(note: Originally written my sophmore year of college in January 2003)
Continued from part VI (part V, part IV, part III, part II and part I)

Try and imagine that nothing you have ever taken for granted in your belief system is true. What am I trying to say? We look at scripture through a lens, that lens is our American society, our peers, our neighbors. That is not the lens through which we are to be looking at the Holy Scriptures. Rather we are to be looking at the text from the same perspective that we get from the text. We are to give, give, give. We sing about it in songs all the time, but some how in our rationalist, emotionalist type of society we can somehow sing those words offering in a sense our entire lives up to Christ, walk out the door and go about our life exactly how we want to. What really though does it mean to give it all up for Christ? The rich man was to sell everything. Another was not to go home even to bury his father. Maybe in our pleasure oriented (And please don’t think I’m saying pleasure is a bad thing) society, what we need to be giving up is those things which we and the society about us tells us, and believes is pleasurable. What if we were to give up drinking alcohol, completely. Not because alcohol is inherently bad or wrong in anyway, in fact it is God given and for our enjoyment, Jesus drank wine and even made wine from water. But, by drinking water and not alcohol we save X amount of dollars which we can give to those who do not even have bread, let alone clean drink. Even greater, what would it tell our neighbors when they see we can have just as much fun without alcohol? You might be saying, well they don’t see it that way. They see Christians not drinking as a command they have to follow or they will go to hell and they see Christians as stuck-up and holier-than-thou because of it. Maybe, so let us take this concept to things we never really think of. What if you choose not to go see movies in the theater? Not because there is anything inherently wrong with movies, or theaters (although many movies today feed a visual stream of images that leads us to anything but godliness). Rather, again it saves finances that can go to those who don’t even know the concept of entertainment, because their days are filled with the overwhelming desire for food. In addition, it would again show our neighbors there is something oddly different about us. It might say to them that we don’t need to escape in the action or drama or love of a movie to experience those feelings and emotions and longings of our human nature. Now, before I move any further I need to point something out. These assumptions that your neighbor will wonder what is different about you are based on the assumption that you yourself our still happy with out watching movies, without drinking alcohol, without a nice new car. It’s easy to say God is what truly makes you happy when your life is full of material blessings which you enjoy everyday, but is it really God that makes you happy or the things he gives you? Do you still feel empty sometimes? And have you ever felt down on yourself because you are sort of depressed and you feel ashamed because you have all this stuff and tons of other people don’t so you should be happy and feel blessed. Maybe the point is that stuff has nothing to do with the happiness thing at all. Maybe it’s that you somehow mistook the stuff God gave you for the place where you would find happiness. But rather God meant for you to have happiness in Him and experience the joy of that happiness in giving those things which you have been given to others. Who knows?

(This is the end of this series. Not because it’s complete, it’s just that’s as far as I got my sophomore year)