Rick graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Fine Arts and before going into ministry worked as a writer and art director at Young & Rubicam, an advertising agency in New York City. His work at Y&R included campaigns for New York Telephone, Rolaids, and STP.
Leaving Madison Avenue in 1988, Rick and his wife Katie joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ where he has served as Campus Director at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and for many years as Regional Director for the campus ministries of the Mid-Atlantic.
Rick currently serves as Publisher of Crupress (crupress.com) and is responsible for writing and producing ministry resources for the Campus Ministry. Rick is also a traveling speaker for Campus Crusade, speaking on campuses and at conferences across the U.S. His books include Flesh: An Unbreakable Habit of Purity in a Pornographic World, Jesus Without Religion (IVP, 2007), and A Million Ways to Die (Cook, 2010).
Rick lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania, with his wife Katie and their three children Avery, Whitney, and Will.
The Borders of Culture
The Place of Faith in Spiritual Growth
In the Garden of Good and Evil
Adam Bomb
The Problem With Half and Eye
The Language of our Cells
Body Count—Explaining the Resurrection
If you had been driving on the roads of Stockholm in 1967, you would have been tapping your steering wheel to the catchy pop song, “Hall dej Hoger, Svensson.” In English that translates to “Let’s All Drive on the Right, Svensson,” and its popularity was due to the long awaited change over in Sweden: from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right.
“H-Day,” after the word hoger (Swedish for “right”), was scheduled for September 3rd when the entire country would get up in the morning, get in their cars, and drive, on what was to them, the wrong side of the road. As the day moved closer, prophecies and predictions of a looming traffic apocalypse continued to mount. An article in the New York Times stated, “What is going to happen here in September has cast many grotesque shadows all over Sweden.”
But on September 3 the oddest thing happened; the roads in Sweden became safer. And not just for a day or a week, but it would take a full year for accident rates to climb back to where they had been. It was astounding and the results led to a small revolution in the field of traffic design, as the focus of road planners shifted from driver safety to driver alertness. See, the roads in Sweden hadn’t become safer because people were driving on the right; they had become safer because people were alert and paying attention. It turns out that a safe, predictable path is not the best way to travel from point A to point B.
Gathering data, highway engineers found evidence for this counterintuitive phenomenon everywhere: when dangerous curves were marked with warning signs and safety reflectors, people drove faster; the more stop signs on a given road the more likely people were to disregarded them or double their speed between the signs; the wider the roads the more cars tried to pass one another. The traffic system had been designed for safety and inadvertently produced the opposite.
In Europe people have been driving on the implications of this research for decades. Long stretches of highway have bends in them every mile or so, not because of the landscape, but to keep drivers alert. Safety signs have been taken down in towns and cities because drivers will take their cues from the signs and not what’s going on around them. Curbs have been removed to take away the perceived security they provide. In these European towns, drivers are alertly negotiating the real world, no longer following mindlessly the regulatory and cautionary signs that did the driving for them.
Unbeknownst to most of us, God has been laying down stretches of highway in our lives with a view toward alertness and relational engagement not safer driving.
“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.”
Ephesians 5:15-17
The blind corners, detours, roundabouts, and rumble strips of life are what keep us alert, engaged, praying without ceasing, reliant, humble and ever vigilant behind the wheel. To understand this is to never again ask the question, “Why doesn’t God make his will clearer?”
Now, you might say, that’s fine, I’m okay not having a road map for the rest of life but it would sure be helpful to have that clear, GPS voice of reason telling me when it’s time to make a turn, “TURN . . . RIGHT . . . IN . . .TWOPOINTFIVEMILES. But see, that wouldn’t keep you alert either. If you follow complicated directions using a GPS, you really have no idea how you got to where you were going, nor could you find your way back. One learns their location through the attention straining process of searching, and in the spiritual world that means constant prayer, reliance, openness and vigilance in seeking God’s leading and direction.
Talking to a pastor yesterday, he recounted an informal interview he conducted with someone leaving the church. The individual said they felt excluded and uncared for. The pastor reminded him of three recent invitations to lunch, but this didn’t seem change the person’s perception, probably because the reasons and rational given were not the real reasons. What those real reasons are, God only knows.
