A "Stepford" god

"If you don't trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you. For example, if a wife is not allowed to contradict her husband, they won't have an intimate relationship. Remember the (two!) movies The Stepford Wives. The husbands of Stepford, Connecticut, decide to have their wives turned into robots who never cross the wills of their husbands. A Stepford wife was wonderfully compliant and beautiful, but no one would describe such a marriage as intimate or personal. 

Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won't! You have a Stepford God! A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with god. It is the precondition for it." pg 118

-Tim Keller

from: http://www.amazon.com/Reason-God-Belief-Age-Skepticism/dp/1594483493/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354128718&sr=1-4&keywords=tim+keller

"Out Of This World's Parade"

"In determining relationships we must begin somewhere. There must be somewhere a fixed center against which everything else is measured, where the law of relativity does not enter and we can say 'IS' and make no allowances. Such a center is God. When God would make His Name known to mankind He could find no better word than 'I AM.' When he speaks in the first person He says, 'I AM'; when we speak of Him we say, 'He is'; when we speak to Him we say, 'Thou art.' Everyone and everything else measures from that fixed point. 'I am that I am,' says God, 'I change not.'

As the sailor locates his position on the sea by 'shooting' the sun, so we may get our moral bearings by looking at God. We must begin with God. We are right when and only when we stand in a right position relative to God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other position. 

Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and to bring Him nearer to our own image. The flesh whimpers against the rigor of God's inexorable sentence and begs like Agag for a little mercy, a little indulgence of its carnal ways. It is no use. We can get a right start only by accepting God as He is and learning to love Him for what He is. As we go on to know Him better we shall find it a source of unspeakable joy that God is just what He is. Some of the most rapturous moments we know will be those we spend in reverent admiration of the Godhead. In those holy moments the very thought of change in Him will be too painful to endure.

So let us begin with God. Back of all, above all, before all is God; first in sequential order, above in rank and station, exalted in dignity and honor. As the self-existent One He gave being to all things, and all things exist out of Him and for Him. 'Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.' 

Every soul belongs to God and exists by His pleasure. God being Who and What He is, and we being who and what we are, the only thinkable relation between us is one of full lordship on His part and complete submission on ours. We owe Him every honor that it is in our power to give Him. Our everlasting grief lies in giving Him anything less.

The pursuit of God will embrace the labor of bringing our total personality into conformity to His. And this not judicially, but actually. I do not here refer to the act of justification by faith in Christ. I speak of a voluntary exalting of God to His proper station over us and a willing surrender of our whole being to the place of a worshipful submission which the Creator-creature circumstance makes proper. 

The moment we make up our minds that we are going on with this determination to exalt God over all we step out of this world's parade. We shall find ourselves out of adjustment to the ways of the world, and increasingly so as we make progress in the holy way. We shall acquire a new viewpoint; a new and different psychology will be formed within us; a new power will begin to surprise us by its upsurgings and its outgoings. 

Our break with the world will be the direct outcome of our changed relation to God. For the world of fallen men does not honor God. Millions call themselves by His Name, it is true, and pay some token respect to Him, but a simple test will show how little He is really honored among them. Let the average man be put to the proof on the question of who is above, and his true position will be exposed. Let him be forced into making a choice between God and money, between God and men, between God and personal ambition, God and self, God and human love, and God will take the second place every time. Those other things will be exalted above. However the man may protest, the proof is in the choices he makes day after day throughout his life." pgs 100-103

- A. W. Tozer 

from: http://www.amazon.com/The-Pursuit-God-Study-Guide/dp/1600661068/ref=wl_mb_hu_m_6_dp

"He Speaks To Them In Their Affliction..."

I struggle a lot with fear, namely fears of suffering and pain, and not even just that which I go through already, but whatever I might experience in the future. You're probably thinking, "Yeah, who doesn't?" Or maybe you don't think about it all that much and focus on what's right in front of you (an ability I pray for often). Having grown up in the U.S., I have ingrained in my being the tendency to avoid any discomfort that I possibly can. However being a human and a Christian (which means following the God who entered history as a man in order to give us life by suffering and dying an excruciating death then being raised to life again, still possessing the scars from His death) I am not really afforded much room to run. Also, considering a sacred book as the highest written authority over my life which is filled with accounts of suffering because of following Jesus, I have quite the internal tug of war going on. 

