Good News Quote #44

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

[Job's three friends] did better when they did nothing. That's a hard lesson to learn, but it's indispensable for anyone who really wants to comfort the afflicted. Sometimes there is nothing we can do to comfort them, and this itself is a form of suffering that is hard for us to bear. But it is also a way that we enter into their suffering and share it. It is essential to the work of sympathy and compassion -- both of which are old words meaning to suffer with someone. And it is hard work to sit in silence and listen to someone we love groan and cry and say dreadful things about God. Sometimes the most we can do to relieve their suffering is just hear their awful words and bear with them patiently. This is the cross of listening, a cross Job's friends were unwilling to bear. They thought they had to do something about his awful words.

Good News Quote #43

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

One temptation we have is to blame the afflicted for upsetting our worldview. The very existence of their undeserved suffering raises questions about our theology and our faith that are hard to face. [...]


There is a whole book of the Bible that deals with the temptation to blame the afflicted for upsetting our worldview. I'm talking of course about the book of Job. [...]


Job's speeches hardly mention the literal or physical aspects of his suffering, his foul skin disease and the death of his children. Job makes it clear that his real problem is with God. [...]


But he wishes things were different: there ought to be someone in heaven who could speak up for him!


And it turns out, Job has his wish and things are as they ought to be. For the whole story began with God speaking up for Job in heaven, and that in fact is why Job is suffering -- so that God may be proved right when he speaks up for Job. But Job is in no position to know that, which is why he suffers so badly.

Good News Quote #42

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

What also happens is that the biblical exhortations, such as the apostle's words, "Rejoice in the Lord always!" (Phil. 4:4) are turned into a kind of command, even a kind of condemnation. Instead of inviting us into joy, they demand that we be joyful, or else.


In this case, it's our individualism that turns invitation into condemnation. Like the passage about being filled with the Spirit discussed in chapter 1 (Eph. 5:18), this exhortation is addressed to the church in the plural. In the Greek, it's more like, "You guys! Be celebrating the Lord Jesus all the time!" It is not about how each individual is supposed to feel every hour of the day, but about how the life of the church is always to be a kind of advance celebration of the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Good News Quote #41

From Chapter Eight, Why You Don't Always Have to Experience Joy: Or, How God Vindicates the Afflicted.

It goes something like this. The Christian life is supposed to be an abundant life, a life of victory -- so you can't go around telling people that it really hurts inside. People at church may not understand if you start talking as if your life was a failure. You're not really allowed to be sad at heart, because everybody says Christians are supposed to have an inner joy deep in their hearts, which is always there beneath all the troubles of life. So it can't be that at the center of your feelings is a great ball of hurt and suffering. Not if you're a Christian! [...]


Now it's true that God has many ways of comforting us with joy in the midst of sorrow and pain. These are some of his most precious gifts, for which believers throughout the ages have raised songs of thanksgiving. But it is also true that sometimes the cross we bear means suffering without joy, without any kind of emotional consolation. For our feelings, like our bodies, remain human through and through, capable of agony and emptiness, vulnerable to crosses that can deprive them of all comfort.

Good News Quote #40

From Chapter Seven, Why You Don't Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the Time: Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Us.

We cultivate our feelings the way we cultivate a garden: we can't entirely prevent weeds from coming up, but we can take care to remove them before they do much harm. We cannot simply choose never to get angry, and we cannot fully control it when we do get angry, but the more disciplined our moral lives are, the more likely we will be able to keep our anger under some measure of control. For example, we can discipline ourselves in how we think about people in private (not cultivating a sense of resentment against them), how we talk about them behind their back (not gossiping), and how we interact with them in public (not speaking with disrespect or trying to embarrass them). These disciplines will not eliminate any poisonous feelings toward other people, but they will keep them from growing strong and overshadowing the better feelings in the garden of our souls.

Good News Quote #39

From Chapter Seven, Why You Don't Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the Time: Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Us.

