Holiness

Love Sin / Hate Sin

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My church held their annual picnic this last weekend. One of the church-wide contests was a chili cook-off. I told my wife I was going to enter and win the whole thing. This blogger can cook a scrumptious bowl of chili. I whipped up a batch, entered it, and indeed won the whole thing.

Upon winning that coveted blue ribbon, I let out a huge whoop, raised the hands high, and let everyone there know that I was triumphant. And later I felt bad about doing so.

Was it too much? The more time passed, the more I felt that I’d been a tad over the top in my moment of chili glory. While the other contestants trash talked before the judging, I was relatively quiet—I let the chili do the talking. But afterwards I really wanted to rub their noses in it, at least a little.

It’s been a tough last few weeks. The tenor in the household is “muddle through” stage. That stage has been common around here far more than it should, and I’ve grown to hate it. You feel that things will never get better.

So is a little rejoicing for a silly contest too much? Can a little hollering be good for the soul here? Or am I just exulting at someone else’s expense?

Sin is perpetually crouching at the door. The smell of it lingers in the air. And though we are told to flee it, despise it, and rail against it, there are times that I must confess—to my own dishonor—that I love it.

During my tenure in the Lutheran Church, I never got a handle on Martin Luther’s famous aphorism on sin that he penned to his buddy Philip Melanchthon 484 years ago:

If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here [in this world] we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness, but, as Peter says, we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world. No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly—you too are a mighty sinner.

Now that I am older, though, it makes more sense to me. As much as I am commended to loathe sin, there are still parts of me that love it just a little more than I should.

  • I love/hate reveling in accolades bestowed upon me.
  • I love/hate watching foes—real or imagined—get their comeuppance.
  • I love/hate convincing myself that I’m smarter than most people.
  • I love/hate gazing just a breath too long at the pretty young thing in line ahead of me at the grocery store.
  • I love/hate cutting down an opponent with a witticism worthy of Oscar Wilde or Will Rogers.
  • I love/hate knowing that the terrorist who just blew himself up and took out a dozen other people is going to burn in hell for eternity.
  • I love/hate watching haughty people taken down a peg or two.
  • I love/hate the dark fantasies I entertain.
  • I love/hate my own pride.

As a younger Christian, I would deceive myself into thinking that I wasn’t like this. But faux innocence is just that—a denial of the reality that in this world there will be sin. No one is immune no matter how perfect the persona we project to others.

I think the Christian blogosphere perpetuates this. Cruise around enough blogs on a daily basis and it’s fairly easy to see the hate portion of the love sin / hate sin equation. Yet there’s not quite as much of the love sin portion displayed. MasksToo much confession may alienate the more righteous readers. Too much confession may cast doubt on how well ANY of us Christians are doing in walking the walk as well as we talk the talk.

Far more of us are dying for confession than almost anything else, I suspect. Whitewashing takes exorbitant amounts of work, and legions of Christians are propping up an image of a fictitious sinner, the error Luther warns of, to their own detriment.

I crave grace, don’t you? What a marvelous gift, sublime, healing, and transforming all in one. Because of my love for grace, I can never be a fictitious sinner. My errors will always be bold. I can only ask that my prayer of repentance be yet bolder still.

Are you laboring to maintain the façade of a rosy righteous glow when darkness has become your friend instead? Christian, stop fighting and let someone else know!

…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God….
—Romans 3:23 ESV

There is peace in confessing your sins not only to God, but to someone else:

Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
—James 5:16 ESV

Don’t be a fictitious sinner. It will steal your joy away. If you love a particular sin, acknowledge that before someone else and allow someone to draw up alongside you in the name of the Lord:

…a three-fold cord is not quickly broken.
—Ecclesiastes 4:12

Most of all, rest in the peace that the Lord Jesus bought with his own blood, the very blood that takes away the sins of the world. He said:

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.
—John 14:27 ESV

Beloved, now is the day to come into the light of Christ’s grace.

The Little Things: The Zodiac Blogger

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God's been bringing these Little Things to my mind more and more. These posts were supposed to be occasional, but I can't stop noticing them of late. This post is about one little thing that makes my heart sink when I see it.

