Published: 2011 (25th anniversary revised edition)

Genre: Theology, Christian Living

Rating: 5

Duh!

To the guy God used to show me that joy is the only respectable and rational pursuit in this existence, and then that real joy could only be found in the One who is the source of infinite delight…

well, I’ll be forever grateful to God for Pipes, because there is nothing more freeing than the truth and the truth is this:

Our God is the “happy” God and it is His joy to see His children find pure and passionate delight in Himself, the One who has at His right hand (which is where Jesus sits) infinite pleasures forever.

God delights in seeing His children delighted

How awesome is that?

And what He desires for us is that we would find perfect joy and it just so happens that perfect joy can only be found in Him, so:

God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in Him

Or

The end of all men is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.

(Both of the above are paraphrases/quotes from Piper).

And Piper doesn’t extrapolate this from the Bible with any sort of magic or chicanery-trickery, instead John points to explicitly hedonistic passages in the Bible like:

“Our God is in the heavens; He does all that He pleases.” – Psalm 115.3

“Delight yourself in the LORD.” – Psalm 37.4

“His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’” – Matthew 25.21

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” – Deuteronomy 6.5 (The chapter also talks about God’s desire to do good to His people always and forever).

Or how about:

“looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” – Hebrews 12.2

So Jesus went to the cross, not out of a sombre-like duty, but Jesus went to the cross in  in the pursuit of His joy (and ours).

Amazing! Amazing love!

So this book is a life-changer and a giver of joy. The revised edition is made even better with the added chapter on suffering and how we can find, even in suffering, our great joy. Here is the 2nd to last paragraph in that chapter:

“This is the essence of Christian Hedonism. In the pursuit of joy through suffering, we magnify the all-satisfying worth of the Source of our joy. God Himself shines as the brightness at the end of our tunnel of pain. If we do not communicate that He is the goal and the ground of our joy in suffering, then the very meaning of our suffering will be lost. The meaning is this: God is gain. God is gain. God is gain.”

I received this book free from the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

And able to suffer frequently and deeply.

If we would love.

• So love hurts. And sometimes it hurts like hell.

And this leads me to my second point:

• If your heart never hurts, then you probably do not love anyone very much.

Which leads me to this insight:

• When love begins to hurt we often choose to run away, to change the relationship, to call timeout and shake things up (i.e. shuffling out old relationships for new relationships).

And this brings me to my exhortation:

• If we would love, then we must be willing to stay with relationships even when they begin to hurt us, even when it feels like our hearts are about to shrivel into  little dry balls of excrement and dust.

My heart is broken as I type these words. There is a family in this world, a family that has become my family, a family I love more (in many ways) than my own family. I have a new mom and dad and they don’t speak English, except for a little bit. I have two hard working brothers and two more beautiful sisters.

And it hurts my heart. My heart is broken.

How can I show them? How can I tell them so that they might understand how much God has done in Jesus Christ? How can I help them see that God can give them everything they need in Himself? How can I bring the love of God into their hearts? How can I set them free?

I wish that I could die for them, if only my death could bring them to God.

I know that I can’t set them free, though, only God can. And so I pray some more, cry my eyes out, and try to share the Bible with them again, the book that talks about a God who became a man so that He could suffer and die for His creatures who rebelled against Him and hated Him. And God did this, so the story goes, because He loved them, the creatures he made. Even though they had rejected Him, forgotten Him, and lived only for themselves.

• We cheated on God. But God remained faithful to Himself and even died and rose from the dead to bring many people back to Him.

I love this family. And I want them to see the light of God, I want them to know the real joy, the real hope, the real truth, and the real love of God in Jesus.

1 Corinthians 13

13:1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, [1] but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; [2] 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Some examples

Romans 9.1-8

9:1 I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit— 2 that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, [10] my kinsmen according to the flesh. 4 They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. 5 To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.

6 But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, 7 and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” 8 This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.

• This is anguish of the deepest kind. If ever Paul’s letters come off as hard and ungracious, read this again. And, lo, guess where this passage moves to: musings on God’s sovereign grace, the Potter and His clay, vessels of mercy and vessels of wrath. (This hurts like hell, because I know some, if not most, of my friends are vessels of wrath waiting for destruction. They will never know the joy or peace in Christ… I am thankful for Paul’s tears. AND I am praying for God to prove me wrong. He can and I’m praying He will, especially for the ones I love the most. It hurts, what am I supposed to do? I pray and I cry and a try to share the word. That is my portion, the rest I must leave to God).

