Rants, Wrath, and Righteousness

“Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” (James 1:19–20)

I wonder what James would have done with social media. I mean, here’s a tool that allows people to expose the innermost condition of their hearts before a worldwide audience in the blink of an eye. Luke 6:45 says that our mouth speaks from “the abundance of the heart.” It is no big leap to understand that our timeline or Twitter feed reflects that of which our heart is full. This is abundantly clear in the online firestorm produced by the presidential race and the recent election results. I believe what James says is extremely relevant to the current debate.

“Swift to hear” doesn’t mean “listen poorly”.

“Swift” refers to readiness to hear, in contrast with slowness to respond or react in the “slow to speak” statement. In fact, elsewhere, the Bible warns against responding without truly listening: “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.” (Proverbs 18:13) It’s actually shameful and foolish to listen (or read) poorly and respond before understanding clearly what others are saying.

Only a few days ago the media was exposed for being mistaken (best-case scenario) or downright misleading (worst-case scenario) in their reporting in the run-up to the election. You would imagine this would produce a heightened sense of caution when receiving any new information from the media. If my Facebook newsfeed is any indication, nothing has really changed. People on both sides of the issues are posting and linking inflammatory information as if their lives depended on it, and much of it can be debunked with a simple search on Google.

We need to be ready to listen, and listen fully and carefully, before we respond or repeat what we see or hear (on the internet or in person).

You have the right to remain silent.

Had James written these verses today, he could have said, “be slow to post or tweet.” What James doesn’t say is that you shouldn’t talk at all, but that we should take time to consider what we say before saying it. You have the right to remain silent while you consider what to say. After all, even a fool is considered wise when he keeps silent, right? (Prov. 17:28) But when you speak, everything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion. Hasn’t Trump’s “locker room talk” demonstrated this? Aren’t there a bunch of celebrities awkwardly explaining why they aren’t leaving the country as promised?

More than ever, it is important to choose your words wisely. This is an even greater responsibility for the Christian, since your words don’t just reflect on you, but should reflect Jesus Christ. If we practice slowness to speak, we will consider what we have heard wisely, and then consider what we will say just as wisely. What we say exposes the condition of our heart.

when you speak, be righteous.

It’s interesting that James includes the “slow to wrath” statement. The idea of people going ballistic isn’t new, but in his day they couldn’t do it online. I can’t get into all of it here, but anger is tied into our internal sense of justice: we perceive imbalance in the circumstances to which we are exposed, so we try and judge them in the court of our heart, and many times we execute judgment on injustice (perceived or real). If that process is swift in our heart, we will respond externally in anger before we have determined if our justice system aligns with God’s justice system. We will mouth off in “righteous” indignation online, exposing the unrighteousness of our own heart to the world in a split-second decision.

Even when we are slow to wrath, we have to be sure that our response lines up with God’s will for that situation. Why? Because our anger cannot produce the righteousness that God requires. No matter how worked up I get over genuinely unjust things, my anger will not produce God’s justice. And even when I’m righteously angry—angry at the same things that anger God—my atitudes and actions have to reflect God’s desire for me in the circumstances. Angry ranting on social media cannot produce the righteousness God requires.

While this post isn’t directly one of the topics I planned to write about following my “The Fountain and the Broken Cisterns” post a few months ago, I think I can safely tie it to the concepts of the Jeremiah 2 passage from that post. How does this subject reflect a “broken cistern” for Christians? James goes on to encourage us to be doers of the Word, not hearers only (James 1.22). When we ignore biblical teaching, we will both listen and respond as unbelievers do. Thus we turn our backs on the fountains of living water, and turn to broken cisterns. When we resort to our wrath, we are ignoring God’s righteousness and turning to broken cisterns of vengeance and spite.

So, brothers and sisters, let’s be ready to hear people out, to be slow to respond verbally or online, and slow to anger. May the innermost condition of our hearts, wherever it is exposed, reflect an abundance of God’s love and righteousness.

