There is the great commission: go and make disciples. There are the two greatest commandments: love God, love neighbor. There is the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. There is the new commandment Christ gave: love one another as he loved us. There are the ten commandments and we are told that if we love Jesus we’ll keep his commandments. We are to love our enemies, to be merciful as our Father in heaven is merciful. We are to pray without ceasing, to submit to one another, and to study the word like a workman who needeth not to be ashamed. We should take care of widows and orphans in their distress, have nothing to do with deeds of iniquity, flee Satan, gently rebuke brothers who have fallen into sin, and forgive seven time seventy times a day. If we keep the word of the law in our mouths and are careful to do everything written in it, we will be prosperous and successful in all we do. We should praise God and rejoice always and give thanks in all things. We are to be anxious for nothing. We are to resist the devil and to draw near to God. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. And when we are offering our sacrifice and we remember that our brother has aught against us, we are to leave our gift. We are first to go and be reconciled with our brother.

Wow! Who has time for all of this? Is anyone feeling a little heavy laden?

How can we keep track of all the commands? Should we have interpretations and then interpretations of the interpretations? Are these commands hard to keep? Are they confusing to understand? Do we need to ask, “Who is my neighbor?” Do we need to wonder if we are preaching enough, or sending enough encouraging cards, or inviting enough people to church or to dinner?

Jesus says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

His yoke is easy and his burden is light? What about all those commandments? Don’t I have to sweat them? Don’t I have to worry about falling short?

Jesus was talking to a people who were heavy laden with sin, and burdened by all the rules their religious leaders and the law had placed on them.

All of our strivings for righteousness don’t work. We can never be good enough. We can never worship well enough, or serve well enough, or keep our hands clean enough.

But we are told that we should consider Jesus who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that we won’t grow weary or fainthearted. We are to look to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1-3)

He finished the race. He endured hostility from sinful men—hostility that took him to the tortuous cross, even. He scorned the shame, and he is now seated at the right hand of God. It was for joy that he endured. He had a goal. He fixed his eyes on something–that place in heaven with his Father. And we are to fix our eyes on that same spot. We are to look at the triumphant Christ and know that he is interceding for us. And he is waiting for us, and he is preparing a place for us, and we are headed for great joy.

We are to be imitators of Christ as dearly loved children. (Eph. 5:1) And the way to imitate someone is to watch him and copy what he does. Dearly loved children imitate their parents. They don’t say, “Today I will practice speaking with my mother’s accent.” They automatically speak with the accent they hear spoken most.

And we will love others as he loves us. We will endure hostility from sinful men as he endured hostility from us. We will love our enemies and lay down our lives for our friends.

It’s unseemly for the creature to rise up against its Creator–to refuse to do the work it was created for. If our cars or our computers suddenly decided to rebel against us, we would say they were out of order. We have made these things to serve us, and when they no longer serve us, we cast them off.

Man was also made to serve his Creator. Man was made for worship. There is no other acceptable response from us when we are confronted with the Living God.

So when God ends this world and pours out his wrath on those who have refused to bow to him, it will be good and glorious.

As the new earth comes down, I’m guessing the old earth will explode and melt in some cosmic pyrotechnics show unlike anything we’ve ever seen or imagined. I love lighting storms—I love the raw power in them. How much more power will be unleashed when God destroys the earth? It will be awesome in every sense of that poor, over-used word.

And yet, for all of that display of power and glory that God’s wrath will be, the love of God, pouring forth from the bloodied and broken body of the man from Galilee, is a far louder testimony to God’s strength and a far more spectacular show of his glory.

In Christ, justice is satisfied, and mercy is purchased, and, for the saints, wrath is done away with. At the cross, wrath is conquered by mercy. How glorious is that?

So while God’s greatness is seen in his transcendence, it’s seen even more strongly in his willingness to stoop down to save us.

I am to love him, but I can only love him because he first loved me. I am to be faithful to him, but I can only be faithful to him because he’s faithful to me. I am to serve him, but I can only serve him because he first served me.

And there are probably people reading now who are bothered by my pointing out that God serves us. They don’t like all this talk about love. God is a God of holy wrath, not some doddering old grandfather.

And they are right, as far as they go. God is high and holy. Yes he is.

