Students, don’t miss this series of posts on “wasting your life” over at the Rebelution blog.  Good Stuff – here is part 2 in the discussion:

I am convinced our lives will be no better than our view of death. In Luke 9:23-25 Jesus spoke the following: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”

Jesus makes it clear that depending on how we think about death we will either save our lives, or we will waste them. We can waste our lives trying to save them, or we can find our lives striving to spend them for Christ.

Drawing primarily from the life and death of Jim Elliot, as well as Michael Billings, we will spend the remainder of this series examining three marks of a tragically wasted life, and then three marks of gloriously spent life. Here’s a quick preview:

3 Marks of a Tragically Wasted Life
• A lukewarm attitude of complacency.
• A lazy habit of procrastination.
• A paralyzed lifestyle of timidity.

3 Marks of a Gloriously Spent Life

• A hot-hearted desire to be useful.
• A relentless passion for the good use of time.
• A constant readiness to risk for the Gospel.

Some questions for discussion:

• Does your life contain any marks of a wasted life?
• Does your life contain any marks of a spent life?

I read the following from a Westminster Prof – Carl Trueman.  A very convicting and convincing article.  I encourage you to take the time to read it!

Growing up, I adored my grandfather.  He was probably the funniest man I ever knew, with a razor sharp wit, absurdism and satire running through his veins, and an imagination that seemed to know no bounds.  His letters to me were mini-masterpieces of surreal satire, and he knew how to have fun, how to puncture pomposity, and how to provoke people to think.  Yet he was, by today’s standards, uneducated.  He had left school at thirteen to work in a factory; he was a union man; he lived through the General Strike and the Depression; he knew what it was like to tramp the streets, looking for work but knowing there was no work to be found; and, a psychological victim of the British class system, he never came to see my mum play sport for her school lest he cause her embarrassment.  I loved him dearly and when he died, it was as if my own world came to an end.

I hated the system that had treated my grandfather like dirt and kept him tugging his forelock at those whose only virtue was to have been born to wealthier familes; I hated the system that had worked him so hard and broken his health so that he could never really enjoy his retirement; and I hated the system that had made him believe all this was part of his proper place in the world and had even persuaded him that it would be less embarrassing for all if he did not come to the touchline to watch his daughter play sport for her school. Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted so desperately to get in to Cambridge was to show him, and myself, and the chinless public school (in the British sense) wonders who epitomized the system, that the system could be beaten, that someone from my family could push their way in to the very heart of the establishment by sheer hard work and natural talent, rather than by money, `breeding,’ and possession of no chin and an old school tie.  The day I was accepted, he told my mum that he could not believe that the family had risen from being nothing to being represented at Cambridge.  But in my eyes we hadn’t risen at all, we had simply made a necessary point: we could do it too; we could get to where `they’ were.  My grandfather was not nothing; he was -and still is — one of the greatest men I have ever known.  What could that great mind have done, if only it had been given the privilege and leisure of study?

Now, there’s quite a contrast between the world in which my grandfather grew up and the world of today.  By age fifteen, he had done two years of hard work; had he not done so, the result would have been simple – he would have starved.  By age twenty, he knew what responsibility was; by age thirty he had spent over half his life in the workplace.  Indeed, he did not become an adult when he married and had children; he had already been an adult since before he had really needed to shave.

Today is so different.  If the poverty and hard work of my grandfather’s era left men middle-aged at thirty, the ease and trivia of today’s society seems to leave us trapped in a permanent Neverland where we all, like so many Peter (and Patty) Pans, live lives of eternal youth.  Where my grandfather spent his day hard at work, trying – sometimes desperately – to make enough money to put bread on the table and shoes on his children’s feet, today many have time to play X-Box and video games, or warble on and on incessantly in that narcissistic echo-chamber that is the blogosphere.  The world of my grandfather was evil because it made him grow up too fast; the world of today is evil because it prevents many from ever growing up at all.

In some ways, today’s world is the very antithesis of earlier ages.  I always found sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings of children to be somewhat creepy: adult heads on tiny, immature bodies, as if the artists had no real concept of youth and childhood that allowed them to depict faces as such.   Strange, isn’t it, that the airbrushing techniques so often used in today’s glossy magazines seem designed to have precisely the opposite effect: to place young heads on bodies that we know are much older.  The concept of old age is perhaps slowly but surely being airbrushed out of representations in the popular media.

