Someone said a while ago that it’s a bit weird how many christian authors and preachers apparently do nothing much but travelling by plane and having all sorts of interesting experiences and inspirations on those flights, which they manage to masterfully include in their messages. Today, it’s going to be a bit more down to earth. So when I was travelling on the high speed train to Hamburg the other week, I had to think of how often there are storm tides in Hamburg. I don’t know why that’s what came to my mind, I guess I’ve been influenced by the media and all the thunderstorms and hurricanes that I’ve read and heard about recently. And I thought that such a regular storm tide doesn’t really matter much to the people of Hamburg. They’ve been wise enough to not build any vitally important buildings in places that usually get flooded during these tides. We all know from the news that it doesn’t always work that way because we all remember what happened in New Orleans a few weeks ago, when it more or less completely sunk into the water during a hurricane, a lot of things were destroyed and even now they are still busy pumping the water out of the city again.

Maybe you already noticed: today I just keep going on about tides and floods and storms and of course there’s a reason for that. I want us to look together at a story that Jesus told of two men who each built a house. Matthew tells us this story in chapter 7, verses 24 – 27.

When we read or listen to that, we notice that apparently there are good and bad ways of building a house. Oversimplying the whole thing, you could probably say that the planners in Hamburg are more like the wise man and the planners in New Orleans are more like the foolish man.But Jesus isn’t really talking about building houses of stone or clay or whatever they used back in His time. The house symbolizes our life – the building of our life. The stony, hard ground, that’s Jesus – and the sand, that’s all the many other things that we like to build our life upon instead.

I think it’s quite easy to build on sand. You know, a rock is quite hard and heavy and means a lot of work; sand on the other hand is easy to shovel and move (yes, it’s easy for me to say so – please, don’t ask when I last held a shovel…). So building on sand seems to make sense at first. If only there were no storms and floods.

And that’s the point that always confuses me for a short moment because it doesn’t match the picture I would like to see. Jesus does not say that you can avoid the storm and the flood by building on a good foundation. On the contrary – both men get the exact same dose of storm and flood. Jesus isn’t promising us insurance against the occurance of storms, all He promises is that we will be able to withstand them and won’t be washed away if we build on Him. And that’s a great thing – I think many who have built on sand at some point in their life later wish they had chosen a more solid foundation. I mean, nobody in his right mind start to build saying “I’m going to find myself a nice insecure spot, with lots of sand that gets flooded all the time and then I’m going to build a nice house there”. Usually, it just happens without much thinking – probably because we don’t think much about it. And most of the time, we don’t even notice where we’ve built. All is quite and peacful. Maybe you just started a good job, your dream job. Success, fun at work, nice colleagues – and you built on it going on like that. But suddenly the storm: the company goes bankrupt… unemployment, no future – is the building of your life still strong enough or will it collapse? Or you started a relationship with the love of your life. You’d do anything for him or her… but after some time, it doesn’t go well, something’s not right, maybe the other person finds somebody else… separation. Is the building of your life still standing?

When you’ve built your life on the things of this world, then be prepared to swim when the flood comes. Personally, I find it reassuring that Jesus says no matter where we build, the storms will come. Why I find that reassuring? Because it shows me that it’s perfectly normal to experience storms in my life. It’s not a question of what foundation my life has. The storms are not the real problem, the problem develops when the foundation doesn’t hold in the storm. In my life there have been a number of storms. During the first ones, I wasn’t a Christian and even when I already was, I did swim quite a bit. But since I really started living with Jesus, the foundations have been strong – at times I couldn’t believe it, but they did withstand the storm.

Maybe you’re in the middle of a storm just now, the rain is blasting down on you and you can hardly see for all the rain that gets in your eyes. Maybe all is calm and you don’t even notice the small clouds on the horizon. What do you see when you look at the foundations of your life?

We have one major advantage over houses made of stone – we can change our foundations even when the storm is already there. So if you are a Christian, but you realize that you’ve built your life on things of this world, it’s not too late to go to Jesus and tell Him that and ask Him to help you build your life truly on Him instead. If what you’re standing on is insecure and won’t survive a storm, use the chance to move your life onto a solid foundation – better do it now than wait until you’re already swimming.

