Abortion sweeps away about 42 million babies a year. By any measure, abortion is the greatest weapon of mass destruction ever unleashed.

If 42 million 2-year-olds were being slaughtered every year, our lives would be ordered around the horror of it. Try to imagine that—whatever policies or laws might be used to justify the death of 123,000 toddlers every day, even atheists would call it deeply evil. And all Christians would be able to see, without qualification or reservation, that satanic powers were at work in and through these laws and policies. Moreover, we would instantly grasp how such a demonic weapon was nothing less than a blood-war against life itself, and an assault on the kingdom of God. We would all understand that among those 42 million lost every year were many who would otherwise grow up to testify to God’s grace and pour themselves into the great work of the gospel. That we do not react to abortion in this same way is part of what makes it so supremely evil.

John Ensor, Innocent Blood: Challenging the Powers of Death with the Gospel of Life (pp. 108-109)

Buy individual copies from: Westminster Books / Cruciform Press / Amazon • Buy it in bulk from Cruciform Press

Cruciform Press’ latest book, Brass Heavens: Reasons for Unanswered Prayer, is now available and it’s among the strongest titles released yet. While I’ll be offering more substantial thoughts in a future post, the following (adapted from a few highlights in my ePub edition) is too important to not share:

[Our] relationship to God as Father is alive, rich, nuanced, dynamic, and personal. Our behavior certainly can influence this relationship. Although God the Father will never disown or reject us as his children, our behavior can please or displease him in a thousand different ways.

To be on the wrong side of God as judge is to be headed for eternal punishment—absolute disaster. But to be on the wrong side of God as Father because our sin has displeased him is not to be outside his love, care, and mercy in the slightest…

However, though our sin does not change the reality of our newfound relationship with God, it does impact our father/son or father/daughter relationship with him. . . . When God the Father chastens his children the goal is always restorative—never punitive. To say it again, God does not punish his children—he disciplines them…

The discipline of God is an evidence of his love, not hatred. If God does not discipline you when you go astray “then you are illegitimate children and not sons” (v 8). Therefore, do not be made anxious by the presence of discipline in your life. Be frightened by its absence.

This is crucial for us to remember: If God loves us, He will discipline us in order to be conformed more and more to the image of Christ. It’s not always pleasant, but it’s essential for our growth as believers.

If you want to pick up a copy of this great book, head over to CruciformPress.com or Amazon to order your copy. And if you’ve got a blog, Cruciform Press is running a blog tour for Brass Heavens—so, if you want to receive a free digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, sign-up at the link!

Much of the time, the spiritual wisdom of the world wants us to believe that God (if He exists at all) is unknowable. You can’t really know Him—what He’s like, what He cares about, what wants for humanity. You just can’t know.

But what if you can? What if God—who would otherwise be unknowable to humanity—actually did make Himself known? That’d be great news, wouldn’t it?

Now, imagine if the people who say they believe in this God and have easy access to the source of knowledge about Him… just ignore it?

So many of us struggle to read the Bible—we try different reading plans, to no avail. We ask for prayer and accountability, but things don’t change. We know we should read the Bible… but is it sometimes that we just forget what the Bible really offers us?

What the Bible, and especially the New Testament, offers us is an actual knowledge of God. We are to know him as our Father. “No man,” says Christ, “cometh unto the Father, but by me.” So I can know God, not as someone who is far away in the distance, of whom I am frightened, a tyrannical someone who is set against me, but I can turn to him and trust him as my Father. “Ye have received the Spirit of adoption,” says the apostle Paul, “whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15). In other words, we realize that God loves us with an everlasting love, that he is so concerned about us that the very hairs of our head are all numbered, and that nothing can happen to us apart from God and outside his will.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Let Your Hearts Not Be Troubled (Kindle Edition)

We can know God—really know Him as our Father. We don’t really need to look elsewhere for knowledge of Him—not to books (even good ones), mountaintop experiences, or vague spiritual activities.

God wants us to know Him, and really know Him and the everlasting love with which He loves us in Jesus Christ. What further encouragement do we need to read our Bibles?

Last night our internet service went down. Again. After a few minutes of troubleshooting, I quickly found out it was a widespread problem with our service provider. Then the tweets started.

Oh my stars. You’d think the world had ended because people couldn’t get on the Interwebs. The responses ranged from the mildly entertaining—”Please get your service back up, lest I have to actually talk to my family!”—to the childish (and slightly deranged)—”if your service ever goes down again I’ll burn your headquarters down.”

Reading through the feedback (thanks to Google’s handy-dandy public DNS settings), I was more than a little disturbed by the responses—in many cases, it seemed like a loved one had died. But thinking about the reactions I saw, I realized there are a couple of things Christians can learn from the reactions of others to life’s inconveniences and how we can choose to respond:

1. Inconveniences aren’t the end of the world. I had some work to do and was a bit peeved, but I found a solution to get over it. Some folks were more seriously inconvenienced (like freelance designers and such), but for the majority of us, it meant not being on Facebook for a few hours.

