Discipleship Archives - Page 9 of 167

Based on just the title of this post, I can hear lots of people cheering and lots of other people rethinking whether or not they want to go to heaven.

No sports in heaven? For some that is truly heaven, while for others it sounds like hell.

Whichever feeling wells up within you, bear with me…

Someone once told me that since there wasn’t any mention of sports in the Bible, this means that there will be no sports in heaven.

I think that logic is pretty bad, but recently as I was listening to a news update about the passer rating of a certain quarterback, it occurred to me that there was a pretty good theological reason for there not to be any sports in heaven.

Except for baseball…. Kevin Kostner proved that there is baseball in heaven…. 😉

The Theological Reason for No Sports in Heaven

It is often taught in churches that when we get to heaven, we will never get sick, we will never die, we will have all our questions answered, and we will be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect.

That sounds nice… until you begin to realize what this means…

I like the idea of no more sickness and no more death, but the more I think about having all my questions answered and being perfect in everything, I am not sure I like that at all.

I am not a sports fanatic, but I like watching some sports, and I even play a bit of sports. … Well, no I don’t. Not any more. But I used to.

But here’s the point:

Sports is based on the universal reality that humans are not perfect in everything we do. That’s why we have batting averages. Free-throw percentages. Quarterback ratings.

Imagine if there was a person who always batted 1000, who never missed a free throw, and whose every pass of the football was for a touchdown.

Such a player would dominate the world of sports. Whatever team he was on would always win. Always.

Now imagine that every single player on both teams played just as perfectly. It sounds thrilling for about one second until you begin to think of what that game would be like.

Imagine a basketball game where every single shot was good. The announcer’s job would be easy. All he would have to say is “He dribbles down the court … he shoots … he scores!” over and over and over. Heck, the players wouldn’t even have to dribble down the court to shoot. All the shots would be full-court shots with 100% accuracy. It sounds thrilling to watch … for about five minutes. Then it becomes incredibly boring.

Of course, it is here where we start to run into problems. Take baseball as another example. It is logically impossible to have a player bat 1000 and have a pitcher throw a perfect game.

So you see? Sports are based on the fact that nobody is perfect in everything.

But if in heaven, everybody is perfect in everything, this means that there could be no sports.

So Heaven Sounds Pretty Dull After All…

Frankly, I find this highly depressing. Not because I am such a sports lover, but because I am such a lover of learning.

I love the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Just as some people love sports, I love the feeling of my mind and heart racing as I encounter a new idea from a book or insight on a particular passage of Scripture.

I wonder what life would be like without this. I think it would be pretty boring.

All in all, heaven is starting to sound like a pretty dull place.

So the only thing I can conclude is that we won’t be perfect after all in our eternal state. We will not be perfect. We will not know it all. We will grow and develop and think and ask questions and learn by trial and error. We will invent, inquire, and inspire.

As it turns out, imperfection is the only way heaven can be real and not be hell.

So maybe there will be sports in heaven after all…

All you football fans can breathe a sigh of relief.

But if Heaven Requires Imperfection…

Then the ramifications of this got me thinking.

If we are not perfect in what we know and what we do, does this mean that we can get injured and hurt after all? If, in heaven, I decided I want to learn to become a tightrope walker, and I become so good I decide to tightrope across the heavenly version of Niagara Falls, what happens if I make a mistake and I fall?

Or, what happens if I decide to become a Master Chef, and in cutting potatoes one day, I slip with the knife and slice my finger? Will it cut? Will it hurt? Will it bleed? I cannot see how it cannot. If I remember correctly, I think C. S. Wrote about this is The Problem of Pain. I don’t have the book in front of me, but I seem to remember Lewis explaining that pain tells us when something is wrong. (If you find the section, let me know!) If I cut my finger with a knife, I need it to hurt so that I can know I should stop cutting! If it didn’t hurt, I would keep cutting, and do great damage to my finger.

