Sharing Life — Abortion, Stem Cells, Euthanasia, Intelligent Design, Reproduction Technology

Life operates by principles we did not create and we do not control. Not only that, but we are part of a world with forces and conditions that determine us, rather than we determining them.

For the modern Western mind, this assertion is contrary to the philosophical notion of man as the deciding factor in all events. “Man at the Center” is the idea that we are the arbiters of truth, and the creators of our own destinies. This man-centered focus is prideful and false, but it is such an ingrained idea of modern culture that even Christians hold it thoughtlessly along side the idea of God as the source of all truth and life.

The world operates best according to God’s intended design. Human relations work best when ordered along God’s principles of right behavior. Sin is simply the idea that we can live in the world anyway we want because we can re-write the laws of life and nature. We delude ourselves into thinking we can suspend or ignore the laws of nature. It is as though we thought we could blindfold ourselves, and walk into a strange room, and not bump into other people and the furniture. We will always “run into” some reality we thought we could re-write by our prideful self-determination.

Chuck Colson has recently released a book: “The Good Life”. The book spends 2/3 of its volume addressing the use and limits of reason to understand the world. Yet, Colson, a very thorough and systematic thinker, takes logic and reason as far as it can go. A lawyer, he “makes the case” for the Christian world view as superior to every other. The case proceeds on the basis of logic, and an examination of the evidence for how the world really works. Yet, even the most penetrating logic takes us to a threshold requiring us to admit with humility that we cannot know many things, and that the full nature of God is incomprehensible to us. Living life fully requires faith. “The Good Life” is ultimately about both reason and faith, working together, not in conflict.

Originally, Christianity was referred to as “The Way”. I like this reference because it connotes that there is a “right path”, a manner or method of living that conforms to “the way” the world works. Jesus embodied the “Way” we are to live. He explicitly identified Himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Way is a path of light, of truth, and of faith. The Way is a direction leading to a destination we cannot yet perfectly see or understand, and for that reason, we walk the path of the “Way” in daily faith, seeing what is within our limited vision, and trusting that the Way will lead us to the eternal life and happiness promised by Jesus and the Scriptures.

A friend provided me with the following article, which I post because it evidences that the real battles of life are spiritual, and the enemy is conducting a frontal attack:

More churches confronting porn addiction

Christian leaders are increasingly acting to address this ‘elephant in the pews.’

By JANE LAMPMAN CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
On a blustery day early this year, 13,000 people showed up at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., for what became known as “Porn Sunday.” Two young California pastors with a Web site called XXXchurch.com – “the No. 1 Christian porn site” – were in town with a silence-breaking message.
Their frank talk about the struggles many Christians are having with pornography has drawn huge crowds in several churches across the country, and now the Revs. Craig Gross and Mike Foster are planning National Porn Sunday for Oct. 9.
“We were tired of hearing stories about people’s lives being wrecked, and feeling they had nowhere to go in the church to get help,” Gross says. He and Foster hope to engage 200 churches in talking openly about “America’s dirty little secret” and are offering resources to help them initiate healing programs for their congregations.
While some consider the pastors’ efforts controversial, many religious leaders recognize they need help on how to talk about this “elephant in the pews.” Surveys show that 40 million Americans regularly view Internet pornography.
For years, churches were in denial about the scope of the problem, but the toll on marriages, careers and faith communities has grown, Christian leaders say. And it involves not only congregants but pastors.
In a 2001 survey published in Leadership Journal, 37 percent of pastors said pornography was a struggle for them, and 51 percent admitted it was a temptation.
“For 25 years, I would have said that the pro-life issue is the most pressing threat to America morally, but pornography has overtaken it,” says the Rev. Richard Land, a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant denomination. “More people’s lives are being destroyed on a daily basis by addiction to pornography than through abortion.”
Douglas Weiss, a counselor with divinity and psychology degrees, speaks at churches of many denominations on sexuality issues. “Wherever I am … and no matter what the denomination, at least half of the men in the church admit to being sexually addicted,” he says. Based on his experience, “The clergy don’t differ that much from the general population – between a third to half.”
Many men have been trying on their own for years to get free, Weiss adds.
Some denominations encourage local congregations to educate members and to install filtering software in church and home computers. Evangelicals have responded most vigorously.
Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based Evangelical group, was alerted a few years ago when its toll-free clergycare line began lighting up with calls from ministers – and 25 percent were porn-related. “We’ve been working hard to alleviate the addiction, and are seeing some improvement,” says the Rev. H.B. London, vice president of ministry outreach.
Focus on the Family has quietly spent thousands of dollars sending pastors to treatment centers. It also offers churchgoers help through its “Pure Intimacy” program on the Internet, and has set up a global referral network of
Christian counselors.
Those most active on the issue include those who have found healing themselves and are helping others through seminars, support groups, and Web site communities.
Simon Sheh, a psychologist of evangelical faith in Edmonton, Alberta, offers a one-day seminar designed to equip men to safeguard themselves against pornography. Pastors bring church members, fathers bring teen sons. “It’s a family thing, to create a legacy of purity in the family,” he says. Surveys show that the average age of first exposure to Web porn is 11. Most caught up in it say it began in their early teens.
While the seminar uses biblical strategies of taking responsibility for oneself, being honest, and learning how to be godly, Dr. Sheh explains, it also educates about the consequences of addiction and on other issues that most often underlie it.
“Pornography is not just about sex. It is a drug of pain relief,” Sheh says.
Counselors say it is often emotional pain – from childhood abuse, from feeling isolated, rejected or inadequate – compounded by not having someone to talk with about it. What some scientists call the “neurochemistry of sex” also fosters the addiction.
Recognizing those factors helps men deal with the shame of seeking help.
“They often have the perception they are perverts,” Sheh says. “I tell them, ‘God does not make perverts, and God is your physician. He healed me. He can heal you, too.’ ”

