Yet like most words, English cannot encompass what magnitude and depth this word contains. Following what the Strong’s Dictionary tells me, it means more than just the “peace” that people imply. Peace is a poor English word to describe what a huge expanse this word entails. Shalom means completeness, wholeness, health, peace, welfare, safety soundness, tranquility, prosperity, perfectness, fullness, rest, harmony, the absence of agitation or discord (7965). Shalom comes from the root verb shalom meaning to be complete, perfect and full.

When used in the Hebrew, it is the fullness that is comparable to a debt that is paid. That is, the debt is not partially paid, but fully–there is a sense of the completeness and the efficacy of the shalom being complete, and requiring no further action.

Keeping this in mind, I wonder when we read the words of Jesus, he often uses the greeting: “Peace be unto you,” a translation of shalom aleichem, what that would mean to us.

If it is, that Jesus is calling for our debts to be paid, and ourselves to be made whole through the freedom from the bondage of sin. What if shalom meant more than just peace, as we have understood it to mean, but Jesus continually inviting us to drink of the Living Water and eat of the Bread of Life? Applying this, are we seeking more than just peace, but are we looking for the debt of our sins to be paid fully.

Moreover, if we greet our brothers and sisters with the greeting–shalom–do we wish them completeness, wholeness…etc. ? Do we hope and pray for the utmost of graces and love to be lavished upon them, because Jesus certainly did for the people he encountered. To have the heart of Jesus is to know love other as you would treat them, and to love God with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength.

“But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.” 1 John 1v.7

It confounds me that for all the advances of feminism and the empowerment of women in modern culture (which I’m all for), that we still have women that allow themselves to listen to this. I am honestly convinced that Joyce Meyer is an insult to the intelligence and theological brevity of all women in the world. She is evidence that we, as the human race, have not gone far enough in the elimination of inequality between sexes because people still listen to her mind-numbing ignorance.

I seriously believe that. The same goes for men, that we have sure a derelict of godliness and Berean spirit that we listen to Joseph Prince, Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar e.t.c. It confounds me, that we as a human race, have catapulted technologically so far in the past century, but still follow these ritualistic, materialistic gods of wheat and rain. Never before in history have we had so much access to theological resources, but we seem to be in the greatest times bereft of seeking after God.

The Confidence in Self

Anyway, upon recommendation, I was listening to some Joyce Meyer the other day. The talk, I deign to describe it as a sermon, was on “Seven Secrets of a Confident Woman”.

I didn’t really understand the structure of the talk. The talk seems to be a lot of stories told in succession like a comedy routine. I guess it was entertaining, with chuckle or hint of laughter was merely another soul going to hell.

It was only thirty minutes in that the seven steps began. Of which, the first step toward becoming a confident woman was “knowing that God loves you”. She was very adamant on how important it was:

“Step one: Here’s what I want you to do. Tonight this is probably the most needed message we can preach…I want you to take one giant step of faith out of your boat of insecurity and I want you to say “God loves ME”…I want you to say that a hundred times every day out loud.

Go look at yourself in the mirror and say “God loves me” and if there’s someone out there who won’t think you’re full of yourself ” (source)

That’s a lot of times. The core of what Joyce Meyer seems to be preaching is that the love of God is the cure to our own insecurity and fears. The positive affirmation of God’s love towards us should drive us to confidence. This “confidence” is expanded on later:

“Be confident enough to confront fear and live the life you want to live. If we have low confidence or lacking in confidence, then really we are lacking in faith. But faith is confidence”

Really, the faith and confidence that is being preached here is the faith and confidence that looks inwards, rather than outwards. God’s love is the activator for living the best life now, rather than the primary motivator for life. It’s a poor view of God, and a poor view of grace if it only repairs our insecurity. If God’s love can merely make us live better lives then what a poor eternity we must be heading towards.

This really demonstrates the broken view of the brokenness of mankind and the underestimation inertia of man’s hearts.

                    Because, surely, God loves me. It should surely drive me towards the enormity of the undeserved grace, not the confidence of entitlement.

God loves me despite all my sin and failures. Furthermore, when there was no hope for eternity, God sent His Son to die on the cross for me. Daily, I don’t love God–but daily, God’s grace extends greater everyday. God’s love towards us is simultaneously rending and repairing our hearts.