Genuinely life-changing experiences lead to something more lasting. The key example is conversion to Christ, which changes our lives not because it's such an intense experience -- lots of good Christians never have an intense conversion experience -- but because it begins the life of faith, in which you are united to Christ, our Bridegroom. Conversion can be a lot like falling in love, leading to the one Christian marriage that is at the basis of all marriage: union with Christ. By the same token, just as falling in love is not necessary to a good marriage, no particular experience at all is necessary for faith in Christ. What matters is believing that his word is true, just like what matters in marriage is believing and keeping the promises you make in your wedding vows.


Nor is it especially important, in either case, to "keep the feeling alive." Feelings come and go -- that's what they're for. They change all the time, because they are about responding to the immediate situation. But over the course of a lifetime they do tend to settle into predictable patterns, such as are found in the virtues and blessings of a good marriage.

Good News Quote #38

From Chapter Seven, Why You Don't Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the Time: Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Us.

If falling in love is a kind of discovery, then it's not surprising that it happens at the beginning of many relationships. Perhaps there are exceptions, like when old friends fall in love after they've known one another for years, but even then I'd figure that's because they discover something new in each other. In any case, when you make such a discovery it's meant to point in the direction of something more lasting, like the lifetime of love in marriage and the raising of children together that comes from it. Falling in love is a perception that says, "This would be a wonderful person to share a lifetime with, to be the mother or father of my children. If I were to grow old with this person, seeing our children grow up, it would be the fulfillment of my deepest desire on earth.


If I'm right, the importance of falling in love lies not in how it feels, but in what it perceives. And as always with our feelings, the key moral issue is how truthful the perception is. That is why, as I said in chapter 4, I urge my students considering marriage to ask the questions: is this really a good person, someone good for me that I can be good to, someone with whom I could be a good parent? Falling in love is a sign that this might be someone with whom you could make a good marriage. Still, it's not enough, because the feeling is not always as perceptive as it should be. You can fall in love with people who seduce you (seductive people are good at getting you to fall in love with them) or, if you're emotionally unhealthy, you can have a repeated pattern of falling in love with people who are bad for you.

Good News Quote #37

From Chapter Seven, Why You Don't Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the Time: Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Us.

I've heard both pastors and students try to explain this by saying that love is not a feeling, it's a choice. But I'm afraid that's still consumerism talking. [...]


But love is not a choice -- or rather, it is not only a choice, just like it is not only a feeling. Love is a way of life for the long haul (again, think of love for your children) and its presence in our hearts is what Christian doctrine calls a virtue -- an enduring pattern of feeling and thought, choice and action and perception. Love involves all these things, including choices -- many, many choices over the course of a lifetime, made in light of the people and things you love. But of course it also involves feelings -- how could it not? When we look at the children we love, playing or sleeping, we are filled with tenderness and delight. What loving parent doesn't have such feelings?

Good News Quote #36

From Chapter Seven, Why You Don't Have to Keep Getting Transformed All the Time: Or, How Virtues Make a Lasting Change in Us.

In consumerist spirituality, the new stuff on order is mostly new experiences, "transformative" experiences that you're supposed to get if you don't want to miss out on something special in your spiritual life. Often there are books and videos and ministries to go with it, but the selling point is usually some experience or other. Which means, of course, that if you've never had the experience they're selling, they'll do their best to make you wonder what's wrong with you. You'll feel you're missing out on the prayer of Jabez, or being filled with the Spirit, or speaking in tongues. It's not like you have to have this experience to be saved (you will be reassured), but you'll also be told that without it you're just an ordinary, plain Christian, lacking the extraordinary power and blessing that God wants you to have in your life.

Good News Quote #35

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

Questions ought to have a place in our hearts, because asking questions is a way of seeking the truth and the love of truth is an important virtue. [...]


