I was listening to the soundtrack from Where the Wild Things Are, more specifically the track called All is Love from Karen O and the Kids.

“L – O – V – E, It’s a mystery”

The lyric is repeated several times throughout the song and it got me thinking about how really fascinating the reality of ‘love’ is. From a purely rational standpoint, it doesn’t make all that much sense. Now, I know the naturalistic arguments for love. I just think they all sound to me like ditch efforts to explain something profoundly confusing. From my perspective, the practice and experience of love, outside of sexual pursuit, really is quite a mystery.

Why do two good friends care about one another, sometimes regardless of what the other one does, or does not do? Why do two brothers defend one another at the potential loss of their own lives? Why will a mother risk her other children to protect one?

To me, love really is mysterious.

I was just reading a short article on Gajitz.com about a Swiss team of scientists who developed a controlled colony of simple robots. After being introduced into a ‘natural’, evolution-like environment which involved communicating, feeding and mating, the robots eventually learned to lie to one another in order to starve their fellow robots and further their own progress.

All of it compounded to highlight the mesmerizing phenomenon that is human love. Impossible to neglect is the even wilder notion that an immortal, all-powerful, all-knowing God would love creatures of his own imagination that fail even his most basic standards. And a plan, devised by that being, for redemption which involves deep-seated self-sacrifice would then seem absolutely ludicrous.

Yet, this is what we believe and in this we place our faith. And for me, the basic phenomenon of love is an impossible evidence to ignore.

In the book of acts, when Paul was in Philipi preaching the word a woman Lydia heard what he said and believed the word of the Lord. The action of believing was hers—she believed.

But look what the text says. Acts 16:14:

One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.

Although her actions were her own—she listened—God had distinct responsibility in her believing. That can’t be ignored.

Community on NBC is my favorite new comedy to come along since The Office. Smart, Witty and delightfully dumb. Plus, it’s generally pretty tame in its sense of humor. In other words, most jokes are about pop-culture, not sex—which I appreciate.

The most recent episode, the Christmas episode, made a point to poke fun at religion in general, which each member of the ‘community’ having a different, stereotypical religious belief. There’s the Jewish girl, the middle eastern Muslim boy, the African American Jehovah’s Witness, the feminist atheist, the born again Christian woman, the older liberal man who’s in a cult but doesn’t know it, and the main character who’s an agnostic.

When they introduce everyone’s belief, the main Character reveals that he is agnostic. The others scoff at him insisting that he’s too ‘lazy’ to decide what he believes. It was a comical discussion, but it got me thinking about the Church’s various theological makeup.

An extremely large portion of the church finds itself as a sort of “agnostic Christian”. Of course, not in the literal sense of the word.

Religiously speaking, an agnostic is “a person who claims that they cannot have true knowledge about the existence of God (but does not deny that God might exist)”. In Christianity, many people take the complexity of theology and conclude that we simply cannot know the right answer and sit non-committedly in ambiguous belief. They’re mostly unwilling to place definitions on God, or on the way God works.

But, this is simply wrong. We are able to look at scripture and draw confident conclusions about God and how he works. While we shouldn’t scoff at anyone’s belief, we should encourage our brothers and sisters not to rest in ‘agnostic Christianity’, but to seek the scriptures and draw conclusions.

I strongly believe that it is important to know what we believe and why. Even if that belief isn’t necessarily ‘right’, knowing our beliefs about God is important and much healthier than giving up because we think it’s too complicated.

People have a lot of different ideas about God and Jesus and the Christian life. Many of them may not necessarily be right, but people can still have a fruitful walk while believing and adhering to them. The rightness or wrongness of our theology isn’t what makes us Christians. God makes us Christians through our faith in his redeeming power.

But I think there is at least one disposition that is a kind of prerequisite. Whether it’s understood with this language, or in a less concrete or intellectual sense.

It’s from the end of Job where God is rebuking Job and his friends for their presumptuous attitudes.

“Who has first given to me, that I should repay him?
    Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine”

Christians must believe that God is all and that we have no claim that we can stake before him. We cannot believe that God owes us something. This would be contrary to grace, which is the only ground our salvation stands on.

Although a lot about me has changed since becoming a Christian, to this day, the most notable change was inside. I can remember my thoughts before knowing Christ. They were self-centered in an absolute sense. Now, all Christians will struggle with self-centeredness. It’s not something that’s going to completely go away. But before coming to Christ, there was no struggle. All streams of thought led back to me.

It was after believing that I changed. The shift was subtle, but far reaching. As a Christian, the self-centeredness I will always have to fight, is now naturally swimming with a concern for other people, regardless of what benefit it might bring me.

After a discussion with an old friend the other night, I was thinking about the topic of assurance. Having confidence that we are numbered with the redeemed. It’s something we’re taught to find in the fruit of our life. If we are Christians, is it manifested somewhere? That’s where all these thoughts collide.

1 John 3:14:

“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love, abides in death.”

Of course, this passage doesn’t nutshell everything I’ve just said. But the idea is represented.

When we shift from death into new life, the most notable change will be love. We’re all going to continue to struggle in various ways and to various degrees depending on where and through what God is leading us. But love will surely be present and it will guide more of us than we think. And I think there’s assurance in that.

I’m slowly reading through Albert Mohler’s new book Atheism Remix. The book is about the “new” atheism in America, which I won’t go to great length to describe right now. The gist is that the last 50 years has seen a shift from the intellectual elite down, in which it is not longer “dangerous” not to believe in God, but rather, it is dangerous to believe in God.

Mohler does a good job showing this in the context of our current culture, but you’re just going to have to take my word for it right now.

But, what struck me yesterday was something Mohler quoted while profiling Daniel Dennett, one of Mohler’s “four horsemen of the New Atheism”. Dennet believes that every aspect of existence can be described with the evolutionary theory. All consciousness can be reduced to that one basic process. He claims belief in deity to be part of that process. At one point in time, that belief must have produced a reproductive advantage, but now no longer does and so it will soon die out, but not immediately.

Dennett sees culture by and large, no longer believing in God, but rather, “believing in belief”. A strange statement to be sure, but it kind of makes sense. More any more people believe in a religious relativism. “What’s true for you isn’t true for me.” Of course, this kind of thinking has a short fuse. If something is true and we don’t believe it, wouldn’t that make us foolish? Stupid? And, if something is "true" for someone else, but we don’t believe it, then how can we really believe what is "true" for us? Hence, Dennett’s point. People believe less, but believe more in believing.

To support his point that few people actually believe in God these days, Mohler paraphrased Dennett saying:

"They really are not claiming cognitively to believe in God, because… if they really believed in God then they would have to live differently than they do."

He’s right. It’s logical. And, it’s the proof that much of the church isn’t really the church and the New Testament confirms it (1 John 1:6-7). If people had an honest belief in God, they would be forced to live differently than they do.

When a person believes they can be seriously injured in a car accident, they buckle their seatbelt. When a person believes they can be robbed, they lock their doors. When  person believes in God, in Jesus, they fall to their knees at the realization of their destitution and repent. They live differently than they do.

Dennett may be wrong about God, but I doubt he is wrong about the conditions of belief and the conditions of hearts. We would be foolish to ignore it.