Pornography statistics

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$ 12 billion: U.S. pornography industry annual revenue.
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$2.5 billion: Internet pornography revenue.
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12 percent of all Web sites are pornographic.
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25 percent of daily search-engine requests related to pornography.
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40 million American adults regularly visit pornographic Web sites.
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20 percent of men and 13 percent of women admit accessing porn at work. Source: TopTenReviews Inc.

Starvation is occurring in the most affluent and best educated parts of our national community. In fact, the starvation is sometimes thought of as a “rich girl’s disease” although it can strike any socio-economic strata and either gender. Still, there is a “profile” of a likely anorexia victim: 15 to 25, female, highly intelligent, upper income, academically or athletically driven, and unusually pretty. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that deep at the core of these young people is a feeling of being worthless. There is a drive to accomplish “success” by some external standard in order to feel “good enough”. There is a deep sense that one is unloved, abandoned, and unlovable.

The primary diagnosis is “phobic” — a fear of food. The secondary but almost always present diagnosis is anxiety and/or depression. Why a phobia of food? Well, “why any phobia?”, might be the threshold question. A phobia is a specific focused fear that otherwise would be so general as to be completely unmanageable. One can avoid a specific source of danger, but not a generalized anxiety that is unrelenting. Food becomes the enemy, and avoiding it gives a sense of control and safety. In the process, the person develops “body dysmorphia”, or the inability to see in the mirror what everyone around her can see clearly: she looks like a holocaust victim. This dysmorphia persists as her bones disintegrate from osteoporosis and her internal organs begin to fail, including her heart. There is a 10-20% mortality rate associated with this disease.

Anorexia is a disease that baffles the general public, and still challenges the understanding of the medical community. It can be treated, and if treated early with a combination of medication and psychotherapy by professionals specializing in the disease, it can even be managed over the patient’s lifetime. The disease is not “cured’ in a permanent sense.

For sometime, medical personnel sought to treat alcoholism by various ineffective protocols. Carl Jung, founder of Jungian psychology, did all he knew to do, unsuccessfully, to treat an alcoholic. He told him there was no treatment he could offer that would cure the patient. The patient was near death and desperate, and pleaded for a referral. Jung replied that he had heard of a few men like his patient who had turned to one another for support, and that they had seemed to find some recovery through a belief in God. The group was the beginning of the original 12 step program, and Jung’s patient found hope among these fellow lost souls.

The 12 Step program requires as its first steps that the adherrent acknowledge his life is unmanageable, and that only a power greater than himself can restore him to sanity.

Anorexia, although quite different diagnostically than alcoholism, still is a spiritual as well as a physical disease. The unmet love needs deep within the human heart account for the insane drive to meet those needs through self-destructive methods. Medications can provide a platform from which an individual can better address those spiritual needs, but no medication can provide the core love and core healing needed to recover from phobias and addictions.

