Why the Bible isn't your personal guide-book

So many times, whether in youth group, some bible study, or any gathering of believers, questions about ethics or situational problems arise, and the answer is always "Read your Bible." While this solution is not necessarily wrong in essence, it kind of skews the purpose of what the Bible is really there for. I know it gave me the impression that all the answers are hidden between the lines on the pages, and if I read hard enough I can figure out where God wants me to go. Or if there's a difficult situation I can figure out what God wants me to do. But that is not always the case.

The Bible is our measuring stick, our litmus test for the world. We use it as a lens to see through. And that lens can be one of many things. I was reading Jefferson Bethke's book It's Not What You Think and he put it so well that I'm just going to copy his examples.

1. The Sword of the Spirit

The Bible refers to itself as this, so of course it is not inherently wrong. And I'm not suggesting that any of these lenses are evil or twisted, just that the Bible is so much more than the box we sometimes put it in.

"And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit,

which is the word of God." Ephesians 6:17

"For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any

double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and

spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes

of the heart." Hebrews 4:12

"Do not think I have come to bring peace to this earth. I have

not come to bring peace, but a sword." Matthew 10:34

This is all well and good, but is dangerous to only see the Bible through this combatant lens. The fighter lens of the Bible is simply a facet of a much bigger picture. As many times as the word soldier is mentioned, bride or child is included twice as much.

The biggest part of Jesus's ministry was healing the sick, marginalized, and down-trodden. He didn't make it his primary goal to go around using The Word as a weapon by flinging bible verses at everyone. Indeed he had God's law written on his heart, as evident when he was responding to needling by the pharisees and the devil in the desert, but when he encountered hurting and desperate people he looked on them WITH LOVE.

2. A Personal Road Map

"When you view the Bible as your personal roadmap, you can't help but

create a God who is a blend of Santa Claus and the magic eight ball...

The world is revolving around you, and God is present as butler, not Lord."

- Jefferson Bethke

I've certainly viewed the Bible this way. The future is scary, unknown, and mystical. We cling to safety, rarely are willing to change, and prefer to remain comfortable. But following Jesus challenges ALL of that.

"If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and

take up his cross daily and follow me." Luke 9:23

Jesus's slogan while on earth was, "COME AND DIE." If that doesn't threaten our sense of security, I don't know what does.

So in order to obverse these scary feelings that come with being a Christian, we look for answers in the pages of the Bible. But God never promises us that. He promises that He will watch over us, stay by our side (even when we think we don't want Him there) and His love will remain steadfast. But He never promises that we'll know all the answers.

But that is the BEAUTY of trusting in our Lord and Savior! Why wouldn't you give your life to him? Why wouldn't you want the Creator of the universe to write your story? Besides, a life apart from God is meaningless, a chasing after the wind, all a vanity*.

Looking back on my life I have no idea how I got to where I am. I am applying to Physician Assistant school, something I never say myself doing. I've gotten to this point through a series of steps, each one a little higher than the last. I have found something that I have never been more passionate about, and I am thrilled and excited for the future that God already knows. I am expectant that God will use my story as a thread in the tapestry that is His Kingdom. Even if I don't know where that thread leads, or exactly what I'll be doing in five years, it doesn't matter because God takes care of his children.

"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or

 store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

Are you not much more valuable than they?" Matthew 6:26

3. A Moral Compass

"The Bible is descriptive, not prescriptive."

Jefferson Bethke

The problem with looking to the Bible for any conundrum you find yourself in, is that it doesn't give you a right answer for every situation. The Bible isn't a list of do's and do not's. It is a STORY. A story about how much our Creator adored the world. A story about how an only son redeemed a sinful word. A story about how a broken world will be put back to its former glory and God and man will dwell together. How awesome is that? CanIgetanamen!

The Bible is chock-full of rape, murder, incest, and the like. In the midst of all that mess God inserts some moral codes. But the Bible is "mainly about how God relates to a broken and rebellious human race" (Jefferson Bethke).

I'm not saying we shouldn't follow the Ten Commandments. The moral codes that ARE listed in the Bible are all very good to follow. But humans are sinful. We are going to mess up at one point or another.

As a broken and rebellious human, I think I can appreciate a story more than a list of what I should or shouldn't do. The story offers Grace and Redemption and spotlights the good we can do in God's name, while a list just shows me all my shortcomings.

A lot of people skip over the Old Testament, or skim through it to get to the good stuff in the New Testament. But ALL of the Word is true and holy. Erasing the OT erases half of God's design for the world. Skimming over the genealogies skims over Jesus's birth line: the real people that brought a real person into the world who was also God that also saved humankind**.