Technorati : Jesus, Matthew, christian, foundation, life, rock, security, sermon

“The entire law is summed up in a single command: Love your neighbour as yourself. If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.” (Gal. 5, 14+15, NIV). This, for me, is the single most important scripture when it comes to dealing with conflicts, relationships and all that comes with them. It’s not something that Jesus came up with in His teaching, but something that He took from Old Testament law and highlighted as one of the two most important commandments. It’s actually in Leviticus 19,18 and when in Matthew 22, the disciples asked Jesus what the most important commandment was, Jesus answered: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” You can tell that it was important to him.

Now, this is not going to be one of the standard sermons about loving your neighbor and how we need to have more of that, you’ve probably heard enough of that already. This is about the question, why this commandment is often so extremely hard to follow. I have a theory that more often than actually getting it right, we actually fall into one of the following two extremes. We either have too much love for ourselves and thus love ourselves more than the other or we do not have enough love for ourselves and thus assign a few others much more importance that they are due. I would like to focus on that second extreme because I believe it to be the more common one.

So, let’s look at the commandment from that angle once more. There are two important words that we often fail to notice: “as yourself”. Jesus knows how important it is to be able to love oneself. How can I love my neighbor if I can’t even love myself? If I don’t love myself, if I don’t understand my own value (and sometimes I may understand it in my head, but it just doesn’t find its way into my heart), the most natural thing to do is to search for acceptance. The problem is that we rarely turn to God to find that acceptance, instead we look at others to give us what we need. We form little groups of people that assure each other of their superiority by looking down on others outside the group. We see gossip, division, a separation from those outside (and this group could even be a church, let’s not think that we are immune against this) and thus a deficiency when it comes to loving our neighbor.

One of the major reasons for not loving ourselves: we often define others by the sume of their negative attributes – “good news is no news” could be the motto here. Instead of being happy about what they can contribute to our community, we focus (and talk behind their backs) on what we don’t like about them. And believe me, they notice. Now, if they have a low self-esteem anyway, that just confirms their own self-image… even more loss of self-love and the circle begins again. In many ways, this is a breakdown of communication – we have stopped communicating what we value in someone. A while ago I had an evening with two friends of mine and we did something extraordinary – for an hour or more we talked about other people we knew and tried to only teel each other what we like about them. That was quite an eye-opener.

So, now that we have established the cause of many of the problems, what can we do? First of all, as a group we can start paying attention to how we actually talk about other groups, churches, generations and individuals and how we define ourselves as a group. We can try to call to our attention the good things in somebody we find especially annoying. Try to see them the way God sees them. Communicate positively… not in a formal kind of way (“I need to say something positive before I can start with the negative things”), but from the heart. And as someone who is actually a victim of a lack of self-love? Try to see yourself with the eyes of God. He made you and it was good. Ask yourself why you are looking for acceptance with others, what you are willing to do to gain that acceptance and how that affects your other relationships. I believe that many people are trapped in destructive groups, forced by group dynamics and that yearning for acceptance to look down on people they actually like. Ask God to feel this self-love in your heart, so you can give love to others.

I think that it’s important to talk with God, but also to talk with people and to remedy the things that may stand between people, groups and churches. It’s good to ask for forgiveness and to be willing to forgive. Sometimes that’s hard and may take time because the wounds are deep and healing doesn’t come over night, but do bring these things before God and experience healing, so that forgiveness can follow.

I have one verse to challenge you with as I finish, it’s in Acts 2, 46+47: “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” Can we earnestly expect to find “the favour of all the people” and see them understand and accept the Gospel of Jesus Christ while we still don’t have that unity, not even in the smallest groups in our churches?

Technorati : bible, christian, jesus, love, self-love, sermon, unity

I was going to continue my series on the attributes of God today, but I won’t. Sometimes God puts more important things on our hearts, it’s almost like in real life . A few months ago I wouldn’t have thought that I would be speaking about tonight’s topic so soon, it was an area of my life that I felt was in some kind of disorder and caused me a few headaches and general unhappines. But in the last few months a lot has changed, I have gained a new perspective and changed priorities and although I cannot say I’m quite there yet, at least it seems that the direction is right. God has really been at work in this and I think that for some people here tonight it will be helpful to hear what I have learned in this process.

