Liberal ideology tries to convince us that most people steal because they need what they take to survive.  But that is unmitigated nonsense and does not account for the wickedness that is bound up in the heart of every man, woman, and child, including my own.  No, people do not steal because they need something.  That is a secular socialist myth.  People steal because they want something, whether they need it or not.  More often than not, they don’t need it at all.

And the act of stealing is always justified in the eyes of the thief through a process of self-vindicating rationalization which suggests that not only did the person or organization not need what was taken, but perhaps the bandit actually deserved to possess it instead.

But beyond such excuse-making, it seems St. Augustine was right when he wrote this in his Confessions about stealing pears from a neighbor’s orchard: “[I]t was not the fruit that gave me pleasure, I must have got it from the crime itself . . . .”

The bald fact of the matter is that in a world marred by sin, stealing is, for human beings, fun.  It’s the thrill of obtaining the illicit, the forbidden, the impermissible.  Burglary brings a brigand much more than bread.  It brings him bliss.  As Proverbs 9:17 puts it, “Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.”

This subtle love of wickedness is what makes it so necessary for us to find our hope and joy in nothing more or less than the matchless love of Jesus Christ.  He died between two thieves and gave His life away that He might steal from us our sin-tainted lives and fully cleanse us from every blot and stain.  Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift, for His gift cannot be stolen but only humbly and gratefully accepted.

I have always loved retreats because they pull us away from the tyranny of the mundane and help (force us?) to relax, reflect, pray, fellowship, and worship.  But I have to be honest.  There’s another part of me that feels just a little bit guilty about it.  After all, there is always so much more to do.  There are always so many around us who are still lost and in need of Jesus.

My church is depending on me, my family needs me, my friends need me, the world needs me!  There are gifts to buy, papers, letters and emails to write, books to read, phone calls to make, people to reach out to.  Who has time to relax and pull away from the crush of life’s demands?

What will happen if I actually and purposefully take time me time off to rest?

A friend of mine once asked me, “How did Jesus do it?  How did He handle all the pressures of having masses of people constantly clamoring for his attention?”  The answer God showed me came from Luke 5:16 which says, “But [Jesus] would withdraw to desolate places and pray.”

There are other recorded instances where Jesus went away like Matthew 14:23 (after feeding the 5000; cf. John 6:15) and Mark 1:33-37—“Everyone is looking for you!” (cf. Luke 4:42).

Here we can see quite clearly that even God incarnate, precisely because He was human, needed a break!  We are not only designed for hard work, we are also designed for sleep and rest.  But why?  Why did God design us to need sleep?  We could presumably have been designed to need no sleep at all.  Just think of all that could be accomplished if sleep was no longer a need!

I think that the need for rest (like a need for shelter and food) reminds us first and foremost that we are finite, frail, dependent, and weak.  That is to say, we are not God almighty.  Thus, everything decidedly does not depend on us.

Sleep is an act of faith because it forces us to trust God.  It forces us to entrust ourselves and our responsibilities to a faithful God since while we are sleeping we are completely helpless and unable to do anything “useful” at all.  This is part of the reason why so many people have so much trouble sleeping, because they have trouble trusting.

In Matthew 11:28-30, Jesus calls us to come to Him when we are tired and He will give us rest, not more work!  And let’s face it, some of us struggle to say “no” because we secretly believe we are both indispensable and irreplaceable.  Are we really?  We sometimes act as if God simply cannot get by without us!

Now don’t get me wrong.  We must work and work hard.  The One for whom we work is utterly worthy of our best and most diligent efforts.  And yet, God did not make us infinite beings.  You simply cannot be all, do all, and know all—and that is okay!  We can truly rest in letting God remain God even while we take a much-needed rest, just as Jesus Himself modeled resting to His twelve disciples—and to us as well.

Accept your limitations as a gift from God to teach you to trust Him more.  And in your finitude, intentionally take regular breaks for rest, prayer, reflection, and fellowship.  Put it in your busy schedule to rest so it does not get pushed out!

This is not just good for your physical and mental health.  It is good for your spiritual health and is a concrete way to follow Jesus Christ, who regularly chose to rest even when everyone was clamoring for His attention and the whole world was in need of saving.

One of the great challenges of contemporary higher education in the West is the (often assumed and undefended) expectation that all good research should be characterized by “originality.” The problem with this expectation arises when scholars are forced either to think of something new or be considered mentally and scholastically deficient. This often results in the denial of a chance to obtain an advanced degree of any kind.

