A couple of summers ago we were a day away from leaving for vacation when my cell phone went missing. For a few days we looked for it passively, keeping half an eye out for it as we went about our business in the house. We tried calling it to see if we could hear the ring; I guess the battery was flat. The phone didn’t show up. So for one morning we tore the house apart, looking high and low. We couldn’t find it anywhere. All we knew was that it was last seen in the hands of Michaela, who was just a year old at the time. Finally, with our vacation looming (and a vacation that would involve 2000 miles of driving) we decided we had better give it up for lost and buy a new one.

When I was in the store and looking for a phone, I was amazed at the variety available to me. There were flip phones and sliders, MP3 phones and Blackberries. There were phones with cameras and phones with video, phones with all kinds of absurd features and the low-end phones with only the bare-bones capabilities (which, these days, still seems to include a camera and a variety of ridiculous games). I eventually decided on one of the cheaper models (though it still does all kinds of things I’ll never need it to do). And then I had to choose a phone plan. There were hundreds of plans available to me—out-of-the-box plans or, of course, plans customized just to fit my needs. Far too many, really. Each looked pretty good until I looked to the small print. One plan gave all kinds of free minutes, but only to other callers using the same network. Another provided lots of airtime but charged ugly fees for call display and call answer. And on and on. After a good hour of work I finally left the store with my new phone. I was far from certain that I had chosen the best one or the right one, but after a while I just had to choose and get out of there.

We live in a world of almost infinite choice. It wasn’t always this way, of course. Even just a few generations ago people made do with far less to choose from. But today we demand and expect that we will be able to choose from among hundreds of options. A short time ago someone sent me a short outtake from the movie Borat. I haven’t seen the movie, don’t recommend the movie and hear that it is, from all accounts, not the kind of thing Christians should see. But this clip was harmless and pointed to our ridiculous demand for choice (and Sasha Cohen’s ability to draw out a joke). Standing in a supermarket with a manager, he walks slowly alongside a refrigerator, pausing at each package of cheese and asking, “What is this?” “Cheese,” says the manager. Borat moves to the next one. “And this is…?” “Cheese.” “And this?” “Cheese.” It goes on and on and on. And then, like a typewriter hitting the end of a row, he zips back to the place he started and begins in on the next row of cheese. And the whole thing starts over.

I guess the thing is that by now society has given us just about all we need to live comfortable lives. But companies have found that they can increase profit margins by leveraging us into buying things based on marginal options. These options are not necessary or even that important. Instead, they are the optional features that few of us will ever use but all of us think we might, just perhaps, need. So we buy the camera with the extra megapixels (in case we ever want to make a print the size of a house) or the extra address book storage capacity (in case we ever have that many friends to keep track of). John Naish writes “The market for most practical products is saturated. Manufacturers used to respond to this problem by competing primarily on price, but beyond a certain point that gets too painful. So they began instead to offer more options—creating whole new wants and then supplying things to meet them.” They give us more to choose from, which gives us all the rationale we need to spend more money.

A little while ago an article in the Times discussed this very thing. Though our consumeristic mindset may beg to differ, choice, is not the key to happiness.

Everywhere you turn there is a mind-boggling parade of clothes, gadgets, financial products, holidays and entertainment. Tantalised by all these buying options, we stockpile our shopping baskets, homes and lives with ever more consumer goods that we probably don’t need or even appreciate. And this isn’t good for our happiness.

“The huge number of choices that assault us every day makes many of us feel inadequate and in some cases even clinically depressed,” says Professor Barry Schwartz, a psychologist from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of The Paradox of Choice. “There is vastly too much choice in the modern world and we are paying an enormous price for it. It makes us feel helpless, mentally paralysed and profoundly dissatisfied.”

And who can claim that they haven’t felt dissatisfied after choosing from among so many options? Some time ago, with our dryer threatening to burn the house down and our washing machine refusing to spin, Aileen and I headed to the big box stores to shop for a new set. There were so many choices we didn’t know where to begin. We looked to Consumer Reports but were befuddled by the 500+ reviews of machines they list. Is the Maytag THG438447 the same as the THG438448? Is it true that 4 of the 6 brands sold at Best Buy are simply re-branded models of GE appliances? And do we really need sixteen wash settings and 247 dry settings? What’s the difference between a front-loader and a top-loader. Is there any benefit to having a glass door or does the solid door work just as well? “Professor Schwartz believes that the dogma of all Western societies - that maximising freedom and choice increases welfare-is deeply flawed. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if eventually you’ll be able to buy a mobile phone with integral nasal-hair trimmer and creme brulee torch,’ he speculates sardonically.”

