Pastor Rant

“Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now…We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America — to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.” Barak Obama

I’m not writing this as a political statement! I myself am an independent, and unsure of who I would vote for right now in the 2008 election. I would say that I like a lot of what Mr. Obama stands for, but am appalled in regards to his insensitivity for the unborn. With that said, I am elated to read Mr. Obama’s speech regarding race, and applaud its audacity and its veracity. The black world wants to blame, and the white world wants to sweep it away, but the LA riots and the words of Reverend Wright continually remind us that the truth can’t escape us. And that truth shows us there are divisions in this country in regards to race that affect us greatly! As a white person, I am frustrated with my white brother’s and sister’s who consistently deny this reality, and usually vilify anyone that brings up the subject. “White Guilt” is the evil epithet often applied to any white person that cares about race in America. After all, we are beyond the “Cosby Generation!” “Blacks have equal rights!” “Stop spouting that liberal rhetoric!”

I hope that this speech sparks a national debate that aims at some politics I can sink my teeth into. I am tired of the good ole’ boy network doing the same politicking , favoring his/her political careers, instead of diving in to real political problems at the risk of their careers. I think that last week, we found one candidate willing to do just that. I’m sure the pundits will toss this aside as another political ploy to re-right his sinking ship, but whether it was or not, it was refreshing and apropos! I know this election has focused mainly on health care, the economy and the war in Iraq; all worthwhile topics for sure, but our politicians hardly focus on cultural issues that are equally important such as race, and I believe that their (Our) ignorance on this important topic is paralyzing to our nation, and still marginalizes many people due to the stereotypes exhibited by Reverend Wright, and many whites that I have encountered over the years. The same ignorance fuels the fear on our borders (Which is another hot topic in this election), so maybe it’s time to take a long look at the latent racism in the hearts of Americans, white, black and brown! Oh, I forgot, I’ve been told many times that the minority cannot be racist. Then let’s rephrase it, It’s about time we take a long look at the latent HATRED and prejudice in the hearts of Americans white, black and brown!
“Can’t we all just get along?”

I just received my shiny new copy of the much awaited Tim Keller book “The Reason for God,” and so far (2 chapters into it) it has not disappointed. The first part (”Leap of Doubt) handles the 7 “defeater beliefs” he has identified as the top seven reasons Americans do not believe the gospel. The second part (The Reason for Faith) deals with 7 classical arguments for faith in Christ. Keller’s approach is Schaefferian, and his writing reads as one of his sermon manuscripts, which are generally well informed, not too heady, and always humble. So far I would disagree with the Newsweek reporter that claimed his sermons are better. It’s hardly indistinguishable at this point. Anyway, I have always appreciated Tim Keller’s body of work (Almost all audio up till now), and I hope you all pick up a copy of this book, read it, and give a copy to that skeptical friend you are witnessing to at work, or in the neighborhood!

Once again I turn to an article by Dinseh D’Souza and “To the Source,” because I find that he has a lot to say in an age of materialism run amuck. This week Time Magazine ran a front page article entitled the “Science of Romance,” which once again reduces everything man is to a series of $2 chemicals. While their science isn’t neccesarily wrong, as the “To the Source” article reminds us, it is incomplete. No, in spite of science’s hubris, they can’t discover the soul through natural means. Once again we have naturalist dictating epistemology (ie. The only something is true, is if it can be explained through reason alone), and forcing their own faith commitment on to the many who disagree. Hope you enjoy the short article! happy Valentine’s Day!

February 13, 2008

by Dinesh D’Souza

Physicist Victor Stenger in God: The Failed Hypothesis rejects the idea that humans have souls. “If we do indeed possess an immaterial soul, then we should expect to find some evidence for it.”  Along the same lines, philosopher Daniel Dennett writes, “Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems.  You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul.”  Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker adds, “Every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely on physiological events in the tissues of the brain.”  And what happens to free will?  “It seems free to you,” biologist Francis Crick explains, “but it’s the result of things you are not aware of.”

