Romans 9:3

In Romans 9, Paul writes, "For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh."

What a powerful statement that is. When I first read it, I thought Paul was actually saying that he would sacrifice his relationship with Christ if it meant assuring the salvation of Israel. What a testament to Paul's devotion to Israel, but what a statement on Paul's part about what he was willing to forsake. Would anyone in their right mind forsake their salvation in Jesus Christ for someone else? That salvation, the hope of mankind, the hope for every sinner, the redemption from eternal punishment and separation from God? We barely inconvenience ourselves for the people around us. Would you go to hell for someone else?

Jesus did, for us, for three days. Jesus, in fact, gave up His place with God for our salvation, in the same way Paul would have wished for the salvation of Israel at the cost of his place with God. That was different though. Jesus has a certain return to glory. The thought for Paul to be "accursed from Christ" probably meant no hope for resurrection from that separation from God.

What a thought to give up your place with God for the sake of someone else! Yet, we see a few examples in the Bible. After the episode with the golden calf in Exodus 32, Moses pleads with God, "Oh, these people have committed a great sin, and have made for themselves a god of gold! Yet now, if You will forgive their sin -- but if not, I pray, blot me out of Your book, which You have written."

I don't think that Paul actually dared to wish that he could exchange his salvation for that of Israel's. He knew it wasn't possible for his sacrifice to cover an entire nation's, and he knew that his sacrifice would be no assurance of anyone's salvation. His words are "I could wish" express a strong desire, rather than a literal meaning, in the same sense that "I could kill him, I'm so angry" doesn't really mean that I want to or intend to kill anyone. Paul's words simply communicate a strong passionate wish for the salvation of Israel and a personal commitment and investment.

The story that really helps me visualize this sort of sacrificial love is in Mark 2. It's not clear why four men are carrying the paralytic to see Jesus; it's not clear if they're friends, or the four men found the paralytic on the periphery of the crowd, or if the paralytic made the request, or if the four men were simply proactive in love. But I think it's reasonable to think that those four guys could've pushed through the crowd to see Jesus for themselves, and left that guy outside. "Sorry, but seeing Jesus is really important to me, and I'm not willing to give that chance up. I'm really sorry, but I'm going to have to leave you outside." How often do we say that our individual pursuit of Jesus is the most important thing in our lives? But here we see four men risking their chance to see Jesus to help the chances of the paralytic.

It helps to know that Jesus loves and blesses and rewards that kind of sacrifice. It helps to know that it isn't really possible to lose our salvation in pursuing the salvation of others. But that strong love and desire for others to see God will take sacrifice, and it's verses like Romans 9:3 that make you stop and think about what you'd be willing to give up for the sake of other people.

Things I Learned in College

I came to Rice University four years ago, and I'm not really any smarter now, but I am wiser for the experiences I have here. I thought it'd be valuable to write down some of the things I've learned since I've been here. It's not a comprehensive list, but it's something.

1. Family is important.

You know, if you're like me, you grow up with your family and you spend a lot of that time wanting to get away from them. You can pick your friends because you have something in common with them, they're likeable, they're fun, or whatever quality you could predetermine, but your family is a random group of people that you're just stuck with: why wouldn't you prefer to be with your friends?

I grew up with a strained relationship with my dad, or at least I felt like I did, and to a fifteen or sixteen year old, that's all that matters: you feel like life's dealt you a lousy hand. Why don't my parents love me? I wondered. Of course they loved me, but teenagers have a really poor sense of perspective. At any rate, it was a huge turning point when I realized that I had not been asking the real question about love: how can I love my family?

I realized I'd been having the wrong approach to family: that it's not just a random assortment of people that are supposed to love you no matter what -- it's a random assortment of people that you get to love, no matter what. And what an opportunity to see and experience love as it really is. You don't love your sister or your brother because they're super-nice or for any other merit. You love them because they're your family and that's who God's given you to love. That's how God loves us. That's how we're supposed to love. It's hard work and it's so much more worth it because it's not easy.

I came to college wanting to get away from those annoying people that constituted my family. Now I realize that family is a God-given opportunity for us to learn about love.

2. Second Chances are Important.

I used to read the story about Jesus telling His followers to forgive their neighbors not seven times, but seventy times seven times. And of course, the point of the story is that we're supposed to embrace forgiveness without keeping a count of how many times we've been wronged. Obvious, right?

