Right now I’m in sort of a postpartum wedding depression as I try to remember just what it was I did with my time before I started planning a wedding. It’s almost anti-climactic now that it’s over. Not that I don’t love being married, but you put all your time and energy into ONE day, and then it’s over. Poof!

In the days following the wedding, I began to reflect on how much of myself I poured into this event and I started to feel ashamed, if not hypocritical. A wedding can really mess with your perspective as you gradually become totally consumed by it. I went into the whole process intending to keep a level-head, not like those “other brides” I had known. But I’m not entirely sure that is a possible goal. Almost inevitably, I succumbed to the very same pitfalls into which I had watched many other brides fall.

When I looked at how much time I put into planning the menu and the wedding favors and the table centerpieces, and I compared that with the message of the wedding ceremony–namely, the centrality of Christ–I felt convicted that there was a huge discrepancy. On the one hand, I wanted it to be all about the Gospel; on the other hand, I was essentially losing myself in the preparations. That doesn’t exactly seem to match up.

However, I have begun to wonder if my conviction is rightly placed. I have started to suspect that the preparations themselves are a part of the divine reflection that marriage is meant to be. In the Bible there are a lot of parallels between marriage and the Christian life–Christ is the groom and his bride is the Church–so we focus on this illustration the day of the wedding and the days that follow.

But here’s the thing–a wedding doesn’t just happen out of nowhere. It’s not like one day my husband and I decided to get married, so the next day we went to the church and said our vows. We spent months and months preparing ourselves for one another. We took classes, we read books, we prayed, and we made sure that the day itself would glorify God. And in addition to all that, we had actually been preparing long before we even met each other. For the last 28 years my parents have been praying for me, and I’ve been praying as well. I’ve tried to guard my purity and be the kind of woman with whom a godly man would want to partner.

With all of that in mind, one might say that on some level, preparation for marriage has actually defined my entire life up to this point.

Is this degree of readiness inappropriate? Or is it exactly what God had in mind as He designed marriage to reflect our relationship with Him? Are such thorough preparations not the very thing God intends for us as we prepare for our heavenly bridegroom, Jesus Christ? In the same way that a bride pours herself into preparing for that special day when she becomes one with her groom, are we not called to do the same?

In Matthew 25 Jesus tells the story of 10 virgins, 5 wise and 5 foolish, who are waiting on their bridegroom throughout the night. When the groom finally arrives, 5 are prepared and ready to meet him, so they immediately join him at the wedding banquet. The other 5, however, are not prepared and must return to their homes to get ready. In doing so, they miss the bridegroom and are left outside the wedding banquet.

This is indeed an analogy for our lives. The parallels between Christ and the Church do not begin on the wedding day–they begin long before. As I frantically rushed about doing all I could to make the wedding day perfect, I was participating in a story far greater than I realized. My preparations were a picture of how we should live our lives in preparation to meet our heavenly bridegroom. These preparations should literally consume us–every minute of every day we should be readying ourselves for the day we meet our Savior. Like a bride in a white dress, we want to stand before him knowing we did our best to honor and serve him, without a spot or stain of pride or disobedience. We must throw ourselves into these preparations like a crazy bride who will do anything to make her wedding day perfect. After all, as much as I love my husband, I desire to please my Savior so much more!

So yes, I did get a little carried away with the wedding preparations. But I think God knew that would happen to just about every bride who ever said “I do,” and perhaps He even planted that drive within us. Why? Because it is a perfect reflection of the avidness with which we should approach our heavenly union with God. Whether you’re married, engaged, or forever single, the analogy transcends all relationship statuses. We are all to be in a state of preparation for marriage, living each day in preparation for our most adoring groom.

Well I am back from my honeymoon and it was awesome! I had a wonderful time with my new husband, and special thanks to David Goodman for posting his thoughts on science, theology, and birth control.

Without trying to beat a dead horse, I want to close out this discussion today with a few final thoughts. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the science involved in the debate, I hope this was helpful. The reason I asked David to post his own perspectives is that a) I am completely incompetent in all things science, and b) I frequently hear Christians excuse some methods of birth control on scientific grounds. For instance, countless fetuses fail to survive on their own, so is there really that much of a difference whether a fetus fails to survive due to nature or birth control?

It is at this point in our discussion that I become wary of how greatly we are letting science determine our theology. While science can tell us things about the world, the purpose of science is not to explain the why behind it. While we should indeed give ear to the scientific community, we must not give authority to science that it does not possess.