The Fountain and the Broken Cisterns

Well, it’s been over a year, so I suppose I should write something to keep up the pretense that I blog. (Actually, I have a pretty faithful weekly blog in Portuguese, but don’t have the time to translate it for my two or three English readers. Sorry, Mom. Oh wait, Mom can read the Portuguese blog. Sorry, other reader.)

Jeremiah 2:1-13 is a haunting passage. It is well worth reading and understanding the stunning things God says to Israel (and to us through His message to them). For this post, I just want to focus on the last verse and make a possibly strange, but perfectly valid application.

For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. Jeremiah 2:13

Without going into all the details, the verse above makes something very clear: God has a complaint against His people, and brings two accusations against them:

1. They had abandoned Him.
2. They were worshipping other gods (see vv. 9-12).

But instead of expressing Himself as I just did, He put it to them in a water metaphor. And what a metaphor!

He was telling Israel He is a fountain of living water, i.e., an unending source of a substance humans desperately need. Water is not optional for us; we need it like we need air and food. It is so fundamental that science says we are what, 60% water? Even so, the metaphor isn’t meant to point to a physical reality, but a spiritual one. Humans desperately need God. He is the essential spiritual substance we cannot exist without! And His accusation against Israel was that they—His own chosen people!—had abandoned Him, this fountain of essential, irreplaceable sustenance! 

But they didn’t stop there.

In abandoning God, they did the unimaginable: they turned to other gods. He challenges them to search out the pagan world around them (whose gods they undoubtedly were choosing to follow) to see if there was any other nation swapping gods. Not even among the heathen was there this level of disloyalty. But Israel was doing just that.

Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? but my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. (v.11)

The water analogy summons the image of people turning their back on a gushing, bubbling fountain of crystalline, refreshing, nourishing water and setting about the back-breaking work of digging out their own cisterns. The problem is that the cisterns are broken, so they don’t hold water. It drains out, leaving nothing but brackish, muddy residue as it seeps through the cracks.

The image is so rich! God is the Fountain—the Source of spiritual nourishment that gushes freely to His people. But, rejecting Him, they turn and must toil (hew, or carve out) and make their own spirituality, only to find that their efforts are pointless, and can’t sustain them. They didn’t just abandon God, but they turned to gods that had no sustenance to offer.

It is very easy to read this and say, “Silly Israelites! Don’t they get it? How foolish!” (And that’s putting it nicely.)

My question is: how are Christians any different?

We witness daily evidence of this happening in a seemingly innocuous place: our Facebook newsfeed. I’ve been known to make weird connections between things that don’t seem to have any correlation, but as I looked at my Facebook newsfeed today, my mind immediately went to this Jeremiah passage.

Facebook has gone through all kinds of trends over the years—remember the buttons? the quizzes? the clickbait? the videos?—but one trend that is deeply saddening is the number of Christians posting memes that simply don’t have biblical messages. Oh, they’re inspirational, pithy, sometimes funny, sure, but they don’t reflect biblical truth.

It doesn’t follow automatically that people who post these things are abandoning God; but their posts demonstrate that they are not measuring the truth claims or presuppositions of what they post against the Truth of God’s Word. And by abandoning God’s Word as a fountain of God’s Truth, they are, in essence, drinking from broken intellectual cisterns made by human minds. Cisterns that just don’t hold water.

I am going to be ambitious for one who hasn’t written in over a year. I am going to commit to writing a series of blog posts on the same subject. Actually, I have a friend to thank for this idea; my original post was well over 2000 words, and he suggested I break it up. If we know anything about today’s culture, it is that we have the attention span of a goldfish (sorry, goldfish). We even sum it up with the expression “tl;dr” (“too long; didn’t read” for those of you who were about to Google it).

So in order to not go too long, this post will serve as introduction. I will refer to it in the upcoming posts, as I apply the teaching of Jeremiah 2 to the kinds of things Christians are posting on their timelines.

And, hopefully to pique your curiosity, here are three areas I have already considered, and will  be posting in installments shortly.

