French skeptic Voltaire (1694-1778) bragged that within 100 years of his death, the Bible and the Christian faith would be completely eradicated from the planet. Yet, here we are, 235 years later, and the Bible remains the most widely read and widely published book in the world.

Are you looking for reasons to trust in the reliability of Scripture? I give you three legitimate ones in this message titled, ”Why I Believe in the Bible.”

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I’ll share why that’s the case in a moment, but first let me tell you how this whole Bonanza thing came about.

The Backstory

Halfway through graduate school I jettisoned my belief in God, the trustworthiness of Scripture, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, hell, the Virgin birth, the fact that Pepsi is better than Coke, everything – you name it, I kicked it to the curb.

Looking back, I lay blame on a few agnostic professors dressed in sheep’s clothing and radical historical criticism of the Bible, topped off with an espresso shot of existential philosophy.

Yet, if I’m being completely transparent, I think I abandoned my faith mostly because I felt lonely.

I’ll never forget the sensation of what Soren Kierkegaard so eloquently calls dread, the terror within when one has lost the very ground of their being. It was as if I had been cast adrift with no oars or rudder, not sure whether I was going to make it back alive.

I tell people that I clawed my way back into Christian Orthodoxy by first asking what I knew to be true, about anything – not just about God but literally, anything – and from there I worked that backwards to the possibility that there might be a God. From that point I compared religions, and on and on. Back to Jesus. Back to the Bible. To where I am today.

But that’s not the whole story.

What first pointed me back to faith during that tumultuous time was what I discovered on channel four.

The Discovery

I remember coming home one day for lunch between classes and flipping on our old television set. Lo and behold the old western Bonanza was on.

So I watched it.

And I felt oddly comforted.

I watched it again the next day. Same time. Same place. And felt the same thing.

By the end of the third day, I was hooked. Hoss and Little Joe were so reassuring, and strangely exuded a feeling of being home.

The experience was so inviting that I consciously made a commitment to myself to come home at lunchtime every day and catch up on the comings and goings of the Cartwright clan.

For one full year, five days a week, I left classes at 11:50am and rushed home in time to flip on the television and get lost inside of the world of the Ponderosa homestead.

And it literally saved me.

Kierkegaard talks about the man who saves himself, not by finding new ideas, but by finding order:

“Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance , absolutely sincere because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life.

And that was me – shipwrecked, flailing about in the waves, looking for something, anything, to grab a hold of to bring stability to my chaotic world.

And I found it through the reruns of an old television show.

Here’s how Bonanza saved my faith in God:

1. Bonanza got me outside of my own head.

One of the scariest things about my experience is how alone I felt. Not in the sense that other people weren’t around me – my wife was wonderfully close and supportive at the time. It was that I was stuck inside my own head, the way a boxer gets pushed by his opponent into a corner, unable to escape.

When I started my slow descent of despair, it was as if I leaned over to my wife and quoted those first few majestic lines from The Head and Heart‘s song Lost In My Mind…

Put your dreams away for now
I won’t see you for some time
I am lost in my mind
I get lost in my mind

Watching Bonanza allowed me to break free from the constant loop running in my head by inadvertently causing me to focus on something else – anything else – besides the haunting questions that were consuming me.

2. Bonanza brought order to my chaotic world.

I was sleeping very little, reading constantly, and spending way too much time with brilliant agnostic New Testament scholars. When I stumbled upon Bonanza I started eating a bologna sandwich like clockwork every day at 12 noon and relaxing for one complete hour. Soon after, not coincidently, I decided to start playing basketball at 4pm every afternoon with my friends in my apartment complex. I started going to bed at the same time each night too.

Watching Bonanza one hour a day, five days a week, was the first step towards creating a new sense of order in my life.

3. Bonanza sparked interests in things other than God.

I’m convinced that if all you do is think about God you’ll become bored, and as Kierkegaard observed, “Boredom is the root of all evil.” I experienced that first hand.

It wasn’t until I started watching Bonanza that I developed an interest in Native American history, traveling out West, cowboys, and mid-20th-century film-making.

The problem with my faith wasn’t my faith per se, or even the stringent academic study of it. My problem was it was all I thought about 24/7. I had no other intellectual interests at the time.

I ate, slept and breathed New Testament studies, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, German and French. That was it. I slept 5 hours a night. I spent 2 hours with my wife in the evening. And I studied the remaining 17 hours.

