Back to Basics

Some people have grand stories of the day they believed.  They saw God move mountains in their life and bring them through deep, dramatic things to lead them to the place where they finally put their trust in Christ as their savior.  Maybe they had been running from him or ignoring him for years, and then one day, everything changed.  Such tales show the lengths that God will go to find every lost soul.  I love those stories.  But it isn't mine.

I was born as the fourth child of a Baptist minister, and I was at church every week.  My parents raised me to pray, to read the Bible, and to trust God with my life.  I don't have a period in my life that I remember ever not believing.  It is simply the way it has always been.  When I was seven, I was baptized by my father, publicly declaring my choice to follow Jesus.  And my life has been perfect ever since.

Except, not at all.  Yes, I consider myself to be very blessed, for many reasons.  I was raised in an imperfect but loving home, where I was given a solid foundation on which to build my life.  I made friends in junior high school that are still my friends today, and I love them and my family more than they know, and more than I could express.  Nearly twelve years ago, I married a woman that I love more than the world, who has put up with me despite myself.  While our employment over the past decade has been shaky, with several layoffs, we have always been able to get back on our feet and with jobs that allow us a comfortable life, one where we are able to give back to those in need.  There is much in my life to be thankful for, but we all have our struggles.  Life is full of ups and downs, lefts and rights, and stretches of time standing still and falling down. 

This blog will be about life: the good and the bad, the moments of joy and the moments of pain.  It will be about issues we go through as individuals and as groups.  It will be about the one who is there who can be trusted with all of it, no matter what we're going through, no matter where we are in our walk.

Thank you Jesus, for you are my rock, my salvation, and my stronghold.

People Suck and Other Biblical Truths

I have been ramping up my writing over the last year or so (see my other blog for info on my fiction writing), I am hoping also to increase my non-fiction writing, which is mainly done through this blog.  I am going to be doing somewhat of a reboot on Don't Feed the Hypocrite, which includes (hopefully) posting on at least a weekly basis.  I will be trying to write quite a bit of new content, (I'm currently compiling a list of potential ideas), but I will also occasionally be reusing older content, either by simply reposting it or rehashing the ideas or stories.  I am hoping that, having new posts over some period of time, I will be able to increase the blog's readership and get it listed in some blog directories.  Some of the new content will come from what I had thought about as a book idea in the past, tentatively titled People Suck and Other Biblical Truths.  Writings from that are meant to be a humorous and different take on certain things from the Bible.  Several of the chapters for that were already written and will become blog posts instead, while I have a full list of potential blog posts from my notes.

Also, while the usual URL for this blog will continue to function, I've also registered and set up www.dontfeedthehypocrite.com to use going forward.

There you have it.  As always, if you have any ideas or questions you'd like me to address on this blog, feel free to let me know!

The Sin List

When we, as Christ followers, see people out in the world, how do we see them?  Do we see them as sinners?  Do we see them for their mistakes and their moral shortcomings?  I believe we often do see them in these ways, but is that how we should be seeing them?  How does God view them?

When I look out at the world, I try - and often fail - to see people the way God sees them, because God doesn't see them as sinners.  God sees them as his creations that He loves.  He seems them as people who have been separated from God by their sins, yes, but the cost has been paid for those sins to be forgiven.  God is pursuing each of them to bring them back to Him.  The people out in the world are not defined by the particular sins that they have committed; they are defined by the fact that they have not yet found their way back to God.  They are still lost.

By the way, so were we once.  We are no different from the people of the world who have not yet accepted the forgiveness that is available to them.  Perhaps they do not know it is available, or they have rejected it.  Either way, they are people who are in need of it.

I admit that I feel judgmental sometimes when I see people of the world living in certain ways.  I see them cohabitating before marriage or being unfaithful to their spouse, or otherwise using sex in ways God did not intend it.  I see them getting divorced or aborting unwanted babies.  I see them living their lives in whatever other ways I believe to be sinful.  However, judgment is God's, not mine.  I should not be doing such things.  I should not be thinking of people in such ways.