I could really use a new torch, and all the better if it integrated with my phone, my nail clippers and my iPod.

“So much choice makes decision-making increasingly complex,” says David Shanks, a psychology professor and the co-author of Straight Choices, a new book that examines how to make the best decisions when faced with a perplexing array of options. We feel bad that every time we do make a choice, it seems we are missing out on other opportunities. This makes us feel inadequate and dissatisfied with what we have chosen. Often, we feel bamboozled and just shove a familiar or prominently displayed brand into our basket. Then we feel useless because we can’t cook gourmet dinners like Jamie Oliver and don’t know what to do with any of these exotic new ingredients. So we end up buying and eating the same meals time and again.

This excess also numbs us to the heady pleasure felt by previous generations when they bought something new in an era when budgets were leaner and consumer goods in shorter supply. All we can think about now is what we still want to buy, rather than appreciating what we have.

Or perhaps instead we’re thinking about what we could have had. This new iMac I have is excellent. But maybe I should have bought the next one up—the one with the extra RAM and bigger hard drive. Or maybe I should have saved a few bucks by buying the one that is one-step down. Or…it never ends. The evidence suggests, says Professor Leppe, that we thrive when we have less choice. “Excess choice is paralysis rather than liberation.” “‘It challenges a lot of our beliefs, but it could just be that choice within constraints will make us feel a lot better,’ says Professor Schwartz. ‘We need to live in the moment, appreciate what we have and not think about all the other things that we could choose instead.’”

Even better, we need to live with an eye to the future. We can pile up all the stuff we want here on earth, but we can’t take it with us. But we could still live our lives miserable, always wondering what could have been. The endless choice we face may be the mark of our culture’s prosperity but the evidence is proving that it just makes us miserable. It seems to me that endless choice makes for endless discontent.

Stay tuned. I will continue this article on Friday (after a brief pause on Thursday to begin reading our next classic of the faith together).

As I read John Piper’s book Finally Alive I came across a lot of godly wisdom. But there was one quote that, more than the others, jumped out at me. I thought I’d share it with you today…

*****

This is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. (1 John 3:11-14)

Now this specific form of love in verse 12 may seem to you to be totally unneeded. “Don’t be like Cain who murdered his brother.” Am I really concerned that there will be a spate of murders among Christians? No. And I don’t think John feared that either, though it does happen. He doesn’t focus on the murder. He asks in verse 12, “And why did he murder him?” That’s John’s concern. There is something about Cain’s motive that he thinks will be relevant to the way believers love each other.

He answers at the end of verse 12: “Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.” What John is saying here is not merely that love doesn’t kill a brother, but that love doesn’t feel resentful when a brother is superior in some spiritual or moral way. Cain didn’t kill Abel simply because Cain was evil. He killed him because the contrast between Abel’s goodness and Cain’s evil made Cain angry. It made him feel guilty. Abel didn’t have to say anything; Abel’s goodness was a constant reminder to Cain that he was evil. And instead of dealing with his own evil by repentance and change, he got rid of Abel. If you don’t like what you see in the mirror, shoot the mirror.

So what would it be like for any of us to be like Cain? It would mean that anytime some weakness or bad habit in our lives is exposed by contrast to someone else’s goodness, instead of dealing with the weakness or the bad habit, we keep away from those whose lives make us feel defective. We don’t kill them. We avoid them. Or worse, we find ways to criticize them so as to neutralize the part of their lives that was making us feel convicted. We feel like the best way to nullify someone’s good point is to draw attention to their bad point. And so we protect ourselves from whatever good they might be or us.

But John’s point is: Love doesn’t act like that. Love is glad when our brothers and sisters are making progress in good habits or good attitudes or good behavior. Love rejoices in this growth. And if it happens to be faster than our own growth, then love is humble and rejoices with those who rejoice.

