Endowed... By Whom?

President Obama recently slipped up while quoting the Declaration of Independence. Not once, mind you, but twice. Both times he committed the same error, stating that "all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights..." Notice what's missing? Three simple words: "by their Creator."

Is it merely coincidence that a president who is known for his intelligence and public speaking acumen would commit the same simple error on two separate occasions, merely a month apart? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Either way, this all got me thinking about something that's far more important than Barack Obama, or any other president for that matter. It got me thinking about the importance of those words, "by their Creator." Why were they put in the Declaration of Independence in the first place? And what happens if you take them away? All sorts of bad things happen, unfortunately.

The Declaration of Independence gave moral justification to America's separation from England by basing it in "nature and nature's God." At the time it was written, one didn't have to be a dedicated Christian in order to embrace that document. "Nature's God" could be understood in a number of ways, Christian, Deist, or otherwise. The same is true today: One doesn't have to be an evangelical Christian like I am in order to support the Declaration.

But one does have to acknowledge the same "self-evident truth": that the fundamental equality of all men, which is what ensures our liberty, derives from the Creator. The consequences of failing to acknowledge this, as many people (including our president) seem wont to do these days, are potentially disastrous. I flesh this out a bit in a recent article at the Colson Center, in which I ask Do We Still Hold These Truths?

Polishing Diamonds

Ever notice how cool and exciting things eventually become mundane? You know, something that you were so excited about once is now just a ho-hum part of your everyday life.

I'll never forget how excited I was in the weeks leading up to the purchase of our first house. We'd been married for 5 years, all of which had been spent living in rented apartments. Our daughter was 18 months old, Amy was not working, and I was in graduate school and working a full time job at City Hall for a mediocre salary. So our home-buying hopes were not high. But then the real estate swell started really picking up steam (yes it led to the infamous big crash of 2008, but this was before all that) and we suddenly were able to not only qualify for, but to actually afford to buy a house.

I was so excited about our first little house! Big yard for the kids, no walls shared with noisy neighbors, a piece of ground we could call our own. I was flying high the whole day we moved in, and waking up that first morning in our own house was just cool.

But over time the euphoria, predictably, declined. A year after we moved in, waking up in our own house was just... waking up. I no longer felt pleasure at having my own walls. And while the yard was still nice for the kids to play in, it was also a lot of work to mow each week! Don't get me wrong: we were happy with our house. But the early sense of excitement we'd had had diminished, because the comparison with what we'd had before had been long forgotten.

This happens in our relationship with God as well. One of the reasons we may feel less than enthusiastic about him is that we've forgotten just what we have in Christ. And maybe remembering how great a thing he is, and how great a life and future he's secured for us, is the path to appreciating him more fully rather than taking him for granted.

Sometimes a diamond shines better after it's been scrubbed and polished. And sometimes our appreciation for the beauty of Christ increases when we scrub off layers of accumulated familiarity. That's the subject of an article I wrote, which was inspired by a trip Amy and I took to Astoria a few years ago. You can read it at the Colson Center: Appreciating Magnificence

Relentless Love

Whenever the Colson Center publishes something I write I provide a link to it from this blog. But more than just linking to it, I also like to write some of the "back story" here: to reveal some of my own thoughts and feelings that went into the article, which you won't get just from the article itself.

Recently the Colson Center has offered a lot of content on the subject of marriage, so I set out to write on that topic. That was an easy decision to make because I just preached a sermon (audio mp3 here) on that topic, so I had done some study already. Seemed an easy enough task.

But I've found that nothing is ever just "easy" when I really start thinking about God's words. I started my study, naturally enough, in Ephesians 5:22-33 which is probably one of the best known New Testament passages on marriage. I noticed, as I have previously, how effortlessly Paul moves between talking about the husband/wife relationship and the Christ/church relationship. In fact he doesn't really move between them as much as he blends them together. The point is, the main purpose of marriage is to reflect God's love for us.

Then I really started thinking about that. I mean really thinking.

What kind of love is God's love? It is fierce love, love that never quits. It is love that jealous of the beloved, and it tolerates no rivals. It is love that persists long after the beloved has ceased to deserve it. It is relentless love.

And this is the love my marriage is supposed to put on display for the world. Fierce, persisting, devoted. Relentless.

As I let that sink in I found my thoughts drifting to Hosea, that sad and pained prophet. God gave him the unenviable job of not only speaking his message, but living it via his marriage. God told Hosea to marry a prostitute so that we would know how God feels about our faithlessness. And to show us what relentless love looks like.

Many of us have very different circumstances from those God appointed for Hosea. But still, I started wondering how relentless my love is for my own wife. She has been the most dedicated companion I could have hoped for, and together we've faced our share of difficulties. From chronic health challenges to special needs to unfulfilled plans and desires, our path through life thus far has been different than what we thought it would be. Isn't everyone's?

But writing this article helped remind me of the larger reality of our marriage, and that perspective puts the "daily grind" of life in a different light. In the end it isn't about our plans, our pains, or our prosperity. It is about love. Not our love for one another, but God's love for us. It is about Relentless Love.

Faith & Science: Where Angels Fear To Tread

Some of you may know that I studied Physics for 2 years as an undergraduate at Cal, and once even entertained the notion that I would spend my life as a professional astrophysicist. Well I didn't get along too well with higher mathematics, so I eventually realized my calling in life was probably not to be a scientist!