Numerous incidents over recent years have brought the sad effect of all this home to me.  As a professor at university and seminary, I have had too many run-ins with students who act like five year olds and, when held to account, express all the pouting resentment that one comes to expect from a generation that demands respect but refuses to put in the time and effort to earn it.  You see them on the blogs, screaming their abuse and demanding to be heard, carrying on their tirades long after the threshold of Godwin’s Law and any semblance of decency or credibility has been passed for the umpteenth time.  They have achieved nothing – but they demand that you respect them!

The inept Islamic suicide bombers in Britain are just the most extreme, pestiferous example of this immaturity: incompetent, spotty juveniles who make portentous suicide videos and then fail to blow anything up because they forgot their car keys, or bought the wrong ingredients for bomb making from the local store, or were amazed that putting in an order in for two-hundred bottles of peroxide aroused suspicion at the local hair salon who contacted the local police: `I see, madame, and can I assume that Mr Mohammed is not actually a natural blond…..?’. These thugs demand respect in the most extreme ways; but their behaviour inspires less horror than it does simple derision and mockery.

But it gets more disturbing than simply finding people in their twenties and thirties acting like spoiled children.  Parents are becoming increasingly involved as well. With two sons in travel football (that’s soccer to any American readers), I have stood on too many touchlines where parents act like frustrated two years olds as the game does not develop as they would like; and, again, as a professor, I have had unpleasant experiences with parents too.  Being told by a parent that their child is `young and immature’ works for my wife – she teaches at a church nursery, dealing with three year olds – but it wears a bit thin when the problem child is eighteen, nineteen, twenty….thirty….  And that this kind of stuff seems more common in the church than in the secular world is disturbing.  It does not inspire much confidence about the future and, if anything, provides anecdotal confirmation to those who see religion in general and Christianity in particular, as a refuge for the emotionally retarded.

So what are we to do?  I am tempted to say: return to the world of my grandfather! but that would be foolish.  I hated that world for what it did to him.  Yes, he grew up fast and took responsibility for himself and his family, but at what cost?  Indeed, I hate that world as much as I despise the glib talk of `the dignity of manual labour’ that drips from the lips of the chardonnay-sipping chatterati for whom manual labour is not scrubbing floors to make ends meet, as it was for my grandmother, but pruning the roses and putting out the recycle bin once a week — no doubt full of empty bottles of Bolly and Krug.

The answer, then, is not a naïve, nostalgic hankering for a return to an era of poverty and cruel hardship.  Rather it is surely obvious: we need to put aside childish things and start acting like adults.  Pascal put his finger on the problem of human life when he saw how entertainment had come to occupy a place, not as the necessary and momentary relief from a life of work, but as an end in itself.  When entertainment becomes more than a pleasant and occasional distraction, when time and income become devoted to entertainment and to pleasure, when sports teams become more important to us than people – even the people to whom we are close – then something has gone badly wrong.   The frothy entertainment culture in which we live is a narcotic: not only is it addictive, so that we always want more; it also eats away at us, skewing our priorities, rotting our values as surely as too much sugar rots our teeth.  My grandfather was lucky in this one thing: he did not have time to be immature because he did not have the surplus income that would have granted him that luxury.  That is not to exalt the virtue of poverty – poverty is an evil – but it is to underscore the dangers that come with wealth in abundance.

Second, we need to stop idolizing our children.  At twenty seven, I had a wife, a child, a Ph.D. and a monograph from Oxford University Press. I looked for all the world like an adult.  Then I got myself into a bit of financial difficulty, to the tune of about two-hundred pounds, a small sum but not when you are at the bottom of the British academic payscale and a one-income family to boot.  I phoned my father for help.  He read me the riot act about financial irresponsibility, helped me get out of the immediate fix, and told me that he never, ever wanted me to call and tell him I was in such a fix again.  He loved me but he did not idolize me; he knew it was time for me to stand on my own two feet. I loved my dad, but he scared the daylights out of me with that talk.  Yet, looking back, that was one of the moments which was the making of me: look, son, you’re big boy now; look after yourself and don’t come crying to me every time you screw up.  A sobering, critical moment in the relationship between father and son; but, in my dealings with others, it finds increasingly few parallels.  Touch the child, even the one with the beard, the wisdom teeth, and the warm fuzzy memories of the time when New Kids On The Block were all the rage in High School, and you touch the sacred idol; you can expect the parents to come a-calling.

You are, of course, what you worship, as Psalm 115 reminds us, and thus, as long as we idolize our children and the culture of youth, we can expect to – well, be just like them: pouting, irresponsible, hormonal, unpleasant and, frankly, as creepy as those sixteenth century portraits of little children with adult faces.  Trapped in Neverland with no hope of escape.

I think if we worship anything but God, we will inevitably become what we worship!!!