The materialist fallacy, Schopenhauer wrote, is that mistake of “the subject that forgets to take account of itself.”  Schopenhauer was an atheist, but he recognized that the materialist understanding of reality is a very shallow one.  I’m not sure if today’s leading atheists like Dennett and Pinker have someone to care for, but if they did they would surely know, and would not need me to remind them this Valentine’s Day, that love is much more than chemicals.

Here at Harambee we are continually working out what it is to be a missionary for God’s kingdom. We’re asking questions like “Who has God chosen to own communication of the gospel message?” I (Aaron) will be posting some thoughts via video over the coming months on this topic over at The Line. Here’s the first one.

Hi Friends,
Pastor Aaron here. We don’t normally use this blog for these purposes, but a number of you have asked questions regarding our recent discovery that I have Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Just wanted to let you know that I will be posting periodic updates here, including this introductory post. We welcome your comments and questions.

Thanks much for your prayers and support. To God be the glory!

Aaron

Here is a post from www.reformationtheology.com that I though was helpful. I found the third paragraph to be the most helpful. How often do I find myself in love with a mistress? I am too easily amused by the things around me that I often forget about the greatest treasure available to me.

“How May We Know Whether We Love God?

He who loves God, prefers Him before estate. “For Whom I have suffered the loss of all things.” Phil 3:8. Who that loves a rich jewel—would not part with a flower for it?“

On this past Monday there was a debate between Chrstopher Hitchen’s (Author of “God is NOT Great”) and Dinesh D’Souza (Author of “Why Christianity is Great”) at Oxford University. I watched a portion of the debate, and though I am certainly biased toward the Christian position, I felt that Hitchen’s was exposed as the mean spirited wind bag he has become through his books and his vapid ranting. So many of these books by the “New Atheist” are not new in any scholarly way, and are only rapid fire, pop arguments that fall quickly under the weight of reasoned arguments from men like mr. D’Souza. I do not think that we should shy away from reading these books and interacting with them, but I hope we balance them with the fine writing from men like Dinesh D’Souza, and articles like the following from Mr. Daniel Robinson, who himself has a decorated academic career as a Ph.D in neuropsychology from the City University in New York, and has lectured in the psychology and philosophy departments of Columbia, Oxford, Princeton, Georgetown and Amherst. You can either go straight to the link (Below) or read the article that I have pasted into this blog. Enjoy, and let’s love God with our mind too!

http://www.tothesource.org/10_23_2007/10_23_2007.htm

October 24, 2007
Standing Room Only
by Dr. Daniel N. Robinson

There is a sense in which, of all that fish might discover, water itself is excluded. To be so immersed in the stuff, at all times and for all of a lifetime, is to be so habituated to it as to be insensitive not only to its nature but to its necessity. By analogy, one who argues against religion, and specifically against Christianity, is typically oblivious to the fact that the very terms of criticism – suffering, injustice, oppression, truth, science…the list approaches dictionary-length – received either their first or their fullest development within the sphere of religious teaching, practice and disputation. Indeed, beyond the ambit of Christian teaching, what’s wrong with oppression? Aristotle was satisfied that, “It is fitting that Hellenes shall rule barbarians.” The Jews of the Old Testament railed against the Egyptian oppressors but surely not on the grounds that slavery is always and everywhere a moral wrong. I note this to make clear the unintended irony of Christopher Hitchens’s attack on religion as a source of, yes, oppression!

Let me stay with this for the moment. The Sixteenth Century founder of what is called the “School of Salamanca,” the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, is perhaps the lesser known of the leaders of thought regarding the Just War; certainly less known than Aquinas or Grotius or Pufendorf. But it was Francisco de Vitoria’s De Indis that served as an unanswerable indictment against the Spanish monarchy and the Catholic clergy for the treatment of native Americans; a treatise that provided the firmest foundations for a universal prohibition against all attempts to rule the conscience of the individual person. Though tightly and logically argued, De Indis draws its central maxims from the doctrines of the very Church whose clergy are shown to be treasonous to that very teaching. Note that it is not to classical Athens or ancient Rome that one looks to learn that “mercy is the perfection of justice”, or that, by way of universal brotherhood, all persons are of equal moral worth, or that acts of war for reasons divorced from the highest moral ends are unjust, or that each person is under an obligation to love others, even those who might be cast in the earthly role of enemies. In a word, then, Hitchens’s rants at The Kings College debate, to the extent that the content was at all summoning and convincing, must find their grounding in – ready? – the Christian canon. Oh, and yes, NOT ISLAM!