That said, even if many fetuses fail to survive, that is God’s call to make, not ours. In no other arena do we allow ourselves the freedom to take another person’s life simply on the grounds that they might die anyway, so it is strange that we hedge on this one.

But with all the science aside, I have one final word to all my female readers out there:

Ladies, God has created a world in which our bodies are Ground Zero for the beginning of life. The creation of a new person, a divine image bearer for which God has a purpose and a plan–it all begins inside of us. This is a gift, but it is also a responsibility. We owe it to God and ourselves to study and learn as much as we can about how God created us, for what purpose, and how best we can be stewards of it. This does NOT mean we all have to churn out babies, but it does mean we must never be casual about it. Never. The creation of a new life that bears the image of God is a serious, beautiful thing, and I hope that these last few posts have challenged you to consider how you understand your body within God’s greater story for the world.

Your body is beautiful and wonderfully made. God has a special plan for you, and for many of you that involves children. But no matter the plan, I pray we will be a generation of women who seek to honor God in ALL that we do, offering a prophetic voice of hope and clarity in a world that consistently devalues human dignity, treating people more and more like things to be used than reflections of their gracious Maker. We must be defenders of the glory of God in one another, and that begins with defending the glory of God in ourselves.

While I’m on my honeymoon, my friend David Goodman will be posting his thoughts about the relationship between science and theology. Now before you tune out because this sounds nerdy/boring, you should know that my conversations with him have surrounded the issue of birth control, and that’s why I’ve asked him to post. He is going into his 4th year of medical school at UNC-Chapel Hill and has wrestled with this topic a lot as he considers the ethics of prescribing birth control, and how it coincides with his pro-life beliefs. He is a godly man, as well as being super sharp, so I thought you all would benefit from his insights!

 Hello blog world.  She Worships has been invaded by a dude, most notably illustrated in the picture from Rocky IV situated to the left.  No, this is not a shameless plug to get Sly Stallone on Sharon‘s blog.  This was the image that came to my mind when Sharon asked me to write about the relationship between science and theology.  You see in the film Rocky is a fiery, passionate boxer with a mission to prove going up against the formidable Russian Ivan Drago, the machine-man that represents the overwhelming strength of the Cold War USSR who crushes opponents with almost superhuman force.  At one point in the fight Rocky is dancing around the ring, taking punches from the Russian and taunting him saying “You ain’t so bad!” in an effort to tire him out.

Right now I am in the throes of a massive head cold, so I’ve decided to depart from my usual quasi-intellectualism and write about something that’s a little bit more at my current functioning capacity. Bear with me.

(And my apologies to those of you who are offended at the use of the word “poop,” or if you’re like my friend Joe, who is utterly disgusted by girls who make any kind of reference to this bodily function.)

As we all know, most dating relationships go through a series of stages of comfortability. There’s the stage in which you will let your boyfriend see you wearing sweats, when you let him see you without make-up, when you let him kiss you before you’ve brushed your teeth, etc.

But perhaps one of the ultimate relationship benchmarks is the Smelly Bathroom stage. Prior to this stage, you will do whatever it takes to fool your significant other into thinking that you simply do not produce the Big Number 2. You will go across the street, find a bathroom in another part of the building, house, or apartment, or if you don’t have that option, you’ll turn on the bathroom fan and run some water. Or for those of us who are really ashamed, we’ll hold it…much to the dismay of our intestinal tract.

But eventually there comes a point at which you quit putting on the charade, and you just go for it. Sometimes this happens with your foreknowledge, other times you are so desperate that you have no choice and mother nature forces you.

But whatever the circumstances, you reach a point at which you are no longer ashamed in the way you used to be. You have now owned up to the reality that you do in fact poop, and amazingly your boyfriend is still attracted to you, so you have a new level of connectedness and acceptance that you didn’t have before.

What is truly ironic about this whole process is the shame and embarrassment that we associate with this bodily function, even though EVERYBODY does it. Why is it that we feel the need to pretend that we are the only human being in the history of time that doesn’t have to do this? Why aren’t we comfortable with the reality that it’s a normal part of life?

When you get right down to it, everyone poops. And not only that, but everyone’s poop pretty much looks exactly the same (unless you’ve had one of those cheesy burritos from Taco Bell…but let’s not make rules based upon exceptions). We all do it, so what’s the big deal?

