Please Subpoena My Sermons

A great hue and cry has arisen from some people in the Christian community over the fact that "the city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor."

I can't understand the outrage. What in the world is wrong with Christians who complain about this demand for their sermons? Such a subpoena should be a cause of rejoicing, not dismay.

I would to God that someone would subpoena all my sermons. I am not embarrassed about what I have said from the pulpit. As the Apostle Paul wrote, "I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ" (Romans 1:16). I preach "Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2), and work hard to present "the whole counsel of God" (Acts 20:27). Nothing I have said in my sermons (there are a couple on YouTube), or written here on this blog, is meant to be private communication that must be shielded by law from nosy people. Good heavens - the whole point of preaching is that it is meant to be public. The more people who hear it, the better. The sorrow of any true servant of God is not that too many people listen to his message, but too few!

A preacher who believes what he says to be important and true wants everyone to hear it - friend and foe alike. I believe that those who feel differently have no business in the pulpit.

"But," someone might ask, "what if turning over my sermons to government authorities results in persecution?"

So much the better! Remember in Whose steps you walk. Jesus' preaching resulted in crucifixion. And his apostles, when they preached his gospel and were beaten for it, "rejoiced that God had counted them worthy to suffer disgrace for the name of Jesus" (Acts 5:41).

Preachers, make your sermons public or do not preach them. If those messages are ever demanded of you, give thanks to God, comply, and rejoice.

Can You Be A Christian If You Don't Want To Be Good?

Can you be a Christian if you don't want to be good?

No. You can't. If you do not want to be good, you will have to pick a different religion. Christianity is not for you.

Recently I heard someone say, "Everyone wants to be good," but I'm not sure I agree. I think most of us prefer satisfaction to goodness. More than anything, we want peace, pleasure, contentment, joy, happiness, and freedom from pain. If being good is compatible with those ends, we can endure it. If being good is a means to those ends, we can positively embrace it. But what if there is a conflict? What if there is a choice between goodness and satisfaction, and we find that we must sacrifice the one to gain the other?

Pastor Stuart Briscoe once asked a little girl, "If you could choose between being happy, being healthy, and being holy, which would you choose?" She said, "I know the answer is 'holy', but I'd really rather be happy." He delighted in her honesty, and thanked her for it.

If we would be as honest with ourselves as that girl was with Briscoe, we would admit that when happiness and holiness contend with each other for supremacy in our hearts, happiness often proves the stronger. Holiness - even the desire for holiness - seems to require a special measure of grace. But though our desire for holiness may be weak, we know that it ought to be strong. Like the little girl, we know what the right answer is.

The other night on Jimmy Kimmel six random men were interviewed and asked whether they had seen the stolen photos of nude celebrities that some hacker had made available. Five said that they had seen them, or planned to. A sixth said no, but his motive was unique. He had tried to take naked photos of his wife, but she had objected, saying that the pictures might become public. If he looked at the celebrity photos, he reasoned, it would justify her objection! Interesting man.

Before showing the video clip of these six interviews, Kimmel made a revealing comment. He said, concerning the photos, "There has been a lot of debate about whether it is even wrong to look at them. It is wrong, by the way..."

It is? It is actually, truly wrong to look at such things? I agree with Kimmel: it is wrong. But note how quickly that parenthetical acknowledgement of right behavior gave way to relieved guffaws as shameless men confessed their indulgence without guilt. Holiness is a hot coal that we may tap briefly, but then we withdraw our hand lest it start to burn.

Because the desire for goodness is rare, fleeting, easily suppressed, and easily confused with the desire to appear to be good, wherever we find a spark of that innocent yearning for goodness we must surround it with tinder, fan it into a flame, and stoke it desperately to keep it alive. Desire goodness. Want to be holy. Or, if you cannot go that far yet, then desire to want to be holy. Take that tiniest first step.

