Maybe Joel Osteen is on to something

Though I don't really make a big deal about it, I have not been all that excited about Joel Osteen. I don't have a huge burden to discredit his ministry, because I'm sure that people are being blessed by him to some extent. And though I am not totally prepared to say that he is the greatest thing since sliced bread (he's more of a motivational speaker than anything else), a few things I've learned about him recently have softened my opinion about him.

One of which, if you haven't already seen or heard, is that he has spoken out against eating unclean meats - quite a step for anyone to take, but especially him. He admitted to his church that he has not been eating pork for a while, and that we should abstain from lobster, craw fish, etc.

You can watch the video of this here (Windows Media).

No matter what you think of the man, you at least have to give him credit for talking about this issue and candidly telling his church that something is wrong!

A Trip to Florida and an Ellen White Quote

I got back yesterday afternoon from a weekend trip to Florida. I spoke three times on Sabbath at Advent HOPE Florida, which is a Sabbath School group that meets at the Forest Lake Church. I had a great - but tiring - time speaking about the Song of Solomon and meeting wonderful people who have a similar passion for the Lord. It is always nice to meet other young adults who have a burden for sharing the three angels' messages.

As an added bonus, I got to spend some time with my sister, brother-in-law, niece, and a few aunts and uncles - who all live in the Orlando area. It was my niece's first birthday on Sabbath as well, and it was great to be there for her big day. On Friday afternoon, we went swimming at my brother-in-law's parent's house. The picture to the right is of Calleigh and me enjoying the water. (The one below is Calleigh's reaction to her birthday cake. For some reason, she starts going berserk when she sees birthday cake. We're not sure if it's the cake itself, or the candle, or the fact that everyone is focused on her. Imagine a child that refuses to eat cake, though!! Perhaps we should have given her a broccoli cake instead.)

My brother-in-law, Duncan, and I also saw Ben Stein's controversial movie, Expelled, which was fairly enlightening and interesting. I'd like to share my in-depth thoughts on that at some point in the near future, so stay tuned for that!

Perhaps the only bad thing of the weekend is that my luggage didn't arrive with me from Orlando. You would think that with a direct flight, it would be fairly easy to get my bags to Manchester, but, alas, it was left in Orlando. At least they didn't lose it the other way around: it's always a lot easier to cope without your luggage when you are home than when you are on the road.

Finally, I wanted to share a wonderful Ellen White quote that I came across this morning. As always, she is right on. Her thoughts on a grateful and appreciative heart are a very appropriate reminder to what I consider the most important - yet neglected - element of the Christian experience:

Gratitude should fill our hearts as we think of what God through Christ has done for us. The thought of the infinite gift made to us should refine and ennoble us. As we think of the love and goodness of God, we should banish selfishness from our hearts, asking the Lord to make us kind and compassionate. Has not God a right to our affections? Do not our powers belong to Him? What more could He have done for man than He has done? In one great gift He poured out for us all the treasures of heaven. Why then do we not talk of His love and tell of His power. (1888 Materials, p. 569)

Global cooling, anyone?

So now the "scientific community" is telling us that the world is experiencing global cooling - "a result of a natural and temporary shift in ocean currents." They predict that this cooling effect could last for the next 7-22 years, and that it has been going on for the last ten years or so.

Whatever happened to global warming? Whatever happened to Al Gore's infamous line, "The planet has a fever"?

Apparently it doesn't.

Admittedly, there is a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth among these environmentalists, as they worry that the decrease in temperature across the planet "may take the heat out of action to fight" global warming.

Gee, do ya think?

The funny thing is, we keep hearing that our human activity is causing this massive shift in the climate - the warming, that is - and that if we don't change, then, well, who knows what will happen? But let me get this straight - global warming is man-made, but global gooling is natural?

Isn't that a bit arbitrary?

Meanwhile, Al Gore goes around and wins Nobel Peace Prizes for his fight against climate change (what climate change has to do with peace, I still haven't figured out) and we keep being propagandized by this environmental agenda. About a month ago, I went to two IMAX movies at the Boston Museum of Science and both of them talked about global warming, citing them, much like evolution, as cold, hard, assumed facts.