Well I got to thinking about this, and I had a striking realization–we engage in the same game of pretend when it comes to sin. Just like the inevitability of an occasional poop, everybody sins. With the exception of Christ, there has never been a single person on earth who has lived a sinless life. Yet we carry on these charades, acting as if we don’t sin, and being ashamed and embarrassed that someone might find us out. In the same way that we’ll run across the street just to find a toilet, we’ll go to extreme measures to hide the sin in our lives, even from the people with whom we are closest.

And this secrecy keeps us in bondage. We are constantly trying to position our lives in such a way that will hide the unattractive parts. But that is no way to live, and it only contributes to a much larger trend in which ALL people think they’re the only ones.

So we need to start being honest about the fact that everyone sins. And just like poop, our sin pretty much looks the same. Scripture tells us that we have not endured any temptation that is uncommon to man (1 Cor. 10:13), so while you may secretly believe that you’re a particularly bad person, God would have to disagree. We are all equally fallen, and all in need of grace, so let’s start talking about it.

Once we create a community in which we can be open about our sin, we might just experience an effect that is similar to the “smelly bathroom” stage of a dating relationship–yes it’s gross, but you are still loved and accepted anyway. That’s a good place to be.

And thus concludes my head-cold inspired writing. I hope you enjoyed it. I will return to my regular standard of thinking and maturity in a few shorts days.

This week the Episcopal Church created yet another stir at its General Conference when the presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori denounced the idea of a personal relationship with God through Christ as heresy (that is, a contradiction with the truth of Scripture and belief of the Church). She explained,

“The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy –- that we can be saved as individuals, that any of use alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being.“

She later added,

“I said that this crisis has several elements related to that heretical and individualistic understanding. We’ve touched on one – how we keep the earth, meant to be a gift to all God’s creatures. The financial condition of the nations right now is another element. The sins of a few have wreaked havoc with the lives of many, as greed and dishonesty have destroyed livelihoods, educational possibilities, care for the aged, and multiple forms of creativity – and that’s just the aftermath of Ponzi schemes for which a handful will go to jail. If we want to be faithful, we need to be continually rediscovering that my needs are not the only significant ones.“

The great irony of the Bishop’s statement is that the Episcopal Church has embodied this very individualism against which she rants, by departing from the bulk of Church tradition in their ordination of homosexuals. In doing so, the Episcopal Church has actually isolated itself from the larger community of faith, a move that some might call ecclesiologically individualistic.

But aside from that minor detail, I actually think there is something to her words. Bishop Jefferts Schori is right in critiquing the idea of “my personal Jesus”–an understanding of Jesus that not only enables one to isolate one’s self from other Christians, washing their hands of any responsibility to others, and refusing accountability from the larger Church, but it can also turn Jesus into a kind of custom order Savior who serves your particular needs–namely, not going to Hell.

In the face of such distortions, I can understand why Bishop Jefferts Schori would raise an eyebrow. The language of “personal relationship” has been used in the name of some very unscriptural practices.

However, Bishop Jefferts Schori goes awry in her identification of the problem’s source. The problem is not the language of the personal–the problem is how we’ve used it. A healthy understanding of “personal” is that God knows you intimately as a person. He “knit you together in your mother’s womb” and he knows “when you rise and when you fall.” Just read Psalm 139–it doesn’t get much more “personal” than that.

What’s more, God is not some far off entity who is only accessible through a system. If you need God, you can cry out to Him–yet another practice we see all throughout the Psalms. Yet Bishop Jefferst Schori elevates community to a level of near idolatry given how thoroughly she founds salvation upon it. If salvation is both by faith AND community alone, then we can offer little comfort to missionaries, both abroad and in the American workplace, who find themselves isolated from other Christians with whom they can fellowship.

But most importantly of all, I would like to know how Bishop Jefferts Schori would reconcile her idea of heresy with Paul’s method of conversion in Acts 16. The Philippian jailer, frightened by an earthquake that had freed the Christian prisoners, comes to Paul and asks, “What must I do to be saved.” Paul simply responds, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”

When we depart from this said “formula,” we wander dangerously close to the heresy from which Martin Luther fought to free the Church 500 years ago. J.D. Greear once stated, “Salvation is by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.” We must let this truth serve as a boundary for our language about “personal relationships,” but the personal aspect must remain. When we reject it, we not only stray from the model of salvation given to us in Scripture, but we lose any hope of reaching a human race that was designed to be inherently relational.