So the lesson for us is: Everywhere you see some growth, some virtue, some, spiritual discipline, some good habit, or good attitude, rejoice in it. Give thanks for it. Compliment it. Don’t resent it. Don’t be like Cain. Respond the opposite from Cain. Be inspired by other people’s goodness.

Love is humble. Love delights in other people’s good. Love doesn’t protect its own flaws. Love takes steps to change them. What a beautiful fellowship where everyone is rejoicing in each other’s strengths, not resenting them! This is what the love of God looks like when the new birth gives it life in the people of God.

Years ago I was standing in the foyer of the church I attended at that time and a person who was new to the church came to me and, rather quietly, asked “What do you guys believe about smoking? Is it okay to smoke in this church?” I laughed a little, not because it was a stupid question but because the church had people from such a great diversity of backgrounds. We had heaps of ex-Catholics, a core of ex-Charismatics, a few long-time Baptists and so on. I told him I had no idea what the general consensus was but that I was sure that as long as he smoked outside no one would care too much. I was reminded of this a couple of days ago when a reader of the site asked if I’ve given much thought to the subject.

I know lots of Christians who smoke and it has never really caused me to examine the idea of a conflict between that action (or addiction) and their faith. But I know that for some people this is a significant stumbling block. They feel that the action of smoking reveals something about a person’s heart or even about his spiritual state.

Christianity Today’s Campus Life once published a small article that provides the usual arguments against smoking:

• Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, so be careful what we put in our bodies.
• Smoking is an addiction and Christians are to guard against addictions.
• Smoking has many harmful effects and can often lead to other addictions.

These are all rational arguments. Another common argument we might add to the list is that God provides our finances and we are told to be diligent stewards of them. Lighting them on fire is not a God-honoring way of using his gifts.

All of these arguments are well and good, but they all have other sides to them. Yes, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, but how much worse is it to put smoke (and all it carries with it) into our bodies than much of the food we eat or much of the air we breathe? I would say that there are far more Christians addicted to caffeine than there are to nicotine. Sure smoking has lots of harmful effects, but so does overeating or eating the wrong things. God provides us money, but how often do we use it to buy things we don’t really need? Is spending our money on McDonald’s really much better than spending it on cigarettes?

I guess the crux of the matter is this: is it sinful to smoke?

It seems to me that it is hard to sustain a consistent biblical argument which would conclude that smoking is always and ever sinful. I think it is difficult to bind another person’s conscience without resorting into some kind of inconsistency or legalism. I see the logic behind these arguments, but those same principles seem to fail when they are extended to the rest of the Christian life. There is part of me that feels I should say with certainty that smoking is sinful. But I don’t think I can do so in good conscience.

I actually quite like John Piper’s take on this one (though he does conclude that smoking is sinful). He says, “Habitually smoking cigarettes seems to say, ‘Life doesn’t matter as much as my pleasures do.’ And the fact that it is highly addictive should also encourage Christians to keep their distance.” So maybe there is a difference between the person who smokes two packs of cigarettes a day and the person who occasionally enjoys a fine cigar. Piper writes that in his church they do not focus specifically on smoking; instead, they have a higher standard. “We engage to abstain from all drugs, food, drink, and practices which bring unwarranted harm to the body or jeopardize our own or another’s faith.” Some might argue that this is a lowering of standard, but I’m inclined to believe that it actually raises the standard. It removes the focus from specific pet sins and widens the focus to a wider range of sins that we may be willing to tolerate. We should give thought to everything we do, everything we eat, everything we breathe in.

I have an intense dislike toward smoking. I dislike the smell of it and I have a special pet peeve toward seeing cigarette butts lying on the ground outside buildings. But I don’t presume to think that I can tell much about a person’s spiritual condition by the fact that he smokes. Nor do I find that I can (or would want to) generate the kind of argument from Scripture that would tell another person that smoking is absolutely forbidden. But when we look at the evidence of how smoking impacts the smoker’s health, how it impacts the health of others around him, how it encourages addiction and so on, it seems that it is something the Christian would be eager to avoid or overcome. Is it always and for all people sinful? I don’t know that I would go that far. Piper gets it right when he says “Don’t pick out a few individual named sins, but let your definition of sin be sweeping and pervasive so that it touches everything. And let your definition of holiness be the same. How you drink Coke, eat pizza, or exercise can all be sin issues, or not.”