• Content that expresses vengeance and malice toward those who hurt us.
• Content that expresses loneliness, sadness, disappointment, etc. without hope.
• Content  that defends sinful actions and attitudes through “new” interpretations of Scripture.

Books Christians Should Read: The Definitive List

Inspired by the “20 [or 25 or 30] books every Christian should read” lists that I’ve seen popping up recently, I decided to throw my hat in the ring and present a definitive list. A lot the books in this kind of list are good recommendations. Some, not so much. But I feel that I can say with certainty that my recommendations below are, without any doubt, the best books for disciples of Jesus Christ to read, and they are, in fact, indispensable for any Christian. There are 66 in all:

1. Genesis
2. Exodus
3. Leviticus
4. Numbers
5. Deuteronomy
6. Joshua
7. Judges
8. Ruth
9. 1 Samuel
10. 2 Samuel
11. 1 Kings
12. 2 Kings
13. 1 Chronicles
14. 2 Chronicles
15. Ezra
16. Nehemiah
17. Esther
18. Job
19. Psalms
20. Proverbs
21. Ecclesiastes
22. Song of Solomon
23. Isaiah
24. Jeremiah
25. Lamentations
26. Ezekiel
27. Daniel
28. Hosea
29. Joel
30. Amos
31. Obadiah
32. Jonah
33. Micah
34. Nahum
35. Habakkuk
36. Zephaniah
37. Haggai
38. Zechariah
39. Malachi
40. Matthew
41. Mark
42. Luke
43. John
44. Acts
45. Romans
46. 1 Corinthians
47. 2 Corinthians
48. Galatians
49. Ephesians
50. Philippians
51. Colossians
52. 1 Thessalonians
53. 2 Thessalonians
54. 1 Timothy
55. 2 Timothy
56. Titus
57. Philemon
58. Hebrews
59. James
60. 1 Peter
61. 2 Peter
62. 1 John
63. 2 John
64. 3 John
65. Jude
66. Revelation

Now it might seem trivial to write a list like this, but I did so for two reasons:

1) I know, from experience, that many—if not a majority of—Christians have never read all these books. And among those who have, it was only a cursory reading, to say that they had read them.

2) I know, from the Word, that only these books come with this kind of guarantee: ““All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” (2 Timothy 3:16–17)

Now, there are thousands of good books out there for Christians to read beyond the ones in the Bible.  Like the creators of these lists, I certainly have my opinion about which ones would be profitable for Christians to read. But it’s best to start here.

Redefining “Death with Dignity”

I’m sure by now you’ve heard of Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old newlywed diagnosed with terminal cancer who has chosen to end her own life with lethal drugs two days after her husband’s birthday, on November 1. Her story is giving new traction to those who are in favor of the right to die, or, as she puts it in her video the right to “die with dignity.”

Without getting into all the hot-button issues surrounding the legality of ending one’s own life, I wanted to comment on one statement made at the very end of her video. It is a single line of text, saying,

“At present, only 5 U.S. states allow terminally ill patients the right to die with dignity.”

This is simply not true.

A true statement would be “at present, only 5 U.S. states allow terminally ill patients the right to end their own lives through ingesting legally-prescribed lethal drugs.”

In order for you to accept the video’s statement, you have to first accept their basic definition of “death with dignity.” They are equating “the right to end their own lives through ingesting legally-prescribed lethal drugs” with “the right to die with dignity.”

Do you understand the difference? Let me break it down like this:

When Brittany Maynard and other right to die proponents say only 5 states allow the “right to die with dignity,” they are making at least two assumptions:

• that death involving suffering is a death without dignity
• that choosing to take one’s own life, thus avoiding the suffering, is death with dignity

If we accept these assumptions, we can accept the fact that a 29-year-old newlywed can end her life and call that dignified; and we can accept that it is wrong that 45 U.S. states are withholding the “right to die with dignity” from their terminally ill patients.

Personally, I don’t accept her assumptions. Why? Because:

It simply isn’t true that dying a slow, painful death lacks dignity.

