Olympic Challenge

In 1Corinthians 9:24-27 Paul puts out the challenge to run the race of the Christian life well - like we want to win the prize.
On the last two Sundays we've been reflecting on this challenge and asking what the prize is, why how we run matters, what running well is and is not, how the gospel makes it possible and the role others can play in helping us (the spiritual equivalent of a running club, team, partner and coach.)

We've also used Will Rochfort's drawing to help us identify where we are when it comes to "the race"? Are we just about to start, have we been knocked down? Are we exhausted? Are we aimless and distracted? Are we looking like we're going to finish strong or are we only just going to make it over the line? Or, are we in the stands not quite sure still whether we want to get in the race at all? And then, critically, we asked what will help us to take the next step towards running well, what do we need?

It's been a big challenge but one, I hope, which also encourages us knowing that there is a prize; the crown of righteousness which comes to those saved by Christ and the prize of the "well done good and faithful servant" offered to all who have run well and finished strong.

Check out Olympic Challenge Part 1 http://bit.ly/Rt2rsa
Part 2 http://bit.ly/O1mA4X

The God's of Olympus

I thought this piece from LICC was thought provoking about the way in which we view sport in general and the Olympics in particular. I've been bothered for a while with the way people (politicians especially) look to the Olympics as a panacea. There's only one thing that's going to fix things......

Whatever you do, don’t utter the proverbial, ‘It’s only a game’. If you listen to politicians and administrators, the Olympics are the most important thing to happen to London, indeed the nation, in a generation. It’s about national morale and a major business venture. Sport has become socially, politically and economically useful.

But the affective power of sport is usually greater than the effective power of sport. As it happens, no recent summer games have produced proven significant economic benefits to the host city or country. Research also suggests it’s unlikely that the games will yield any increase in sports participation.

As for the claim that sport can make us better people, the evidence is that more often than not it correlates with anti-social behaviour. And as much as it brings people together, sport can also provide a patina of legitimacy for authoritarian regimes (e.g., Bahrain Grand Prix) or another venue for deep divides to be revealed, with athletes from some countries kept away from others in secluded areas.

So why do we indulge these sporting myths? There are, perhaps, two reasons.

First, a distorted Protestant work ethic continues to write itself large across our culture. Every human practice, we think, has to demonstrate its utility to justify itself. As historian Christopher Lasch says: ‘The degradation of sport... consists not in its being taken too seriously but in its subjection to some ulterior purpose, such as profit-making, patriotism, moral training, or the pursuit of health.’ Sport used to belong to the domain of leisure. Now it has been turned into work. We’ve managed to make it less fun than it should be.

Second, sport has begun to overtake us. For some Londoners, this has literally become the case with the building of the sport-industrial complex, and anxieties about certain freedoms being curtailed. The theologian Karl Barth placed sport – along with fashion and transport – amongst those powers of human creativity which threaten to overcome and enslave as much as liberate. Care must be taken that we do not become subject to their law, and their power, which we have released.

Rightly the Olympics will provide opprtunities for connection and celebration. But we will do well to value sport for its intrinsic worth and reclaim it for the common good rather than reduce it to a tool of politics or economics. Enjoy the games, but don’t believe the hype.

Paul BickleyPaul Bickley is the Director of Political Programme for Theos and co-author of the Theos report Give us our Ball Back: Reclaiming Sport for the Common Good (2012), which explores more fully the issues raised above.

The Effect of Aging on Sanctification

In this five-minute video John Piper shares about some expected and unexpected ways that aging has worked in his experience of sanctification.

http://bit.ly/RMJL4h

Miracles

"Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see." C. S. Lewis

Christ is Our Treasure Not Our Homes

I'm trying to see where the gospel can make a difference to our everyday lives; what's going to make us distinctly different as followers of Jesus. As John Ortberg warns us, in the absence of authentic distinctiveness we often opt for weirdness but there is a better way......by showing that our security and worth is in Christ, that He is our treasure we live differently and glorify God. Christine Hoover's post gives a great example from the world of domesticity....

Christ Is Our Treasure, Not Our Homes
By Christine Hoover Jun 26, 2012






The home exists for Christ. Our marriages, our children, our physical spaces — all these are means of joyful response to Him. Through the home, we treasure Christ and show others how to treasure Him also (Titus 2:3–5; Prov. 31:10–31).


Too often, however, we treasure the home more than we treasure Christ. As a result, what He has given as a blessing and an avenue of sanctification becomes a means of achievement or accomplishment, where our well-behaved children or our organizational abilities are an indication of our value and our righteousness. Our homes become a matter of pride, self-elevation, or comparison. And we cling to our treasure, thinking that the home is under our control, that it’s ours to possess, that we have somehow created and cultivated something special.

The temptation to treasure the home is especially intense on good days, when our children are playing nicely together, when we’re unified with our spouse, or when the house is bright and clean and everything is in order.

But on bad days? When a child throws a fit or disrespects another adult, or when communication is crossways? When the dishwasher leaks all over the kitchen floor or an appointment is forgotten? When a harsh word is spoken or priorities have been shoved aside? What about the days when life is thrown wildly off-kilter?

