Jesus Psychology

What did Christians do before there were so many self-help books written on the subject of being…well, a Christian? A quick search of Amazon shows 23, 288 Christian books that will bring us closer to God. Not one is the Bible.

There is a large Christian reading audience who might not realize that some books published by Christian publishers and sold as Christian books, are more psychology than Christianity. And the writers have captive audiences. They hawk their books on the church summer tour schedule, standing in the place of a vacationing pastors.

Each year Americans purchase millions of self-help books, and though they’re not geared specifically toward the Christian audience, they often carry a generic spiritual message. Recently self-help has migrated successfully into Christianity with similar behaviorism messages, such as weight loss, how to be smarter, richer, and happier, only these themes lose the generic spiritual note for Biblical authority.

How does a discerning Christian know what to read, and are the writers qualified to interpret the Bible as a self-help guide?

1 Corinthians 3-4, Peter explains that each of us builds on the foundation of Christ, but we should be careful how we build. He also tells us that though you may have ten thousand teachers in Christ, you do not have many fathers. “Through the Good News I became your father in Christ Jesus.” The good news is the Bible.

Besides questioning if Christian self-help books over simplify physiological problems that perhaps a trained professional should evaluate, reading is way down the list for most people. Everyone’s life is jam packed these days. TV and the Internet vies for any down time. So I question churches pushing books on how to be a better Christian on Sunday’s rather than encouraging their congregation to spend free time reading the Bible, the first source of answers.
Is there an underlying message being delivered that the average Christian can’t interpret the Bible message and we must go “outside” the source and seek interpretation? There could be something dangerous about that, as it can give Christian writers celebrity status, taking the glory away from Christ.

All well said, and from an author who left the secular publishing to write for the Christian market. Still, my questions do force me to think about what I want to put into print and why I want to put it there and if the Holy Spirit is leading the way.

In 1 Corinthians Paul also talks about the gifts from the Holy Spirit. There are different kinds of gifts, such as writing, and we can glorify God through this gift. The Spirit gives the person wisdom to speak with knowledge about God, and this can be written for other Christians. But are psychological concepts Biblical?

I recently went to a Sunday service that had a guest speaker who wrote a book about weight loss. This service had me thinking that psychological concepts can be oversimplified in a church setting, produce shame, worry and guilt, emotions many come to church already carrying as their painful yokes.

Self help should be a personal choice. Essentially we’ll never change unless we want to change. The first step is making the decision. Churches can offer courses to better our lives, and instill Biblical principles into those programs, but is Sunday the place to sell psychology mixed with Christianity?

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with reading books that will improve our lives, but a little awareness of what we’re reading, who wrote it and why we’re reading it, will keep us from watering down the Word with pop-psychology. God can answer all our questions without interpretation, and he can work through trained physiologists if we’re battling more serious problems such as depression or addictions. Books can often spark ideas, give encouragement, offer another way of understanding the Word, but they never do the work that we need to do on our own.

Remember the next time a guest speaker is tackling a humanistic topic on Sunday morning that he’s selling a book. If the Holy Spirit has anointed it, we’ll know through the heart. The most important place to find the truth about all of our life is in the Bible and prayer.

Read the Bible for Life and trust God will speak directly to us.

Atheism and The Cross

Our Christian God, our God of Moses, Abraham and Jesus Christ is being portrayed as an intolerant evil SOB who cracks a whip of hate, intolerance, violence, fanaticism and zealotry. His followers are automatically gay haters, contemptuous of the environment, anti-abortionists (which means we abhor woman’s-rights), reject same sex marriage, and if you say “out loud” you love Jesus, you’re automatically classified as a fundamentalist–or worse.

The day I was dunked into the Pacific Ocean and accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior, I stopped and at the shore and picked up my Cross.

Being a Christian is a hostel place, it was 2000 years ago and it is today.