Oh sure, the suffering one goes through in the final stages of a disease like cancer aren’t pretty: the patient must suffer not only the physical pain and bodily weakness, but a huge invasion of personal privacy as they become too weak to handle even the most basic forms of personal hygiene. A slow death is eerily reminiscent of a reversal of the birth process. I have watched as a once active, independent mother of three declined in health, becoming more childlike and dependent with each passing day. As the cancer ate away at her body, she lost more and more mobility—at first the ability to leave her home for short outings, then the ability to even leave her bed, and the eventual decline to barely moving at all. Like a newborn, she was left solely dependent on the care of others as she retreated further and further into the darkened “womb” of her bedroom, where she finally passed. Did she lose personal privacy along the way? Certainly. Did she suffer incredible pain? Most definitely. Did she lose her dignity? I can’t say this emphatically enough: NEVER.

In fact, as each step took her farther from viable treatment options and more certainly to death, she grew more confident in her belief that her death—that horrible, painful death—had meaning and purpose. And most certainly, dignity.

She didn’t have to move to another state to end her life to achieve death with dignity. The state of Missouri couldn’t allow or deny her the right to die with dignity. The ability to die with dignity transcends legislature. Dying through suffering sometimes demonstrates more dignity than a quick and painless death, because suffering serves as the crucible from which the refined gold of one’s character pours forth, free from the dross of the mundane.

It simply isn’t true that taking one’s own life is death with dignity.

There is a huge difference between willingly giving one’s life for someone or some cause and taking one’s own life to escape pain and suffering. It is even possible to say, “I’m doing this so my loved ones won’t have to suffer to see me like that,” but the bottom line is still this: in taking your own life, you are avoiding the problem, and not facing it. In my opinion, there is no dignity in suicide.

Her main argument is that she knows she’s dying, and knows what a horrible death her cancer leads to, so she is exercising her right to choose when to die, on her own terms, with the people she loves, etc. Again, there’s an assumption behind this argument: she knows she’s dying, therefore she can choose the time and way of her death.

But aren’t we all dying?

Not a single person on this planet can realistically expect to live forever. We are all terminal. Oddly enough, it is the terminally ill—those who have received advanced notice that death is near—that have the opportunity to die with dignity, because they know, to a certain degree, how they will die. Facing death, even in its worst forms, gives opportunity to show the true qualities of one’s character (the crucible I mentioned before), and that is where it becomes possible—in any U.S. state—to die with dignity.

Why didn’t I bring God into this discussion?

Don’t worry, I will. My primary point in this post is not religious or spiritual, however; it is linguistic. Naturally, as a believer in Jesus Christ, I have many things I could say about death and dying, particularly regarding the hope we have in Christ for life beyond death. But for this post, I wanted to make a linguistic point: we do not have to accept people’s definitions just because they present them in emotionally charged videos. The fact that Brittany is 29 years old, or a newlywed, or articulate, or full of life, or a world traveler, should not distract us from the issue presented in the video: to convince us to accept her definition of “dignity.” Had Brittany made a video that defended her legal right to take her own life, this would be a completely different post. By including the concept of “dignity,” she, along with the right to die movement, are trying to ascribe dignity to suicide, and at the same time strip the dignity of dying a slow, painful death from those who chose not to end their lives.

Let me end this post with a second video. I met Zac Smith briefly in 1991, and didn’t hear about him again until this video was posted in 2010. As you will see in the video, like Brittany, his story was tragic: he was 33, married for 11 years, father of 3 kids, and diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him later that same year. The big difference is that he chose, through his faith in Jesus Christ, to face death with dignity, not by ending his life, but by living his life with purpose until the very end, and, by way of this video, to encourage others to do so as well. Where Brittany is using her video to help fund more “dignified suicides,” Zac was pointing people to His Savior.

Francis Schaeffer once said:

A culture or an individual with a weak base can stand only when the pressure on it is not too great.

“How Should We Then Live?”

