Welcome to My World

In the November 2022 issue of Christianity Today, author John Koessler in his article “Truth, Love & Social Media” shares the following:

“After 18th-century literary icon Samuel Johnson had dinner at a friend’s house, his biographer, James Boswell, asked if the conversation had been any good. ‘No, Sir,’ he said. ‘We had talk enough, but no conversation; there was nothing discussed.’

“Johnson’s friend had offered one kind of hospitality at that dinner party, but not another kind: discussion. Conversation, whether remote or in person, is an exercise in hospitality, or welcoming the other. When we engage someone in conversation, we invite them into our thinking.”

Somehow, in the modern church we’ve gotten the idea that hospitality means inviting people into your nice clean home for a classy meal. While that is one expression of hospitality, it’s certainly not the only one. What most of us want is to be seen and known, to have real conversations about real issues. It doesn’t matter where those conversations take place. It could be in your home, your office, the church fellowship hall, or a table at Arby’s (or Chick-fil-A if you’re a “good” Christian).

I think the hardest times in my life have been when I felt like I had no one to talk to, no one who really knew me. Isolation is not only disheartening, but it can also be an enticement to sin. We may say, “If the church isn’t there for me, then I’ll find some other community that will be.” The Bible has more than 30 “one another” commands in the letters of the Apostle Paul alone, and there are another half dozen references to hospitality. That seems to indicate that it is important to God.

“God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Cor. 12:24b-26).

How might we foster those kinds of “one another” conversations in our churches? Who do you see who might be living in isolation and need a listening ear?

“May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (Rom. 15:5-7).

© 2023 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

Clothed

In that first garden, long ago,
Our parents walked with You unclothed.
They were sinless and unashamed
To see and to be seen and known.

Into the garden the tempter came,
Sin brought with it all its shame.
Fig leaves were not clothes enough,
Hiding when you called their names.

The tree of knowledge with it brought
Death to all who knowledge sought.
You found them there, and sent them out,
Clothed in the death their sins had bought.

Another parent, another day,
In the manger gently lay
Her sleeping boy, snugly wrapped,
In swaddling clothes upon the hay.

He grew to face another tree
On the mount of Gethsemane,
Naked hung in our sin and shame,
Unclothed for all humanity.

One day soon will come to sight,
Our Savior returning in robes of white,
Clothed in His righteousness we’ll be,
To dwell in His eternal light.

May we seek to live as those
Who will be in perfection robed,
Free from every sin and shame,
Bowing now before His throne.

“I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for He has clothed me with the garments of salvation; He has covered me with the robe of righteousness: (Isaiah 61:10a).

 

© 2023 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

To Boldly Go

I admit I am a fan of Star Trek. Every now and then I notice some comment made by a character that stirs a recognition of either a biblical truth or a secular lie. Here’s a sampling:

“Mortality gives meaning to human life, Captain. Peace, love, friendship—these are precious, because we know they cannot endure” (Commander Data in ST:Picard S1.E10).

This quote is antithetical to Christian belief. We believe that it is the immortality found through faith in Jesus Christ that gives meaning to life. Love is eternal because God is love and God is eternal. As Paul wrote to the Corinthian church (quoting from Isaiah 22:13), “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” If this life is all there is, then we can either choose the path of supreme enjoyment or the path of trying to make some lasting difference in the world. But in either case, our influence will soon fade. Which brings me to the next quote from the funeral for Dr. Crusher’s grandmother:

“Now we commit her body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope that her memory will be kept alive within us all” (ST:TNG S7.E14).

Although some reviewers have characterized this scene as a Christian funeral, that’s certainly not the language from the Book of Common Prayer— “in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.” Do we really want to put our hope in the memories of those who knew us? How many people who died 100 years ago are truly remembered aside from a name on a stone somewhere? But if our hope is in the coming resurrection, we know that God Himself will remember those who belong to Him, all whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life (Rev. 21:27).

Once in a while, Star Trek does stir more encouraging thoughts. In Deep Space 9 (S7.E2), Commander Sisko has a conversation with the “prophets,” who are almost god-like beings. He asks,

“You arranged my birth? I exist because of you? … Why me?”

“Because it could be no one else.”

This scene actually reminded me of parts of Ephesians.

“[God] chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him” (1:4).

“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (2:10).