Maybe I should stop speaking like an enigma and tell you what tonight’s topic actually is. This evening is about friendship. It’s actually a topic that’s easy to misunderstand, let’s just have a quick look at the text for tonight, we find it in 1 Samuel 18, verses 1 to 3. Just quickly the background of this story. David has been anointed by Samuel to be the future king of Israel because of Saul’s sin. Saul doesn’t know about this yet, but David comes to his court after the defeat of Goliath, where he became a national hero. It’s at this court that David meets Jonathan, Saul’s son. Here’s what the Bible tells us about this: “And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to his father’s house. Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul”. Interesting… does anyone think there was something weird going on between David and Jonathan? If you think it’s ridiculous to think of them as homosexuals or something like that, then I’m happy for you because I think so, too – but I’ve heard people say that about them. And even though I think that’s totally off the mark, I can understand where they are coming from. I mean, if you look at those words, they describe an intimacy between the two that is rather unusual. In the context of our society, where same sex relationships are nothing unusual, our minds can be influenced by the world and we may be tempted to interpret a relationship like theirs in a sexual way. Let me tell you that in the context of Old Testament society, that was not an issue. Besides, David is not exactly suspect of not being interested in women… so there has to be something else behind this.

Two things in this short text really speak to me. The first thing is this unusual intimacy between the two friends, the other is how they get to know each other. Let’s start with the second one. That’s really interesting – there’s nothing about David and Jonathan becoming friends. David’s part in this is a rather passive one. Jonathan is the one who starts to love David and whose soul is knit with the sould of David. David doesn’t actually do anything at first. If you read on for a few chapters (and reading the Bible is never wrong, so I’m not going to give you any pointers, just start where I started and read as long as you like), you’ll see that David never really loses that passive role in their relationship. Jonathan is the one who risks his life for David, who turns against his father and tells David about his plans to kill him and so on. David is the one who wins a friend (that’s actually the title of this paragraph in my translation: David wins Jonathan as a friend) – but Jonathan plays the active part. When I heard this in a sermon some months ago, I started to think about how that works in my friendships. And I realised that I’m more of a Jonathan type of guy. Most of my really important friendships (and I’ll go into a bit more detail later) started because I began to love someone – more often than not for no obvious reason. It wasn’t like they were the obvious choices. But when I started to love them, with that came a desire and a commitment to be there for them. And sometimes they didn’t even want that… or at least they saw no necessity. That confused me for a moment, but it didn’t stop me. I knew, and that’s why I’m sure that God’s hand was clearly in this, that my feelings weren’t wrong. So far I can claim a 100% success rate.

What’s important to me, and that’s why I’m talking about this today, is that for Jonathan, this wasn’t at all about himself. When we think about friendships today, one of the questions we often ask is “what’s in it for me?”. I can’t deny that I have asked that question far too often and far too often I have failed when I made this the foundation of my actions – I told you in the beginning that this is an area of my life where I’ve been unhappy for a long time. We often pick our friends because they are popular, part of the “in crowd”, have the right amount of money, wear the right kind of clothes. I think that when we look for friendship, we have a better chance of success if we don’t ask that question and instead ask ourselves “who could need me as a friend?”. For Jonathan, there wasn’t much that he could get out of it – David was the one who needed him and in the end even took his throne that he would otherwise have inherited. Only one thing was there for him to find: true friendship. Maybe we’d be better off if we would look less for other things in a friendship and were more willing to offer our friendship unconditionally, the way Jonathan did.

