[Has Christianity Failed You?]

- CHAPTERS ONE – THREE -

“Jesus says that the problem is not everyone else; the problem is within each of us. Attempting to satisfy the passions that rage inside us and the longings that motivate us, we invent spirituality, lean on political solutions, create new villains, turn our backs on Jesus, and blame a thousand tyrannies—but we never come to terms with the source of the problem deep within the heart and inclination of every human being. No matter our accomplishments or successes, our failures or shortcomings, the greatest struggle we face is within ourselves.”

“Malcolm Muggeridge once said that human depravity is at once the most empirically verifiable fact yet most staunchly resisted datum by our intellectuals.”

“[What] is left to believe if we dispense with God and the miracle of life itself? We argue for the existence of things and continue to believe they exist, even though they are mathematically impossible. We default to the belief that ultimate cause is something physical, even though no physical entity, however sectioned, explains its own existence. We hunger for love and meaning, even though we believe they are constructs of the mind and of culture or conditioning. We believe that only the empirical world is true, yet we posit this belief in metaphysical terms. We believe that matter has produced mind but that the mind transcends matter. We believe that everything that comes into being must have a cause, yet we believe the universe is causeless. We assume intelligence behind intelligibility—except for the universe. We believe in humanity’s ability to totally transcend the mind but are forced to concede that we are subject to an unbreakable determinism. We deny the absoluteness of good and evil, yet we fill our prisons with relativists who have believed this—often highly educated and successful citizens. I am compelled to ask you: Which position believes most in the ‘god of the gapes’ and which position relies more on faith?”

“How many times have we treaded into dangerous terrain, knowing deep inside that what we are doing is not right, yet rationalizing and arguing our way deeper and deeper along the path? How often does the appeal to the eye outweigh the caution of the soul? How repeatedly do we fall for an enticement we know is a lie, convincing ourselves that this time it will turn out to be true? How many disappointments and regrets must it take to prove that Scripture is right when it states there is a way that seems right to a person, yet its ends are the ways of death (Proverbs 14:12)?”

“The temptation in the beginning of creation was clear: By playing God, we redefine good and evil. In rejecting the voice of God and the boundaries he has set for us, we have made ourselves the master ethicists, and all categories become subject to our sovereign pronouncements. The point of the narrative is the propensity of humanity from the beginning to deny the warning and justify our own autonomy to become the ultimate judge of all reality. This choice to reject God’s authority and replace it with our own is now an inherited characteristic with which we all must struggle.”

“[The] longing to be touched is also the reason many Christians question God when they struggle to live life well in a manner that brings glory to God, especially when they are going through a time of darkness or fear. We would love to feel God’s arms around us. We would love to feel the embrace of the Almighty when we are feeling abandoned and alone. How many times have we wished we could just hear his voice? To the true seeker, sooner or later God comes through, even though his touch may not be recognized until much later. You see, instead of spectacular manifestations of power, the same God who used the human hand to write the Scriptures and preserve the written Word uses the human touch of his children to restore broken lives around them.”

“[When] I do things God’s way, even when it is hard, the delight I receive in return is limitless. When I do things my way, I exhaust pleasure very quickly. It is not that Christianity has failed to teach me how to delight in God’s presence; it is that I have failed by seeking pleasure through godless ways or by resisting God’s provision for me because it is not what I want.”

- CHAPTERS FOUR – SIX -

“In its efforts to make God relevant to modern men and women, the emergent church seldom emphasizes to its audiences that the ultimate result of prayer is that Jesus intends to make his home within the life of the supplicant. We have turned prayer into a means to our ends and seldom wait on God’s response long enough to think about what he wants for us in that very moment. By reducing the evidence of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to one particular gift, we have robbed people of the Holy Presence that prompts us in prayer, prays for us when we don’t have the words to pray for ourselves, and comforts us in our times of need.”

“This is precisely how a wise parent raises his or her child—teaching the child to train his or her hungers and longings so that in turn, the parent is able to provide for those hungers and longings. More than anything else, this is what prayer is about—training one’s hungers and longings to correspond with God’s will for us—and it is what the Christian faith is all about.”

“God will always protect his name, but when we disrespect that name—when we imply by our speech and by the way we live that the character of God is not revered—and when we live with the illusion that God will not call us to task for what we are doing to his name, he will act drastically to disassociate himself from the desecration of his name. To be reverenced is the very least that God expects from every human being.”

“Through Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane we learn the most important thing about prayer—that it is ultimately a conversational relationship in which God for you what you cannot do for yourself. It is not trying to persuade God to rethink his will but the means through which God reshapes you into a person who desires his will and is content to receive it, regardless of what it entails. This is not fatalism. This is not defeat. It is not confusion. It is not a cop-out. It is sometimes easier to resist God’s will than to have faith and confidence in God and in his specific purpose for each one of us. Only through exercising this kind of faith can the moment be accepted and understood as a small portion of a bigger story. For some of us this may entail a long, arduous journey, but it will be accomplished one moment at a time, one day at a time, each moment and day undergirded by the strength of the indwelling presence of God.”

“Prayer teaches us faith. It is not a guarantor of getting what we want. It is the assurance that our Lord superintends over our lives in our needs and our dependencies, in our successes and accomplishments. Faith is that sublime hourly dependence on God—our conviction that even though we may not get what we want or think we need, we know and love the One who denies us in this instance for his good reason and for our ultimate good.”

- CHAPTER SEVEN -

“Jesus’ resistance to political power was a remarkable caution about top-down belief systems. In the gospel message, the beginning of change begins in the heart of each individual. This heart change makes a difference in the home, then in the community, and ultimately in the nation—and in turn it shapes the future of a cultural ethos. Eventually, from the overflow of the values of such a society, a ripple effect takes place in cosmic proportions, not because it is imposed from the top but because God has changed the hearts and minds of his people. This is the difference with Christianity. The gospel was never intended to be a political theory that would dictate how societies should be structured.”

“Paul points to the three supreme trusts given to us by God: (1) to guard and care for our bodies, these temples of God… (2) to guard and care for our minds… we read and study and thereby inform our minds; and (3) to guard and care for our souls… we read and study and apply the Scriptures and allow them to nurture and guide our souls. If we are to understand the world and the God who made it, the church as an institution and each one of us as individuals within it must guard these three individual trusts. Any one of these held in imbalance will distort our growth.”

“[There are] three excellencies that make a meaningful life possible. In his great chapter 13 in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes, ‘And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love’ (verse 13). These are the elements of life without which it is impossible to live. Faith is that aspect which is built on a relationship between the truth we know and the truth we have yet to learn, as we enlarge our knowledge into the unknown. Hope casts a long shadow, even in times when it seems to have disappeared. But then comes the greatest—love. Think about this: The only way any of this is true is if God exists. Love is the supreme value and the supreme expression in a world where so often hatred seems to have won the day. In the certainty of God’s existence, the imperatives of faith, hope, and love follow.”