Our lives have purpose because God chose to give us each specific work to do. Your role in this world can be filled by no one else. Sometimes we may be inclined to think that we are expendable, that our work doesn’t matter, but God says it does. That’s not to put undue pressure on us to live up to high expectations, but it should be an encouraging reminder that each of us is a unique and valuable contributor to God’s grand story. In that hope, we can boldly go into the day ahead of us—knowing that we have a purpose today and for eternity with Him.

“This was according to the eternal purpose that He has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in Him” (Eph. 3:11-12).

 © 2023 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

It is not uncommon these days to hear calls for tolerance and acceptance that say, in essence, “If you love me, you’ll let me do whatever makes me happy.” Although this isn’t a new idea, the voices are much louder than they used to be. Often this comes from a misconception of the biblical idea that “God is love.” C.S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain:

“By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness… And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness… What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ …whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’ …I should very much like to live in a universe which was governed on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don’t, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction… If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt” (35-37).

David Powlison wrote something similar in Good and Angry:

“[God’s] mercy is not niceness. His mercy is not blanket acceptance of any and all. Mercy to us costs him—the blood of the Lamb. And mercy comes to us at the cost of our sins and pride. His kindness is an open invitation to turn to him in repentance and faith, to come to him in our need for mercies freely offered, and our trust in mercies freely given” (as quoted in Take Heart, Jan. 13).

God’s love is not benign approval of whatever we may love and enjoy. His perfect love means He puts divine boundaries on what is acceptable, because He knows what is best for us. We, in our sinful nature, often choose what is less than best—what is convenient, comfortable, and even corrupt. It is for this reason that we have His written Word to guide us, to help us understand what has been true from eternity, as opposed to what may appear true in our culture today.

The Apostle John wrote, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:8-10).

God didn’t create the world so He could just smile down on whatever His creation wanted to do. He created us to be brought into relationship with Him. Because of our sin that relationship was broken, and so God sent Jesus to pay our debts, redeem us from sin, and make us right with God again. God’s love for us meant that He gave the ultimate sacrifice, not to simply make us happy, but to make us more like Himself, in the perfect righteousness that we’ll experience for eternity if we follow Him as Lord in this life.

So when we look to God’s model of love to guide us, we don’t choose indiscriminate niceness and acceptance of anything and everything our culture comes up with. It doesn’t matter whether the demand is from a child asking for unlimited cookies, or an adult wanting unlimited sex, or anything in between. In love, we should recognize that many things are off limits if we truly want what is best for one another. And we need to look at it from an eternal perspective—will today’s choices lead to ‘fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore at God’s right hand’ (Psalm 16:11), or will they lead to “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 13:42 & 50)? True love should make us do all that we can to point people to eternal life, not eternal death.

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

 

© 2023 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

In the Book

Last week in Sunday school we were talking about differing views of predestination (Arminianism vs. Reformed). There is certainly benefit to studying Scripture to try to figure out what it is saying about salvation. Sometimes though, I think we forget that God is not bound by space and time. This analogy isn’t perfect, but I picture God as the author of a grand book. He has chosen the characters and established their lives and their destinies. Each page, from beginning to end, is unchangeable. But for the characters, each choice they make is a normal outworking of their personality, desires, and priorities. Each choice matters because it leads to the next page of the story. This analogy is supported by Scriptures such as these:

“[God] chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him” (Eph. 1:4).

“In Your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (Psalm 139:16b).

There are a couple unique features of God’s book. One is that He wrote Himself into the story in the form of Jesus Christ— “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14a). Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection were required to make the story come to the proper conclusion. That points to the second unique feature—at the end of the story the book isn’t just stuck on a shelf somewhere. Instead, God will transform His chosen people from two-dimensional characters into fully living members of His eternal family. (Everyone else will not be “lifted” off the page into new life.)

Like I said, the analogy isn’t perfect since it doesn’t address things such as prayer and worship being real interaction with God. However, I think most would agree that eternal life is going to have new dimensions we can’t currently imagine: How did Jesus appear to the disciples when they were hidden behind locked doors? Will we be able to just transport ourselves anywhere we want to go? How will we recognize and relate to the fellow believers we’ve known during this life? What good work will God have for each of us to do on the new earth? “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12).

With the author and book analogy, I have no qualms about saying that God chose me before I existed and apart from anything I could do to earn salvation. At the same time He enabled me to choose Him. He has used all the circumstances of my life—both good and bad—to make me who He wants me to be. Whether I understand all the details or not, I can trust that He will fulfill His perfect plan, and I can give Him the glory for all of it.

“The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before My Father and before His angels” (Rev. 3:5).

 

© 2023 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.