Philemon 3.17-21

17 Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. 18 For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. 19 Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. 20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

• Notice Paul’s tears and then what he says about the end for those who are not in Christ. He is saying their end is destruction… AND he says this with tears in his eyes, NOT with a sense of glee or arrogant self-knowledge, but with great sadness. He speaks what is their true end, but he sees no joy in it, which is why, I think, he then goes on to remind his readers about their joy so that they would not despair because of the lost.

Luke 19.41-44

41 And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, 42 saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. 43 For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side 44 and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

• God needs nothing and He still weeps over His enemies, those who killed Him. I am even more grateful for the tears of Christ.

Luke 11.35

35 Jesus wept.

• Lazarus was dead, but Jesus was going to raise Him. Knowing this, Jesus still wept because of sin and death.

John 3.16-17

16 “For God so loved the world, [9] that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

• He gave His only Son to suffer and die for His enemies, that they might be saved for joy and peace and love and truth in Him. See Isaiah 53 and John 15.13 as well. God suffered and died. (He did rise from the dead too, so suffering ain’t the whole story, but it’s a BIG part).

I’ll post further thoughts tomorrow.

(Note: all quotations are from the ESV).

Published: 2011

Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult

Rating: 3

Summary: In the land of the Expanse there were four great kingdoms. These kingdoms hailed their ancestry from one ancient group of refugees from the land of the curse, which was beyond the forbidding wall. Now, the kingdoms are being destroyed by various enemies and their citizens are once again becoming refugees. Under Abascar’s King, Calraven, a group of refugees begin to search for the lost city of Inius Throan, and with the help of the Ale boy and a girl with magical powers they hope to defeat their enemies and give hope to the peoples of the Expanse.

This is the last chapter in Jeffrey Overstreet’s series, “Auralia Thread.” Since I had not read any of the previous books I was wondering if I would be able to enjoy the story. Well, I did enjoy the story. It was exciting, adventurous, and left me wondering, “what’s next” most of the time.

However, the story was not all that it could have been, so here is a short list of some dissatisfying flaws:

1. The end. Overstreet concludes the story quickly, too quickly, I think. Conclusions should not be stretched out, but they should also draw out enough detail to give the reader the opportunity to savor the end of the story. The ending does not give us much to savor. In fact, I felt somewhat cheated by the ending, because it was not enough. Not all loose ends tied up, which is fine as long as some of them are (or if none of them are, then there needs to be good reason).

2. Unnecessary deaths. I think too many of the interesting characters were killed off. Maybe I’m short-sighted here, I don’t know. Authors should be ready to kill their characters, but for the right reasons. There need to be compelling reasons for the deaths of good characters. They must move the story forward and/or add something important to the story. I’m not sure all the deaths were warranted.

3. Writing characteristics. I enjoyed the detailed descriptions in the writing. Overstreet uses many good words and creates pictures and sounds and smells and etc. This was good. But he used repetition and alliteration too often. These devices are usually better left to poetry or used only when there is compelling reason to do so in narrative story-telling. I’m not quite sure why this is so, but it is so. Maybe it’s because the use of repetition, alliteration, and other similar literary tools, can cause the reader to bounce out of the story; certain literary tools can jostle a reader out of his imagination. Maybe?

4. Predictable. At times the author made it far too easy for me to see what was coming. This was not done too often, but when it was it did hurt the story.

The story was good and compelling, but it could have been better, is the argument of this reviewer.

I received this book free from the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Here’s what Ashok says to the interviewer’s question on good and evil in the Ramayana:

Q: “Lord Rama was good but he had flaws and Ravana was not all evil. Can the English language truly capture these characters?”

A: “I don’t believe in good or evil, sorry. Even grey is just a shade on the scale between black and white. In reality, people are more complex, we are like individual shades of colour, and each person is a unique colour that can never be precisely repeated. These things have nothing to do with language, English or otherwise. It’s to do with one’s philosophy. My philosophy is that each side considered themselves right and the other to be wrong, so in my Ramayana Series, from Rama’s point of view he was right, while from Ravana’s and Lanka’s point of view, Rama was the one who did wrong. This is reality: there is no absolute good or bad, merely points of view depending on one’s individual experience. Today the US invades countries to root out terrorism, but who is the biggest aggressor, the terrorists or the US army?”

Okay, so Ashok doesn’t believe in good or evil, at least not absolute good or evil. I wonder if Ashok, he lives in India, has ever heard about the sex trade? And how many Nepali girls are sold or stolen from their homes and families and shipped to India?