When I watch these videos, I see one person with a weak base, that cannot accept suffering as part of life and death, a person’s whose worldview cannot accept that suffering in death is dignified, and who therefore must end her life before the road becomes too difficult. I don’t know what her base is, per se, but the pressure of a painful death is too great for it to withstand. But Zac had a base that the Bible describes as a solid rock (Matthew 7:24-27); it stood strong, even in the face of death; it held up his wife and his kids through the process.

Zac, unlike Brittany, didn’t have to find refuge in one of the five U.S. states that offer death through legally-prescribed lethal drugs in order to have the right to die with dignity. The ability to die with dignity welled up from within him, from its source in his relationship with Jesus Christ, allowing him to face suffering and death…with great dignity.

Tastes Just Like the Real Thing…

Lately it seems that more and more people are choosing to go beyond vegetarianism into the world of veganism. While I’m sure people have all kinds of reasons for choosing to not eat any animals or animal by-products, to many, it’s more of an ethical philosophy than simply a dietary choice.

This is not a post for or against veganism. This is a reaction to an article I read about how unsuspecting customers were fooled by the texture and flavor of a batch of Beyond Meat’s “fake meat” (plant protein) that had been mislabeled as real meat. Actually, it is even more of a reaction to the fact that a vegan Facebook friend linked the article as a triumph of “fake meats.” As in, “See? We can avoid eating real animals by manufacturing believable animal substitutes.”

Does that not strike you as weird?

I’m going to avoid eating animals on the ethical grounds that their life is worth protecting, but somehow, I’m not going to give up wanting to savor what their flesh tastes like. That’s like keeping a chicken around, just for the sake of licking it occasionally.

“I don’t want to harm you, dear chicken, but I occasionally would like to remember how you taste.”

Hmmm.

In my warped mind I can just imagine a British officer crisply walking into a cannibal village and declaring: “By order of her majesty the queen, you shall no longer be cannibals. We have, however, brought you a very believable human meat substitute, so that your disgusting and immoral cannibalistic tastes don’t go unsatiated.”

In my mind this is different from wanting a sugar substitute. See, when people don’t eat sugar, they do so because they either can’t, or don’t want, to eat sugar anymore. I haven’t heard of anyone arguing for the ethical treatment of sugar cane or beets. The idea of something tasting just like sugar makes sense: I can’t have the real stuff in my diet, but I’d like to approximate the flavor.

But trying to get something that “tastes like chicken” when you don’t believe eating chicken is right seems…creepy.

This post isn’t about diet, however. I’m actually going to make this spiritual.

At first my plan was to make a spiritual application using this “I don’t want to eat you, I just want to taste you” oddity as a metaphor for Christians who know something is biblically wrong, but have come up with Christian alternatives to approximate the pleasure of the wrong-doing without affecting their conscience.

You know, like people who gave up drinking, but embraced “near beer.” (I’m not going to get into whether or not all drinking is wrong; that is a discussion for another time. Possibly someone else’s blog, too.) Or Christian “cuss words” that go so friggin’ close to the real thing that, heck, you could only tell the dang difference in the spelling. Or—and I kid you not, this is a true story—Christian schools that held “prims” because they didn’t approve of dancing, so they couldn’t hold a prom.

But the more I tried to come up with “fake sins” that imitated wrongdoing without “crossing the line,” the more I realized that Christians have apparently skipped this phase altogether, and they are back to just doing whatever is “right in their own eyes.” Under the slogan “my God is bigger than that,” people are drinking to their heart’s content, cussing openly in Christian blogs, and apparently dancing is okay, too.

Just to be clear: my purpose here is not to discuss the pros and cons of these particular practices. I am using them as illustrations of things that were once thought wrong, but still worthy of imitation, and that now are completely acceptable in some circles. This is not a defense of the so-called rules—”don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew; don’t hang with those that do.” My goal here is not for you to come away thinking “drinking, swearing, and dancing are wrong.” In fact, while I understand why we come up with guidelines for the so-called “gray areas” of Scripture, I believe that undiscerning Christians have so mistaken the practice of the rules for godliness itself that they believe that our actions produce holiness, when clearly Christ’s holiness should be producing our actions.