Justin

Hey Parents,

Welcome to our first Thursday Thoughts.  I enjoyed meeting many of you on Sunday, and I look forward to serving you and your families in the coming year.  I hope you and your student will be encouraged to be a community that is informed and shaped by the cross leading to new creation.

My son Jed is now a big seven years old, but I am already experienced some tight lips when I ask him questions about school and life.  Some days he can talk till our ears ring and other days it is rough to get a peep.  At the Shepherd Press Blog, there was a great entry on Monologues and Teenagers:

The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge;
the ears of the wise seek it out. Proverbs 18:15

One of our readers left the following as part of a comment to the post, How Sin Works – Application to Teenagers:
“It is hard to dialogue and not monologue with a 13 year old who doesn’t respond. Any suggestion?”

This mom is not alone. Parents are frustrated by contrasts. Contrasts, such as when you observe your teenager talking a mile-a-minute with friends and yet, when you talk with him, his exuberance collapses into strained monosyllables.
Did you have a good day? Sort of.
How was your test? Okay.
Do you have homework? Maybe.
Do you have plans this weekend? Not sure.
Is anything bothering you? No.
Did you clean your room? Not yet.
I thought maybe we could talk later on. Why?
What did you think of the sermon? It was okay.
Why are you so hard to talk to? Aw, mom.
After you finish with a well-intended assessment of how things can be better, including appropriate Bible verses, your son says, Can I go now?

Such exchanges are disheartening. After the time and energy spent in raising your child to the teenage years, with all the love you have in your heart for him, it seems unfair and confusing for your child to act as though your relationship with him is such a burden. So what do you do – think of more creative monologues?

You can read the rest of part 1 here, part II here, part III here

Have a great week! Don’t forget to post comments and tell me what you think.

Until all have heard,

Justin

Your Fearless Leader

Originally uploaded by veritas6point0

Sunday at Veritas, we are starting a new series titled:  “wasted:  keeping our lives from the bottom of the barrel.”

In this series we will examine how to live that counts.  Below are some of the things we will look at during the semester:

• Don’t waste your life
• Don’t waste your pain and suffering
• Don’t waste your humor
• Don’t waste your sports
• Don’t waste your relationships
• Don’t waste your money
• Don’t waste your work
• Don’t waste your sleep
• Don’t waste your family
• Don’t waste your fun
• Don’t waste your mind
• Don’t waste your mission
• Risk is right, better to lose your life than waste it

Join us each and every Sunday night at 6:00 in the basement of Trinity Harbor Church.

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As you are probably aware already, we have our second Veritas 6.0 MEETING of the school year Sunday night.  Looks like Hurricane Ike will be coming to visit (probably will be a tropical storm by the time it hits us).  The rain shouldn’t be a problem for us, though, and we’re planning on having the meeting.

Don’t forget parents (or students, don’t let your parents forget) that we are having our first Parent Meeting of the semester.  Here are the details:

• Parent Meeting at 5:00pm
• Dinner for Parents and Students at 6:00pm
• Meeting at 6:30pm
• See you there!

Here is a weekly quote from the great pastor and theologian Sinclair Ferguson:

The evangelical orientation is inward and subjective.  We are far better at looking inward than we are at looking outward. We need to expend our energies admiring, exploring, expositing and extolling Jesus Christ.

Doesn’t this quote have much to say to us.  I think the young adult culture is extensively focused on the self.  With twitter, facebook status, blogs and the like we can be almost obsessed on looking inward.  We also have a tendency to take this to our relationships with Christ.  We think we have a good week, when we feel close to God, and this feeling of closeness is based not on Christ and His Person and Work, but rather on our quiet times, avoidance of sin and overall inward feelings or outlook.  This quote by the William Wallace of preaching and the pulpit, reminds us that true vitality is found only when we take our eyes and energies off our self and get busy exploring the greatness and beauty of Jesus Christ.  We need to take our self-focused efforts and direct them instead to Jesus.  Read this verse:

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

According to 2 Corinthians 3:18, looking outward to Jesus has the power to transform us and the great news is that even dim beholdings of Jesus are enough to change us.