But, hell, who cares! It’s really not evil, it’s just gray. It’s all about perspective. Like that guy’s perspective when he’s taking advantage of a young girl while his wife and young daughters are at home cleaning house… yeah, that’s not really evil. He’s just having a bit of fun, that’s all. He had a stressful day. From his perspective it’s not that bad.

What about the girl’s perspective? His wife’s?

God’s?

Q: “Do you feel that every age needs a Vishnu to purge off the sins of mankind? Do you feel that myths have a universal value?”

A: “I don’t believe in the concept of sin. I don’t believe mankind is separate from other species, living or otherwise. I believe all creation is one great whole, as the Mahabharata tells us, and that we are all united in a symbiotic cycle. What I do believe is that all violence is wrong, war is a terrible madness with no victors, and that we choose to call upon champions to do our dirty work for us whether they are soldiers, policemen, avatars or gods. Vishnu was the super cop of the devas who was given this dirty job. He did it, and each of his avatars suffered as a result in the end because violent means can never achieve a peaceful end. As for myths, today’s news is tomorrow’s history. Today’s history is tomorrow’s legend. And today’s legend is tomorrow’s myth. Cultures that lack a shared mythology such as the US create their own comic book superheroes and film heroes because we all need someone else to do what we cannot, or dare not.”

So Ashok goes from saying that he does not believe in absolute good or absolute evil, but then wants to claim that war and violence are bad… which is to say that Ashok wants to say that war and violence are EVIL, and are evil all the time, whenever they happen: absolutely.

Oops… how did that word get there?

But, Ashok, you have messed up one of the main rules of logic: two ideas that contradict each other cannot exist at the same time, they are mutually exclusive.

War and violence cannot be bad unless they are evil. And evil cannot be evil unless it is evil. There are no shades of gray for evil. Evil is not evil if it is good. Evil is evil is evil. A thing that is evil cannot change its spots.

And so a person who commits evil is evil.

Unless something happens to make that person good. But then that person’s actions and thoughts would become good too. This is one of the great hopes of God in Jesus Christ: that evil men could be saved from their evil hearts and be forgiven and made new to be wholly good. For the glory of God.

The problem is not that Ashok does not believe in good or evil, the problem is that Ashok does not believe in Jesus Christ. If we get God wrong, then we’re going to get many other truths wrong. And we’re going to get values wrong too.

Ashok sees some things quite clearly: he recognizes that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (even though he doesn’t consciously believe in sin or evil he still does believe in these concepts and it shows), he recognizes that there is a god (though he doesn’t call it god or believe in the true God), he recognizes we can’t know everything and yet he still wants to claim that he knows the world is a certain way (which indicates that Ashok believes in truth and reality).

So Ashok, without realizing it, knows quite a number of aspects of reality, unfortunately he has given up on the major Truth, Jesus Christ, and this has led Ashok away from other truths.

And here’s the link to the interview: Ashok Banker Unplugged.

Published: 2009

Genre: Non-fiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Whimsy, Theology

Rating: 5

This was a cool book.

It started out somewhat pedantically, pandering to the fans of Chesterton and Lewis, even the author’s style aped their styles at times, but thankfully Wilson found his stride, his style, his voice and the writing rocketed off planet earth into the stratosphere and into space, the final frontier as some would say…

But I would not say that, because there is one more frontier even beyond space!

And Wilson tackled it with a poet-philosopher’s pen-strokes, or keystrokes for accuracy’s sake.

His writing is modern, staccato style, and dripping-oozing-cascading descriptive words detailing philosophical ideas and THE Artist’s landscape, which is the cosmos. God being the Artist. Duh…

Holiness is terrible. It comes with the whirlwind. It is a purifying fire. We are not the first Christians to trivialize the cherubim. We are not the first to make things soft on our imaginations and comfortable in our dreams.

When you think of a cherub, do you see a gingham dress full of grandma? Do you see a fat, winged infant peeing in a fountain? Do you see something riding on the wings of a storm, something at home in the funnel clouds? Something with four faces and four wings, the color of burnished brass, unconsumed by an infolding fire?

The trite is more comfortable. I like angels I can hug. Forget the pillar of fire; a teddy bear is a more fitting icon of holiness.

He’s a bit of a sarcastic punk too. We like our own kind.