The second thing from the text: the intimacy of the friendship. In the beginning we only read about Jonathan’s feelings, but if we look further, we will see that David felt the same about him, for example when in 2 Samuel 1 we read about his mourning (and I hope I didn’t spoil your reading fun by giving away the fact that Jonathan dies). There’s a mutual feeling of a very intimate connection between them. Sometimes I think that it’s a very strange thing for many people today that two men (or women, but the story talks about men) have such an intimacy in their friendship, even a bit suspicious – I already mentioned what stupid things you sometimes hear about the subject. Our society is all about shallow relationships, partnerships that only last for some time, about fun and just having a good time – and when times change, when interests change and the circumstances change, it’s time for new friends. As Christians, we are not immune to that development in society. Just look at your group of friends in your mind and ask yourself two questions. First, how many of them are the kind of friends that you feel you could come to with every problem, even your deepest secrets and know they will be a friend who doesn’t let you down, doesn’t betray your confidence, will have a listening and understanding ear? And secondly, for how many of them would you be willing to do the same? When I was at the point of asking those questions a while back, I must admit that I was quite shocked to find out about my answers to these questions – especially the second one. And I realised that I had to make a choice. I’m not saying that you need to do the same, your situation may be different, but I want you to know and it may at least be worth thinking about. For me it became very clear that I had to rethink my friendships. Because I want deep, meaningful friendships that endure the storms that life may bring. I want friendships that are worth investing in. And that’s only possible with very few people. I’m not saying that means not hanging out with a larger group anymore and having a good time. But that’s not the kind of friendships that I’m really looking for. That’s not the kind of friendship that helps me grow and it’s not the kind of friendship that helps my friends grow. And I have seen how God really confirms that decision again and again – old friendships that seemed to almost be going nowhere have received a new quality. Others have only just turned into a real friendship. And all that has happened without me doing anything…. suddenly it just all started falling into place. Jonathan loved David’s soul like his own – that for me describes a connection that is far beyond our human understanding. And I am very thankful that the Bible gives us such an example of true friendship. I wish that we learn to follow their example and, with God’s help, to build true, meaningful friendships like theirs.

Technorati : friendship, David, Jonathan, bible, christian, relationships, sermon

Anyway, I was also going write that I arrived alive and well. The flight was actually great – Emirates is an excellent airline. Although I must say, Dubai International Airport is a bit of a mess at the moment – it feels like a giant building site. I don’t think I’ve ever been driven for 20 minutes from the plane’s parking position to the terminal building anywhere in the world. It looks like they are crash-building at least two new terminal buildings. Inside it was quite funny – the departures terminal is not very complex, but insanely long, the kind of flattened tube structure that seems to be en vogue with airport architects all around the world (London Stansted is like that, Addis Abeba as well). It was kind of hard not to be run over by one of the not so little electric carts that Emirates uses to collect passengers who got lost in the building and need to be brought to their departure gate at breakneck speed.

Here in Hyderabad, it’s around 30 degrees Celsius… quite a change from near freezing temperatures at home. And what is it with the half-hour timezone, who had that weird idea? Anyway, I’ve found the training room to my satisfaction and am being treated almost like royalty. The training starts tomorrow, hopefully it will go well and my participants will really go away after a bit over a week with the feeling that it was worth their while. I’ll see if I can provide updates here while it’s going on or if it’s going to consume me so much that there’s no time for anything else…

Update Mar. 16, 2006: Deepu has taken some pictures that I’ve uploaded, just follow the Gallery link at the top of the page.

Technorati : Emirates, God, Hyderabad, India, nature

The conclusion of the article really struck me: “Never underestimate the power of your actions. With one small gesture you can change a person’s life. For better or for worse.” At first I thought “wow, I could have been that guy”. Of course, I do see the pain in peoples’ eyes. Sometimes I choose to do seomthing about it. More often than that, I probably don’t. And I have to ask myself, how often have my small gestures changed someones life… but for worse?

It’s really true… often it’s not the big things that really make a difference, not the great and noble gestures, but the little things, the ones you hardly think of. The things you hardly notice when you do them – but to someone else, they can mean the world. For better or for worse. A friendly nod, a smile when you pass someone on the street – maybe insignificant to you, but signalling “you have been noticed, you are somebody” to a person unsure of himself. And in much the same way, you can easily send a quick “you are worthless to me” signal to someone. I wish we’d all think a little bit more about our actions, even in the little things. Jesus was all about the small gestures… if we want to become more like Him, maybe we should, too.