Side note: Notice that because of my fear, I leave out all of the other very important parts of what the Bible teaches. Fear tends to cause an obviously narrow focus, almost like wearing blinders, and not by one's own choice.

Anyway, in this struggle I've read a lot, listened to various sermons, and talked with wise persons around me about how other Christians view pain and suffering. I've learned many interesting things in my search, both comforting and discomforting, including things about myself and my view of God's involvement in suffering. I've also learned in the uncanny chain of events as to how I've come across certain books, sermons, or conversations at just the right timing, that amazingly, God even cares about my specific struggle. A little while ago, my Dad suggested I do a word study in the Bible on "suffering." I actually considered avoiding that suggestion, but felt that to do so would probably only further my fears instead of abating them. So I started by looking in the concordance of my Bible. The first mention of the word (in English) is found in Job. That just figures, doesn't it? How about I read about a guy who suffers almost all of a human being's worst nightmares in one lifetime in order to encourage myself to be less afraid of suffering? (Notice again I'm leaving out an extremely important part, the ending of Job where he actually meets God and then gets everything he lost back and more). The verse in and of itself is encouraging: "But those who suffer he delivers in their suffering; he speaks to them in their affliction" (Job 36:15). Yet, it was spoken by one of Job's terrible friends, so I don't know if it's something that I'm meant to take seriously or as a foolish thing the friend was saying? Maybe someone who reads this can answer that one before I stop being lazy and look it up in a commentary. 

The next passage was in Isaiah, a prophecy about Jesus (Isaiah 53:10). Something I have heard as a continual reminder from wiser Christians than myself is that the lengths Jesus went to in His own life show how much He cares about the suffering in our lives. It is something that I deeply desire to sink into all of the caverns of my heart. Part of the Christian's life is to meditate on all of the truths about Jesus' crucifixion and who He is, along with what He did even before He went to the cross. As I've begun to focus on these things, I have noticed a slow but steady change in the way I view all kinds of aspects of life. My fears haven't been "cured" or magically dissipated, but I can tell that portions of it are beginning to be worked out of me, because they are being replaced with a wonder about my Savior. I fully believe in Paul's teaching about the renewing of the mind. He says in Romans 12:2: "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will." Renewing one's mind involves practicing what Paul tells us in the subsequent verses of chapter 12 and the following chapters in Romans, but it also includes keeping a daily reading of the Bible as a priority in one's life.

Not to get too off track, but I'd like to speak on a brief aside about the practice of "daily devotions." As I was growing up, I heard quite often from adult Christians that to be a good Christian, one must have their "quiet time" with God everyday. I wasn't all that interested in the Bible then and only tended to read it when I felt guilty for not doing so, especially when I was a teenager. I had so many more exciting things to occupy my time and thought-life with (mainly boys and all the ensuing drama of liking them, of course). I didn't really start recognizing my need for the Bible until I started facing some tough realities of life in my early twenties. And by then I wished I had spent much more time paying attention to the giant, priceless book beforehand. Always in hindsight, right? Over the years I've noticed that for a lot of people who are growing up in Christian homes, the practices that their parents or other relatives know are necessary for a deep Christian life aren't always viewed with as much importance as someone who comes to Christianity out of a different set of beliefs (whether it be secularism or another religion or worldview). It tends to take some sort of trouble or emotional pain to send a person who's grown up in a Christian home to a place that they know they should have been all along. All that being said, in an attempt to reroute some of you who are in that position I've been describing, please take the Bible more seriously. You will undoubtedly appreciate any time you've spent with it, getting to know Jesus and being taught by Him through it, whenever you hit the tough parts of life, or even re-frame in a good way how you think about the not so hard parts. It will equip you to handle things much more than if you decide to bullheadedly take them on on your own. I unfortunately/fortunately know this from experience. 

Okay, back to my original intent. In my word study, I've come to a couple of passages in 1 Peter that I'm finding very heartening. And actually, that's not even the right word for it, I just can't convey what it does to my heart and mind accurately right now. But after reading 1 Peter 4:12-19, I looked up the passage in a commentary that my parents have in their large library of Christian books (you should come check it out sometime, I'm sure you'll find something good). It's a commentary on the New Testament's use of the Old Testament. Very interesting stuff. Well, the commentary on 1 Peter 14 is what really got me. You can read the Bible passage here: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20peter%204:12-19&version=ESV 

And here is a quote from the commentary that I wanted to share. Because this entry is getting long and I am about to fall asleep, I'll write more about the impact of and my thoughts about this reading later...

