Haley Elizabeth

Professor: You are a Christian, aren’t you, son ?

Student: Yes, sir.

Professor: So, you believe in GOD ?

Student: Absolutely, sir.

Professor: Is GOD good ?

Student: Sure.

Professor: Is GOD all powerful ?

Student: Yes.

Professor: My brother died of cancer even though he prayed to GOD to heal him. Most of us would attempt to help others who are ill. But GOD didn’t. How is this GOD good then? Hmm?

(Student was silent.)

Professor: You can’t answer, can you ? Let’s start again, young fella. Is GOD good?

Student: Yes.

Professor: Is satan good ?

Student: No.

Professor: Where does satan come from ?

Student: From … GOD …

Professor: That’s right. Tell me son, is there evil in this world?

Student: Yes.

Professor: Evil is everywhere, isn’t it ? And GOD did make everything. Correct?

Student: Yes.

Professor: So who created evil ?

(Student did not answer.)

Professor: Is there sickness? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things exist in the world, don’t they?

Student: Yes, sir.

Professor: So, who created them ?

(Student had no answer.)

Professor: Science says you have 5 Senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Tell me, son, have you ever seen GOD?

Student: No, sir.

Professor: Tell us if you have ever heard your GOD?

Student: No , sir.

Professor: Have you ever felt your GOD, tasted your GOD, smelt your GOD? Have you ever had any sensory perception of GOD for that matter?

Student: No, sir. I’m afraid I haven’t.

Professor: Yet you still believe in Him?

Student: Yes.

Professor: According to Empirical, Testable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says your GOD doesn’t exist. What do you say to that, son?

Student: Nothing. I only have my faith.

Professor: Yes, faith. And that is the problem Science has.

Student: Professor, is there such a thing as heat?

Professor: Yes.

Student: And is there such a thing as cold?

Professor: Yes.

Student: No, sir. There isn’t.

(The lecture theater became very quiet with this turn of events.)

Student: Sir, you can have lots of heat, even more heat, superheat, mega heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat. But we don’t have anything called cold. We can hit 458 degrees below zero which is no heat, but we can’t go any further after that. There is no such thing as cold. Cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold. Heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it.

(There was pin-drop silence in the lecture theater.)

Student: What about darkness, Professor? Is there such a thing as darkness?

Professor: Yes. What is night if there isn’t darkness?

Student: You’re wrong again, sir. Darkness is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light. But if you have no light constantly, you have nothing and its called darkness, isn’t it? In reality, darkness isn’t. If it is, well you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn’t you?

Professor: So what is the point you are making, young man ?

Student: Sir, my point is your philosophical premise is flawed.

Professor: Flawed ? Can you explain how?

Student: Sir, you are working on the premise of duality. You argue there is life and then there is death, a good GOD and a bad GOD. You are viewing the concept of GOD as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, Science can’t even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life: just the absence of it. Now tell me, Professor, do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?

Professor: If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, yes, of course, I do.

Student: Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?

(The Professor shook his head with a smile, beginning to realize where the argument was going.)

Student: Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor. Are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you not a scientist but a preacher?

(The class was in uproar.)

Student: Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the Professor’s brain?

(The class broke out into laughter. )

Student: Is there anyone here who has ever heard the Professor’s brain, felt it, touched or smelt it? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established Rules of Empirical, Stable, Demonstrable Protocol, Science says that you have no brain, sir. With all due respect, sir, how do we then trust your lectures, sir?

(The room was silent. The Professor stared at the student, his face unfathomable.)

Professor: I guess you’ll have to take them on faith, son.

Student: That is it sir … Exactly ! The link between man & GOD is FAITH. That is all that keeps things alive and moving.


By the way, that student was EINSTEIN.