Sin is very much a spiritual disease also. We all suffer from it, and we all are in denial in varying degrees that we are in need of help. We can handle our lives for ourselves, thank you very much. We dig our personal and societal holes deeper and deeper, until we fall in it, and can’t get out, all the while declaring that we know better than God how to run our lives.

Some see God as a stern and unfeeling task master who sets arbitrary and impossible rules. In truth, God is a compassionate Father who sets guidelines for right living so that His children can mature into fully alive and happy people who will live with Him forever.

How can we know such love? We must first ask God to for us what we cannot do for ourselves: to see clearly our predicament and to see the depth of our need for divine help. Secondly, we must put aside our pride and call out to a God we may hardly even know to rescue us from our misery and pain. Finally, as God responds to our need, we must respond to Him. We must learn more about Him through the study of Scripture, and by community with “safe” persons who know Him also.

Our deepest hunger is not for food, but for God. We are meant to “feed upon the word of God” and to find comfort and refuge in His Spirit. In our spiritual illness we have come to loathe and resist the very Source of Life. We suffer from a sort of “Spirit Dysmorphia” similar to the anorexics “body dysmorphia”. We cannot see that we are dying, and we vigorously deny and even chide Christans who may in one way or another tell us that our eternal lives are at risk.

John 6:35 - Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.

This morning’s Sports section described an altercation between an 18 year old tennis professional and her father during the player’s tour at the Carlsbad Resort in California. The incident was one of several past similar events between fathers and their teen daughters in the world of professional tennis. In this incident, however, the young player was battered, and suffered cuts and bruises. The exact cause of the father’s “acting out” was unclear, but he was arrested for the attack. His daughter had ranked 35th in the world, but recently had dropped to somewhere in the 100s. The daughter declined to press charges, but the father has been restricted from attending future matches by the professional tennis association organizing the event in the interest of protecting the player.

I can imagine the stress and sadness of this young woman. She was battered by her own father during a competition when she most needed his support. She may have already felt the disappointment of losing her ranking by objective performance standards of “winning and losing”. Now she may have felt her father’s love was just as conditional and unpredictable. Who was she if she didn’t win? Was she lovable only if her ranking met expectations?

This young woman’s dilemma of not knowing if we are loved or lovable is something we all share in some degree. Some of us are lucky by disposition or by actual experience of love. We know that inner feeling of calm security that we are cared for, provided for, nurtured, and safe. We have resources then to “face the world”. Others of us grew up in insecurity, without reliable parents, and maybe even parents who verbally and physically attacked us on a regular basis. We felt loved only if we were “good enough”. The result is that consciously or unconsciously we go through the world with a fear of abandonment and a broken spirit. We are unable to trust others to love us.

Christians are broken, sinful people, who also sometimes struggle to “face the world” because they continue to need an inner healing of the places left empty by the sins and omissions of others. The difference is that they have consciously accepted that brokenness, and in faith they placed it before God, their Heavenly Father. They believed in such a Perfect Father because they found Him through God Incarnate, Immanuel, or “God With Us”. They went in faith and trust to a spiritual Father through the introduction of the living God-Man, Jesus, the Christ or “Promised One”.

This process of salvation is difficult for the sophisticated and cynical people of the 21st Century (or of any time) to accept. Many educated and bright people reject the idea because of intellectual pride, and the belief that this way of simple faith is too easy, and too strange. A “sophisticated” God would have done things much differently.

Yet, the journey of the wounded heart captured and restored by God is not a “sophisticated” journey, but a straight-forward experience that is proved by a radically changed attitude and a renewed hope. A life is not merely “touched” by salvation, it is regenerated and renewed to the original glory God intended before sin infected the human race.

So, even as Christians continue to sin, and even as they continue to struggle with some of the “old issues” of their past, they know deep within their hearts that a continuing process of regeneration and renewal is underway, and that daily love is retaking the territory of the heart lost to injury and sorrow. This experience is the power of “Christ living within”.