But what about (Gads, here we go again, and again and again…) The Problem of Evil?. Before there was Hitchens there was (a) a veritable army of savants wrestling with this for about twenty centuries, (b) a library of refined, informed philosophical analysis establishing nothing less than the very terms of the debate and (c) a range of candidate-solutions, no one of them entirely successful but each of them rising to levels of judgment worthy of the topic itself. One could have wished that, with all this firmly in place for the better part of a millennium, Mr. Hitchens might have drawn upon resources deeper than his own animus. He did not.

“Evil”, of course, is not a term whose meaning is univocal. Leibniz found it necessary to distinguish between and among metaphysical evil (understood as the defects and imperfections of all that is finite), physical evil (the principal instance of which is the suffering to which the flesh is heir), and moral evil or sin, which is perpetrated by human acts of will. As to why God allows any of this, it is necessary to recognize the three species, for the same answer is not applicable to all in precisely the same way. Why the created universe is imperfect and defective is, on Leibniz’s reckoning, a logical requirement. Where the essence of something is perfection itself, whatever matches it cannot be distinguished from it, this according to Leibniz’s law of the identity of indiscernibles. Thus, if God is distinct from his creations, the latter cannot be perfect.

This would be sufficient (logically) to establish that created life must be comparably defective, but there is more to be said about physical evil: It is the impulse to creativity, to benevolence and sympathy, to resignation. In a word, it is an evil that is productive of good and only one who can see the entire landscape of the creation could fathom just how and where this evil serves the good of the whole.

I do not see this entire landscape, nor does Christopher Hitchens, nor does Dinesh D’Souza. What Mr D’Souza and I have in common, and what Mr Hitchens lacks, is an awareness of the limitations of our perspective. Mr Hitchens believes that his is wider owing to science, but science has its own metaphysical foundations and is thus constrained and deformed by these. Deformed? Yes, for science can explain a cosmos that has been ‘engineered’ to fit into the explanatory and investigative framework of science itself. It’s a good framework: It gets us to the moon and back. It’s a limited framework: It can’t tell us if the journey is worth it.

Enter Einstein, Deism and Theism, and Mr Hitchens’s spurious standing as an interpreter. First, “Deism”. As it happens, the roots of deism are to be found in reactions against the frenzied enthusiasms of the Witch trials and executions, with the better minds of the period reaching the conclusion that the guide must be reason, not scripture. It is a widely and wrongly argued claim that “Deism” is an achievement of the Enlightenment. Early in the seventeenth century, the movement of thought and sentiment had already produced a large cadre of free-thinkers, atheists, libertines, so much so that in Burton’s classic The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) there is a special clinical category reserved for them: that of religious melancholy arising from the woeful thesis that God is merely Nature itself! Charles Blount, who must be on anyone’s list of Deism’s Founding Fathers, put the ism this way in 1695:

“REASON…being the Supreme and Primitive Director of every Man, to infringe its Liberty of directing, is to invade the Common Charter of Nature, and every Man’s Right and Property…”

Nothing in the foundational arguments of the major deists is at the expense of “theism” or, for that matter, Christianity. Rather, the starting point for all religious claims, it was insisted, must be rationality itself. A Deist founder as influential as Blount was Charles Gildon whose The Deists Manual (1705) makes all this quite clear:

“Man then being confes’d to be the Effect of an Intelligent and good Cause, not of Chance, this Cause could want, neither the Will, nor the power to put him into a Station capable of yielding him that Happiness, which was design’d (for) him; but it being evident, that this entirely depends on Society; it follows that Society is of divine Institution…It is also as evident, that God cou’d not in his Wisdom and Goodness, lay on Man a necessity of Society, without furnishing him with means of making that Society conducive to that End, which a Benevolent maker propos’d,
that is, the Happiness of the Creature. This Means is evidently Reason; which plainly discovers, by Man’s Activity of Mind, and Reflection on the nature of Things, all the necessary Rules of this Society, which must make it useful to the common Happiness of the whole”.