Here is the truth: we're all sinners.  If I look at the world, the evidence of sin is overwhelming, but it's not just coming from unbelievers.  Christians are doing the same things.  Even though we are saved by Jesus, we are still sinners, and we still do sinful things.  Christians are not altogether less likely to get divorced or cohabitate or be unfaithful.  This is not the way it should be, but it is the way it is, because we're still sinners living in a broken world.  We all make mistakes and have great moral shortcomings, and yet we often view ourselves as being better than those in the world who are living in certain ways.  We're no better than anyone else.  It's not even about being better.  It's about being saved.

If we look at people of the world and simply see a sinner, and not someone in need of a savior, then we are missing the opportunities that God has placed before us to be His church, to spread the good news of Christ Jesus to the world.  The point of this is that it doesn't really matter what sins a specific person has committed.  It doesn't matter what they're doing.  It doesn't matter how they're living.  When they're lost in this world without a savior, the only thing that truly matters is that they need Jesus.  They need to know that God loves them and always has loved them, no matter what.  They need to know that He sent his only son to die on a cross so they may have eternal life.  It is what we are called to do.  Salvation is what matters for every living soul on the planet, not the list of specific sins they are committing.  When our lives are over, it's not that list of sins that will determine where they spend eternity, because we all have that list of sins.  We all have a list of sins that has separated us from God.  Where we spend eternity is based on whether or not we accepted the sacrifice of Jesus, the one son of God, to sanctify us and set us right with God.  When we accept the forgiveness of Jesus, our salvation is set and our eternity is secure.  It is then that we try to live a more Godly life.  We should be holding ourselves to the standards of righteousness, because we should want to live more like Jesus.  But the world isn't there yet.  We don't need to be worrying about how the world is living.  We just need to be worrying about where they're going.

The Irrelevance of Sin

Sin is a strange thing.

On the one hand, it is a terrible truth of the human existence.  We all sin.  Each and every day, each and every one of us does things that go against God.  Sometimes we know the sin that we're committing, and sometimes we don't.  Either way, each of us sins against the God who created us.  That sin created a divide in our lives - a divide so large that it separated God from the entire human race.  We were once on a level field, side by side.  When Adam and Eve walked the Garden of Eden, they were sinless.  They were naked and not ashamed.  Sin then entered the world, and everything changed.  That level field was split, as though a great earthquake had shaken everything that we know and everything that we are.  A canyon now separated the creator of the universe and his prized creations: a deep, treacherous canyon we could not cross or circumvent.  Suddenly we were alone with no hope, and what was the cause of this?  It was sin, that terrible force of evil, that brought the divide between us.

Sin is indeed a terrible force, one that we must be aware of and can never ignore.  What would God do in the face of the sin that inflicted his creations?  Would he leave us to be alone for all time?  Would he surrender victory to sin and forfeit his creations away?  No; in a way that only God can, he went ahead and made sin completely irrelevant.

There's an asterisk by that statement, of course.

Around two thousand years ago, a man walked this Earth and lived his life in a way that no other man ever did or ever will: he was sinless.  Not a single blemish can be found on his record.  There was no hidden darkness.  There were no covered scandals waiting to be found.  There is simply the truth that Jesus was a completely innocent man.  In today's world, we have good people.  We have people who we see as righteous and living moral lives, but every human is a sinner, even those we see as good.  Every human except Jesus, who was the only man to ever complete the feat of a sinless life.

He also happened to be the son of God.

So how did God make sin irrelevant?  He send a part of himself down to Earth in physical form to live among us, to teach us, and then to die for us.  It was us, the very people who he came to save, who nailed him to a cross and hung him to die in humiliating fashion.  That single event summed up what Jesus came to do: the murder of Jesus was, in fact, a sin.  It was a sin that was being committed at the exact same moments in which it was being forgiven.

