Greg Denham

THE MADNESS FOR MORE

We’re living in a time of “madness!” Yes, there is Islamic Jihad but I’m talking the MADNESS FOR MORE!

The Bible says, “Watch out for all kinds of greed!” Greed is an obsession for more than one needs and an excessive anxiety over money and materialism.

This is a particular challenge in our generation where it seems everyone is trying to sell you something. There is a subtle message that accompanies the ads, it is that one’s well being / even identity and value – is based on “things” — “things” that we don’t really need, but are really just “greeds!”

When I think of what happened 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem that led to the unjust crucifixion of the Lord– the main reason that I see was simply greed! There were power-brokers in Jerusalem who were making a killing off of the worship in the Temple. Jesus had spotlighted the mismanagement saying that the Temple had become a “den of thieves …” I believe those “thieves” intoxicated by “greed’s” were threatened and did their best to stamp out the Light of the world.

The MADNESS FOR MORE. Greed. Materialism. They are NO friend’s of the Family. They are no friend’s of Marriage. They are no friend’s of the ministry of the Gospel, and the church. Greed has a consuming/ intoxicating influence, that get’s your focus on the temporal rather then the eternal and it is consuming. It consumes days, and weeks and years. The Bible calls it the “pride of life!” It trying to derive one’s value and significance and identity based on “things” and it is an endless pit that never delivers.

When the rich lost man Zacchaeus, the chief tax-collector of Jericho, welcomed Jesus into his home it wasn’t long before the issue of greed and materialism and the madness for more came to the surface. Zacchaeus promised to give ½ of his money to the poor and repay any injustice. When Jesus came into his home and came into his life — the idol of greed and materialism was broken and replaced with Jesus!

Similarly, when the Lord has his rightful place in our life money goes back to just being that, money. We’re no longer driven by greed’s. Money now becomes a tool for doing good and serving people. We learn that we have enough to meet our needs!

I know there are  few out there enjoying the book “The Reason for God” by Timothy Keller that we’ve been recommending in the church for a few months now. I’ve decided to switch gears a bit and jump ahead with a few excerpts from various chapters in the book. If you are new to the blog I encourage you to take the time to read all of the exerpts I have posted from  Keller’s book. I think you’ll enjoy all of them and of course feel free to comment!

Enjoy:)

Greg

Epilogue—Where Do We Go From Here?

 One of the most recent people to note this logic in Bono, the lead singer of U2, in a conversation with Michka Assayas:

Assays: Christ has his rank among the world’s great thinkers.But Son of God, isn’t that for-fetched?

Bono: No, it’s not far-fetch to to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: He was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook. Christ says, No. I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: “I’m the Messiah.” I’m saying: “I am God incarnate.” And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet we can take. You’re a bit eccentric. We’ve had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don’t mention the “M” word! Because, you know, we’re gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no, I know you’re expecting me to come back with an army and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he’s gonna keep saying this. So what you’re left with is either Christ was who He said He was—the Messiah—or a complete nutcase. I mean, we’re talking on the level of Charles Manson…. I’m not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilization for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me that’s far-fetched…

The faith that changes the life and connects to God is best conveyed by the word “trust.” Imagine you are on a high cliff and you lose your footing and begin to fall. Just beside you as you fall is a branch sticking out of the very edge of the cliff. It is your only hope and it is more than strong enough to support your weight. How can it save you? If your mind is filled with intellectual certainly that the branch can support you, but you don’t actually reach out and grab it, you are lost. If your mind is instead filled with doubts and uncertainty that the branch can hold you, but you reach out a grab it anyway, you will be saved. Why? It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN –The Reality Of The Resurrection

N.T. Wright does an extensive survey of the non-Jewish thought of the first-century Mediterranean world, both east and west, and reveals that the universal view of the people of that time was that a bodily resurrection was impossible. Why? In Greco-Roman thinking, the soul or spirit was good and the physical and material world was weak, corrupt, and defiling. To them the physical, by definition, was always falling apart and therefore salvation was conceived as liberation from the body. In this worldview resurrection was not only impossible, but totally undesirable. No soul, having gotten free from its body, would ever want it back. Even those who believed in reincarnation understood that the return to embodied life meant that the soul was not yet out of its prison. The goal was to get free of the body forever. Once your soul is free of its body, a return to re-embodied life was outlandish, unthinkable, and impossible.

