Bold, loving and sensible.

Evening all.
I'm going to try to squeeze something coherent out, though the alarm is optimistically set for 9am, for starting the revision early in order to picnic on the Vale with some of the best people around tomorrow lunchtime.
Things are grand and groovy, revision happening, sometimes sporadically, but have a lot of peace about the exams and extremely pleased to be back in Brum for, amongst other things:

-Catching up with some very lovely people whom I love....(Flowers remain optional).
-Getting stuck in with the youth group and settling back into Oasis
-Jamming in the house with some top movers, Messers Taylor, Miller and (in spirit) Dickens busting some moves that are seldom seen there, especially on Latin night.
-Seeing United progress to the final in style
-Seeing Chelsea fail to progress to the final in style, and seeing the reaction friends' reactions.(read:friend singular, ie Mr. Strain)
-Shocking my body into (and swiftly out of) a football tournament.
-Worms, Fifa and Pro Evo battles
-Far too much bacon.

All in all; life is grand, balanced, and thankfully being increasingly focussed on the one who matters in everything that goes on.

It's been a while...apologies...I finally found the catalyst to sort this post out and bind it together though.

It begins with some fresh-faced young chaps from Sheffield, that cheeky bunch, The Gentlemen. Their first outing, 'Smile back at me' was the was (and indeed remains) my favourite indie/breakbeat album full stop- a rare achievement to lure me away from straight up rock.
It has a diversity across genres that new bands rarely exhibit, and an honesty in the lyrics that weaves faith, relationships and personal reflection together under a funky, well produced album. Top marks for being unique, relateable, and evidently committed to getting truth into the tunes.

Their sophomore album came out a few days ago, ambitiously titled 'A Candid History of Faith, Hope, Love'.
I have been looking forward to this album for a good few years and have to say that my expectations have been met and exceeded. The above recipe has been largely unchanged, but there's nothing wrong with that, and the boldness of the title and cover art are warranted.
Upon the first few listens, a few tracks stand out from an excellent bunch;

'Unique', which is musically compelling- guitars are layered and a synth adds atmosphere, building to a rousing, rocky outro. It talks of our uniqueness as individuals, and then, for the most part, lifts its gaze higher and acknowledges God's ultimate uniqueness, wherein one can have trust in Him to the point of saying: "break me and make me everything you want me to be".
The second that stands out is 'Protest Music'.
These guys don't shy away from bold and emotive titles, and yet again, this doesn't disappoint.
Musically, it's definitely a song that I'm prone to head-bop and stomp to during the verse and allow it to progress into jumping and wild head swinging and air-drumming in the chorus.
But it's some of the lyrics of the song that grab hold of me:

"Wanna know a loving nation, wanna see a people free,
Wanna be a new creation, want to hear a symphony,
Now I don't want pornography all over MTV,
I don't need a magazine to tell me who to be.

This is my protest music, this is my protest song
I don't have all the answers, but I see some things are wrong

Wanna hang out with my parents,
I've still got so much to learn,
What a privilege to raise children,
I can't wait 'til it's my turn
So I don't need your teenage angst or rage against the air,
Because I care about my g-g-g-generation, but also value theirs.

What's the point in acting sexy when you say you're after love?
I couldn't care less if you're flexy, set your eyes on things above,
I don't want your underwear, no, please don't come backstage,
All I want's a wife that cares who loves me through old age."

It addresses some of the things that I struggle with and see wrong with the world, and a catchy, poppy song is a seemingly innocuous place where truth and peaceful rebellion against worldly ways can wriggle into consciousness.

Red Hot Chilli Peppers suggest that 'music is the great communicator'.
They certainly have a point...music is incredibly effective to get a message across, and it is about the things in the song, amongst others, that we should be protesting about in our own ways.

However, in a more general sense, the rebellious U-turn against the world comes in the way that we live every day, once we spend time with God and realise why we're trying to do things differently.

I've been reading the letters to Timothy lately, and this verse (2Tim 1:7, TM) hits me:
'God doesn't want us to be shy with His gifts, but bold and loving and sensible'

This is a fantasitc marrying of three essentials in all ministry.

The blueprint seems to be uncompromising conviction and faith in His sufficiency, speaking out with confidence because of His (and therefore our) love for others, communicating in a relevant, sensitive way that isn't small minded, judgemental or alienating*, which, tragically and somewhat bizarrely, is the way that a Gospel of immeasurable grace, forgiveness and love sometimes comes across as.

Oh...my heartfelt prayer is that I become a man that shares God and his gifts in that bold, loving and sensible way.

But I have to ask myself;

How infrequently do I achieve all three of these at the same time?
In an attempt to be helpful and do things from a place of love, I'm frequently not sensible, I'm insensitive and tactless.
Or I do things out of duty without love.
Or in a chronic bout of cowardice, I use 'sensibleness' as an excuse as I fail to be bold and speak out about how amazing He is.

