Good News Sense

A few months ago, I wrote about Life Without Rules, where I suggested that God gives us relatively few commands and leaves us free to find our own way within those guidelines. People often ask to know “God’s will,” as if as to say “God, tell me what to do and guarantee my success.” His way is really much more exciting. He guides us with wisdom about the basics and then says, “Go, discover, work, enjoy!”

Where do those principles of wisdom begin? Make the best relationships you can with God and your neighbors. Whenever I ask a class or audience what God puts first, people come up with things like live a holy life, tell others about Jesus, obey God’s commands, or be Christ-like. They all sound pretty good, but they’re wrong. As commendable as they seem, none of them are first. To be honest, I always wonder how we miss this because Jesus is so clear. He says it’s the first and greatest commandment; it contains all the others: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and the second is like it; love your neighbor as yourself.”

More importantly, it makes the others viable and effective. When a believer is inspired and motivated by love, all the other things he or she does work as they should. When love is missing, our best is far from good enough; it is nothing, empty, and worthless. Paul is just as clear as Jesus: ^“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.”

I find this so ironic. I work with young people, and it is obvious from adolescence how important they find relating to each other is for them, whether it is their friends or the beginnings of interest in the opposite sex. Older adults like parents and teachers begin to seem suspect and even out of touch; their peers seem so sensible, wise, and, most of all, critically important. Yet, despite such a powerful interest, they soon learn to mistreat the very people that matter so much. It is almost a puzzle. Why do people do damage to something that seems to matter so much?

We neglect love for love’s opposite. What is the force or motivation those works against love? An easy answer is hatred. A bit more reflection suggests apathy or carelessness. Yet both are wrong. Love’s opposite includes both. If love is caring for another person as much as oneself, then the opposite only cares for self. We call it selfishness, self-interest, or self-centeredness; it is an attitude that seeks more to be loved than to love. Much that is selfish comes from fear, but true love cares more about that which may harm another than that which harms oneself. It is an rather insidious complication and easily becomes fully evil and damaging.

What is the corrective? One might say just obey the commandment, but many don’t really know how. So self-involved, we our often don’t recognize their own self-centeredness. There is a skill that can be learned that will help. It’s called listening. We know people care about us when they take the time to listen. This is so important and so powerful that I define love as “listen, understand, and respond appropriately.”

The wise person puts first things first.  If we respect God at all, we will do what he says; that is where wisdom begins.  Jesus tells us plainly that love comes first…our relationships with God and with people.  We typically fall into the trap of self-centeredness but learning to listen can help us escape the trap.  It is a simple way of achieving God’s clear priority and, at the same time, finding what we really want.

So there it is…a simple prescription.  Now what will you do with it?

SPAM was an interesting concoction made of meat scraps.  My Mom used it as a regular lunch meat, and while it wasn’t my favorite, I respect it for what it is…edible nutrition.  She sometimes fried it, i think, with a bit of brown sugar and then added pineapple, kind of a poor man’s sweet and sour; it wasn’t that bad.

SPAM has come to mean electonic junk mail.  It is unwelcome in our email in-boxes, just like its snail mail counterpart.  I respect the right of people to try to advertise, to a point.  I hate intrusive phone calls; now that I have a cell phone, I never answer a number I don’t know.  They’re welcome to leave a message, and I will call back if I choose.  I glance at some junk mail, to a point.  If it’s crude or offensive, it gets deleted pronto.

A new application of SPAM shows up as comments on blogs, like this one.  I have deleted several hundred, so far, and stopped accepting comments, for now.  They are mostly adverstisements for drugs.  Personally, I think anyone who buys drugs from anonymous Internet ads is unbelievably foolish.  I wouldn’t buy them from some guy in a pick-up whom I  can see; I certainly wouldn’t buy from someone i can’t see!

This stuff is done by electronic robots, so those responsible don’t even have much awareness of where their garbage is dumped.  They waste whatever resources they use to get them here because I must approve comments before they’re posted.  SPAMming us is just an annoyance for me.