The entirety of the Bible is a story, and all centered around Jesus. It has many facets, and we should be careful not to make one of those facets our entire worldview. Our human, sinful nature makes us inclined to think ourselves the hero of the story, but that's not the case. The Lord has graciously granted us parts in the story of the Kingdom of God, and it is up to Him how our stories will be written. What we do is desire to have true hearts - hearts that assimilate to His Will.

"Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of

your heart." Psalm 37:4

*I’ve been reading Ecclesiastes and recently looked up what the word the translation of the word vanity actually meant. Vanity: frailty, nothing, nearest to zero, puff of wind, vapor, unreliability, emptiness, futility, no effect.

**Honestly I still have a bit of trouble with this. If anyone has a good grasp on this concept of human but also God, either comment below or email me!

The Idol of Health

Now, wait a minute, how can health be an idol? Doesn't the Bible say we're to treat our bodies like temples, because the Holy Spirit dwells within us (1 Cor 3:16)? Doesn't it also say not to be gluttonous (Prov 23:20-21)? If we practice those things, are we not doing right by God? Well take a minute and read this, and let me know what you think:

I started reading the book Medicine as Ministry by Margaret Mohrmann because of a recommendation by another blogger. Mohrmann struck a very interesting point that I just had to grab hold of and expand upon.

As human beings we are all made to worship something. We all have this God-shaped hole in our hearts. We attempt to fill it with things that we think of as being good, like passions for our jobs, caring for our family, even our health. But if we fill that space with anything else than God we end up feeling empty and unsatisfied.

People that aren't religious might scoff at that and think that it doesn't apply to them, but I disagree with that. Show me a person who doesn't worship something and I'll show you a pig that flies. Worshiping doesn't entail shoving your nose into the ground and prostrating yourself before a higher being. Worshipping doesn't mean singing pretty songs or clapping your hands rhythmically. What worship means is that you place something at the center of your life and everything you do revolves around what you have designated as the nucleus of your existence, whether it was subconsciously or not.

Mohrmann made the comparison that our pursuit of longevity in life was similar to the Israelites at the base of Mt Sinai building a calf of gold. And in the practice of medicine many people idolize health, making sure their emotional and spiritual healths are consummate in order to prolong their physical health.

"Evidence of the idolatry of health in our society is clear, manifesting 

itself in our fickle, shifting obsessions with diet and exercise machines

and with jogging down every primrose path to perfect health, whether it 

is the path of vitamin C or brewer's yeast or no yeast at all or oat bran or 

whatever the latest 'cure du jour'. We have all been treated to, and have

perhaps participated in, the spectacle of reasonable, pragmatic citizens of 

the last half of the twentieth century fearing and finding carcinogens 

everywhere, in much the same way our ancestors feared and found demons 

and witches everywhere." 

Now I am certainly not saying that medicine is bad, nor is practicing a healthy lifestyle. But we must realize that using medicine and being healthy is not a means to an end, but rather they serve the purpose of keeping our current lives healthy and full so that we can better perform our Father's will. Healthiness looks different in everybody. And there are so many options that you can choose in order to live healthily.

In my own life I have fallen into the trap of idolizing health. After quitting soccer two years ago, I've had to do the whole fitness thing on my own. I thought that if I ate the magic foods, did the magic workouts, and looked a certain way, only then would I would find happiness. But happiness, true joy in life, is only found in God. I realize now that my darkest times of thinking in this contorted way was when I was farthest from God. When you have a good healthy relationship with your Lord and Savior, everything else will not necessarily fall into place, but you will be centered and purposed in the right direction. 

So, brothers and sisters, let us pray that we be knowledgeable and wary of the many idols in our world that threaten to come between our relationships with our Heavenly Father!

P.S. Another great book that talks about the idols in life that goes along with this same message is Gods at War, by Kyle Idleman.

Lezzbe honest, mkay?

     I just finished the book Scary Close, by Don Miller and I loved it. His main point was that the only way (or one of the only ways) to achieve real intimacy with someone in whatever relationship is to be open and honest. If you think about it, it makes total sense. If we go around presenting a front to the people we interact with because of insecurities, fears, or doubts, we essentially build a wall around ourselves. That wall inhibits growth, intimacy, joy, and fulfillment. Because at the end of the day (at least in my life) the only fulfillment I truly find is in my relationships with other people. 

     So let us pray to God to break down those walls so that we can build good, healthy, discipling relationships with each other. Let us pray that we would overcome our insecurities, realize we are all made perfect by Jesus' blood, and not one of us is better than another. Hopefully through doing this we can shine a light, and further His kingdom. 

     As Josh Garrels sings in his song, "Farther Along":

"Heaven filled me with more than enough

Broke down my levee and my bluff

Let the flood wash me."