If you do not feel that you have within you a deep desire for goodness, may I try to awaken it in you? Try to imagine what it would be like if you were good. What would it be like if you were always honest, kind, selfless, gracious, pure, and diligent? What if you could respond to every challenge, loss, insult, pain, threat and disappointment with undaunted courage and perfect generosity of spirit? What if you could sympathize with those who suffer and always act in the wisest way to alleviate their pain? What if you could celebrate the happiness of others, and never feel the sting of jealousy or regret that their special joy would be a thing forever beyond your reach? What if you were perfectly reliable? What if you could be that utterly dependable fortress of character to whom the weak fly for refuge and encouragement?

Note that I did not say a word above about being happy, or being loved or respected, or having money or success. I am trying to see if you hunger and thirst (or at least are willing to try to hunger and thirst) for something Christians call "righteousness". Is goodness a delight for you all by itself, a thing to be treasured and hunted down and cherished for its own sake? Or have I only succeeded in provoking you - if somehow you have had the patience to read this far - to shrug your shoulders and say, "Uhh, I don't know. What good would goodness do me?"

Jesus said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled" (Matthew 5:6). If you would be good, come to Jesus, believe in him, and say a prayer to him asking for the grace to become his disciple. If you do not want to be good - or, if you think you are good enough already just as you are - then I'm afraid there is little Jesus can do for you. In the Bible, Jesus had an unnerving tendency to dismiss people who felt they were righteous enough without him.

A Gospel Tract of the Christian Religion

We did not make ourselves, and we did not arise from nothing out of random chance. God made us. He made everything, and we are one of the things he made.

Because God made us, he owns us. We belong to him. As a man who makes a machine owns that machine, so God owns us.

But we are not like machines because we have a will. That is because God put something like his spirit into us. The Bible says that we are made in God’s image. We are not God, but we are like God in that we have the ability to think and to choose.

The Bible says that from the very beginning we have chosen badly. That is why the world as a whole and we as individuals are such a mess. God made us in order that he might love us and that we might love him. The Bible says that God is love. But our refusal to love God - our rebellion against him - has broken the relationship between him and us. Though God loves us, our bad behavior has opened up a gulf between him and us that we cannot cross.

But God did not abandon us to our misery and sin. The solution he devised for our wretched condition apart from him is both beautiful and heartbreaking. The Bible says he became one of us. Like a playwright becoming a character in his own play, God in the person of Jesus inhabited a human body and walked among us.

And he did so for an amazing purpose: so that he could die at our hands. The Bible says that Jesus came “to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus died a cruel death by torture on a Roman cross. The Bible describes his death as God’s way of bearing our sins. God himself absorbed our rebellion and hatred and selfishness and experienced the death that results from it.

Then Jesus rose from the dead. As a man, Jesus could die, but as God he could not remain dead. The Bible says he lives forever, and it describes him as the first of all who will some day rise from the dead.

The Bible says that Jesus reigns forever as king and master. It also says that all who believe in him are rescued from their rebellion against God. God saves from their sin all who trust in Jesus and acknowledge him as their king.

Believe in Jesus. Confess your sin to God and he will forgive it. Be baptized as a sign that you believe in Jesus and wish to follow him.

If you have further questions or concerns, please write to me, Paul, at paullundquist7@gmail.com.

Why Contemplate The Cross?

The other day I watched a video of a guy playing a kazookeylele and singing "The Final Countdown" loudly and off-key. (A kazookeylele combines a keyboard, a ukelele, and a kazoo.) I laughed hard and showed it to my wife, who could not understand why I found something so annoying to be so funny. So I sent a link of the video to my son, figuring that since he gets half his DNA from me (a fact he may regret but cannot deny), he would laugh too.

But when I talked to him on the phone he said that he watched the kazookeyleleist right after seeing Team USA member Paul George get his leg gruesomely broken in an exhibition basketball game. The video of that injury was so disturbing that he wasn't in a frame of mind to chortle over some mindless buffoonery. Bad timing, I guess.

