As I reflect today on this my 49^th birthday, I am struck by a number of things that are hard to put into words.  There is a strange mixture of deep gratitude to God for all He has brought me through coupled with a bewildering sense of dismay and astonishment at the speed with which my life has passed and is passing.

I am grateful to God for so many things big and small: for His forgiveness and the hope of heaven; for a loving wife and three amazing kids who love Jesus and put up with and forgive me; for parents who raised me in the discipline and instruction of the Lord; for His continued provision; for a body that still works even after I broke my neck and my back (on separate occasions!); for the privilege to serve and participate in what God is doing in Singapore and all over the world; for friends who encourage and support and exhort and sometimes even rebuke me; for Wednesday nights at ICS where I can still play some ball with the guys; for evening walks and talks with the love of my life, Barbara; for incredible adventures in all kinds of places around the world; for good books to read and good movies to watch and good music to listen to and sing along with in the restful seams of life’s demands; for the legacy of godly examples to follow down through history; for a God who uses utterly ordinary people (like me) to accomplish His extraordinary purposes and plans for this world.

So much has been left out of this cursory list, but it gives a brief snapshot of all that God in His absolute faithfulness has done in and through my life so far.  He deserves all credit and praise for saving and using and preserving me through these 49 years.

And yet in the midst of gratitude I still find myself astounded at the breakneck speed with which my life has already passed.  Life seems to get shorter and shorter the longer it lasts.  Looking back on it, time almost folds into itself.  There is a sense of immediacy to our past as it is somehow compressed into our present.  And this reminds me of Psalm 90:10 and 12: “As for the days of our life, they contain seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years . . . for soon it is gone and we fly away. . . .  So teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.”

They say that once you get over the hill, you pick up speed and I believe it.  And yet the quickly passing years of our lives and the wisdom of God’s word both remind us of this simple but difficult truth: You cannot stop time, but you can choose how to spend it.  Soon enough my life will be fully spent, so while I still can, I intend to pour it out in service of the One who spent His life for me that I might live for Him.

So what’s wrong with homosexual marriage?  That’s a question many have rhetorically asked since the recent flood of successful gay-rights initiatives have been inundating not only the US but also many other parts of the world.  For these activists, the answer to the question is obvious: nothing at all.  In fact, it’s a wonderful and long-overdue alteration of cultural mores in our increasingly “enlightened” post-Victorian age.

But when the euphoria wears off, we will experience the bitter and growing long-term repercussions of a social tsunami that has rent the basic fabric of society—the family—from top to bottom.  In this sense, gay marriage is not, as some have opined, the beginning of the end.  In America, that process started back in the 1970’s when “no fault” divorce laws were passed, making it that much easier for families to be “faultlessly” torn apart.  And these laws were made sensible by the prior embrace of personalist and existentialist philosophies that had been brewing in academia for nearly 75 years.  These false ideologies embraced and celebrated the humanist myth that “freedom” simply means “lack of external restraint,” and promoted social theories suggesting that basic social institutions like marriage and the family are nothing more than man-made contractual agreements between willing and like-minded individuals and groups.

When the family was reduced to nothing more than a contract between consenting human beings, the seeds of destruction had been duly planted and their ghastly germinations were sure to follow.  Marriages were no longer meant to be honored until death, but only until consenting adults came to change their hearts (mostly) and minds.  The stability of the institution was subsequently shattered and the resultant crops of insecurity and lack of moral guidance and restraint frequently produced by such broken homes yielded an entire generation of children who did not know who they were, did not clearly know the difference between right and wrong, and did not understand why seeking to discern such things was so important in the first place.  At the same time, these children were perpetually bombarded through secular media, peers, and even adults all around them with the message that they could be whoever they wanted to be.  No one could tell them what to do, what to think, or who they were.  In fact, the sky was no longer the limit.  They merely had to “look within” and nowhere else to become true to themselves, letting that authenticity take them to new and almost unimaginable heights of being and becoming.

