Tag Archive for: sin

The really hard questions of life…

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A brother recently shared this with me: He said, “The hardest questions about life (for Christians) are not the Theological ones (and they can be very difficult) but the existential ones.”

I’m sure by now many of us have seen the video of the Ugandan househelp brutalising the little child left in her care. I’m not yet a parent, but I can tell that any parent in their right mind will not hesitate to rain down fire and brimstone on any person who did 10% of what that househelp did.

This video was the subject of discussion I was having with my friend when he made the point about the hardest questions Christians ask.

When he saw the video, his mind went to his nine month child and he said to me “I told myself there would be no place that girl would go to keep her safe from me”. Of course I’m paraphrasing, but you get the picture. It evokes a strong sense of the need to bring retribution and the worst form of punishment upon this househelp.

And then my friend said his wife sent him a follow up on the video that the househelp was so badly beaten by the child’s father that she was in a wheelchair and had to be fed through a tube. (Now I’m not sure that part of the story is true). But upon hearing it, my friend did say that he felt a sense of calm and peace and some small joy because the right thing had been done. The father had gotten some justice for his helpless child.

And then my friend said he felt this question screaming itself at him, “WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?”

These are the hard questions we ask. The existential ones.

The househelp made in the image of God. A person for whom Christ died. Someone Christ loves and yet, someone whom I, – who likes to call himself a living breathing Christian, filled with the Holy Ghost, – wants to see beaten, punished as brutally as humanely possible (and I would have done it if I was close to her… I would have cast the first stone and proudly done so…) and all this with zero love and compassion in my heart for her.

This is the love and compassion I demand (beg) of Christ when I sin against Him. When I confess my sins. This is the love and compassion I have spoken about when I have taught countless numbers of people about forgiving others as Christ has forgiven us.

After all, all sin is ultimately against God and so her sin is first and foremost against God. And if God, the offended party seeks to bring her to a place of repentance so He bestows her with her forgiveness, using us (Christians) as vessels… then…

But yet, I still want to hit her. Do something to make her hurt as much as she hurt the little child. She sinned against the child, and the family of the child, and me and all of the social media universe. We are all angry!!!

And for many Christians, we are too angry to ask, “What would Jesus do?”.

Jesus wrote on the floor (in the sand) and asked the Pharisees, “Let Him who is without sin cast the first stone”. When they (the raging angry crowd) had all left , He said to her, the adulterous woman, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”

The hardest questions we ask are the existential ones. How do we establish Christ’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven as he has so demanded of us?

What would Jesus do? What would He do in this particular case?

I’m sure He (Jesus) would forgive. I’m sure He would forget. I’m sure He would lead the househelp to the knowledge of her sin and to her need for salvation. He’d introduce her to Himself, the living Saviour and give her a hope that would give her everlasting life.

Beyond that, He would come and dwell in her heart and make her a new creation. One whose life would be so devoted to Him it would be a marvel for the world.

He most certainly would not hurt this househelp. NO! He’d reach out to her with His love. He’s always doing this.

“But Jesus isn’t the father of the baby”, I argued with myself. No He isn’t. But can the father of the baby love his child more than Jesus does?

These are the hard questions we ask. The existential ones.

Now I’m not saying that she should not be punished for her deed. I’m not saying that she should be hugged and given warm glass of milk. No. Not at all.

There are laws that govern our society. These laws have punitive measures that enforce some order in our society. Without the laws and their punishments our society will descend into anarchy.

But these laws and their punitive detractors are careful to treat the worst of offenders (criminals) with a dignity and a respect for their humanity they do not provide their victims.

So if the laws of every “civil” society reaches out to protect the humanity of the worst criminal offenders, then how much more the Christian?

The existential questions are hard…

But as hard as our existential questions may be, Jesus models the answers for us in his person and character and this is the character and person we are to emulate, after all, why are we called Christians?

 

When the dead preach

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I am here again in the Dissection Room (DR), the familiar scent of Formalin highlighting the sanctity of its atmosphere. Apart from the incense-saturated atmosphere, and the white-clad ‘catechists’ surrounding their ‘lifeless priests,’ little chants of Latin ‘prayers’ could be heard: “Flexor Digitorum Profundus.” Say Amen to that!