There is also HUGE discussion for another time about what freedom in Christ actually means. I won’t get into it here, but I will suggest Romans 6 is a great starting point for understanding the scope and nature of our freedom.

So what is the takeaway here?

Let me sum up with these words:

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.”

(1 John 2:15–16 KJV)

If we are truly dead to sin (Romans 6), and truly new creatures in Christ (2 Corinthians 5), then why on earth would we want things that belong to this spiritually dead, scheduled-for-destruction world we live in (2 Peter 3)? Why would we want things that will pass out of existence along with this world? Why would we want things that are pretty good imitations? “Tastes just like sinnin’!”

A good friend of mine has a great response to any behavior or action that can be defended by the oft-used “what’s wrong with this?” His question is pretty simple:

“What’s right with it?”

No matter how good the imitations get, or how pleasurable the real thing is, God is calling us to leave the wrong spiritual diet behind, and embrace a diet that isn’t an imitation of the old, but is wholly transformed by His Son to something completely new. And the only way to know what that is is to read what He has to say in His Word.

As a rule of thumb, if something falls under the category “this is something I really don’t need to be doing,” we should probably go ahead and forget what it tastes like as well.

Bible Stories for the 21st Century

I figured I would return to blogging with something light. The truth is I have dozens of half-written posts just sitting in my drafts pile, all of them waiting for me to have time to develop them. In the meantime, I’ve been off the air for over a year!

The inspiration for this strip came as we were listening to a dramatized version of the story of Abraham and Isaac. Since Isaac’s name means “laughter” in Hebrew, I imagined what he would have been named if he had been born in our modern era of Twitter and texts.

This was what I came up with.

Knock, knock…

Nearly every day something strikes me as being “bloggable.” In other words, I want to give my two cents’ worth to the world via my blog, knowing full well that only a very, VERY tiny percentage of the world even knows of my existence, and even a smaller percentage of the Patrick-knowing world actually reads my blog. But it still seems cathartic to have on public record what my opinion is, for all the difference it makes. And as many times as something bloggable presents itself, so do numerous other life things that either are, or appear to be, more important than shouting from a virtual street corner in a neglected neighborhood of a small town bypassed altogether by the information superhighway, and so I end up just telling my wife, or a friend who unwittingly crosses paths with me, or sometimes even a random stranger who happens to be at hand long enough in a public place.

Today’s bloggable thought hit me while I was writing the study guide for our church’s small groups, and I decided to actually blog it. The sermon was about the letter to the church in Laodicea, in Revelation 3. We were studying how this church’s self-sufficiency had led them to believe they were rich, and well-clothed, and needing nothing, when Christ’s assessment of the church was that they were poor, naked, and blind. By way of personal application, I was asking for discussion about how we might have blind spots in our lives, where we seem to be doing great, but in fact, are destitute, and needy, and weak spiritually. And then I asked this question: What percentage of your life is truly dependent on Jesus Christ? And, taking it a step further: If Jesus were to completely disappear from your life, how much of it would continue working as it always had? (The implication, of course, that if we can remove Him from our lives without effect, we truly don’t depend on Him for much.)

It’s a sobering thought. People survive this life without Jesus Christ all the time. They are all around us. They sleep, they wake up, they work, they have families, they play, they eat, and they sleep again, all without any contact with Him, and do so with varying degrees of success (by earthly standards). Some of them with way more financial success and better organization and more productivity and, sadly, greater benefit to mankind (again, by earthly standards) than many Christians. And it stands to reason that if we can do the same, we really aren’t dependent on Him, we just say we are. Any part of my life that could continue “all systems green” without His presence, influence, control, and/or guidance is simply me, on human autopilot, pretending to be led by Him.