But the scriptures warn us that whenever we choose to be and become “authentic selves,” we choose to be and become authentic sinners, for that is who we truly are apart from the grace of God made known through Jesus Christ.  This, of course, is not a very encouraging, self-affirming, or “politically correct” picture, but it is the reality with which we must deal if we are to courageously face and overcome the wickedness that lurks and festers deep inside the heart and mind of every man, woman, and child—myself included.  But our refusal to submit ourselves to God and admit our desperate need for Jesus, the righteous and transforming Savior of the world, blinds us to the tragic and inevitable aftermath of being “true” to our insidiously sinful selves.

It is not at all surprising, then, that a new movement is rapidly growing out of the fertile and toxic soil of gay marriage promotion: polygamy.  If marriage is nothing more than a contract between consenting adults—male to male, female to female, male to female—then why should the number be limited to only two?  Why not three or more consenting adults?  If everyone is agreeable with the arrangement, then how can anyone outside the community place limits on the contract made between concurring friends?

Further, why should it be limited only to human beings?  Isn’t that blatant “speciesism,” the bigoted and arrogant assumption that we can “discriminate” based on the species of animal?  If we are nothing more than a highly complex animal, why place ourselves in a seat of special superiority over other animal species, especially those who exhibit significant aspects of genuine personality?  So, for example, we might conceivably “marry” our miniature schnauzer who has ever been our constant companion and faithful friend in life.

I am not speaking tongue-in-cheek at all, although I wish that I were.  I predict polygamy and its many odd and subsequent permutations will shortly become a significant source of ongoing dispute in the increasingly confused courts of American jurisprudence as well as in the hearts and minds of average citizens.  Such skirmishes are already looming as people are both forced and forcing judges, legislators, and others to face the subtle and not-so-subtle implications of putting ourselves in the place of God Almighty and promoting the idea that divinely-sanctioned institutions like marriage are, at their root, nothing more than social conventions and inventions subject to ongoing human revision and innovation.

But God, who is there and is not silent, will not ultimately be mocked.  As C. S. Lewis puts it on page 239 of God in the Dock, “[W]e are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge.  Or rather, we are not dealing with them but (as we shall soon learn if we meddle) they are dealing with us.”  And thus we will reap what we have already sowed and still foolishly continue to sow.

So what’s wrong with homosexual marriage?  Everything.  And the sooner we come to our senses and restore a God’s-eye view of this sacred institution, the better off everyone will be.

What does it mean to be human?  Answering this question requires that we know who human beings really are (anthropology).  But we cannot do anthropology any justice apart from theology, for it is only in hearing from and listening to our wise Creator and Designer that we get a true and accurate picture of who human beings really are and what we really need in order to be virtuous.  And virtue then leads to fulfillment, not in terms of pleasurable sensations or “happiness” in the superficial and existential understanding of these concepts in our contemporary world, but in the ultimate and lasting sense of the word fulfillment.  In this way, the expression of virtue is the “coming home” of human beings, to do what we were made to do, to think what we were made to think, to finally arrive where we were meant to be.

Modernity has tried to convince us that we are the ones who know—or even better, I am the one who knows—how to find the path to fulfillment.  Thus, we see ourselves as gods, as the ones who individually know and can do what we internally believe and declare to be right, all in the name of “authenticity.”  But if there is no transcendent referent point beyond the human condition, we logically and actually have no means of knowing who is actually closer to or farther from the ideal of the right and the true for every human.  All we have, as Nietzsche rightly saw, is the hope or attempted ability to assert our vision of humanness—our “will to power”—over others in order to create a subservient community for our own perceived well-being and good.  But history shows that such dictators great and small usually wind up destroying others and themselves in the quest to bring about their personal kingdoms.  Nietzsche’s powerful vision, while logical when God is thought and declared to be “dead,” is largely destructive in nature.  And this suggests that it is wrong to possess the ability to have whatever I want before this short, brutish, and nasty life comes to its unyielding end.