I generally write about my experiences with a church in America that blended Christanity and Hinduisum, and I’m in the middle of a series, but I had to weigh in on atheism. One of the reasons I’m interested in this subject is I’ve had a few strange conversations with people who are parroting high profile atheists who are pumping out propaganda through publishing houses, media, colleges, and the internet. In particular best sellers, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, have started a buzz, and it’s spreading.

Approximately 1/3rd of the population of the earth carries the Cross and believes Jesus Christ is their Savior. There’s roughly 7 billion people on the planet, and that makes about 2.3 believers, according to one current atheist speaker, as suffering from a “kind of mental illness.” 2.3 billion people, according to another ashiest, have “blind faith.” Even if you take out the people who are uneducated and illiterate (97% of Americans are literate), you still have billions of people sized by a few popular atheists as having a defect in their emotional state.

Though this list is a few years old, here’s some stats on where Christians call home:

1. USA 224,457,000 85%
2. Brazil 139,000,000 93%
3. Mexico 86,120,000 99%
4. Russia 80,000,000 60%
5. China 70,000,000 5.7%
6. Germany 67,000,000 83%
7. Philippines 63,470,000 93%
8. United Kingdom 51,060,000 88%
9. Italy 47,690,000 90%
10. France 44,150,000 98%
11. Nigeria 38,180,000 45%

Apparently all of these people, in all these countries, are out of their minds, especially those who live in the first country to reach and walk on the moon. Oh, I forgot, some people don’t believe that, either.

Since becoming a Christian, I’ve learned there’s way more to being a Christian than believing in Christ and being saved. I truly, really, thought that Christians were that shallow. My thinking was in line with the atheism, only I pushed eastern thought in its stead.

In David Marshall’s book, The Truth behind the New Atheism, quotes Blaise Pascal (French mathematician, scientist and philosopher) as saying, “...Faith must not be lightly given, for “reason is a thing of God...”

When I accepted Christ, I had no clue the responsibility, and perhaps had taken it too lightly. To be honest, I was looking around at the bikini clad women thinking I looked fat in my shorts and T-shirt. When I had accepted Jesus as my savior that summer afternoon, I was a little naive walking into the waves, but God has changed all that. In here lies the testimony of a Christian, and every Christian converted at an age old enough to remember. Our stories of how Jesus Christ changed our lives can’t be harnessed in a test tube. Atheists try to retaliate by throwing facts and figures that, amazingly can't out number the sheer testimony of the human voice.

“But by any secular standard, Jesus is also the dominant figure of Western culture...much of what we now think of as Western ideas, inventions and values finds its source or inspiration in the religion that worships God in his name. Art and science, the self and society, politics and economics, marriage and the family, right and wrong, body and soul - all have been touched and often radically transformed by Christian influence. Seldom all at once, of course - and not always for the better....the same gospel he proclaimed has underwritten both democracy... Often persecuted - even today--” Newsweek 1999. 2000 Years of Jesus

When Atheists offend Christians, they offend our Western culture, our arts and science, the self and society, politics and economics and democracy.

While researching atheism in America, I came across a powerful article by George F Will:

“Modern science is about the strangeness of things: solid objects are mostly space; the experience of time is a function of speed; gravity bends light. The human mind no longer seems to be a sovereign "ghost in the machine"; it seems tied in unexplained ways to our physical selves, and to nature. The philosopher's question ("I can do what I want, but can I want what I want?") has become a general anxiety. We are born without intending to be, we die without intending to, and perhaps our intentions don't matter much in between. If neither reason nor passion makes the world go round, what does?

“...Science and religion seem, to many, less competitive than complementary because science deepens, rather than diminishes, the sense of life's mysteriousness, and religion speaks to anxieties science stirs.

“...But Christianity is a religion of unadjusted people whose obligation is to adjust to something that transcends the culture of the day, any day. That is why, 70 (99) years ago, Charles Peguy said that this century's real revolutionaries would be the parents of Christian families." Newsweek, October 15, 1979; George F. Will

And here we are, some raised in Christian families, some not, but all grown up, the largest diverse society known to humankind, and yet a small group of vocal atheists are trying to silence our voices, and so far, doing a remarkable job at getting their word out.