The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved

In the Gospels, the apostle John often refers to himself as the “disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 21:20). To the modern reader, it might seem self-promoting or prideful to identify themselves as beloved by Jesus.  However some scholars have argued that it is a mark of humility, the writer of the Gospel was deliberately obscuring his identity to magnify Jesus.

I feel that’s really the attitude for all of us, that we are ones “whom Jesus loves”. Because Jesus loves us, we become more and more the background. Martin Smith argues that “the disciple is never named, never individualized, so that we can more easily accept that he bears witness to an intimacy that is meant for each one of us”. This shows that the Apostle John wasn’t really concerned about standing out and being a legendary saint of the Church, rather He was content for Jesus be the center of His life.

God loving us doesn’t bring us more and more confidence, it brings us closer to God. By consequence of the cross we are able to approach the throne of God with confidence through Jesus. The love of God instills humility, and is diametrically opposed to the confidence that Joyce Meyer is propounding.

The Loss of Confidence

God loves me. It should drive me towards humility and service, not self-empowerment and self-esteem.

Try saying “God loves me” without any sorrow about our rebellion against God. It’s a very high estimation of yourself to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, and say that God could love this man. Me. If people that thought that insecurity was the only thing between God and man, then they merely need a therapist. Therefore, it is not insecurity that affects me, but a false sense of security around the depraved state of my soul.

It is a delusional person to say that God loves me and is intimately involved with me, and because of that he lets me continue in my self-destructive route. God surely would hate me if I was not rescued from my own wretchedness.

Counter to what Joyce Meyer preaches, the gospel reaches those in low esteem. It brings in a new system: a system of grace. This system is counter to the rash capitalism of the world which weighs karmic scales for our sins. It doesn’t give us more material blessings or leaves us alone to help ourselves. It isn’t a soothing ointment or chicken soup for the soul–it is a new body, new earth, new heaven.

The biggest failure of the prosperity gospel is that it doesn’t think big enough. Material and existential things are exactly that: material and existential. God is longing to do so much more in our lives than give us confidence. Surely God loves us. He loves us SO MUCH. Oh gosh, he surely loves us so much. I cannot express it in words eloquently enough. Insecurity and confidence to do things is only the shoreline of the vast ocean of God’s love for us.

Photos of this nature are maddening.

This is, of course, excepting my presence in reading my facebook newsfeed, which is exceedingly more maddening. I am just a slave for slogans and the ilk.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s largely correct, as far as I can tell or what meaning I can infer from it: God is our healer through providential care and grace. We can put our faith on Him to bring us through this world, nothing can extend or shorten our allotted time on this earth. Admittedly, I’m not sure what “heart doctor” means exactly–perhaps they mean cardiologist. Moreover, when they refer to “energy booster”, I assume they aren’t referring to chugging down Red Bull energy drinks and mistaking angels for people with “wings”.

God is our portion, He fills our cup overflowing. But if that is all the post is about, it’s entirely incomplete–I would argue it’s blasphemously incomplete.

The problem of the post is not itself, but the underlying motivations of the post.

The intention behind the post is what is lacking as it is brazenly existential.

It assigns most of our hope on the current alleviation of suffering and none on the reward of faithfulness.

It doesn’t even try to engage with the duality of God not wanting us to suffer, combined with the necessity of suffering to sharpen faith. It forgets that our present sufferings are nothing in comparison to coming pleasure and joy. The misdirection lies in the post encouraging us to look presently, at how life can be better, without considering our eternal lives in heaven. C.S. Lewis put it this way:

“There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

At its core, the post fails because it fails to engage the duality of a loving God and a holy God. If God is all of these things, how can He possibly allow other people to suffer? The god of this post is entirely one-dimensional faith. The post merely confirms God to be powerless and nothing more than a cardboard cutout to hide our fears and anxiety.

I may be using some very strong words, but that’s about as much substance this god would be.

The post misses the centrality of Christ, while emphasizing the centrality of the self. It remains content on starting every statement with “me” at least 5 times, and proclaiming God as the solution. Faith is nothing like that. It doesn’t start from yourself and God is the solution. God is one who plants grace, the Holy Spirit is the one who changes us, Jesus is the one who mediates between us and God. Simultaneously, we feature as a central focus through which God does the work of salvation, but we feature very little as background to and instrumental God’s redemptive purposes.