This day has been one of multiple convictions and several awakenings inside this dull, quiet heart. God has gently reminded me of the reality around me throughout the hours of today. As I rushed to complete a reading assignment before class this afternoon, God slowed me down and taught me. He showed me how much I treasure the things of this world. Not only did He show me that, but He taught me what kind of affect that can have on my witness and His image. He taught me that in treasuring the things of this world, He does not look great. He does not look like something to be treasured. He only looks like a side-interest that is really only useful as an escape from hell. He looks boring, useless, and unimportant, rather than the all-satisfying Treasure that He truly is. My coveting, my love, my heart, all depict the cross of Christ as a waste of time. And now that I am seeing what I have been doing for months, my heart is so heavy. Conviction doesn’t seem like a strong enough word for this. Heartache. That’s closer. Disgust. Regret. Those words only come close to what I am feeling, but they don’t capture it. This disgust didn’t quite settle in until after I was refreshed of another truth. As I was attempting to write an English paper on missions, I rapidly searched through a multitude of books that I have read on missions, and sharing the gospel. I came across Radical, by David Platt. This book watered my desire and passion for missions in a very powerful way, and opening those worn pages today brought upon my heart a tugging, aching feeling. A feeling of reminiscing something lost. Remembering something far away. A loved one lost to death, a friend lost to disagreements, a time of happiness swept away in the stresses of life-kind-of-feeling. Remembering something missed? Something gone from my life? I was remembering a time of passion and fire for Christ that was so rapidly overflowing I could hardly stand to sleep as I thought about the lost. As I read these words of David Platt, I couldn’t help but feel sick to my stomach: “Wake up and realize there are real battles to be fought, so different from the superficial, meaningless ‘battles’ you focus on. Wake up to the countless multitude who are currently destined for a Christless eternity.” I have certainly woken up today. Gently, but painfully, God has stirred my heart to awareness yet again. And I can’t help but cringe at the recent memories of my complaints about my car, my phone, my clothes, my school, my responsibilities, my body. I can’t help but painfully laugh at myself for treasuring such non existing things. One day, hundreds, maybe even thousands (if the world goes on that long) years from now, my car will be rusted ash in the ground. My phone will not exist. My clothes will be torn to bits and pieces of dust particles. My body won’t even be a pile of bones anymore. It will be dirt under the surface of a vast planet floating through space. And I manage to value these things. Highly value them. Value them so much that I’m not even pleased with the ones I have now. I want a nicer car to one day rot in the ground, a nicer phone to one day perish into nothingness, more clothes to one day shred to dust. Why? Someone please tell me why I give into the lie that ANY of those things matter at ALL?! I complain and I covet, all the while the Jesus who saved me from an eternity of hell sits idol in my heart. Rarely coming out. Rarely crossing my mind. All the while, children, adults, families, orphans, starving nations, homeless people are living and DYING without the ONLY thing that will keep them from an eternity, an ETERNITY of pain, misery, and separation from the God who made them and separation from the only purpose they could ever posses. Eternity. Never ending. My heart is screaming in pain over my sinful, selfish, disgusting love for material. Not only mine, but the worlds. The culture I live in does not see the wrong of this. The culture I live in is blind. Even those with the beautiful truth of Christ become blinded by this culture so quickly. I am desperate to escape this life, the closet thing to hell I’ll ever know. But the heartbreaking fact that there is so much work to be done keeps me here. Paul said it better than anyone ever could: “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.” Those words have never gripped me so tightly before tonight. I pray that God would revive His people, WAKE THEM UP, and teach them that how they choose to treasure this life is how they will display Him. And the more we as Christians treasure the same things that this world treasures, the less appealing and important Christ will look to unbelievers, lost souls who are destined for a Christless eternity. There is a war going on and we have jobs to do while we’re here. My heart is aching so much at the idea of people never hearing the gospel because of my treasuring rotting, perishing, dust particles of this life, and not the only eternal substance there is. Christ, His Word, His salvation, His kingdom. The only hope of a future is in Him and I know that. How could I care about anything else?

I’m reading a book by John Piper for one of my classes at NGU. It’s called “Don’t Waste Your Life”. I didn’t think twice about what it might teach me, I only saw it as an addition to the rest of my assignments in school. But after only two chapters it has already changed how I view my God and taught me so much. I cannot help but share. 

One thing Piper stresses in chapter two is the tie between happiness and glorifying God. Which of the two are we to strive for in life? One seems inevitable to strive for; happiness. And one seems right; glorifying God. So which one is it?