Only later, when the French philosophes mounted their war on all authority, equally on that of Cross and of Crown, did the ism take on the dismissive and abusive tone that is now so “official” as to make Mr Hitchens seem nearly scholarly. Yes, Spinoza argued against the notion that God intervenes “occasionally” to keep the universe in order, etc., but Spinoza – as Mr D’Souza correctly noted – is not the last word on Deism. As for Einstein, his several utterances on the subject, chiefly in letters and staged debates, find him recoiling from the concept of a personal divinity stepping in to answer prayers, etc. I have no reason to consult Einstein on such matters, any more than I would consult Thomas Aquinas on the curvature of the universe. However, I might well consult Einstein’s physics if I were of a mind to consider whether the cosmos as given is best conceived as DESIGNED. Obviously, it IS designed, whatever one’s position is on the quite different question of whether there is a DESIGNER. As for this latter question, once it is granted that “X” expresses design at the level of macro- and micro-laws, surely a reasonable inference is that a designer is at the very origin of the thing. None of this is for science to prove or disprove, and only the slaves of SCIENTISM are inclined to think otherwise.

There is no doubt but that “Godless Communism” has been the death squad for tens of millions. Mr Hitchens covers for this by speaking with confident but empty authority about Pope Pius XII and the Nazis. He seems unaware of the Encyclical of 1939 (Summi Pontificatus) which commands solidarity with the Jews and with all who believe in God. How did the New York Times characterize the Encyclical? “Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism; Urges Restoring of Poland”.
Had I time to prepare a reading list for Mr Hitchens, I would be sure to include Rabbi David G. Dalin’s The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis, as well as Ronald J. Rychlak’s Hitler, the War and the Pope.

D’Souza won the debate, not merely owing to the force of his arguments, but as a result of the utter lack of argument on the part of Hitchens. The latter confuses a conclusion with the argument that leads to it. It is not enough in debates of this sort for one side to say TELL ME THE ULTIMATE TRUTH OF EVERYTHING OR I’LL DECLARE YOU TO BE AN OPPRESSIVE FRAUD. What Mr Hitchens would presume to explain is, in large measure, what science wisely avoids and what religion hopefully approaches, even if through a glass darkly.

There is much on offer for Mr Hitchens, just in case his mind is as open as he believes the mind of the Christian to be closed. He can read Dinesh D’Souza’s recent book, which is a truly fine effort; if he is even more philosophically inclined, he might thumb an exceptional recent work by the distinguished philosopher, John Cottingham, “The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value”.

Mr. Hitchens: There’s really much more to all this than you now can imagine.

I was reflecting on the last chapter of John, which we finished up last week. Particularly the part about Jesus asking Peter three times if he loved Him before giving him the command to follow Him, and what that would entail (…”someone else dresses you and takes you where you don’t want to go.” John 21:18). I thought about how easy it is to say we love Jesus, but are we really willing to follow Him (which is what being a disciple of Jesus means: following Him) particularly if it takes us where we don’t want to go? As I was contemplating this, my wife handed me a transcript of John Stott’s last public sermon. Stott is one of the most respected evangelical writers/leaders of our time. It is entitled “Becoming More Like Christ,” and found it to be very helpful in thinking though what it means to be a disciple/follower of Jesus. I pray you find it helpful as well.

In Christ,
Pastor Bryan Nelson

Dr. John Stott – ‘The model – becoming more like Christ.’ Sermon delivered at the Keswick Convention July 17th 2007.