Technorati : Jesus, actions, gestures, suicide

My experience with servant leadership as a concept is a bit of a mess. On the one hand, I have seen some great examples of servant leaders, but on the other hand I’ve had servant leadership preached to me a few times too often by people who did not serve as good examples at all. But let’s start with the positive examples.

To me, it’s always fun to watch the faces of participants during some of the conferences I go to, when they suddenly realize that the guy who helped them with their luggage earlier in the day is actually the evening’s main speaker and one of the highest-ranking leaders (if there is such a thing as rank among Christians) of the organisation they are about to join. Watching those leaders during the day, as they help people get settled into the new surroundings by taking a bit of their load upon themselves is always a great inspiration and example. They don’t do it because they want to be more popular or because somebody told them to or because it’s some kind of conceptual thing that they feel they have to do to be viewed as the right kind of person – you can actually tell that they enjoy being a blessing to those they serve. Yes, it’s an attitude and personality thing. You can’t fake that – you can try, but chances are that the person you’re serving will notice.

That brings me to the more negative examples – I just can’t stand it when servant leadership as a principle is preached to me by people who seem to be unable to practise what they are preaching. It’s often in the little things… if it happens once that the person teaching about it goes home while the others are cleaning the place, that’s ok – if it happens all the time, it makes me wonder. And if then confronted after the tenth time, the person actually asks whether it can really be expected of him to do cleaning, that kind of invalidates all his previous teaching. That’s just one example of many, I’m afraid.

I guess servant leadership is a lot about not asking others to do things you wouldn’t gladly be willing to do yourself. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean you should be doing things that others can do much better and that it’s wrong to ask those who have the skill – but asking the question “how would I react if someone asked *me* to do this” is probably a good first step. And of course there are things that just have to be done – would you be willing to do them, even if it means you do something that you feel overqualified to do? And would you be willing to do it with a smile on your face and a joyful heart, knowing that what you do is helping someone else, the team you’re in, the ministry you’re involved with?

Technorati : christian, ethics, leadership, servant

What is pornography?
There are many possible definitions, it even depends on culture what is viewed as pornographic. Take as an example the outcry that went through US media when Janet Jackson “accidentally” lost a part of her clothing and revealed a certain part of the female anatomy during the Super Bowl a while ago… in Germany, noone would have even mentioned it. Different cultures and different people have different definitions of pornography. But it doesn’t really matter because if someone is struggling because he’s looking at pictures of semi-clothed women, his struggles are not very different from those of someone looking at pictures of a men and women completely naked and more than that…
Actually, I’ve been told and I’ve read up on it a bit, that most women are not so much attracted by pictures. They are often more interested in erotic stories, chats etc… so even though some of the things I talk about don’t seem to fit, let’s include those in the definition of pornography.

Why do naked people look so good?
God made men and women in His image – and he also made them so that they complement each other. Women are attracted to men and men are attracted to women because of their physical attributes as well as their personality etc. – don’t believe those who say that looks don’t matter. They do, but people have different perceptions of beauty… so someone might think of his wife as beautiful and physically attractive, even though you think she’s actually quite ugly. It’s very natural that men find women attractive and vice versa… it’s part of being human. How we deal with this attraction is the real issue.

Why is pornography bad?
Looking at pornography means looking at pictures of things we are not meant to see. It’s sexuality taken out of the context of a committed, lifelong relationship. That’s part of the attraction, but that’s also the danger. In our minds, the pictures we look at can take on a life of their own and lead to a kind of addiction that demands more and more – and also more explicit – pictures. The fantasies that go with this are usually not very healthy. It can become very difficult for a man who has seen a lot of pornographic pictures of women to not project those images onto every woman he meets. And once that happens and she becomes part of your fantasy, it’s very difficult to have a normal relationship with that person, one where sex is neither the objective nor the first thing you think about when you meet. How can you get to know someone as a person when you already have those images in your head of something that, if at all, will come at a much later stage in the relationship?
And if you’ve seen it all, what kind of expectation does that create, once you get married and start having sex (if you can even wait that long, with all the fantasies you have)? You may have all those fantasies, but your partner does not.
I often hear that pornography is degrading to women… I think it’s equally degrading to men. It reduces sexuality to the mechanical act of “doing it”, to a world where women are always willing and men are always able to perform all kinds of sexual acts.