I told my son that I had not seen the Paul George injury. I can't watch those things. To this day I've never seen the famous Joe Theismann or Kevin Ware bone-breaks. Whenever a sportscast shows a player twisting his ankle, I look away. Call me a wimp, and I'll agree with you. Mine is a sensitive nature. Though the main reason I've never seen The Passion Of The Christ is because I object to actors portraying Jesus, it is also true that my spirit erupts with profoundest discomfort whenever I see someone getting beaten. The book Unbroken is one of the best I've read in a while, but I won't see the movie version. I can't imagine sitting there watching poor Louie Zamperini get tortured in a Japanese POW camp for an hour or more.

Christians are sometimes accused of morbidity because of our weird obsession with the agonizing death that Jesus suffered on the cross. Why focus on that? Why are we so into pain?

Well, I'm not into pain. My cowardice and extreme sensitivity, though embarrassing to me, serve to deflect suspicion that I might be guilty of sadism or masochism. That can't be it. I'm no voyeur. I cannot bear the thought of experiencing, inflicting, or even observing great physical distress. I'd rather watch a kazookeyleleist any day.

So why think about Jesus on the cross? Two reasons occur to me. The first is the obvious one, that contemplating the cross of Christ reminds me of the wrath of God toward sin and of his love for me, the sinner. On the cross, God took upon God the brutality, ugliness, corruption and outrage of the whole writhing mass of humanity at its most foul. Evil - including my evil - met its match at the cross of Jesus, and was swallowed up in his love.

There is another reason too, and it is kind of related to my son's inability to laugh right after watching Paul George get hurt. Certain scenes temper our spirits and deepen us, and it is good for us to allow those things to affect us that way lest we spend our whole lives splashing about in a shallow pool of fluff and nonsense. I don't think that regular contemplation of the cross of Christ will - or should - diminish our joy or impair our ability to indulge in occasional giddy romps of clowning around. In fact, it has always seemed to me that devout Christians laugh more than anyone else I know.

But contemplating the cross does make it a bit harder to sin. Try being a real jerk to somebody right after, in your mind's eye, spending some time at the foot of the cross of the suffering Lord Jesus. It's like giggling at comedy after watching a brutal injury - you can't do it.

I like to quote a professor of mine who interviewed evangelical scholars and administrators Kenneth Kantzer and Carl F. H. Henry shortly before they died. He asked them how they had kept themselves from becoming proud because of their prominent roles in scholarly evangelical witness and influence in the latter half of the 20th century. By what means of grace had God preserved in them the spirit of charity, humility and good will? They sputtered in their embarrassment, till at last Henry answered, "How can anyone be arrogant at the foot of the cross?"

C. S. Lewis On The Conditionality Of Love

In The Horse and His Boy, King Peter asks his sister, Queen Susan, if she plans to marry her boyfriend, Prince Rabadash. She answers, "No, brother, not for all the jewels in Tashbaan." Now that she has gotten to know Rabadash better, she sees that he is a bad person. Peter replies, "Truly, sister, I should have loved you the less if you had taken him." Peter could not figure out why she had ever liked him in the first place.

Most evangelicals today find morally repugnant any sentence that begins with the words, "I should have loved you the less if...". They would regard Peter as a terrible man for letting his love for his sister rise or fall in response to her moral performance. But Peter does not apologize for saying it, and Susan is not offended by it, and C. S. Lewis, who wrote the dialogue, clearly regards the sentiment as valid. All three believe that Peter would not have sinned by loving his sister less if she had knowingly married a bad man. (What might have motivated her to marry that villain? His money and good looks? For shame.) Peter rejoiced to see his sister choosing wisely, and that enabled him to love her more than he could have had she succumbed to baser motivations of wealth and appearance. The degree of his love was frankly conditional. It was set, at least in part, to the gauge of her moral behavior.