I really want to do the things He's told us to do and bless others with the gifts He gives, but sometimes I can't seem to connect all the dots at the same time by myself...
The big lesson I'm beginning to learn is that Jesus is as sufficient to help me do this as He is to forgive me and save me.
He brings the balance between these things (boldness, love and sensibleness) along with the gifts themselves in order for them to be effective and helpful.

Like pretty much everything that Jesus taught, (preaching the gospel, loving the Father and our neighbours, having faith, even being perfect) we don't just get an instruction to 'do' or 'be' them ourselves, we don't even just get the gifts, but we get the capacity from Him to be able to 'do' and 'be' them and use the gifts properly for Him.

He doesn't leave us stranded. He doesn't abandon us with just an instruction manual.

He comes along side and teaches us on the job, like an apprentice being shown how to use the tools of a master-craftsman by the main man himself.

It's tough to reach that place and stay there though- I've found that selfishness and pride make even ministry about us; it becomes our work, our responsibility, our little Gospel projects, and often our failure, frustration and guilt when our own driven endeavours come to nothing...."why isn't my friend saved yet?"..."why doesn't that work?"..."why is living as a Christian such a slog sometimes?"....

All these are questions that have come into my head, and stepping back to observe what I'm doing and why I'm doing them allow me to reach the following crossroad:

The paradigm shift we have to make is from 'we should do good things because that's just what Christians do, and evangelism is a tiresome and frustrating activity' to 'it is a mindbending privilege to be working within God's plan, He's the reason and source of all our efforts of evangelism, encouragement and edification. Out of gratefulness and love for Him, because of what He's done and who He is, I'll allow Him to teach me and help me, knowing that as I step out, His grace is unending, so as an 'apprentice' who will inevitably make mistakes, there is no guilt or condemnation. He is the author of the salvation plan, His timing is perfect, and I will trust in that.'

Let's not get so caught up in religion that we forget why we're doing it.

So, I urge myself to live boldly, lovingly and sensibly, trusting Him for all that I need, and for all sorts of gifts to be given to be used in the ways He wants.

*A word on the aforementioned lack of tact and overly judgemental attitudes.

It worries me that some Christians subconsciously (and even consciously) expect others that haven't been saved to adhere to a way of living we seldom attain (and when we do, only managing because of God's grace). If unbelievers feel like we are looking down on them from a moral high horse, rather than feeling loved and welcomed, then we are scarcely being Christ-like.

For example, if I criticise drunkenness in my non-Christian friends, (them knowing that I don't drink much) they quite understandably would feel affronted, and are far less likely to be open to anything I have to say, even if it is about love and grace and freedom.

It takes a lot of wisdom and trust to know how to approach each person and each situation so that the Gospel can be explained effectively.

But the encouragement is again that it's His Gospel, not ours, His work, not ours, grace is SO BIG, and He helps us to be bold, loving and sensible in our conversations, so let's be on the lookout to remain open, welcoming and loving rather than introvert, cliquey and legalistic.

I shall probably take a break for a few weeks now that exams are nearly on top of me.

Loving some truth in 1 and 2 Peter right now, we'll see where that leads another time.

Until then, let's keep living deeply and simply.

Take care amigos.

Brace!........the ramble is in full flow

Yo yo yo...
Right, sophomore blog post...now that I've come to the realisation that people are actually going to READ this, part of me comes with a tendency to go off on one and ramble and try and make unfunny jokes and vaguely witty comments.
I shall do my best to avoid that and focus on my audience of one.

So, revision is getting off the ground at 'the pace of an arthritic slug', but is starting all the same and days are longer and less wasteful. Result!

A great time at Borderlands regional celebration this evening....good talk....love and the church being the hope of the world, some ace stuff that has been buzzing excitedly about the grey matter about a stones and dwellings and other such things....but that's for another time!

I said last time that I may delve into the Creationism/Evolution thing.
So, I realise that I've come a way down this track to be able to reach a certain intellectual point, but I think all that knowledge has served to augment what can be reached with or without knowing the structures of amino acids and DNA and genetics etc.
Simply put, I don't think that it's academic suicide to say that it doesn't matter as much as some people are making it out to.

With a little help from Conor Cunningham's ideas put forward in 'Did Darwin kill God?', I'll try and explain why.

As I see it, it's only the extremists on both sides that have created and subsequently aggravated this argument and apparent gulf between science and God.
The extremists on one side are the fundamental Christians who, perhaps misguidedly, interpret everything the bible says to not only be truth, but exact, literal fact from cover to cover....hence the argument for creationism and the proposition that the universe is, give or take, 6000 years old.
The extremists for 'Science' are the ones that not only say that the world is a lot older than this and that life developed naturally, but take Darwinism and apply it to everything, ie saying that all ideas and impulses that we experience are like the genes by which evolution is proposed to have worked- by survival of the fittest- as each gene 'selfishly' tries to survive, so the ideas and impulses (or 'memes') survive selfishly too.
This suggests that everything that we know and are could be truth or fiction, as long as the meme can perpetuate itself, meaning that everything is subjective, rendering everything (including religion and its ideas about our existence) a fabrication, necessitating atheism.