I'm sometimes clumsy when I confront people, so I hope that I'm not accusatory in this post. Think of this as a challenge to purity of conviction then. We've become inured to the whole issue, and anything we're inured to is for all intentions invisible. Magnifying glassThe diabolical part about this particular Little Thing is that it's astonishingly prevalent. I want to believe it's just because it's so ingrained in American culture that we don't think about it at all.

It's being a Zodiac Blogger.

It may seem like a little thing, but my informal poll of people who listed "Christianity" or "Jesus" as a topic of interest in their Blogger profile shows that two-thirds of them have their zodiac sign listed.

God says this:

And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.
—Deuteronomy 4:19 ESV

And also this:

…but test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.
—1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 ESV

Horoscopes and astrology fail the test of the above passages. The Father desires that we have no other gods before Him.

This look at Little Things is about just that: the little things that keep us from walking in fullness of life. They may not seem like much, but they still speak to our allegiances. I don't want to show the world I have any allegiances to worldviews that are against the worldview of Jesus Christ. Honestly, I wish I had no idea what my astrological sign was. But this I do know: I definitely won't be putting it out there for others to see. I don't want anything to disqualify my witness for Christ, so I just avoid anything astrological altogether.

If you have a Blogger profile that includes your zodiac sign, consider removing that sign. It may not seem like all that much, but I think God would be pleased if we eliminated those things that might hold us back or divide our hearts.

Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.
—Philippians 3:13-16 ESV

Update: I've been told—I assume the sources to be good here—that Blogger automatically puts up your zodiac sign if you fill in your birthdate in your Blogger profile. I did not know this. Still, it's a product of the times that these things are assumed as being desirable to know. If I were in the position of displaying that sign, I'd still consider removing my birthdate if all it's doing is generating a zodiac sign.

Some of the commenters here have said that this may be too little a thing to be part of this series, but I don't feel that way. I'm a big advocate of grace and grace will cover these things if we are ignorant of them. But I believe we still need to think about them because too many things like this add up to us being held back by the world.

I've long been convicted of the narrative in Joshua 7 that found the army of Israel being routed in their battles against the Amorites. When Joshua fell on his face before God and asked why, God told him that someone in the camp had taken as plunder of war items that were dedicated to the Canaanite gods, items that God had said must be destroyed (after a previous military victory.) That man, Achan, had hidden these in his tent. Joshua took Achan, his entire family, and all his animals, and stoned them to death. Then he burned everything that had been associated with Achan.

God takes these things seriously. Thankfully, we don't have to suffer stoning for what we've done. I know that I'd be under a pile of stones for the things I've done in my life. But it doesn't mean we should tolerate those things, either, especially when we consider their source.

This last year the Lord has been showing me what I need to purge from my life, more things than ever before. I think what has changed is that I no longer desire anything that will hold me back from being all that He can make me, so now He can get down to work. I'm sharing some of those issues in this series and Cerulean Sanctum, in general. I'm simply hoping my comments on this will help others out there. Whether people can accept these things or not, I understand.

Have a blessed day, all of you.

Not So Wild About Harry

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I’ve ignored writing on all things Harry Potter over the years, but this weekend forced me to change my mind. With my wife’s sister’s family down for the weekend, we were looking for things to do. Unfortunately for us, the city we live near was in the grip of Pottermania and half the activities in town were geared to the release of the latest book.

I’ve written a few posts about the world of fiction in the last couple weeks, but this isn’t going to be a diatribe about J.K. Rowling’s billions or the quality of her writing. The problem is not one of literary aspirations. To me, Harry Potter is a symptom of the much larger problem.

When I was a kid I watched Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and any host of shows that featured magic. Some Christians would say that I was leaving myself open to all sorts of negative spiritual forces for doing so, but what no one could claim then is that they knew real witches. I certainly didn’t at that time. There weren’t any girls in my school that fancied themselves to be a witch (or even sympathetic to the witch’s cause.) The worst thing you could say about some young woman was that she had the lousy ’70s and ’80s fashion sense to dress just a little too much like Stevie Nicks. But witches? Nah. In fact, it was more likely that guys could be accused of witchcraft because Dungeons & Dragons was insanely popular by the time I graduated from high school. At Carnegie Mellon University in the early 80s I knew guys who skipped all their classes just to play D&D, sitting around getting high and drawing arcane symbols on the walls of their dorm rooms.