So much of what we do in ministry, or at least how we do it, seems to flow from the polls and interviews of Christian research. But I wonder what a Barna Poll of Jerusalem would have revealed about the first church: interviews with those resistant or rejecting of the gospel. I don’t imagine much positive feedback at all.
In March of 2000 Sports Illustrated ran a story about how top young recruits were leaving the Indiana basketball program. The story focused on the allegations of a former player, Neil Reed, who claimed that during a basketball practice, head coach, Bobby Knight, had strangled him, and that if the assistant coach hadn’t pulled him off he would have killed him.
No one had a hard time believing Bobby Knight would do such a thing. His temper was legendary.
But months later, footage from that practice surfaced showing Bobby Knight grabbing Neil Reed but little else. What was interesting was subsequent interviews with Reed revealed he wasn’t lying. He was absolutely wrong, but he wasn’t lying; he remembered it exactly as he told it. He thought Knight was going to kill him. Researchers label this a failure of source memory.
Failure of Source memory is common because memories and experiences are clouded by personal feelings, judgments, beliefs, and biases. Why this can be so deceptive is that we hold memory and experience to be objective and absolute. We retrieve experience with little suspicion that the image we’ve filed has been manipulated.
In light of this, I suspect a Barna poll of Jerusalem would have elicited comments about Christians like: They think they’re better than everyone else; They’re judgmental, They’re shoving Christianity down our throats, They’re strange and cliquish; They stir up trouble and anger; They break up families; They pollute our young people.
According to Scripture, this is not how God viewed the church, and this is the point. Whose assessment should we take more seriously? Should we change what we do on the basis of the perceptual distortions of unbelievers?
In response, one could say that perception is reality, and it matters little if Christians are being kind if they are perceived as being critical.
But somehow there has to be a more critical balance. Certainly feedback from unbelievers is helpful, and sometimes both justified and true. At the same time, it’s foolish to look at such research without acknowledging that the state of a person’s heart in relation to God and the church is going to produce a myriad of source memory failures: imagined exclusion, perceived judgment, suspected conspiracy, fabricated aggression. In fact, an uneasy conscience is much more likely to generate false experience and memory for the purposes of justification.
In experiments and analysis there is a term used, called an “X Factor,” the definition of which is: a hard-to-describe influence or quality that has unknown, but potentially determinitive impact on outcomes and results. This is the X factor missing from Christian research: what sin, hardening of heart, rejection of the gospel, and resistance to God’s spirit, does to perception.
I think an historical point needs to be clarified as it relates to Christ’s Return: the fanatical Christian worldview of a rapidly approaching Doomsday is neither fanatical nor Christian (strictly speaking).
It was not Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth that started the world buzzing about the End of Days—just the evangelical world. The world had been buzzing for some time. In 1914, a half-century earlier, H.G. Wells, seeing the inevitability of a world war, dashed off a rather sloppy anti-war novella entitled The World Set Free. At the center of the story is a fictitious element called Carolinum: an atom whose nucleus was so unstable that it was continuously casting off pieces of itself (radio-activity).
Realizing the power contained in these atoms, unscrupulous scientists begin making an “atomic bomb,” a term invented by Wells. King Egbert, the story’s protagonist, realizes that the only way to postpone Armageddon is to safeguard the world’s supply of Carolinum, and that he does, ushering in a reign of peace with the fateful element under lock and key.
Decades before the atom was ever split, Wells was predicting a very feasible end time scenario. Ten years before that, in 1904, Mark Twain wrote Sold to Satan, envisioning the Dark Lord in a radioactive body comprised of the newly discovered element, radium.
“I stand six feet one; fleshed and blooded I would weigh two hundred and fifteen; but radium, like other metals, is heavy. I weigh nine hundred-odd.”
This is where Doomsday began to capture the popular imagination. It was Well’s novella that circulated among the scientists of the Manhattan Project not books on Bible prophecy. Soon would come Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then the Atomic cafes, Neutron Diners, and Fallout shelters. The apocalyptic mindset of postwar America is, I think, captured in William Faulkner’s 1950 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, “There are no longer problems of spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?”