If you ever take a class in Church History, there is one famous story that you are sure to read about: the childhood story of St. Augustine and the pear tree. It goes like this:

Little Augustine lived next door to a house that had a pear tree in its backyard. Nothing about the pear tree was appealing or enticing at all–it was kind of wilted looking and the pears didn’t taste particularly good. (Which I can relate to–I hate pears)

There was nothing about this tree that one should be jealous. But one day Augustine and his buddies got bored with their regular games, so they devised a plan to break into their neighbor’s yard, shake the pears out of the tree and steal them. And that’s exactly what they did–they made off with a truck load of pears.

And when they had accomplished this plan, did they eat them? Did they sell them for money? Did they throw them at Augustine’s little sister? No. They dumped them out, let some of the pigs eat them, and walked away. They wasted them.

As Augustine reflects on this incident in his book Confessions, you’d think that he’d chalk it up to teenage delinquency. I think we all know plenty of little boys who would pull something like that. But Augustine doesn’t make that move. He instead summarizes his motives this way:

It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in [God] to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.

In other words, he sinned for the sake of sinning.

In telling this story, Augustine highlights something about human nature that we often overlook. He reminds us that we are so profoundly broken that we do evil just for the sake of evil. And that is a concept that the modern mind struggles to understand, if it does not resist the idea altogether.

Today, everything is someone else’s fault. Even when we are the perpetrators of a wrong, it’s only because we were victims at some other time. A woman is promiscuous because her dad didn’t love her. A man beats his wife because his dad beat him. A girl has an eating disorder because the culture tells her she’s fat.

This victim mentality serves as a kind of escape clause in the face of taking blame. Yes, I may have done something wrong, but I can ease the blame by displacing it onto somebody else.

Well I began to question the validity of this perspective as I myself made some poor life choices. I found myself compromising in my dating life in some pretty major ways, all because of the need to get attention, acceptance and love from guys. And as I made these decisions, I started to ask myself, “Why am I doing this? Have I been missing unconditional love from my dad? Did I have a dysfunctional relationship with my parents or a boyfriend that caused me to be so insecure? There must be SOME reason from my past that I am acting this way. Someone did this to me!”

But the reality is, none of that was true. I have a wonderful relationship with my parents, and even though I had some rocky dating relationships early on, it was nothing that would have destroyed my entire self-esteem.

The real reason I made those decisions, the real reason I sinned, was because I was a sinner, and that’s what sinners do. I’m not broken because someone else broke me–I contribute to my own brokenness every day. Not because I’m a victim of someone else’s wrongdoing, but because sin is enjoyable and it makes me feel good in the moment. Like Augustine, I like to sin.

Many of the mistakes I made were done to satisfy my twisted desires. I wanted to feel good, have fun, indulge my anger, my lust or my pride–all the while knowing that those things were wrong, and doing them anyway. That said, girls aren’t promiscuous JUST because they’re insecure, but because sex feels good to them. Teenagers don’t shoplift because their parents aren’t providing for them, but because of the thrill of getting away with it.

While there are indeed times when our behavior stems out of past experiences, it’s important that we take responsibility for our own decisions. Sometimes, we do broken things because we are broken people.

And this is crucial to remember, not only because it will hold us in check when we’re tempted to excuse away our bad decisions, but because it impacts our relationship with God. If we believe that we’re all victims of someone else’s sin, then God has no right to hold us accountable when we act out. If we are mere victims, then we make God out to be unjust. He’s placing the blame on us while we believe the blame lies elsewhere.

What’s at stake is the very character of God. How we see God, and ourselves, will determine whether we repent or reject God when we are held accountable for our decisions.

Keep this in mind the next time you act out in anger, pride, or lust. It’s not your mom’s fault, your dad’s fault, your spouse’s fault or your kid’s fault. While any one of those individuals may have influenced you or tempted you, they’re not the ones who pull the trigger. So don’t underestimate your brokenness. Not for the sake of self-loathing or deprecation, but for the sake of truly comprehending just how much God loves you. When we truly understand our sin, we begin to understand God’s grace.

I’ve recently found myself in a number of situations in which preachers and Christian speakers were conveying what, I would call, “half of the Gospel.” By this I mean that they teach parts of the Gospel perfectly, even brilliantly, but simultaneously fail to mention key parts of the Gospel. It’s not that these teachers were saying anything wrong, but they were not conveying the whole truth either.