When Jesus told the Laodicean church that He was at the door, knocking, He wasn’t making a salvation altar call; He was speaking to a group of believers. I picture it like the tail end of the Flintstones closing credits, where Fred is inadvertently placed outside of the house and locked out, and is left shouting “Wilma!” at the top of his lungs. Here’s this church, doing great financially and materially, and as it continues its daily routine, it simply locks Jesus outside, and continues about its affairs without noticing that He’s missing from there midst! And no, he’s not a bellowing caveman, but sadly, there He is, outside the door to His church, trying to get invited back in.

So what about you? Have you seen Jesus lately? Or is life going on happily “in His name,” while He is nowhere to be found?

It’s very convicting.

Well, I gotta run, I think I heard someone knocking at the door.

Jesus’ Last Words

It started out as joke. I was offered the last three weeks in June to preach a series before my upcoming trip the States. My mind being what it is, I immediately thought of Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture,” and thought up the ominous-sounding title: “The Last Series.” It would most likely have a small subtitle “until the next one” or “in June.” As it turns out, no one around here knows who Randy Pausch is, so I changed tacks and came up with the title “The Last Words,” with the tagline, “What would you say if you knew they would be your last words?”

I thought it sounded catchy, but naturally they couldn’t be my last words. I’m a stickler for expository preaching. This led me to think about several people whose last words are recorded for us in Scripture. Not surprisingly, I picked Moses (whose last words are the basically the whole book of Deuteronomy), Paul (whose last words aren’t necessarily recorded, but 2 Timothy gets pretty close), and of course, Jesus.

I won’t go into all the details of each message because I want to get to a point (and I’m sure you want me to do so as well).

There are a number of ways to approach the last words of Jesus Christ. One can take it literally: the last thing He said on the cross (there is no lack of “The Seven Sayings of Jesus” material out there). The idea can be broadened a bit, and focus on His final words to the disciples before His crucifixion. But as I considered how I was going to handle it, it hit me:

Jesus will never speak His last words.

When speaking of Jesus’ “last words,” we always have to qualify a context. His last words to His disciples. His last words on the cross. Death has a way of rendering men speechless, but Jesus has a way of rendering death powerless. He rose again. So we must resort to more qualifying: His last words before His ascension. His words to Paul at his conversion. His words to John in Revelation. Surely, way at the end, in chapter 22, where He says He is coming quickly—those are his last words! Well, possibly the last ones recorded, but still not His last, because I imagine we will be doing most of the listening in eternity.

The Bible speaks of two different words as eternal: God’s Word, as in, the Scriptures (Is. 40:8; the same of Jesus’ words in Mt 24:35), and Jesus Himself, the incarnate Word (John 1:1; 14). Over the course of human history, God has revealed the written word to mankind, with the goal of pointing to the incarnate Word. It is God’s revelation, pointing to God revealed—God with us. Jesus is God’s ultimate and final word (Hb 1:1-2). Everything we need to know about His final Word is found in His written word. And neither will ever pass away.

I have already spoken on Moses and Paul at church, so I’m looking forward to the final Sunday in the series, as I speak of Jesus’ “last words.” It is encouraging to think that Jesus will never speak His last words; and yet humbling to think that He will always have the last word.

I can only hope that my last words—when the time comes for me to say them—will ring with a passion for God’s written Word as they point to God’s ultimate and final Word, Jesus Christ.

Error: Your Heart Drive Cannot Be Partitioned

I must begin by warning you: in this post, I make a lot of references to the original geek language. Should you have trouble relating to or understanding anything, consult your local techie.

Sunday night, at church, our senior pastor was preaching from Matthew chapter 6. At one point he referred to v.24: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (ESV). In order to explain this, he said that our hearts can’t be divided. For some reason, he didn’t use the more common Portuguese word dividir—which is quite similar to our English word “divide”—instead he used partilhar. Because of this word choice—and the weird way my brain works—I immediately thought of the word “partition” and how it is used in the computer world.

