Chris Howlett

What Scares You?

“A great many people are trying to make peace, but that has already been done. God has not left it for us to do; all we have to do is to enter into it.” – Dwight L. Moody

A recent story in The Week asks, “What Are We Scared Of?” They report the results of several polls and studies about the causes of anxiety in America. 42% of us are afraid of a random mass shooting, up from 16% in 2015; 57% of teens worry about gunfire erupting at school; 74% of us are fearful of corrupt government officials; 64% fear another world war breaking out in the near future. Like so many other issues on which we can’t agree as a nation, we’re also divided on which is scarier: sharks or President Trump. 43% say sharks and 42% say Trump.

We live in an era of high anxiety. The 24-hour news cycle and social media are dominated by messages of conflict and potential disaster. Life seems to have become more tenuous and uncertain. Despite all the changes in society, there is a solid rock in which we can trust, a God who never changes. The Apostle Peter, speaking to a group of believers in a different age of anxiety wrote: “Throw all your anxiety onto him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7 CEB). 

Our heavenly Father sent his Son, Jesus, to be our Savior and Lord. He sends the Holy Spirit to be God’s presence with us. We can trust him to carry us through the deepest valleys and raging storms to experience the peace that surpasses human understanding. God is faithful and God is good.

Searching

“For we were the purpose of his embodiment, and for our salvation he so loved human beings as to come to be and appear in a human body.” – Athanasius of Alexandria

The 12^th century Buddhist poet, Saigyo Hoshi, wrote the following poem following a visit to a Shinto Grand Temple:

        God’s here?
        Who can know?
        Not I.
        Yet I sigh
        and tears flow
        tear on tear.

The world longs to experience ultimate reality. People want to believe in and experience a being and power greater than themselves. All human religion represents this longing, the human search for God.

The Christian faith is radically different. We believe God is in search for humans, that he sent his only Son, Jesus, to become human, so we could know him and know what it means to be truly human. The message of Christmas is one of the most needed messages in the world today. We’re not alone. Our lives have meaning. There is a purpose driving our existence. There is One who loves us and has reached out that we might know and love him.

This Christmas, my prayer is that you would know Jesus and live in such a way that your words and actions help others experience God’s presence and grace.

Rescued to Rescue

“For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.” Colossians 1:13 (NIV)

Katharina Groene, solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, was on a death march. She’d hiked 2,500 miles, beginning at the Mexican border, now, in Washington State, she had only 150 miles to go. The problem she faced was snow storms with no snowshoes. Nancy Abell met her about a month earlier on the trail and Nancy urged her to take a break, get off the trail, and procure the necessary equipment. Katharina kept marching forward in pursuit of her goal.

Back home, Nancy couldn’t stop thinking about the lone hiker in the mountains. When forecasters predicted two feet of snow, she called the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, explaining that Groene might be in trouble.

Katharina was in trouble. She grew dehydrated and disoriented, suffered from frostbite, and kept falling and struggling to get back up. Hypothermia set in. Surrounded by evergreens that were sinking under the weight of snow, she screamed for help. There was no one to hear her.

Officers launched a search and rescue mission and soon found her. They said she likely would have died within twenty-four hours had they not found her. 

Groene’s experience is a metaphor for all of humanity. We’ve been on a death march, going our own way, doing our own thing. We’ve ignored the goodness of God’s loving leadership. Instead of leaving us to our own devices, God launched a rescue mission. That’s what we celebrate at Christmas. God, himself, has come looking for us.

Now, that we’ve been rescued, we get to join God on his mission, searching for those hopelessly lost in great need. They’re all around us. How can we, as a family of missionary servants, join God in rescuing people, offering a life-saving relationship with his Son, Jesus? This is our mission, if we choose to accept it.

An Alternative Approach to Advent

“The depravity of [humankind] is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.” – Malcolm Muggeridge

The themes of the four Sundays of Advent in the medieval church were death, judgment, heaven, and hell. The last Sunday before Christmas Eve, worshipers focused on hell. Bring a friend!

What a strange divergence from today’s hope, peace, joy, and love! Fleming Rutledge, in her new book, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, points to the logic behind the sombre themes. She writes, “The idea was–and is–to show how the light of the birth of Christ appeared against a backdrop of darkness, depravity, and despair.”