Now this has always bothered me, but I was willing to look past it. After all, God IS love, so it’s great to hear a sermon on loving the poor and caring for the needy. And God IS a God of holiness and judgment, so it’s important to learn about the severe implications that His character has for our lives. Because God is infinite, it would be impossible to encapsulate all that He is into one sermon. And so I rationalized that these messages about “half the Gospel” were ultimately ok. Hearing half the Gospel is better than hearing none of it at all, right?

But recently I’ve started to reconsider this position. In fact, I began to wonder if “half” the Gospel is really even the Gospel at all. For instance, is the Gospel kind of like Math?–I may not know all there is about Math and its abstracts concepts of calculus and algebra, but I know how to add and subtract, so I can definitively say that I know Math.

In the same way, if I only learn one part of the Gospel, can I then claim that I know THE Gospel? Or if I preach just one part of the Gospel, can I then say that I have actually preached “the Gospel?”

The answer to this question is a resounding “no.” The Gospel is not at all like Math in that sense. The Gospel is instead more like a cake. As a friend of mine so cleverly put it, if you only have half the ingredients of a cake, you don’t have a cake at all. You have a couple eggs and some salt, but that’s not a cake–that’s scrambled eggs.

And that is what we get when we only preach half the Gospel–we get a scrambled eggs theology that ultimately looks nothing like the Gospel we find in Scripture.

Some of you may be thinking this is a bit harsh. After all, if God is love, and we preach love, are we not still teaching the heart of God? I would argue no, because preaching God’s love without God’s judgment is to fundamentally misunderstand God’s love in the first place. God’s love is so radical because of the judgment that we deserve. He is a righteous, holy God who has every right to condemn us, yet He does not.

Thus to preach a Gospel of love without judgment is to domesticate God into some sort of warm and fuzzy deity in the sky who is devoid of wonder and fear-inspiring awe. It is also to make the cross utterly incoherent. Why would God let His Son endure such a gruesome death if not for his sense of justice?

What’s more, you have to look at the implications of “half the Gospel.” Yes, Jesus cared about the poor, but if our ultimate goal is to feed the poor and clothe the hungry without ever addressing people’s spiritual needs, then what are we left with? Say that we were able to clothe everyone, feed everyone, and heal everyone, would that change eternity one bit? No. Scripture tells us that life on earth is but an instant compared to eternity, so we would be laboring to make one instant better, while ignoring the glaring blind spot of peoples’ eternal needs. As Derek Webb puts it, we would ultimately be clothing corpses.

In this way, half the Gospel is not really the Gospel at all–it is either secular social activism, or Pharisaic religiosity, but it is not the Gospel. For that reason, keep your eyes and ears open for these speakers of half-truth. And more importantly, make sure your life preaches the whole truth, because half the truth is actually little more than a dressed up lie.

In case you missed it, last night Pastor Mark Driscoll appeared on Nightline along with several other individuals debating the issue of whether or not Satan exists. Driscoll does a fantastic job of defending this traditional, orthodox doctrine, so I encourage you to check it out!

Click here to see the video.

This is what I’ll be watching for my Friday night!

This post serves as the second part in a series that my friend, Joe Jones, is writing on 1 Corinthians 2. Joe will be speaking at my ministry’s worships service Tuesday night, so this post serves as a forerunner to that message.

Joe is a wise man, as well as humble–which you can gather from this picture of him.

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WISDOM: Content & Context

The term ‘wisdom’ is a big deal in Christian circles. We go to churches, ministries, and Bible-studies because we believe they offer wisdom. We pray for wisdom. We get all warm inside when people call us wise. But for all the talk we do about wisdom, I often wonder what exactly Christians mean when we talk about wisdom. I’ve asked many of my friends this question, and I found that though we talk about “wisdom” or “wise decision-making”, we rarely break from using general terms; therefore, a clear and particular definition of wisdom was hard to pin down.

I believe 1 Corinthians may provide Christians with a helpful definition of wisdom.

Paul (the author or Corinthians) defines wisdom in two ways:

First, he defines it as having a lot of what my great-grandmother called “fancy book learnin’” (1:20). It is the type of wisdom that we see in people who write and debate well. A good example of this is Ben Stein. Ben Stein is so smart that in the 90’s there was a game show in which, to win, you had to prove you knew more than Ben Stein. In reality, I’m sure there are a bunch of people out there with Noble Prizes who are smarter than Ben Stein, but I can’t pronounce their names, and they aren’t on TV very often.