Secular historian, Tom Zoellner, has observed that, “whether it comes from a genuine divine source or a neurological twinge (or both), the suspicion that the earth is ticking away its final hours… exists on a grand collective scale.”
Over the past 2,000 years more than a few Christians have wrongly predicted the End of the World. This is undeniably true. But when secular scientists, scholars, and writers begin shouting “the end is nigh,” well, this is something altogether different. This has been the somber, global awareness that civilization could end with the same push-button ease it takes to get a Snickers bar from a vending machine: whether that button ignites a bomb, or deletes the Internet. The scientific, economic, and political reality of our age is that to assume the world’s perpetuity (apart from God’s providence) beyond this next century is denial, gross optimism, or naivety.
Though often contorting the laws of biblical interpretation and exegesis and adding fuel to fanaticism, Christians have sought (rightly or wrongly) to make biblical connections to apocalyptic ruminations that existed quite apart from them.
Looking at Doomsday from this broader historical lens, brings out the irony of the age in which we live. The irony? Unbelievers running around as though the sky were falling while Christians stand on street corners, their placards reading “Relax. We’ve Made the Same Mistake Ourselves.”
As I walked past a newsstand in the airport the cover of a Newsweek turned my head like a face-slap. It read, “Apocalypse Now,” the subhead as follows: “Tsunamis. Earthquakes. Nuclear Meltdowns. Revolutions. Economies on the Brink. What the #@%! Is Next?” Yes, you heard me right, it was Newsweek.
This got me pondering, and I turned again to what Scripture has to say about the End Times. I’ll share my reflections—as I have the—over the weeks to follow.
In light of global events, those to which the Newsweek article is referring, I was thinking this morning about the question, “How close are we?” I’m no different from the disciples, and this is precisely what they wanted to know: ‘Tell us,’ they said, ‘when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Matthew 24:3).
In one sense, we’re always close. This, I believe, to be the point of Jesus’ teaching concerning his Coming: motivation more than information. It’s an evergreen encouragement, good for the duration of the church age. It’s like an exit on the Jersey Turnpike: wherever you are, it’s always just up ahead.
We can also safely say that we are getting closer. For the Christian, history does not repeat, it echoes. It moves forward, not in circles. Events do not reoccur but themes do, because history is a story whose author reveals his presence and plot through foreshadow. For those within the story, stuck inside its pages, it’s quite impossible to know with surety when the convergence of events indicates yet another instance of foreshadow or the actual culmination or climax of the story.
The TV series Lost was one of the most popular in the last decade, but after the first two seasons I stopped watching. Every time the plot seemed to be building to a climax, it dissipated, generating yet new story threads. I’d been suckered in by shows like this before: Alias became Alias Season One, than Two, then Three. By the end of Lost’s second season, anticipation had given way to cynicism—“does producer J.J. Abrams even know how to end a story?” As each apparent climax turned out to be yet another “build” in the plot, what was “lost” was my interest. I simply stopped watching.
Understandably, I think this is where a lot of us are as it relates to the End Times, not wanting to be emotionally drawn in, cynical it’s just another iteration of the theme, another build in the plot, and not the climax of the story. I’m sure it was for us—those tuned-in to the 2,000th season—that Jesus repeated his warnings to keep watching and to do so with growing anticipation, not cynicism.
Jesus lived at a time like ours, when eschatological expectations fueled messianic claims, rumors, and predictions. In light of this, what Jesus doesn’t say to his disciples is as surprising as what he does. He doesn’t say, “Don’t look for signs,” or “Avoid speculation.” Rather, he gives them very specific signs and encourages them to be on the look out for them.
And. So. If Newsweek has turned its attention to the signs Jesus gave for his Return, I think I’ll follow their example and re-engage with these texts.
More to follow.
Sir:
Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in a manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into an important source of energy. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the administration…
I can think of to the scenarios found in the book of Daniel. During WWII the government employed the best and brightest minds in the country and yet not one of them could interpret the data or provide any answer to the question of nuclear fusion. And so they pluck this old man out of the teachers lounge at Princeton University and ask him to solve the mystery on which the fate of the world hinged.