It is precisely because he is so high and holy that his taking upon himself the form of a servant is so hugely glorifying. The more a man has to lose when he sacrifices his life, the greater the glory due him. The man with terminal cancer is not sacrificing as much when he volunteers for a dangerous mission, as the young man with his whole life in front of him and with a wife and babies at home.

The best way to glorify God is to 1) praise him for his choice to make himself lowly and to die for his friends and 2) tell everyone about this loving, friendly God.

Jesus came without fanfare. He was a poor man with no place to lay his head. He died on a cross, beaten, mocked, and hated. He went as a sheep to the slaughter. Silent. He was not raging and calling down God’s wrath. He asked his Father to forgive the God-haters that hung him on the cross.

We don’t hear any wrath coming from him. No bitterness. No cursing. No mocking. No imprecatory prayers.

Hmm. Imagine that.

Umm…no. But just to clear up any misunderstandings…

I wasn’t comparing God to sex and a hamburger. I was comparing my relationship to God to a man’s relationship with his wife (and God did that first—in the Bible) or to my relationship with a cheeseburger.

When Jesus told the story of the woman seeking justice and the unjust judge, he was not saying that God is an unjust judge. Neither am I saying God is a cheeseburger.

The man also had this to say:

Forgive my intellectual perversity. But from your description your god and my God are worlds apart…

Where is the God of wrath and justice and holiness of which the entire Bible speaks? Where is the God to whom the only correct response is reverent fear – and through that fear – love?

He had a good point there. When I went back to look at what I had poured out, I saw that there wasn’t a lot about God’s wrath. I had purposely written my answer very quickly, because I wanted to see for myself how I really see God, not how I think I should see him. So I appreciated this guy for pointing out that I was light on wrath.

I didn’t leave out the wrath because I don’t believe God is going to pour his wrath out on man. I think I must have forgotten about it because I don’t believe he’ll ever pour his wrath on me.

The question was put to me in a personal form. The man wasn’t asking who God was. He already had his own ideas about who God was. He was asking who I thought God was because he wanted to test my orthodoxy. Who is this God you love? What is your relationship with him like?

Well, I don’t have a relationship with a God who pours out wrath on me. The God I love is the God who died to save me from wrath. My relationship with God is one of reciprocal love—I love him because he first loved me.

So it’s no surprise that what tumbled out of me was love-heavy and wrath-light.

Before I was saved…oh, then God was a God of wrath. I was sorely afraid. I used to pray every night begging him to let me live one more day. I’d promise to do better the next day, if only he would let me live.

I was afraid of him, but I never feared him. I harbored in my heart the belief that he was really a cranky God, a party-pooper, a God who couldn’t stand to see anyone having any fun. I was afraid of him because I knew he was going to hurl me into hell, but I didn’t think he had the right to do that. I thought he was judgmental and nasty. I would beg him to save me then blame him for not saving me, when in reality I didn’t want to be saved, at all. Rather, I wanted to go on sinning and I wanted him to be OK with that. I was mad that he dared to say sin wasn’t allowed.

One day the Holy Spirit opened my eyes. I saw that God had only ever been kind and loving to me and I had treated him like…dung, let’s say…every day of my life. I had disobeyed him every day, I had treated him with scorn and contempt, I had been unloving to him and to people he created in his image, and to make matters worse I had treated him this way when all he had ever done was love me. He had suffered long with me. He had called to me often, and I had plugged my ears. He had invited me to worship him and enjoy him, and I had hated him and offended him.

And for the first time in my life I realized that I really deserved hell. I realized that if he sent me to hell it would not be because he was cranky and unloving. It would be because I was hateful and rebellious and disobedient.

And at that moment God’s love covered me and filled me in a way that can only be described as joy incomprehensible. I knew he loved me. For the first time, I was sorry for my sin. And for the first time I was cleansed of all unrighteousness. And I have never again thought of him as a God of wrath. Toward me, he has shown only love. Always love.

Who, or what is this God that you love? Tell me about your relationship to him. How do you know him? What is the difference between knowing God and knowing about God? Is there a difference and does it matter?

I answered him, but it occurred to me that readers here may wonder, too, about the God I believe in. So here is my answer to him:

OK, Sofros, lots of questions there. I’m going to be typing fast, off the top of my head, so if I miss something please don’t assume that I don’t believe a certain thing, ask for confirmation.