The second way Paul defines wisdom is understanding the purpose of life (2:12). This type of wisdom is not simply about having knowledge, but how to use that knowledge as well. This is the wisdom we associate with Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela – Less reality television but more C-Span and CNN!

What I love about Paul’s definition of wisdom in 1 Corinthians is that Paul does NOT mark either type of wisdom as bad. Instead Paul urges people to be careful–it is one thing to possess wisdom, but quite another to be a good steward of it.
In my efforts to acquire both types of wisdom, it’s helpful to remember that I can’t discover the second type of wisdom on my own. As Paul explains, only God can reveal the purpose of life, and He reveals it to individuals who are humble enough to admit, “I know far less than I think I do.”

What’s more, 99% of my non-Christians friends that are weirded-out by Evangelicals or Southern Baptists are actually quite comfortable talking about Jesus. What they can’t stand is when Christians try to prove we are wise through our exceptional debating skills. They are turned off when we are passionate for the first type of wisdom, all the while neglecting the second.

A very famous anti-Christian philosopher once said, “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”

It breaks my heart to think that a man with such an astute definition of wisdom was inspired to hate Christianity by the actions of a few Christians living apart from a 1 Corinthians definition of wisdom.

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To read more of Joe’s writing, check out his blog at www.iagreewithjoe.com

Next week at my ministry’s worship service Joe Jones will be speaking on 1 Corinthians 2 and the topic of wisdom. In preparation for his talk, Joe is going to be posting 2 blogs as a lead-up to Tuesday night. Joe is one of my best friends and a powerful communicator of the Word, so even though many of you won’t be able to attend his talk next week, I guarantee you will be challenged and entertained by his writing.

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One of the funniest things I remember about my childhood is that I firmly believed my father would accidentally spank me to death. I would freak out so much over spankings people thought my parents were abusive –though my parents never were.

The main reason I thought I would die is that my father is huge. He’s about 6’7,” weighs 300-something pounds. He’s so big that every time he would visit my elementary school, kids would talk for days about how I was being raised by a giant. This was awesome, because in the fiercely competitive social battle war-zone that was Dowell Elementary School, the only thing cooler than having a giant dad was having a Nintendo Power Glove.

The confusion concerning my dad spanking me to death was not my only childhood misconception. I thought all dinosaurs were big alligators, I thought babies were made when people hugged in bed, and thought the tooth fairy was just an old lady that collected teeth while riding in a magical flying ferry boat.

There is a name for the specific type of misconceptions that are popular among children – Kid Logic. In particular, Kid Logic is defined as the misconceptions children have about the world that is caused by an over-confidence in the small amount of knowledge they do have.

As I get older, I am convinced that Kid Logic is also a popular phenomenon in the church. More often than I would like, when I’m traveling and speaking at conferences I’ll hear a Christian who read a few books on evangelism or led a couple of Bible studies ranting about how some other set of Christians is wrong or how Christians on their campus should REALLY be doing ________ . And I quietly think to myself – that’s Christian Kid Logic. Christian Kid Logic is when Christians with a little bit of knowledge about God become so over over-confident in our beliefs that we start making claims about what the entire Christian world SHOULD be doing.

The dangers of Christians applying Kid logic is not a new issue. Case in point: 1 Corinthians chapter 2.

At the beginning of 1 Corinthians 2, the author is telling a group of Christians to stop arguing over which Christian preachers and scholars know the most about God. This type of Christian debate also happens a lot in the modern church. Just insert modern arguments over which worship music style is best, church size, and/or what type of preaching is best, and you find yourself with a modern version of this very old fight.

The author of 1 Corinthians does something unexpected. He argues that truth is not simply revealed through logic or the possession of knowledge, but also through experience. Why would he argue this? Because there will always be intelligent men and women who can effectively use complex logic and articulate language to give the appearance of truth in almost any argument. However, truth that is supported by experience over the passage of time is very difficult to fake.

Hitler used logic to argue Aryans were a super race; scientists once claimed slavery was necessary for the development of the savage natives ; and according to record sales statistics, the Jonas Brothers should be considered a legitimate music group – experience and time have revealed all three beliefs to be categorically false.

In short, the beginning of 1 Corinthians chapter 2 is saying that the problem of Christians using Kid Logic is not that Christians have not read enough books to make better arguments. Rather, Christians need to live such that our life experience reveals to both ourselves, and the rest of the world, that Christ is true.

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To read more of Joe’s writing, check out his blog at www.iagreewithjoe.com