Christians in former times understood this principle, and, as best as I have been able to determine, never challenged it. The better the person, the more you can love him. Christians likewise understood that the better person you are yourself, the more you are able to love someone else. In 1649, Richard Lovelace, explaining to his girlfriend Lucasta why he had to leave her to go fight in battle, wrote, "I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more." That is a profound insight into the nature of love and its degrees. Because Lovelace loved honor more than he loved Lucasta, he was able to love her more than he could have had he been a coward. Righteous behavior increases love in all directions.

Lamentably, leading voices in evangelicalism over the past 30 years have labored to sever this intuitive and long-cherished connection between goodness and love. They have taken rhetorical sledgehammers to the mortar that binds the increase of love to the increase of moral excellence. They have been so successful in dismantling this conditional aspect of love that they have rendered the words of wise King Peter repulsive to the modern Christian ear. This is a bad thing.

Peter is not the only victim. So also is Sarah Smith, the holiest character apart from Aslan that C. S. Lewis ever dreamed up. In The Great Divorce, Sarah is dead on earth but wonderfully alive in heaven, where she meets with her newly arrived husband Frank. Frank is a damned soul and a selfish jerk who is only visiting Paradise so he can rebuke it. He hides behind a false front, a Tragedian actor, who does the talking for him. As Frank resists Sarah's invitation to leave pretense behind and begin an ascent to the higher mountains of heaven, he becomes smaller and smaller until he disappears completely into his spokesman. Sarah then says to this facade:

"Where is Frank? And who are you, Sir? I never knew you. Perhaps you had better leave me. Or stay, if you prefer. If it would help you and if it were possible I would go down with you into Hell: but you cannot bring Hell into me."

The Tragedian responds, "You do not love me."

She answers, "I cannot love a lie. I cannot love the thing which is not. I am in Love, and out of it I will not go."

Sarah's love is conditional. She can only love Frank if he truly is, and he cannot be unless he repents. When he has so identified with corruption as to be subsumed into it then there will be no real person left to love. But if he fulfills the condition of repentance then he will become more solid and more lovable. If he disappears into evil, then her love also, of necessity, will disappear. Neither God nor his saints can love evil.

The notion of becoming more lovable is a constant theme in Lewis. In The Problem of Pain Lewis writes that God's love "must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labor to make us more lovable." God, in love, works to expunge from us the things that keep him from loving us even more. Good pet owners do this to their dogs. Lewis writes that a man "interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man's love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely." Because the dog is "so nearly lovable...it is worth his while to make it fully lovable." So stand we in relation to God.

Regrettably, the current rhetorical climate in evangelicalism renders it nearly impossible to make this point. Week after week in pulpit after pulpit we are told, "God loves you unconditionally. Nothing you can do can make him love you any more or less than he does now." I have witnessed the indoctrination of this profoundly unbiblical teaching firsthand, and have almost despaired of getting Christians to read their Bibles and believe what it actually says - repeatedly! - about the love of God. (For detailed Scriptural documentation, please see the August 30, 2012 post, "God's Conditional Love".) The depth of the problem might be illustrated by a book we're reading at the church I attend. Amazingly, in a book co-authored by a C. S. Lewis scholar(!), there is a barrage of affirmations that God's love is unconditional, including this doozy: "The good news is that [God] loves us, and His love is not conditioned on our behavior. It is not increased by our performance nor diminished by our failures."

Oh well - what can you do? God is not dead, but sometimes I fear that sound theology is.

Listen, this is important. If you choose to become proud, petulant, cowardly, lazy, impure, greedy, unkind, selfish, covetous, undisciplined or dishonest, God will not love you exactly the same as he always has. That is a lie of the devil, and I beg you to oppose it as firmly as our Lord opposed Peter's satanic resistance to his march to the cross. So what if you heard it from your pastor, whom you know to be a good man, and so what if it made you feel really good inside when you heard it. Error is error no matter how captivating it sounds and no matter how worthy is the man who spouts it. C. S. Lewis taught the right thing about God's love - though he did little more than express ordinary biblical truth and the consensus of 19 centuries of Christian tradition. It is in our day that Christian teaching about God's love has gone off the rails. Here is the truth: God so loves us that he longs to remove every impediment that keeps him from loving us more. If you rebel against his will and become morally corrupt, then, though you comfort yourself all day long with the devil's lie, "God loves me just the same as ever!", that will not make it true. Be warned. There exist real-life Frank Smiths who, defying God and loving only themselves, render themselves unlovable.