Every sin creates a debt between us and God, and it is a debt that must be paid.  In Biblical times, the Jewish people would sacrifice animals to be forgiven for their sins.  The person sinned, and the animal was given up to pay the debt.  There were detailed instructions in the scriptures on how they were to make such sacrifices, and they had to make those sacrifices over, and over, and over again.  Because they kept sinning, and debts kept on being created.  And all debts must be paid.

On that day, around two thousand years ago, when the son of God hung on a cross, dying, the blood that was being spilled became the payment for so much more than one sin by one man.  The death of Jesus paid the debts created by all men, for all the sins they had ever committed, and all the sins they ever will commit.  Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice - one that covered all sins for all time.  The canyon was filled back in, and sin no longer separated us from God.  Sin no longer had the power over us that it once did.  Sin had become irrelevant.

* And now we come back to that asterisk.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." - John 3: 16

That's it.  Jesus came and died for all of us, but we must accept his sacrifice in order to fully receive the forgiveness that he brings us.  We must acknowledge that God is God, and that Jesus is the son of God sent to die for our sins.  And then, in the eyes of forever and the eternal destination of our souls, sin becomes irrelevant.  We should be striving to live godly lives, of course.  We should be striving to live by God's moral standard and not our sinful nature.  However, our lives should become more about living for God and spreading the good news of Jesus to a lost world, than about living a perfect life.  Because we won't, and truthfully, for Christ followers, our lives shouldn't be about that anymore.  While sins we commit may still have consequences on this Earth, our sins have been forgiven and there is no more debt to be paid.  We should not live in guilt or shame of our past or present sins, for God has remembered them no more.  Just as Jesus then rose from the dead and defeated sin and death once and for all, we should wave sin goodbye as it is no longer the defining truth of our relationship with God.  We should live as lights to the world, seeking to make everybody else's sin as irrelevant as ours.

The Case for Death, Again

I've been sadly lacking in blog posts for quite some time now, but here we go. I have posted before about a potential non-fiction book idea called The Case for Death, which I spent a little time on recently. Here is the updated version of the first part of what I have so far.

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The world is full of a vast variety of life, and even within our own species, there is a plethora of diversity.  We come from different places and go to different places.  We are all different shapes and sizes, skin colors and personality types.  Some of us play Duck Duck Goose, while others play Duck Duck Grey Duck.  We have different likes and dislikes.  Two people can look at the same thing and yet not see the same thing.  We are each like the snowflakes of winter, for no two of us are identical in every way.  God did not create us from an assembly line, choosing from a small set of default personality types, churning out human beings with limited variations.  No indeed; he took great care to mold each of us with his hand.  He made us each different, giving us each a uniqueness that is truly our own.  Yet there are certain things that are true for each of us.  First, we are each created and wholly loved by God.  He created our lives for a distinct purpose.  The second universal truth is often more difficult to accept.

One of the undeniable truths about our human lives is that, eventually, they end.  Each of us was born of a woman, our bodies knitted together in her womb by the very fingers of God.  We begin life as an infant, then grow big and strong and capable of amazing things.  I see other people with accomplishments that I can’t even fathom.  How did they do that?  How is that even possible?  I don’t understand it, but there are people all over this planet who amaze me on a regular basis.  God created us to live big, amazing lives, full of great purpose, and there are many people out there who are living their lives to the fullest.

However, we are not meant to carry on with such amazing things forever.  Someday, each of our bodies will lose its vibrancy; blood will no longer flow through our veins, our minds will no longer churn with imagination, and life will no longer pour out from within our physical selves.  This is not something we can outrun or evade or deceive, for death is simply an inevitability that we must accept.  Yes, science is continually looking for ways to extend our lives, which there is nothing wrong with, of course.  We long to be immortal, to never have to say goodbye to the existence we know.  Yet even the most brilliant advances in science or the most impressive technological innovations will not defeat the inevitability that is coming for every one of us, eventually.  Each of us has a day, the final day of our Earthly lives, perhaps soon, perhaps not for many years.  Only God knows the day, for He is the one that created that day, and every day from now until then.

