Tag: hedonism

It Is Okay To Enjoy Your Life

Can enjoyment help spread the Kingdom? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

When I did my senior sermon in Bible College, I chose to talk about the theme of wonder. Why is it that we don’t seem to have wonder in anything? Christian philosopher once said the great tragedy for the ancients was that they worshiped the sun, moon, and stars. Our great tragedy is we’re not even tempted to.

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not opposed to the scientific enterprise, but we’ve reached a point where if we think we can explain anything scientifically, it loses its fascination with us many times. Dan Barker relates an experience in Godless where he is riding with a relative who is trying to convince him of God and points to the beauty of the mountains. Barker responds by giving a scientific explanation of how mountains are formed. The relative takes this as a defeater. Why should it be? Cannot the mountains be the beautiful work of God that hold us in wonder and still be the result of a scientific process?

When I preached the above sermon, someone beforehand hearing about what I was speaking on had told me about a then recent cover of Moody magazine with the question “Is it right to enjoy my life?” Yes. Someone had to honestly ask that and someone had to honestly write an article saying it is no sin to enjoy your life.

Of course, this doesn’t equal traditional hedonism. Don’t go and do something just because it’s fun. At the same time, don’t think something is sinful just because it’s fun. Dare I say it, but one of the great slams you could give to the evil one would be to rightfully enjoy your life?

Why? Because we believe every good and perfect gift comes from God. That means that we ought to enjoy these things. 1 Tim. 6:17 even says this explicitly. God supplies us with all things richly for our enjoyment. This applies to the natural world that we see, but it also implies to the things that we create. We can enjoy a good movie, book, TV show, artwork, hobby, etc.

When we enjoy them, we are delighting in the gifts of God. There is so much around us every day and we are showing the proper gratitude for them. Boredom is not the idea of God. Boredom is more the idea of the evil one. It is the idea of saying that there is nothing here worth being excited about.

It’s odd because we think the devil is behind pleasure. He’s not. Pleasure is a tool for the enemy only if it will keep us from the greatest pleasure, knowing God. This is because we usually see God as a killjoy who is opposed to our fun. If there’s any area of life where this is shown clearest, it’s in sexuality.

Something about sex is that while it has many purposes, one such purpose is pleasure. Sex was meant to be enjoyable for a man and a woman. A woman even has a clitoris just for the purpose that she can enjoy sex. I remember hearing years ago the saying that the devil will do anything he can to make a couple have sex before they’re married, and after they’re married he’ll do anything he can to keep them from having sex. Loving sex in a committed marital union that binds the man and the woman together is something that builds up trust and intimacy and something the evil one would not want. One of the best gifts you could give the Kingdom of God if you’re married is a happy and thriving marriage.

Sadly, Christians have earned the reputation of being opposed to anything enjoyable. How many of us have heard this kind of testimony? “Well, I used to go out and party, get drunk, hang out with beautiful women and have a lot of sex, but now I am a Christian and I don’t do any of that stuff.” A lot of non-Christians in the audience would be saying “Sounds like you lost out.” They’re not right, but can we understand how when we phrase it that way, that they could have a point?

To this day, I can remember being in a Sunday School class with a friend of mine and hearing the teacher say with a finger pointing and in the most monotone way that I can imitate to this day “The Christian life should be the most exciting life of all.” He was right in what he said, but horribly wrong in how he said it. There was nothing exciting about it. The dry tone made us think that he couldn’t have been listening to himself.

I’m not at all advocating a materialistic hedonism or anything like that, but I am saying we Christians need to do some serious thinking about the role of pleasure in our lives. It is no sin to enjoy the world God created. It is no sin to delight in the things He has made. We could say if anything is sin, it is the opposite. It is sin to not appreciate and delight in what He has made.

So for me, I want to make it that part of my witness to the world is that I enjoy being a Christian and I delight in it. I love what I do, including being in the field of Christian apologetics, and I love that I’m married to the woman that I love. These give me enough reason to wake up and be thankful every day. My life has meaning because I am part of the grand story that God is creating and my life is not a punishment. It is a gift.

I think I’ll treat it like one.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Jesus Among Secular Gods

What do I think of the book by Ravi Zacharias and Vince Vitale published by FaithWords? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I have been doing apologetics for a little over fifteen years. When I first started, one of the shaping books for me was Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ followed by The Case For Faith. It was in the latter that one mind I read particularly gripped me with his story, personality, and reasoning style and that was Ravi Zacharias. One book of his quite popular at the time was Jesus Among Other Gods. I remember devouring that book and thoroughly enjoying it. Now here we are years later and we have Jesus Among Secular Gods.