If there is no pain in our eternal bodies, does this mean that we will never cut our fingers? That the knife turns to rubber if we try? If we are out for a hike on Pluto, and we fall off a cliff, does that mean we will bounce when we hit the bottom? I cannot see how. But on the other hand, there will be no more death, so will we be like the Wolverine from X-Men or Claire from the TV show Heroes who can regenerate no matter what? That’d be cool…

But this then leads me to the question of God.

Earlier when I said that we will be perfect as God is perfect, I intentionally misquoted Matthew 5:48. Why? Because how I misquoted it is how I sometimes hear others misquote it.

In Matthew 5:48, Jesus says that we should be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. I have written on this text before by saying it is impossible to live perfect lives, but for our purposes here, note that Jesus does not say that we will ever be perfect just as God is perfect, nor does Jesus even say that God Himself is perfect. Jesus simply says that we should strive to be perfect, in the same way that God is, however that is.

Some people point to 1 Corinthians 13:10 as evidence that when we get to heaven we will be perfect, but this verse is talking about spiritual gifts and is not teaching anything about mental or physical perfection when we get to heaven.

Then there is 1 John 3:2-3. Some say that since Jesus is perfect, when we see Him, we will become just like Him, and hence, we will also be perfect. Well again, I am not denying that we will become like Jesus. And I am not denying that through glorification, we will achieve moral perfection.

Hezekiah 2:7: “And God gave us baseball…”

Come to think of it, I cannot think of a verse anywhere in the Bible which says that in our glorified bodies, we will be perfectly perfect in every way, including all our mental, moral, emotional, spiritual, and physical capacities. Can you think of anywhere that teaches this?

If were to achieve this perfectly perfect perfection, then we would be exactly like God.

Or maybe …. could it be? …. maybe God is not like this either? Maybe we constructed a God of our own liking according to platonic philosophical ideas of what “perfection” entails, and God is not like that at all!

Is it possible that God Himself learns, invents, and inquires as well?

Could it be that our creative desire to see and try new things comes from the very nature of God Himself?

Maybe we seek answers to life’s problems because God does.

Maybe we want to explore, discover, and seek because God has these desires too.

Of course, maybe, just maybe, we have no clue what heaven will be like after all, and this whole post is a bunch of malarkey.

One thing is for sure … who ever knew that sports could get you thinking about heaven?

The Greatest PROOF of Christian Truth I have EVER read!

By Jeremy Myers

44 Comments

I was reading the book reviews of a certain Christian book on Amazon yesterday, and stumbled upon the most astounding argument for the truth of Christianity I have ever read.

One reviewer of this book (which will go unnamed) left a fairly negative and critical review. As you may know, Amazon allows you to comment on other people’s reviews. So a Christian who was a fan of this book (and the author) commented that this was the stupidest review they had ever read… Another Christian weighed in and said that the commenter was stupid as well for just using cut-and-paste attacks upon people who write critical reviews.

Then I read this…

I laughed and laughed and laughed! It reminded me a bit of my post from a few weeks ago about Christian hate speech.

But do you see what this person wrote there at the end? It’s GENIUS!

He says:

Actually, it’s an example of one of my two irrefutable points that show Christianity is truth — the continued existence of the Church despite the continued behavior of the members of this Church.

He’s right, you know. We sure can be glad that Jesus said, “I will build my church,” for if He had left it up to us, we would have destroyed ourselves a long time ago… I imagine, however, that sometimes Jesus is shouting at us, “Stop destroying what I am building here!”

I asked him what his other irrefutable point was. I’ll let you know if he responds…

What REALLY controls and guides Christians: Fear and Guilt

By Jeremy Myers

34 Comments

Christians like to claim that we are guided by Scripture and controlled by the Holy Spirit.

But I was recently talking to my insanely wise and beautiful wife, Wendy, and she pointed out that the two things which seem to guide and control Christians are actually fear and guilt.

We are guided by fear and controlled by guilt.

My wife used the example of a typical church-missionary relationship. When raising support, some missionaries use guilt to get others to support them. They shows pictures of starving children, or tell stories about how people without the gospel are headed for hell. But then, when they are on the missionary field, and not much is happening through their ministry, they feel compelled to embellish what they are doing so that it the money which people are spending on them is well-spent. They are afraid that if they “tell it like it is,” the money will stop.