So what do you think? Is smoking sinful? Or can it, like so many other things, be done for God’s glory?

This weekend I spoke at a youth retreat in Northern Michigan. I won’t get more specific than that because, well, I can’t. I followed some vans full of teenagers from Flint and stopped where they stopped, about an hour and a half north. We settled in at this rather nice little Christian camp in what appeared to be 175 acres situated right in the middle of nowhere. It was an ideal spot for a retreat.

Almost ideal, actually. The camp was not far enough away from civilization that cell phone reception disappeared. It was weak, but it was present. And that was enough, I fear, that a lot of students were not able to retreat at all. Before we left, the youth leader asked the students if they would consider going without their phones for as much of the day as they could stand. He did not want to legislate that they had to leave their phones at home, but he did ask that they consider trying to untie themselves for at least a short while.

I must be old because I tend to use my phone as a phone (Imagine that!). Anything else I can do with it is merely supplemental; a handy bonus for desperate times. I almost never send or receive text messages and really don’t understand why I’d want to. Only on the rarest of occasions will I use it to browse the web since the access it offers is slow, tiny and restrictive. I usually just prefer to wait until I’m in front of something that can do it better. I do make the occasional exception (like the other day when Aileen and I were out and wanted to check show times at the nearby theater) but my phone is pretty much just a phone to me.

I can see, though, that for teenagers a phone is so much more. A cell phone really becomes an extension of who they are; it becomes a part of them. It is a bridge to their friends through texting or even calling, it is a bridge to the internet and a bridge to the world of social media. They can hardly separate their identity, their self-understanding, from it. And this makes me realize that for them to retreat (i.e. to go away on a youth retreat) must mean leaving the phone behind. I don’t know that today’s teens can retreat at all when the phone comes with them. After all, the whole purpose of a retreat is to get away—to get far away. When an army signals the retreat, the soldiers drop anything that holds them back, anything that weighs them down. They run for their lives. When we retreat for the good of our souls, we should be just as willing to unencumber ourselves, to leave behind whatever will weigh down our hearts and souls. A personal or youth group retreat is an opportunity to remove oneself from the usual situations, the usual contexts, and to spend time focusing on the soul. It is a time to lose some of one’s self-identity whether vocationally or as a student or in any of one’s other roles. It is almost impossible to do this, I think, when the outside world keeps beeping and buzzing and beckoning, announcing its presence. Its pull is too strong; its grip too firm.

While my cell phone does not grip me this way, I do know that other things do. One other thing does, at any rate. This weekend was not a retreat for me (or for any of the leaders up there). There was too much to do with preparing to speak six times, with trying to get to know the kids, with trying to be available to them, and so on. But if this had been a retreat for me, I can see that I would have had to leave technology behind as well. Maybe I could take my phone since it is merely a tool for me. But my computer, or at least its access to the Internet, would have to stay behind. I couldn’t properly retreat and bring the internet with me. It would be no retreat at all. My internet identity is a part of my self-identity that I’d have to leave behind if I wanted to retreat.

It is always amazing to me just how pervasive technology has become. But I’ve usually seen this by way of quantity more than quality. I’ve been amazed that I can go just about anywhere and find reception for my cell phone (and thus access to the internet) so that I almost never need to be completely unavailable to my wife should she need me (or my blog, should it need me). But rarely have I paused to consider that the pervasiveness of technology goes far deeper. It goes to my very identity so that I am something less without access the Internet. When I disconnect, a piece of me, a piece of who I am, disconnects as well. If this is true of me, who had the digital world grow up around me and who has known life without it, how much more is it true of those digital natives, the teens and kids of today who have never known anything but the digital world?

In John Stott’s little book Your Mind Matters I found this quote from Martyn Lloyd-Jones. He was commenting on Matthew 6:30 in his Studies in the Sermon on the Mount and offered a great critique to those who feel that faith and thinking are opposites; that a person who has faith is a person who refuses to use his mind. Instead, says Lloyd-Jones, a person who exercises faith must use his mind.

Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph, is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. … We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them. … Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else, and, as we put it, he goes round and round in circles. That is the essence of worry. … That is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think.

Theology remains something of a bad word in Christian circles. I’d believe that the success of a book like The Shack has proven this to us yet again. Many people seem eager to embrace some form of Christian spirituality but have little desire or love for theology. Theology is linked in people’s minds with frigid, dead religion that cares more about principles and matters of the head than deeds and matters of the heart. It is associated with fundamentalism and with cold conservatism. We need only look at the meaning and etymology of the word, though, to conclude that God requires all Christians to be theologians.

The word theology, as I’m sure you know, is derived from two Greek words. The root “theos” means God and the suffix “-ology” comes from the Greek word for speak. So what theology really means is “speaking of God” or as has become the more accurate definition, “the study of God.” That sounds quite inoffensive, doesn’t it? If you are a Christian, I suspect that it sounds exciting. If you love God and if you are loved by God, you will want to know him. I don’t think any Christian can deny that we are called by God to learn more about him and to study his ways. The process of sanctification is just that—learning more and more about God and his requirements for our lives. Our lifelong challenge is to mold our lives to fit into that image.

So what is it, then, that people are rebelling against when they disassociate themselves from theology? I believe that what they are running from is better termed “theology-ology.” It is a study of the study of God. If a Christian is diligent in studying God through the right motives and methods and for the right reasons, there will necessarily be change in his life. He cannot help but be changed by the living Word of God. However, if someone studies God only to acquire knowledge about him without applying any of that knowledge to his life, he is not so much studying God as he is studying the study of God. The study of God when done as he has commanded must always lead to application, heart change and then life change. Conversely, studying God through improper motives and methods with no view to application cannot affect true heart change in anyone.

There seems to be a fine line between theology and theology-ology. The line is not found in what we study as much as it is the motives behind the study and the result we expect to achieve. For example, 1 Corinthians 11 speaks about the necessity of women wearing head coverings while in church. I can look at that section of the Bible in two different ways. I can go in with a motive of wanting to show that women are subservient to men and sin if they do not wear head coverings in church. I can begin this study with the intent to prove to my wife that she needs to wear a head covering next Sunday. On the other hand, I can turn to this section with a motive of wanting to understand what God is trying to teach us in this passage. I can seek to understand the principles the Bible is teaching and how those relate to people today. I can begin my study with the intent to learn something that I can humbly and prayerfully apply to my life. This is an extreme or simplistic example perhaps, but it displays the difference between wanting to acquire knowledge of God through proper or improper methods and for right or wrong intentions.

I love theology. I love studying God and continually learning about him and about what he has done. I must confess that there is a part of me that also loves to study the study of God. There are many times in my life where I have learned about God simply so I could have more knowledge about him, never intending to change myself in response to what I have learned. There have been times where I have studied God just so I could convince others of their need to change. It is my prayer that whenever I study God I do so with proper motives and with a humble attitude, preparing myself to be changed by what I learn about him.

On Monday I wrote about freedom and offered a pretty weak effort, I think. It’s been a tough few days around here with everyone except me being sick at one time or another (and mostly all at the same time) and I fear that my article on Monday reflected a lack of attention. There is one thing I had wanted to say on Monday that I somehow did not quite communicate. I’m going to take another swing at it today.

We, as sinful human beings, seem naturally inclined to believe that there is greater freedom outside of God’s will than within it. I believe from a plain reading of Scripture that God intends that husbands will lead their families and that wives will submit to their husbands. I believe that this submission is far less humiliating than many in our culture would believe simply by hearing the word. Yet it is submission nonetheless, and submission comes very, very hard to human beings. And the more sinful the leader is, the harder it must be to submit. Every one of us owes submission and allegiance to God, the perfect God, and we can all attest, every day, just how hard that it is and how often we fail. Every time we sin we are telling God that we can live better outside of his will than within it. If we find it hard to submit to God, how much harder is it to submit to husbands or church leaders or Presidents and kings and Prime Ministers?