Since I started my first dating relationship a little over fifteen months ago, I've realized that I'm not naturally very good at forgiving. My girlfriend really seems to be. She's just about the most forgiving person in the world, and it puts me to shame. But I found that especially as she kept making the same mistakes over and over, I found it harder and harder to let it go. Why would you do this again? Didn't you do it yesterday, and realize how much it angers me? I know I'm supposed to forgive and everything, but how many times are you going to screw this up?
It is a lot of work to forgive. It is a lot of work to say, "It's okay, honey, I still love you, and I don't hold it against you" and really mean it every time.

It helped to read 1 Corinthians 13, where it says that love "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." The NIV says, "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs."

It is humbling to realize that as much as I struggle with forgiving little things from day to day and giving someone a second chance every chance, God does the same for you, and He does it perfectly. It is no easier for Him; someone doing something wrong or hurtful to you is a universal downer. He is just that good.

3. Thinkers are common, talkers are common. Doers are rare.

4. God is bigger than I thought.

I more or less had God figured out when I came to college. Now I feel like I know very little about what there is to know about Him. I'll give an example: for a young believer, when they ask, "Does everyone who believes in Jesus get saved and go to heaven?" It's a pretty safe and true answer to say, "Yes." The answer to the real question at hand is, "Yes, if you give your life and yourself to Jesus, He's promised His salvation for you." But a more mature believer might ask, "Well, what about the Scriptures like James 2:19 where it talks about demons believing and trembling? What about Matthew 7:21-23? What about the whole doctrine of faith versus works?" And it would be good sense to reason that maybe not "everyone" who "believes" in Jesus would be saved, depending on how you define those terms. What about non-Christians? Do all of them go to hell? Romans 1:18-21 would suggest that people who don't even hear the gospel have a chance to realize and accept God or reject Him. Where do we even get our conception of hell? What does the Bible say about hell? Not a whole lot in very clear description.

As I've studied Scripture and pursued God through my time at Rice, I've come to realize that a lot of the things I used to think were simple black and white, are not as obvious or defined as I thought they were. Of course there are truths to live by, and some of my contemplation is foolishness. But God is much, much bigger and beyond my understanding than that feeble religious system I had Him pegged in when I came to Rice four years ago.

5. Experience counts.

In Bible study and in ministry, I'm starting to give more value to experience than I used to.


These things seem obvious, but they're not until you really learn them.

Mere Sunday Christianity

The term "Sunday Christian" is one tier above the class of people who go to church exclusively on Christmas or Easter. So technically, for most of college years, I've been one step below a Sunday Christian -- I hadn't been going to church because campus ministry has been pretty amazing at meeting my needs for discipleship, mentorship, bible study, community, etc., and also a great outlet for personal ministry, so this past Easter was the first time in months that I'd really gone to church. (Okay, I went to Kurt's church once, but it had a food court.) I like this one, so far; I think I've been for four Sundays in a row, so I can now augment from being a "submarine Christian" that only surfaces twice a year.

All these derisive labels are rather tellingly explained on Wikipedia.

This past week, though, I really was a Sunday Christian. I led leaders' bible study on Monday about Ecclesiastes, and that went well, but from Monday until today, I really didn't give God a second thought. I had conflicts with both discipleship and Martel bible study, so I didn't participate in either of those, which makes me realize how dependent I sometimes am on structured events to begin seeking God. I think, without really thinking about it, I reassured myself with the thought that it was okay because on Sunday, I'd get right with God and start the week over again. There was no urgency to the now.

It was really easy to slip into being a Sunday Christian for a week.

I've had enough dry times to know that your faith isn't necessarily broken if you've spent some time away with God and you don't feel horrible as a result. That's a new believer's dilemma: "How can it be that I haven't spent any time with the Lord in the past few days and I still feel okay, I don't feel empty or miserable or anything without Him?" Well, hey, it's called grace, and God is sometimes super-nice to us, and no, you don't deserve to feel okay, but that's the whole point. And I don't think there's any problem with really seeking God in organized, disciplined routines -- discipline through regular churchgoing and bible study and discipleship at set points throughout the week are really amazing venues through which God can work in your heart. God even set incredibly regular, prescribed remembrance feasts for His people in Leviticus 23, which I think we can take to mean that not all our "authentic" spiritual experience has to be spontaneous or "organic." The sticky part about taking a disciplined approach to faith is that you have to have some discipline. I can say, I'll probably grow a lot in the Lord if I set aside these times to pursue Him in these ways, but I have to actually follow through, and often times I don't because I'm lazy.