But the desire and ability to obtain everything I want is precisely what must be debated at the start.  Is having everything I want actually what is best for me?  To the contrary, the raw necessity of prohibitions, the limiting of the self and others, appears to be part of the very fabric of God’s design for long-term human well-being and thriving.  We are hard-wired to need taboos, sanctions, and injunctions.  But far from being restrictive in a purely negative sense, these embargoes are the very things that direct and channel our lives toward the fulfillment of who God designed us to be.  As a result, limiting ourselves to the things we were ultimately made for is the only way to experience the joy and satisfaction of knowing that our lives are truly good, that they are well-lived and not being wasted, that they are making a real and lasting impact and are directed toward the eternal ends for which they were graciously created.

That we are not self-sufficient, that we must exist in an environment and take from outside of ourselves, resources like oxygen, food, and drink in order to survive, is direct evidence that we are not, and can never be, “self-made” men and women.  In one sense, this is the negative side of reality.  But the positive side is no less important.  We are not merely made to be prevented from certain practices and desires and ideations.  We are also made to fulfill and actualize certain divine goals and purposes, and it is these that become the greatest sources of satisfaction that each and every one of us longs to know and enjoy.

The very notion that we are creatures first and only secondarily creators, presupposes that we are dependent, needy, and wholly incapable of knowing for ourselves who we really are or why we are here in the first place.  It is the Creator who understands the purposes and restrictive aspects of the creature He has made, and not the creature itself.  “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’”  (Romans 9:21).  It is not the clay’s decision to be whatever it wants to be—unless, of course, it is granted some measure of freedom by its maker to pathetically try and become something it was never intended or meant to be.  It may freely submit to the purposes given to it by the potter, or it may try to become something else and something more in its own estimation.  But a pot that tries to be a hammer may very well find itself shattered on the base of substances much harder than itself because it wrongly believes that it is able to withstand that kind of misuse and abuse.

When we seek to detach ourselves from our Creator while possessing only a limited and tainted vision of the good, we are destined to find ourselves crushed on the rocks of unyielding reality, a reality grounded in God, the One who is really real and intimately involved in the maintenance of this world.  As such, we must echo the Pauline reminder that “God cannot be mocked.  A person reaps what s/he sows” (Galatians 6:7).  One cannot sow to the wind and finally avoid reaping the whirlwind.  And yet we can rejoice that the converse is also true: “The one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life” (Galatians 6:8).  It is for this we were finally made, and it is in this we discover what it really means to be human as we confidently and gladly submit to the empowerment and wise guidance of the One who made, sustains, and loves us.

In the late 1990’s, evangelicalism was producing grand critical treatises on the dangers of postmodernity both inside and outside the church.  But even then, it was easy to see that postmodernism was a “free radical” ideology that would rapidly decay into something else.  The important question was how soon and into what would it decay?  Accordingly, I always tried to challenge my students to pursue and provide a positive vision and set of practices for the moral, intellectual, and sociological vacuum being created by the indiscriminate viciousness of rampant deconstructionism.

I also found myself wishing that I was somehow a stronger visionary and leader in such a quest to forge a compelling and stable set of Christian practices and perspectives for the growing need for social stability and goodness in the world.  Alas, I turned out to be just like everybody else—a genuinely normal and very average Christian.

Nevertheless, I still knew that something would soon emerge from the tossing turbulence of the late 20^th century.  A recent candidate for this emergence has grown up around the notion of “design,” where we are told that we now live in an age of celebratory creativity and inspirational inventiveness. 