But it does not have to be that way. Be encouraged: there are also Sarah Smiths, who, holy as they are and holier than you or I will ever be, still have not fully plumbed the depths of the love of God. There remains yet more of it before them - more of it before you and me, and every step of obedience will draw us deeper into it and swell our hearts in joyous celebration of the fact that God's love, great as it was, has grown greater still.

A Christian Welcome To M. Ward's "Chinese Translation"

You are in for a treat if you go to YouTube now and listen to the song Chinese Translation by M. Ward. Spoiler alert: below I talk about how the song turns out. If you have not heard it, it would be better to listen to it first and let its cleverness hit you fresh.

A young man goes searching for answers and winds up at the top of a tall, tall mountain where an old, old man will respond to three questions. He asks the wise man,

What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart?
How can a man like me remain in the light?
If life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?

The old man answers:

See I once was a young fool like you, afraid to do the things that I knew I had to do. So I played an escapade just like you. I played an escapade just like you.

He explains that he too had once sailed a wild, wild sea and climbed a tall, tall mountain where he found an old, old man and asked the same three questions. And that old man proceeded to give the same answer he was giving now. When he was a young fool...

One perceives that the same quest had been going on since there were wild seas for young men to sail on and tall mountains for old men to meditate on.

The beauty of the song is that it actually contains an answer, it actually shows the way forward to the bewildered and heartsick youth. The answer is in the old man's prologue to his tale. He explains that what spawned his quest was the fact that he was afraid to do the things that he knew he had to do. Rather than doing his duty, he "played an escapade". That is, he went on a wild and foolish adventure that was - truth be told - nothing more than an escape from the moral obligations that stared him in the face. (The word escapade comes from the word "escape".)

When you flee duty, you'll try to justify your flight as "a search for answers" or a lofty quest to "discover yourself and your purpose." But that is just a cruel joke you're playing on yourself. Small wonder you wind up confused and heartbroken. Instead, do the things that you know you are supposed to do - even if they are troublesome and inconvenient or require the kind of courage that you just don't feel you have. Do what you ought. Repent of your sin. Embrace goodness. Do the simple thing that is right in front of you that you have been putting off. In so doing, you will find that you have already arrived at the goal of the quest you thought you needed to go on. The questions that you had will either be answered or will lose their relevance. Joy and wisdom lie in the path of the one who simply puts down one obedient foot after another.

I myself know very well what to do with the pieces of a broken heart. My own heart has been mashed to bits more than once - more than twice, now that I think about it. I am the last person in the world to say that I have succeeded in re-assembling those broken bits through the shockingly simple expedient of doing the things that I knew I had to do. But I know that is where the answer lies. It is all of a piece with what my Lord Jesus Christ taught when he said, "Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own" (John 7:17). Jesus affirmed that the choice to do God's will would precede the assurance that his own teachings were anything more than the platitudes of an itinerant Jewish carpenter. Do good, and you will know.

A Message To Atheist Friends

Assume that those of you who are atheists are right and there is no God. Let me further assume that you have led a relatively comfortable life. By "relatively" I mean compared to the world population through the history of human existence. You live in America or some other prosperous nation, you have not known famine or plague, you do not experience daily chronic pain, your family was not wiped out in a disaster, you have not spent years in slavery or in prison for a crime you did not commit. The society you call home is closer to Lake Wobegone where "the men are handsome, the women are strong, and the children are above average" than it is to hellholes in the Congo where the men die violently, the women are raped, and the children have AIDS.