2. You can always do something else. Internet outages really just mean a chance to catch up on reading our Bibles, praying and spending time with our families. Take advantage of those opportunities!

3. Finding a new service provider is always an option. If your provider stinks, get a new one. There are a few out there (we’re considering this one)—and you may even save some money. (And let’s face it, financial stewardship is important.)

4. How you respond to inconveniences tells you something about your affections. “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person,” Jesus warned us (Matt. 15:18). If an inconvenience like having no Internet connection sends you into a tailspin, what does it say about your heart? I’m not writing that as someone above the need to check his own heart—too often I’ve flown off the handle for something completely nonsensical. How we respond to inconveniences—even really frustrating ones like the “Rogerspocalypse” as the Toronto Star lovingly called it—says more about us than the one we’re upset with.

None of us wants to be an unnecessary stumbling block in the way of someone believing the truth of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. But how often do we consider our reactions in light of our witness? Is the grace of God reflected in our reaction—or are we more likely to be snarky and angry?

These are certainly not profound things we can learn from a (in the grand scheme of things) minor inconvenience, but hopefully they’re helpful.

Right now I’m reading a book that’s rocking my socks, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry as a Human Being by Zack Eswine. This book is all about the human side of ministry—specifically realizing that all of us who minister to others (vocationally or otherwise) are human beings.

Early on in the book, Eswine writes about limitations and the danger of ungrounded ambition:

 …aspirations, even noble ones, can go awry. Human nature is restless. “Its ambition,” Calvin said, “longs to embrace various things at once.” Discontent with one thing at a time locally exposes the longing for grander things that can tempt even a shepherd. Shepherd is one of the primary images used in the Bible to describe a shade giver. The ambition of a shepherd can err. God rebukes erring shepherds. The error includes the lack of locality in their ambition…

Shepherds are meant to give shelter and refuge to an ordinary people in a particular place. So, when I think about giving shade locally, I feel Calvin’s point. Each of us longs to embrace various things at once. Locality can mess with one’s contentment. That is why leaders sometimes strive to be everywhere at once. But to be everywhere generally is to reside nowhere particularly. To strive for various things at once is to announce one’s secession from place. The driven have no places in what they imagine; only positions and postures. (p. 58)

What Eswine identifies here is important. There’s a kind of ambition or restlessness that is actually good and God-honoring; it’s what some have described as a holy discontent. A kind that recognizes the evidences of God’s grace in the lives of people or events, while also recognizing there’s so much more to be done.

But there’s a different sort of ambition that makes us see where we are and only wish we were somewhere else. So we run in all directions, doing as much as we can for as long as we can until we crack.

Or realize that maybe God’s purposes for us involve staying somewhere for a little while longer than we’d expected.

For a number of years, we’ve been wrestling with this whole question of “calling” (or whatever language you want to use)—and while we’ve seen God providing clear answers in some regards, we’ve not seen a lot of definitive forward motion toward a complete answer. And it can be kind of frustrating. I like getting things done, achieving goals, and so forth.

Waiting is hard, and I don’t really like it.

But shepherding, like anything else, requires waiting. “Complete patience” is connected with the role of shepherding in 2 Tim 4:2 because people don’t learn quickly (no matter how much we may want them to). Sometimes that person who doesn’t learn quickly is us.

Whatever our ambitions are—maybe it’s being a bestselling author, recognized as a leader, or pastoring a large and growing church—our locality reminds us that we can’t make these things happen on our own (and I really am speaking to myself here). We are where we are because God wants us there. Which means we can embrace it and wait, we can fight, or we can completely disengage.

When we fight, we always lose. When we disengage, we dishonor God. But when we wait and embrace our locality, we get to fulfill whatever God’s called us to for the moment.

Waiting is hard, but we need to do it. 

photo © Mark Barner

Recently Emily was listening to the CBC (that’s the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for the many non-Canadians out there) and they started playing a song by Jason Collett (of Broken Social Scene fame) called “I wanna rob a bank.” Written against the backdrop of the Occupy protests, this catchy tune captures the frustration of many about the alleged misdeeds of the wealthy elite while simultaneously making you bop your head.

About a minute into the song, with it’s repeated refrain of “I wanna rob a bank, don’t you wanna rob a bank,” there’s a funny line:

Someone’s gotta save the day / even Jesus would say it’s okay / to wanna rob a bank / Don’t you wanna rob a bank?

Collett’s done something fascinating in this song, capturing the frustration and sense of self-justification (or is it satisfaction?) many in the Occupy movement felt while inadvertently illustrating our habit of re-imagining Jesus in light of our cause, whatsoever it may be.

