God And

In the natural order of things, people are effect-driven.

I typically do things because there is an effect that I want for myself, and I can achieve the effect by some particular action. This could be thought of as the "engineering model," and it is the backbone of all high-level human activity. We are continuously "engineering" our experiences.

In the natural way of thinking, to do something without some target effect would mean to do it arbitrarily, which is equated with foolishness, or worse.

If I were to drive for four hours, and I did not particularly want to drive, nor did I have to drive, nor was I going anywhere in particular, that would be considered foolishness, or maybe some indication of illness.

So then, in the natural way of things, I seek the effect of things but never really seek things themselves.

This must change with God. I must not seek "God and..." some effect, but must be content in seeking God Himself - the true thing.

This may seem at first to be about reverence - about "showing" that our interest is God, and not just what He can do for us. While this is a noble mindset to have, this is not the point of the argument (nor do I think it is very useful anyway): The restraint here is for our own good:

If I seek God in prayer because I know that praying will produce a certain effect in me - say, peace, or the social comfort of having interacted with God, then I will pray until I have the effect, and will likely not continue much further. The "engineering" compulsion will evaluate the usefulness of further prayer, and will find nothing concrete, because I have no "want" to wait upon. At best, I might "want" to feel more loving, and less selfish, and that becomes my reason to continue. It is still about the effect.

If I worship God in the hope of achieving the pleasant effect of sensing His presence, or of being pleasantly distracted, or of a thousand other good things, I will likewise restrict both myself and God to a relationship which is pre-defined according to what I am really seeking, which is not actually Him.

However, where I seek God Himself, I will find that I am free from "the engineer." In having no pre-defined reason to come to God except to seek Him, I am free from this ironic state: where, because I have found God in experience, I am now content to end my pursuit and experience Him no further (until I want to). The better way is that when I have found God in experience, I perpetually wish to experience Him further. This ideal could never be "want" driven, but is sensible only to relational desire - where love for God Himself takes place of that more mechanical compulsion to find some effect from Him.

When we seek God, as opposed to "God and...," we are truly free to know the love of God, and our hearts are truly ready for the relationship of love that is always pressing at the seams of our natural order, waiting to ensue.

We could say that the natural way is to be effect-driven, but the love of God will make us affection-driven.

Our agenda with God is what holds off our relationship with Him, because it defines our use of Him. If our "use of Him" is He Himself, then our pursuit of God is bound only by His idea of the relationship, which is far more impressive than what we would come up with on our own.

It is in our best interest, and is the only way unto love, that we abandon "satisfaction." We must not be satisfied, or else we will stop short of God's desire for us. And I do not mean "God's desire for us" in the sense of "things that He would like to do for us," or of the like: I mean His possessive desire for "us, ourselves," that yearns that we would desire Him, Himself. When we stop wanting God, Himself, the relationship can grow no more.

We must seek God for the shear wild adventure of being near to His heart. We must seek God to have the pleasure of His love and blessings, but without finding any one object of pleasure at which we are willing to walk away without another.

The adventure of Christianity takes place with a Person, and God forbid we should want anything less.

The Christ-Life

I wrote this recently to address non-believers on a different website. Thought I'd share it here.

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What is the essence of Christianity?

In short, it is the exchanged life. It is the life where what I am naturally is set in order to give way to the life of God that is in Christ. It is where the natural life is exchanged for the Christ-life, and this is accomplished through the mechanism that Christians refer to as faith.

The Christian life is not one of merely holding a particular set of ideals, or of doctrines, nor can it be summarized in what might be called the Christian "practice." These things in themselves are not "faith."

The Christian life is one of true regeneration, where what I am by natural order is placed subject to what God has purposed me to be by unnatural order - that is, through the interjection of the Christ-life in place of what I am without God. The comparison between the two is often thought of as that of darkness to light.