In the first century there were many other messianic movements whose would-be messiahs were executed. However,

In not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed followers claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead. They knew better. Resurrection was not a private event. Jewish revolutionaries whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest themselves, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option. Unless, of course, he was.

There were doens of other messianic pretenders who lives and careers ended the same way Jesus’ did. Why would the disciples of Jesus have come to the conclusion that that his crucifixion had not been a defeat but a triumph—unless they had seen him risen from the dead?

CHAPTER TWELVE—The (True) Story Of The Cross

“Why did Jesus have to die? Couldn’t God just forgive us?” This is what many ask, but now we can see that no one “just” forgives, if the evil is serious. Forgiveness means bearing the cost instead of making the wrongdoer do it, so you can reach out in love to seek your enemy’s renewal and change. Forgiveness means absorbing the debt of the sin yourself. Everyone who forgives great evil goes through a death into resurrection, and experiences nails, blood, sweat, and tears.

Should it surprise us, then, that when God determined to forgive us rather than punish us for all the ways we have wronged him and one another, that he went to the Cross in the person of Jesus Christ and died there? As Bonhoeffer says, everyone who forgives someone bears the other’s sins. On the Cross we see God doing visibly and cosmically what every human being must do to forgive someone, though on an infinitely greater scale.

Rather, this is a God who becomes human and offers his own lifeblood in order to honor moral justice and merciful love so that someday he can destroy all evil without destroying us.

CHAPTER TEN—The Problem Of Sin

When we turn good things into ultimate things, we are, as it were, spiritually addicted. If we take our meaning in life from our family, our work, as cause, or some achievement other than God, they enslave us. We have to have them. St. Augustine said that “our loves are not rightly ordered.” He famously said to God, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee!”

CHAPTER SEVEN —You Can’t Take The Bible Literally

It is often asserted that the New Testament gospels were written so many years after the events happened that the writers’ accounts of Jesus’ life can’t be trusted—that they are highly embellished if not wholly imagined. Many believe that the canonical gospels were only four out of scores of other texts and that they were written to support the church hierarchy’s power while the rest (including the so-called “Gnostic gospels”) were suppressed.

In his landmark book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham marshals much historical evidence to demonstrate that at the time the gospels were written there were still numerous well-known living eyewitnesses to Jesus’ teaching and life events. They had committed them to memory and they remained active in the public life of the churches throughout their lifetimes, serving as ongoing sources and guarantors of the truth of those accounts. Bauckham uses evidence within the gospels themselves to show that the gospel writers named their eyewitness sources within the text to assure readers of their accounts’ authenticity.

Mark, for example, says that the man who helped Jesus carry his cross to Calvary “was the father of Alexander and Rufus” (Mark 15:21). There is no reason for the author to include such names unless the readers know or could have access to them. Mark is saying, “Alexander and Rufus vouch for the truth of what I am telling you, if you want to ask them.” Paul also appeals to readers to check with living eyewitnesses if they want to establish the truth of what he is saying about the events of Jesus’ life (1 Corinthians 15:1-6). Paul refers to a body of five hundred eyewitnesses who saw the risen Christ at once. You can’t write that in a document designed for public reading unless there really were surviving witnesses whose testimony agreed and who could confirm what the author said. 

 All this decisively refutes the idea that the gospels were anonymous, collective, evolving oral traditions. Instead they were oral histories taken down from the mouths of the living eyewitnesses who preserved the words and deeds of Jesus in great detail.

The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, however, were recognized as authoritative eyewitness accounts almost immediately, and so we have Irenaeus of Lyons in 160 A.D. declaring that there were four, and only four gospels. The widespread idea, promoted by The Da Vinci Code, that the Emperor Constantine determined the New Testament canon, casting aside the earlier and supposedly more authentic Gnostic gospels, simply is not true.

Timothy Keller excerpt …

CHAPTER FIVE – Science Has Disproved Christianity

The first reason that many people think science has disproved traditional religion is that most of the major faiths believe in miracles, the intervention of God into the natural order. The miraculous is particularly important for Christian belief. Christians annually celebrate the miracle for the incarnation, the birth of Jesus, each Christmas, and the miracle of the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead each Easter. Armed with this presupposition, scholars turned to the Bible and said, “The Biblical accounts can’t be reliable because they contain descriptions of miracles.” The premise behind such a claim is “Science has proven that there is no such thing as miracles.” But embedded in such a statement is a leap of faith.

