At least a couple of times during my first couple years as a Christian, my beliefs over certain theological things were shaken dramatically. I was forced to reassess my stance.  Both times that I can remember clearly, I resisted changing my belief because doing so would be a shot to my pride and I would have to own that.

Reading in Galatians this morning, it occurred to me that if anyone else had experienced this kind of thing, it was probably Paul. Galatians 1:22-23:

And I was still unknown in person to the churches of Judea that are in Christ. They only were hearing it said, "He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy."

There’s a reason people use the term ‘Pauline Conversion’ when talking about people’s dramatic changes in opinion. It’s because scarcely was there ever a person who made a more spectacular 180 degree turn.

Paul was actually a violent opponent to the Gospel. After God struck him on the road, the greater portion of his theological belief was turned on its head. He stopped persecuting the church and instead, became a part of it and preached the Gospel with more vigor than nearly all of his contemporaries in the Church.

Thank God the Holy Spirit convicted him with the potency that he did and that he didn’t tarry, resisting the discovery of this truth, since he eventually became the author of most of the New Testament.

When our convictions are shaken and changed, we should not to give our pride space to stop us. If we discover we are mistaken in our belief, we should humbly accept that we were wrong and move into what we have discovered. Not like I have, sitting, resisting, insisting that somehow our original belief was right—just for the sake of saving face.

In Tim Keller’s book Counterfeit God’s he has a chapter devoted to the allurement of power and how, as human beings, we often elevate power a success (both socially and professionally) to the level of a deity.

As Americans we often have the idea that we can do ‘whatever we set our mind to’, but Keller asserts that:

“We are not nearly as responsible for our success as our popular views of God and reality lead us to think.”

As Keller describes, we have a tendency to want to see our lives as a blank canvas for us to draw on as we go. As children and young adults, we see things in our family and parents that we vow never to emulate. But before long, any rational assessment of our lives will reveal just how much our family and life circumstances have shaped who we are, what we do and what we like to do.

With just a quick step back, we can see these are things we have had no control over whatsoever. We do no choose when we are born, where we are born and to whom we are born.

If these are three things shape a massive amount of our character and person, they are also sure weights in the balance of our success in all kinds of areas of life.

We are therefore profoundly naive to ever honestly believe we are really ‘in control of our destiny’ so to speak. If we believe in the God of the bible, we must be humble and confess that we are not in control of our lives in the way that we would like to be.

Keeping this in mind is a humbling thing and massive step toward trusting God and having confidence in his decision making.

I am one who enjoys a healthy debate. I like a good, sometimes heated, discussion about serious matters. Okay, even some not-so-serious matters. On more than one occasion I have seen substantial shifts in my opinion come from a good debate. And, I’ve known plenty of others who share that experience.

But, with the internet nosing its way into virtually every part of our lives, more and more often those healthy discussions take up residence on the net. And from there, they suffer from a kind of environmental infection rendering them almost completely useless. In fact, I’d even venture to say harmful.

Yeah, you read that correctly. Internet debate, I think, almost always leads nowhere good.

I think it has a lot to do with the impersonal nature of the internet. We’re all covered in what we feel is a shroud of privacy when we converse on the net. In real life we tend to avoid conflict. But on the net most people come out guns-a-blazin’. In less mature circles, online debate spirals into a flame war.

But in more mature circles, I think it manifests in far more subtle ways.

For example. In real life, conversations and debates usually progress nugget by nugget and our answers are not usually rehearsed. They coming off the cuff. That means the conversation moves bit by bit. Rarely is one detail exhausted, but rather, many small details are swept over as the come up in conversation.

But, on the internet it’s just the opposite. I am able to state an opinion or an idea. Someone who disagrees is then able to respond to me. But, instead of responding to one portion of what I said and following the conversation from there like we would in real life, they are able to respond to every detail all at once. Researching on the net, revising their thoughts and looking for leaks in their argument. All before ever hitting submit. That might sound like a benefit. But I don’t think that it is.