In other words, it’s selfishness at the core of this thinking. I am convinced that the biggest enemy to faithful Christianity today is individualism. This is opposed to the reality that Christianity doesn’t have that much to do with you; Michael Horton puts it this way:

“The gospel changes lives precisely because it is not about us – even our changed lives – but about Christ”

Our Christianity is bankrupt if God is only here to help us during the hard times. More than that, this Christianity doesn’t impact our lives in any way, we are not new creatures–it is a crutch merely to help us cope with life. A faith that only copes, doesn’t conquer the evil in the world but supports a blindness to the gaping wound of our depravity and selfishness.

In all honesty, my life would be okay without Jesus. I don’t really need Jesus and I”m confident I could survive this lifetime without Jesus. But I do need Jesus, I can tell you that I need Him daily–on a eternal scale, though I am not conscious of it, God is holding up the world from chaos, and Jesus is holding me back from my natural self. The reason for this? Sanctification through justification, and glorification through regeneration.  My point is, the flaw is to define the “sick” as only those who feel sick at that point in time. It is something like the 10 lepers who were healed, at which point, only one came back to Jesus to thank Him–it is clear the others were merely looking for an alleviation of an existential ailment.

The point of all this is simply this: if we seek prosperity and earthly things, we will be satisfied by a temporary false joy that will only make us thirst more. That is not to say that we can receive temporary alleviation and respite, but they are consequences of seeking the Kingdom and God not primary goals.

If we seek the Kingdom, we will find eternally immeasurably more. It upsets me that people would settle for anything less. The failure of chasing the God that merely the fixes of our fragile anxiety and fears is jumbled because God is not our slave. We are a slave to His love, and His grace, and more.

The disappointing thing about a lot of Christianity is that it is comprised merely of motivational speakers and psychologists dressed up as sheep. Jesus isn’t around to “fix” all our problems per se. He is so much more–He revives us, as it says in Ezekiel, from a pile of bones. And all you care about is, “Oh, I need money to buy a house, I need more confidence to make friends, I am anxious about asking my boss for a raise, I need confidence to live the life that I deserve”.

For all the power our words have, it is a colossal waste if we are to be serious about seeking God.I’m glad people are all about live a great life. But it steals SO much glory from God to make life about little pithy things without the bigger picture of what life transformation comes through the Gospel and the Holy Spirit.

Simply, this life isn’t yours.

If you’re living your best life now, you’re going to Hell. – Shai Linne 

there may or may not be another part featuring Joyce Meyer. When I find the time to write about it. also, i forgot to rant about the effects of capitalism on christian evangelicalism. T.T

– verse 10

“Affliction” by George Herbert.

Lovis Corinth. The Blinded Samson, 1912.

From wikipedia: “In many of his self-portraits he assumed guises such as an armored knight (The Victor, 1910), or Samson (The Blinded Samson, 1912)…In December 1911, he suffered a stroke, and was partially paralyzed on his left side. Thereafter he walked with a limp, and his hands displayed a chronic tremor.”

This painting was painful to draw, Lovis was only able to paint this with the assistance of his wife. Great is the fall from a mighty knight with no impairments to a hairless Samson within a year. Life changes within a moment and our greatness is shown to be foolishness.

We are nothing. We control nothing.

1. We Get It.

You love Jesus, we get it. You love others, we get it. However, it’s confusing when you treat Jesus and His words so flippantly.  It’s confusing when He’s merely “the man upstairs”, or “big bro in heaven”. I don’t really understand this Jesus you guys have placed your faith and hope, and ultimately laid down your life for. It’s confusing the obtuseness of your theology and lack of clarity in soteriology.

For this, I really respect the Muslim friends I have. They have a strong religious fervour, of which, I do not admittedly possess. It’s confusing when you don’t understand Jesus at all beyond a vague concept that permeates your social club.

2. Youth

You can judge a church by its youth. Mainly through what form of relationship there is between the youth and eldership of the church. It’s even more confusing when the youth form part of the eldership, or are tasked with leadership and overseeing of anything.