Below are some excerpts from Timothy Keller’s book entitled, “The Reason For God!”

Enjoy …

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Just because you can’t see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one. Again we see lurking within supposedly hard-nosed skepticism an enormous faith in one’s own cognitive faculties. If our minds can’t plumb the depths of the universe for the good answers to suffering, well, then, there can’t be any! This is blind faith of a high order.

Many people have to admit that most of what they really needed for success in life came to them through their most difficult and painful experiences.

Though none of these people are grateful for the tragedies themselves, they would not trace the insight, character, and strength they had gotten from them for anything.

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If you try to explain away all assertions of truth as one or the other or something else you find yourself in an untenable position. C.S. Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man:

But you cannot go on “explaining away” for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on “seeing through” things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too?…a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not see.

 NEW SERIES SUNDAY MORNING (JAMES CHPT 4)

“I’m trying to figure out God’s will for my life.”

Have you ever said that?

I’m sure you have. We all have!

But what is God’s will? Should we think in terms of specific blueprint that we are to find and follow? And, if so, if we were to step out of God’s will, can we get back into it or is it too late? How detailed is the will of God for our lives?  What’s the difference between God’s Sovereign Will and God’s Moral Will? Are there some decisions in life that God leaves to us? Is God a micro-manager or a Shepherd-King? Aahh only some of the questions we’ll be answering!

As you know, we’re studying the book of James on Sunday morning (fast becoming one of my most favorite books!). And, now, we’re entering chapter four of James that specifically addresses the will of God. Is there a more important subject?

I really encourage you to study with us as we grow in the subject of God’s will for our life — and invite some friends too! Let them know that we’re beginning a series on “How Can I know The Will Of God For My Life!” You never know – for them, experiencing God’s will for their life may begin by turning to Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord!

God wants you to experience His will! He’s not keeping it a mystery.

See you Sunday!

JOIN ME

I’d love for you to join in a discussion on the book “The Reason For God” written by Timothy Keller!

I read the book a few month’s ago but I am excited about going through it again and I’d love to read it through with you in the next few months.

As I mentioned Sunday morning, I thought it would be a good idea to read a few chapters each week and open it up for comments and perhaps even some dialogue here on the blog.

If your unable to read through the book at this time, that’s ok – you are still welcome to join in the conversation and it would be great to hear from you!

I’ll be posting some of excerpts from Keller’s book that I have found particularly interesting and insightful that I hope you enjoy (see below the first excerpt from the Introduction to, “The Reason For God”).

Enjoy.

FIRST EXCERPT FROM “INTRODUCTION”

I want to make a proposal that I have seen bear much fruit in the lives of young New Yorkers over the years. I recommend that each side look at doubt in a radically new way.

Let’s begin with believers. A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard  questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.

Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts—not only their own but their friends’ and neighbors’.  It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.   Only if you struggle long and hard with objections to your faith will you be able to provide grounds for your beliefs to skeptics, including yourself, that are plausible rather than ridiculous or offensive. And, just as important for our current situation, such a process will lead you, even after you come to a position of strong faith, to respect and understand those who doubt.

But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternate beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B. For example, if you doubt Christianity because “There can’t be just one true religion,” you must recognize that this statement is itself an act of faith. No one can prove it empirically, and it is not a universal truth that everyone accepts.  If you went to the Middle East and said, “There can’t be just one true religion,” nearly everyone would say, “Why not?”  The reason you doubt Christianity’s Belief A is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt therefore, is based on a leap of faith.

The only way to doubt Christianity rightly and fairly is to discern the alternate belief under each of your doubts and then to ask yourself what reason you have for believing it. How do you know your belief is true?”  It would be inconsistent to require more justification for Christian belief than you do for your own, but that is frequently what happens. In fairness you must doubt your doubts. My thesis is that if you come to recognize the beliefs on which your doubts about Christianity are based, and if you seek as much proof for those beliefs as you seek from Christians for theirs—you will discover that your doubts are not as solid as they first appeared.