But when they send glowing reports of all that God is doing on the mission field back home, those in the pews feel even more guilty because they don’t see God “working” in their own life in the same miraculous ways. They feel guilty that they are not following Jesus overseas.

The missionaries also get put up on a pedestal so that when they return home on furlough, they have to conform to a certain standard of holy behavior which matches the pedestal that has been built for them. Furthermore, even though the missionary may be exhausted from working overseas, they feel compelled to visit people in their homes and go speak in a myriad of churches just so that they can maintain their financial support.

And on and on it goes, in an endless cycle of fear and guilt.

Fear and Guilt in Church

Of course, this cycle goes beyond just the relationship between churches and the missionaries they support. Guilt and fear are at the heart of preaching, of doing what our pastor says, of attending church regularly, and of putting on the smiley face for Sunday services.

The pastor wants to prove that he is worthy of his pay (even though he is afraid he is not), and so must use manipulative practices to keep people coming to church and giving their money. He fears that if he does not keep this up, he will lose his job. He also fears that his sermons are not as good as the ones the pastor down the street preaches, and fears he will lose his people to that other church. The pastor, robbed of life by fear and guilt, uses fear and guilt to control others.

People fear displeasing their pastor, since his is “the man of God,” and so often do what he says without question, because he speaks for God and knows what God wants better than they do themselves. The people, living under fear and guilt of what will happen if they do not obey, do not have the freedom to follow Jesus for themselves.

People are afraid to miss a Sunday service because of what others will think or say about them. Fear and guilt keep us returning to situations where only more fear and guilt get piled upon us.

People are afraid to let others know about their sins, temptations, struggles, and doubts, and so put on a smiley face for church services and Bible studies. Since everybody is doing this, nobody realizes that everybody is afraid that others will discover who they really are, and feel guilty that they seem to deal with issues and temptations that nobody else faces. Fear and guilt keep us from being honest and from opening up to others about our struggles.

What’s the solution?

I think we all struggle with fear and guilt in numerous ways. We experience fear and guilt in our jobs, our marriages, our families, and our finances.

But I also believe that Jesus wants to free us from both. I do not think we were meant to live life wrapped in the chains of fear and guilt.

How do we break free?

We follow Jesus.

He will lead us into freedom. The journey is long, but it is a journey worth taking. As we walk with Jesus, we will discover that the one person who knows everything about us is also the one person who loves and accepts us completely. When we come to that realization, the fear and guilt begin to wash away, and we are able to begin to live in freedom with other people as well.

If you are struggling with fear and guilt, let me recommend three things.

First, don’t become fearful or guilty about struggling with fear and guilt. Just recognize the fear and the guilt.

Second, let Jesus know that you want to be led by Him instead. Just tell Him. And keep telling Him.

Finally, trust that Jesus will lead you. Over the course of the next couple years, as you learn to live in recognition of your fear and guilt, and as you learn to trust that Jesus is leading you to where He wants, you will look back over your life and see how much more liberated and free you have become. You will be shocked at how much more forgiven, loved, and accepted you feel.

Do you struggle with fear and guilt? Do you even know that you struggle with it? Do you use it to control others? What sort of strategies have you found helpful in seeking to liberate yourself and others from fear and guilt? Please share below!

You will never believe how Jesus spent $3,150,000,000 in 2014!

By Jeremy Myers

51 Comments

Arthur Sido recently brought to my attention that in 2014, United States churches spent $3,150,000,000 on church buildings.

$3,150,000,000

And this amount is down 80% since 2002!

I wrote about this in one of my books (I cannot recall which one), and I have written previously on this blog about how churches spend money. See:

But it recently occurred to me that since Christians are the representatives of Jesus Christ on earth, since we are His ambassadors, since we are the “Body of Christ,” this means that when we spend $3,150,000,000 on church buildings in one year, it is Jesus Christ spending this amount of money in one year.

We are spending HIS money.

And it really made me wonder … If Jesus had $3,150,000,000 to spend, do I really think He would spend it on church buildings?