Of these youth, I don’t understand how you can profess to be missional and seeking to make the world a better place when you purchase a 25 kilogram bag of rice for the sole purpose of pranking each other. No one has realised the irony of the deep-rooted affluence? It’s the biggest contradiction I’ve ever seen.

3. The Performance

When you feel the need to take photos and video, you’re no longer at a church, you’re at a concert. You’re attending a performance with a clear relationship between stage and audience, not pulpit and congregation.

band + congregation -> God.

congregation -> band; God. 

You often have dancers up there, spinning and contorting in a range of beautiful positions. The people in the audience often applaud at the end. Simply, I don’t understand how you can justify that this is not a performance. For people, and not for God. I’m sure dishonesty is a sin and man cannot serve two masters.

In short, you’re worshiping the band on stage, while putting God as a distant secondary player. It’s not so much where your heart is at, it’s the stance that reveals the true intent of the heart.

==

The core of the problem is this insatiable need to make everything entertaining and fun. It’s the need to make God “fun”. At the expense of forming God into something that is not offensive or cutting sharp, and at the same time, full of vicarious healing. He inhabits a place somewhere in the middle between “the safety of the boat and the crashing waves”.

The God that I follow is in stark relief against this fun and exciting God, He moves in different ways that I often don’t know how to explain. It’s more mysterious, and I’m okay with that. It doesn’t have to be appropriate or palatable to society, it just is what it is. I don’t really feel the need to temper myself to apologise to society.

For this reason, I often consider that we worship different Gods.

Written by John Newton, it speaks of the danger of asking for holiness, growing in the Lord. On the flipside, it proclaims the comfort and security in amidst the turmoil and despair. It’s quite lovely.

I asked the Lord that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace;
Might more of His salvation know,
And seek, more earnestly, His face.

‘Twas He who taught me thus to pray,
And He, I trust, has answered prayer!
But it has been in such a way,
As almost drove me to despair.

I hoped that in some favored hour,
At once He’d answer my request;
And by His love’s constraining pow’r,
Subdue my sins, and give me rest.

Instead of this, He made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart;
And let the angry pow’rs of hell
Assault my soul in every part.

Yea more, with His own hand He seemed
Intent to aggravate my woe;
Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,
Blasted my gourds, and laid me low.

Lord, why is this, I trembling cried,
Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?
“‘Tis in this way, the Lord replied,
I answer prayer for grace and faith.

These inward trials I employ,
From self, and pride, to set thee free;
And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
That thou may’st find thy all in Me.”

“Abortion seems to be the only medical procedure that people want to deny you based on how you got in that situation.

Drove drunk, got in an accident and need an organ transplant? No problem.

Messing around with a gun, accidentally shoot yourself in the leg and need surgery? Of course.

Smoke tobacco for most of your life and need treatment for lung cancer? Yep.

Climb a tree, fall out and break your leg? We’ll fix that right up.

Have sex and get pregnant when you don’t want to be? YOU GOT YOURSELF INTO THIS SITUATION AND YOU DESERVE NO MEDICAL HELP OR COMPASSION! THIS IS YOUR FAULT AND YOU WILL DEAL WITH THE CONSEQUENCES!”

—– Worry About Your Own Uterus (via quoilecanard)

I don’t normally care a lot about people arguing about abortion. I feel there is a lot of baggage associated with the pro-life, pro-choice debate. In that, I don’t think a lot of pro-choice arguments are about whether a baby is being killed in abortion, but the whole issue is intrinsically tied with feminism. Therefore, it is difficult to engage the abortion debate when the two sides aren’t talking about the same thing.

Regardless, I stumbled across this little tib-bit on tumblr. There is obviously a great amount of hyperbole, and a bit of irrelevance. I don’t think that a hospital is really a good idea of what is morally right or wrong.

It also disturbs me that the writer has compared having a baby to: [having] lung cancer”, “breaking a leg”, or “[receiving an] organ transplant”. Moreover, that having sex is like “smoking tobacco”, “driving drunk”, or “falling out of trees”.

The Ripple Effect.

The core of my problem with this argument is that none of those examples given involve a life outside of the person’s own life. It’s not very much like you drove drunk and got into an accident because that is all about your own life’s preservation.

