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Very often we Christians are enamored with understanding God’s “will” for our future. It is kind of like journeying into the city for a day. We start by examining the map to determine the particular roads on which we will drive to reach the destination. We then turn on the radio or check the internet to learn about weather conditions. With a high degree of certitude we can envision how the day will unfold, taking into account challenges and opportunities.

Thankfully, living the life of faith doesn’t work this way. God’s Word is a “lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path” (Ps. 119:105). As an old bishop friend once told me, “Imagine a flood light strapped to the front of a train engine pointing downward toward the tracks. It only illuminates five or six feet ahead. It is NOT a headlight pointed upward shining out into the distance.” This is how God leads, and it is a good thing. Thus, we are given the precious gift of surprise and discovery. Around each turn the Father delivers gracious gifts. These gifts result in delight and before long we realize that the walk of Christian faith is about the process of journeying with Him, not our notions of a particular destination.

Timothy Jones (1955 – ), the author of The Art of Prayer: A Simple Guide and Awake, My Soul, was formerly an editor of Christianity Today. He is now senior associate rector at St. George’s Episcopal Church in Nashville, Tennessee. In the following excerpt from his book, A Place for God, he describes the radical commitment of early Celtic saints who embarked on a life of missionary faith without worldly assurances or visible supports.

“The Celtic saints of earlier centuries made much of the idea of peregrinatio, a difficult-to-translate word that suggests an open-ended journey. It was not uncommon for medieval Irish monks to set out with no destination; they left with only the simple impulse to go and seek, guided by the Holy Spirit. Unlike the pilgrimages to shrines common to medieval lore, writes Esther de Waal, “there [was] no specific end or goal such as that of reaching a . . . holy place that allows the pilgrim at the end of the journey to return home with a sense of mission accomplished.” Rather, the idea was to learn to live as travelers, pilgrims, “guests of the world,” as sixth-century Irishman Saint Columbanus put it. There was to be a creative openness, even if that meant living in a kind of exile so as not to hold too tightly to one’s ambitions and spiritual itinerary. The idea was to leave behind the known and safe to find a truer basis for security.”1

Footnotes

1 Timothy Jones, A Place for God: A Guide to Spiritual Retreats and Retreat Centers (New York: Doubleday Image, 2000), 47.

Dale Ralph Davis (1944 – ), an honored professor of Old Testament, was called back into full-time pastoral ministry. He is well known for his lively devotional commentaries on Old Testament history books, such as Joshua, which combine thoughtful study with practical application. In Joshua 14, Caleb recalls how he and Joshua had stood alone and trusted God, when they spied out the Promised Land (cf. Num. 13-14): faith can sometimes be lonely. In light of our recent Culture Impact Series, Davis’ application is instructive to us as we stand in faith against the secular forces of our world. Davis writes:

“Hence [for Caleb] the devotion of faith required courage, a willingness to stand alone, to go against the grain. The devotion of faith led to the isolation of faith. Such is often the case. The Christian teenager knows what this is like, when he or she must go against the moral-ethical flow of high-school culture. The Christian executive who tells his superior that he must either resign or be transferred to another department, because he refuses to line up prostitutes for the company’s weekend visitors—that man knows this loneliness. Even pastors know a good bit of this. So you will not baptize the grandchild of a church member because the parents are not believers? Or you have the gall, along with the other elders, to place someone under church discipline? You may seek to follow the Lord completely and at the same time reduce church membership. God’s people then must be prepared, for devoted faith frequently means lonely faith. And yet when Paul alluded to his first defense and lamented that “everyone deserted me,” he added in the next breath, “But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me” (2 Tim. 4:16-17).1″

Footnotes

1 Dale Ralph Davis, Joshua: No Falling Words (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2002), 116-117.

Last night was the final meeting of our God, Sex, and the Culture War series. We were privileged to have Dr. E. David Cook as our plenary speaker. David is Director of the Whitefield Institute in Oxford and Holmes Professor of Faith and Learning at Wheaton College. I told David last night that he is the William Wallace of bioethics (Scotsmen appreciate being compared to Braveheart). His courage, encyclopedic knowledge, clarity, humor, and wit are downright infectious, such that I would like this week’s blog entry to direct our thinking toward the critical topic of sanctity of life. Thanks David.

In January 1998, renegade scientist Dr. Richard Seed (1929 –) announced his plans to clone a human being. A physicist by training, Seed turned to fertility technologies in the 1980s and has since become a vocal proponent of human cloning. One of the motivations for cloning, he says, is to advance medical knowledge and cure diseases. But as Seed acknowledges with a chilling candor, he has another goal as well—one more sweeping and infinitely more dangerous. He writes:

“God made man in his own image. God intended for man to become one with God. We are going to become one with God. We are going to have almost as much knowledge and almost as much power as God. Cloning and the reprogramming of DNA is the first serious step in becoming one with God—very simple philosophy.1”

Dr. Seed sounds to me like a Mormon who has read too much Voltaire. Of course this is not the first time in history that such an audacious (indeed idolatrous) statement has been made. It says in Genesis 11:4, “Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.’” Dr. Seed’s agenda can be summarized with these words: “Making a name for ourselves.”

Let’s look beneath DNA reprogramming to the motivation behind such an enterprise—the desire to be like God. Are we humans so terribly self absorbed that making a name for ourselves is the height of our ambition—the pinnacle of life’s purpose? Can we not ascend above the horizon of human progress and grasp something greater than ourselves, even God?

The answer is yes; indeed this is the good news. God delights in elevating humans above the hopeless altitude of human idolatry. According to God’s great promises, in his Son Jesus, we “may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire” (2 Pet. 1:4). This occurs not by engineering life in the image of man, but by aggressively reflecting into the world the image of Christ.

Footnotes

1 Richard Seed, interview by Joe Palca, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, January 6, 1998.

The great evangelist, church planter, and founder of Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Dwight L. Moody (1837 – 1899) had a passion to proclaim the gospel to the masses. Often preaching in the slums, Moody stressed faithfully the need for repentance and the hope of salvation in Christ Jesus. Ever looking forward to the Second Coming of Messiah Jesus, his life’s desire was to see revival—revival that, he believed, had to begin in the Church of God.

“I firmly believe that the Church of God will have to confess her own sins, before there can be any great work of grace. There must be a deeper work among God’s believing people. I sometimes think it is about time to give up preaching to the ungodly, and preach to those who confess to be Christians. If we had a higher standard of life in the Church of God, there would be thousands more flocking into the Kingdom. So it was in the past; when God’s believing children turned away from their sins and their idols, the fear of God fell upon the people round about. Take up the history of Israel, and you will find that when they put away their strange gods, God visited the nation, and there came a mighty work of grace . . . The judgment of God must begin with us.1

If . . . confession of sin is deep among believers, it will be so among the ungodly also. I never knew it to fail. I am now anxious that God should revive His work in the hearts of His children, so that we may see the exceeding sinfulness of sin.2″

Footnotes

1 Dwight L. Moody, Prevailing Prayer (Chicago: Moody Press, 1990), 28.

2 Ibid., 32.