In my earlier posts, I have written about the experience of God’s grace “within the gap”. The “gap” is that place which is the distance between where we are and where God hopes us to be. Our God, however, is not like the tennis professional’s father. He will not hammer us if our score doesn’t meet his expectations. When a Christian accepts God’s invitation to be renewed through following Jesus Christ, the score is settled: God 1, Sin 0. Now the process of life is one of daily transformation in which we are no longer condemned by God, and we are wise to therefore no longer condemn ourselves. The prize of the Christian life is freedom, and our daily challenge is to live in that freedom in a world characterized by enslavement to sin.

As a lawyer on the receiving end of a cultural avalanche of lawyer jokes, I take particular pride in the scriptural description of Jesus, the Christ, as our advocate before God.

1 John 2:1 - My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous;

OK, I may have over-claimed the parallel, but too many lawyer jokes can do that to you. What is this reference to Jesus as Advocate? The basic idea is that God the Father is a completely just God, who can, because of his Complete Holiness, have no part in sin. The dilemma of mercy for sinners is that if God simply allowed sin in a world He intended for perfection and “goodness”, then He would be acting contrary to his character as Holy.

How could justice be accomplished without the destruction of a rebellious human race? No imperfect human could “make the case” or “pay the penalty” sufficiently to satisfy a completely just God. The remarkable love of God is this: that He Himself paid the penalty that humans could not pay. The crux of Christianity is that the Christ is the fulfillment of a New Testament (covenant) with people living by faith in God’s redeeming love. The New Covenant is this: that God has reconciled Himself to us, and restored us to our original intended goodness through the life, death, and victorious resurrection of the God-man, Jesus. Therefore, Jesus in effect stands before the Father as our advocate to “maker our case” that we are “justified” before God. The case we could not make, Jesus, the Son of God, makes for us.

Well, then why do we continue sinning, and why is the world by all appearances turning darker in sin rather than renewed in the Light? Are we really in a state of “restored goodness”? The answer is that God works by a process of change, rather by immediate transformations. God works. Yes, God does labor through His Spirit working in us to continue a process of change initiated by our acceptance of eternal life though our faith in the “New Convenant”, that is, faith in the work of Jesus completed by his suffering and death.

Now, read 1 John again:

1 John 2:1 - My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous;

John is basically acknowledging that we are a work in progress, and that sin is inevitable as the process continues, but that we surely will be sinning less as the process continues. Because the process is the work of the Holy Spirit living in us, Jesus, the Son of God, bascially makes the case that even in our sinning we are not condemned, and we do not have to live a life of guilt or self condemnation. This, even Freud would agree, is good news.

So, a jaded and “sophisticated” world would declare Christians to be “crazy” for these beliefs. In truth, Christians are the most mentally healthy persons on earth because free of neurotic guilt and self-condemnation, even as they daily “fall short” of their ultimate perfection in eternity.

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Immature Christians should not try to digest heavy theological diets. Their stomachs just aren’t yet strong enough to process the startling and mystifying information of who God is revealed to be in Scripture.

Compounding the shock of some theological conclusions is that Theology is perhaps as much a psychological study of theologians themselves as it is the study of their infallible God. We humans cannot resist putting God “in a box”. The “box” is inevitable. If a theologian systematically gathers and studies scripture and reaches a conclusion, and if the conclusion is a “higher order” presupposition concerning the character and purposes of God, then of course other questions will be resolved consistently with the first presupposition. The problem is that a wrong conclusion at a high level produces wrong conclusions at lower levels.

So far, all I’ve stated is a principle of practical logic. The spiritual consequence of this reasoning can be disastrous for the new Believer who too quickly focuses on the arcane questions of theology. Without a deep foundation of grace and faith, supported by a personal experience of God’s redemptive love, the study of theology can disgust and disillusion the new believer. Why? Because theological notions of God can contradict our basic notions of a “loving Father”. Theologians, especially those in the conservative camp, can follow a path of “high level presuppositions” that lead to a starkly “harsh” God: one who has created “vessels of wrath made for destruction”.

Romans 9:22 - What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the vessels of wrath made for destruction,
Romans 9:23 - in order to make known the riches of his glory for the vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory,

Reformist (Calvanist) theologians focus on language like this from Romans 9 to support a “high level presupposition” that God predestined some to be saved, and others to be eternally condemned. Now God is “in a box” because other scriptures define God as offering salvation to all, so that whosoever should believe in Him (the Christ) will have salvation (a life of eternal reward).