Abortion has a much greater far-reaching impact on not only yourself and whatever you’ve done to yourself, but your own unborn child. It has not been engaged with properly by the author, but some rather fantastic analogies have been given for an abortion.

The Reality.

The reality goes more like this:

It’s more like you were driving home from a dinner with your girlfriend. You had a few glasses of wine, but not that much that you thought it wasn’t safe to drive home. On the way home, you didn’t stop at a red light. It somehow slipped your mind as you were thinking about work the next day. The car door has been wrenched open, where you T-boned the car at the intersection.

You start mumbling in a drunken haze:

“WHYYY ARE YOU IN MY WAYYYY?!”.

You then begin to explain your conditions. You expect the person to pay for the repairs to your own car, and not to call the police or anything. Basically, you begin to demand to the body that they don’t interfere with your life and to pretend that nothing happened. After a while, when the body doesn’t respond you realize that the person you crashed into is actually dead and you’re actually just talking to a bloodied corpse.

Maybe the corpse is on fire and the clothes have burnt off leaving a naked body. You shake the limp body and ask for compensation for your own mistake and lack of foresight.

After a while, you become sober, and you walk home. The police never come knocking at your door. The whole car disappears overnight, the midnight bells have caused the carriage to revert to its former state. The shards of broken windshield scattered on the road the night before is no more when you drive to work the next day. It’s almost like it was a dream.

It is blatantly obvious if you drive drunk, you have an increased chance of crashing into someone and causing loss of life. If you have sex with someone without a condom, you have an increased (well, almost 100% greater) chance of having a baby.

There is a risk taken. Abortion immediately assumes that there is a positive and negative side to this coin flip. It has this idea that life is always great or unimportant according to someone who doesn’t know anything about the person they just crashed into.

The Solution.

Christians fail in this department. More often than not, they are too willing to condemn babies born outside of wedlock because it makes them feel good about a sin they are not guilty of. More often than not, there needs to be a sense of humility and service to people that are unlike us.

On the reverse, the condemnation they dish out, they create an environment that distances rather than draws sinners close. Admittedly, I am one of those who would be more likely to be standing outside abortion clinics, but you would never see me supporting the single mothers. You never see me play an important part of raising these babies not judged as interference to life. It’s so much easier to wave signs and say sermons to people for a short time, rather than invest a lifetime into seeing someone grow to value life and what a gift that God has given.

Don’t miss the forest for the trees. Don’t miss the babies for the political stance.

The Church needs to be that vehicle the gives the help and the compassion.

I had to bite my tongue in class when the topic of war came up.

I find that my views on war and violence are often quite controversial. I suspect that it is because they are controversial, that people are not always willing to hear them. Furthermore, people seem to not like opinions which span more than one sentence. They like black and white views on life–I am a Democrat, I am a Calvinist, I am a Cessationalist, I am a capitalist etc. More often than not, people don’t have the patience or time to hear a full exposition of how my view of war has been formed and evolved through time to arrive at what I believe in this. With this in mind, I think with any opinion there is a time to voice them, and there is a time to be silent. I also think there are clear opinions on war, that are reflected in our society.

It is unfortunate, because I would argue that the evolution in the history of someone’s thought is immeasurably more interesting than the final opinion that one finally arrives at. John Piper in Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian talks about how his initial views on race were shaped and influenced by growing up in a conservative culture in the South. As he grew up, he began to realize and change how he saw the world in a profound manner.

The Status Quo  

On this line of thought, I feel that a lot of our lives have been marked with the war experience.

Though we live in a  post-World War 2 Earth, I feel the idea of conflict on a global scale is something that has been constantly in our media and minds for the past century, millenia, existence of mankind. A life without war, is something that we are not familiar with. It is something that is unavoidable, that countries are fighting with each other, sanctioning each other–basically never living in harmony.

In addition, with the globalisation of news, our lives are no longer disconnected from the war in Sudan, or Joseph Kony abducting children for his army, soldiers dying in Afghanistan e.t.c. It’s something that has a personal connection to us on a daily basis. Perhaps, then, it is something that is difficult to imagine our lives without, without constantly watching the blood splattered over the 6 o’clock news, and the bold letterhead on the news-stands on the street corner. It’s a central part of our life: conflict.