This might surprise some people. Secularists don’t have gods! In the sense of real entities that are deities that have their own being, sure, but there are a number of isms out there like scientism and hedonism. Can the claims of Jesus stand up to secular thought? Does secular thought really answer the deep questions of life?

Ravi has a story early on about dialoguing with someone in the Middle East who drew two circles. For most Middle Easterners, their faith is the outer rim of the circle and their life is a little dot in the center. We have it reversed. It’s easy for us to compartmentalize our faith. This is what the Middle Easterner believed would lead to the fall of Western civilization. One’s religious walk is a secondary part of their life instead of becoming what influences their whole life.

Ravi goes on from there to interact with Stephen Hawking who suggested that we need to find extraterrestrial life if it’s out there before it destroys us. I appreciated Ravi’s cynicism at first in wanting to say that since we’re having a hard time finding intelligent life here, let’s find it elsewhere, but his next thought was even better. Isn’t it fascinating that intelligent life is something we are to be looking for outside of our Earth, unless that intelligent life happens to be theistic.

Richard Dawkins isn’t safe either. Many of us remember him saying that

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Yet if God is a fiction, then we have a problem. The actions attributed to him are really to be attributed to some really gullible people who in turn did some evil things. If so, then where does the evil lie? If Dawkins has it that God is a fiction and in turn there is no fall away from him but man living by his own nature, then aren’t we the source of the evil? Isn’t it the problem man playing God? Should we not strive to avoid that?

I like a story he tells about Billy Graham visiting Disneyworld and telling Walt Disney that he had created an amazing world of fantasy. Disney replied that Graham had it backward. He had shown the real world. Everything else was fantasy. What did he mean by that?

In Disney’s world, one of the greatest gifts is children are children. They laugh and play and have utter delight. Go out there and what do you find? You find children attacking other children. You find children cutting themselves and harming themselves. You don’t find white knights coming along to save them and you find dragons roaming in the real world that no one will fight.

Of course, Ravi and Vince contrast this with answers from other faiths. A story is told about talking to a man from a Muslim country asking the difference between the Christian God and the Muslim God. He was told that if you want to know what the Christian God is like, read the life of Jesus. If you want to know what the Muslim God is like, read the life of Muhammad. That was enough to settle the question for him.

Vince also shows himself to be taking on the thinking of Ravi. I liked how he described that we talk about the intellect of God and how He knows everything immensely and we can’t compare, but when we talk about His love, we downplay it. We make God’s love very human and act like it’s just as prone to being broken as ours is.

I also appreciated the story about Matthew Parris writing on how Africa needs God. God gives the people hope. Following God helps them to be provided for and keeps them away from other gods such as the infusion of Nike, or the witch doctor, or the machete. We need to have evangelism going on in Africa and not let it be stopped.

By the way, Matthew Parris is an atheist.

Vince when taking on hedonism starts with the idea of the experience machine. Imagine a machine you could plug into and feel the sensation of any experience you wanted. You could be making love to a supermodel or going into battle in whatever time period you want or you could be making a scientific breakthrough. You can have whatever you want. Should you plug into the machine?

No. We don’t want just the feeling of doing these things. We want to be able to do these kinds of things. We don’t want to just feel loved. We want to be loved. We don’t want to just have dreams. We want to accomplish them.

Vince also tells about the Christian view of sex here. I like the story he tells about seeing a testimony in the past with someone saying “I used to drink. I used to party. I used to have sex. But now I’m a  Christian and I don’t do these things any more.” If this is your testimony, please stop. Everyone who isn’t a Christian is saying “It sounds like your life was better before.”

Vince reminds us that sex is something sacred and meant for a covenant of two people. The action means something and it is special when saved for that covenant relationship. Our world treats sex as something common and the results have been horrid for us.

That being said, God is not anti-pleasure, but he calls us to more than just living for ourselves in this moment. In fact, he tells us our greatest joy is in denying ourselves and following Him. Lewis would say this is really having us be more ourselves than we ever were before. Christianity is not opposed to pleasure, including sexual pleasure, but that pleasure is not to be a god.

The writers also point out the importance of disagreement. We have reached an age where to disagree with someone is to devalue them as a person supposedly. To be sure, there are wrong ways to disagree with people, but that doesn’t mean all disagreement is the problem. Disagreement can mean we value the person’s opinion and we think the subject itself is really important.

The book overall is a good look at the thinking we have in the West and how we need to contrast that with Christ. Ravi I have found consistently is a writer who touches the heart as well as the head. Vince follows along very well in that pattern and hopefully we’ll see more of him in the future. I recommend you go out and go through this book.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

How To Save A Country

What can we do at this point in time? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.