Hoss made me laugh. Adam reminded me of myself, with a dash of Little Joe thrown in. And the Cartwright’s made me want to go to Lake Tahoe, which we did. And go to Yellowstone, which we did. And to the Tetons. And Salt Lake City. And Cody, Wyoming. And a host of other places out West.

So what’s your “Bonanza?”

As I write this, I’m wondering about you.

You might be going through something right now that has ripped the foundation right out from under you.

• results from a test that came back from the doctor
• you found out your spouse was cheating on you
• a divorce
• a soul crushing job
• children causing unspeakable pain
• or you’re struggling intellectually with your faith like I was

Whatever it is, if you’re struggling and doubting God, my recommendation is that you not watch Bonanza (because honestly, that would be weird). But find something which will force you to get out of your head, help create new routines in your life, and spark a passion to explore new interests.

Sometimes the most God honoring, Biblical, and deeply spiritual thing you can do is throw yourself into things that have absolutely nothing to do with your faith.

Trust me.

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5 Best Blog Posts:

• The BBC’s Emily Buchanan’s article Is Child Sponsorship Ethical? should be required reading for all Christians.
• Maya Angelou’s words on Courage and Creativity in the Harvard Business Review really spoke to me.
• Couldn’t stop laughing at Echo Hub’s 7 (Honest) Church Postcards.
• Carlos Whitaker asks an honest question in his post Does Your Worship Leader Need To Be “Hot?”
• Brian Moll’s article Is God REALLY Speaking to You? in The Huffington Post was excellent.

5 Best Resources:

• I’ve found Todd Rhoades Ministry Briefing to be an excellent resource so far.
• Downloaded Jon Acuff’s book Start. Great read so far. Flat-out hysterical writer.
• Started using Scrivener for all my writing. Will update you later on how useful it is.
• Exponential Conference is going all west coast on us. L.A. next year sounds kinda nice.
• Vince Antonucci’s book and church-wide campaign Renegade was a great experience for us.

5 Best Videos:

• Stoked about Joe Boyd’s movie Strange Brand of Happy releasing Sept 13 nationwide.
• No doubt you’ve already seen the video of Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches. Very moving.
• Neil deGrasse Tyson answers the question “Does the Universe Have a Purpose?”
• William Lane Craig’s answer to the same question is 100 times better.
• And finally, here’s the cutest video I saw this week:

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Yet, by the end of his life, through letters to editors, friends, fellow artists, and critics, Hemingway left a treasure trove of compelling insights on how best to express one’s words through the written page.

WHAT I LOVED ABOUT IT:

For as long as I can remember it’s been my practice to read one book whose author is long passed for every book whose author is still alive. Time has a way of separating truly compelling authors and ideas from modern-day fads. So it was with great enthusiasm a few years ago that I sat down to read Ernest Hemingway On Writing.

I always pictured Hemingway’s life as a mirror image of that of his characters – one non-stop adventure, romance, and legacy-filled moment after another. It turns out Hemingway was just as lonely and neurotic as every writer I’ve ever met. As a writer myself, I found this oddly encouraging.

WHO SHOULD READ IT:

• Anyone looking for inspiration to discipline themselves to do hard work
• Anyone wanting to be a better writer
• Anyone who creates content for a living
• Anyone struggling to stay focused and committed to their task
• Anyone who is suffering

QUOTES WORTH SHARING:

I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world – or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin. (Letter to Mrs. Paul Pfeiffer, 1933, Selected Letters, p.397)

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it. (George Plimpton, “An Interview with Ernest Hemingway” The Paris Review 18, Spring 195)

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?  Y.C.: An unhappy childhood. (By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, p.219)

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead. (Letter to Arthur Mizener, 1950, Selected Letters, p. 694)

I have to write to be happy whether I get paid for it or not. But it is a disease to be born with. I like to do it. Which is even worse. That makes it from a disease into a vice. Then I want to do it better than anybody has ever done it which makes it into an obsession. An obsession is terrible. Hope you haven’t gotten any. That’s the only one I’ve got left. (Letter to Charles Scribner, 1940, Selected Letters, pp. 503-504)

There’s no rule on how it is to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges. (Letter to Charles Poore, 1953, Selected Letters, pp. 800-801)

I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can’t expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do. (Letter to L.H. Brague, Jr., 1959, Selected Letters, p. 893)

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it – don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist – but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you. (Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1929, Selected Letters, p. 408)