By the way, that is the name of a muscle. Not much has changed since I last visited the DR, at least not the shadow of a man lying supine on dissection table number 12. He is still very dead! With a scalpel in one hand and a pair of forceps in the other, I do my best to skilfully cut my way through skin and fat all in a bid to discover the evidence of what I have been taught in Anatomy 201 by some of the country’s most learned minds. But even these foremost Anatomy Professors cannot fully describe or explain the beauty and sanctity of what I am seeing. It is amazing how the innate are able to articulate to us the beauty of the life we are living! How the dead can talk and the living cannot! More amazing is how the confluence of nerves, veins and arteries and the contours of muscle combine to produce the shadow of a complex organism, an almost complete Homo sapiens. If only he could rise and breathe for a brief moment!

Ironically it took just a brief moment for this gentleman (too gentle for my liking) to prove his mortality. I may never know how he died or how he was born, what his name was or how he came to be lying at the edge of my scalpel. I may never know whether or not he was a good man in his lifetime. But on this side of life, he has proven to be one of the best teachers I have ever met and will ever meet or meat.

A legend is told of a certain three-day old cadaver who chose that particular fate—death—and self-managed to raise himself up! I once tried raising myself up alive o. Try as I would, I only succeeded in discovering new ways to fail. You may want to try too. According to this legend, He was God. That explains why he was able to resuscitate himself right? For who else can do that? Now, in choosing a way to die, if I were in his shoes, I would have chosen the easiest way. Wouldn’t you have done same? After all, he had the power. But the legend says he did the complete opposite. Well, it is just a legend so it cannot be true or can it? Everything and anything is possible in a legend. It need not necessarily be true.

Did this legend really happen? Unfortunately, it did. History corroborates the fact that at one time in the distant past – some two thousand years ago – a man died on a cross on the outskirts of Jerusalem. And his reason for dying was not so ‘wise’: He loved you and I so much so that He chose to die to save us from our imminent ‘death’ (which we very much deserved by the way). They say love is blind, don’t they? But I doubt if God is blind. If God really saw us in our most wretched, unlovable state and still chose to die for us, how shall we call this? Not love? Love which we did not deserve yet which He kindly and willingly gave.

Like the cadaver on my table, Jesus died to show us a way—the way! In His death, He revealed to us something – that the beauty of life lay in the act of dying to the flesh. He taught us that it was only in dying to the flesh that we can rise up. He taught that sinful man had to be born again in order to experience the beauty of life [John 3:3, Romans 8:1-8]. We may try raising ourselves up by ourselves but who would we really be fooling? The Law of gravity is at work in full gear. It will only take the laws of aerodynamics to help us overcome it. The pulley has been set. Jesus is ready and willing to pull you out of the mess you are in. He will do so if only you will hold on to the gift of his rope of hope, of a second chance, of salvation from sin, of grace – if only you will believe!

Back to that glimpse of our fate lying on my concrete table in the DR – the grim picture of our future: we shall all die! [Hebrews 9:27]. No one knows when though, except the All-knowing God. When and when death comes, what happens then? What happens then is a detailed accounting of how we used everything that we were given, even this sermon from an unknown cadaver. How are you going to answer?

 

 