What we learn as Christians, though, is that there is greater freedom within God’s law, within God’s boundaries, within God’s will, than there is outside. If you are a parent, you know this already. Your children are more free to live a fulfilling, joyful life when they obey you than when they do not. Your child gains no freedom from touching the hot stove after you have told him not to; she gains no liberty by running across the busy parking lot when you have told her to stay put. Such freedom is no freedom at all. It leads only to pain—perhaps immediate and consequential pain or perhaps the pain of punishment later on; perhaps both. Yet every day you and I battle this very thing. We battle the desire to run away from God, to do things our way, to do things in whatever way we determine is best.

I think we sometimes feel as if God has saved us to a lifetime of captivity to his laws. Now that we are Christians there is so much we cannot do. There is so much we must do. Suddenly we see that “wives should submit in everything to their husbands.” We see that “every person [must] be subject to the governing authorities.” We see that our submission to Christ leads to submission to others. We see that our submission to Christ requires us to do so many things that come so slowly and reject many things that come so easily. And we regard this as captivity. We may even resent these high, tough standards that God requires.

But God gives these high standards, he gives us these laws, he gives us these boundaries for our good and for our freedom. “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). As we grow in our knowledge of God and as we grow to be more like him, we see that what we thought was freedom was really slavery and what we thought was slavery is in reality glorious freedom. We find our freedom in submitting to God and obeying him, even when such obedience goes against all we want to do and all we want to believe. God knows best and we live best before him when we submit to his ways, whatever the cost.

At my church last night I preached a message that was part of a series we are doing on various points of theology. The topic I had to address was biblical manhood and womanhood. It’s something of an uncomfortable topic to have to preach and one we, as Christians, are too often intimidated by. I sought in this message to emphasize the freedom and the delight in God that come to us when we understand and even celebrate the differences between men and women—when we understand what God tells us about biblical manhood and womanhood.

I guess I am very traditional (and hopefully biblical) when it comes to gender roles within the church and within marriage. I believe that God has called men to lead their families and to lead their churches. I believe that God has made men and women, husbands and wives, to be complementary—to complement one another. And in so doing he has given us the privilege of reflecting him in his Trinitarian relationship. Here we see the Father always leading, the Son submitting to the Father but exercising authority over the Spirit, and the Spirit always submitting to both Father and Son. We learn from the Trinity that we can be equal in value and worth and dignity, even while having different and subordinate roles. And this is the way God intends the church and the family to function.

The subject of freedom was much on my mind as I considered the topic. It was my conviction as I prepared this message that there is greater freedom for those who understand the roles God has assigned to men and to women than to those who deny that such roles exist. This may seem to go against the societal grain. We are told, if not explicitly at least implicitly, that there is more freedom in a lack of rules or a lack of boundaries than there is with their presence. Freedom comes, we are told, when we live without rules or when we cast off the old rules.

I do not believe this. I believe that we are free only when we live within the boundaries given to us. Here’s a silly illustration I used for this.

Imagine a country in which there were no traffic laws whatsoever. There were plenty of cars, but no rules about how those cars can be driven. No speed limits, no minimum age requirements, no safety standards, no “no parking” signs, no dotted lines down the middle of the road, no stop lights, no drunk driving laws. Every person would have freedom to do whatever he wished to do. I could drive on the left and you could drive on the right. I could park in the middle of the freeway and you could drive 100 miles per hour past a grade school. No one could rightly tell either one of us not to.

What kind of freedom would this be? Sure, we would all be free to drive however, whenever, wherever we wanted. But this freedom would be devastating and terrifying. I would have no real freedom to travel from Toronto to Ottawa; I would undoubtedly not make it far before finding myself in some kind of accident. We would be free to get killed in all kinds of original and awful ways. Freedom comes when we have rules and when we obey those rules.

Adam and Eve had freedom, didn’t they? They had true freedom—the freedom not to sin. And yet they also had rules. Or one rule, anyways. They were free to live before God but only if they lived within the boundary he gave them. You know how the story went. And human beings have been fighting boundaries ever since.

So I guess I see biblical manhood and womanhood through this lens. We experience a kind of freedom in submitting to the rules God has given us—the rules that tell us how men and women should relate and especially so within the church and within marriage. This opens up to us the freedom to live as he would have us live. It opens to us a freedom to understand the beauty of seeing things and doing things in God’s way. It allows us to see that, for all the supposed wisdom of men, God’s ways really are better.