The word “mystery” occurs only ten times in the Old Testament and all of them are found in the book of Daniel. The content and meaning of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams were a “mystery:” vivid as an Ambien induced dreamscape but unintelligible. And so Daniel is sought out for he alone can answer the mystery and interpret the dream.
This is the significance behind Colossians 4:3: “And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ.”
Paul’s use of the word “mystery” can only be drawing from this one OT source —the book of Daniel. And it is the unlikely image of Daniel that informs Paul’s perspective on missions and evangelism.
The perspective is this: God has sent us into the world to reach people who are lost, who like Nebuchadnezzar, have no answer to the riddle of life, no way to interpret the events of history or even their own existence. For Unbelievers, life is Nebuchadnezzar’s dream: a mystery that no one can unravel and therefore up to each individual to invent his or her own interpretation.
In his evangelism, Paul sees himself as Daniel, holding the interpretive key to life’s meaning, and to the meaning of each individual life. He sees the gospel as the interpretation of the dream and Jesus Christ as the answer to the mystery—a really cool perspective I think from which to see our witness for Christ.
Revolutionary, radical, extreme, stoked, amped: buzzwords used to sell everything from a Taco Bell Challupa to the X-Games. I find it hard to believe that teens and twenty-somethings salivate when marketers ring this bell, and I suppose I don’t particularly care either, except that the marketing of Christian books, magazines, music, and bands seems to tap into this same ‘radical’ impulse. This isn’t anything new of course: the cover of a popular New Testament from the 1960’s read, “Blueprint for Revolution.”
I’m conflicted about this appeal to the radical impulse. Conflicted, because there really is something quite radical and revolutionary about the Christian life. There are times when idols need to be toppled and dictators overthrown; I mean, what really is repentance but a spiritual coup against the flesh?
And yet as a marketing and recruiting tool, or as a rallying vehicle for the young, the language of revolution and radicalism tugs more at the Flesh than at the Spirit. It has a driving rhythm that syncs with the metabolism and ambitions of the Flesh, a drumbeat that arouses the hormones and passions. Pointed toward a godly direction or a spiritual goal, the drive of the Flesh can easily masquerade as a movement of the Spirit. This is what makes ‘radical’ and ‘revolution’-like terms dangerous territory (and not just a little) when popular Christian writers, speakers, and musicians, employ it. As performers pluck at the heart-strings of guts and glory in an effort to elicit love and commitment, radical and revolution fan to flame Flesh and not Spirit.
In truth, the spirit of radicalism, as opposed to the Spirit of God, is unsustainable as a motivational force. Sooner or later, the revolutionary needs to mature and find more substantial sources of growth and motivation. This is why Castro looks, or rather looked, ridiculous in his military fatigues and Che Guevara undergrowth: he believed that the revolutionary drive could be marshaled indefinitely through nothing more than good theater and fiery rhetoric on his part.
Radicalism is also a tainted fuel source. It has within it the drive to overthrow, to topple, to rebel. It has angry elements, grumblings that are anti-authority, anti-establishment, anti-elder. It is enflamed by an arrogance that others are too inbred, out of date, or out of touch to “get.” As with the purges of China and Russia, voices of history, tradition, wisdom, and moderation tend to be swept away. Radicalism always wants to reset the calendar to year 0.
To me, the most destructive elements of radicalism come from its polarizing view of the Christian life. The Christian life, the life of wisdom, keeps polarities in dynamic tension, retaining both and steering between them. Wisdom is both/and while radicalism is either/or. Like a marching army, the drive of revolution is always seeking food and fuel, and it finds it in polarizing rhetoric which pools together the combustible elements of anger, jealousy, resentment, prejudice, indignation, and pride.
Again, I am conflicted. The Christian life clearly has revolutionary elements and moments, and these can be constructive in the way that they ignite a certain passion, but true perseverance is driven not so much by a revolutionary spirit but by the Spirit of Christ in us.
Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, of the devil. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.
But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.
If humbling ourselves is returning to the truth about who we are, then the best description of that journey and process can be found in Paul’s letter to the Philippians.
