This is a classic book by a beloved author.  C. S. Lewis brings his heart for presenting theology and his great skill as a fiction writer together in this book.  This is a collection of letters of dialogue from Screwtape, an older demon, written to a young demon, Wormwood, to teach him how to tempt people.  The letters consist of very interesting dialogue, and the book gives you very interesting thoughts on temptation and how to respond to it.  Lewis presents his thoughts on temptation clearly in this book in a very interesting and readable way.  The part of this book that stands out the most to me is when Screwtape is informed that one of the people that Wormwood had been tempting had become a Christian.  His response was that the best thing that Wormwood could do now was to keep the new Christian content in where he was spiritually.  If Wormwood could make this new Christian apathetic and his faith, he would have no impact on any other people.  This is a very interesting way that Lewis uses to present the idea that apathy leads Christians to have no impact on others around them.  This is just one of the hidden ideas that readers will find throughout the book.  This is a must read for any Christian to give new insights on the theology and ways of temptation.

“Freedom is not free at all.  It comes with a cost- the cost of bood.” - The Queen of Sparta in 300

I was watching the movie 300 the other night when I came across this quote that really struck me.  This is a quote that was used by the Queen of Sparta when she was attempting to purswade the Spartan senate to send more troops to join her husband King Leonidas and his 300 brave men in the Battle of Thermopylae against King Xerxes and his Persian Army.  This quote so closely parallels the gospel which leads it to stand out to Christians.  Our freedom that we have is not freedom from a ruling dictator Xerxes that sees himself as divine, but rather it is freedom from ourselves and our own depravity.  Jesus paid with to pave the way to cleanse us from the power that our sin had over our lives.  Freedom from our sin, struggles, and the depravity of our hearts has been found! But this freedom has come with a great cost.  The cost of the blood of the Son of God.  Let us live in light of that freedom!

There has been a recurrent theme that the Holy Spirit keeps bringing to my mind and heart.  It is this idea of the fact that we, as Christians, are called to reflect the glory and holiness of Christ in and through out lives so that people around us can see the beauty of the Savior in and through our life.  The theme that keeps coming up regarding this is things that create dust on our life mirror reflecting the glorious image of Christ to the world around us.  This theme has come up in a book that I was reading about becoming holy and set apart for God.  This book talks about how we allow dirt to get into our minds and hearts whether that dirt comes from things that we expose ourselves to on TV, in movies, or online.  These are things that fill our mind and distort our view of morality and the world around us.  We subtly begin to believe that if something is seen as acceptable to people around us or people on TV that it is therefore acceptable to God.  This theme was brought up again on Sunday when I went to hear one of my favorite preachers, Dr. Calvin Miller, speak at a church.  He was talking about Sodom and Gomorrah and the sinfulness and wickedness of those cities and then compared them to our culture.  He talked about how lightly we view sin in the world around us and how our standards begin to become more and more lax with regard to what media we expose our minds and hearts to.  This was really convicting in light of everything else that God has been teaching me on this topic.  Then I turned on my iPod today to get my daily dose of preaching podcasts, Francis Chan was preaching on when we desire sin more than God.  He looked at the picture in the book of Jeremiah of the people leaving God, the Fountain of Living Water, to turn to their own cisterns that do not hold water.  He went on to talk about fixing our gaze on Christ and how Satan likes to wave hooks of temptation in front of us, but we must keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.  I know so often in my life, I get my gaze off of Christ and bite one of Satan’s hooks.  Then this theme came up again, I was listening to another podcast from a church who has been dealing with unfaithfulness and sin in a former pastors life that had just been made public.  The current pastor was preaching on how we deal with sin in church leadership.  He came back to this theme of being accountable to others and that we are called to reflect the glorious image of Christ.  God, make me someone who presents a untarnished picture of Your glory and holiness to a watching world.  Through the power of the Holy Spirit, dust away all of the dust that I have allowed to collect on my reflection of you.