In the second movie, on the Grand Canyon, I listened as, in plain English, the narrator (Robert Redford) told us how, 500 years before, part of the Colorado River had dried up where a Native American tribe had lived. There was a terrible drought that disbanded the village. And then he said, "And we want to make sure that doesn't happen again. So take shorter showers. Don't buy bottled water. . ." And then in the next shot, they cut away to Las Vegas, telling us how this city has "drained" the Colorado River of its once-plentiful water.

I was utterly confused. Surely lands Las Vegas couldn't have caused the drought 500 years previously. And surely the drought didn't come about 500 years before because Bobby took 10 minute showers instead of 8. If a drought happened before - sans Las Vegas and bottled water and the 6 billion people that roam this planet now - whose to say that anything I do now will prevent it from happening again?

In the other film, we were taken to the Swiss Alps - a place where the glaciers are seriously disappearing. Yet the movie itself seemed to admit that these same glaciers go in cycles every couple of thousand years or so. But a few minutes later, they say, "Global warming is jeopardizing these glaciers. Stop driving your car."

Apparently the producers are a little confused, as are many scientists.

Well which is it? Global warming? Global cooling? A natural cycle? El Nino? La Nina?

Meanwhile, with this whole global cooling epiphany - whose mention is scantly found anywhere on any major news station or newspaper - scientists have now given themselves a little cushion so they can come up with another explanation 15 years down the road when they realize that this global warming thing isn't panning out.

And, oh yeah, New Hampshire almost set a record this year for snowfall.

And by the way, I definitely believe that we should take care of God's planet. We are definitely called to be stewards of it. But let's just make sure we know what that stewardship really looks like, instead of being sold a bill of goods. Should we try to conserve water? Yes. Does this mean I shouldn't buy it in a bottle? Maybe not. Should we become vegetarians so that more of the rain forest in South America - where a lot of the cattle is raised, only to find its way onto American's plates - is destroyed, all the while displacing thousands of people from their natural habitat? Most definitely. But, again, let's just make sure we know what we're talking about so we don't needlessly place ourselves in slavery to the environment. We are called to be "stewards" of this planet, not slaves to it.

Follow-Up on Salvation

I just wanted to share a quote from Ellen White that I happened to stumble upon this morning. It speaks beautifully to my previous post on "Defining Terms" and how a person is "saved." Regarding the idea that there are "conditions" for salvation, notice what she writes (all emphasis mine):

The question will come up, How is it? Is it by conditions that we receive salvation? Never by conditions do we come to Christ. And if we come to Christ, then what is the condition? The condition is that by living faith we lay hold wholly and entirely upon the merits of the blood of a crucified and risen Saviour. When we do that, then we work the works of righteousness. But when God is calling the sinner in our world, and inviting him, there is no condition there; he is drawn by the invitation of Christ and it is not, "Now you have got to respond in order to come to God." The sinner comes, and as he comes and views Christ elevated upon that cross of Calvary, which God impresses upon his mind, there is a love beyond anything that is imagined that he has taken hold of. (1888 Materials, p. 537)

She seems to be unequivocally clear that the only "condition" for salvation is that we come to Christ by faith. The idea, as some have proposed, that faith and works are a condition for salvation, does not jive with the biblical witness, or Spirit of Prophecy.

I was accused by a well-meaning brother this last week of buying into "the popular line in contemporary Adventism" (proposed by Morris Venden and Jack Sequiera, they claim) that "first we get saved, then we become obedient." Besides the fact that I don't say we "get saved" (an evangelical straw-man phrase which implies that I believe once a person "gets" saved, then they cannot lose that salvation), it seems evident to me that obedience does follow salvation. As Ellen White says, "When we do that [ie., come to Christ by faith], then we work the works of righteousness." Those works of righteousness do not precede faith. On the contrary, they accompany it and are the result of a true and living faith - which is what James has said all along.

Where these well-meaning brethren come up short is that they all-too-often point away from Calvary, when the Bible and Ellen White keep pointing us back to it. For some reason, we cannot get it through our thick skulls that the cross of Christ is powerful enough, in and of itself. We do not need to say that we are "saved by faith and works." We do not need to say that "obedience is a condition for salvation." Understanding Christ and Him crucified is what "saves" us, and contemplating Christ's infinite sacrifice is powerful enough to compel a person into an obedient and mature walk with God. "For I determined not to know anything among you, except Jesus Christ and Him crucified" (1 Cor 2:2). "For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died; and He died for all that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them, and rose again" (2 Cor 5:14, 15).