If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.
But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ (Phil. 3:5-9)
Paul begins by stating that if salvation was something to be earned, he could muster an impressive resume, more impressive in fact than any of the legalists.
But when Paul came to Christ and received salvation, he reckoned his spiritual resume—beautifully printed on 60lb. ivory cover stock—to be nothing more than dung sitting on a piece of Charmin two-ply. An admittedly disturbing word picture, but “dung” is the actual word in the text, not “rubbish” as the Victorian translators have rendered it. The word “dung” not “rubbish” was selected by God to shake us awake and we are not aided by toning it down and making God speak in his “indoor voice.” God chose “dung” here and uses it elsewhere in Scripture because dung has been, is, and will always be, tied to our sense of shame.
And it is dung that depicts the outrageous nature of Paul’s salvation and ours: the humiliation and shame in realizing our unsanitary spiritual condition and the humbling absurdity of the transaction—trading our dung for Christ’s righteousness.
Martin Luther, the German leader of the Reformation, was asked when it was that he realized salvation was by faith and not works. His response was “in cloaca” which sounds rather spiritual until you translate it; it means sitting “on the toilet.” Many scholars believe Luther was actually using a common metaphor for ‘humbling oneself’ which was popular in the Middle Ages, the term, “sitting on the toilet,” a metaphor that’s almost identical – and equally repugnant – to Paul’s “dung” allusion.
And it is a perfect metaphor for humbling oneself, for if there is ever a time or a place when we are completely without pretense or posturing, it’s sitting on the john. Here there are no facades, no keeping up appearances, no image management, no cover-ups, no masks, no masquerades, no make-up—you are what you are. The toilet is ground zero for humanity. The key to the kingdom is in fact the key to the rest room.
But now here’s the part of the passage that’s easy to miss—and again due to translation problems. Clearly, Paul humbled himself when he came to Christ, we get that—couldn’t be clearer. But the passage also states that in a manner similar to his salvation, Paul continued to humble himself. This was an ongoing practice in Paul’s life. The text of Philippians 3:8 literally reads, “What is more, I continue to consider everything a loss.” The translators fail to indicate the ongoing verb tense and omit the word “continue.” Fortunately they weren’t the translators at, say, a Nuclear Arms treaty as the difference between “I’m sorry we bombed you” and “I’m sorry we are going to continue to bomb you” is not insignificant.
Paul “continued” to humble himself; he made the trip back to truth over and over, as many times as he wandered from it, as many times as he sought to find or define his sufficiency in anything other than Jesus Christ. Like a man with an aging prostrate, Paul was always back and forth to the bathroom.
The French have a phrase, La Petite mort, or “the little death” which is roughly defined as “the period of melancholy resulting from having spent one’s life force.” I’m embarrassed to tell you where the expression comes from, but if you must know it refers to the emotional lull that proceeds sex. I apologize for the bluntness, but one must make certain allowances for the free expression of artists, poets and . . . the French. Life is a series of little deaths, a million black dots, major and minor, of varying duration, culminating in a glorious crescendo—“Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints” (Psalm 116:15). We are always rehearsing for that final movement.
In his letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul describes his trials in similarly poetic terms, though not with the potty mouth or innuendo of the French. In stating that “death is at work in us” (2 Cor 4:12), Paul is referring to his trials as a series of little deaths, or an ongoing death experience. But Paul is a poet in the way that George Bush is a poet, that is to say, not at all. Besides an occasional doxology or engrafted creed, issues of clarity not aesthetics govern Paul’s word choice. So, if Paul observes that trials are like “little deaths” it’s because there are important reasons for seeing them this way, not because “hey, isn’t it kinda cool to think of our trials as, like, little deaths and our prayers as mini-screams and our bodies as tiny coffins.” Here then is Paul’s description of trials as perpetual dying or little deaths:
We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. (2 Corinthians 4:8-12)
So why refer to trials as “little deaths”? Paul has commandeered the words “death” and “dying” from the lexicon and used them as synonyms for the word “trials.” For Christians the idea of “death” is always coupled to “resurrection;” they are virtually two syllables of the same word. If I were to ask you to complete the sentence: “the death and (blank) of the Lord Jesus Christ,” I doubt you’d labor over it like a crossword puzzle inserting different words to see which fits best. You know it’s the word “resurrection:” “resurrection” always sits across from “death.” Paul wants us to see trials as “deaths” because he wants us to see God’s resurrection power at work in them.
