What are our doubts?

I'm finishing up preparations for this new sermon series I'm starting in June on the Gospel of Luke. In this book Luke is parading in front of us 100s of "eyewitnesses" to affirm our faith. Then I began asking the question what doubts do each of these eyewitnesses address. Because that is the function of a witness, isn't it? There is a doubt about the truthfulness of an event. Then someone presents witnesses to clear up doubts so we can rely on the truthfulness of the event in question. So what are our doubts about faith? I want to collect as many comments as I can so that I can factor them into my further sermon preparation. So let me know: What are some doubts and uncertainties that people have about faith? What are the uncertainties we find ourselves living with as Christians?

The Harder Lesson

I thought I would share a communication that I had with a member.

He writes:

Eric, To whom is it harder to get THE LESSON across? Someone just hearing of God's love or someone that has turned their backs on their first love and Savior? I hesitated about sending you this note until today. My brother-in-law and sister will be with us on Sunday, the Lord willing. He was my roommate at Freed-Hardeman Jr. College and has been my best friend since the 7th grade. Somewhere along the line, he has given up on the Lord. Probably the most intelligent person I've known my whole life but simply doesn't believe anymore. We remain best friends but do not discuss God. I pray for you and your family constantly. Your work and words mean so much to us. We come home, feeling refreshed and ready to tackle another week from our drive to Columbia on Sunday mornings. Keep on keeping on. God bless.

I wrote:

God bless you for your words of encouragement. I praise God that you are fed and filled by your sacrificial drive to and from. You will never know what that means to me. But to answer your question I tend to believe it works on a case by case basis. There are those who have never known Christ that have had so many wounds that they can’t believe anyone especially God would love them while others who never knew Christ fall head over heels immediately upon the meeting. Now with those who have turned from Christ I tend to believe they turn not from God but their misconceptions about God. I think all of us have a tendency to create for ourselves a idea of God pieced together by fragments of scripture, pop cultural fallacy, ideas that come from our own experiences, etc. And that idea of God sometimes is vastly different than the God in the Bible ( It’s hard to even realize the fact that God is so much bigger than what we find in the Bible. He has only revealed that which humanity can understand of Him. But He is infinitely bigger than what our minds can conceive of. We can’t grasp that because we have a hard time understanding the little bit He has given us.) So it is quite natural to come up with grave misconceptions and when the mistaken God doesn’t function like the real God we tend to turn away. So some people begin seeing God for who He is vs. who they thought He was and fall head over heels immediately while others refuse to believe God could be anything other than what they can conceive of with their petty consciousness and get stuck. But what we do is pray harder than we have ever before and allow God to use us all to love your friend into deeper relationship and deeper truth. If it’s God’s will I look forward to meeting them and I pray God has His way with him this weekend.

Your Brother,
Eric

Point of Grace

My worst day as a Christian is better than the best day of the one who has yet to find Christ.

Talking About Him As If He Is Not In The Room

Has that ever happen to you? Your in a room with a bunch of people and they start talking about you but do not acknowledge that you are actually right there. You're listening; with the ability to chime in and maybe give greater depth to the conversation; because it's your life and experience that they are talking about. I hate those moments.

And I find that I do that all of the time to God. Because as I'm working on developing a sermon I'm researching about God, and pondering about God, and writing about God but at no point regularly do I acknowledge His presence in the room. Last week was different though. Armed with this new profound awareness of His presence I began to write my sermon as if a dialogue between me and my God in the room. The process became so much more intimate.

Then I started thinking, "Wow, what if I lived my life with God in the room!" Aware of His presence as I talk to my kids as I love my wife as I plan our future as I serve His church. Now a formerly distant impersonal God is surrounding me with His wisdom and insight and grace listening and giving greater depth to the conversation. Why? Because even with my family and my future it's His life and His experience that I'm dealing with.

Motivation to preach from Ecclesiates

Absurdity is the anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less “well organized” and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos. This is what immediately impresses itself upon the man who has renounced diversion. It cannot be otherwise; for in renouncing diversion, he renounces the seemingly harmless pleasure of building a tight, self-contained illusion about himself and his little world. He accepts the difficulty of facing the million things in his life which are incomprehensible instead of simply ignoring them. Incidentally it is only when the apparent absurdity of life is faced in all truth that faith really becomes possible. Otherwise, faith tends to be a kind of diversion, a spiritual amusement, in which one gathers up accepted, conventional formulas and arranges them in the approved mental patters, without bothering to investigate their meaning, or ask if they have any practical consequences in one’s life. --Thomas Merton

Yikes!

We have a habitual tendency to reduce the irreducible. Because we cannot rest in our identity as paint strokes in a larger canvas; threads in a much larger tapestry; because we have a hard time seeing that we are not the biggest thing around, we tend to reduce things to suit our twisted and self-centered perspective. We think love too small; the earth too local; God as petty. We need to create for ourselves the myth that we are indeed the right people to determine what is ultimately the right thing for our lives. So we spend an inordinate amount of time reducing thing in our mind to bit size chunks that suit us. Case in point: the resurrection of Christ. If it is reduced to a nice story that may or may not happen we can look at it romantically. If we look at it as a historic event relegated to the past then we can look at it authoritatively. But if we see it as it truly is as something larger than the universe itself; something wild and untamed; something primal; something that simultaneously merges the earthly with the divine in the most miraculous of ways then we would have to change almost everything about ourselves. We would have to celebrate that resurrection daily by living a resurrected life. Yikes!

I Guess I Better Read the Manual

We just purchased a really effective tool for the church. It's called PhoneTree. Anytime I need to make an announcement to the whole church I get on the computer, record one message, and the computer calls all the church members and leaves that message on their answering machines. It can do a lot of things (text message, send emails, take my message and translate it into different languages). But it is more than likely I will not be able to do the majority of those things because I REFUSE TO READ THE MANUAL!!!! It ain't gonna happen. I'm a guy, I'm too busy, I'm just not feelin' it. I got it to call everyone to let them know to sign up for the potluck last Sunday and that's good enough for me. I think that's the way we are with our kingdom hearts. At the point of belief and baptism we receive a kingdom heart. While under the waters of baptism God performs spiritual surgery and gives us a kingdom heart. A heart that desires to do God's will; that desires to love sacrificially; that desires to change the world for the better! And that heart can do so much. But we refuse to read the manual! If we could only see the Bible as the manual for the kingdom heart. To see how it works; what it can do; how it can be expanded; what environment the kingdom heart must exist in to function well. I think we (and I include myself in this) live far below the potential of our kingdom hearts. We manage our day, we sin a little less than we did upon the start of our walk with Christ, we make it to church regularly, we pray sometimes, we read our Bibles periodically. And that's good enough? When the kingdom heart can exact change in our family and our world? Man, I guess I better read the manual.