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do it write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.  (A Moveable Feast, p. 12)

After a book I am emotionally exhausted. If you are not you have not transferred the emotion completely to the reader. Anyway that is the way it works with me. (Letter to Charles Scribner, 1952, Selected Letters, p. 778)

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. (from Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, pp. 528-529)

My temptation is always to write too much. I keep it under control so as not to have to cut out crap and re-write. Guys who think they are geniuses because they have never learned how to say no to a typewriter are a common phenomenon. All you have to do is to get a phony style and you can write any amount of words. (Letter to Maxwell Perkins, 1940, Selected Letter, p. 501)

Write about what you know and write truly and tell them all where they can place it. . . . Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people that you study up about. (By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, p. 184)

Do not let them deceive you about what a book should be because of what is in the fashion now. (By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, p. 184)

I still need some more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently. (Letter to Wallace Meyer, 1952, Selected Letter, p. 752)

I hold, very simply, that a critic has a right to write anything he wishes about your work no matter how wrong he may be. I also hold that a critic has no right to write about your private life while you are alive. I am speaking about moral rights; not legal rights….Public psycho-analyzing of living writers is most certainly an invasion of privacy. (Letter To Thomas Bledsoe, 1952, Selected Letter, p. 748)

For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live. All write [right] but if you write enough and as well as you can there will be the same amount of masterpiece material…. (Letter To F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934, Selected Letter, p. 408)

Other Book Reviews:

Born Standing Up – Steve Martin

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I’m sure it’s always been this way, but it seems that as of late, every time the local church comes up in conversation, it’s spoken of critically.

I’m sick of it.

Pastors, stop deconstructing the church.

Christians, stop bad mouthing your local fellowship the way you talk about that restaurant of yours that’s gone downhill.

The great Catholic social activist Dorothy Day once wrote:

As to the Church, where else shall we go, except to the Bride of Christ, one flesh with Christ? Though she is a harlot at times, she is our Mother.

In other words, our local church has its problems, but it’s all we’ve got. And we shouldn’t want it any other way.

Think about this the next time you’re tempted to speak critically of your church:

God lives in the messiness of the church.

Speaking to the believers in Ephesus, Paul writes, “You too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” (Ephesians 2:21).

How awesome is that?

God is living in you, me, that crazy lady who always lifts her hands during the third song and that guy who always dings your doors in the church parking lot?

We’re the dwelling place of the creator of the universe?

That’s not too shabby.

Yes, every local church has its problems.

• Boring sermons
• Divisive members that need a time out
• Shallow commitment
• And yes, dare I say, mediocre church softball teams

But it’s us. We be the church. Me and you. Not people “out there” than can be objectively criticized, dissected and reassembled again on a disinfected lab table.

We are the church.

And despite all of our easily recognized flaws, out of all the possible choices he had at his disposal, God chose to make us his temple.

We’re the only church lost people have.

There’s no bigger, badder, more awesome model of the church coming down the pike and moving into your town that’s going to save the day.

There’s never going to be a skeptic that tilts her heads and says, “Ah, now there’s the church I’ve been looking for. Flawless, fit, and with that Brad Pitt twinkle in her eye every time she talks ever so majestically about her deity.”

No, we’re the ones who tout Jesus-fish emblems on our bumpers at red lights, then proceed to flip people off when they rev their engines behind us.

We’re the ones sharing half-baked political arguments over the water cooler at work.

The ones with stupid Christian t-shirts and the crappy church signs with sayings on them made up by the lady who isn’t allowed to join any other organization in town, but she’s in charge of choosing statements for our church’s best marketing tool.

That’s us. Yep. Guilty as charged.

Still, to everyone’s amazement, God uses us to help people find their way back to him, not so much because we’re the best team he could field, but because God uses those who show up to play.

And as long as we’re the ones wearing the jerseys, there’s always going to be something we can point a finger at.

Which is why in countless places in the Bible we’re encouraged, as the church, to do everything in our power to point to the One who calls us together, and not to ourselves.

We may be a whore, but the One who calls us together is not.

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10 things, which, if fully implemented in my life, would make me feel like I’m using the full range of my abilities as a Christ follower to make God proud and help a lot of people.

But, as you can probably guess, I haven’t started one of them.

Not one.

Every day, for as long as I can remember, these 10 tasks have been getting quietly moved off my to-do to another list I keep, my list of good intentions and hopeful wishes. It’s the list of tasks Stephen Covey would call the important, but non-urgent things in my life.