It's not just idle curiosity or intellectual pride. Above all, it shouldn't be confused with the obnoxious desire to be right all the time, which is a vice, not a virtue. The people who love the truth are not the ones who are always trying to prove they're right and everyone else is wrong. They're people who are glad to discover when they're wrong, because that gets them one step closer to the truth. And that shows how rare and difficult this virtue is. It's close kin to repentance, because it undermines our desire to justify ourselves and put others in the wrong, and thereby makes us more fair and just in our relationships. Without it morality is just a sham, a game we play to impress people or to persuade ourselves that we're good Christians.

Good News Quote #34

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

One last unit in that army of cultural stereotypes fighting against people who think too much is what I call the "God makes no sense" move. My students make this move a lot. They say things like "I can't explain it, it must be God" or "It makes absolutely no sense, you just have to believe it" or "Faith means you have to let yourself believe in something crazy and illogical that you can't understand." These are the cliches of people who have taken to heart the warning that they'd better not think too much. It looks to me like they're trying to preserve their faith by not even admitting to themselves that they have questions about it.


And this is sad. It treats Christian faith as if it were make-believe. If you're a child trying to hang on to your belief in Santa Claus, then you really do need to keep yourself from thinking about it too much. Critical thinking really will kill your faith in Santa Claus. But the Christian faith is true, so it can stand up to serious questioning.

Good News Quote #33

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

As reason welcomes emotion and subjects it to the self-criticism that values truth over self, the two end up pulling together in the direction of making us better people.


Of course not all our reasoning works in that direction. When it goes off in the wrong direction, the problem is not that we're thinking too much, but that our thinking is bad, lazy or dishonest. Our reasoning then is not in the service of truth, which is what reason is really for, but promotes our own self-serving agenda. This results in the perversion of reason that psychologists call "rationalization," as I mentioned before. It's a form of irrationality in which our thinking is all about serving emotional needs that have nothing to do with what's really true. So instead of learning to put truth before self, and thus turning emotions toward justice, generosity, and humility, our thinking is corrupted by the wrong kind of emotions, which end up driving everything.

Good News Quote #32

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

This goes against an old stereotype about reason or rationality (I'll use these two terms equivalently). The stereotype is that in order to be rational, you have to deny your emotions. But that's never made sense to me. Reason is about finding the truth, whereas denying your emotions means telling lies to yourself about what you're feeling. There's no rationality in that. Some psychologists call it "rationalization," but that doesn't mean it's rational. In fact, "rationalization" is a technical term in psychology for a certain kind of irrationality, precisely because it refers to an attempt to avoid realizing the truth about ourselves.

Denial of reality is not what reason is for. And getting in touch with reality is one of the most important things our emotions are for. That's why reason and emotion -- thinking and feeling -- belong together: they both help us get at the truth about reality. But they get at the truth in different ways, which is why they need each other.

Good News Quote #31

From Chapter Six, Why You Don't Have to Worry about Splitting Head from Heart: Or, How Thinking Welcomes Feeling.

I've never heard anyone warn people about splitting their head from their heart when they're in the grip of strong, raging emotions that obliterate their capacity to think straight. No, it's always when you're thinking a lot that people warn you about splitting your head from your heart. And what seems to make them especially nervous is when you think too much about your feelings. [...]

There's nothing in the Bible to suggest that there's any such thing as thinking too much. And since there's no such thing, it's not something to worry about. We should all go ahead and think as much as we need to, just as we should feel as much as we need to. You can't really do too much of either. What you can do -- and this is what we should be concerned about -- is think dishonestly carelessly, uninsightfully, just as we can also have feelings that are dishonest, malicious, arrogant, and so on. There are evils to watch out for in both our thinking and our feeling, but sheer quantity is not the problem. The problem is not too much thinking or feeling but evil thoughts and feelings.

Good News Quote #30

From Chapter Five, Why You Don't Have to Be Sure You Have the Right Motivations: Or, How Love Seeks the Good.