I remember very vividly, some years ago, that the question which perplexed me as a younger Christian (and some of my friends as well) was this: what is God’s purpose for His people? Granted that we have been converted, granted that we have been saved and received new life in Jesus Christ, what comes next? Of course, we knew the famous statement of the Westminster Shorter Catechism: that man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever: we knew that, and we believed it. We also toyed with some briefer statements, like one of only five words – love God, love your neighbour. But somehow neither of these, nor some others that we could mention, seemed wholly satisfactory. So I want to share with you where my mind has come to rest as I approach the end of my pilgrimage on earth and it is – God wants His people to become like Christ. Christlikeness is the will of God for the people of God.

So if that is true, I am proposing the following: first to lay down the biblical basis for the call to Christlikeness: secondly, to give some New Testament examples of this; thirdly, to draw some practical conclusions. And it all relates to becoming like Christ.

So first is the biblical basis for the call to Christlikeness. This basis is not a single text: the basis is more substantial than can be encapsulated in a single text. The basis consists rather of three texts which we would do well to hold together in our Christian thinking and living: Romans 8:29, 2 Corinthians 3:18 and 1 John 3:2. Lets look at these three briefly.

Romans 8:29 reads that God has predestined His people to be conformed to the image of His Son: that is, to become like Jesus. We all know that when Adam fell he lost much – though not all – of the divine image in which he had been created. But God has restored it in Christ. Conformity to the image of God means to become like Jesus: Christlikeness is the eternal predestinating purpose of God.

My second text is 2 Corinthians 3:18: ‘And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness, from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.’ So it is by the indwelling Spirit Himself that we are being changed from glory to glory – it is a magnificent vision. In this second stage of becoming like Christ, you will notice that the perspective has changed from the past to the present, from God’s eternal predestination to His present transformation of us by the Holy Spirit. It has changed from God’s eternal purpose to make us like Christ, to His historical work by His Holy Spirit to transform us into the image of Jesus.

That brings me to my third text: 1 John 3:2. ‘Beloved, we are God’s children now and it does not yet appear what we shall be but we know that when he appears, we will be like him, for we shall see him as he is.’ We don’t know in any detail what we shall be in the last day, but we do know that we will be like Christ. There is really no need for us to know any more than this. We are content with the glorious truth that we will be with Christ, like Christ, for ever.

Here are three perspectives – past, present and future. All of them are pointing in the same direction: there is God’s eternal purpose, we have been predestined; there is God’s historical purpose, we are being changed, transformed by the Holy Spirit; and there is God’s final or eschatalogical purpose, we will be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. All three, the eternal, the historical and the eschatalogical, combine towards the same end of Christlikeness. This, I suggest, is the purpose of God for the people of God. That is the biblical basis for becoming like Christ: it is the purpose of God for the people of God.

I want to move on to illustrate this truth with a number of New Testament examples. First, I think it is important for us to make a general statement, as the apostle John does in 1 John 2:6: ‘he who says he abides in Christ ought to walk in the same way as he walked.’ In other words, if we claim to be a Christian, we must be Christlike. Here is the first New Testament example: we are to be like Christ in his Incarnation.

Some of you may immediately recoil in horror from such an idea. Surely, you will say to me, the Incarnation was an altogether unique event and cannot possibly be imitated in any way? My answer to that question is yes and no. Yes, it was unique, in the sense that the Son of God took our humanity to himself in Jesus of Nazareth, once and for all and forever, never to be repeated. That is true. But there is another sense in which the Incarnation was not unique: the amazing grace of God in the Incarnation of Christ is to be followed by all of us. The Incarnation, in that sense, was not unique but universal. We are all called to follow the example of His great humility in coming down from heaven to earth. So Paul could write in Philippians 2:5-8: ‘Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God some thing to be grasped for his own selfish enjoyment, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.’ We are to be like Christ in his Incarnation in the amazing self-humbling which lies behind the Incarnation.

Secondly, we are to be like Christ in His service. We move on now from his Incarnation to His life of service; from His birth to His life, from the beginning to the end. Let me invite you to come with me to the upper room where Jesus spent his last evening with His disciples, recorded in John’s gospel chapter 13: ‘He took off his outer garments, he tied a towel round him, he poured water into a basin and washed his disciples’ feet. When he had finished, he resumed his place and said, “If then I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet, for I have given you an example’ – notice the word – ‘ that you should do as I have done to you.’