So Wilson, to be straightforward, talks about death and life and beauty and truth and love and God and Jesus and Spirit and wraps it all in modern-poetic-philosophical-biblical musings. With the backdrop or pattern being a tilt-a-whirl, which is a ride ya’ll will find at circuses and state fairs and Disney parks, and etc. The idea is that Wilson begins talking about one thing and then flips to another subject and then there’s maybe an interlude and then he goes back to a subject and on-and-on until the end. He attempted to unite all of the subjects and, I think, he succeeded because he talks mostly about BIG issues; life and death; and exchanges BIG picture views with small-little-tiny picture views. The panoramic shot versus the up-close-and-very-personal.

And he does all of this with a theological crook somewhat like mine (the crook is like the word “bent,” and not used here as a synonym for “thief” or “blackguard” or “robber”).

So this book was awesome. After reading Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz I was thirsting for someone with a perspective similar to mine to write a book with something like Miller’s modern and artistic writing style.

And Wilson brought it home. That’s right.

Awesome.

So buy it, read it, enjoy it.

Author bio: Nathan Wilson is the son of a Pastor, the author of 100 Cupboards and Leepike Ridge, and the screen-writer for C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.

She’s 10 and May Be Sold to a Brothel

These days, Unicef estimates that 1.8 million children a year enter the commercial sex trade. Multiply M. by 1.8 million, and you understand the need for a new abolitionist movement.

But this is also an awesome and amazing opportunity for Christians to be salt and light. Thank God for grace and His Spirit living in us. God can give us the opportunities to shine light in a very dark world. So let’s do it, wherever we are, and fight evil, wherever it is, until we’re dead.

I need to figure out this blogging thing. Need to find a tone of voice that isn’t so rachety or asinine. I want my writing to be more grace-filled, yet without becoming fluff-filled and petite and pathetic at the same time. A bold grace.

Abortion, anyone?

One could then argue, if really desiring to be fair and still have circumcision illegal, “…so make both abortion and circumcision illegal, because the children should be given a choice…” (and, hey! I’d take that trade-off any day of the week!)

But I don’t believe they can have their cake and eat it too,

Because

I think we can see where this logic goes: the right for children to do whatever they wish, which has many inherent problems (example: whose choice? The child’s choice? Or the child’s choice as an adult? A mom and pop are just children become adults, so whose choice? Who runs the household? No one?).

This is basic Poe-moe 101. Post-modernism (which dances the tango with nihilism) has never been anything but postmortem. And not even that, because post-modernism has never had life. It is dead and empty, without truth.

So let’s be true to reality and use the Bible for common and true sense.

Abortion is wrong, because it takes a life without a righteous justification. The words “righteous” and “justification” are equally important here. We know righteousness only through God’s righteousness, likewise justification.

On the other side, circumcision was commanded by God for the O.T. Jews (which would seem to make it okay for us moderns, especially Christians, though no longer necessary).

So…

We only have ground to stand on when we adhere to the word of God. Otherwise we can argue anything. (Yes, you can hold to other books being true, but if they’re not true then it doesn’t matter if you have rejected one falsehood, post-modernism, for another falsehood, i.e. pick your choice of any religious book other than the Bible, because only the Bible reveals God in Jesus Christ of Nazareth).

And all this weird thinking because of one of the silliest comments I have ever read:

That was a part of MY penis that they removed without MY consent … I have to be reminded of this every time I go to the bathroom. And if that alone is not a good enough reason to criminalize the practice then I do not know WHAT IS.

I am circumcised too, yet somehow I’ve managed just fine. No trauma here. Though, to be sarcastic, perhaps this man’s circumcision went horribly wrong. It’s possible he was emasculated in a tragic incident involving a scalpel. Or maybe some sort of disfigurement occurred. I don’t know. But circumcision tends to go perfectly fine for the majority. No tragedies, no post-traumatic stress, no onset of a terrible infection, so I think this man is the exception to the line and has become bent out of shape due to the lies screaming through his mind.

There is one benefit, though, to these kinds of happenings in our world because this is the sort of bizzaro-world comment that makes me want to be a writer. I enjoy, in a strange and navel-gazing way, showing the world’s own bizzaro-nature in the mirror.

And I say, “O, you look so beautiful, my pretty, pretty world.”

Btw, I’m glad that we don’t make laws based on this guy’s problems with going to the bathroom and seeing his, well, you know…

And if you really were involved in a tragic circumcision accident, then that is terrible, but just because accidents happen does not mean we outlaw the use of automobiles. No, we go to God and ask Him to be our hope and our joy, because only He can give us what we really need.