Typical "Year in Review" Post

Now that the semester is over and I've had time to take a breath and actually think about something other than a Negishi coupling reaction, what hormones are secreted from the juxtaglomerular apparatus, or what the symptoms are from an infection of Mycoplasma pneumonia, I've done some reflecting. And besides the academic things I've lucubrated over this past semester, I've learned some other things. 

1. Dying to yourself is kind of hard.

            I’ve learned that basically everything in Christianity boils down to picking up your cross and following Jesus. Luke 9:23 and 24, “Then he said to them all: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.’” But actually getting up every day and saying, okay today I am going to die to myself is a difficult thing to do.

            Everything around us constantly screams to pleasure ourselves. Food, drink, relationships, do it all because you deserve it. YOLO, and all that jazz. And while we definitely only have one life, the greatest thing we can do is to take our only life and surrender it to Jesus.

2. I don't need to know everything.

I love learning, and I love being able to edify other people with the things I am learning. Knowledge is life, and it's what separates us from barbaric practices. But there are things that I may never learn about, and that has frustrated me. 

I think that as we grow in our faith dances, God teaches us different things. The minute we pray those words we are taught to pray and accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we can't possibly be given all the knowledge we are meant to know throughout our life. Where would the growth be? That is what is so special about Christianity. As we grow, we constantly learn new things about God. He opens our eyes to what we couldn't see before, and that effect can be enchanting. 

But still, God doesn't want us, as humans, to know everything. Because HE is the One that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. There are things in the Bible whose meaning will never be revealed to us. 

However, in that ignorance there may be a bit of bliss. He has revealed to us the important parts, to simply trust Him with your life. As I have mentioned before, the greatest call in the Bible is to die to yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus (Luke 9:23-24, Matthew 10:38, Romans 6:6-7). In doing so, we will have LIFE and FREEDOM. And everything will fall into place, because as we know so well, “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" (Matthew 6:26). 

3. Because I don't need to know everything, I don't need to worry about what God is doing.

On my campus this past year, there has been a lot of change and a lot of things not going too well. We chalked it up to being a “transition year” and left it at that, but in the back of my mind a constant thought was, what is God doing? I know without a shadow of a doubt that God does all things according to His perfect will, and nothing happens without a purpose, but I felt (and still feel) the need to know what that purpose is. What the end game to all of it is.

And I’m still working on it, but I’ve come to the realization that God’s perfect and holy will is not a thing that I need to ruminate over. I recently heard a sermon where the preacher told us about hurricanes. Hurricanes and tornadoes are mysterious and tragic things, and meteorologists and scientists are still working on figuring them out. So when a hurricane is headed to your home, you don’t stop and say, “Wait, we need to figure out all of its intricacies and the exact path this hurricane is going to take before we leave.” No, when a hurricane comes you pull tail and get out of there.

Just as we treat a hurricane, so we should treat God, the great and consummate Creator that crafted the hurricane. We don’t need to scrutinize the complexities of His will, we just need to obey His Word and what He has chosen to reveal to us.

I’ve learned many other things this past year, but these are the big ones. I love looking back on my life a year ago and just seeing what a different place I am in. I am excited to keep moving forward and keep discovering new things God wants me to learn, along the way pursuing the passions and dreams He has given me.

Adios amigos!

Psalm 50

Psalm 50:12-15

“¹²If I were hungry, I would not tell you,
    for the world and its fullness are mine. ¹³ Do I eat the flesh of bulls
    or drink the blood of goats? ¹⁴ Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
    and perform your vows to the Most High, ¹⁵ and call upon me in the day of trouble;
    I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.”

I love this passage for numerous reasons:

1)      God has some serious dry wit.

Exhibit A: “Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?” Like no, His being doesn’t require sustenance from mortal things that He created. He created us. He created the animals and plants that keep us alive. I’m assuming this passage is talking about the guilt and sin sacrifices/offerings the Israelites performed. So God is asking if we seriously think offering sacrifices to Him actually benefits Him in some way. No way Josè.  The guilt and sin sacrifices (and then the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior) our meant to benefit us. Us: the little puny humans whose lives aren’t more than mists in the wind (James 4:14). Us: the mortals who rely on God to give them strength (Psalm 28:7).

Exhibit B: Moses and the burning bush (Exodus 3)

Exhibit C: God’s reply to Job’s suffering (Job, chapters 38-42)

2)      We don’t need to DO anything

God doesn’t have to be appeased. God literally appeases Himself through His creation. We don’t have to earn salvation through good works. Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— ⁹ not by works, so that no one can boast.” We don’t have to earn the approval of God. Thus…

3)      Everything we DO do should be in thanksgiving

Because we can’t earn God’s grace (it has already been freely given to us) we should thank the Lord by glorifying His name, which is ultimately what He requires us to do. And if He wants us to glorify His name, He will not lead us astray. Psalm 23:3 says, “He refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name's sake.”

