Andrea Bianchi, from Today’s Christian Woman, has some pretty strong blame to lay on home school stoops. Her blog post is poorly thought out and needs to be examined because the way we school our children should not be decided by our emotional response to the issue or how much we think our parents failed us. Andrea, in her blog post, doesn’t even begin to ask what God wants. It’s a strange post for an editor of Christian magazine. It’s as if God is completely absent from her life while she’s in college flirting and visiting privately with her professors and counselors. And from the post, it’s not clear where God is in her life now. But how can we determine how to best school our children without consulting God on the issue?

This home school topic is heating up. With more and more kids graduating from home schools, some with good things to say about it, others with horror stories about abusive parents, it’s going to be talked about more and more.

What I think we must guard against is laying all our problems on the way our parents raised us. My parents made lots of mistakes raising me. I’m making lots of mistakes raising my children. But God makes us take responsibility for our own sin. He didn’t allow Adam to say, “This woman you gave me…” and he doesn’t allow us to say, “These parents you gave me–they made me the sinner I am.”

And whether we’re home schooled or private schooled or public schooled we’re all going to go wrong. We’re all going to be injured and bear scars. And we’re all going to be tempted, by our own sinful hearts, to justify ourselves and blame others.

It’s not pretty.

A friend, Mary DeMuth, sent out her, Inside reNEWal ezine today. She had an article on suffering which I found encouraging. Here’s a quote:

Going through severe trials push us to the Father, who aptly shoulders our grief. Our capacity, then, isn’t to become great in ourselves, but to trust the One who is great on our behalf. The more trials (and the more we lean into Jesus during them and after them as we heal), the more trust. I learn that I am not, but I know and am empowered by I AM.

“I learn that I am not, but I know I am empowered by I AM.” I love that!

Check out her blog and her books also, if you go to sign up for her ezine.

Here’s a fine way to spend an hour–Bob Vincent preaching in 2004.

As I listened today I thought of myself at different stages in my Christian life. I thought of how tempting it is to be more about law than grace.

I think I do like to feel good about my own law keeping. I like to focus on those areas where others are falling short and I have grown to maturity (in my own mind, anyway). Those things make me feel good about myself.

Of course, if I happen to forget and look at Christ in the middle of my patting myself on the back, I am rudely awakened. Yikes! It’s scary stuff.

We had a great sermon today! (I’ll link to it once it’s uploaded.) That’s not unusual, of course. But I particularly liked a couple of points our pastor made. Go listen if you have time. I liked the part where he pointed out that God the Father responds to our love for Christ, even knowing how poor our love is.

God responds to our love for Christ? That’s something I want to chew on more.

In discussing this passage of scripture in our Home Fellowship Group, we were talking about what it means to pray in the name of Christ. What does it mean that the Father will give us whatever we ask in Christ’s name.

I remembered once getting a speeding ticket in Canada–hey it was hard to convert the kilometers per hour to miles per hour –and on the ticket I was ordered to appear in court. That order was given in the name of Her Majesty the Queen. The queen herself, through the hand of her agent, the mountie, was ordering me to appear in court. The mountie who pulled me over was acting in the queen’s name. He was acting under her authority.

What if the guy had pulled me over and told me to dance a jig on the roof of my car? I’d not have been obligated to obey him. The queen never authorized him to ask that of me. All she told him he could do was write me a ticket, arrest me under certain circumstances, shoot me if such force was warranted, I suppose, but he didn’t have free reign. He was limited in what he could ask of me.

In the same way, we may pray to the Father in the name of the Son and the Father really is obligated to give us whatever we ask. He’s promised and he is no liar. But what we may ask of the Father is only that which Christ authorizes us to ask. We may not ask the Father to dance a jig. Nor may we expect the Father to take away all our suffering—Christ has told us we will suffer (go listen to the sermon when it’s uploaded—May 11) he hasn’t authorized us to demand that all our suffering be removed.