Even as we acknowledge and understand that our future includes death, it is true that we often fear it and despise it, holding on to our lives and our remaining time with all our might. Humans fear their death like nothing else, and that fear stems from the fact that we simply do not fully comprehend the part that death plays in our lives.  We look at it from the human perspective, not from that of an eternal God.  We miss His plan for us; His plan for the end and the beginning of each human life. For all things, good or bad in the sight of men, work together for the goodness of God.  We find it difficult to understand that God’s plan for our lives includes the day they end.

The scriptures tell us not to fear.  Once Jesus has become our lord, and God becomes the center and purpose for our life, there is nothing to separate us from Him and the salvation that we now have. Nothing in this world, no powers in the spiritual realms, and not the eventual death that leads from this life into the next.  Once the choice has been made, God will never leave your side.
I’ve found that most fears are inherently irrational.  We fear spiders, despite the fact that they are tiny, fragile, and usually harmless.  One of my main fears in life is public speaking.  It turns me into a man who can barely put together a coherent thought.  When I’ve been in the unfortunate position of having to give a speech, I need to have every word printed out before me.  If I don’t, I my mind will likely become a completely blank.

Here’s a true story.  During a speech class in grade school, I stood up in front of the class to give an instructional speech on how to fold a paper airplane.  I got up with my piece of paper, and my mind went blank.  I had absolutely no idea what to say.  I was completely terrified.  And so, I didn’t say anything.  Not a single word.  I simply stood there, folded myself a paper airplane while my hands were shaking, and then sat down.  I got in C in the class, which was probably much better than I should have received.  Oh, I hated speech class, so very much.  I hated the way it made me feel, from the moment I knew I had to give a speech to the moment it was over, and then some more.  It wasn’t until a speech class I had in college that I received better than a C in such a class.  I still hate it when I have to talk in front of a group of people, even if that group is fairly small.
Is this fear rational?  Of course not.  What do I think is going to happen?  Did my fellow students in speech class surround me and beat me up?  Do I get taken outside and dragged through the street whenever I open my mouth at work?  No, of course not.  There is nothing truly bad that happens when I speak in front of people.  The bad things that happen are occurring all in my head, due to the fear I’ve built up over the things that won’t actually hurt me.  The pain and suffering that comes from fear is usually self-caused and worse than the actual consequence that result from the thing we fear.

We fear things because we do not understand them, or because we give them too much power.  We make ourselves weaker than we need to be.  We allow ourselves to be overtaken by things that have no real power over us.  This includes spiders, public speaking, and, of course, death.

We must change the way we view death, for it is not the end, but merely a time of change.  It is not something to be feared, but something to be understood and accepted. As strange a thought as this might be, death is actually something to look forward to. Not in any depressive or suicidal manner, but in such a way that we long to be with Christ in the world to come. For this world is not our home; we are as aliens in a foreign land, and Heaven is our true home. Our father waits there for us, ready to welcome us into his glorious kingdom, and we should wait patiently and yet with excitement for the day when we walk those streets of gold. We will no longer be strapped with the problems of this world.  We will no longer live in fear, but will have all of eternity to be with Christ.
Our time on this Earth is precious, and even while we are young and the years seem to stretch out before us, death is coming for each human, some long before they expect it. We know not what day will be our last, but that is not for us to choose. God has planned each day of our lives, and He knows what day He will call you away from your body and into His presence. Do not fear that hour, for a greater glory awaits us than we could ever experience in these bodies. Live each day as though death was around the corner, for it truly is, even if we do not see it.
In The Case for Death, in order to improve our understanding, we will consider seven different myths about death.  These are things that, as a race, we humans often believe as fact, and yet, they are not true in the eyes of God.  Some of these myths may be difficult to accept, yet we should be striving to see things as God sees them, for he is the ultimate source of all knowledge and truth.  If we rely on our own understanding, we are putting our faith into something that is terribly flawed and limited.  God is eternal, and only through Him and His word will we be able to truly understand and accept death.