Death (or trials), to Paul’s way of thinking, is raw fuel which God uses to generate spiritual life. It is the principle or dynamic of Genesis: light out of darkness, form out of void, life out of death. This is the principle at work in us as God takes the death of trials and transforms them into life. Paul wants us to see trials as a consumable resource like firewood that can be burned and transferred to heat.
The alchemists invested their time and genius trying to transform waste into gold. Noting its bullion color, Hennig Brand, for example, left 60 buckets of urine to putrefy in his cellar in hopes a residue of gold would be left when it evaporated. It didn’t—though we can thank Brand and his vile experiment for the discovery of phosphorus. The idea of turning raw sewage into something as precious as gold was not insanity: the idea that man could do it was. Few things allow us a vantage point from which to view God’s glory and power than the transmutation of life’s sewage (trials) into life. Who but God could take our trials, our little deaths, and turn them in to spiritual life and vitality?
—the LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes (Psalms 118:23)
Someone recently showed me an old magazine interview with, now fallen, Christian leader, Ted Haggard. Of course his answers to certain question were ironic in light of what the future would reveal, and there were serious issues to be sure, but the article captured a deeper problem having nothing to do with Ted Haggard: a hidden sin affecting all of us, more deceptive and far more systemic.
Alongside the article was a typical photojournal image of Haggard, only it looked like it had been taken in the Oval Office. The light was streaming through the windows creating a backlit halo. He was laughing, an apparently approachable potentate, with just a touch of graying wisdom at his temples, a handsome suit, and a power tie with the gravitas to bring warring nations together. Had Mitt Romney been standing beside him he would have appeared a vagrant by contrast. The heavy mahogany desk that he presided over bore several books and the weight of the free world. The magazine was Christian: the image, not so much. It embodied regality, dignity, power, wealth, intelligence, confidence and strength: everything my flesh could have hoped for.
Now, I’ve exaggerated the photo a bit—just a bit—but not the problem it represents. See, the image was taken and placed in the article quite unconscious of intending meaning, which is what makes it such an accurate portrait of our worldview. This is how we see the successful Christian life; this is what we think it should look like. The picture oozes success, power, strength, confidence, invulnerability, wealth and control. Unless there was a crucifix on the wall, the cross is not visible anywhere in this picture. And we can safely assume the power of Christ is not manifest in situations where we are either drawn to asking for someone’s autograph or drawn to signing one.
Stories and images are powerful and we’re all affected by this distinctly American narrative of the abundant Christian Life, one that’s told to us over and over in similar conscious and unconscious ways.
In 1938, De Beers Consolidated, owners of the global diamond monopoly, approached the NY advertising agency of N.W. Ayer and Son. DeBeers was in crisis and if it couldn’t open up the American market they’d be in ruin. So N.W. Ayer took them on as a client and produced one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. We all remember it but not as advertising; the narrative they invented was so deceptive we remember it as history.
See, in America, prior to 1938, people did not give diamonds as engagement rings. As Tom Zoellner, author of The Heartless Stone, makes clear, the ads were “a brazen denial of three centuries of American cultural history, in which diamond rings were generally regarded as foppish extravagancies.” Year after year, ad after ad, we believed the tale that engagements were incomplete without diamonds, that diamonds were an essential part of the history of love, and our history as well. It was all a story, told so well we didn’t even realize it was a story. And some eighty plus years later, here we are: our perceptions and understanding of the entailments of love and engagement, deeply, irreparably flawed.
Well however such wizardry was enacted upon us—perhaps Satan hired N.W. Ayer— we’ve all been effected by an alternate narrative of victorious Christian living, and the only answer is to come back to the words of Jesus, his narrative of discipleship, his vision of faithfulness, his definition of “normative,” his cross:
“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.”