I just deleted a page called “What’s New?”  It wasn’t new anymore, any way.  The SPAM was somehow still able to get through there.  Hopefully now that door is closed.  I’ll be looking for ways to filter this kind of SPAM when I have the time.

The good news?  You don’t ever have to see the SPAM.  I read a very touching column recently about the death of the writer’s mother.  I couldn’t believe the things that were posted as comments.  What rule allows people to think that rudeness, crudity, unkindness, and self-absorption is acceptible posted on someone’s web site?  Well, don’t worry.  You won’t see it here.

Talk to you soon with something positive and upbeat, okay?

(We’ve had to disable comments due to excessive spam; we apologize for that because we enjoy interaction from our readers.  We will restore comments when we have successfully addressed the problem)

We’ve al been there. A friend or acquaintance tells us a dreadful story of sin, corruption, injustice, or evil, and we want to assure them of deliverance, redemption, justice, and the victory of righteousness. They ask, “How soon?” We want to say, “Now!” but we cannot. We know too many stories where the desired outcome failed to happen. We’ve been disappointed ourselves. We have our own unanswered questions. We hate to admit it, but we struggle with our own doubts. Like David we ask, “Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me. Hope in God, for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and thy God” (Psalm 42:5, 11; 43:5).

How do we find hope when we feel so hopeless? How can we believe that things will be right when they are evidently so wrong? It’s not like the stories where the cavalry came over the hill just in time to drive off the savages or when the wise man knows exactly what to say and his words are unerringly accurate.

Some have asked, “How can bad things happen to good people?” but we know that none of us are really good. We want to know why bad things happen to innocents, to children who have never harmed a soul. We want to know why the most evil of men—the Hitlers, Lenins, and Pol Pots—ever get the chance to kill, torture, and maim. How can we have hope when this world seem so hopeless so much of the time?

We who ask such questions should read and mediate upon Psalm 37, often and at length. In it, David urges that those who do evil should neither be envied nor “fretted over.” The brief successes of the wicked may seem unfair compared to the setbacks that the righteous may experience, but in the end the unrighteous will disappear like smoke. Those who do good will know the everlasting blessing of God. We observe these apparent inequities and injustices from this moment in time; God puts things to right from his all-knowing, everlasting perspective, one we will share in the end.

What creates evil in the hearts of human beings? How does a seemingly innocent child become an Osama Bin Laden or a Jeffrey Dahmer? Where does the evil of a man who throws a baby out of a car window come from? How does any child become an adult capable of beheading a victim for religion or drugs? This is a puzzle because good people escape the evil circumstances of horrible families and childhood experiences while the most loving parents and finest homes somehow produce an occasional “black sheep,” some who become anything but righteous. How does this happen?

These two sets of troubling questions are related because we live in a world marred by sin. No one escapes; everyone is affected because every person sins. The affects of human sin corrupt all human culture. Even the creation itself is marked by sin. What we often call “acts of God” are part of this shadow on the impersonal world. As much as they cause pain, the more personal evil causes even greater pain, leading to our asking, “Why? Why? Why?”

In Romans 8, Paul calls them birth pains and adds, “All things work together for good for those who love God…” Does this mean all sunshine and roses and happy endings? We know better. The “good” is for those who love God “to be conformed to the image of his Son,” in other words, to become Christ-like. I won’t overstate the case, but I suspect the explanation is simple. The evil in us requires strong medicine to reshape us into righteous, holy people suitable for the family of God, the household of faith, and the kingdom where Christ reigns.

The good news in this is that even the worst of suffering and pain, evil and wickedness, and pain and sorrow produce good, by God’s plan. We may not understand it now. It may feel wrong. Our minds may not be able to make sense of it. I believe, however, that His promises are real and certain to be fulfilled, and one day we will comprehend and appreciate what He will have accomplished, itself at a terrible price—the death of his own son on a cross.