I feel the constancy of war and conflict in our lives, conditions us to think a certain way–that violence is a viable way of resolving conflict. Not only that, but that other paths don’t lead to the same resolution, that is, the only way to really solve a conflict is the way that we’ve been conditioned through the news and media: violence. This is unfortunate. I would argue that it is shallow to imagine that everytime we approach a conflict, the ultimate resolution is violence as most countries seem to do and support. I think a lot of why violence is so popular and equally terrifying is the finality. I feel more often than not, war is the process of rising to the top of the scrap-heap, because when you get to the top it is very profitable.

War makes assumptions. the largest of which is that good and evil in this world is black and white. More often than not, the victors/aggresors are  the ones that write the history. I wonder what a different world of difference it would make if  Soviet Russia had triumphed in the Cold War, or what if the Cuban Missile Crisis was not resolved. As someone not living in the USA, I would argue that, though the lesser of two evils, America is not the darling we want to think it is. That having won the Second World War, and creating a better, albeit imperfect, world, but this is the same America that used South Vietnam as a puppet, and used torturing techniques like water-boarding on many war criminals.

The Antithesis

Therefore, it’s a world of conflicted, imperfect people–some good, but none perfect. We are capable of doing a great amount of good, but we are all deserving of violence and a conflict that wipes us off the earth. I feel that in Christ we are provided with a solution greater that makes all else on this earth pale in comparison. In many ways it is an inversion of the human system of good and evil, in that, it proclaims we are all evil, and makes us good.

God is both the aggressor and the forgiver–forgiving the evil, and punishing the wicked. He forgives all the evil inside of us, and sanctifies us to goodness. He separates the wheat and the chaff carefully leaving only the good to prosper. I feel as when we try to become the aggressor, or we try to be the forgiver, we try to play God. Whether on a individual level, or a country level–no one can read people’s hearts, and no one can cast the first stone.

The One who can cast the first stone, gave the greatest solution–He sent His perfect Son for the imperfect world. He who takes all our evil, all our violence, all our conflict, all our suffering away from us, so we can love our neighbour and pray for our enemies with a pure and clean heart. Therefore, on this earth we should be transparent in our dealings as Christ died for all our hidden sins. We should seek reconciliation and peace before we start to wield pitchforks and hate as Christ died for all our hate and anger.

In application, truly, the Gospel supercedes ourselves with an everlasting peace.

A lot time has to be spent at the beginning of any conversation exerting that I was generalising. I wasn’t talking about all missions trips, and I wasn’t judging any specific one. It was a general trend that I’ve been assessing and thinking about, not any specific trip I was thinking about.

Moreover, while on the topic of mission, I feel I have to define a lot of the terminology sharply, in case of mis-comprehension. A lot of what we define as missions, is just humanitarian work–people need to differentiate more clearly between the Great Commandment to love God and our neighbour, and the Great Commission. One was a general command, and another was a specific command to the Apostles. I think it is an important distinction to make between the two, and focuses our work, and the work of the Church better.

There was a time ago when someone on twitter referred to short term missions as a “holy vacation”. I feel I can identify a lot with that–a lot of the time there is a disconnectedness between our lives and *their* lives–whereever we would visit. Whether it be children in Kenya, or unbelievers in Europe, I feel that the knowledge of the transient nature of the trip is not really in the spirit of missions. I don’t think that missions was ever a short term thing and that God’s mission is anything less than a lifetime calling. Boiling it down to its essentials, the intention of short term missions is to satisfy the shallow rootedness of our modern culture.

Call me simple, I still think it’s amazing to twist the tap and seeing clean water to come out–not in meager droplets, but in full flow. It amazes me continually opening the fridge door and pouring out milk from the carton, I’m still looking for where the cow is. How does a fridge even stay so cold? It all blows my mind. This land which we live in is a world away from people who have so much less than what we have. I don’t really have the words to say how peculiar this Western world we live in is. It’s always changing. I’ve been reading a lot on the character of Malcolm X this year. He’s a fascinating character. But the world he in inhabited was vastly different from the world today, and that was merely 40 years ago.