Who or what is God?

God is the God found in the Old and New Testaments; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the Creator of heaven and earth; the maker of all things, seen and unseen. He is triune, being Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in three persons. He is a spirit, but God the Son took a body at the incarnation and still has that body. God is love. God is perfect and he does not change like shifting shadows. He is the giver of every good gift. He is not evolving. He is not learning and growing, he is immutable, immortal, infinite in wisdom, power and glory. He is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He so loved the world that he sent his only son to die that sinners might live. He proved his love for sinners in this: that while sinners were yet sinners, Jesus died for them. God is the Savior and he does not give his glory to another. He is Jesus, the way, the truth and the life, and no man can come to the Father but by him. He is the Spirit who regenerates those chosen by the Father. He is the Father who chooses his own. And he is the Son who dies for his own and who will not drop one of them but will raise them up at the last day. He has chosen us, we have not chosen him. He is the God who takes no delight in the death of the wicked. He is the God who laughs at the wicked who conspire against him. God is eternal, having no beginning or end. God knit me together in my mother’s womb and made me fearfully and wonderfully. He owns me. He is my lover, my husband, my friend, my advocate, my judge, my righteousness, my father, my elder brother, my redeemer, my counselor, my rock, my strong tower, the lover of my soul. God is the one who lavishes his love on me. God is the ruler of the universe. God commands the wind and waves. The heavens declare his glory and all of nature obeys his voice. He rides on the clouds and hurls lightning bolts. He sends the snow.

OK I could go on and on.

My relationship with him?

All that stuff about him being my father, my friend, my counselor, my advocate, my husband…all of that is about relationship. God is all sufficient. He is everything I need. He is my savior. He is the one who died for my sins once for all, the righteous one, for the unrighteous one, to reconcile me to God. My relationship with him is poor because I don’t love him nearly as well as I ought. I’m selfish and self-centered. I am an idolater. I am a wretch. Who will save me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ, my Lord. My relationship with him is poor because I see through a glass darkly. My relationship is poor because the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. But I have found much joy and consolation in his love. I have been comforted by him in all manner of trials. I have experienced the joy that passes understanding. I rest under the shadow of his wings. I fear no evil for he is with me and his rod and his staff comfort me. I trust him. I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I’ve committed unto him against that day, and I trust that he will bring to completion the good work he began in me. I hope in him. I know that I have an inheritance, incorruptible, kept in heaven for me. I know this because he has moved me from the kingdom of darkness into his marvelous light and because I have the down payment of the Holy Spirit. As I obey him, I learn to know him more. When I fight him and disobey, I don’t grow in my relationship with him. But when I obey, I always find that he is trustworthy. So I learn to trust and love him better and to enjoy him more.

How do I know him?

I know him by listening/studying/meditating on his word (the Bible). He speaks (in the Bible) and I hear him and I begin to see who he is, just as when I speak (in my blog), you begin to see who I am. I know him because I am I his sheep and I hear his voice. I know him because his Spirit has opened my blind eyes and breathed life into my clay nostrils and has called me from the tomb. I know him because he has given me faithful men to pray for me and to teach me and to walk before me, showing me how to know and live with and obey him. I have strayed but he has always come after me and brought me back. He is faithful. He has carried me through deep, dark places. He has delivered me from the pit. I know him because I have kept my eyes on him and because he is molding me into the image of his son.

What is the difference between knowing God and knowing about him?

Knowing God is to knowing about him…as having sex with your wife is to masturbating as you look at her picture.

I guess.

I mean…I don’t know how to answer that. It seems like a no-brainer. I can see a picture of a cheeseburger or I can smell and taste and eat a real cheeseburger. If I know God, I have a relationship with him. If I know about him only, I have no relationship.

Does it matter? Of course it matters. This is eternal life, to know God and Jesus Christ whom he sent. But the Pharisees didn’t know him. They searched the scriptures thinking that in them was eternal life, but those scriptures bore witness about Christ and the Pharisees refused to go to him and find life. They knew about the Messiah, but they didn’t recognize him when he showed up.

Yes, it matters hugely if we know God or just know about him.