I’ve been mulling things over a lot after the election. Actually, my wife would tell you it was extremely depressing for me. The way I see things, our country is heading into financial ruin and immorality is on the rise. To make matters worse, we have enemies in the Middle East who are closer to getting a nuclear weapon and who knows what havoc they can wreck on us or another country if they happen to develop one? Personally, we’re not in good financial straits as jobs cannot be found and I currently still lack health insurance. It’s not a good position to be in.

But sometimes, the darkest moment is just before the dawn. It is when things are their darkest that the light can shine the most.

I am conservative in my politics, morality, and economics. I do believe that good capitalist principles are the way to economically grow our society and provide the best way that we can all care for the poor. I do believe Romney would have installed such principles, but I also do not believe that would have been enough. It would have been a good buffer, but the change needed would not come through just that.

When we review the election, we realize that one state legalized marijuana. Also, there were states that for the first time decided to redefine marriage. There was celebration elsewhere that the country had elected an openly gay senator. We have spent much time in our country looking at the financial situation that we are in, and there is no fault in that, but what connection could all of these have?

The connection is all of them are about people seeking to make the government give them what they want.

The root problem is hedonism.

Hedonism is the belief that pleasure is the highest good. Of course, there is no doubt that pleasure is a good. To say something brings pleasure is not to say that that something is bad. On the other hand, if something is good, we can expect it to have a connection to pleasure. It does not work the other way around. There are many things that we consider pleasurable that we do not consider good, hence our term of guilty pleasures.

In fact, this is what Harold O.J. Brown wrote of when he talked about sensate cultures. These are cultures that no longer pursue the great ideas. There is no concern of truth or goodness or beauty itself. There is only the satisfaction of our own desires because we have nothing higher to look for. There are no ideals. We want what pleases us. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.

Gone from this is any notion of work. It is wanting to reap the fruit of success without having paid the price for it. The reason I am where I am in apologetics is for the price of buying books, going to conferences, seeking an education, etc. It cannt be done secondhand. The reason many people in this country are wealthy is not because of inheritance or lottery winnings, though those do apply, but because of hard work. Many resent that, and they seek to bring the rich down to their level.

Consider this passage in Amos 2:12

“But you made the Nazirites drink wine
and commanded the prophets not to prophesy.”

Nazirites were forbidden to drink wine in showing a holy lifestyle for a vow. Prophets were supposed to, well, prophesy. The people wanted to silence these beacons of holiness and bring them down to their level rather than raise them up. For a contemporary example, consider the debate on redefining marriage. Are we getting a rational debate in the public square when we present our view? No. We are told that we are bigoted discriminating homophobic haters, and that’s just including terms that I can use in this blog!

No debate. It’s just an attempt to shut you down, and the sad reality is that it usually works. An insult is not an argument. It should not be taken as one.

What is the answer to this hedonism?

The last time I wrote on this, I said that Jesus did not show up. The church did not do its part. For those worried about the future of our country, we have only one answer. We must be Christians. Only Christianity can save our country. Only Christianity can save us from our hedonistic lifestyle. Only Christianity can stop us from seeking entitlements more and more and going into financial ruin. Only Christianity can build up our defense enough that we are more than ready to handle any threat from a nuclear Iran, or even better, make sure that that never happens.

Great preaching has changed societies. John Wesley’s work was instrumental in changing England. Many places in the world have seen change when they have heard the gospel for the first time. Most of all, there is the Roman Empire. It was there that Christianity first showed up, and in the end, Christ defeated Caesar. Now when I say this, I do not mean a theocracy. This should still be a country where everyone is free to worship how they see fit, but it should be one permeated with Christian values.

Some might think God has judged us and there is no stopping it. Sometimes that happens. We cannot know that. We must go on and do the work of an evangelist. Last night in fact, my wife and I were doing nightly Bible-reading with the verse-a-day app and the first verse we had in a short passage was this one:

“But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.”

Paul’s advice to Timothy still applies to us today. This is a dark hour, but it is also the finest hour for apologists. Too long have we let the world bully us into submission and silence us. Now it must be the time where we rise up and say “No more!” We all seek to make a difference in the kingdom and that starts with our own backyards. Those of us living in America can see the way we’re going. If we love our neighbor and see them making a foolish decision, we will warn them. How much more should we do so if we love our country?

I challenge you, let the Christian revolution in this country start today! Let it be that the church of Christ will refuse to be beat down any more but will stand up for the precious truths that Christians have died for since the time of Christ. If we die in the battle, then we die, but let us have what happens with Tertullian happen to us. Our blood will be the seed of the church.

We can do this. It will take work, but we can fight this, and we can win.

In Christ,
Nick Peters