Does God Owe Us Something Better?
The loss of our jobs opens our eyes again to the fact that God is that something, that someone better. Or at least we have the chance to believe that’s true, or refuse to believe that’s true and become bitter. If our default is to see God’s role as merely to give us something better than we have lost, then we have miss the point of God! Here’s the test. What if, in losing our jobs, God has pushed us back onto relying on him more? What if, instead of getting what we think we want we have our wants exposed and changed?
Something Better?
I was lamenting on the phone with a friend yesterday about the loss of both of our jobs this year.
The frustration was real, especially for him as he’s subsequently missed out on a couple of roles that would have suited him well. And here we are coming up to Christmas and he still has no job after four or five months. I’ve got a lot more social capital than he, so things seem to be slotting together well for me. Not so for him
So we chatted for a while, processing the last few months. And we kinda made this comment as we chatted, talking through the pressure and uncertainty that losing your job puts you through.
“Well if God has taken that away then he has something better for us, that’s what we have to believe.”
And on the surface, or for an instant, we affirmed that for each other. But then something kicked in – for both of us. And I like to think it was the gospel that kicked in! For we realised, pretty much at the same time as we said it, that that is not strictly true. Or at least it may not be strictly true.
The truth could be far more complex than that. Both of us liked our jobs and believed we were good at them, and they satisfied a certain number of criteria in our lives. But that does not mean that God has some better job for us in the future than those jobs were for us in the past. It doesn’t mean that’s there a more rewarding role with more financial and experiential rewards than what we just left behind.
That simply isn’t the case. It could be that for both of us we’ve peaked – at least in terms of work. I hope not, but it could be. Those roles could be the best ones we have ever had and will ever have going forward. That’s just the case. To say that God has something better for us – workwise at least – is not something we can say with any deep assertion.
And that’s why our conversation then took a different turn. A different, deeper and richer turn. I said to my friend in response to our initial assertion:
“Actually that’s not quite right. What we need to take from this is this: not that God HAS something better for us, but that God IS that something better.”
And as I said it, I think we both got it. I think we kinda knew it, but hadn’t articulated it.
You see, that’s the central point of what it means to be a Christian. And that’s the central point of the Christmas season. Not that God gives us stuff. Not that God gives us the job we want. Not that God gives us a better job than the one we had before. But that God gives us God! God is the something better. And if we just allow him to show us that, even in the tough times, it will make all of the difference.
Let’s define it even more sharply. God is not something better, he is SOMEONE better. God doesn’t desire to simply give us created stuff, he desires to share himself – the Creator – with us.
Perhaps the loss of our jobs is an opportunity for God to show us that he is that something better that we are craving. And to lose sight of that in a time such as this is to lose a great opportunity to grow into what God wants us to be. In fact the loss of anything is such an opportunity, hard though that may be to hear.
And that’s a whole different ball game. I came away from our conversation in a better frame of mind. Our chat steered us away from the roles we had lost, and the imagined roles we wish we could have, or possibly might have if everything lands perfectly,.
The conversation was steered onto what it might be that God is doing in our lives as we go through this season, ahd how he is showing us, in what seems a painful way, how he himself is the better thing that we seek.
Our Idolatrous Hearts
And here’s the guts of that: God is shaping and refining us away from a constant, almost magnetic, pull towards the good gifts that he gives us and towards the constant, majestic pull of God towards himself. For anything less will ultimately end up as idolatry.
That’s the heart of idolatry after all, as Romans 1 tells us – craving and worshipping the things that the Giver gives us rather than the Giver himself.
The loss of our jobs opens our eyes again to the fact that God is that something, that someone better. Or at least we have the chance to believe that’s true, or refuse to believe that’s true and become bitter. If our default is to see God’s role as merely to give us something better than we have lost, then we have miss the point of God!
Here’s the test. What if, in losing our jobs, God has pushed us back onto relying on him more? What if, instead of getting what we think we want we have our wants exposed and changed? What if, instead of the temptation to seek our identity in a work role, God removes that from us in order to deepen our identity in him? Is God allowed to do that?
And what if this situation opened our eyes to the fact that we may have been cruising a little bit, relying on the things of this age – good and proper though they are – and not leaning more steadfastly on him? Is God allowed to do that?
What if, ironically, our ministry roles were taken away from us to ensure that we found our worth in the God we declare, not the job that declares his worth?
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Why Every Young Pastor Needs an Old Mentor
My old mentor brings hope. He got through the tough stuff and knows the way! He’s already taken the machete and blazed a trail. I need to follow his path. My old mentor connects me to a significant generation. He helps me understand the oldest in my congregation. I can ask him questions without fear of offending him.
“Sometimes the being is more important than the doing.”
My mentor shared this wisdom at our last meeting. He’s in his late-80s, almost 50 years ahead of me. He retired from a church in Indiana and moved to Bradenton several years ago. I inherited him with my church when I was called as pastor a few years ago. Unfortunately, he recently moved back to Indiana to be closer to family.