And that is just one small story, in a sea of stories that are full of agony.

Another one? A man shot and killed eight people at his place of work and then killed himself.

How many more stories were there today? How many people left their cancer-ridden bodies? How many unborn babies were killed? How many little boys were raped today? How many people lost their jobs and how many people were injured in car accidents? How many spinal cords were severed? How many kids died of starvation today?

You want to see something that will stay with you forever? Look at the pictures of the Chernobyl children.

In the midst of all this pain, how dare I tell stories about God giving me a gas station in the middle of the night? How dare I suggest that if we’ll just pray and step out in faith, God will answer? Am I mad?

How can I say that God always answers at the perfect time when he clearly doesn’t answer much of the time?

One fellow who heard my gas station story was offended by my depiction of God as a superhero who comes in and saves the day. I was painting a false picture of God, he said.

Is that it? Is my perception of God false? Or is this other fellow’s perception of our needs false?

All I have are pictures. And every one of them is false in some way. There is no way a picture can show God completely.

We only have shadows. The pictures of the Chernobyl children, as horrific as they are, are merely shadows of hell, I think. Just as the new earth will be better than the most pristine landscape here, hell is more horrible than our worst nightmares.

So my gas station story is a small picture of the faithfulness of God to his children. It illustrated for me, at that time in my life, some points I had taken from Scripture: If you get out of the boat you may be able to walk on the water. If you stay in the boat, you will never know. If  you give Hagar to your husband you’ll only complicate matters. If you’ll wait on God, he’ll answer at the perfect time.

And death and injury and the Chernobyl children do not disprove these things. They are pictures of something else. They are small pictures of what man’s rebellion against his Creator brought and what it will bring, I think.

Neither picture—pain and death or a gas station in the nick of time—is the complete truth. They are both just shadows.

Really we are all like the children of Chernobyl, only most of us don’t realize it.We are all born with defects—warped by sin. We all fall short of the glory of God.We are all waiting for deliverance.

My point about God always answering at the perfect time is true. We Christians have a hope for the future. We have an inheritance, incorruptible, kept in heaven for us. I may d—I will die. We all die. But that does not mean that God is not really a super hero coming in to save the day. He is a super hero. He has saved the day. And when we die we will be ushered into a glory we haven’t begun to imagine.

This world is not the real world. It’s the world that is passing away. When we die we will praise God saying, “You made me go past E and I didn’t think I could walk one more day in that sin-soaked world, but you gave me strength, and you answered at the perfect time. You delivered me from that weak, earthly tent and from my wretched estate at just the right time.”

When I was a very young Christian, a friend flew up to Alaska to visit and I drove him up to Denali so he could hike and camp for a few days.

Saturday, after work, I drove up to get him, and about three-quarters of the way up I realized I was going to have buy gas before I got back home. I saw an open station, but didn’t stop, thinking that if I waited for the return trip and bought gas closer to Anchorage it would cost less.

As I got closer to the park, I realized my mistake. It was only nine but it had already started to get dark. It hit me that summer was over. The tourists were gone and gas stations weren’t going to be open late. Denali was about four hours away from where I lived and the road is lonely. Maybe every fifty miles or so a house/gift shop/restaurant/gas station/shower combo sits on the side of the road. And that night, as I neared the park, every one of those little stations was zipped shut.

I began to pray for an open station.

I picked up my friend and told him we were probably going to run out of gas. He was so angry. He’d been sleeping in the rain for four days, he was cold and miserable, and he wanted to get back to Anchorage to a warm bed.

I prayed more earnestly for a gas station. My friend wasn’t a Christian. None of my friends were. They all thought I was a wacko. And there was John, so mad, saying, “I cannot believe you are so stupid. How could you not buy gas?”

John was my older brother’s best friend and we’d known each other for years, so he felt free to call me a little idiot. I didn’t mind that at all. What I minded was that he was going to tell my brother and all our friends what a bonehead I was and they would laugh and say, “Well, what do you expect from Sally? She’s turned into some kind of religious wacko. She’s lost her mind. You can’t trust her for anything anymore.” They, the brilliant ones, were sitting around smoking pot and smoking coke, and seeing everything clearly, while I was a delusional wacko. They all still liked me alright in a kind of “isn’t she cute, we’ll pat her on the head and wait for her to come to her senses” kind of way. But I was the butt of the jokes. I didn’t mind if the jabs were undeserved, but I didn’t like to really do stupid things because I didn’t like to fuel their disdain for Christians.