Whether you are aware of this or not, your computer’s hard drive can be divided into a number of different parts, called partitions. In order for a computer to work, it needs an operating system (OS), and for an OS to work it needs a certain amount of space on the drive set apart specifically for its use—a partition.

Most people operate quite happily and obliviously with a single partition on their drive, because they only use one OS—Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc. But other people have reasons to work with more than one OS, and, in order to save themselves the trouble of working on multiple computers, they can partition a hard drive to run multiple operating systems. There is even software that can run two or more operating systems simultaneously.

In other words, any hard drive can be partitioned to run as many operating systems as you can fit on it, even if they are totally incompatible with each other.

My point is: your heart doesn’t work that way!

Unlike the computer world, there are only two competing spiritual operating systems. God installed the original OS when He created us, but through our sin and disobedience we hopelessly corrupted it. God has continually offered tech support over centuries, and man has consistently refused it, opting for the snazzy, feature-fat, operating systems our adversary has to offer. We even blindly assume that there are many different operating systems out there, but if we look deep enough, it is either God’s or the competition’s. The only solution to our heart drive problem is drastic: we need to let God shut it down, and swap it out for a new one that has the original, uncorrupted OS on it.

Mankind didn’t like that solution, so we have sought other ways around it: partitions.

“I will divide my heart drive! God can even have the lion’s share of memory. But I will keep a little partition over here, that runs my favorite competing OS.”

Error: your heart drive cannot be partitioned.

“Well that’s frustrating! I have all the tools here to do it. I have done all the steps. This should work!”

Error.

“But what if I…”

Error.

Your heart is hard-wired by the Manufacturer to run only one operating system at a time. It cannot be partitioned. You cannot serve two masters. This truth is so hard-wired in man that even in our fallen state we express corrupted versions of it. We feel jealousy and betrayal as children when a friend starts spending more time with someone else; as young people, when that special person goes out with someone else; as adults, when a spouse leaves us for another. We want people’s undivided attention, but are more than happy to give God only part of ours!

The bottom line is this: If you are not glorifying God, obeying Him, and serving Him, then you are glorifying, obeying, and serving someone or something else. There is no middle ground here. Jesus Christ didn’t die on the cross for a piece of our heart real estate—He bought the whole thing with His life!

It is time to check what operating system your heart is running. If it isn’t God’s OS, or if you find yourself trying to partition your heart drive, it is time to call on Him to help you.

You cannot serve two masters.

Your heart cannot be partitioned.

It Gets Bitter

Warning: the video linked below is contains offensive language, in the form of expletives and offensive speech against the Bible. Please view at your own discretion, and not with children present.

When I watched this video this week (linked on a friend’s Facebook page), I felt that it was comment-worthy, but not for the reasons you might think. It would be easy to argue against his attacks on the Bible, but there really is no point. What he says about the Bible is offensive to any Bible believer, but that’s to be expected from someone who ignores what the Bible has to say.

What I thought was noteworthy was how he shows his true colors in this speech. Remember, his whole campaign is against bullying. And yet here he is, the anti-bullying spokesman, appealing to ad hominem attacks against Callista Gingrich. This is the man who speaks against beatings, referring to his own speech as  “beating up the Bible.” When kids silently walk out (rather than confront him) he calls them “pansy-a**ed.” Would he rather they attack him? He states that they don’t like “being pushed back.” This implies that someone pushed first, and yet he is addressing teenagers, listening to a speech he was invited to give.

Is bullying okay when it’s against the bully? Or, in his case, against high school kids who don’t hold his views and have done nothing to him? Observe how he even says he has a “right to defend himself.” Against whom? He wasn’t under attack: he had the floor! And—oh, the sweet irony—he used the opportunity to bully people!

This is just more evidence that “tolerance” is a tricky message: even the most tolerant advocates of tolerance are going to reach a point of intolerance. Not surprisingly, they will be most intolerant of those who most oppose their view of tolerance.

Apparently, when it push comes to shove, bullying is okay if you as long as you perceive yourself as the victim.

Dan Savage has a message for you: “It gets bitter.”