What does the bible say?
The bible is pretty clear on issues regarding pornography, even though it does not mention it as such. But isn’t looking at a person with lust “coveting your neighbour’s wife” in some way? At least as long as he/she’s not your wife or husband? And Jesus went even further in His teachings and said that you have already committed adultery if you only look at a woman with lust (apparently the men in Jesus’ time were all very unattractive and no woman would have ever looked at them with lust ). I know there are a couple more verses of scripture that could illustrate this point, but I think you’ve already been convinced that pornography is wrong, both from a psychological and from a biblical point of view.

So what role does the Internet play?
Ten years ago, we didn’t have a seminar on pornography. Maybe five years ago, we slowly started to see a need. Today, we see it more than ever. Why is that the case? The Internet has changed the way we have access to pornography. Ten years ago, when you wanted to look at it, you had to go to a shop and buy it. You had to go to the shopkeeper and pay for it. You had to be of a certain age to legally buy it. Someone you know might have seen you. It could have been embarrassing. Today, you can access pornography in the privacy of your home. Nobody will know who you are, nobody will see you, and nobody will know what you do behind closed doors. The step to accessing pornography that was once relatively steep has become almost no step at all. And there are lots of places where you can even have it for free and most of them don’t care if you’re old enough (well, you’re really never old enough, but I mean legally old enough). That’s why we’re seeing so many more young people who are joining OM who are struggling with this issue – but it’s not limited to young people. There have been studies done in the US that found out that about 30% of pastors in the survey had admitted to struggling with pornography – and it’s mainly the easy and anonymous availability on the internet that has been the cause of this.

So what do we do then?
As I mentioned earlier, the Internet has to a large taken away the potential for embarrassment – so one thing we need to think of is getting it back. There are several ways to do that – some examples: don’t surf the Internet when you’re alone. If you live with others, have the computer monitor facing your door, so that anyone walking by can see what’s on your screen. Limit your Internet activities to what is necessary – don’t use it to kill time when you’re bored.
Talk to someone you can trust about your problems – allow them to ask you if you’re making any progress. Accountability is the keyword here. There are even useful programs around that will sit in the background and monitor your Internet activities and they will send anything that’s suspicious to another person that you are accountable to. If you switch off the monitoring program, that will be reported as a suspicious activity as well.
Those are all rather practical tips what you could do – of course I know this is not just a practical problem, it’s a spiritual problem as well. So do seek counselling – it’s nothing to be afraid of. God is a mighty God and He can help you become free of this kind of addiction. You will have to ask Him… sometimes He will just do it; sometimes he will use the tools and tips mentioned before to make it happen. There’s nothing wrong with doing both – when someone’s ill, we pray for his healing and send him to the doctor, not because we don’t trust that God will heal but because we know that He often uses doctors to heal…

What about filters?
There are a lot of filtering programs available that are supposed to keep pornography away from your computer. I’m an IT guy and I personally don’t think much of them… at least not as a tool for someone who is already struggling with pornography. With addiction comes a certain determination and a person who is determined enough will be able to find ways around the filter. Besides, if it’s your own computer, who will keep you from switching the filter off?
Nevertheless, I think that filters have their place where we want to protect people from accidentally being confronted with pornography. When I did this seminar at Teenstreet in 2004, I asked the teens how many of them had accidentally been on pages that contained pornography, even though that was absolutely not what they were looking for – about 80% raised their hands. Most of those 80% could have been prevented if there had been a filter blocking such content. On the other hand, we need to find a balance between keeping things away from people entirely and educating them to avoid such places. Filters are always intrusive and you can be quite sure that they will also block things you may need to have access to at some point.
If any people from personnel want to know what systems we recommend in OM for the purpose of filtering, please talk to me at some point during the next week.

Resources:
http://www.covenanteyes.com/
http://www.x3church.com/x3watch/
http://www.promisekeepers.org/resc130

http://www.deeperdevotion.com/articles/1399/ also mentions a few filtering solutions for standalone computers

Technorati : Christian, Internet, Pornography, addiction, breaking