" A. New Testament Context: The Spirit of God Rests on Those Who Suffer for Christ's Sake

Suffering quite often takes us by surprise. Peter tells his readers not to be surprised by the 'fiery ordeal' that has befallen them (4:12-19). This ordeal is more specific than the sufferings that are part of this broken world, of course: Peter has in mind the abuse and opposition of a world that detests Christ and his followers. Nevertheless, the perception that suffering is 'not the way it's suppose to be' (to borrow the title from Plantinga 1994) is at one level a reminder that sin and all its nefarious effects are abnormal.

   Misfortune and death are certainly 'normal' in the sense that they are universally experienced, but they are not   

   normal when viewed from God's intention in creation and his plan in redemption. The idea that normal life should 

   always be harmonious and free from suffering, despite universal suffering and death, remains a lingering echo of 

   life in Eden as God created it before the fall. It is also a longing for the time where there will be no more tears, 

   suffering, pain, and death (Revelation 21:4). (Jobes 2005: 286)

Nevertheless, to participate in 'the suffering of Christ' should bring joy (4:13). 'If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed' (4:14). The blessing that Peter has in mind is not the suffering itself, nor is it alone the potential for character improvement (note the 'testing' in 4:12); rather, it is the very presence of God: 'you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you' (4:14, citing Isaiah 11:2). The theme is tied to what Peter says earlier: suffering with Christ rather than sliding into moral and spiritual compromise in a pagan world is a sign of the transforming work of the Spirit (1:2), evidence that one has become a living stone in the spiritual house of God (2:5).

B. Old Testament Context. 

Isaiah 11 is a glorious messianic passage. The movement of thought begins in Isaiah 6: Isaiah is charged to announce that God has determined in his holiness to cut his covenant people back to a mere stump (6:13). Just as God destroys the insufferable Assyria, so also he cuts down the arrogant and corrupt house of David (10:5-34). Nevertheless, God promises a coming messianic ruler (Isaiah 7), a righteous messianic king who sits on David's throne and is recognized as the mighty God (Isaiah 9). In other words, from the stump there springs a new shoot (11:1, thus harking back to 6:13). The following verse, 11:2, promises the endowment that will be on this messianic figure, 'The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him,' and then Isaiah describes the consequent charismata that his Messiah will enjoy, set out in three pairs: wisdom and insight, counsel and might, knowledge and fear of the Lord." pgs 1040-1041

from: http://www.amazon.com/Commentary-New-Testament-Use-Old/dp/0801026938/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1353659425&sr=1-1&keywords=commentary+on+the+new+testament+use+of+the+old+testament

A Challenge To Believers and Skeptics

"I want to make a proposal that I have seen bear much fruit in the lives of young New Yorkers over the years. I recommend that each side look at doubt  in a radically new way.

Let's begin with believers. A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection. 

Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts--not only their own but their friends' and neighbors'. It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them. Only if you struggle long and hard with objections to your faith will you be able to provide grounds for your beliefs to skeptics, including yourself, that are plausible rather than ridiculous or offensive. And, just as important for our current situation, such a process will lead you, even after you come to a position of strong faith, to respect and understand those who doubt. 

But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternative beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B. For example, if you doubt Christianity because 'There can't be just one true religion,' you must recognize that this statement is itself an act of faith. No one can prove it empirically, and it is not a universal truth that everyone accepts. If you went to the Middle East and said, 'There can't be just one true religion,' nearly everyone would say, 'Why not?' The reason you doubt Christianity's Belief A is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt, therefore, is based on a leap of faith. 

Some people say, 'I don't believe in Christianity because I can't accept the existence of moral absolutes. Everyone should determine moral truth for him or herself.' Is that a statement they can prove to someone who doesn't share it? No, it is a leap of faith, a deep belief that individual rights operate not only in the political sphere but also in the moral. There is no empirical proof for such a position. So the doubt (of moral absolutes) is a leap. 

Some will respond to all this, 'My doubts are not based on a leap of faith. I have no beliefs about God one way or another. I simply feel no need for God and I am not interested in thinking about it.' But hidden beneath this feeling is the very modern American belief that the existence of God is a matter of indifference unless it intersects with my emotional needs. The speaker is betting his or her life that no God exists who would hold you accountable for your beliefs and behavior if you didn't feel the need for him. That may be true or it may not be true, but, again, it is quite a leap of faith. 