Some Christians take Jesus’ command literally and have a foot-washing ceremony in their Lord’s Supper once a month or on Maundy Thursday – and they may be right to do it. But I think most of us transpose Jesus’ command culturally: that is just as Jesus performed what in His culture was the work of a slave, so we in our cultures must regard no task too menial or degrading to undertake for each other.

Thirdly, we are to be like Christ in His love. I think particularly now of Ephesians 5:2 – ‘walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.’ Notice that the text is in two parts. The first part is walk in love, an injunction that all our behaviour should be characterised by love, but the second part of the verse says that He gave Himself for us, which is not a continuous thing but an aorist, a past tense, a clear reference to the cross. Paul is urging us to be like Christ in his death, to love with self-giving Calvary love. Notice what is developing: Paul is urging us to be like the Christ of the Incarnation, to be like the Christ of the foot washing and to be like the Christ of the cross. These three events of the life of Christ indicate clearly what Christlikeness means in practice.

Fourthly, we are to be like Christ in His patient endurance. In this next example we consider not the teaching of Paul but of Peter. Every chapter of the first letter of Peter contains an allusion to our suffering like Christ, for the background to the letter is the beginnings of persecution. In chapter 2 of 1 Peter in particular, Peter urges Christian slaves, if punished unjustly, to bear it and not to repay evil for evil. For, Peter goes on, you and we have been called to this because Christ also suffered, leaving us an example – there is that word again – so that we may follow in His steps. This call to Christlikeness in suffering unjustly may well become increasingly relevant as persecution increases
in many cultures in the world today.

My fifth and last example from the New Testament is that we are to be like Christ in His mission. Having looked at the teaching of Paul and Peter, we come now to the teaching of Jesus recorded by John. In John 20:21, in prayer, Jesus said ‘As you, Father, have sent me into the world, so I send them into the world’ – that is us. And in his commissioning in John 17 he says ‘As the Father sent me into the world, so I send you.’ These words are immensely significant. This is not just the Johannine version of the Great Commission but it also an instruction that their mission in the world was to resemble Christ’s mission. In what respect? The key words in these texts are ’sent into the world’. As Christ had entered our world, so we are to enter other people’s worlds. It was eloquently explained by Archbishop Michael Ramsey some years ago: ‘We state and commend the faith only in so far as we go out and put ourselves with loving sympathy inside the doubts of the doubters, the questions of the questioners and the loneliness of those who have lost the way.’

This entering into other people’s worlds is exactly what we mean by incarnational evangelism. All authentic mission is incarnational mission. We are to be like Christ in his mission. These are the five main ways in which we are to be Christlike: in His Incarnation, in His service, in His love, in His endurance and in His mission.

Very briefly, I want to give you three practical consequences of Christlikeness.

Firstly, Christlikeness and the mystery of suffering. Suffering is a huge subject in itself and there are many ways in which Christians try to understand it. One way stands out: that suffering is part of God’s process of making us like Christ. Whether we suffer from a disappointment, a frustration or some other painful tragedy, we need to try to see this in the light of Romans 8:28-29. According to Romans 8:28, God is always working for the good of his people, and according to Romans 8:29, this good purpose is to make us like Christ.

Secondly, Christlikeness and the challenge of evangelism. Why is it, you must have asked, as I have, that in many situations our evangelistic efforts are often fraught with failure? Several reasons may be given and I do not want to over-simplify but one main reason is that we don’t look like the Christ we are proclaiming. John Poulton, who has written about this in a perceptive little book entitled A today sort of evangelism, wrote this:

‘The most effective preaching comes from those who embody the things they are saying. They are their message. Christians need to look like what they are talking about. It is people who communicate primarily, not words or ideas. Authenticity gets across. deep down in side people, what communicates now is basically personal authenticity.’