I am not writing this book as a theologian (because I’m not one).  I’m not a Bible scholar, though I feel like I could defeat the average American in Bible trivia (which my family did play often growing up).  I do not perceive myself as having a better understanding of the infinite truths of God than any other soul in the history of the world.  I am merely a Baptist preacher’s kid, now in my mid-thirties, who wants the world to know Jesus.  I want the truth and the good news of my savior to be known and accepted by everyone in the world, because the eternal fates of all unbelievers hang in the balance.  I also want today’s Christ followers to be lights shining to the world, not fearing the world or the difficult truths it holds.

We do not know what tomorrow holds, but the unknowns of tomorrow should not hold us back from living well today.  God holds your life in His hands, and His timing is perfect. Trust in Him and do not fear the future, and do not fear death, for on the other side of our last day is the first day of a beautiful beginning.

You Need Jesus

Yes, you.  Whoever and wherever you are, you need Jesus.
But you don't know it.
You know you need something.  You know something is missing.
There's a gap in your life.  An emptiness that nothing can fill.
You know you need to fill that gap.  Every day you look for something, and every day you come up short, you still feel empty. 
You've tried everything.  Sex, money, drugs, love, or a million other things.  The world has so much to offer, and yet it has never been enough, not even close.  The gap remains, the nothingness, the void.
You've tried everything.  Why not Jesus?  What have you got to lose?

I Don't Like Christians, Either

I mean, just look at them.  They've got major problems.  

They're liars and cheaters.  They're hypocrites.  They're fools.  They're judgmental and selfish. They're often not very likeable. Christians are just as likely to be at the center of a scandal as anyone else, just as likely to throw away friendships, marriages, careers, and lives due to foolish choices and sinful living.  They say they believe in kindness, but they're just as likely to walk by the needy without lending a helping hand, just as likely to waste their resources on themselves and things of this world.  They say they believe in purity, but they're just as likely to be into pornography, just as likely to be unfaithful and engage in sex before marriage.  When things get difficult or monotonous, they're just as likely to walk away from their commitments, even if those commitments were made with sacred vows before God.

Christians are totally messed up.

Did I mention that I'm one of them?

To those of you who walked away from God because of your dislike of Christians, I completely understand your sentiment.  Why would you want to be involved with these people?  They've got some serious issues.  However, that's kind of the point.

Don't judge God based on his followers.  God is not limited by the foolishness of his people.  God is the creator of the universe and all that it holds, which includes you.  He loves you more than you could ever know.  Your choice to follow God is between you and God, not between you and the Christian community.  The truth of the gospel is not affected by its followers' ability to be sinless.  Don't reject God because of Christians.  Instead, accept God because He loves you.  He loves you despite the sins you've committed, despite your flaws and mistakes.  As humans, we've all got problems.  A Christian is simply someone who has accepted that, due to their own sinfulness and their own long list of problems and mistakes, they need a savior.  And the only true savior is Jesus.

As Christians, we certainly should be striving to be living righteous, godly lives.  The Bible tells us to follow God's commandments, and that should be our goal.  However, even those who seek to live righteously will fail.  Some fail more often or in bigger ways than others, but we all fail.  One thing we should not do is sit around comparing each other's sins.  You sinned in this way and I sinned in that way, and perhaps my sins are greater than yours, but sin is sin and you need just as much grace as I do.  God doesn't have a sin meter for each of us.  The mere fact that we are sinful at all is what separates us from God, not the amount of sin.  It is the same Jesus that wipes all the sin away and promises us eternal life, where we will all be sinless.

We should not live our lives in order to look good to everyone else.  We're all sinners and we all know it.  We're going to make mistakes.  We're going to have foolish moments, and we're going to made bad decisions.  A Christian who says they have no sin is a liar and a hypocrite.  There is no such thing as a perfect Christian.  The fact that we are all sinful is part of the point of our message: we all need Jesus.  We all need to be saved.  God will take us in not because of anything great we've done, but because of his love for us and the sacrifice of his son Jesus on the cross.  He loves each and every one despite our sins.  Don't turn him away because of the rest of us.  Accept his love because it is real and true.