The only way to doubt Christianity rightly and fairly is to discern the alternate belief under each of your doubts and then to ask yourself what reasons you have for believing it. How do you know your belief is true? It would be inconsistent to require more justification for Christian belief than you do for your own, but that is frequently what happens. In fairness you must doubt your doubts. My thesis is that if you come to recognize the beliefs on which your doubts about Christianity are based, and if you seek as much proof for those beliefs as you seek from Christians for theirs--you will discover that your doubts are not as solid as they first appeared.

I commend the two processes to my readers. I urge skeptics to wrestle with the unexamined 'blind faith' on which skepticism is based, and to see how hard it is to justify those beliefs to those who do not share them. I also urge believers to wrestle with their personal and culture's objections to the faith. At the end of each process, even if you remain the skeptic or believer you have been, you will hold your own position with both greater clarity and greater humility. Then there will be an understanding, sympathy, and respect for the other side that did not exist before. Believers and nonbelievers will rise to the level of disagreement rather than simply denouncing one another. This happens when each side has learned to represent the other's argument in its strongest and most positive form. Only then is it safe and fair to disagree with it. That achieves civility in a pluralistic society, which is no small thing." pgs xvii-xix

-Tim Keller

from:http://www.amazon.com/The-Reason-God-Belief-Skepticism/dp/1594483493/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353226971&sr=8-1&keywords=the+reason+for+God

"Sad Cases"

"I 

MY DEAR WORMWOOD, 

I note what you say about guiding our patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" of "false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary", "conventional" or "ruthless". Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about. The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it "real life" and don't let him ask what he means by "real".

Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's!) you don't realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years' work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear What He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said "Quite. In fact much too important to tackle it the end of a morning", the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added "Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind", he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of "real life" (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all "that sort of thing" just couldn't be true. He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about "that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic". He is now safe in Our Father's house.        

You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. There have been sad cases among the modern physicists. If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology; don't let him get away from that invaluable "real life". But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is "the results of modem investigation". Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach! 

Your affectionate uncle    SCREWTAPE."

- C. S. Lewis 

from: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=john+cleese+screwtape+letters+playlist&oq=john+cleese+&gs_l=youtube.1.0.35i39l2j0l8.376.1699.0.5575.8.5.0.0.0.0.658.1587.0j1j3j5-1.5.0...0.0...1ac.1.V6t7qLVNds4

"Dogs" and Our Rights

" And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden.  But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet.  Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. And he said to her, 'Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.' But she answered him, 'Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.'  And he said to her, 'For this statement you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter.'  And she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone." Mark 7:24-30

"On the surface this ['...and throw it to the dogs'] appears to be an insult. We are a canine-loving society, but in the New Testament times most dogs were scavengers--wild, dirty, uncouth in every way. Their society was not canine-loving, and to call someone a dog was a terrible insult. In Jesus's day the Jews often called the Gentiles dogs because they were 'unclean.' It what Jesus says to her just an insult, then? No, it's a parable. The word parable means 'metaphor' or 'likeness,' and that's what this is.  One key to understanding it is the very unusual word Jesus uses for 'dogs' here. He uses a diminutive form, a word that really means 'puppies.' Remember, the woman is a mother. Jesus is saying to her, 'You know how families eat: First the children eat at the table, and afterward their pets eat too. It is not right violate that order. The puppies must not eat food from the table before the children do.' If we go to Matthew's account of this incident, he gives us a slightly longer version of Jesus's answer in which Jesus explains his meaning: 'I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.' Jesus concentrated his ministry on Israel, for all sorts of reasons. He was sent to show Israel that he was the fulfillment of all Scripture's promises, the fulfillment of all the prophets, priests, and kings, the fulfillment of the temple. But after he was resurrected, he immediately said to the disciples, 'Go to all the nations.' His words, then, are not the insult they appear to be. What he's saying to the Syrophoenician woman is, 'Please understand, there's an order here. I'm going to Israel first, then the Gentiles (the other nations) later.' However this mother comes back at him with an astounding reply...

...In other words, she says, Yes, Lord, but the puppies eat from that table too, and I'm here for mine. Jesus has told her a parable in which he has given her a combination of challenge and offer, and she gets it. She responds to the challenge: 'Okay, I understand. I am not from Israel, I do not worship the God that the Israelites worship. Therefore, I don't have a place at the table. I accept that. 