When the home is the treasure above Christ and our value is entwined with the circumstances of our home, the bad days are unsettling, even devastating.
On the bad days, we recognize the home acting similarly to the Law:

· Our treasure, the home, speaks urgent, ever-changing, and unending demands for perfection that can never be fulfilled. (Galatians 3:10)
· Our treasure, the home, causes us to value and conform to what pleases others or earns their respect rather than what pleases God. (Colossians 2:20-22)
· Our treasure, the home, with its perfectionistic, image-maintaining urgencies, cannot bring life to our hearts and our families. (Galatians 3:21)

If we treasure our home as our righteousness, we subtly teach our children that behavior matters more than the attitudes of the heart, that a clean home matters more than relationships, that we are superior to others, or that we must cling to and control the things we love rather than trust God with them.

The good news is that even when we treasure our home more than we treasure Christ, our failings act as a tutor to bring us to Christ, the true Treasure, and to show us that we are incapable of righteousness apart from Him (Galatians 3:24). We recognize in our failings that we need something apart from ourselves to make a home as God intended, that something being the grace and power of Christ.

When Christ is our treasure, our homes consist of love, grace, and utter dependence on the Holy Spirit. We don’t chase self-righteousness, and we don’t cling to treasures that, despite all their goodness, can still be lost. We cling tightly to the only Treasure that cannot be stolen or tarnished, Christ Himself.

Solo Scriptura?

The cry of the Protestant Reformation was "Sola Scriptura!"- Scripture alone! It was a rejection of papal authority and the idea that the ultimate authority for knowing the mind and character of God lay outside the Bible.

But have we replaced this with "Solo Scriptura" - Scripture interpreted all on my own? This is the idea that all I need is a Bible and the Holy Spirit and I'm away. But this is fraught with danger as you can see from all the craziness that people have got into over the history of the Church.

Scripture is indeed our ultimate authority but we need to listen to tradition and the view of others. Scripture should always be interpreted in the context of community.

And so if we come up with an idea about God that no one has ever come up with before.....it might be worth talking to others!

Charles Spurgeon offered this critique of those who prefer the Solo Scriptura approach to hearing God:

It seems odd, that certain men who think so much of what the Holy Spirit reveals to themselves should think so little of what he had revealed to others.....

A useful warning to us to listen to one another as we seek to follow Jesus.

Fake Love, Fake War: Why So Many Men Are Addicted to Internet Porn and Video Games

Fake Love, Fake War: Why So Many Men Are Addicted to Internet Porn and Video Games
By Russell Moore


You know the guy I'm talking about. He spends hours into the night playing video games and surfing for pornography. He fears he's a loser. And he has no idea just how much of a loser he is. For some time now, studies have shown us that porn and gaming can become compulsive and addicting. What we too often don't recognize, though, is why.

In a new book, The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, psychologists Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan say we may lose an entire generation of men to pornography and video gaming addictions. Their concern isn't about morality, but instead about the nature of these addictions in reshaping the patten of desires necessary for community.
If you're addicted to sugar or tequila or heroin you want more and more of that substance. But porn and video games both are built on novelty, on the quest for newer and different experiences. That's why you rarely find a man addicted to a single pornographic image. He's entrapped in an ever-expanding kaleidoscope.
There's a key difference between porn and gaming. Pornography can't be consumed in moderation because it is, by definition, immoral. A video game can be a harmless diversion along the lines of a low-stakes athletic competition. But the compulsive form of gaming shares a key element with porn: both are meant to simulate something, something for which men long.

Pornography promises orgasm without intimacy. Video warfare promises adrenaline without danger. The arousal that makes these so attractive is ultimately spiritual to the core.
Satan isn't a creator but a plagiarist. His power is parasitic, latching on to good impulses and directing them toward his own purpose. God intends a man to feel the wildness of sexuality in the self-giving union with his wife. And a man is meant to, when necessary, fight for his family, his people, for the weak and vulnerable who are being oppressed.
The drive to the ecstasy of just love and to the valor of just war are gospel matters. The sexual union pictures the cosmic mystery of the union of Christ and his church. The call to fight is grounded in a God who protects his people, a Shepherd Christ who grabs his sheep from the jaws of the wolves.
When these drives are directed toward the illusion of ever-expanding novelty, they kill joy. The search for a mate is good, but blessedness isn't in the parade of novelty before Adam. It is in finding the one who is fitted for him, and living with her in the mission of cultivating the next generation. When necessary, it is right to fight. But God's warfare isn't forever novel. It ends in a supper, and in a perpetual peace.
Moreover, these addictions foster the seemingly opposite vices of passivity and hyper-aggression. The porn addict becomes a lecherous loser, with one-flesh union supplanted by masturbatory isolation. The video game addict becomes a pugilistic coward, with other-protecting courage supplanted by aggression with no chance of losing one's life. In both cases, one seeks the sensation of being a real lover or a real fighter, but venting one's reproductive or adrenal glands over pixilated images, not flesh and blood for which one is responsible.
Zimbardo and Duncan are right, this is a generation mired in fake love and fake war, and that is dangerous. A man who learns to be a lover through porn will simultaneously love everyone and no one. A man obsessed with violent gaming can learn to fight everyone and no one.
The answer to both addictions is to fight arousal with arousal. Set forth the gospel vision of a Christ who loves his bride and who fights to save her. And then let's train our young men to follow Christ by learning to love a real woman, sometimes by fighting his own desires and the spirit beings who would eat him up. Let's teach our men to make love, and to make war . . . for real.