Category: Christian Living

What I Learned from StarGate Movie

I’m a sucker for magical and sci-fi movies and TV shows. If a show involves anything remotely related to supernatural powers, flying, magic, time travel, and legends, I’d watch it. So I watched the movie StarGate, the prelude to one of the longest running TV shows in America, StarGate S-1.

I’m also a sucker of good theology. I often kid myself that when I grow up, I would like to be a combination of John Piper, Jonathan Edwards, RC Sproul and D. A. Carson. If I could manage to get a bit of Philip Yancey and Charles Swindoll on the side, that would be really, really awesome.

If you think there’s a huge disconnect about me liking magical fantasies and sound theology, relax. C. S. Lewis did it. I’m not alone. Now back to StarGate.

The StarGate movie had a simple plot. Egyptian civilization was started by the sun god Ra using his advanced technology. He came to earth via a device called StarGate, a portal that could take you to other galaxies. Ra took some ancient Egyptians to another planet to work as his slaves, but in order to avoid the mistake he did with Egyptians from Earth, he outlawed reading and writing there. The people spoke Ancient Egyptian dialect but they can’t read and write simple glyphs.

Ignorance kept the people on the yoke of slavery. Illiteracy bound them for generations. Not knowing and “not caring about knowing” subjected them to hard labor, fear and superstition, until the reading of ancient, worn out glyphs paved the way for their freedom. Egyptologist Daniel Jackson broke their chains with simple knowledge.

The spiritual parallel is unmistakable here. But unlike them, we suffer from information overload to the point that we consciously avoid necessary information. When you begin to speak or write something sensible, people’s automatic response is: “That’s deep! You’re weird.”

Critical thinking is never deep. It should be as normal as breathing. Careful analysis is never weird. It should be natural to anyone who is sane. Herd mentality and gullibility, that’s what’s weird. Following fads without asking WHY, that’s deep, as in deeply disturbing.

Ours is a culture of ignorance by choice. And if our society and culture go down the drain, we have nothing to blame but our self imposed ignorance and refusal to read and write sensibly.

Self Repair

A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can, to some extent, repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble- because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.

That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or- if they think there is not- at least they hope to deserve approval from good men.

But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as a roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.

Source: Clive Staples Lewis, Mere Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 1980) p64.

We Have Shrunk

In a consumerist world where advertising reigns and ethical and spiritual ideas must kneel in the presence of the almighty market, we have become “insubstantial” people with “thin” selves. In other words, we are not deeply rooted in any sense.

Oftentimes, we don’t think profoundly; we don’t connect meaningfully; we don’t focus extendedly. We can all too easily flit through life, trying new experiences, inventing new selves through online media. We watch endless amounts of television, keep a constant vigil over our email accounts, and update 800 of our closest friends when we make a piece of toast, but we often cannot be bothered to read, or think, or delve into the lives of unbelievers who are everywhere around us.

We have focused on ourselves, pumping ourselves up through self-esteem exercises, redefining our sins as “tendencies” that require therapy of one kind or another, and discarding traditional marks of maturity to gratify desires we refuse to tame. In the process, we have not grown. We have shrunk.

Source: Owen Strachan and Doug Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards on True Christianity (Moody Publishers, 2010) p41.

Guard Your Heart

Guard your heart…

“Let it be closely garrisoned. Let the sentinel never be sleeping at its post . . . if the citadel is be taken, the whole town must surrender. If the heart be seized, the whole man—the affections, desires, motives, pursuits—all will be yielded up.

The heart is the vital part of the body. A wound here is instant death. Thus—spiritually as well as naturally—out of the heart are the issues of life. It is the great vital spring of the soul, the fountain of actions, the center and the seat of principle, both of sin and holiness (Matthew 12:34–35).

The natural heart is a fountain of poison (Matthew 15:19). The purified heart is a well of living water (John 4:14). As is the fountain, so must be the streams. As is the heart, so must be the mouth, the eyes, the feet.

Therefore, above all keeping, keep thine heart. Guard the fountain, lest the waters be poisoned. . . . Many have been the bitter moments from the neglect of this guard. All keeping is vain, if the heart not be kept.

Did you catch that? All Bible study, all mission trips, all marriage vows, and all worship is in vain if the heart is not kept.”

Source: Steve Farrar, How To Ruin Your Life by 40 (Moody Publishers, 2006) p128.