To be happy? Or to glorify God? Unspoken for years, there was in me the feeling that these two were at odds. Either you glorify God or you pursue happiness. One seem absolutely right; the other seems absolutely inevitable. And that is why I was confused and frustrated for so long. Compounding the problem was that many who seemed to emphasize the glory of God in their thinking, did not seem to enjoy Him much. And many who seemed to enjoy God most, were defective in their thinking about His glory. But now here was the greatest mind of early America, Jonathan Edwards, saying that God’s purpose for my life was that I have a passion for God’s glory and that I have a passion for my joy in that glory, and that these two are one passion. When I saw this, I knew, at last, what a wasted life would be and how to avoid it. God created me (and you) to live with a single, all-embracing, all-transforming passion, namely, a passion to glorify God by enjoying and displaying his supreme excellence in all the spheres of life. 

This is just the beginning of what God really taught me. After reading this, and really understanding that glorifying God can make me happy, and not only that but that being happy in Christ IS glorifying to God, He taught me even more. 

I have always had a hard time understanding God’s love, and our love. How they tie together, how they are similar, how they are different. I know that real love is a love like God’s love for us. I also know that real love is selfless love. And to be honest, I had a hard time seeing God as selfless. I understood what Christ did was selfless in a sense, but in the end it always points to God and His glory. God created us (love) to worship Him (selfish). God sent His son to, overall, save us from our sins (love), so that He could receive glory (selfish). I’ve heard many times that God has the right to be selfish, because He is God. And I agree with that, but that point distorted my view of His love. How do I aim to selflessly love others, AND love others in a godly way? Christ, God, is my example of how to live. Of perfection. Of what to strive for as a way of living. How was God creating us to worship Him a selfless act? Or even a loving act? Maybe I’m the only one thinking this, or maybe I look too far into things. But this question was answered in the following points made by Piper.

Does being loved mean being made much of? For many people, they do not feel loved when they are told that God created them for His glory. They feel used. This is understandable, given the way love has been almost completely distorted in our world. For most people, to be loved is to be made much of. Almost everything in our Western culture serves this distortion of love. We are taught in a thousand ways that love means increasing someone’s self-esteem. Love is helping someone feel good about themselves. Love is giving someone a mirror and helping him like what he sees. This is not what the Bible means by the love of God. Love is doing what is best for someone. But making self the object of our highest affections is not best for us. It is, in fact, a lethal distraction. We were made to see and savor God, and savoring Him, to be supremely satisfied, and thus spread in all the world the worth oh His presence.  Not to show people the all satifying God, is not to love them. To make them feel good about themselves when they were made to feel good about seeing God is like taking someone to the Alps and locking them in a room full of mirrors. 

Now, after reading that, I had a better idea of what love is. But my question still remains. How is God’s love selfless? As Piper goes on, he answers that question as well.

Not to aim to show God is not to love, because God is what we need most deeply… If you don’t point people to God for everlasting joy, you don’t love. You waste your life… Now this what this means for God’s love. How shall God love us? Mere logic could give us the answer: God loves us best by giving us the best to enjoy forever, namely Himself, for He is best… The soul was made to stand in awe of a Person, the only person worthy of awe… God loves us by liberating us from the bondage of self, so that we can enjoy knowing and admiring Him forever. God sent Christ to die so that we coud come home to the all-satisying Father. This is love. God’s love for us is God’s doing what He must do, as a great cost to Himself, so that we might have the pleasure of seeing and savoring Him forever… God is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the most loving act.

Piper has is figured out. And I am so thankful he chose to write about it. The song “How He Loves” comes to mind when I read these pages. Oh, how He loves us. He loves us so much that He created us to enjoy Him. He could’ve created beings that had no choice and had to worship Him, receiving nothing themselves. He could’ve created things for Himself only. But He didn’t do that. God, being the BEST thing that will ever exist, simply because He is God and nothing can ever be greater than Him, created humans to enjoy Him, and through that enjoyment and happiness, glorify Him. God, who is perfect and had no implications to ever make us or even keep us around, even after we turned away from the amazing gift of joy in Him, even after we spit in His face, even after we disobeyed time after time, even after we mocked Him by searching for something else to make us happy, God sent His son, Himself, to this earth He created, and died, taking on all the wrath that WE deserve, so that we could enjoy Him eternally, and in doing so, glorify him. That is the definition of selfless love. That IS love. 