Isn't this amazing? She doesn't take offense; she doesn't stand on her rights. She says, 'All right. I may not have a place at the table--but there's more than enough on that table for everyone in the world, and I need mine now.' She is wrestling with Jesus in the most respectful way and she will not take no for an answer. I love what this woman is doing. 

In Western cultures we don't have anything like this kind of assertiveness. We only have assertion of our rights. We do not know how to contend unless we're standing up for our rights, standing on our dignity and our goodness and saying, 'This is what I'm owed.' But this woman is not doing that at all. This is rightless assertiveness, something we know little about. She's not saying, 'Lord, give me what I deserve on the basis of my goodness.' She is saying, 'Give me what I don't deserve on the basis of your goodness--and I need it now.' 

Accepting the Challenge

Do you see how remarkable it is that she recognizes and accepts bot the challenge and the offer hidden within it? 

A good translation of Jesus's rabbinical reply to her would be 'Such an answer!' Some of the translations have Jesus saying 'Wonderful answer, incredible answer.' And so her plea is answered and her daughter is healed. In his study of Mark, biblical scholar James Edwards puts it wonderfully:

     She appears to understand the purpose of Israel's Messiah better than Israel does. Her pluck and 

     persistence are a testimony to her trust in the sufficiency and surplus of Jesus: his provision for the 

     disciples and Israel will be abundant enough to provide for one such as herself....What an irony! Jesus 

     seeks desperately to teach his chosen disciples--yet they are dull and uncomprehending; Jesus is 

     reluctant to even speak to a walk-on pagan woman--and after on sentence she understands his mission

      and receives his unambiguous commendation....How is this possible? The answer is that the woman is

      the first person in Mark to hear and understand a parable of Jesus....That she answers Jesus from 

     'within' the parable, that is, in terms by which Jesus addresses her, indicates that she is the first person 

     in the Gospel to hear the word of Jesus to her.'

Similarly, Martin Luther was amazed and moved by this encounter, because he saw the gospel in it. This woman saw the gospel--that you're more wicked than you ever believed, but at the same time more loved and accepted than you ever dared to hope. On the other hand, she is not too proud to accept what the gospel says about her unworthiness. She accepts Jesus's challenge. She doesn't get her back up and say, 'How dare you use a racial epithet about me? I don't have to stand for this!' Can you hear yourself saying that? But on the other hand, neither does the woman insult God by being too discouraged to take up his offer. See, there are two ways to fail to let Jesus be your Savior. One is by being too proud, having a superiority complex--not to accept his challenge. But the other is through an inferiority complex--being so self-absorbed that you say, 'I'm just so awful that God couldn't love me.' That is, not to accept his offer." pgs 87-90

- Tim Keller 

from: http://www.amazon.com/Kings-Cross-Story-World-Jesus/dp/0525952101/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1352747404&sr=1-1&keywords=tim+keller+king%27s+cross

"Spiritual Receptivity"

"Receptivity [as in spiritual receptivity of God] is not a single thing; it is a compound rather, a blending of several elements within the soul. It is an affinity for, a bent toward, a sympathetic response to, a desire to have. From this it may be gathered that it can be present in degrees, that we may have little or more or less, depending upon the individual. It may be increased by exercise or destroyed by neglect. It is not a sovereign and irresistible force which comes upon us as a seizure from above. It is a gift of God, indeed, but one which must be recognized and cultivated as any other gift if it is to realize the purpose for which it was given. 

Failure to see this is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern evangelicalism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar. 

The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: these and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul. 

For this great sickness that is upon us no one person is responsible, and no Christian is wholly free from blame. We have all contributed, directly or indirectly, to this sad sate of affairs. We have been too blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire anything better than the poor average diet with which others appear satisfied. To put it differently, we have accepted one another's notions, copied on another's lives and made one another's experiences the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward. Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass, and worst of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed. 

It will require a determined heart and more than a little courage to wrench ourselves loose from the grip of our times and return to Biblical ways. But it can be done. Every now and then in the past Christians have had to do it. History has recorded several large-scale returns led by such men as St. Francis, Martin Luther and George Fox. Unfortunately there seems to be no Luther or Fox on the horizon at present. Whether or not another such return may be expected before the coming of Christ is a question upon which Christians are not fully agreed, but that is not of too great importance to us now. 