I have come to worship

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Author: Akyana Britwum
I have dwelt in the midst of sin for a long while. I delighted in it and refused to part ways with the destructive lifestyle that had come to typify my way of life. Today, the 15th of May 2014 I listened to a sermon on faith by Paul Washer. He spoke on Hebrews 11. He said something about verse 15 and 16 that struck me:
Hebrews 11:15-16 “If they had been thinking with [homesick] remembrance of that country from which they were emigrants, they would have found constant opportunity to return to it. But the truth is that they were yearning for and aspiring to a better and more desirable country, that is, a heavenly [one]. For that reason God is not ashamed to be called their God [even to be surnamed their God–the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob], for He has prepared a city for them.” [Amplified]
And I realized my sin. It wasn’t the bad things that my heart had come to delight in. No. It was then fact that my heart had become content with this world, with its current ways, its wisdom, and its entertainment. I no longer longed for the kingdom Christ was bringing. The things of this world became sweet. Their attractive allure held me fast. So that even my pursuit of Him was tainted. Tainted by a quest for worldly knowledge a worldly knowledge of Him. I did not delight in Him anymore. I could only appreciate Him from a worldly stance.
So I tried to cast away my worldly sins as I saw them. Lust for the earthly things I knew were killing me. Little did I realize that I was worshiping the world’s system and it had so corrupted me that my quest for Christ became a worship of the world. In other words, every tool that I looked to for emancipation became my god. I did not look to God. I did not want to nor could I do so. I was trapped and caught up in my folly.
But today, I heard the Scripture from Hebrews 11 and I knew He was reaching out to me. So I have come to worship my King and my God. As I worshiped I struggled to let go of the vain things that charmed me most. “Certainly Lord not these”, I said. Then I saw Him on the tree crucified for the sins that I held so dear. The image of how He gave it all up so that I didn’t have to live with my sins nor face the righteous wrath of God for the sins I was unwilling to give up. 
“Lord” I prayed “I have sinned because I have not esteemed thee as I ought. But now at Thine feet I pour my love, my all, withholding nothing. Take as I am. Cleanse me, restore me. You are all I want, You are all I need. Fill me up anew.” 
And so at the mercy seat where I found myself, I lay, waiting on my God and my King. I am still lying down. I have come to worship my God.

God, Sex and Me

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The desire for sex is one of the powerful hungers of our humanity. It can make you  restless when you have in one way or another provoked and entertained it but have no way of immediately satisfying it. Being a Christian or following Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour does not shield you from desiring to have sex. Getting married does not mean your sexual desire can only be aroused by your spouse. Some men in high positions have destroyed the trust and admiration the public had for them by not controlling their sexual urges. Think of the scandalous stories of Bill Clinton, Straus Khan, Tiger Woods and even King David in the Bible. A good thing can be abused and this has been our predicament with sex.In non-religious societies or among individuals who do not submit themselves to conservative religious doctrines, sex is like a free drug to be dispensed to anyone ready for it. They may only discriminate because of personal preferences such as attraction to the potential partner or the fact that they want to wait till marriage so that their wedding night will be special. Some Christians may hold the latter reason as something laudable. But as ideal as it sounds, it is not even Christian nor is it a biblical reason not to have sex.

In his satirical poem titled, Creed, the English journalist, Steve Turner, speaks about many of our modern secular ideas, and his second stanza mocks our present ideas on sex:

We believe in sex before, during, and

after marriage.

We believe in the therapy of sin.

We believe that adultery is fun.

We believe that sodomy’s OK.

We believe that taboos are taboo.

Many people today believe everything is alright as long as you do not hurt anyone, to the best of your definition of hurt, and to the best of your knowledge.  This belief has worked itself out in our lives – for both non-religious and religious folks.  Today we have an expression like “two consenting adults” as if to suggest that so long as there is agreement about the sexual act among two adults, there is really nothing morally wrong with it. The moral rightness or wrongness of the sexual act is now defined by the agreement or its absence thereof between the two adults.

Followers of Christ’s teachings have been and are expected (and rightly so) to live above reproach yet we are miserably not living up to expectations. Stories of pastors and church leaders involved in sexual scandals are common place. These are people whose philosophy of life dictates that they ought to have sex only with the woman they have married yet are living otherwise. ‎The unexposed private lives of the ordinary church members are no better. To suggest that the frequency of extra-marital sex and pre-marital sex among Christians within our churches is a problem is to state the issue too mildly. It is a scandal, a travesty, a matter calling for repentance and mourning. There is no denying that to some extent, these are indications of a stunted theological understanding of our sexuality. I remember attending youth programs in two different churches, (one an orthodox church, the other charismatic) that featured a talk on God’s view of sex and listening to some of the youth asking questions about whether sex before marriage was wrong. I was quite surprised to realize that this was an ambiguous area for them. But it underscored for me the fact that the times had changed. Churches are not preaching Christ’s precepts in this area; or if they are preaching it then perhaps not well enough. We are more concerned about teaching practical solutions for the temporary problems, rather than the eternal realities. Believers must be brought to a point of understanding that inspires firm belief and encourages acceptance of God’s teachings about our sexuality.

