why i believe what i believe

I feel like it would be good for my friends and community if I briefly explained why I believe what I believe here on Easter weekend. Or probably a better way of phrasing it is "how do I know that I'm not deluding myself?" A friend recently asked me that question, and it is a good one to ponder. All are welcome to comment. I will obviously be touching on things very briefly, but I would like to start a conversation in this direction, as many other people have recently started other conversations in other directions.

In summation, I believe what I believe because the Holy Spirit has enabled me to trust in Jesus for salvation and has taught me who Jesus is and how He died that I might live through the Bible. I can trust the work of the Holy Spirit in my life and the words of the Bible because of reason, history, experience, community, and hope.

Reason
If you take the Bible as it is and believe that Jesus died and rose again for your sins, you wind up with a fairly self-consistent worldview. There are innumerable variations on this worldview, of course, with varying degrees of difficulty therein. Yet the answers to the biggest questions humans have always asked-- why are we here? why do things happen the way they do? how ought we to live?-- are answered in a pretty satisfying way. There are logical arguments for God's existence that may be helpful to some people, but I don't think they're particularly useful except as interesting knickknacks within this worldview. You cannot start with or end with reason when it comes to believing in God, but I don't think starting with or ending with reason gets you anywhere. However, I don't think it is a stretch to say that just about everything within this framework is reasonable & self-consistent; very few ways of understanding the world meet this very basic test.

History
This is a point wherein one could spend days and days arguing about archaeology, textual criticism, and who knows what else and get nowhere, but I will simply say that there is ample evidence to suggest at the very least, that Resurrection of Jesus happened like the Gospels said and lots of other things about the Gospels are trustworthy. If that really happened (and that's a big if), there's good reason to take the rest of the Bible seriously, since that's what Jesus did. There are lots of difficulties with taking the Bible seriously, and while I cannot say I have thought about them all, I've encountered quite a few. I would be happy, either publicly or privately, to discuss them. The big thing, though, is (again) it is still reasonable to subscribe to the theory that the Bible was inspired by God, that Jesus rose again from the dead, and that you do not have to abandon your intellectual credibility to believe in Jesus.

Experience
Oh, what a nebulous entity, our experience! While I do not think it should get as strong a value as reason would in processing life, I think it is still important that what we believe correlates with what we have experienced. And in this regard, I will say that unless my mind is oriented with Gospel thinking-- that is, that I am a sinner saved only by grace and transformed by love-- then I will either think too highly of myself or too low. I will either be faced with the horrors of my selfishness, pride, and condescension towards others or I will lie to myself and allow those things to consume me until those things define my interactions with others. And the more that I trust that Jesus has looked at all that ugliness and chosen to exchange that ugliness with His beauty, the more that those things lose power in my life. I am able to forgive, sacrifice, and love over and over because Jesus does, and He has shared His strength with me. Living in a "dangerous" neighborhood, moving to Africa, and dealing with annoying people are all so much easier when I consider the weight of glory that comes with knowing and loving Jesus. Furthermore, I cannot love by myself-- usually what comes out then is just my selfishness looking for more attention or, if it approaches being genuine, it is quickly exhausted when I run out of energy. But if I connect myself to the wellspring of love and receive from Jesus' love, I can continue to love even when it hurts.

Community
This is really an extension of the last paragraph-- over my short years on earth and over the centuries, communities of Christians have done incredible things. This is not to say that you have to be a church to do good for others, or all communities are a blessing to their neighbors. Lots of non-Christians do way more good than other Christians, and some churches are simply poisonous and wicked. Yet I think that across the board, when you encounter groups of Christians who take the entire Bible seriously, they are not only accepting enough to take in any sinner, they are also challenging enough to transform any such sinner. Their love leads them to sacrifice in ways that others don't do on nearly the same scale, sacrificing their lives in many cases for the sake of lifting others up. I can meet a woman with AIDS in Kenya of a different nationality, language, ethnicity, and background than me-- but the Gospel brings us together and we can rejoice together. I have been hurt, loved, built up, challenged, forgiven, and shown grace by these communities in many different ways, but it has all, in the end, been good.

Hope
We live in a world of evil, injustice, oppression, and sorrow. If you don't know this, you will eventually. Whether it is internal, external, or both, you will be wounded deeply as you live. And you will always be able to find someone else whose suffering was both less deserved and more horrific. For some, this is reason alone not to believe in God. For me, it is impetus to believe-- for if God is not sovereign and is not going to bring justice to all those who escape it in this life, nor is He going to make all things right in the end, how much more horrifying is the world we face! For those of us who have the privilege of wealth, friends, education, and other resources to deal with tragedy, we can eventually shrug off the harm that has been done to us. But for those who have no such recourse, it is unimaginably cruel to imagine that there is no justice or vindication whatsoever for them, that in this life, thieves and rapists and murderers will have the last word. We cannot comprehend how all things work out, and we should be careful not to treat such a matter with triteness. But I think there is a way of confidently saying that God's love is beyond our imagining and His plans beyond our realization, and in the end our feeble understanding will be overwhelmed with the beauty of His work.

So that's it. I have found that listening to Tim Keller has been very helpful in processing these issues, and as I mentioned, I am hoping this sparks conversation. Thanks for reading and participating.

[cross-posted on facebook.]

the Andrew Osenga House Show recording!

There is now a recording of the whole Andrew Osenga concert we held at our house last week! You can download it all in one nice neat zip file, or download the individual tracks as you please. Standouts include story right before "Hold the Light" (and the accompanying song), "All the Wrong Reasons," "New Beginning" and its story, and "Early in the Morning."

Some notes:

-As of right now, there's an extra track 7. One of them is 128kbps, so just delete it when you download.

-If there's clipping or something else terrible on a track you can't stand, leave a comment or e-mail me and I'll try to fix it. Other feedback is also appreciated.

-If you want the lossless version (I promise it's not that different), you can also contact me.

-If you like this and want some more, you can buy some more of his music! If you kinda like this and want to hear some more before you pay anything, you can download more free music directly from him. If you didn't like it, you should probably download the free stuff anyway and give it another chance. If you just like house shows and live recordings, you can go here.

-I also made a youtube playlist of live video from Andy's old band, The Normals.

-If there is no other way for you to listen, I will gladly make you a CD of this show.

Other important points to help understand what happened if you weren't there:

-On track 2, when he stops playing right at the beginning of the second verse, two of our friends walked in. There was not much room in our living room, so they were walking single file, when one of them sat right down in front of the other, thus blocking her friend from walking any further. It was funny, I promise.

-I made all the dumb requests on track 11.

-On track 13, Andy mentions Ellie's Run for Africa, which helps out schoolkids in the slum of Kibera where I worked for three summers.

-On tracks 13 and 15, there is some discussion about a particular song. What I meant to say was that it was a contender for our first dance song, but we ended up using a Weepies song. We still danced to "Dance Away the City" during the regular old dancing portion of the reception. I still embarrassed myself in front of Andy and the whole concert, but I wanted to clarify anyway.

-Peter is the one singing along on track 6.