We’d like to believe the world is progressing right along, and in many ways it is. Desperate poverty is at an all-time low in the history of humanity. There've been tremendous advances in medicine. But, in other, more ominous ways, that may have far-reaching and progress-reversing implications, our society, particularly Western Culture, is on a downward spiral. The current political climate with the relentless demonization of the other serves as an example. The violence in the streets of many cities around the U.S. and Europe doesn’t bode well for our overall direction. Whatever happened to a good old-fashioned protest? Now, we’re burning cars, destroying property, and threatening our opponents with physical harm. All the while, a new and virulent form of political correctness is snuffing out free speech, the hallmark of a liberated people.

Against the backdrop of this darkness, we look to the coming of the light. Advent is a season of anticipation, of hopeful expectation, that the current reality can, and is, being undermined by Jesus Christ and his followers. It’s a call to action, that we would follow the way of Jesus and learn to love others, even those with whom we disagree, perhaps especially them.

Pasta, Forgiveness, and Second Chances

“I believe in the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of ignorance.” – Adlai E. Stevenson

Three American college students studying in Italy decided to do their own cooking one day. They purchased pasta from the local market, took it home, and commenced cooking. I’m not sure how long the young women had been in Italy, but it couldn’t have been long because they'd obviously never witnessed the proper pasta process. In their attempt at culinary excellence, they prepared the pasta sans water.

A fire ensued and spread, damaging the kitchen before being dowsed. The Italian newspaper, La Nazione, published a story about the students’ misadventure and, of course, most of the online comments were of the negative variety.

However, the story attracted the attention of restauranteur Fabio Picchi, who offered the students a four-hour cooking lesson that concluded with lunch with his chefs at his restaurant in Florence.

Aren’t you glad your most embarrassing foibles weren’t published in the paper? Even if they were, we can look to redemption through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who loves us even when others find us repulsive. Jesus is always ready to take us by the hand and show us a better way.

Virtue Signaling in Light of Lent

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us.” – C.S. Lewis

Virtue signaling is a thing. It’s a major form of communication on social media, especially Twitter. In our age of high anxiety, where every action and statement is intensely scrutinized by the political correctness police, virtue signaling has become a way of indicating that one is in the “high moral ground camp.” Most virtue signaling is empty. It’s just signaling. The virtue signaler tries to demonstrate they’re on the good side of the political or social debate and that their opponents are bad and ought to be outcast. They’ll take no substantive action to right a wrong or bring healing and hope to the world, other than their signaling, “Look at me! I’m one of the good guys!”

Ash Wednesday brings us back to earth. It can help me see that I’m not one of the good guys. I’m broken like the rest of humanity. My brokenness may express itself in ways that differ from your brokenness, but we’re all broken. We’re like Humpty Dumpty. We’ve fallen and we can’t get up.

Lent, this season of self-examination, is a good time to reflect on the futility of our own efforts to make ourselves appear good. We want to be good so that we can be worthy of God’s love. It doesn’t work that way. We’re not good. We don’t have to be good for God to love us. Like C.S. Lewis said, God can make us good, he can transform us, not based on anything good in us, but based on the goodness of his love.

Jesus came into the world, not to condemn the world, like the Twitter virtue signalers. Instead, Jesus came to save the world by taking the concrete actions of love and sacrifice on behalf of you and me. To receive his love is to admit that I’m not virtuous, but desperately in need of his grace. This Lenten season, reflect on how you need the grace of God and place your life into the loving embrace of Jesus.

A Solid Foundation?

“Without a solid foundation, you’ll have trouble creating anything of value.” – Erika Oppenheimer

The Millennium Tower in San Francisco is the tallest residential building in San Francisco. The luxury condominium high-rise was opened in 2009 to residents. It’s a 58-story, 645-foot-tall skyscraper. And, it’s leaning. Not only is it leaning, it’s sinking. Engineers determined in 2016 the building had sunk by sixteen inches and was leaning two inches at the base and six inches at the top of the tower. The problem is the foundation. The concrete slab foundation is built on top of 60-90-foot deep pilings embedded in dense sand. Some buildings in the area use a similar system, while other developers chose to place their pilings 200-feet-deep into bedrock. The Millennium Tower developer blames the problem on a building project next door, but the sinking had begun well before that project was started. Tenants and the city of San Francisco are suing the developers. It’s a mess and it’s going to be a bigger mess in the future because the cost to fix the problem may very well be more than the liability insurance held by the owners of the building.

Jesus said, “Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock. But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn’t obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash” (Matt. 7:24-27 NLT). Jesus wants us to prosper and enjoy a fulfilling life and he knows we can have that life if we build it on the rock of his truth rather than the shifting sands of cultural norms and expectations. Trust in his teaching as the bedrock on which you must build your life and you’ll never look back with regret.