Over the past few years, there have been a variety of news stories both local and national about ministers of the gospel falling into sin and being removed from the church.  These stories are saddening to hear about, but it seems like the majority of the time someone falls in the church whether they are considered a minister or not the situation is not handled with grace.  I want to raise some questions regarding the current process of dealing with sin in church leadership and to suggest some thoughts to make it more biblical.  I want to make one thing clear before I start these thoughts: sin is a very serious issue.  Your sin and my sin both the “big ones” and the “small ones” led to the crucifixion of Jesus.  Sin always produces death.  It may be the death of a relationship, friendship, or marriage, or it may be physical death.  We live in a world every day where each one of us struggles with sin.  It is an ever-present mark of our fallen world.  Even if we do not want to admit it, each one of us lives each day with what the Apostle Paul calls a “thorn in the flesh” (see 2 Corinthians 12: 7) that causes us to struggle daily.  So when we turn to look at ministers, we must realize that even though they may have been to a seminary and stand on a stage every week they still have struggles.  They are in leadership in the church and should be held to a high standard of accountability, but they still struggle with sin.  When someone falls publicly and is removed from a position of ministry, the first unbiblical thing that is commonly done is that the Christians begin to stone the person in their minds.  You hear statements like “I cannot believe that he or she would do something like that.  He or she is a horrible person!”  The thing that we tend to forget in our mental and verbal stonings of the fallen is that we have struggles with sin also.  We tend to place ourselves in a mental state of judgement condemning others while missing “the log in our own eye” (See Matthew 7: 3-4 and Luke 6: 41-42).  When we look at how Jesus handled sinners, we see the picture of Jesus with the woman who had been caught in adultery in John 8.  This is one of the most compelling pictures of grace in the gospels.  The woman has been caught in the act of what we would consider a really “bad sin” and has been drug by the legalistic religious pharisees to Jesus.  They have brought her to Jesus to try to catch Him into not abiding by the Old Testament law regarding adultery.  Jesus is well aware of the law which says that this woman deserves to be stoned to death.  So he tells the people that the person without sin can be the one to start the stoning.  The people starting with the oldest all walk away because they realize the sin and struggles in each of their own lives.  The people realize that they are not in a place to judge this woman.  Jesus and the woman remain.  He is the one who is sinnless and can throw the stones, but in the moment that He can be the righteous judge, Jesus looks into the eyes of the broken and ashamed woman and tells her to “go and sin no more.”  I think that so often in this story we want to be the people with the stones in our hands waiting to rid the world of the sinner, but Jesus is calling us to show radical grace to the broken and hurting who have fallen.  I am not saying here that sin should be blown over and taken lightly, but rather that their needs to be a grace-driven process of restoration for the fallen and hurting.  Fallen people are in a time of great need and vulnerability, and the worst thing we can do is to stone them instead of showing grace, love, and compassion to a broken soul.

A few nights ago, a few friends and I watched the movie Minority Report.  For those of you that are unfamiliar with the movie, it is a Tom Cruise film about the idea of catching criminals before they commit crimes and punishing them for the crime that they have already committed in their mind.  This film seems to investigate this system and raises many moral and ethical questions.  The whole idea of the Precrime Unit hinges on the fact that the people who had these thoughts to commit crimes such as murder would inevitably go through with those thoughts and commit murder.  Does the law extend to cover punishing people for crimes that they have already committed in their mind and heart?  The question reminded me of when Jesus redefined the law.  In Matthew 5, we see Christ talking about the Mosaic Law.  He mentions the two commands which command the Isaraelites not to murder or commit adultery.  These are two of the commands that most of the people had not broken and were seen as the “worst” sins.  He then goes on to redifine breaking these commandments.  He takes murder and says that to hate someone in your heart is to murder them.  Then He says that to lust in your heart is the same as committing adultery.  Therefore, when looking at what should be punished as sin, God will punish not just the actions but the thoughts whether or not they lead to actions.  This is a passage that seems to help enforce once again, as we see so often in scripture, that we are helpless and stuck in our sin.  The more and more we realize how helpless we are without Christ, the more and more we develop a love for Him and a deeper understanding of His grace.

For my times of connection with God over the last few weeks, I have been reading through Genesis.  There is this really weird story that you come to at the end of Genesis 9.  God has just destroyed the earth due to the sin in it.  He has found Noah to be the only righteous person so He has spared Noah and his family as an act of His grace while wiping out the rest of the world by an act of His wrath.  Noah gets off of the ark, gets blessings and promises, and then the most random thing happens.  Noah decides to get drunk and then lounge outside naked.  This seems very odd for this to be put in scripture, but I think that there are two key reasons for this very odd passage.  The first thing is that God wants to present not just the sucesses of His people but also the failures.  Noah, the one that God finds righteous, fails.  God does not present people in the Bible as these ethereal and holier-than-thou people.  He presents them as real people who have real struggles, but the thing that defines them and sets them apart is this pursuit of God and His desires.  The second thing is this cursing of Canaan that we see at the very end of the passage.  So Cannan, one of Noah’s sons, spots his father lounging outside of his tent drunk and naked.  So what does this son do? The ideal thing for him to do would be to try to cover up his father’s sin and failure that is on display for the whole world to see, but instead Canaan goes and gets his brothers so they can check out this crazy scene.  After this whole deal is over, Canaan receives a curse from Noah and is placed as a slave to his brothers. To me this whole cursing thing was very odd until it hit me that Canaan was making a mockery of Noah’s sin.  He was taking the sin of this man of God lightly and sharing it with others like it was some kind of joke.  Then it hit me how often I make light of the sin in my life and the culture around me.  How often and easily are we willing to sit back and take a laugh at sin presented on TV or in the movies or in the lives of others around us? When we do, we are acting just like Canaan.  We should be like the two other brothers, which received a blessing, and seek to cover the sin up from public view and then confront the person caught in that sin.