 Putting things in perspective

God made this world. He invented sex, so to speak, when he created our reproductive systems and also commanded us to reproduce. So sex is good and is a gift from God. In the Genesis story, God told man and woman to multiply and this required being one in flesh and in spirit. Indeed in the book of Malachi when God was no longer accepting the offerings from the people of Israel, the prophet explained one of the reasons as follows:

“You ask why he no longer accepts them. It is because he knows you have broken your promise to the wife you married when you were young. She was your partner, and you have broken your promise to her, although you promised before God that you would be faithful to her. Didn’t God make you one body and spirit with her? What was his purpose in this? It was that you should have children who are truly God’s people. So make sure that none of you breaks his promise to his wife. ” Malachi 2:14-15 GNB [Emphasis mine]

From this it is clear where the place of sex is intended to be – in marriage.  Outside this institution, having sex is sin. And sin means missing the mark, falling short of God’s standard. This does not seem like something serious. “Okay so, I missed the mark. What is the big deal?” one might think. It is a very serious deal – a deal with eternal dimensions.

Sin must be understood in terms of man’s relation to God. This is why Jesus, God in human flesh, can forgive sin that was not even done directly to him but rather to our fellow man. The definition of sin was given in the Genesis story when Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s commandment not to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. They ate this forbidden fruit because they lost faith in God by believing a lie. They believed the devil’s subtle suggestion that God could not be trusted because he was keeping something good (i.e. the knowledge of good and evil) from them. Sin then is the faithless rebellion of man against the just authority of God. And this is where the significance of sin lays. Whenever we sin, whether we lie, cheat, yield to our bodily lusts etc, we show how faithless we are in God; how much we do not trust him. We make a statement which says we do not believe that God’s precepts and commandments are for our good or are in our interest; we believe he is keeping away from us something that is good for us.

Further, breaking God’s law at any point involves transgression at every point (Galatians 3:10). If we break the law of adultery, we have also broken the law of covetousness, killing etc. How come? This is so because the very authority of God which instituted the law of adultery is the same one that instituted the rest of the laws. As a result, rebelling against his authority in one area of life is simply rebellion against God’s authority, pure and simple. God has just one authority and it is himself. If you defy his law, you have defied his authority – you have defied him. You have broken fellowship with him. But because man was made to have fellowship with God, and to thrive on God, a sinful life brings a sense of restlessness and often a general lose of meaning in life because the divinely intended fellowship has been broken by sin.

In the Old Testament (Leviticus 18) God prohibited certain sexual activities. Also in the New Testament, in Jesus’ and Paul’s teachings, it is also clear that not all sexual encounters are permitted in God’s scheme of things. Adultery, homosexuality and fornication are spoken against in very clear terms – that people who engage in such things will not inherit God’s kingdom. Some current myths about sex that people have include:

        i.            Sex can be casual

The truth is God does not look upon sex as something to be treated casually; a pleasure to be had with just anyone when you feel like having it.

      ii.            If you love each other you can have sex.

The truth is that love is patient (1 Corinthians 13:4). Real love will wait for marriage, under God’s blessing, before expressing itself through sex. If your love cannot wait, it is not love. It is lust, it is selfishness – it wants what it wants, how it wants it, when it wants it.

    iii.            We are going to get married soon anyway, so what is the big deal?

The big deal and the gospel truth is that being “about to get married” is not the same thing as “married”; you are not married yet and any of you could change their minds (or even external factors may prevent the idea of marriage from becoming reality) after the sexual act.

iv.            There is the need to ensure “it works” before you commit

Here is the hard but real truth: If you have genuinely given your life to Jesus Christ yet God in his infinite wisdom gives you a sexually defective partner, you can be sure that God will also grant you the grace, the wisdom and strength to be able to live with that partner as you keep depending on him. I know this is easier said than done. It might be hard to take in but it is truth. God has the power to carry us. In the most trying times of life, trusting and obeying God is the only way to enjoy his profound peace and joy which transcends human understanding. God is always with those who rely on him in their times of distress. He carries them when all else is spent – when strength (whether emotional, psychological or physical) is gone, wisdom is …