My father is a race car driver.  He loves cars, and especially loves racing them.  He has raced bikes, go-carts, R/C cars, quarter-scale, late models, stocks, modifieds, sprints, migets and soap box.  If it has wheels and can be run, he will race it.  Growing up he invited me into this world.  I grew up at the track.  Every Friday and Saturday night we found ourselves at the local dirt track.  I can still smell the popcorn, the mud, the smoldering oil and burnt rubber.  I can see the racing the oval rubbing my dust filled eyes.  I hear the roar of the multitude of engines, and I still taste the dust.  My dad involved me in all of it, and he had high hopes for me.  I tried to ride and drive, but I was too scared, too timid for the speed and the edge required of a driver.  I just didn’t love it like dad did and does.  But if there was a love or at least a  romantic impulse, a muffled desire or muted longing it was for this mystical race called Baja.  My dad would speak of it, often but I never saw it, because it wasn’t on TV.  I remember cheering for Rick Mears at Indy, but Ivan Stewart and the Baja, no visual moving pictures to inspire.  I mean I saw snap shots in the racing magazines dad subscribed too, but that was it – only still pics.  This left room for my imagination and my dreams.  And I had the words of my dad.  He would talk about this 1000 mile race that went all day and through the night.

It happened in Mexico – Baja, California.  The men who drove in it had a dedication and drive that made the nascar and indy car drives quake in their comfortable seats.  Sure those guys went faster, but it is kinda like the glory of the dragster verses nascar.  Dragsters go fast, but only go for a few seconds, whereas the Indy car and the Nascar drivers go 500 miles.  Well, at Baja they go fast, and they go long – 1000 miles – 15 to 20 plus hours.  It is off-road, not pristine tracks with angled turns, rather it is a race with twists and turns, ups and downs, pits of dust and mud, cacti and 1000’s of loyal fans who line the dust-filled roads just a few feet off the course taking their lives in their own hands as they watch.  It is staged over the course of a full day, and there is driving at night.  There are no street lights and no pit roads with comfy RV’s.   Only a few lights on a cab or helmet to guide.  There are motorcycles, ATV’s, dune buggies, trucks, and VW bugs.  The motorcycles are the fastest and the unmodified bugs are the slowest, but the event is marked not just by speed but also by those who finish.  In fact there isn’t  even huge prize money, no million dollar purses, and there isn’t any big-time trophies.  What is there is glory.  The glory that comes with enduring till the end in a grueling and challenging race that risks life and limb of both contestant and spectator.  One racer called the race spiritual, mystical.  Another says in one day you experience everything, great and terrible and it is how you deal with them at the end of the night – it’s like life.

I spent part of my night last night watching a documentary called, “Dust to Glory,” which documented this great race that is a microcosim of this thing called life.  One such story is that of a driver named Mouse McCoy.  McCoy is an accomplished motorcycle driver.  He has driven motocross since a boy and has both left the thing he loved, abandoning it in burn-out only to return once again to the well, seeking joy and sustenance from it one more time.  He and his team decided they would attempt to become the first motorcycle driver to ride the whole 1000 miles alone.  You see Baja is a team race.  It takes a dedicated team of mechanics, sponsors and spotters to get the drivers to cross that finish line, but it also takes multiple drivers.  I mean seriously, I am exhausted after a 10 hour day of driving the comfy asphalt of the interstate in my smooth riding, air-conditioned, cruise-controled mini-van.  Imagine a 1000 mile 15 plus hour day of physical beating, stress of racing, burden of taking your life in your hands so to speak at every turn and the pressure of the expectations of a team of friends, workers and sponsors who have put their livelihood into your effort.  That makes for a pretty exhausting day.  Well, Mouse starts early and halfway through is in like 10th place.  He is mostly delirious, seriously he sounds half drunk through most of the commentary, but this is the stress and burden of the ride.  He manages to make up 7 or so spots in the next 400 plus miles.  He passes the 3rd place cycle and is only 60 miles from the finish line.  His wrists are numb, his mind is loopy, his bike is battered and his team is amazed, but 60 miles out he wrecks.  This is Baja.  It can jump up and bite you at any moment and leave you shipwrecked on the side of road, beaten and bloody.  Mouse has broken ribs, a separated shoulder, a broken bike (no lights- and it is the middle of the night), and is still as mentally exhausted as ever.   Will he finish?  Or will he be disqualified, out of the running?  Well, another rider, comes by and discovers Mouse, while his team is frantically scouring the back roads of Mexico outside Ensenada hoping to find him alive and well.  This rider stops helps Mouse back onto his bike and together with this rider’s lone light they ride to the finish.  But they don’t just ride.  They don’t coast it in.  They could, right?  I mean Mouse is broken.  He deserves to take it easy.  He will still be the first to finish the ride all by his lonesome.  Nope these two ride driving over 100 mph, and race to the finish.  One driver sacrificing for another to get him to the finish line, racing the both of them together all the way in.  I mean you can’t write better poetry.  And you can’t have a better parable of the Christian life, so to speak.