God gave me a spiritual heavyweight of encouragement with him. He sat a few rows from the back—prayerfully listening every week. He held no formal leadership position in our church. He did not need it because his prayers moved mountains.
Every young pastor needs an older mentor. I know that’s not a new thought. I press the point because it’s hard to overstate the value of wisdom from someone 50 years older than you. Unfortunately, young pastors tend to dismiss the oldest generation of leaders. Not overtly, of course. Few would explicitly state they don’t want to hear from someone older. The dismissal comes more in the form of time.
Our ears can only listen to so much before words start melting together.
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Why You Shouldn’t Give Up on the Church
The blue screen of death. We’ve all experienced it. You’re plugging away on a paper or trying to load a website and whammo, your computer is toast. A few minutes and a hard restart later, you’re back up and running, but not without consequences. You might have lost your train of thought or part of what you wrote. Ironically, I experienced the blue screen of death writing this post!
Covid-19 was a cultural blue screen of death. Work, school, and church rhythms were all disrupted, and as a result everything changed. People’s connection to church shifted or ended completely. Nearly every pastor I’ve spoken with affirms lower church attendance today than eighteen months ago.
The blue screen of Covid, it seems, made everyone re-think just how important church is.
A Replacement for Church?
More than a handful decided that other spiritual practices can take the place of church. Jen Hatmaker recently shared about a conversation she had with her therapist where she came to the realization that “church for me right now feels like my best friends, my porch bed, my children, and my parents and my siblings. It feels like meditations and all these leaves on my 12 pecan trees. It feels like Ben Rector on repeat. It feels like my kitchen, and my table, and my porch. It feels like Jesus who never asked me to meet him anywhere but in my heart.”
Others have decided to cut themselves off from church due to their frustration with what they perceive the church to be. This thread of tweets between Laura Chastain and Andrew Novell captures the spirit of those who feel disappointed by the church.
Whatever the stated reason, at its core this exodus from the church stems from a lack of understanding of the true heart, function, and mission of the church. -
“God Made From One Every Nation of Men”: Exploding the Evolutionary Myth of Creation-Based Racism, Pt 1
As Dr. Sanford demonstrates, taken together, all of this evidence indicates that every man and woman on earth today is a direct descendant of one man—“Y Chromosome Adam”—and one woman—“Mitochondrial Eve”—who were created in a state of genetic perfection, less than ten thousand years ago, just as God revealed in the sacred history of Genesis.
Part I
(LifeSiteNews) — A recent article in the journal Scientific American by Allison Hopper entitled “Denial of Evolution is a Form of ‘White Supremacy’,” managed to pack an enormous amount of scientific, historical and theological misinformation into a brief attempt to convince her readers that an acceptance of the “science” of human evolution would destroy the traditional Christian reading of Genesis which, she alleges, is and has been used to promote “white supremacy” for hundreds of years. In this series of articles, we will show that the pseudo-scientific molecules-to-man evolutionary hypothesis has actually been used and continues to be used to justify racism and to destroy faith in the only firm foundation for a culture of universal brotherhood: The Catholic doctrine of creation and the traditional Catholic reading of the sacred history of Genesis.
Genesis and the Myth of White Supremacy
Hopper begins her article by alleging that the Mosaic account of the creation of Adam and Eve and history of their descendants Cain and Abel has long been used to justify “white supremacy.” Without citing any evidence from the Bible or from Church Tradition, Hopper claims that Genesis has led Christians to believe that Adam and Eve were white-skinned and that “dark skin” was a consequence of the curse that befell Cain after murdering his brother. According to Hopper, recognition of the “fact” that the first humans evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees in Africa would redound to the glory of dark-skinned people in Africa and throughout the world and help to dissolve the myth of “white supremacy” that the Christian reading of Genesis has promoted for so many centuries.
It is a sad testimony to the extent to which contemporary western intellectuals receive indoctrination rather than education that a contributor to Scientific American was allowed to publish libels against the Mosaic account in Genesis without any serious “fact-checking” by her editors. Where, we would like to know, do the Scriptures or the Fathers of the Church, tell us that Adam and Eve were “white-skinned”? Where does the Bible or the Tradition of the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church teach that Cain acquired dark skin as a consequence of murdering his brother Abel?
These falsehoods may have been bandied about by some anti-Catholic members of the KKK, but they have no basis in the Word of God as understood in God’s Church from the beginning. The mere fact that a writer for Scientific American would publish this libel, with the full permission of the journal’s editors, shows that the first prejudice that all of them need to overcome is the myth of molecule-to-man evolution’s “supremacy” over the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation as a coherent account of the origins of man and the universe that fosters universal brotherhood.
Genetics, Paleoanthropology and the End of the Evolutionary Hypothesis
In recent decades several excellent books have been written refuting the alleged evidence for human evolution. In a short article like this, we can only summarize the most important evidence against the hypothesis of human evolution and refer our readers to the sources of that evidence.
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