What God in His sovereignty may yet do on a world-scale I do not claim to know: but what He will do for the plain man or woman who seeks His face I believe I do know and can tell others. Let any man turn to God in earnest, let him begin to exercise himself unto godliness, let him seek to develop his powers of spiritual receptivity by trust and obedience and humility, and the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in his leaner and weaker days. 

Any man who by repentance and a sincere return to God will break himself out of the mold in which he has been held, and will go to the Bible itself for his spiritual standards, will be delighted with what he finds there." pgs 69-71

-A. W. Tozer

from: http://www.amazon.com/The-Pursuit-God-Study-Guide/dp/1600661068/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1351479875&sr=8-

Tim Keller on Mark 2:1-5

"A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. So many gathered that there was no room left, not even outside the door, he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing him a paralytic, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, 'Son, your sins are forgiven.'  (Mark 2:1-5)

What a dramatic scene! If somebody suddenly came down through the roof as I was preaching, everything would stop--I would be speechless. What were these men so determined to get from Jesus? Well, it doesn't seem at first that Jesus understands. Jesus turns to the paralyzed man, and instead of saying 'Rise up, be healed,' he says, 'Your sins are forgiven.' If this man were from our time and place, I believe he would have said something like this: 'Um, thanks, but that's not what I asked for. I'm paralyzed. I've got a more immediate problem here.' 

But in fact Jesus knows something the man doesn't know--that he has a much bigger problem than his physical condition. Jesus is saying to him, 'I understand your problems. I have seen your suffering. I'm going to get to that. But please realize that the main problem in a person's life is never his suffering; it's his sin.' If you find Jesus's response offensive, please at least consider this: If someone says to you, 'The main problem in your life is not what's happened to you, not what people have done to you; your main problem is the way you've responded to that'--ironically, that's empowering. Why? Because you can't do very much about what's happened to you or about what other people are doing--but you can do something about yourself. When the Bible talks about sin it is not just referring to the bad things we do. It's not just lying or lust or whatever the case may be--it is ignoring God in the world he has made; it's rebelling against him by living without reference to him. It's saying, 'I will decide exactly how I live my life.' And Jesus says that is our main problem. 

Jesus is confronting the paralytic with his main problem by driving him deep. Jesus is saying,'By coming to me and asking for only your body to be healed, you're not going deep enough. You have underestimated the depths of your longings, the longings of your heart.' Everyone who is paralyzed naturally wants with every fiber of his being to walk. But surely this man would have been resting all of his hopes in the possibility of waking again. In his heart he's almost surely saying, ' If only I could walk again, then I would be set for life. I'd never be unhappy, I would never complain. If only I could walk, then everything would be right.' And Jesus is saying, 'My son, you're mistaken.' That may sound harsh, but it's profoundly true. Jesus says, 'When I heal your body, if that's all I do, you'll feel you'll never be unhappy again. But wait two months, four months--the euphoria won't last. The roots of the discontent of the human heart go deep.'

Nobody has articulated the damage caused by that discontent better than Cynthia Heimel, who used to write for the Village Voice. She wrote an article that I've never forgotten. Over the years she had known a number of people who were struggling actors and actresses, working in restaurants and punching tickets at theaters to pay their bills, and then they became famous. When they were struggling like all of us, they said, 'If only I could make it in the business, if only I had this or that, I'd be happy." They were like so many other people: stressed, driven, easily upset. But when they actually got the fame they had been longing for, Heimel said, they became insufferable: unstable, angry, and manic. Not just arrogant, as you might expect--worse than that. They were now unhappier that they used to be. She said,

               I pity [celebrities]. No, I do. [Celebrities] were once perfectly pleasant human beings...but now...their   

               wrath is awful...More than any of us, they wanted fame. They worked, they pushed....The morning 

               after...each of them became famous, they wanted to take an overdose....because that giant thing they 

               were striving for, that fame thing that was going to make everything okay, that was going to make their

               lives bearable, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment and...happiness, had happened. 

               And nothing changed. They were still them. The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable. 

She was sorry for them. They had the thing they had thought would make everything okay--and it didn't. Then Heimel added a statement that took my breath away: 'I think when God wants to play really rotten practical joke on you, he grants your deepest wish.' You know what Jesus is saying to the paralyzed man? I'm not going to play that rotten joke on you, I'm not going to just heal your body and let you think you've gotten your deepest wish." pgs 27-30

- Tim Keller

from: http://www.amazon.com/Kings-Cross-Story-World-Jesus/dp/0525952101/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1352343971&sr=1-8&keywords=tim+keller