If great paintings could talk, and they saw you walking through the gallery staring at the floor, they would cry out, “Look! Look at me. I am the reason you are here.” And when you look and exult in the beauty of the paintings with those around you, your joy would be full. You would not complain that the paintings should have kept quiet. They rescued you from wasting your visit. In the same way, no child complains, “I am being used” when his father delights to make the child happy with his own presence. 

I could not help but share the truths that I’ve learned this week. Many of us do not realize how loving our God really is. His ability to be completely selfish in creating us mattered not to Him. He created so that He could not only receive glory, which would have been perfectly fine because He is God and He can do what He wants, but He created us to bless us with Himself. To allow us to enjoy Him and in doing so worship Him is the most perfect blessing He could ever create. And then to selflessly die for us, so that we could continue to love and enjoy Him for eternity, was the ultimate act of selfless love. My God is so unbelievably loving and caring, to share His glory with us and to grant us happiness in Him. 

John Piper, “Don’t Waste Your Life”, Published by Crossway, 2007.

Not everyone who says to me”Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of Heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in Heaven. On that day many will say to me “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?” And then will I declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.” -Matthew 7:21-23

These verses have been on my mind quite a bit over the past couple of days. My heart breaks at the realization of truthfulness in them. I am brought to tears by the truth that on judgement day, there will be people who truly believe they know Christ, that truly believe they are saved from their sins, who do not know Him, and are not saved. Who will have an eternity separated from Him. The reason I am so certain of this truth is not only because it is stated in the Word of God, but because at one point I was one of those people. For a period of time, when I was younger, I sincerely believed I was saved and had a home in Heaven. I was baptized around the age of 7 after thoughtlessly and ignorantly claiming I was saved. A few years passed and after I realized what it really meant to claim Jesus (persecution, hatred from the world, morals and no fun at all, according to myself at the time) I hated the idea of salvation, of Christians, of God. Once in middle school I completely denied His existence at all. I went from thinking I was saved to not believing there was anyone to save me in a matter of years. The fact that I was so convinced at one point that I was safe from Hell when I truly wasn’t, shows me how easy it is for anyone to feel the same way. Salvation, though I probably would have never admitted it at the time, was merely a ticket into Heaven, a pass from Hell, and a way to make my life better. So many people view salvation this way and truly believe that it’s as simple as that. 

“Jesus, you remember my baptism right? You remember all the times I went to church, all the good decisions I made right? I know I wasn’t always perfect, I messed up more than I did any good. But I was baptized! I went to church! I even prayed! You remember that right? You remember me?”

“I do not know you, depart from me.”

Can you imagine? 

I can’t. It is painful to even think about. But it is so true. And I believe God has laid this on my heart for a reason. The verses say the one who does the will of God will enter the kingdom of Heaven. How many people out there, claiming Christ, claiming salvation, are living out the will of God for their lives? How many people out there truly believe they have a “ticket into Heaven” who are so far outside of God’s will that they’re completely blind of what salvation really means? Consider the people in your life today. Those who claim Christ and those who don’t. Those you aren’t sure about. And consider their eternity. God has His children on this earth for a reason. It is to be Christ’s witnesses through the Holy Spirit. We have a job here. To find out what’s really going on inside the hearts of those who are in our lives. To know if Christ lives there or not. To show them what it means when He does live there. To live that out in a way that shows nothing less than urgency. To pray fervently for the lost souls in our lives and to make it our soul purpose to lead them to salvation. I no longer want to sit by and watch people I know run from God without making it a point to share with them and pray for them. I no longer want to wonder whether or not they really know Christ or not. God saved me, not just so I could avoid getting what I really deserve (Hell), but to use me to save others from that as well. To show people why they exist. That’s what I’m going to do from now on.