirituality. In short, they fail to challenge those in the pew as a whole.

But what of a grand call to follow Christ by taking up one’s Cross and dying to self, bearing one another’s burdens in love? What about challenging “thick-blooded” sermons that tend to empty pews because they are rich with the offense of the Cross? What of a polarizing call that the church must be the church in the World? If those kinds of sermons were preached regularly—attended by features or not—we may well see a wholesale retreat of tares, but we’ll also enjoy a wonderful harvest of wheat. The fields are white, but sadly the workers are few.

This is a point made here before and it bears repeating. This time, however, let’s take up a variation of the question: that is, how does God read our reading of him? Is our view accurate? Do our various responses to him fit who he really is?

With that question in mind we become more open to his coaching us—ready to ask him to correct us if we’re off base. And if we have read him correctly, it’s likely to encourage us to be bolder in sharing him with others.

A brief Old Testament book, Zephaniah, gave the people of Judah a helpful reading of God’s perspective. When I reread it a couple of weeks ago it caught my attention more than ever before. The prophet warned of “the day of the LORD” that is coming soon. On that Day every false version of God will be corrected. Any human distortions will be dissolved by the reality of his actual presence.

Zephaniah offers God’s reading of the way these Judeans read God. That double reading applies to us as well. It’s what God is looking for in any age; and what his plans and promises are for that coming Day.

A seeking heart. The book begins with the promise that on that Day God will “utterly sweep away everything” (1:2). While restarting relations after a clean sweep sounds encouraging at one level, it really isn’t good news to those who haven’t paid attention to what God has expressed about himself in the past. Devotees of Baal and Milcom are listed among the false versions of God common in Zephaniah’s day who will be swept away. Yet in a summary sentence (1:6) we’re told of the timeless measure to be used by God in this final sweeping judgment: he will confront all those “who have turned back from following the LORD, who do not seek the LORD or inquire of him.” God looks after those who look for him; but those who don’t seek him are facing a frightening future.

A bigger God. Zephaniah also wrote about how God views the decayed morality that comes with either a weak view of God or in settings where he is dismissed. Zephaniah lists qualities such as violence and fraud, and even merchandising that isn’t true and fair as the sort of thing that God won’t accept. What is it in this corruption that stirs God? The naïve belief that he really doesn’t know what’s going on: “At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps, and I will punish the men who are complacent, those who say in their hearts, ‘The LORD will not do good nor will he do ill’” (1:12). God is not casual about those who are casual and careless towards him.

A faithful devotion. If anyone believes that Jesus in the New Testament offers God’s grace while in the Old Testament the Father is angry and harsh, they’ve missed one of the great themes of the Bible: in both Testaments God is jealous for our love. Sin is ultimately faithless disaffection—a refusal to love God—even though he is the one whom we were created to love and enjoy. In the place of loving God fallen human hearts now love security and pleasure—as located in “silver” and “gold” (1:18). But this false love will be confronted on the coming Day: “In the fire of [God's] jealousy, all the earth shall be consumed; for a full and sudden end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth.” Faithlessness won’t endure that Day but, as will be seen below, faithful love is treasured by God.

A genuine humility. The main feature of a heart devoted to God and to his ways is humility. But it’s not as if humility is something we manufacture. Rather it goes with seeing ourselves for who we are while at the same time seeing God for who he is. He is our creator; we are his creation. He pours out his goodness to us; we receive it in full dependence. He directs; we respond. This spontaneous and appropriate humility is crucial: “Seek the LORD, all you humble of the land, who do his just commands; seek righteousness; seek humility; perhaps you may be hidden on the day of the anger of the LORD (2:3). The goal of all God-fearing people is to please the God who loves us, not to compete with him.

A deep trust. Zephaniah offered a review of the major world powers of his day. Each country is promised divine justice. Many are hostile to Israel and behind the anti-Judah impulses of that day is a Satanic hatred of God. This is an echo of the revolt in the garden of Eden. Nineveh, for instance, refused to trust God but trusted in themselves, using a title reserved for God alone: “This is the exultant city that lived securely, that said in her heart, ‘I am, and there is no one else’” (2:15). Thus her reward on the coming Day will be desolation. The same is true of any group of people—including Jerusalem: “She does not trust in the LORD; she does not draw near to her God” (3:2). God reads hearts and delights in those who trust him, simply because he alone is fully trustworthy.

A song of loving delight. As we have seen, much of what Zephaniah offers in anticipation of the coming Day is shared as warnings. The book ends, however, on an upbeat note. God looks for that coming Day when those who love him will join him in antiphonal delight. Decades ago it was the fashion of musicals such as the Sound of Music to have a lover and his beloved sing to each other. This is the final vision that Zephaniah offers of the future. In a coming day those who are forgiven in Judah will “Rejoice and exult with all your heart” (3:14). God will celebrate in return: “The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” (3:17).

This vision of the coming Day offered by Zephaniah tells us of a God who is both frightening and winsome. He wants us to read him accurately; and he reads us with unerring awareness wherever we are in respect to him. The invitation we have before us today is to be captured by him and by all he offers us. And then to wait for the Day when he rejoices over us with his “loud singing” of delight. What a God and what a future!

What drives us? Are there aspirations that explain our priorities in life? Certainly, there are, and one of these is our love of power. So I’d like to reflect here on the role of power—including our desire to gain and hold power—as a motivator for all of us.
What kinds of power? There are too many to count! The power of personal security is a good starter. That comes through our earning power—the ability to work for a good wage—which then gives us purchasing power in the markets of life.