It seems that life is filled, at almost every turn, with trials and difficulties. Some of these times of trail are light while others are terrible and weighty. Strangely, some of these trials are caused by times of great joy while others are caused by great pain. The birth of a child can prove to be almost as great a trial, despite being brought about by such joy, as the loss of a job or another occasion of pain. It is during times like this that I am particularly grateful to be a part of the church. In these times we see and feel God’s wisdom in bringing His people into this type of community.

I am one of those people that loves to help (most of the time, anyways). While I am a shamefully selfish person in many ways, I do derive joy from helping others, even if that help is expressed in something as simple as lending my back to help a family move, lending my van for hauling a crowd of people from place to place, or lending my time to help out at some occasion or another. Whether I always do this from a pure heart, deriving my joy from obedience to God in helping these people, is debatable. It is a strange and unique fact of the Christian faith that, as far as God is concerned, motives matter more than actions. God values a pure heart and one that seeks His honor above all. Far too often I know that I do things from the desire to be seen, known and praised. It’s pathetic really. Shameful. Yet it is all too human.

But while I love to help, sometimes from pure motives and sometimes from impure, I am not the type who likes to be helped. I assume that this is primarily an outworking of pride in my life. I am convinced that it is also a product of my upbringing. Despite not having any recent Dutch heritage, I was, in large part, raised among second generation Dutch-Canadians. I went to Dutch schools and churches and no doubt absorbed much of their culture and many of their values. The Dutch are, in so many ways, a noble group and, when saved, make some of the strongest, most committed Christians I’ve known. There are few groups I have seen that do a better job of taking care of and ministering to their own. While these Dutch Christians value hard work, they also take very good care of those who are unable to work because of age, infirmity or circumstance. These Dutch churches put to shame many congregations I have come across since where those who fall upon hard times are considered burdensome and are shunned rather than honored, left to their own rather than ministered to.

Yet while the Dutch people I knew took very good care of those who were unable to care for themselves, they still placed great value on self-sufficiency. Charity was something to be extended only to those who had a genuine need for it. While it was not generally considered shameful to need or accept charity, it was considered most shameful to request it when it was not absolutely necessary. Embedded deep in the Dutch culture is the value of a person pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, being strong, and showing no weakness. Those who were considered weak, especially when young, were often trampled underfoot. The Dutch schools I knew were full of weak, frightened people who feigned strength simply to survive. The churches were probably not much different.

It is a strange dichotomy, I suppose, but this desire to be self-sufficient was as much part of the culture as was the desire to help those who had genuine needs. Charity was valued as highly as self-sufficiency. This was the culture I absorbed as a child and teenager. It was the culture that, in some ways, I carry with me today. I am usually glad to extend charity, but am rarely as eager to express need or to accept help from others. I hate to feel weak.

It is only over the past few years that I have come to see the value of expressing weakness when I am weak. I have seen the value in asking people to come in to my life and to minister to me when I have needs. But then in my honest moments I see that I still hide in my pride too much of the time, not wishing to be a burden on others even in my weakness.

I have come up with a list of three reasons that Christians need to be honest about expressing weakness and need.

First, expressing weakness is an expression of humility. Conversely, it is only pride that keeps me from making my needs known and asking others to minister to me. When I am filled with pride, a strong and ever-present foe, I would rather suffer silently than humble myself and allow others to extend help to me. Far too often I have feigned strength when I am filled only with weakness. Far too often I have allowed pride to overwhelm humility and have suffered in my sinful silence.

Second, expressing weakness allows others to plead for me before God. There are times when my prayers are weak and filled with doubt. There are times when I don’t even know what to pray or how to pray for myself. In these times it is comforting to know that others are praying for me and holding me up before the throne of grace. What a blessing it is to be part of a body where we can express the needs of others and bring these before God.

Finally, when I refuse to express my weakness I refuse to give other people the opportunity to minister to me. I withhold a blessing from them. It is a strange fact that, while I am always eager and willing to help those who reach out to me, I am far less eager to reach out to others. I cannot count the number of times that I have been blessed by having the opportunity to help others. While I attempt to see extending help and charity as a selfless act, an act primarily for my own benefit, it is sometimes difficult not to! I have had my faith challenged and strengthened and have been greatly blessed in helping others. When I have heard expressions of gratitude by those I’ve been able to help I have often had to say, with honesty and humility I think, that it was surely a greater blessing to be able to help than it was to receive assistance. Why is it, then, that I am so hesitant to allow others the opportunity to be blessed by helping me? It seems to me that I must be as sinful in refusing to help those in need as I am in refusing to allow them to bless and minister to me when I have need.