Somehow, I really, really doubt it…

C. S. Lewis speaks out on Masturbation

By Jeremy Myers

96 Comments

A while back someone submitted a question to me about masturbation and whether it was sinful or not.

There is also a thread in the forum about masturbation, through only one person has attempted an answer on it…

It is a very … touchy … subject to deal with.

So as I was recently reading through the Letters of C. S. Lewis, I was surprised to learned that

(1) C. S. Lewis struggled with the temptation of masturbation, and
(2) he had a pretty good theological answer for it.

Here is What C. S. Lewis said about Masturbation

I agree that that the stuff about ‘wastage of vital fluids’ is rubbish. For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sending the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.

And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifice or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival.

Among these shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification is ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself.

Do read Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell, and study the character of Mr. Wentworth. And it is not only the faculty of love which is thus sterilized, forced back on itself, but also the faculty of imagination.

The true exercise of imagination, in my view, is (a) To help us to understand other people (b) To respond to, and, some of us, to produce art. But it has also a bad use: to provide for us, in shadowy form, a substitute for virtues, successes, distinctions, et cetera which ought to be sought outside in the real world — e.g., picturing all I’d do if I were rich instead of earning and saving.

Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres.

After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison (Lewis, Yours, Jack, 292-293).

In a later letter to a different man, C. S. Lewis wrote this about masturbation:

The evidence seems to be that God sometimes works such a complete metamorphosis and sometimes not. We don’t know why: God forbid we should presume it went my merit.

He never in my unmarried days did it for me. He gave me–at least and after many ups and down, the power to resist the temptation so far as the act was concerned. He never stopped the recurrent temptations, nor was I guarded from the sin of mental consent. I don’t mean I wasn’t given sufficient grace. I mean that I sometimes fell into it, grace or no.

One may, I suppose, regard this as partly penal. One is paying for the physical (and still more the imaginative) sins of one’s earlier life. One my also regard it as a tribulation, like any other. The great discovery for me was that the attack does not last forever. It is the devil’s lie that the only escape from the tension is through yielding.

… Disgust, self-contempt, self-hatred–rhetoric against the sin and (still more) vilification of sexuality or the body in themselves–are emphatically not the weapons for this warfare. We must be relieved, not horrified, by the fact that the whole thing is humiliating, undignified, ridiculous; the lofty vices would be far worse.

Nor must we exaggerate our suffering. We talk of ‘torture’: five minutes of really acute toothache would restore our sense of proportion! In a word, no melodrama. The sin, if we fall into it, must be repented, like all our others. God will forgive. The temptation is a darn nuisance, to be born with patience as long as God wills.

On the purely physical side (but people no doubt differ) I’ve always found that tea and bodily weariness are the two great disposing factors, and therefore the great dangers. Sadness is also a danger: lust in my experience follows disgruntlement nearly always. Love of every sort is a guard against lust, by a divine paradox, sexual love is a guard against lust. No woman is more easily and painlessly abstained from from, if need be, than the woman one loves. And I’m pretty sure purely male society is an enemy to chastity. I don’t mean a temptation to homosexuality: I mean that the absence of ordinary female society provokes the normal appetite (Lewis, Yours, Jack, 307-308).

C. S. Lewis on “Wanting a Woman”

We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he “wants a woman.” Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want.

“He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).

“Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.”

(#AmazonAdLink) –The Four Loves

So what are your thoughts? Is C. S. Lewis right about what he says regarding masturbation? Is he wrong? Feel free to comment anonymously!

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Why There Will be No Sports in Heaven

The Theological Reason for No Sports in Heaven

So Heaven Sounds Pretty Dull After All…

But if Heaven Requires Imperfection…

But this then leads me to the question of God.

The Greatest PROOF of Christian Truth I have EVER read!

What REALLY controls and guides Christians: Fear and Guilt

Fear and Guilt in Church

What’s the solution?

You will never believe how Jesus spent $3,150,000,000 in 2014!

$3,150,000,000

C. S. Lewis speaks out on Masturbation

Here is What C. S. Lewis said about Masturbation

C. S. Lewis on “Wanting a Woman”

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