I give you a microphone, comfortable and correct atheist. What would you like to say to those who really suffer?

I ask because I have found some of you to be mean-spirited and cruel to people who experience soul-crushing sorrows that you have been spared and can only imagine. I know it is not your intention to be mean. On the contrary, you think you're compassionate. I do not assail your motive, nor accuse you of perverse and deliberate cruelty. I am merely accusing some of you of thoughtless and casual cruelty.

Case in point: the following comments from a former minister, presumably now an atheist, that were recently posted on the website "Humans of New York":

It doesn't make sense to believe in a God that dabbles in people's lives. If a plane crashes, and one person survives, everyone thanks God. They say: 'God had a purpose for that person. God saved her for a reason!' Do we not realize how cruel that is? Do we not realize how cruel it is to say that if God had a purpose for that person, he also had a purpose in killing everyone else on that plane? And a purpose in starving millions of children? A purpose in slavery and genocide? For every time you say that there's a purpose behind one person's success, you invalidate billions of people. You say there is a purpose to their suffering. And that's just cruel.

Is it? Is it cruel, as this man insists, to say, "there is a purpose to their suffering"?

There is a question I would like to ask him. "Sir, do you actually think it is kinder, instead, to say that there is no purpose to their suffering?" Think about it. I think you're the cruel one here. Telling a sufferer there is no purpose to his pain is like booting a cup of cold water out of the hands of man dying of thirst. Why deny him his only possible hope, his only source of comfort? Is your truth of hopeless despair so important to you that you cannot rest until those who are miserable embrace it as you do, and relinquish their grip on the only thing that might give them joy? Your proselytism for purposelessness does not merely kick a man when he's down - it stomps all over him until his ribs are crushed and he cannot breathe. Do you then walk away with a clean conscience, glad that you disabused the tortured soul of his stupid delusion that someday his life would make sense? Is that kind of you, or cruel?

A commenter piled on. She wrote,

Yesterday a 3 year old child was crushed by a security gate at a Rita's Water Ice here in Philadelphia. And in the comments on the news article, so many people said "its so sad, but it happened for a reason" and I'm like what possible reason could there be to crush a child's skull with a security gate while she was waiting in line to get some ice cream. Bullshit. That's what it is, bullshit.

This commenter and I probably share the good fortune of never having seen one of our children's skulls crushed before our eyes. It is a pain beyond our reckoning. We can only try - and fail - to imagine the devastation. But my question to this commenter is, "Why in the world do you want to compound the parents' misery now? Who gave you the right? Was your child mangled to death in an unspeakably gruesome accident? Did you suffer this loss? How dare you proselytize now and seek to shove your despairing misery down other people's throats! The parents who lost this child in all probability feel a grief that robs every waking moment of its potential for light and joy. And you choose this moment to chip in with your, 'And there was no purpose to it, by the way. Just random pain and grief. No hope. No redemption. The pain your child experienced in the moments before death and the fathomless grief you experience now have no point to them and never will. And any other view is just bullshit.'"

Wow. Thanks, atheist. You've been a tremendous help. If my son had died in this accident, I would find your contribution to be about as welcome as those "God-Hates-Fags" signs carried by sons of hell from Westboro Baptist "Church" at the funerals of military heroes. It seems that some hate-filled people - whether they hate gays or the idea of God - just do not know how to keep their big fat mouths shut.

I find something sinister in the eagerness with which certain atheists seek to dismantle the hope of those who have suffered immeasurably more than they. What could possibly motivate such passionate diatribes? One suspects an underlying current of, "Because I do not believe there is purpose behind suffering, I cannot bear to see others find purpose behind their suffering. No! They must abandon it. When they suffer, they must suffer hopelessly. Their pain must never know the mitigating balm of faith in a purpose that will render meaningful their miserable lives and miserable futures." Do such nihilists gain satisfaction from extinguishing others' hope? Have they really sunk that low?

It's enough to make you think there's a devil after all.