Why is that idea so scary to some people?

A Leap in Logic

So I just read this article in the Wall Street Journal, talking about how human beings are innately wired to react positively to the face of a baby. It is a fascinating hypothesis, though, of course, that's just what it is: a hypothesis. Judging by the fact that I am with my little niece right now, though, and I love to see her little face, I would have a hard time arguing against it.

What is more unbelievable, though, is the conclusion that researchers have drawn from this study. Oxford child psychologist Alan Stein reflects: "It suggests we are probably all hard-wired to respond and care for babies, to help us perpetuate the species." With such a conclusion, Stein goes from any scientific explanation, to pure conjecture. Nevermind that the hypothesis is debatable to begin with - the conclusion that this is some innate wiring that evolution has built into us has no basis in the evidence.

Yet if someone were to declare that this is some wiring that God has built into the human psyche, they would be laughed out of the scientific community.

While we should be intrigued by such research, making highly speculative leaps in logic is problematic.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

My sister was telling me yesterday about a Bible study that she attends every week. There are five or six women - from varying Christian faiths - who attend this study, and they have been looking at different aspects of Christianity. Just this past week, they got sidetracked a little bit, and they got to talking about different theological questions that always seem to come up. Among them, a question invariably came up that stumped my sister. She admits that this is the one question she has the most difficulty answering. A few of the ladies asked, "Does it really matter what we believe? We all pretty much believe the same things when it comes down to it. As long as we all believe in Jesus, we should be able to put our differences aside, shouldn't we?"

In this postmodern climate that we live in, this seems to be a fairly popular sentiment. And I understand why. The history books show us the results of allowing theology to divide. The Spanish Inquisition claimed the lives of thousands; Ulrich Zwingli had Anabaptists drowned in Switzerland because of their insistence on rebaptizing; and we still see the conflict in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics. Why should one's views on God be the cause of so much animosity and hatred?

Problem is, the Bible doesn't work that way. And neither does life. We all have a yearning to understand truth on some level. At some point, kids give up on the idea of Santa Claus really existing, and if a grown-up were to insist on his existence, we would question his sanity. This is not to say that anyone has ever been killed in the name of Santa Claus and, to be sure, killing in the name of God is absolutely repulsive, but one of the basic yearnings of the human heart is to be able to separate truth from fiction. We may all have a desire for community and for getting along, but that will never be enough to put a pause on our desire to understand truth.

Take marriage, for example. When I first started dating my wife, I wasn't merely satisfied with staring into her eyes for hours at a time, silently passing the hours away. I wanted to know everything about her. I wanted to know her fears, her dreams; I wanted to know the truth about her.

And so it is with God. The person who has a deep heart-experience with Him doesn't simply want to "get along" with everyone else at the expense of knowing God. That person naturally wants to know all the peculiarities of God's personality. He or she cannot be satisfied with peripheral knowledge about God, and forfeiting a knowledge about God for the sake of community would never satisfy that person. Deep down inside, we all have a deep yearning to understand the things of God, and to ignore that knowledge and truth would be to go against that which we long for.

More significantly, however, the Bible has some strong things to say about truth. I came across a delightful verse the other day - before talking with my sister - that addresses this very issue. It's not a verse we hear quoted very often, but it has great relevance to those of us who just want to get along at the expense of a deepening understanding of God. Paul writes that there are certain individuals who will perish "because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved" (2 Thess 2:10).

Did you catch that? Paul makes it abundantly clear that, in order to be "saved," we have to have a "love [Greek: agape] of the truth." This mentality of "it doesn't matter what you believe" is unbiblical and will ultimately lead to a person's destruction. In our pluralistic culture, this idea doesn't sit well with us. And yet, if we choose to humble ourselves to the authority of the Bible, we have to grapple with this idea.

No, we shouldn't let theology divide us to the extent that it far-too-often does. But neither should we feel that it doesn't matter if, for example, I believe in Arminianism, and my buddy believes in Calvinism. God cares immensely about how He is presented to the world. Wouldn't you also feel hurt if your character was misrepresented to others - the way that God is so often misrepresented today?