John 3:16 - For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Even a mature Christian with a confident core belief in Christ will struggle to understand how God can be “fair” and “just” by granting some salvation and not others, when all people are equally deserving or undeserving of salvation. Reformed theologians reconcile these conundrums by stating simply: We are not to question a soverign God. After all, they argue, God need show no mercy at all. If He chooses to show some mercy, then that is to His glory. For the new believer who may be grounded in a culture of skepticism and materialism before conversion, this response is very difficult to swallow.

So I do not attempt to resolve this problem of “God in a box”. Frankly, the problem is irreconcilable, because we humans are creatures of our own limiting definitions, and we see the world (and God) through these boxes. A large measure of humility, faith, and trust in the personal experience of God’s love may be all we have to carry through the storms of doubt and logical inconsistencies.

Babies and Children learn by encouragement, not punishment. Animal trainers know this too. If you want a particular behavior, reward it. Rather than punish negative behavior, ignore it until you elicit a desired behavior, and then reward that behavior. By consistently rewarding the desired behavior, animal trainers “train” the animal to perform a routine.

God states explicitly in Scripture that His way of handling sin in the Follower’s life is based on the same idea that we are being drawn to be like Him step by day, day by day, by the rewards of His love, rather than by the heavy hand of His condemnation. Three verses help understand God’s approach to maturing us in our spirits:

2 Timothy 3:16 - All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

Romans 8:1 - There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

1 John 3:19-22 — By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before him 20 whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. 21 Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God; 22 and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.

So, we see from these scriptures that we are God’s Children in Training, and that God does not condemn us, even if our misinformed, neurotic hearts attack us with guilt. God obviously hates sin, but he understands that even His Followers continue to sin because we are yet weak and immature in our spirits. God’s Spirit in us is working to transform our tendency to sin to a tendency of right living. This process takes place daily in the GAP between who we are and who God intends for us to be. We live patiently in the Gap without self-condemnation, because God loves us exactly where we are and as we are.

Living in the “GAP” between our ideal and our actual behaviors can be either a path to heaven or a dead end feeling of hell. That “gap” is a place of creative tension or destructive impulse. Why? Because in the gap we experience the existential dilemma of freedom with responsibility or resignation and irresponsibility.

Many skeptics and atheists look upon Christians as soft-headed, and as escapists who look to religion as the “opiate of the masses”. Marx of course could make such a sweeping generalization without looking into the specific life of a devoted follower of the Promised One. The Christ was a hard headed realist struggling with the hardships of a world constantly challenging His human limits. He met human suffering and injustice head-on, and paid a daily high price to oppose it.

Living in the “gap” requires spiritual and emotional maturity. Why should a Christian fare better in the gap than non-believers? The answer is that Jesus, as the incarnate God, entered into the Gap also, and demonstrated that we will find God in the gap if we seek Him earnestly. This gap between our current state of sin and our promised state of perfection is closed in a daily process of change through the Spirit of God. Through and in the Spirit of God, we find in the “G”-”A”-”P” :

“G”uidance

“A”biding Presence

“P”rovision.

When we live in the ambiguity and imperfection of the gap, we can take heart that God fully understands that we are not yet perfected, and that mistakes (sins) will continue to be part of our human experience. God does not condemn believers, and believers are not to condemn themselves. Rather, we fail, we acknowledge failure, we seek forgiveness where our failure is by our choice or neglect, and we turn again and again toward God for acceptance and mercy. Believers then rely on the mercy of God expressed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. They feel no neurotic, recurrent guilt. They are not oppressed within the reality of the “gap”. They take hope and strength in knowing God is working a transformation within them that daily is completing the “perfection” process that we cannot achieve on our own.

Therefore we can be free of self-condemnation and feelings of inferiority, even as we continuously fail to be the people we would like to be. God isn’t finished with us yet.

Christians assert that God chose to live among us as a human to communicate His love, and to restore us to full life. Why would that be necessary? We don’t have to look at the world long to see how broken it and we are. We are unique among the animals in seeing our failings and being aware of them. We live in the “gap” between our actual state and our deep awareness that we are drawn to be fulfilled and perfect. God entered into the “gap” as one of us, and bridged the gap between us and Him. This place of being less than we know we are created to be is the place where we most rely on God. God does not condemn us because we are in this gap. He meets us there, and guides us in a daily process toward closing the gap—a process that does not end with our physical deaths.