John and I left Denali with a quarter of a tank—him cursing, me praying.

Night fell.

There were no other cars on the road.

Every station we passed was closed.

The needle got closer and closer to empty.

When the needle was on E we saw a gift shop/gas station combo and pulled in. Someone lived upstairs, in the top story of a log cabin. We knocked, hoping the guy would have mercy on us. It was close to midnight. No one answered.

We got back into the car and I said, “Here are our choices: We can park here, sleep in the car, and get gas in the morning, or we can pray and keep driving. With the needle on E we can go another forty miles, maybe. If we keep going and we don’t find a station, we’ll have to sleep on the side of the road and hitchhike in the morning. Some trucker will eventually come by and pick us up.”

John said, “What’s coming up in the next forty mile?”

“Nothing but more of the same.”

“Then why would you even suggest we keep going? What do you know? What do you think God has told you.”

I said, “I don’t know anything. I don’t think there are any gas stations open between here and Anchorage at this time of night. But I’ve been praying for gas for the last several hours and if we park here and don’t keep going I’ll never know if God was going to answer my prayers.”

John said, “OK. You pray, since you’re the one who knows God, and then we’ll drive on.”

“And you won’t curse me out if we run out of gas and have to hitchhike in the morning?”

“I won’t be mad.”

So I asked God to give us gas so we could get home because I wanted to go to church the next day and John wanted a comfortable bed. But I told him we’d praise him even if we ran out of gas and had to sleep on the side of the road.

John gave an “amen” and we drove away.

We went about thirty miles and were just about to the top of a hill when the car chugged and sputtered and John, who was driving, started to pull off the road.

“See if we can make the top of the hill, ” I said. “We might as well coast down the other side. Go as far as we can.”

We got to the top of the hill, leaning forward, urging the car on. We crested the hill and looked down, and at the bottom of the hill was a Chevron station, in the middle of nowhere, all lit up and looking like the Promised Land.

We coasted in to find a high school kid in the bay working on his car.

I said, “You sure are an answer to prayer. Our tank is bone dry.”

“You’re lucky, then,” he answered. “Nobody’s open between here and Anchorage. We all switched to winter hours two weeks ago. I closed up myself at nine. My girlfriend got sick and cancelled our date, so I came back to work on my car.”

Variations of this story have been repeated in my life so many times. If I pray and then keep going—if I head out onto the highway instead of staying in the safe parking lot—God always answers. He never answers as early as I want him to. He always makes me go past E and I’m usually sweating it and thinking there is no way we can keep going. “I’m about to die down here, Lord. Can you hear me? I can’t do this anymore.” But I always find that I can do it for several more miles, and God always answers at the perfect time.

Talk with your doctor or mental health provider to nix your irritability, sadness or anger and boost your mood with SSRIs. Feel good again.

Nix your irritability with SSRIs!



Is this how God wants us to nix sin? Irritability is a sin. Sadness is a sin. Anger is a sin. Not always. Of course there are things that rightly make us sad and angry. But most of our sadness and anger, I am willing to bet, is sinful. We are sad because we are bored or discontent with what God has given us. We are angry because we are prideful.

And irritability? I can not think of a single time when being irritable is not sinful.

So does God want us to boost our moods with SSRIs?

God does want us to feel good again. He wants us to rejoice in the Lord always. But he does not want us to mask our emotional pain with drugs, I’m pretty sure. Emotional pain is much like physical pain. It has a purpose. When you stick your hand in the fire the nerves in your fingers scream out, “Pull back! Pull back! Alert! Pain! Danger! Pull back!” And you whip your hand back.

My husband was paralyzed from the neck down. If he stuck his hand in the fire, he felt nothing. For twenty-two years he had to do a visual check of his body every few minutes. He had to look at his body and look at the space around him and see if he was in danger from heat or cold or from sharp objects. Because if his foot fell into the campfire he’d leave it there until he smelled the burning flesh.

Why would that matter? Who cares if he burned his foot?  He couldn’t feel the pain.