We are in a race like the Baja 1000.  The race is like life, and it is full of treachery, danger, adventure and intrigue.  It is painful and frustrating.  It is full of good and bad, beauty and ugliness, ecstasy and pain.  We too ride alone but as a team.  We need this team, depend on this team and in reality we race together.  We too falter, fail, fumble and fall.  We also race for glory.  Now, we can take this parable to one extreme and make it rich with rugged American individualism.  Right, every many must race alone and finish alone.  It is all on you.  We can even make it spiritual.  Only your decision for Christ will last.  Sound familiar.  We only finish when we chose this day who we will serve.   We can take it to another extreme of that of extreme dedication, hard work and determination.  Right, we fight the elements of life and we work hard, do our best and we finish that race.  It sounds Christian.  We even add “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” meaning I can do it if I work hard, pray hard and just believe that I can do it.  Christ name is attached, but Jesus is largely absents.  We do this so well.  We mix our metaphors and confuse our stories.  We think that if we work hard enough or long enough or if we just keep getting up when knocked down then we will finish this race of life and God will look down and say, Well done faithful servant, and based on our meritorious, boy scoutish way, we will earn the Lord’s good favor by finishing strong, racing till the end, helping a brother out.  To be certain there are glimmers of truth in these views, but the real parable is that of us staggering our way down the dusty road of life, trying and failing, fluttering and falting, dizzily wallowing about on the road.  We are discombobulated like Mouse.  We are broken down like Mouse.  We are lost like Mouse, but then comes a lone rider who amazingly can finish the race alone, one who can make it all the way, and in reality He isn’t alone at all, in fact He is following every action of His Father and is being upheld by the Spirit.  He is racing as a team, and amazingly He invites us in and by His finishing the race, by His record and by His sacrifice kinda like the rider who helped Mouse, in Him we are saved.  In union with Him, we finish, because He finished.  When He screamed those words on the cross, and when God vindicated Him by resurrecting Him from the grave, the race was won.  We still race, all do, but in Him and only in Him do we finish.  Not by attaching Him to our small stories, but by being united with Him and in Him to His work, do we finish.  And through this union then, we are able to get up and finish, because He finished, not just as our example, but also as our actual advocate and finisher.  And it is in union with Him that we race for the only glory that will last, glory not to us and our efforts, but glory to the only one who finishes, the only one who carries us, the one who lasts, the only one who is really worthy, Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God.

“Dust to Glory” concludes with the following quote, “1000 miles in 32 hours can be a lifetime in a blink, do they find glory?  I couldn’t say, because the race never ends.  But if they do it is in the dust and it won’t wash away.”  The Scripture often speaks of us as dust, indicating how common we are, how dependent, and in truth our racing and striving do end, and as for glory, it can be had but only by being united to Christ, racing with HIm, through Him, by Him, in Him…for from Him, through Him and to Him are all things.  To Him be the glory forever.  Amen”  You see He gets the glory, because He is worthy to receive it, and in union with Him we too share in this glory, this glory that we desperately seek is received only when it is given away to the only one who actually earned it.

Here is the recount of the martyrdom of the church father Polycarp as told in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs:

Hearing his captors had arrived one evening, Polycarp left his bed to welcome them, ordered a meal prepared for them, and then asked for an hour alone to pray. The soldiers were so impressed by Polycarp’s advanced age and composure that they began to wonder why they had been sent to take him, but as soon as he had finished his prayers, they put him on a donkey and brought him to the city. Brought before the tribunal and the crowd, Polycarp refused to deny Christ, although the proconsul begged him to ‘consider yourself and have pity on your great age. Reproach Christ and I will release you.’

Polycarp replied, ‘Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has never once wronged me. How can I blaspheme my King, who saved me?’ Threatened with wild beasts and fire, Polycarp stood his ground. ‘What are you waiting for? Do whatever you please.’ The crowd demanded Polycarp’s death, gathering wood for the fire and preparing to tie him to the stake. ‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘He who will give me strength to sustain the fire will help me not to flinch from the pile.’ So they bound him but didn’t nail him to the stake.

As soon as Polycarp finished his prayer, the fire was lit, but it leaped up around him, leaving him unburned, until the people convinced a soldier to plunge a sword into him. When he did, so much blood gushed out that the fire was extinguished. The soldiers then placed his body into a fire and burned it to ashes, which some Christians later gathered up and buried properly.

(Tullian)

What an incredible account.  I am reminded that the call of the Christian and the path to true spirituality is a path of death.  Death to self, death to stuff, death to wants, death to reputation, death to rights.  Francis Schaeffer calls this a hard wall, that we must bump into on journey with Jesus.  This is a great picture of the faithfulness of an old saint who practiced dying to his self daily, and thus when the time came to give up his life, it was the final expression of the regular practice of a Christian disciple.