Of course there is room and need for creative thinking in higher learning, and certain fields in Christian thought—including theology and apologetics, for example—lend themselves more readily to the need for originality than others (like Old and New Testament exposition). But difficulties arise when the drive for creative thinking encourages and pushes the thinker into arenas of extremism and even heresy. In the pursuit of a higher degree and due to the demand for originality, many contemporary Christians are almost forced to devise new ideas that seek to challenge tried and true conclusions about our enduring source of authority, the Holy Bible.

In the end “something new” becomes the elusive and sought after goal of all research to the detriment of desperately needed ongoing exposition and restatement of God’s enduring truth. Consequently, few in the Christian community actually know what the Bible really says anymore. I am reminded of the Athenian philosophers and foreigners in Paul’s day who “would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21). In this sense, there really is “nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

But I fear that like the ancient Athenians, some pastors and Christian scholars have succumbed to the ubiquitous and not-so-subtle temptation to expound something new so that they can appear profound, remain interesting, and be deemed someone on the “cutting edge” of contemporary life. In a day and age such as ours, we would do well to hear and obey the ancient words of the prophet Jeremiah in 6:16 which have never been so relevant as they are today: “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.”

A friend of mine is dying.  She has been diagnosed with a relentless terminal disease that will likely take her life in the next three to four years.  She recently wrote the following very poignant words to me:

I believe people will follow our grief to get to Jesus.   They will watch . . . and they will look to see if the God we preached on our best day can sustain us on the hardest one.  Many people cannot relate to outrageous success, but they can relate to tears and brokenness and sorrow.  We all suffer, but those who know Christ should suffer with hope so that a watching world can see that He is a very present help in times of trouble.  My prayer—and I ask you to pray with me to this end—is that I will be able to share Christ as long as I am on this earth and bring Him honor and glory.

The courage and faith in God she has shown in the face of inevitable death has been a deep source of both inspiration and conviction.  Her faith is inspiring because it challenges me to hope in God no matter how short or long God gives me on this earth.  But it is also convicting because I find as I honestly look deep inside, I detect an underlying and abiding sense of fear.  I fear that death might be the end of my existence.

I fear that I have given my heart, soul, mind, and strength to a myth that is ultimately untrue and only wish-fulfillment.  I fear that in the end I will not face death with the kind of urgent hope and faith that I see so clearly in my friend.

I think that facing death in an instant requires very little of the one dying.  Dying suddenly means that there is little to anticipate or think about.  There is no time to contemplate, reflect, or consider what death will be like.  And there is no need to traverse the agony and angst that represents the encroaching face of death that all who know they are dying must encounter and stare back at unflinchingly.  But those who know their time on this earth is quickly coming to a close have much to think about and many decision to make.  The ones like my friend who do this well beautifully demonstrate the unfailing hope we have in Jesus.

Why do we fear death, even as Christians?  Why does it seem to bother us so much?  I suspect it has something to do with the tragic fact that human death was not part of God’s original design.  We were made to live without the prospect of death, but sin took that all away.  And until our Lord returns, fully redeeming creation, we live in a culture of death.  It is a culture that outside of Enoch and Elijah none have escaped.  Even Jesus had to die, although through His dying, death was finally defeated.  He rose from the grave and gave us the hope of heaven in a way we had never dreamed of or imagined before.

Perhaps fear remains, but what is faith and courage without a measure of fear?  And our fear is not crippling or overwhelming.  Rather, it calls us to recall the undying hope we have in Jesus Christ.  Death will come to us all, but those of us who know that we are dying and dying soon can face that grave specter with an indescribable sense of confidence that death is not the end.  Instead, it is a glorious and magnificent new beginning where we are finally in the full and unimpeded presence of the one who loves and died for us, the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

“We have sinned against the Lord.  We waited for peace, but no good came; for a time of healing, but behold, terror!”

As I read them today, these verses from Jeremiah 8:14-15 jumped out at me.  In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, I found myself contemplating parallels between Israel at the end of the 6^th century B.C. and America at the start of the 21^st century A.D.

While it is sometimes dangerous to draw straight-line relationships between situations we encounter in the Bible and those we face in contemporary life, some parallels appear to be more direct than others.

In Jeremiah, context tells us that Israel was being judged by God because they had forsaken a clearly covenantal relationship between them and God.  America has no clearly similar divine calling and relationship, but the moral atrocities described in Israel are strikingly parallel to those of modern America.  Listen, for example, to Jeremiah 5:27-29: “They have become great and rich.  They are fat, they are sleek, they also excel in deeds of wickedness; they do not plead the cause of the fatherless, that they may prosper; and they do not defend the rights of the poor.  ‘Shall I not punish these people?’ declares the Lord, ‘On a nation such as this shall I not avenge Myself?’”