Make It a Great Week,

Pastor Chris

Epiphany-inspired New Year's Resolution

Epiphany celebrates the visitation of the Magi to Jesus in Bethlehem. January 6 has been set aside for this commemoration for over 1,600 years. The significance of Epiphany is in the name, which means manifestation or appearance. Classically it was used for the appearance of the sun at dawn. In the Church it indicates the manifestation of the Messiah to the Gentiles, inaugurating the Mission of God to offer salvation to the whole of humanity.

The Magi, wise men from the East, were drawn to Bethlehem to worship the King of Israel. The Heavenly Father led them to worship the Son. This is the inspiration for a good New Year’s Resolution. Jesus Christ humbled himself and appeared to us in a way we can understand and experience. He took on human flesh in order to redeem fallen human beings and offer salvation. What’s our response? Like the Magi, we worship. We worship Jesus because he is God, because he deserves worship, because he is worthy of our praise. We don’t worship in order to receive something from God, we worship because we have received something from God, in response to his generous outpouring of grace.

Because God is so good, because he revealed his love to us through Jesus his Son, because he has drawn us to Christ by the Spirit, let’s resolve to worship him regularly, throughout the week in prayer and thanksgiving, and on the Lord’s Day, as we gather to worship the One who is truly worthy of glory and praise.

Resolutions are Hard

“People need revelation, and then they need resolution.” – Damian Lewis

Are resolutions worth making? 

Online grocer FreshDirect reports¹ that lots of their customers fall short of keeping resolutions. Customers’ liquor and wine consumption picks up by forty percent in February. At the same time, juice-cleanse sales drop by twenty-five percent. They report that sales of ice cream and desserts grow by fifteen percent and pizza is consumed at a thirty-five percent higher rate in February. What’s the deal with February? A study by Foursquare, which is an app that tracks businesses and places where people check-in, found that February marks an increase in visits to fast-food establishments and an abandoning of trips to gyms.

Resolutions are hard. They often aren’t kept. But, are they worth making?

I come down on the resolutions are worth making side of this debate. A resolution is a special type of goal. Goals are good. Without goals we tend to drift through life, randomly responding to the circumstances. With goals, we get in the driver’s seat. We make proactive decisions to improve our lives and the lives of those around us. Goals based on healthy and life-promoting values help us make the world a better place.

That’s really the key. We need to ask ourselves why we are making a particular resolution. Is it grounded in true north principles or on a passing feeling? If it’s a good goal, break it down into smaller bits so you can celebrate little wins on the way to the big win.

So, go ahead, make some resolutions. Base them on healthy, godly, deeply held beliefs and values, then pursue them daily. When February comes, do a check-in with yourself, pick up the slack, and keep moving forward.

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¹"Online grocer finds New Year's Resolutions last about a month" in The New York Post, 2-21-2016

Re•forming Church: Scripture Alone

“The difference between us and the papists is that they do not think that the church can be 'the pillar of the truth' unless she presides over the word of God. We, on the other hand, assert that it is because she reverently subjects herself to the word of God that the truth is preserved by her and passed on to others by her hands.” ― John Calvin

October 31, 2017 is the 500^th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. In honor of that anniversary I offer these devotional thoughts on “Scripture Alone.”

The idea that Scripture is primary, not church tradition or church teaching or church authority, is the idea that drove Martin Luther and the subsequent Protestant Reformation. Authority lies in the Bible itself, which is God’s Word. Scripture guides decisions we make about how we experience salvation, how to live a life of discipleship, and how we serve God’s purposes of instituting his Kingship in this world so his will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

This is a good time to reflect on how I am allowing Scripture to speak into my life. The psalmist wrote, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105 KJV). Prior to the Reformation the only way God’s Word informed the life of an ordinary person was for that person to hear about it from a priest. With the Reformation, the Bible was translated into the languages people could actually read and the number of people who could read grew exponentially as Reformers founded schools to educate the masses. Today, the Bible remains a worldwide number-one best seller and is available anywhere over the internet. We’re blessed with the availability of the Word of God, but are we taking advantage? Is dust gathering on our bibles? How are we utilizing the incredible resources at our fingertips?

Take time every day to read the Bible. It’s God’s primary means of communicating his will for our lives. Without direction from God, lives drift off course and miss the blessing and happiness God intends as we partner with him in his mission.