But while I'm hardly a science expert I do still have an interest in the sciences, and this interest came up again recently. I've been writing a series of brief articles which look at life from the perspective of a Biblical worldview. In wrapping that series up (links to the whole series can be found here) I found myself pondering the long-running tension between science and faith.

I've thought a fair bit about this tension over the years, and about the way science is understood by those who have made a career of it, as well as those who haven't. Questions such as:

• Do we have to rule out the idea of God in order to do science effectively?
• For a Christian, do the findings of science represent what the Bible calls "man's wisdom" (which, in the Bible, is bad) vs. "God's wisdom"?
• While it will probably always be a challenge to figure out how faith & science relate to one another, are they actually opposed to one another?

In asking these questions I know I'm getting into deep waters; waters that have been sailed in by people smarter than me! But they are important questions to ask if we're going to see all of life through the lens of the Bible. After all, science and technology are a big part of "all of life." With that in mind, here are some of my thoughts on the topic including what I think is the real culprit in the tension between faith & science. I'd be interested in your thoughts too.

(Image above of the Eagle Nebula courtesy of NASA)

Loving Racket

Everyone knows life never fully measures up to what we want it to be. And we all have ways of responding to it when it doesn't. Noise may be one of them.

Here's what I mean: ever feel like you can't turn off the TV, radio, or other media even when you're not actually listening/watching? I noticed this years ago when I had to commute to work in the car. Even on days when I wasn't really paying much attention to the radio, or when I wasn't really that interested in what was being said or played, I had to have it on. It was like turning it off made me uncomfortable - I couldn't handle the silence.

Why, I wondered? Maybe because I didn't want to be alone with my thoughts. Perhaps if I was alone with them they would wander to the chronic pain in my home, or the goals Amy and I (mostly I) had set that didn't get achieved in our time frame. Maybe the constant background noise was a way of crowding out serious reflection and thinking.

Maybe I wanted it that way.

But perhaps that's not the Biblical way of seeing life's disappointments. Maybe there's a healthier, more God-honoring way of responding to them. That's where the following quote from John Wesley, which I found just recently, really struck me. Wesley talks about what it means to really submit to the kingship of Jesus in our lives. He writes:

Whether it be higher or lower, a prosperous or afflicted state: be content that Christ should both choose your work, and choose your condition; that he should have the command of you, and the disposal of you: make me what you will, Lord, and set me where you will…I put myself wholly into your hands: put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will; put me to doing, put me to suffering, let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you, exalted for you, or trodden under foot for you; let me be full, let me be empty, let me have all things, let me have nothing, I freely and heartily resign all to your pleasure and disposal

There it is: a whole different perspective on life's disappointments. Not something to be crowded out by noise, but something to be embraced as the road our Lord has ordained for us. But I cannot think this way, not truly, unless I have embraced the kingship of Jesus deeply.

So I wrote a short devotional Bible study for the Colson Center, based on this quote from Wesley, that draws us in to the Scriptures and what they say about living a Prostrate Life. I hope you find it as meaningful as I have.

The Elusive Search for a Christ-Filled Christmas

We're now well into the relentless run-up to Christmas, which seems to creep back a bit more every year. The impenetrable wall of Thanksgiving used to shield the months of October and November from overt Christmas season displays. But now even Turkey Day seems to be getting overwhelmed by the the steady onslaught of wreaths, bells, and little incandescent lights, which are now appearing earlier and earlier.

It's probably not news to anyone that this relentless holiday advance is driven largely by retailers. And it's usually at this point that Christians - especially pastors like me - begin to decry the consumerism of Christmas, lambasting a materialistic culture for defacing so holy a day with commercialized vandalism.

But I'm not going to.

Not that materialism isn't a problem at Christmas - it certainly is. But there are at least 2 reasons why I'm not going to pounce on commercialism as the source of what's wrong with our celebration of Christmas. First, it's obvious. And it's been talked about endlessly. There are already plenty of voices weighing in on how to de-commercialize Christmas, and many of these voices much more articulate than mine (like this one for example).

But the second reason is that I think the Kingdom of God is better served when Christians look in the mirror and do business with their beloved God, rather than looking out the window and wagging our collective fingers at those who don't know any better. If we're interested in putting Christ in the center of Christmas, I think one of the best ways is to look anew at Scripture and enter more fully into the implications of the Christmas story. You can read what I mean in an article that just published at the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview.

The answer may be different than you think.

Simeon, who longed for the coming of the Messiah, holds Jesus while Mary & Joseph look on (Luke 2)

Eternal Perspective vs. Instant Gratification

Our church's current teaching series is covering the message of the entire Bible in 12 weeks. We're explaining how all 66 books work together to say something: God's message to us. One of the points we've made repeatedly during this study is that the Bible is unified: the Old and New Testaments fit together and, contrary to popular opinion, they paint the same picture.

One example of the unity between the two Testaments is their perspective: the cast of both is forward-looking and gratification-delaying. Now, this is perhaps expected in the Old Testament, which looks forward to the coming of the Messiah. But surprisingly, despite the fact that the Messiah has already come in the New Testament, it too is forward-looking and gratification-delaying.

This similarity in mindset throughout the entire Bible, and the way it works itself out in our current instant gratification culture, is the subject of an article I wrote for the Colson Center for Biblical Worldview. You can read more here.

The Siren Song of Status

Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit serves as the inspiration for an article I recently wrote, which is about the inner fight we all have with wanting to please and impress people - often more than we want to please God. Drop by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview and see the results of listening to the call of The Siren Song of Status.

I greatly value the feedback I've already received on this article and I invite yours too, either as a comment here or on Facebook.