Getting Something Out of It

Why do we feel the need to “get something out of” our time with God??? Either in a sermon, or from reading the Bible, we feel that we have to have this huge 'eureka!' moment. But I've been realizing that our relationship with God shouldn't be about that.

In Knowing God, by JI Packer, he talks about the Holy Spirit, and how we sometimes seek all the good feelings that the Spirit can afford us without first seeking a relationship with the Father.

“The cause of such troubles as we have described is a false, magical type of supernaturalism, which leads people to hanker after a transforming touch as from an electric, impersonal power that will make them feel wholly free form the burdens and bondages of living with themselves and other people. They believe that this is the essence of genuine spiritual experience. They think the work of the Spirit is to give them experiences that are like LSD trips. (How unhelpful it is when evangelists actually promise this, and when drug users equate their fantasies with religious experience! Will our age never learn to distinguish things that differ?) In fact, however, this quest for inward explosion rather than an inward communion shows deep misunderstanding of the Spirit’s ministry.”

I think we all realize that reading our Bibles will not be akin to an LSD trip, but we still long for feelings of affirmation and empowerment when we read the words and yearn for God to speak to us. The words in Leviticus recording the types of sacrifices to perform are not as likely to give those feelings as the words in the gospel of John describing Jesus’ life on earth. But God’s word is holy and perfect. Every word in the Bible is there for a reason.

In my opinion, when we read any part of the Bible, we are learning more about God and Who He Is – The I Am. Our relationship with Our Heavenly Father is a long process, one that takes our whole lives to complete. It’s a dance: sometimes fast and sometimes slow and sometimes in between. A dance that we don’t even realize we are growing in until we look up perhaps even months later. There are so many verses about seasons in the Bible. We can’t bloom and show fruit in every single season, or else we’ll quickly die out.

• Ecclesiastes 3:1 "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under the heaven."
• Psalms 1:3 "He is like a tree, planted by streams of water that yields fruit in its season..."
• Acts 1:7 "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority."

Sometimes the Bible challenges us: we read a verse and maybe haven’t had the experiences in life to understand it until years later. The Bible can be just totally and utterly confusing, but only by prayer and continuously being conscious in putting God first may we learn what it means. Sometimes we do get an “AHA!” moment where everything falls into place. Sometimes a verse/chapter/book affirms us and keeps us on the right path. Sometimes a verse/chapter/book shatters our world and we have to choose whether to totally change directions. But every time we read the Bible, we are learning about God. And no matter what the feeling is we “get out of it”, be they large or small or none at all, we are still learning about the God we worship, and that is totally enough.

An Elephant's Faithful One Hundred Percent

I’ve been reading straight through the Bible since last January, and it has been an incredibly eye-opening experience. I never knew I didn’t know the stuff that I didn’t know. I’ve already read through the New Testament and am currently in the Psalms, so I only have a little more to go.

In Psalms 15, it talks about what a righteous man is; someone who is fit to dwell on God’s holy hill. And it mentions that a righteous man in someone “who swears to his own hurt and does not change” (v. 4). So what does that mean?

Someone who “swears to his own hurt” does what he says. He carries out what he has promised to do, even if it comes to his own harm. This makes me think of Horton the elephant, in Seussical The Musical. Horton promises a flighty bird that he’ll take care of her egg for an afternoon because she needs a break. The bird, Maizy, takes advantage of Horton’s good character and flies away with no intention of coming back. Horton still protects that egg even though he is faced with hunters, poachers, extreme weather, and then put in a circus to be gawked at. He maintains throughout the story that he won’t go back on his word, because, “I meant what I said and I said what I meant, an elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.” Even though he was ridiculed and ostracized for taking care of another bird’s egg, he kept his word. As a Christian, Jesus warns us in Matthew 10:16 “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves.” There are people in this world that will take advantage of someone who keeps their word, so sometimes it is okay to say no. I think as we grow in wisdom in our dance with the Lord, it becomes easier to discern when we can truly help or when someone is just trying to take advantage of us.

In Matthew 14, King Herod gave an oath to Herodias’s daughter that she could have anything that she asked for. When she told him she wanted the head of John the Baptist, “the King was sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests he commanded it to be given” (v. 9). To his own hurt of having a fairly innocent man killed, Herod kept his word. In this instance, we must learn that it’s never a good idea to be so filled with lust that we promise anything to our cunning step-daughter.

But anyway, Horton is commendable because he swore to his own hurt and did not change. He didn’t waiver one bit once he set out to do what he promised. In Matthew 5:37 Jesus tells us, “Let what you say be simply, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.” If I have to swear up and down to someone that I will indeed do what they ask, then somewhere along the way my character has become tainted. It can be a long process to get it back, but most certainly not impossible with God. And lastly, in James 5:12, “But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be “no”, so that you may not fall under condemnation.”