And yet God has blessed my faith, unquestionably, unstintingly, in the last four years.

We fail at pursuing God through disciplined means, and we fail at pursuing God when we disavow "pre-packaged religion" and try to make it on our own terms. Here is the real meaning of 1 John 4:10: "This is love, not that we love God, but that He loved us." If I am growing in my faith and relationship with God and only putting in the paltry work of a Sunday Christian, then God's grace for me is far more than I deserve. Even in my failures, God is faithful to reveal Himself.

If there were ever anything to persuade me to the doctrine of predestination, it would be my own failure and God's overwhelming compassion towards me when I don't deserve a thing. The same could also be said about the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Worship

Sometimes there are particular lines, or a few words, that just move you. It's at those times that you stop being cynical and you stop thinking you have everything figured out because something so simple as a few words sung in praise of God can overwhelm you with...I guess a glimpse of truth, or of eternity.

I have a few favorites. Just little excerpts of songs that I can't sing without feeling like God's really grabbing me in a very real way. Here are several of them...

- Oh to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be.

- No guilt in life, no fear in death, this is the power of Christ in me.

- You did not wait for me to draw near to you, but you clothed yourself in frail humanity.

- Let thy goodness like a fetter bind my wandering heart to thee -- prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.

- Though there's pain in the offering, blessed be Your name.

- Heart of my own heart, whatever befall, still be my vision.

- This is all my hope and peace, nothing but the blood of Jesus, this is all my righteousness, nothing but the blood of Jesus.

- And I will seek You in the morning, and I will learn to walk in Your ways, and step by step, You lead me, and I will follow you all of my days.

- Lord, You are more precious than silver...and nothing I desire compares with You.

- Don't let my vision die, I'm calling out, light the fire again.

- Naked and poor, wretched and blind I come. Clothe me in white so I won't be ashamed.

- And I'll sing Your praises forever, deeper in love with You.

- Broken, I run to You, for Your arms are open wide. And I am weary but I know Your touch restores my life.

On a side note, I have a hard time connecting with nature songs ("Running through the forest, dive into the lake") or "breathe" songs ("This is the air I breathe," and many others). Usually I end up just not singing them because I always end up thinking, "What am I even saying."

I've had some really good times of worship this year. One time it was a group of guys, and Mithun, who sings really loudly and unashamedly, and there came a moment where I thought about the way we were responding to our awesome Creator and God and thought, "This is it. This is what the human voice was created for." What an amazing thought, and how humbling to realize how often I use my mouth in a useless way that doesn't glorify God. How stark the contrast between the amazing truth of worship and the trivial things I babble on about on a daily basis. It really drives home the point of James 3 in a way that I hadn't considered before -- what do I use my tongue for?

Worship really is a recognition of truth. From time to time, someone will ask, "If people are created just to glorify God, then isn't that really selfish and petty of God just to make lesser beings to sit around and tell Him how great He is all day?" I think everyone has that thought at some point or another. It took me a while to realize that worship, pure unfettered worship, is the only right, natural response of a being like you and me to an infinitely vast, infinitely good being like God. It is the only way we can approach Him in light of who He is, and anything else is deception or falsehood. To not worship Him is to be dead wrong about the way things are -- you and I are really small and God is really big. It boggles my mind how much of my day is spent outside of a state of worship. It reminds me of the time I sat on top of a 12,444 ft mountaintop in the middle of an incredible wilderness and played cards with some friends because we'd gotten bored of the view and thought we'd seen it all. Stupid.

God also has used worship to show me His heart for His children. My freshman year, I was conversing with a guy on the beach about the gospel and made some headway, but later that night, I found myself in an amazing time of worship at a large group meeting and God's presence was really there. I can't describe what that's like. It's better than having VIP seats at a Neil Diamond concert, which I've definitely done, which was awesome in itself. But I think God really told me that night, "How much better would this be if that guy from the beach were here worshiping next to you?" What a blessing we have in God, and in the joy He gives us, and in our worshipful relationship with Him, and how deserving He is. How stingy I am not to think of others. It's like me eating Thanksgiving dinner and everyone else sitting around hungry with empty plates because I'm too self-centered to share.

That time of worship changed how I looked at God and how I looked at life. Worship is what the human voice was made for, and it's what we're made for too.