We cannot say with any confidence that the bombings in Boston are from the hand of a holy God as a direct result of national sin.  But what we can observe is that when divine judgment came upon the Israelites, their downfall was not ultimately a result of the conquest of an enemy from without.  That conquest was, much like completion of a marathon, the culmination of many decisions, big and small, made long before.

Thus, Israel had already become her own worst enemy from within.  As Jeremiah 8:15 suggests, Israel longed for peace and healing but persisted in forsaking and ignoring God, the only source of both.

In our own time, do we not also long for anything less than true peace and deep healing?  But apart from sincere repentance and reconciliation with the God of peace and ultimate Healer we, too, have become our own worst enemies. 

It is for this reason we Christians are called to run a different kind of marathon; a race of eternal importance.  We must “lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and . . . run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus” that we might please Him, follow Him, and make His name glorious.  For He—and He alone—is the light of the world and hope of nations.

I read a news article today reporting on a million-dollar book contract just offered to a 17 year old woman in the UK.

The deal was for three books chronicling the adventures of a teenage girl who starts a kissing booth to make money.  The first book in the series is entitled (appropriately) The Kissing Booth.  She began writing the series through an online blog when she was 15.

What strikes me about all this is the quantity of cash being directed toward a 17 year old, destined to become a bestselling author.  I’m sure she is a bright and talented young woman with a great future ahead of her if the fame and fortune does not succeed in destroying her life along the way as it has so many unsuspecting youth in search of affluent significance.  But this brightness and talent is the light and capacity of a 17 year old.  And that can only take you so far.  No matter how gifted a person might be, literature reflects a deeper set of values (or lack of them) that cannot be manufactured by technique or obscured by an exciting storyline.  Quite frankly, it says a lot about the level of sophistication and intellect the average reader in our age desires to pursue.  And this is more than an indication.  It’s an indictment.

All of this fervor reminded me when a friend of mine excitedly told me about the Hunger Games book series and raved about how wonderful it was.  “I couldn’t put it down!” she gushed.

Always looking for a true classic in our time, I dutifully went out and purchased the books.  As I read, what struck me most was the sheer superficiality of the characters, the flippancy with which the books dealt in the ethics of children killing children, raw social oppression, a manufactured and insincere love triangle, and a host of other blaring moral deficiencies.  From a literary standpoint, the books seemed so childish, I could hardly imagine taking them seriously for more than an afternoon—about the time it took me to read each one.  What was the attraction?  What enduring value did these books engender besides a cleverly repulsive story line?

When I was in high school, we moaned and groaned about reading great novels and classic literature.  It seemed like an exercise in irrelevancy and futility, a waste of time and effort for everyone involved, especially given the inordinate amount of time and effort required to read and understand many of these classics.  Now I see more clearly how very wrong I was about such things.  Reading contemporary novels is like eating a Snickers bar.  It claims to really satisfy, but in the end, living on Snickers would send me to the hospital for nutritional emaciation and major heart bypass surgery all at the same time.  It requires time and effort to prepare an eight-course dinner, and each course can only be taken in small portions.  It’s the variety of flavors, smells, textures, colors and nutritional values that make the meal so magnificent and satisfying, versus a quick burst of flavor followed by a hollow bloated feeling deep inside.

I found over time that when I read Dickens, Lewis, Tolkien, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevsky–just to name few–I felt like I had been simultaneously fed and cleansed.  I had entered a mysterious, multi-layered universe where a single reading could hardly have scratched the surface of an almost unfathomable depth and breadth.  It was a ocean impossible to exhaust with new richness lurking not only around every twist and turn, but also right in front of me.  It was the difference between a child’s sketch of the ocean surface and diving into the glorious abyss headlong in order to enter a realm of existence which was richly indescribable and nearly inexhaustible.

Now granted, I understand that true classics are only written once in a very long while.  It is a blessed generation that gets to experience the birth of such a rare gem before their very eyes.  But why would anyone take the time and effort in our time to write such a book when they could be making millions off guttural trash and sophomoric plotlines?  It would take a rare genius with an independent source of funds and a heart set like flint against the temptations to “make a buck” and take the path of least resistance.  I must admit, I wish I had the time, talents, and treasures to achieve such a feat, not so much because it would make me rich and famous—but likely only after I was dead and gone—but also because it would also give me something worthwhile to read.

In the meantime, I will continue my search and revisit the classics again and again that I might find what I have been missing and aspire to that from which I continue to fall so spectacularly short.