To be sure, the rapid rise of modern technology has driven some of this design movement, but human nature remains intractably and inherently relational, and technology often pushes against this messy and embodied aspect of human existence.  Thus, many of us have not been so taken by it all as technologists might have hoped or thought we would.  And there continues to be quiet, thoughtful, and persistent movements like those followers of Wendell Berry who push hard against the depersonalization of the technological.  At the same time, you have the techno-savvy savants like Stephen Hawking insisting that the greater future of humanity resides in a gnostic disembodied existence where minds can be “downloaded” and permanently saved on a computer disk—naturalism’s latest form of heavenly immortalism.

But one of my deeper concerns right now for the church is this: Will it have the spiritual depth and grounding to move powerfully and influentially within the forefront of cultural creation?  What I see in the society at large is a passion for creativity and self-realization but primarily detached from any sort of basis or “design set.”  Stemming from the postmodern distrust of tradition and authority, precious little concern is given for crucial questions like, who we were made by and what we were made for?  Instead, the focal assumption is that we were simply made for making. 

Regarding this creativity motif within the church, God somehow becomes a source of hopeful inspiration, like a fuel source for launching us into realms previously unknown and unreachable through the dynamic power of human ingenuity and creativity.  Yet it lacks the delimiting humility of seeing ourselves primarily as creatures and not merely creators.  Detaching creatures from the Creator becomes just one more means for a contemporary expression of an idolatrous celebration of the self—or at least the worship of the most ingenuous representatives of those creative selves, people like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and a growing host of others.

The church, it seems to me, traded the “slick” of modernity for the “grunge” of postmodernity and is now trying on the “inspiration of creativity” while forgetting why it exists in the first place: to know and love and make God known since He knows and loves and has made Himself known to us through creation, the scriptures, and supremely through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  Almost no one in the church today knows the Bible well anymore because almost no one really reads it.  It’s passé, it’s historical, it’s boring.  But it’s also the word of God and through the power of His Spirit, it tenaciously transforms those who have the dedication and daring to both know and take it seriously.  Yet this transformation is grounded in the being of God Himself, not in some internal dynamism that magically springs forth from the unbridled and uncontainable human psyche.

True creativity must be done, as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien insisted, as sub-creators, as creatures placed consciously beneath the absolute Lordship of Christ.  In this way, creativity flows from the well-spring of life and is directed outward in unexpected but theologically grounded ways.  But it is not a product from nowhere, meaning nothing, going no place.  It is intentionally actualized to be and become and remain a witness to the creative Source from which is emanates.

I cannot help but wonder: Is the church creating only to be relevant and/or enjoy herself?  Or it she creating as a living response of active submission to the One in whom we live and move and have our being?  Only the latter will have any lasting impact upon the world in an “Age of Design” whose real need is less for creative design and more for the recreation of the Designer.

Growing up I was constantly told to “always tell the truth” and keep any promises I had made, even to my own harm and detriment. And generally speaking, these were and are words of great virtue and goodness.

However, as I have grown in wisdom and understanding, it now occurs to me that some promises and vows were meant to be broken. Some of the things that we say should not be held onto fastidiously.

This fact came home to me powerfully the other day when a friend insisted that he would “not apologize” to someone when I confronted him about his need to do so. He spoke it with a conviction and determination I have seldom seen in the most sincere of men. His staunch refusal was virtually a vow and a promise he had made, and one he had made foolishly in haste. As Proverbs 20:25 tells us, “It is a trap for a man to dedicate something rashly and only later to consider his vows.”

The holy thing to do in this case was ultimately to repent of and repudiate this foolish vow. I am reminded of Jephthah in Judges 11 who should have known that God would not be pleased with a human sacrifice—the life of his daughter no less—and so should rather have repented in shame and remorse for this rash and thoughtless promise.

The fact of the matter is, humility and forgiveness often require and demand turning away from and renouncing certain ungodly vows and promises we have made. In such situations, not to do so—to remain truthful and a promise-keeper—would actually be a bald expression of arrogance, unforgiveness, and depravity.

In short, in God’s economy of goodness and grace, some promises were meant to be broken.

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.