Another is social power: the ability to influence others. This is the power we find in any given pecking order and it helps us to manage. If we have high standing at our job, for instance, we’ll find that others volunteer to help us more readily than if we don’t. More privileges are granted and deference given. We also look for power in the status and competence offered us by our education. Physical power is another motivator: people will spend hours in weight training or aerobic workouts to feel more fit and able.

Another is political power: the ability to shape a community through writing or applying rules and laws. Political power can range from holding the presidency of a local golf club all the way up to holding the power of the American presidency. Any kind of office, in fact, carries power within the realm of that office—from serving as a secretary in a corporation to serving as a manager of a local coffee outlet. And there is the power that some have to influence those who hold the keys of power.

I suspect that somewhere in this listing exercise we’ll have seen something of our own links to power, and if not, keep looking: there’s also the power of persuasion, parental powers, the power to convince others, and more.

Now let’s shift gears by now applying the moral question: is power good or bad? Or is it neutral—a capacity that can be used for good and/or for ill?

On the one hand, think about a common saying: “power corrupts.” We’ve also heard the extension, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And we can think of any number of totalitarian leaders throughout history and certainly in the last century who have given power a bad name: Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, and many more.

Even at a more mundane level most of us have been in work situations, in school boards, or in churches where we’ve seen someone above us begin to gather power and then to exercise it in bringing about unhappy and even ungodly changes.

And remember that the connection made here between the great and the mundane is only one of degree: Hitler was once a modestly skilled painter who came to power through painting new social realities. He used lies, distortions, mythologies, and even blatant thuggery to climb to power. Only when we look backwards in time, after first knowing how the story ended in a Berlin bunker, do we see evil early in the trajectory he followed.

God, however, handles power without corruption. As believers we speak of his “omnipotence”—an inclusive power to rule over everything he’s created. In the Bible God sometimes speaks of his power as a potter: his ability to shape our circumstances. In the reality of the Trinity, Jesus has the power to create, to heal, to forgive, to raise people from the dead, and more. So clearly God, in the Bible, is not put off by the reality of his ultimate power. Christians also know that the final outcome on Judgment Day—a dramatic moment of power—will have a final score of God:1; the world-the flesh-and-the-devil: 0. That won’t be the actual margin, of course, but we know who wins.

I know I’m simply stating the obvious so far. Now let’s ask another more penetrating question: how does the love of power differ from the power of love?

Here’s a blunt but reliable answer as offered throughout the Bible: one is demonic and the other is divine.

The shape of demonic power is the pyramid. Only one being can achieve the highest place while all others are left to scramble up the steep pyramidic slopes in an increasingly cutthroat fashion. At the base level are the despised workers; further up are the middle managers; higher still are the major managers; near the top are the rulers; and at the very top is the king. He is the one to be served; all others are meant to serve. This is how armies work; how businesses work; how colleges work; how the world works—an aggressive self-love is needed in order to overcome all the others who are equally but less effectively selfish in racing to the top. Those who won’t or can’t race are liable to be abused and crushed.

Jesus, of course, is the actual “capstone” of God’s own kingdom structure, but he still didn’t fit this scheme. His life represents an inverted pyramid that causes every power-broker to stumble.

Think about this: Jesus, in the humility of his modest itinerant teaching role, was still crucified by the power-brokers of his day. Why? Because those leaders were steadily losing their power over the people in the face of Christ’s upside-down kingdom. Jesus was making the last first and the first last; he came to serve and not to be served; he cared for the sinners, not the “righteous”; he healed the blind, not those who thought they could see; and he came to be beloved by all who knew him because he first love them.

God, of course, speaks of his own power and at times he displays it by crushing evil. What is surprising, however, is that more often than not he withholds its use. It is only applied as a last resort. In the time of Noah, for instance, he destroyed the earth; but later—despite the continuation of the very evil among men that stirred that judgment—he promised never to flood the earth again. Similarly in one New Testament setting Jesus and his disciples were refused hospitality. The angry followers wanted to take advantage of Christ’s powers by calling down fire from heaven to destroy the town (Luke 9:54). Jesus refused and rebuked the followers instead.

What explains God’s use of power, then, is that it pours out from a heart of love; and—as the Triune One—his love is eternally other-centered. In John 17:24, for instance, we find that the Son’s great ambition is to bring others to share the eternal, glorious fellowship he has with the Father because “you [i.e. his Father] loved me before the foundation of the world.” And the Father’s salvation is offered because he “so loved the world that he gave us his only Son”.

What we do see of God’s heart in Scriptures is his purpose to save people who are enslaved by the power of sin. In his inverted pyramid the greatest power is unleashed when the greatest number receive the greatest care and compassion—all of which is offered in the context of unique, personal relationships. God works through us to reconcile the world to himself not through coercive powers but through the power of his personal love for us. And that love is never forced upon us; rather he invites us to reciprocate his own prior love with our own love, first in response to him; then in our initiatives toward others. His love is a spreading love.

Let me end by inviting others to comment on this analogy of the two opposed power pyramids: how is the explanatory force best presented and applied? At the least, we can see by it that Christ’s calling and ministry was and is more radical than those who are well placed on the slopes of the standard pyramid will ever grasp.