Rewind: Week Five

I am five weeks into my time in Omaha today. Only three weeks to go. This has been a pretty solid week overall though. Last night, a group of guys that I have been going through a Bible study with got together at a sweet Mongolian Bar-B-Que restaurant here in Omaha called Hu Hot. We had a great time together. It served as the closing of the Bible study as we finished the material the previous week. I have a picture of us at the end of the post. They are all neat men. Friday marked the one year anniversary for Brittany and I since we began dating last summer. I can't believe how quickly that time flew by, but we have made some really good memories together on which we can reflect. And I'm looking forward to many more in the future. One of them will be this upcoming weekend as I will be flying to Chicago to spend a few days with her. We will also be celebrating our anniversary there. I'll be sure to update on that after I get back.

Also on Friday, I started the book, Surprised By Joy, which is C.S. Lewis' autobiographical account of his conversion from atheism to Christianity. I finished it yesterday because I couldn't put it down. He has quite a story beginning with a rocky road down radically legalistic Christianity that emboldened him to embrace evolutionary humanism and then atheism. But when he arrived at Cambridge, a series of relationships, including one with J.R.R. Tolkein, began to chip away at his walls. What was most interesting to me is that the bulk of his journey to embracing Christ came through internal conversation. His atheistic mindset began to war with his background in medieval literature and the significance it had in his views of the Bible. As much as he wanted to disregard the Christian faith, or more specifically the Bible, as being fable and fiction, certain markers, such as geneolgies and descriptive markers of historical context, forced him to believe that it was more than mere fiction. This quote is amazing:

I was by now too experienced in liteary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. and yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion - those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them - was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person depicted; as real, as recognizable, through all that depth of time, as Plato's Socrates or Boswell's Johnson (ten times more so than Eckermann's Goethe or Lockhart's Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god - we are no longer polytheists - then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is no "a religion," nor "a philosophy." It is the summing up and actuality of them all.
(Page 236, Brace & World Inc., New York)

Isn't that awesome? Leading up to this point, his hatred for the Bible and Christianity forced him to study and search for a reason which explained why he held this hatred and instead brought him to the Truth. In his mind, he toiled with his desire for control of his destiny and the shaping of his soul. He wanted to exist in a world that allowed him to act as his own god. Before his conversion, one of the thoughts that pierced his soul came during a debate in a pub with Tolkein in which he told Lewis that the Bible is "a true myth." On a morning after many such debates with his friend, he and his brother were traveling to a nearby zoo for a visit on a historic day for Lewis, about which he quotes:

When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.
(Page 237, Brace & World Inc., New York)

In spite of his deep desire to exist in solitude spiritually, God never let him get away. The product: probably the greatest modern Christian philosopher our world has seen. I highly recommend the book. It is a phenomenal story. This morning, Nathan and Shelby's son, Zachary, was dedicated in church along with six other children from the congregation. I took a video of the dedication in the second service, which will be at the end of this post, but I was not able to record Zachary's dedication because Nathan and Shelby asked me to come to the front and stand with them as Bob prayed over all of the children and their parents before officially dedicating them to the Body of Christ. I was an exciting time for the Bliss family and I was very happy to have been a part of it. This was also the first Sunday in which Bob has preached since I arrived in Omaha. He started a four week series on the church today and preached on the significance of leadership in the church and how we are commanded to submit and obey biblical leadership. The text he used was Hebrews 13:17 which calls us to "obey your leaders and submit to their authority." On this point, Bob addressed how most of us struggle with this idea for two big reasons:
1 - Sin
2 - Our culture which believes in humanism, or man being the final authority. Therefore, he led with this thesis: Our issue is not with church leadership, but rather unqualified church leadership. The Bible does not call us to submit blindly. It commands that we obey qualified leadership whom Hebrews says, "must give an account." Our lives in general reveal this truth to us because anything we learn to do well is done by submitting to qualified authority. A child learns to play baseball by submitting to the teaching of a qualified coach. A musician learns his instrument by submitting to a qualified instructor. This must be the same approach we take with church leadership. Bob said that we become obedient and submissive people through three things:
1 - Acknowledging the holiness of God. Scripture is not a suggestion and therefore submission is a command.
2 - Acknowledging our unwillingness and inability in light of our sins. We are deeply selfish people.
3 - Filling our minds with Jesus and his sacrifice. In coming into our world, he submitted himself to corrupt and misled worldly authority in order to forgive us for our own rebellious nature.
We must be transformed through a relationship with Jesus and not through self-maintenance. In approaching leadership, we should always remember that the Bible is the highest authority by which we are to keep leaders accountable and that the Gospel is central to our lives. It should be applied to leaders continually. But even leaders do not have the final authority. Only Jesus has the final authority. It was a great sermon and is probably worth listening to on their podcast on iTunes.

Before I close, two exciting things about Tuesday:
1 - Project 86, one of my favorite bands, has a new album coming out Tuesday. It is called Picket Fence Cartel and it has the potential to be amazing. Check out the trailer below.
2 - I was given a ticket to see Sick Puppies live for the release show of their new album. It should be awesome and I am very excited. I am having live rock concert withdrawals at the moment. So this should be a good fix for me.

I will leave you with another C.S. Lewis quote. If you do not love him yet, just give me some time with you. I am great at brainwashing people on Lewis. Just ask Nathan Bliss...

When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, "Look!" The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold. "We would be at Jerusalem."

Not, of course, that I don't often catch myself stopping to stare at roadside objects of even less importance.
(Page 238, Brace & World Inc., New York)