Confessions of a Seminarian

God in Your Story

In my last post, The Truth of the Gospel, I shared my story of being saved from suicide and subsequently coming to faith. I also talked about how when I became a Christian, I realized that God was with me even in those horrible circumstances. I realize that many people share stories similar to my own, and many have stories of far worse things happening to them. It is very tempting to ask, either during or after, where God was in those times. While it may seem as though God abandoned you to be raped, beaten, neglected, depressed, empty, etc and chose to love others by blessing them with talent, good looks, money, opportunity, intelligence, friends etc, there is another question that my personal experience has lent me to ask:

Why wasn’t it worse?

Why wasn’t I molested?

Why wasn’t I cut on?

Left in a ditch for my parents to discover?

I said before that my still being alive is evidence of God’s work in my life, and it is, but all the evil things that didn’t happen to me are further evidence. Read more »

costs

This is quite a sobering and sad testimony from the UK about women who undergo multiple abortions for the purpose of contraception.

According to a government statistics cited by the article, the number of women seeking more than one abortion is climbing. Approximately 1,300 women in the UK had their fifth abortion last year.

This, on top of another recent report from the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists, warning about the increased possibility of mental illness associated with abortion.

Is there any reason to believe this is much different in America?

Numerous faith-based ministries and pregnancy resource centers work to counsel women who feel trapped in their situations, and consider abortion to be the only way out. While there will always be folks who give the entire pro-life movement a bad rap (and they always somehow seem to be easy finds for the media), they are the minority compared to the folks quietly doing the blessed work of counseling women and providing help.

And there are encouraging stories out there as well, such as this one about a mother who’s delighted her child survived an attempted abortion.

“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” -Psalm 139:13

Where is the Hope?

I despise news documentaries.

All the 20/20’s and Dateline’s of television “infotainment” get on my nerves.  Give me a sitcom and I can forget about reality for 30 minutes (20 minutes after commercials). But with a documentary, I am forced to think about the real world.

My wife and I were watching one of those shows a few weeks ago, and I learned an amazing truth that I never knew.  Somewhere in southern California, there is a facility that could freeze and store my body after I die until science discovers a way to bring me back from the dead.  The cost for this process is about $75,000.

Now I recognize this might be a medical advance to defeat “premature” death.  Isn’t death life’s greatest enemy?  Death will claim us all, and we are correct to resist it as much as possible.  On the other hand we forget that it has already been defeated.

During the program, they interviewed a particular family.  This family of five had already paid so that they could all be frozen at death.  Their children were all interviewed; the 12-year-old girl said that being frozen and preserved was “better than no hope at all“.

Please understand that nothing was wrong with this little girl.  She does not have some other tragic illness.  She just knows that one day she will become sick and die, and the hope of being brought back to life by a medical professional is the only hope she has.

I was horrified to hear this.

Even if this little girl gets cancer in her mid-forties and 70 years later is thawed out and cured, will she not then face Alzheimer’s or heart disease?  No, this is a tragic viewpoint that fails to recognize that no advance in medicine will ever make this world right again.

Death is a result of sin.

Thank God for the resurrection of Jesus! Death will be with us until the day we follow Jesus in his resurrection.  In 1 Corinthians 15:19 Paul wrote that if Christ did not rise from the dead we (Christians) are to be pitied above all others.   One version says “we are a pretty sorry lot”

Maybe you read that and you pity me because you do not believe in the historicity of the resurrection.  Maybe you read that and you think I am insane.  Maybe you have neither of those reactions.  But the reality is that death will take you.  If you freeze yourself, death might delay, but it will take you.  We all have no hope of defeating death.

Those who believe in the resurrection know specifically that there is more life to be had than here on earth.  At the very end of the Bible we are told that one day God will make things right.  There will be no more pain, death, or tears.

This is the hope of a Christian.  We trust in a future when death will die and things will once again be the way we always knew they should be.

Dead Man Walking

For Holy Week, my church put on four worship services to illustrate the story of Jesus’ last week on earth. The Wednesday night service was organized by the pastor and church plant leadership team we are preparing for in St. Louis city (Mike and I are on that team). The pastor and the worship leader are incredibly artistic men, and instead of the usual worship-preaching-worship model of service, they crafted several short videos that were interspersed with music played by the “Soul Expedition Band.”

The evening’s theme was “The Sweat of a Son,” telling the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying before he underwent torture and crucifixion. To communicate the stark intensity of this struggle, the video showed some blunt video imagery. Clips from the movie “Dead Man Walking (the scene where Sean Penn’s character is executed by lethal injection) were inserted to help contextualize Jesus’ impending execution. The following short video utilized clips from “The Passion,” with frequent flashes of the previous video, to connect and contextualize Jesus’ prayer in the garden with the struggle of knowing he would be executed.

Now, I explained all this because we’ve received some interesting responses after this worship service. One response in particular was noteworthy. Read more »