But he’s given us authority to pray in his name!

We have direct access to God the Father. We have a mediator, Christ the man, who has said, in effect, “You go right to the Father and mention my name and the door will open wide for you.” Using the name of Christ in prayer is like a policeman showing a search warrant. When he shows that paper we understand he’s working with the authority of the law behind him and we let him come in.

There was a time when Christ sent out his disciples and gave them authority over evil spirits. In John 16, he gave them authority with God the Father.

We also have that authority. Not over the Father, obviously, because the Son doesn’t have authority over him. But we have authority to go boldly into his throne and seek his mercy. We don’t have to wait for an invite. My pastor pointed out today that we don’t have to meet with the number four man and work our way up to the big man at the top.

No, we go right to the top and say, “Jesus sent me.”

This just boggles my mind.

My friend Becky Miller posted last week on people being disappointed with God. She’s against the practice.

I am, too. I’ve heard a lot lately about yelling at God, and raising our fists at God. I don’t know if anyone has actually come out and said it’s OK to do such things, but they imply that it is, I think, when they say, “God is big enough to handle it when we yell at him.” Or when they say, “The Psalmist poured out his disappointment to God—we shouldn’t try to hide it when we’re disappointed.”

These things are true. . .they just aren’t the whole truth.

It is true that we need to be honest with ourselves and with God. If we are disappointed we should go to God. Who else can we take our hurts to? Who else can fix our sorrow? And it is true that if we take our disappointment out on God and yell at him, he is big enough to handle it—he’s in the business of being long-suffering, after all. He’s used to his piddling little creatures abusing him.

But make no mistake about it, to yell at God is to abuse Him. It is especially grievous because it heaps abuse upon the head of the perfect one who never wronged anyone, who never did evil, who only ever loved you and poured out mercy upon you. It is sin. Huge, disastrous sin.

So why do people want to encourage this yelling at God, deal? I suspect they want people not to stuff their emotions but to deal with them. I’m guessing that the wonderful Christians who encourage people to be honest with God are trying to say, “If you aren’t honest with God about your pain, he can’t fix it. If you aren’t honest about your anger you’re not getting rid of it.”

Hmmm.

But we don’t encourage people to engage in other sinful activities so they can deal with them. We don’t say to the man who wants to have an affair, “Go ahead and have the affair. You want to do it so when you don’t do it you are being dishonest.” Or, in the case of anger: My children are often angry with me, and yet, I never encourage them to yell at me.

No, we encourage the lustful man and the angry child to fight the evil temptations they have to sin.

I think we should encourage people to fight the temptation to abuse God, too. We should talk sense to them. Remind them that God is good and he doesn’t deserve to be mistreated and maligned. Remind them that they are sinful and then deserve hell and they would get hell but for the great love of God in Christ.

If we are disappointed or angry with God it is because we are sinful and small and selfish and we have not believed God. He’s told us he loves us and is for us and yet we look at circumstances in our lives and decide that God is a liar. We decide he’s being stingy and mean to us.

Kind of like Eve decided in the garden. “Hey, what’s the deal? The fruit looks good and it’s good for me. Why is God withholding this good thing?”

We suffer in this age and we decide God is treating us badly. We decide he’s withholding good from us and giving us evil. We boldly go and yell at him. “I deserve better treatment than you’ve given me.”

To yell at God is to call good evil and evil good. It’s exactly upside-down to what we should be doing. We should be praising God and yelling at ourselves.

Give thanks in all things. Pray without ceasing. In everything rejoice. Be anxious for nothing but in all things, by prayer and petition, present your requests to God, with thanksgiving.

I’m not saying we should be Stoics. We are allowed to be in pain. When we are, though, we don’t yell. We make requests with thanksgiving.

Where is the command that we yell at God? Where are we told this kind of honest spewing of our emotions is healthy for us?

Sin is never ever healthy. It is always, only destructive.