It mattered because if he burned his foot he was opening himself up to infection and to possible death. It is not good for us to have big burns and wounds. That is why God gave us nerves. They are a protection. When we live without them, as my husband did, we are at a distinct disadvantage.

The same is true if you go on SSRIs to mask emotional pain. God gives us emotional pain for a reason. It is there to warn us. “Pull back! Danger! Pay attention! I’m trying to tell you something!”

On the Mayo site, in that same article, we read:

Precisely how SSRIs affect depression isn’t clear….Although antidepressants may not cure depression, they can help you achieve remission—the disappearance or nearly complete reduction of depression symptoms.

How is removing symptoms helpful? You are, in effect, paralyzing yourself. You are deadening your emotional nerves and often, I believe, your spiritual nerves. And you are then able to leave yourself, happily, in the fire.

I’ve never had depression. I’m not judging those who have. I am not anti-science or anti-medicine. It may be that a person is in such a deep depression that he can’t make any progress without the drugs to lift his fog. And psychotropic drugs for schizophrenics have saved many lives, I’d guess.

My point is not that drugs are always wrong. My point is that we, as a nation—and yes, that includes those of us in the church—have an unbiblical understanding of what God wants for us. We have bought into the idea that we have the right to not only pursue happiness, but to catch it. We believe we are entitled to feel no pain. We want our government to provide good health care and good jobs that pay well. We believe we deserve to live in ease.

God wants us to feel pain. He works through our pain. He designed us so that we would not go happily to hell without a lot of struggle. He wants us to suffer, so we will call out to him for relief.

My husband suffered through many surgeries, and through years, literally, in hospitals, fixing wounds he’d gotten because he could feel no pain. Many of us purposefully paralyze ourselves, spending years in spiritual wheelchairs, asleep…half dead, our discernment dulled by drugs or TV or porn or alcohol or exercise or food. We are opening ourselves up to big, nasty wounds that may kill us. We are not learning to obey. We are not growing in grace. We are just, pretty much, waiting to die.

I think we need to wake up. I think we need to stop wanting to feel good and start wanting to be good.

They thought sunscreen was a good thing. I don’t know what else because Mom channel surfed on to the next set of talking heads.

But I’ve heard these shows enough times to know what else they might have covered. Helmets for kids riding their bikes. Maybe salads and fruits for lunch. Probably they said something about hydration.

Here’s my biggest complaint about these endless conversations on the TV and the blogs and in the doctors’ waiting rooms. We are a nation without God. We want to be safe physically and we don’t give a moment’s thought to our spiritual condition.

We want to force McDonald’s to take the toy out of the Happy Meal on the one hand, because we have the right to protect other people’s children from fattening foods. But we scream bloody murder if anyone suggests we should remove sexually graphic novels, such as Push or Choke from high school libraries. “You monitor what your child reads,” the ACLU tells us, “and let the other parents monitor what their children read.”

This is because we think teen sex is safer than hamburgers and French fries. We have discovered a way to make sex safe. We can use protection. We can have our sex without fear of disease. (Ease is good, dis-ease is bad. This belief colors everything.)

“Safe sex” outside of the marriage bed is a myth, of course. There is no such thing as “safe sin” in our sexual practices or in any other area of life. The wages of sin are death, the Bible says.

It’s not safe for kids to ignore God’s law. If we really wanted to keep our kids safe, we wouldn’t be worrying about sunscreen. If we really wanted to save our children we’d take the seat belts out of the cars and attach them to the pews at church, and we’d strap our babies in and let them grow up hearing God’s word. We’d worry less about feeding the kids all the recommended servings of fruits and vegetables each day, and we’d worry a little more about feeding them on Jesus Christ who died for sinners.

I haven’t done any of this right. My kids haven’t been fed good physical or spiritual food. So don’t think I’m saying it’s easy.

But I think a good place to start is to talk about it. It seems to me that we talk endlessly about how to feed and protect and educate our children’s physical bodies—the two-thirds we haven’t aborted—but no one on TV talks about our children’s spiritual health.

We’ve been busy making sure our kids have high self-esteem and we’ve failed to tell them they are sinners who have offended a holy God and they need to repent and ask him to put their sins on Christ’s account. So off the children go—headed to hell by bus loads. We’ve got them safely strapped into their seatbelts, though, by Golly.