We are in the midst of difficult economic times. While my country of Canada has been insulated against the downturn (at least when compared to our neighbors to the south), as 2009 dawns we are beginning to see greater evidence that we will not emerge from these times unscathed. In the past few weeks we’ve begun to see friends and neighbors lose their jobs and are beginning to hear of needs within our community. The stories from Canada are beginning to sound an awful lot like the stories I’ve heard from the United States and elsewhere.

None of us know how long these times will last and none of us know just how bad things will get. There are those who would argue that the worst is behind us; others argue that the pain has only just begun. I think we can be certain that before this is over churches will see an large numbers of brothers and sisters in Christ face financial crisis. And this will be a prime opportunity for the church to be the church. It will be a time for those people who are affected by the times to express need; it will be a time for those Christians who have weathered the storm to be a blessing to others. This is not a time or occasion for pride and bravado. It is not a time to withhold a blessing from another Christian by refusing to express need, to express weakness. As these times unfold, let’s let the church be the church, functioning just as God intends it.

At Grace Fellowship Church we’ve been praying for something big and we’ve been praying it for quite some time. We want a meeting place of our own. It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with the school we meet in now, but more that we can foresee how our own building would be beneficial to the church and to the community. Oh, and we want the building to be free. We’re quite a small church and the leadership (wisely, I think) is hesitant to rope the church into a long and expensive mortgage. Real estate prices being what they are in Toronto, it would realistically be a very long and undoubtedly very expensive mortgage. This would not be a good decision for our church. So we continue to pray for a building of our own, for free.

I am confident that we can pray for such a thing and am confident that God can answer our prayer in amazing and unexpected ways. And really, I’ve seen him answer such prayers in other churches and organizations. The Apostle had confidence that God was able to do things far beyond our ability to even imagine, closing his prayer for the Ephesians by praying in the name of “him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” What seems so big to us is so small to God. Is the Creator of all the universe bound by the limitations that seem so clear to us?

It’s strange to me, then, that I can pray in such confidence that God is able to do great things and yet still pray with such a diminished sense of my prayers actually mattering to God. I am coming to realize that this is one of my great struggles in prayer. I believe in God’s sovereignty; I believe what he says in the Word is true and that he is not only able, but willing to grant what I ask in prayer. “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” God wants to hear the prayer of his saints and as a father delights in giving good things to his son, God delights in giving good things to his children.

And yet so often I pray like it doesn’t really matter. I make it a habit to try to pray for every person in our church every week. Far too often I pray these prayers like I am praying to someone who is not eager to hear the prayers and is not eager to answer them. I pray like I am asking difficult things of a reluctant ruler. I pray like I need to beg God that he will bless these saints, like he is uninterested in hearing my requests that these people will apply to their lives the Word they heard on Sunday or that they will come to church eager to enjoy communion with him. I pray like prayer is a duty, not a delight.

But lately God has been showing me that prayer can be so much more than duty. When prayer is mere duty I see myself falling into the trap of the Gentiles that Jesus talked about in his Sermon: “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” My prayers can be so empty, so meaningless, little more than empty phrases heaped one upon the other. But God has been showing me that they are so much more. They are so much more to him.

So this has been my prayer in recent days—my prayer with which I begin to pray. “God, help me to have confidence that my prayers matter.” I’ve found that such a sense can transform a prayer. With such a prayer I am reminding myself of God’s truth—that He is eager to hear and answer my prayers—and I am asking him to give me a renewed and enlarged sense of this great truth. As I pray this I am reminding myself that God is no petty tyrant disinterested in what I may desire to ask him, but that he is a gracious Father who desires good things for all of his children. And I remind myself that prayer is a means, and often the means, by which he gives us those things that will bless us and bring glory to his name.

Prayer matters—my prayers matter. I fight to keep this in my mind and I fight to keep it in my heart.