While some of the signs for a groundswell were in place even when I was a child, it can be argued that the later syndication of those TV shows I mentioned above lowered the defenses for witchcraft for the generation that came after mine when added to later societal changes. Today, everywhere you look, you can’t seem to get away from all things Wiccan or pagan. In fact, I have to believe that the fastest growing religion in the United States is not Islam, but the same one that has captured so much of the British population in recent years, Neo-paganism. Sorcery, vampire cults, an affinity for the goth lifestyle, even postmodernism—all of it has roots in paganism. Couple this with a societal outlook that is rational but growing more irrational by the day, and Neo-paganism looks ready to explode in the West.

Why? Nature abhors a vacuum. Especially human nature. With Christianity on the down side in the Western world, people who are searching for answers, particularly those answers that cater to humanity’s fallen need to have power and control, are finding what they want in paganism.'Astarte Syriaca' by Dante Rossetti Earth religions are picking up adherents left over from the New Age movement, the children of the Haight-Ashbury crowd, and the rise of “organic culture.” (My wife and I are trying to get an organic farm going and it is shocking how much the “religion” of some organic farmers is rooted in goddess worship and fertility cult thinking.)

Earth religions have been around nearly as long as there has been a planet with that name. The Bible contains numerous commands of God to keep trees and natural distractions away from His altars lest they be construed to have anything to do with the worship of nature (Deut. 16:21 is an example.) The entire religion of Astarte/Ashera/Ishtar that bedeviled the prophets and kings of the Old Testament is the same earth goddess worship we see today (much of it penetrating Christianity in the form of the Roman Catholic Church’s Marian cult.) There truly is nothing new under the sun.

With the desire to worship the creation rather than the Creator comes the desire to control the creation; this leads us to witchery and the rise of Wicca as a religion to be reckoned with in the United States. While the number of self-identified witches, pagans, and Wiccans is wildly variable (anywhere from 100,000 to over three million adherents in the United States), the one truth is that their numbers are growing rapidly.

But nowhere has there been greater capitulation to Neo-paganism than in the UK. With studies showing that less than 3% of the population of Great Britain attends church on the weekends, Neo-paganism has filled the void left behind by the abandonment of Christianity. Even some high-ranking church officials in that country have been linked to the ancient Druid religion, and druid gatherings have been picking up in number, with more and more people flocking to see druidic ceremonies performed.

So it comes as no surprise that Britain gave Harry Potter to the world. Say what you will about the books, they are certainly a phenomenon we’ve never seen before. The problem here lies in the fact that Harry Potter could very well be the poster child for Neo-paganism. As a recruiting tool par excellence, nothing will break down the walls to the further acceptance of Neo-paganism than a boy sorcerer intent on saving his friends, his school, and the confused, non-“gifted” Muggles from evil machinations that threaten the world.

The problem then of Harry Potter that separates him from other books featuring magic is not only the craze that has developed around the books, but that reality is being blurred. When I was watching Bewitched I knew that witches weren’t real. People didn’t go around saying that they were witches. It put a kibosh on anyone thinking that being a witch was a likely choice of religion. But not so today. In my county alone there are several recognized covens. Elsewhere I had mentioned that a young couple came into the Christian bookstore I worked in many years ago and told us they had just left a coven that was actively attacking the bookstore via prayers and incantations. Needless to say, I was naive to this modern reality.

We cannot afford to be naive. If Harry Potter had hit the scene in the 1940s, I believe his impact would have been negligible compared with today. But given that the environment into which he’s flown is primed for his brand of Neo-paganism, I believe the influence of Rowling’s books is far more dangerous. While some might claim that I’m cutting my own throat as a writer of speculative fiction, I can’t keep silent while a generation’s defense against Neo-pagan thought is being systematically disabled by what many Christians consider a harmless story. Fantasy novels of all kinds are some of the bestselling books in bookstores and it is safe to say that the most rabid fans are the ones who are most likely to self-identify not as Christians, but something more akin to Neo-paganism.

Although this may seem like a broad brush, the fact remains that the Harry Potter generation will be the backbone of Neo-paganism in the next dozen years. They’ve been groomed with what on the surface was a mere gripping read, but which planted a seed that will grow into a noxious fruit that we Christians of 2020 will have to confront. We must fight it now and work to deprogram kids before they grow up as enemies of the Lord.