But in doing so, we do ourselves (and Jesus) a disservice.

Because we want to recast Jesus as being for whatever we are for, we fail to recognize that sometimes—or rather all the time—our hearts lie to us (see Jeremiah 17:9). Just because we feel strongly about a particular issue—whether corporate greed, firearms regulations, or eating bacon—doesn’t mean Jesus would agree with us.

That might sound obvious, but consider how often we deceive ourselves on this point. We justify our sinful responses in our anger when offended. When the economy collapses, we declare it the fault of the “Wall Street fat cats” and fail to take responsibility for own spending habits that contributed to the problem. We blame our office environments for making us fat instead of looking at our own eating habits.

We want to be the victim and for Jesus to side with us—even when we’re wrong.

But Jesus isn’t a bankrobber, and he’s not riding shotgun in the getaway car on the way to hell.

A Christ of our own imaging will become complicit in our nefarious schemes, but the real Jesus will have none of it. We should do likewise.

Knowing God is a matter of personal dealing, as is all direct acquaintance with personal beings. Knowing God is more than knowing about him; it is a matter of dealing with him as he opens up to you, and being dealt with by him as he takes knowledge of you. Knowing about him is a necessary precondition of trusting in him…but the width of our knowledge about him is no gauge of the depth of our knowledge of him.

John Owen and John Calvin knew more theology than John Bunyan or Billy Bray, but who would deny that the latter pair knew their God every bit as well as the former?…If the decisive factor was notional correctness, then obviously the most learned biblical scholars would know God better than anyone else. But it is not; you can have all the right notions in your head without ever tasting in your heart the realities to which they refer; and a simple Bible reader and sermon hearer who is full of the Holy Spirit will develop a far deeper acquaintance with his God and Savior than a more learned scholar who is content with being theologically correct. The reason is that the former will deal with God regarding the practical application of truth to his life, whereas the latter will not.

J.I. Packer, Knowing God (Kindle edition)

Not too long ago, I received a copy of one of the many books on someone’s alleged trip to heaven and back. I couldn’t bring myself to read more than a few pages before putting it down.

This was probably the biggest trend I noticed in the “Religion and Spirituality” category of publishing over the last couple of years (especially since the wild success of Heaven is for Real), one I hope won’t continue into 2013.

I chose to not read the book about visiting heaven I received—and will continue to do the same for one reason:

They’re almost certainly not true.

That may seem like a nasty bit of prejudgement, but here’s the thing: the Apostle Paul was “caught up to the third heaven”and what he saw and heard “cannot be told, which man may not utter” (see 2 Cor. 12:2-4). Paul in these verses describes this vision of heaven in the third person—which some commentators suggest means he was so hesitant to even talk about it at all, especially in the context of his self-defence against the “super-apostles” at Corinth.

So why do so many people feel they’ve got a freedom that Paul did not?

Some may ask, “but what about other heavenly visions in Scripture?” There are a few experiences recorded. One in particular (Ezekiel) is filled with such peculiar imagery it’s probably not a good idea to base your full theology on it. The others (in Isaiah and Revelation) have a consistent focal point: Jesus.

Isaiah saw the Lord on His throne with the angels singing, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isa. 6:3) His response? To utter a prophetic curse upon himself and wish for his own death (Isa. 6:5). He recognized his own sinfulness and knew he had no right to stand before the Lord. John’s experience was much the same, falling at the Lord’s feet “as though dead” (Rev. 1:17).

They saw the Lord and were humbled and terrified, until the Lord intervened. Isaiah’s unclean lips were made clean with a coal from the Lord’s altar; John was told to “Fear not.” And their right response was worship of Jesus.

But back to Paul. His speaking of being caught up into paradise”—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows,” he reminds us (2 Cor. 12:3)—was for a single purpose: to quiet the needless boasting about visions.

In effect, he was saying, “If you really want to see who’s got the greater ‘achievements,’ I win.” But he does so in a very interesting way—rather than boasting in his successes (after all, he was instrumental in converting a massive amount of people, and planting dozens of churches), he boasts in his weaknesses. He tells of his many shipwrecks, lashings, beatings, being left for dead, and of the “thorn in the flesh” the Lord permitted to persist.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:9-10)

This is something we ought to keep in mind as we read or hear of others’ experiences. If what you read or hear does not model the same attitude as that of Paul, Isaiah and John—postures of meekness and humility, a fearful trepidation of even discussing such things!—then beware. I realize many of these authors are trying to be genuinely encouraging to people who are hurt, lonely and grieving, but they don’t need 72 Seconds in Heaven—they need Revelation 4, 5 and 21! There is no greater comfort for us than what’s found in the Scriptures. Christian, look nowhere else.