See, from there, if the person who had the thought in the first place wishes to respond, it will have to be in length. Once again responding to each point. This, while our facts may be right, does more for our pride than anything else. And by the time the debate is over, you have a thread of conversation that would make a masters thesis blush.

And, as I mentioned before, I think it mostly comes back to the impersonal nature of the internet.

When you converse with someone in real life, by simply making your opinion known, or contending with someone else’s, you are exposing yourself to vulnerability. And, in order for debate to actually be healthy and have any positive impacts on us, we have to be vulnerable to a reasonable extent. It’s humility 101. Something almost no one exercises on the internet.

I submit that the invulnerability we feel on the internet goes a long way to nullifying our debates and making them essentially useless. So for me, I will try and keep my serious debate (at least with those I do not know well) in the real world… or at least video chat.

As Christ was being crucified, he was offered bitter wine, mixed with gall. He probably didn’t know exactly what they were offering him. Well, at least not in any human sense.

Matthew 27:33-34:

“And when they came to a place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull), they offered him wine to drink, mixed with gall, but when he tasted it, he would not drink it.”

When I read this today, for some reason it reminded me of my niece. Like many children her age (about 10 years old), she is a picky eater. Often times she won’t even try things she doesn’t already know she likes. Even adults often times don’t like to try new things for similar, although more developed, reasons.

When you break it down, they amount to a kind of human pride. We don’t like to be at other people’s mercy. It makes us uncomfortable. The very act of trying something offered to us takes some level of humility.

This instance of Jesus, crucified on the cross, trying the sour vwine offered to him by his executioners is, I think, an amazing picture of the depth of Jesus’ humility.

He did not go bound to the cross with his chest proudly puffed up. No, he went in the profundity of humility. Though he could have deduced that even that act of ‘mercy’ would be girded with cruelty, he didn’t even deny the offer. He tried the sour wine and only after tasting it did he turn it away.

That is absolutely amazing.

A few days ago I posted the lyrics to a song I’ve been stuck on. It’s called The Underdog, by a group known as ‘Spoon’. In the song, the chorus lyric is repeated several times:

You got no time for the messenger,
got no regard for the thing that you don’t understand,
you got no fear of the underdog,
that’s why you will not survive!

I was thinking of it earlier as I read in Proverbs 30, about the four exceedingly wise, yet very small things. It goes like this. Proverbs 30:24-28:

Four things on earth are small,
   but they are exceedingly wise:
the ants are a people not strong,
   yet they provide their food in the summer;
the rock badgers are a people not mighty,
   yet they make their homes in the cliffs;
the locusts have no king,
   yet all of them march in rank;
the lizard you can take in your hands,
   yet it is in kings’ palaces.

It reminded me of how easy it is for us to look down on people of different circumstances from our own. As Americans, it seems bred into us that we’re the pinnacle of what good society looks and acts like. But this isn’t necessarily true.

Ants store up food, rock badgers can live in treacherous terrain, locust march in rank and lizards get to live in the palace of a king.

Indeed, Christians in China have it more difficult than we do here. But they are seeing disciples made and the church spread. Christians in Africa struggle to find clean water, but they’re not weighed down by materialism.

The verse in Proverbs (and the song by Spoon, also I suppose), calls us to be humble. We have to realize that while there are some aspects of our society that are excellent, it has it’s own detrimental shortcomings too, and exporting our way of life will only export our problems, as well.

I don’t really ever play video games. I have an xbox 360, but it only gets my attention for about 45 minutes once ever couple months. Most people would probably call that a good thing. Well, in this case it actually turned out to be the problem.

See, I signed up for xbox Live about six months ago. (In case you’ve been under a rock for the past three years, xbox Live is the online is the online multiplayer subscription service offered by Microsoft). The subscription costs about eight bucks a month. A comparatively small sum. I signed up for the service thinking that I might play online with friends. This never happened.