Hurray for us.

Sitting in my room, listening to the faceless voices, really drives home to me the worthlessness of what is pouring into the house.

Crowds screaming in excitement over the possibility of winning a purse with money in it or trading it for a box on stage.

I thought about how many hours I’ve wasted on game shows, yelling at someone on TV who cannot hear me, telling him the answer to some question. Why is it such a big deal to us to see someone win a new car or a million dollars? There is some draw for those of us who like to solve problems and play games. But I’m thinking we could use the time more wisely by playing games with our family instead of watching people we don’t know playing the games on TV.

Mom switched the channel and I heard women talking about how to keep children safe in summer weather. Sunscreen—

The channel changed again and we heard about a body found in a dumpster—

Another switch and there are white sharks off the coast at Cape Cod. We stayed there for a while to hear about the sharks and find out that the sharks are normal and not a big deal. They are there to feed on the seals and tourists should still go to Cape Cod.

And I’m just wondering why we need to know about all of this. Why do we waste hours listening to stuff that has nothing to do with us? How am I edified when I hear for three weeks about some young man from Holland who killed a young woman in South America? Is there anything I can do to help? Why should I listen to this? Why did we need to see, over and over, Miss California walking across a stage in a bikini, and what business is it of mine that a young American women goes to jail in Italy, convicted of brutal murder and sexual tor—oh wait, we have a dog that scuba dives coming up next.

And that’s probably the most offensive thing: Murder is placed next to mindless entertainment and nothing has any meaning anymore. Nothing has weight. We call in to talk to Nancy Grace about kidnapped children as if sexually abused and murdered children are no more than objects placed in this world for our entertainment. Maybe it’s because we like to feel, and we’ve lost our ability to feel shock and sorrow over lesser sins, so we have to cry over other people’s missing children. Maybe we rave at the parents who abuse their children because it makes us somehow feel better about ourselves.

And I wonder how we can think we are any better than the Romans with their Colosseum.

1. Praying to God:

Be anxious for nothing, but in all things present your requests to God by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, and the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 4:6&7)

2. Meditation Upon God:

Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed upon Thee. (Isa. 26:3)

3. Meditation Upon What God Has Give You:

For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind. (2 Tim. 1:7)

4. Meditation Upon God’s Love:

Perfect love drives out fear. (1 John 4:18)

5. Meditation Upon What God Has Done in History:

The enemy pursues me…he makes me dwell in darkness like those long dead. So my spirit grows faint within me… I remember the days of long ago, I meditate on all your works. I consider what your hands have done. (Psalm 143:3-5)

6. Rebuking Your Soul:

Why so downcast within me? Put your hope in God. I will yet praise him. (Psalm 42:5, Psalm 43:5)

7. Crying Out to God:

Father take this cup….And an angel strengthened him. (Luke 22:42&43)

8. Refreshing Others:

He who refreshes others will himself be refreshed. (Prov. 11:25)

9. Waiting on the LORD:

He who waits upon the Lord will…run and not be weary. (Isa. 40:31)

10. Obedience:

I will run in the path of your commands for you have set my heart free. (Psalm 119:32)  The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart…in keeping them there is great reward. (Psalm 19:8,11)

11. Fearing the LORD:

In the fear of the Lord is strong confidence and his children have a place of refuge. (Prov. 14:26)

12. Praising the LORD:

He has given us the oil of joy for mourning and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. (Isaiah 61:3)

I could go on and on. We are told to be not afraid, be not afraid, be not afraid.

One of the reasons we are to be not afraid is that God is our Father. He has not left us as orphans. He doesn’t forsake us. He won’t let us fall.

Every fear has its root in believing that God is either not good enough or not strong enough to save us. What other reason for fear can there be? We simply refuse to believe God. He tells us he’s good and he tells us he’s strong. What reason does a Christian have for fear?

Christians today look very much like nonChristians. We have the same fears, the same worries, the same depressions, the same ways of combating those bad feelings. We shop too much and eat too much and take medication to ease the pain. Is that because God has failed us? Is that because God is not able to deliver us and give us that joy that is beyond comprehension? Is that because God doesn’t really give peace when we pray?

Or is it because we don’t believe him?