They appear at complete loggerheads, and at face-value the battle between them seems valid.

We must notice the flaws in both of these approaches.

Firstly, these Christians. Until the time of philosophers and apologists like William Paley in the 1700s, there was no mainstream concept of a literal understanding of Genesis. The church fathers acknowledged God as the creator, but not the exact mechanism by which He did it. They found it more important in the why and who, not how.
Indeed, Augustine warned of a literal understanding of Genesis.
This way of thinking also reveals a strange method of reading the Bible.
If we assume that Genesis 1 is literally true, whether days as our days, or days as a long period of time, it is clear that
'the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind' before the man was created.

But in Genesis 2, 'every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew', the man was created from dust- before the plants!
If we are taking Genesis as a pure history book, then there is a contradiction in the first two chapters, and it is a logical conclusion to throw it out as worthless, as many do, sadly.
In any case, I find it strange that people still attempt to reconcile (by ignoring) the contradiction and piece together the exact timing and age of the earth using nothing but the Bible.
But as I read the Bible as a whole, I find there are often seeming contradictions that highlight something that should be considered more deeply, and beyond their face value is a wealth of truth and I think the same applies here.
Dig deeper....I don't think we have to believe that Adam shared the garden of Eden with T-Rex.

Secondly, the ultra-Darwinists...taking the evolution thing to maxed out levels and saying that it ultimately leads to atheism. Using the memes philosophy, they say that there is no absolute truth, and the ideas in religion about God etc are just stories being perpetuated by people passing them on. But they shoot themselves in the foot by saying that the Memes philosophy is the truth. The memes thing could also be just be a lie.....on its own definition, it's no more likely to be true, real or good than religion or existence itself.
I'm an 18 year old trying to pass the first year of a science degree, I'm not a philosopher, but even I can see that that's ridiculous, and as a theory, it self-negates.

So, we end up at a point where evolution as a process does not take away from biblical truth, but at the same time, science is to do with facts in the known realm. It isn't its place to make a claim on any other domain.(And clearly, when it attempts to branch out into another area by itself, namely philosophy, its ideas are self-negating and go against its own self-governing philosophy of objectivity)
I don't think it's an irrational or heretical step to suggest that God, in His wisdom, could use evolution as His mechanism of creation? The Bible wants to show us that the why- the getting to the point of man being able to have relationship with Him (the who) is more important than the how. I don't think it takes away from our intricacy or the intimacy He is desiring.
Maybe these two things that seem to be at war are two ways of saying the same thing?

Also, it's also important to remember that science grows. Evolution, of course, is a theory. Theories can be disproved, but in this case, I think it is more likely that it will be shown that it isn't the be all and end all.
When Newton had his apple moment, within his lifetime they thought they'd more or less got physics pinned down. Then Einstein and relativity happened and now the physicists are looking for a theory that unifies both. The picture is much bigger than ever seemed possible.
The same may be true of evolution. I'm not trying to make excuses for it, or plugging the gaps with my God-thing, it just seems more scientific to not pin everything on one theory and not give it room to be bigger. Because there are some things that seem irreducibly complex that evolution as we know it just can't seem to account for.
Whether science does or doesn't find a natural mechanism that explains the development of some crazy biochemical systems that I shan't bore you with, I'll highlight again, I'm not using God as a gap-filler.
I believe He is running the whole show, and regardless of where science ends up, it's not its place to attempt to refute that He's not.

In conclusion, I think it's possible to read the Bible, believe it to be God-breathed truth, and be in relationship with Him AND be comfortable in lectures about evolution, because the former is far more important, the second is neither as clashing nor important as it seems.

In my mind, there is no doubt that He is powerful enough to have created the universe as literally described in either of those chapters in Genesis. I just don't think it's imperative to believe that He did. I think that the idea that my faith and the things I learn in my lectures oppose each other is a misconception.

The most critical thing is that here and now we need Him, no matter how we got here.
There has been too much unnecessary fighting over this.
And whilst some on both sides of the fence may disagree, I would much rather have good discussion about how these arguments are poorly constructed than attempts to provoke and fight because of a commitment to one of the 'camps'.

I hope that people won't take this post to be an attempt at preachiness, because it's not meant to be. It's just an explanation of how I got to where I am on this thing that seems to be bothering a lot of people lately. I'd hope that maybe someone will read this, see as I did that it's not one or the other, and that that would promote more thinking.


Just keep remembering the bigger picture and live deeply.

Drawing it all together, I find that the bigger picture itself is a beautiful paradox...zooming our perspective out, apparent complexities lead back to simple truth and revelations of the bigger picture, both in this case, and life in general.
Stereophonics said that 'you gotta go there to come back'
Perhaps they weren't far off.


Finally, apologies that I didn't get onto the whole 'what love looks like' thing. (that will be a short, easy post, eh?)
I've been reading some top stuff in Timothy too that I wanted to get to, but am shattered now, we'll get to that next time.

Bedtime.
Peace out and big love, peoples.