There is of course a sense in which love for neighbors is unselfish. But this is not because it is motivated by the desire to be unselfish. Rather, it is motivated by desire for the good of the other. Think of how we love our children, seeking their good as well as taking delight in their very being. But sometimes, when you have to wake up in the middle of the night to deal with your screaming infant for the fourth or fifth time, there is no delight in your heart, just sheer exhaustion and devotion to duty. For once again, if you love, you'll do your duty for the one you love: you'll drag yourself out of bed to deal with this tiny bundle of misery, not because you desire to be unselfish but because she needs you. That's the shape of love, the way it directs your attention: it's not about you, it's about her. The delight is lovely when it's there, but it's not the essential thing. And the desire to be unselfish is surely not enough to get you out of bed for the fourth or fifth time -- it's too self-centered. Only love for your child can do that.

Good News Quote #29

From Chapter Five, Why You Don't Have to Be Sure You Have the Right Motivations: Or, How Love Seeks the Good.

So what should you do if you do discover that you have bad motivations for doing good things? First of all, join the club. You are a fallen human being, and you too have a deceitful heart. So of course you have mixed motives all the time. [...]


That doesn't mean that you shouldn't do anything about it. But instead of trying to improve your motivations or find the right one, the thing to do is repent and confess your sins. [...]


This is a point we often get backward. For some reason, we think we can make Christianity attractive to non-Christians by telling them how God's Spirit has been working in our lives to make us such good, loving people -- so different from our nasty, unloving Christian neighbors. And we wonder why non-Christians think we're self-righteous! It's one thing for a former drug addict to testify about how Christ has turned his life around; but when nice, well-off people who have their lives together talk about how powerfully God is working in their hearts, it's obnoxious.

Good News Quote #28

From Chapter Five, Why You Don't Have to Be Sure You Have the Right Motivations: Or, How Love Seeks the Good.

It's perverse to be motivated by the desire to be unselfish: it's one of the most self-centered motivations in the world. It's all about proving to ourselves what good Christians we are, which, if you think about it, is a pretty obnoxious motivation. [...]


Do you see the trap here? There is nothing more self-centered than the project of being unselfish -- it's all about what kind of self you want to be. So people who are driven by the need to have the right motivations, such as unselfishness, are inevitably stuck with the wrong motivations -- selfish motivations that other people rightly find obnoxious. Being driven by the motivation to be unselfish traps you in a life that's all about yourself.

Good News Quote #27

From Chapter Five, Why You Don't Have to Be Sure You Have the Right Motivations: Or, How Love Seeks the Good.

The key point my student needed to realize was simple but powerful: it's okay to do the best thing. After all, if your desire is to do the best thing, then your motivation is good enough! [...]


For example, to love your neighbors means to seek their good. So it would be perverse to wonder whether you had the wrong motivation for seeking their good. If what you're trying to accomplish really is good for your neighbor, then that's good enough. For Christian love is about the good of your neighbor, not how good your heart is. (It's not about you.) The difficult part is knowing what really is good for your neighbor. [...] So that's what a loving person worries about -- "Is what I'm trying to do really good for this person?" -- rather than worrying about whether you're doing it out of some selfish motivation.

Good News Quote #26

From Chapter Five, Why You Don't Have to Be Sure You Have the Right Motivations: Or, How Love Seeks the Good.

I learned about this from a student who stayed after class one day, early in the semester, to get my advice about whether to drop my course. She was in a quandary because she was worried that her motivations were wrong. [...] Was it all about grades? Was she avoiding a good course just because of a selfish fear that it might hurt her grade point average?


What made it all the more complicated for her is that she really needed to drop the course in order to graduate on time, which provided the perfect excuse for her to chicken out of it. [...] So now she really had a problem: it looked like reality was reinforcing her bad motivations!


Wouldn't it be nice, I wondered, if this poor student could just make her decision based on reality instead of her motivations? It took me a while, asking questions and listening, before it dawned on me that this is exactly what she needed to do.

Good News Quote #25

From Chapter Four, Why You Don't Have to "Find God's Will for Your Life": Or, How Faith Seeks Wisdom.

For our thinking is to be mature, which is to say grown-up and adult or, in Jesus' vivid words, "wise as serpents." We are not allowed to suppose that the dove of innocence is incompatible with the serpent of wisdom.