That is Christlikeness. Let me give you another example. There was a Hindu professor in India who once identified one of his students as a Christian and said to him: ‘If you Christians lived like Jesus Christ, India would be at your feet tomorrow.’ I think India would be at their feet today if we Christians lived like Christ. From the Islamic world, the Reverend Iskandar Jadeed, a former Arab Muslim, has said ‘If all Christians were Christians – that is, Christlike – there would be no more Islam today.’

That brings me to my third point – Christlikeness and the indwelling of the Spirit. I have spoken much tonight about Christlikeness but is it attainable? In our own strength it is clearly not attainable but God has given us his Holy Spirit to dwell within us, to change us from within. William Temple, Archbishop in the 1940s, used to illustrate this point from Shakespeare:

‘It is no good giving me a play like Hamlet or King Lear and telling me to write a play like that. Shakespeare could do it – I can’t. And it is no good showing me a life like the life of Jesus and telling me to live a life like that. Jesus could do it – I can’t. But if the genius of Shakespeare could come and live in me, then I could write plays like this. And if the Spirit could come into me, then I could live a life like His.’

So I conclude, as a brief summary of what we have tried to say to one another: God’s purpose is to make us like Christ. God’s way to make us like Christ is to fill us with his Spirit. In other words, it is a Trinitarian conclusion, concerning the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Auralia’s Colors
By Jeffery Overstreet
Waterbrook Press

It’s here! Jeffery Overstreet’s long awaited fantasy novel has finally hit the shelves, and I highly recommend that you pick up a copy.

“Auralia’s Colors” is the first in what will hopefully be a series of works from Overstreet called “The Auralia Thread”. The story takes place in the Expanse, a land of fantasy which, we are told, is ruled by four houses. As the story moves forward, we find that the forces changing The Expanse for good and evil are much more complicated.

This first novel takes place in House Abascar, a land in the northwest forests of the Expanse. Tragedy and greed rule there in the subtle form of a Proclamation decreeing that all colors and treasures in the land be gathered to adorn the castle, so that it might compete in glory with the riches of neighboring lands. Enter Auralia, a stubborn Jane-The-Baptist who is guided by different, but nonetheless mysterious forces. Tension mounts as Auralia becomes a hero of the forced labor camps, who receive not only strange and wonderful gifts, but also acceptance and love from her hands and heart.

Early on in the story, the reader becomes aware of distinctly Christian overtones in the tale, most obviously in the form of the Keeper, whom the children all dream of and the adults almost all deny. This, however, should not keep Auralia’s Colors from broad interest, as Overstreet skillfully and responsibly engages with questions of philosophy and ethics that are universal to rational inquiry.

House Abascar’s quandaries are epistemological and ethical: Are the universal dreams of children to be trusted more than the empirical observations of the old and hardened? Does the learner choose only the evidence that will re-enforce his worldview, and suppress the evidence which does not? Under what conditions should law-breakers be allowed to re-enter society? How can they prove their merit? These questions occupy not just the mind-space of Christianity, but of humanity in general.

Auralia’s Colors is exciting and dangerous, packed with betrayal, transformation, and discovery. As each wonderfully realized character is confronted by a paradigm shaking “other”, their actions and reactions are revelatory, causing a glorious picture to emerge from the devastation that ensues. By the time the story has reached its tremendous climax, many a reader will be filled with awe at the beauty, power, and creativity of one who could weave with such skill and perfection.

“Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted”
2 Timothy 3:12

The following is an e-mail I had received from one of the pastors we are trying to work with in India. His name is Sudhakar, and he and some of his congregates were taken out of a church service and beaten and arrested for converting too many Hindus. The irony is this type of activity never seems to make it to the nightly news, or any of the alleged human rights news post that exist to help people like this. Why because no one really cares about third world pastors in the slums of an unknown Indian city. They’re not economically viable, and the liberal watchdogs have an aversion toward caring about Christian men and women who get arrested and beaten for no other reason than being Christian. We could all learn from our brothers and sisters in the world who are persecuted regularly, and who still love God enough to endure it! Please read the following e-mail, and pray for this country, and these people!

“Dear pastor Mike Gunn, 

pastor sudhakar”(Sic)