Well, as the great 20th century philosopher Popeye the Sailor Man once remarked, “That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more.”

I’m done.

I’m torching my list of half-hearted, mildly important tasks.

I’m shredding my contract to play Odysseus in an odyssey of false starts and veiled mediocrity.

Damn the sirens and their songs of compromise.

I’m sick of good intentions.

I’m sick of pretty good.

I’m going all in.

Do you have a list of things that would take your life from mediocre to awesome?

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How many Christians do you know who used to evangelize? They can proudly point to a time in their lives when person after person came to Christ through their efforts, then for some reason they just stopped.

God wants us to lead people to faith in Christ until we take our last breaths. He wants us to be more effective today than yesterday, more effective this year than last, more effective in our sixties and seventies than we were in our twenties and thirties.

At the very end of our lives we want to be able to say with the apostle Paul that we are “…being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for [our] departure is near” (2 Tim. 4:6). We left no evangelistic opportunity wasted. No excuses. No regrets.

I think one of the keys to making that happen is staying intellectually hungry.

Create Your Own M.A. Program

A few years ago I started what I call my very own “MA Program.” Since many M.A. degrees are completed in a year, I started this hobby where I study something completely foreign to me for an entire year.

The first year I studied country music. To the absolute shock of everyone who knew me, I made myself leave the radio locked on the country station for one entire year. And, man, it was tough, at least initially. The good news is that I survived, and gained a little twang in my singing voice.

Why do that? One reason is that I’ve always wanted to fully understand and appreciate a genre of music with which I had no experience. The other reason is that I wanted to be able to have conversations with people who listen to 92.5 WXTU, a popular country station in our area. Now I’m familiar with artists like Keith Urban and Kenny Chesney. I know what the CMT awards are. And I’d like to take a trip to Nashville at some point. Best of all, if you’re a country-music- listening-cowboy-boot-wearing non-Christian, I’m ready for you. I would type “Yee Haw” right now, but that would be a little freaky.

One year for my own personal MA program I studied European history and geography, and then Lisa and I took a trip for our twentieth anniversary to visit the museums and major cultural sites of Italy, Switzerland, France, and England.

Another year for my MA program I studied Greek history and mythology. God willing, at some point in my life when I can afford it, I’m going to “finish” the course by taking a trip with Lisa to tour Greece and its beautiful islands.

One year I studied Native American history. We all know the tragic story, but I wanted to understand what really happened—the key figures, geography, culture, and political factors. After a year of study, our family spent some time in the Black Hills Forest on the way back from a Yellowstone vacation. Hiking the land stolen from the Lakota people had a profound impact on me. I’ve never talked with Native American friends the same way after that year.

Why Stay Intellectually Fresh

I go through all this trouble each year for one reason: I believe my best evangelistic years are ahead of me. I truly believe that God is going to strategically place people in my life that will need me ten, twenty, thirty, and hopefully forty years from now, and I want to be ready.

Years from now I believe I could have a conversation where something I learned in one of my MA programs will come up in conversation, and a nonbeliever will tilt his head and say, “No kidding. I thought I was the only one interested in these kinds of things.” You never know.

In the meantime, I’m staying fresh. I’m staying interested. I’m trying to be the kind of person that a non-Christian would have a beer with, even though I don’t drink. In light of this, I believe staying interested and growing is one of the most important evangelistic activities in which I can engage.

My Next M.A. Program

My next MA program is sitting in my garage. My friend let me borrow his telescope, and this telescope isn’t the kind you get your kid for Christmas. It’s literally five feet high, a full eighteen inches thick, and looks like a missile getting ready to launch.

Since I was eight years old and accidentally found the rings of Saturn in my childhood telescope, I’ve been interested in astronomy. So I’m making time to throw myself into reading astronomy books, stargazing in the backyard, and attending stargazing events so I can start up conversations with professional astronomers in our area. I may even take a class at our local college.

Do you have an M.A. program going on right now?