Such language -- wise as serpents! As usual, our Lord teaches with a boldness of authority that is enough to get people rattled. We might ask, "You mean, like the serpent in the garden who god Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?" Yes, that serpent. Jesus knows how to choose his metaphors. We are to be wiser than that serpent and all his ilk, staying away from his shortcut to the knowledge of what is good and bad.


The name of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Hebrew contains the same pairing of words as Solomon's prayer asking for a heart that discerns between good and bad. Solomon is praying for what the serpent was offering, but he's not accepting the serpent's shortcut. He doesn't believe in magic potions or recipes or fruit that could make him wise with one bite. He wants the real thing, which means it must be his own heart that is shaped in wisdom by the Spirit of the Lord; he's going to have to learn. That's why the book of proverbs of Solomon begins with a scene of instruction and the commandments to seek wisdom and understanding. There is no shortcut to learning wisdom, no bypassing the hard work of learning to make good decisions, because the aim is to acquire a heart of wisdom -- and such a heart must be formed by a wisdom that is truly its own.

Good News Quote #24

From Chapter Four, Why You Don't Have to "Find God's Will for Your Life": Or, How Faith Seeks Wisdom.

Take for example the most far-reaching spiritual investment that most of us ever make: "Should I marry this person?" It's a huge question for young people to face, and they need some help from those of us who've already faced it. We shouldn't misdirect them by getting them asking the wrong questions. The worst question of all is: "Is this the one?" The assumption behind this question is that God has a particular person in store for you to marry: that's his will for your life, and you need to find out who's the one he has in mind. This way of thinking makes your most fundamental investment -- the person in which you invest your whole self for the rest of your life -- a guessing game about what's in the mind of God.


But suppose God wants you to seek wisdom, like a steward learning to make good investments. What sorts of questions should you be asking then? Here's what I tell my students: you ask a series of questions about what's good. You ask, first of all, "Is this a good person?" For you should marry a person of Christian virtue: kind, faithful, and generous of spirit. Then there's a second question to ask, more specific: "Is this person good for me?" That is to say, you should marry someone who resonates with you in particular. [...]


There are many good people out there with whom you can make a good marriage, and a good marriage with a good person is good enough. Indeed, it is more than good enough; it is one of the greatest blessings on God's green earth.

Good News Quote #23

From Chapter Four, Why You Don't Have to "Find God's Will for Your Life": Or, How Faith Seeks Wisdom.

If you're looking for a recipe, formula, or method for making decisions, then you're looking for the wrong thing. There is no recipe. There is only wisdom, the heart's intelligent skill of discerning good decisions from bad ones. This is a skill, not a method -- not a formula you can apply to particular situations simply by following the rules, but a habit of the heart you have to develop through long experience of your own, which includes making mistakes from time to time. The concept of wisdom is what every method for "finding God's will" leaves out of the decision-making process. It's left out precisely because the project of "finding God's will" is an attempt to guarantee you won't make a mistake. All such guarantees are falsehoods, attempts to short-circuit the hard work of acquiring wisdom.

Good News Quote #22

From Chapter Four, Why You Don't Have to "Find God's Will for Your Life": Or, How Faith Seeks Wisdom.

The providence of God is called his "hidden will" for good reason. Like the future itself, God's will for our future contains great depths that we can't see very far into. [...]

There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes a prophet will tell God's people what God has in store for them. But even then there is much that remains hidden in God's will for their future. This is illustrated in one of the most famous passages about the will of God in the Bible. It's where the prophet Jeremiah speaks words of comfort to the exiled people of Israel in the name of the Lord their God: "I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope" (Jer. 29:11). God knows these plans, but Israel doesn't. He does not in fact reveal much about them. Through the prophet, he tells them that they will remain in captivity for seventy years, and then he will bring them back to their own land. But that's about all. He doesn't reveal the details. The point is clear: God knows his plans -- we don't.