While we experience life as a patchwork of people, places, and circumstances, our minds give these things a broader context, organizing them into a narrative, making a story out of them. In writing our narrative, our adaptation of life, nobody sets out to write a fairy tale, but pride and ego inevitably elbow their way in—writing and rewriting the story, turning real events and real people into an extravagant work of fiction. Pride turns our mental diary into an infomercial: shameless self-promotion, propaganda for the ego.
I was just taking a shower and I always noodle on my story when I’m in the shower. I was editing a real life conversation I had a few days ago. The conversation, as it actually went down, could have never made it into the final manuscript of my story so I was doing a little editing, trying to get the lines just right: the points I should have made, the way I should have answered, the perfect comeback I should have thought of but didn’t. I’m pretty happy with the dialogue now.
The voice of the narrator in any story possesses a Morgan Freeman omniscience. The narrator is the only one who sees things as they truly are, the one who “gets it.” Everyone else in the story has a perspective of truth but the narrator defines it. Who else but the narrator is qualified to evaluate the rightness and wrongness of people’s thoughts and actions? Who else could possibly speak with surety of another person’s motives?
Not only are we the narrator, we are the story’s protagonist—the leading man or woman. What this means is that all the action of the story revolves around us, much in the same way that Rambo is really a movie about Sylvester Stallone. Other characters are defined by their relationship to the protagonist (to us) and when they’re not in the scene, it can be safely assumed they are thinking and talking about us: stuff we said and did, classic sayings and exploits.
This is the way sin distorts our story. This is how egomaniacs, narcissists and arrogant dictators are created; through the perversion of their mental narrative. Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides to be God. No, you keep a mental diary of life like everyone keeps a mental diary of life, and that diary becomes a story, and you become the story’s narrator and the story’s protagonist, pride corrupts the plot, the story turns into self-aggrandizing propaganda, the propaganda deceives and converts us, we believe the propaganda, we are the propaganda, we don’t know who we are. But other people do know who we are: we’re the self-centered SOB who thinks the world revolves around them.
Humility’s journey is a backtrack: retracing our footsteps back from the ledge over which pride fell. And that journey begins with the simple admission that we’ve been secretly writing such fiction. Stepping back further, we acknowledge just how fictional, how fabricated, how self-serving our version of reality was; we recant of having written it, thought it, and believed it. Retreating further—back to the source—we repent of the pride that authored such a subversive little tome. Then, we toss the book in the fire and let the flames turn it into a psalm, a sacrifice of repentance.
What Did He Say? What Did He Do? What’s the Point?
In Jesus Without Religion, author Rick James begins by clearing his throat. Free of creeds, quarrels and specialized theologies, he speaks of Jesus. No dogma, no politics, no moral at the end. Jesus. What he said. What he did. And what, exactly, was the point. The answers about Jesus, according to Rick James, are in the context. In his own unconventional way, James recalls the specific contexts that color Jesus’ story, bringing forward this man you’ve heard so much—and so little—about.
An unbreakable habit of purity in a pornographic world
Sexual immorality and pornography have become the defining issues and obstacles to spiritual growth and ministry. Written in a straightforward, gracious, and often humorous style, James does not stir up guilt but helps readers develop an unbreakable habit of purity amidst a pornographic world.
Flesh is divided into three sections. First, there is small group Bible study material because a large part of victory lies in establishing encouraging relationships of accountability. A content section follows with articles covering most every issue connected to sex, lust, sexuality, and pornography. Last, there is a month of daily devotionals to saturate the reader in the Scripture, develop new habits of the heart and establish a track record of purity.
The Only Way to Live
As Christians we talk often about resurrection, but what about our death and the many daily “deaths” that must come first? Through stories and biblical insights, Rick James reminds us that when Jesus tells us to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Him, He is describing a path of death, not a path to death.
As we learn to embrace the little deaths of everyday existence, we lose our taste for lifeless religiosity. Our appetite for a thriving, vibrant life in Christ grows—and our own experience motivates others to live out their extraordinary missions on earth. As James so vividly illustrates, death is not an ending—it’s an invitation to more abundant life.
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