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Music:

• PAGE CXVI– Hymns I, II, II, IV (the song “Joy” is amazing, as is “Come Thou Fount”)
• At Folsom Prison (Live) – Johnny Cash (loving the B tracks)
• The Apache Relay (want to see these guys live)

Apps:

• Wunderlist2 (I run my entire life off this thing)
• Feedly (awesome, beautiful aggregator of all my blog feeds)
• Expensify (revolutionized my expense reports)

Books:

• The Good and Beautiful God – James Bryan Smith (worth skipping your next meal to buy)
• The Power of Habit – Charles Duhigg (slowly helping me create new habits and kill bad ones)
• Turning Pro – Stephen Pressfield (the classic kick in the butt)

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Here’s what the Bible teaches that shows this is the case:

Judgment Is an Old Covenant Consequence For Not Forgiving

When Jesus taught that to be forgiven one must forgive, who was he talking to?

The Bible shows us God relating to people in two different ways at two different times. The first way is called the Old Covenant.

• If the people of ancient Israel obeyed God’s commands, they received God’s blessing and favor.
• If they disobeyed God’s commands, they didn’t.

That’s really oversimplifying it, but basically that’s how it worked.

When God sent his Son Jesus to die on the cross, that event initiated a new way for God to relate to us. No longer is the status of our relationship with God based on commands we obey, but upon God’s grace and mercy. This new arrangement is called the New Covenant, and it is the way God relates to us now.

Most Christians don’t realize that Jesus lived under and taught from the perspective of the Old Covenant.

Those who listened to him lived under the Old Covenant as well. All the Israelites from the time of Moses until Jesus’ death and resurrection lived under the arrangement of the Old Covenant and had to obey God’s commands to receive his blessings.

Most people assume, because the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) are found in the New Testament section of the Bible, that Jesus’ teachings contained in the gospels were taught from the perspective of the New Covenant. That’s not the case.

When Jesus said that in order to be forgiven one must forgive others, that’s exactly what that teaching meant to the people who lived under the Old Covenant arrangement. Their relationship with God was based on their obedience to the law.

How did Jesus respond when the rich young ruler approached him and asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17). “You know the commands,” he said (v. 19), reminding the young man which Old Covenant commands he needed to obey to go to heaven.

Jesus replied as any person living under the Old Covenant would have.

I believe that the situation was the same for those who first heard Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness—their relationship with God depended upon obedience to the commands of the Old Covenant.

Our Relationship With God Is Based On Grace, Not Works

For years I squirmed whenever I read or heard Matthew 25:41-43:

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did notinvite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

I used to think, I’d better get out there and start visiting prisoners or inviting hitchhikers to spend the night, or God won’t let me into heaven.

I was always consumed with fear, thinking that there might be something I wasn’t doing that would keep me out of heaven. Like many Christians, I didn’t fully understand how my relationship with God works under the New Covenant.

Ephesians 2:8, 9 spells it out:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.

We can be confident in the status of our relationship with God because God’s continual acceptance of us is not based on our obedience to the Old Covenant law but upon our response to God’s grace.

With this in mind, what we have to do is go back to passages like the one in Matthew 25 and reinterpret them from our perspective as people living within the New Covenant of grace.

Feeding the poor and caring for prisoners are incredibly important activities for Christians, but we do them now because of our love for God and his love for hurting people, not because we’re afraid God will send us to hell.

It’s the same way with Jesus’ teaching on forgiveness.

The reason we forgive people now, under the New Covenant, is because of our desire to please God and because forgiving those who hurt us is the best way to live, not because we’re afraid we’ll go to hell if we don’t.

Simply put, even though we’ll be miserable if we choose to live with an unforgiving heart rather than forgive, we can still confidently know that we’re going to heaven.

Why? Because our standing with God is not altered by our obedience to certain commands, including the one about forgiveness.

If you get only one thing out of these two posts, I hope it’s this: authentic forgiveness never occurs when we feel coerced to forgive.

Unless you want it to happen and are willing to do the hard work to make it happen, forgiveness will never take place. Forgiveness takes time. It is a process.

Bad Theology In Practice

Years ago as a pastor fresh out of seminary, I sat down with a man who had been sexually abused as a child. We talked at length about how he felt like a prisoner trapped inside his memories and how much he wanted to find the strength to forgive. Part way into our conversation, he said that he just wasn’t ready to forgive yet, so I opened my Bible, turned to the passage we’ve been discussing (Matthew 6:14-15), and read it to him as lovingly as I could. Then I recited the traditional interpretation of what those verses mean (“forgive or you won’t be forgiven”) and how that applied to his situation.

I’ll never forget his blank stare and what he said next: “I don’t know much about the Bible, but it’s pretty clear that the person who wrote that had no idea what it’s like to be raped by his grandfather.”

Then he walked out, and I never saw him again.

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