The transforming, regenerating faith that is responsible for this exchange centers upon a more concrete reality, which is transforming, regenerating love. The revealed love of God inspires faith, and always precedes faith in this sense. Human love, then returned to God, sets in motion the purifying love-relationship that creates faith continuously in a more permanent, life-changing sense. Thus, saving faith is entirely the construct of God's saving love, revealed to any willing human heart.

World Without End

This is another song by Reese Roper. It has been one of my favorites for a long time.

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World Without End

For all the deepest thoughts compiled, philosophy to laws of physics, no one has ever heard or seen a more beautiful event than this love that saved us.

The very spark that burns the stars drew near to me today. The God of everything that is whispered in my ear that His love in boundless.

In the soundless awe and wonder
Words fall short to hope again
How beautiful, how vast Your love is
New forever, world without end.

Day of Pigs

These are the lyrics to a song that I like by Reese Roper.

A theme of his music is how modern Christians abuse the privilege of assembly.

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Day of Pigs

Saturday
I could feet the crowd's dismay
They've acquired quite a fire
to burn the profane on a funeral pyre

Voices shrill
cutting silence like they mean to kill
Some pep rally where we scream His name
like God was loosing in a football game

I don't want to waste His name this time
I will never cast Him to the swine
(Grasping at some feeling you once knew
is nothing sacred ever safe with you?)

Silver tongues
all the spirit of an iron lung
Selling highs as if we needed one
Flash the lights so not be outdone

Counterfeit
wanting joy so much we take a hit
like a tapeworm deep in hunger digs
Waste the sacred just to feed these pigs

If this is real, then you must find it
between the space of grace and grim
It's nothing you can manufacture
your walls cannot contain Him

Church and Stuff

So, I promised that I would bring about some new beginnings here by writing "stuff" rather than attempting to stage a theological revolution. I am here now, with my forth empty coffee cup of the morning, to deliver on that promise.

There is no gentle way to ease into the conversation that I want to have right now, so I'll just jump right in:

I think most "churches" these days are really "institutes of Christian sociology." They serve to appropriately socialize those who wish to think of themselves as Christians into the stero Christian bubble. Beyond that, they just circulate a lot of money, mostly upon the conveyance of religious obligation.

The "church" I have experienced for the past six or seven years (with the exception of the ministry of Bob Shaw) is the capitalist-sociological reflection of the gospel but is not the institution of the gospel itself.

I never hear preachers actually preach the gospel any more, or even really talk about the gospel, except in "aside" obligatory comments like "because Jesus died for our sins..." as to explain something else.

I usually feel that I am being spoken to, from the pulpit, as though I am a foreigner to anything spiritual and could not possibly "handle" the actual gospel message, or anything like it. It is as though, presumably, I need to be spoon-fed the rhetoric of distant religious notions, and such as according to the familiar pattern of "ordinary ideas." This manifests as sermons that are preached through clumbsy analogies and vauge emotional imagery, to be metabolized in the imagination rather than what the Bible refers to as the heart (the seat of conviction).

In the same, I never hear preachers actually talk about God Himself anymore either. I hear a lot of talk about "God, the idea," or "God, the founder of this theology." I hear people talk about God Himself so scarcely now that I wonder if anyone will even know what I mean by this...

I mean the way that people would talk about God if they actually knew Him - if He were the person who owned their truest affections, and by the knowledge of His love, commanded their waking thought each day. The one of whom they might say with the bride of Solomon, "I am my Beloved's, and my Beloved is mine."

That is the God that I really want to hear about at church. My soul is sick from discussions of God, by Christians, who speak of Him as though He were a "black-box" character upon whom we experiment to please. I know they do not mean to be irreverent, but they miss the real point of any of true form of Christianity.

I had a dream a few months ago that I was being interviewed for a ministry position at my church. In the dream, I was asked by the pastoral staff, "So, Daniel, what is it that you feel you can offer to this ministry?"

I replied with the words of A.W. Tozer:

"It is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself; and unless and until the hearers come into the intimate experience of God Himself, they are none the better for having heard the truth."

In the dream, I was hired, and put in charge of a kindergarden class.