Several months went by. I didn’t use the service. Instead the system collected dust. At one time I attempted to cancel the service, but I couldn’t find a way to do so in the xbox menu. So, I gave up, rationalizing the purchase by thinking perhaps I’ll decide to play in the future. This of course never happened.

Fast foreword to today.

I was going through some general lifestyle cleanup. Taking care of old papers, cleaning out drawers and cabinets. And, coming upon the xbox, cancelling an unused expenditure.

So, I called Microsoft to cancel the account. They asked for the usual information. Name, email, username, last four digits of the credit card used for billing. I gladly gave them all of these, but they couldn’t get into my account. It would seem that somehow I didn’t have the credit card anymore.

I became increasingly frustrated with the billing representative as she basically said, “If you can’t give us those numbers, we can’t cancel the account”. I was pretty steamed. So I asked for her supervisor. Which, in fact, just proved to be a reboot to the whole process. Eventually, I let her have it. All of my frustration with the corporate system (and likely pent up rage against Microsoft over the years) spilled out at this poor woman on the phone.

I felt justified in my lashing out. At least until I caught a subtle tone in the woman’s voice. Something like, “I really am trying as hard as I can here and I’m frustrated too, just stop yelling at me”. I know, it’s impressive that I could pick that all out of a tone. But it’s the truth it was all there. Suddenly, I felt pretty bad.

It also happened to be at this moment that the woman came across an account that was almost exactly like mine, except missing a letter. She asked what password I signed up with. When I confirmed it she was able to see all of my information.

To my horror, I discovered that I had given her none of the right information in order to look up my account. Why? Because when I signed up months ago, I used false information. Not even a real address. The problems in the billing department couldn’t have possibly been more clearly my fault. Once this was done, she sped through the cancellation process. She asked if I needed anything else, then jumped quickly into a closing script that concluded with a the phone hanging up.

I wanted to apologize. I wanted to explain my frustration and tell her that it was wrong of me to have lost my temper with her.

But it ended too quickly and I didn’t get a chance to say it.

It’s too late now to express my regret. But it was indeed a shot in the arm from my nemesis in the software world. Humility is a bitter pill—with any luck I won’t need to take it for something like this again!

It was over four years ago now. Although it seems much longer. I was leading a small group of high school guys. And, of those guys, I was teaching a smaller, more intensive discipleship group.

The discipleship crew would meet once a week and study the Word. I would come each week with a handout to guide our discussions. They would usually be in question-answer format and would also serve as my own notes. Today, one of the guys from that group asked me if he could get copies of those handouts to give to one of his friend’s who is a new Christian.

The question made me a little nervous at first. When I started the small group and discipleship group I was only beginning to explore the more intricate parts of Christian theology; In retrospect, I’m not sure I was a good person to do the job I was doing. So the idea of giving handouts from that time could potentially be quite humbling—and no one likes that (Okay, 95% kidding)!

But, I wasn’t about to be that defensive about my ego. So I obliged and I decided print them out for him. As I’ve been doing so, what I’ve found has been surprising.

When my pursuit of theological understanding finally brought me to questions of destiny and predestiny and of course the larger questions of Calvinism—I fought hard against the argument. I was raised believing staunchly in the absolute free-will of man. Although not on the basis of any spiritual authority, but simply on a kind of that’s-the-way-things-are way. Some of the basic claims of Calvinism cast serious doubt on those ideas.

You see, when I became a Christian, I wasn’t discipled much into anything; no specific doctrinal position—except the discipline to read the bible. So that’s what I did, I read the bible. What I apparently didn’t realize was that  the foundational teachings of Calvinism were being laid in my mind all by themselves—just from reading the bible.

Today, as I’m going back through and reading these handouts, I’m realizing that my thoughts at this time were already Calvinistic in nature. No one had taught me, no one had explained it to me. In fact, my religious upbringing would probably call these claims heretical. Yet, simply searching scripture on my own brought me to what I would later understand as “Calvinism”.

I find that to be pretty fascinating. It bolsters my confidence in the Word of God being able to teach a reader the truth all on its own. That’s pretty cool, I think.