Termination of Term One

Saturday we will end our first term in Bulgaria.  As I was walking around town today, I looked around at the people, the buildings, and the parks.  I though, "It has been a good first few years."  Here, in no particular order, are some of the highlights:

We hosted the ReachGlobal Europe South and East city teams in December of 2011 for their annual meetings.

I taught English to several business men and women from Bulgaria and Turkey.

Sasha translated counseling sessions for victims of human trafficking.

I taught countless Bible studies at our home, at other homes, and at the refugee ministry of International Baptist Church of Sofia.

We provided food, clothing, and bedding for refugees from around the world.

KENNY!!!! We had a great teammate.

I was named the ReachGlobal Sofia City Team Leader.

I mentored a man who has since left Bulgaria to serve in ministry abroad.

We made a video about various ministries in Bulgaria to promote the work here.  

We spent hours in prayer with our fellow believers in Bulgaria.

Our two oldest girls attended Bulgarian school and received great grades.  (All three of our girls are very smart.)

We learned Bulgarian.  (Except for Sasha.  She did that a few years earlier.)

We saw people make decisions for Jesus.

I baptized Sophie.

We made many many friends.

Sasha, Kenny, and I climbed Bulgaria's tallest mountain.

We visited three seas and two Biblical cities.

I could go on and on.  It was a great term.  God has done some amazing things in Bulgaria.  It has been a privilege to be part of His work here.

I do not want to go.

We will return.

Kambanite

Over the weekend, Sasha and I took the girls up the mountain a little bit to a place called "Kambanite."  It is a monument set up during the 1970's that contains bells from around the world.  It was interesting to see what countries contributed to this monument.  Some nations contributed massive beautiful bells.  Others contributed tiny intricate bells.  Still others had bells that looked like they came off a scuttled old ship.

Some of the countries represented no longer exist.  Some contributions were obviously added after the fall of communism (such as the NATO bell).

It is a unique monument.  I have never seen anything quite like it.

The main bell tower can be seen from miles away.

Some bells were large enough to fit a grown man.

Bulgaria's Bell was one of the biggest.

Ich Bin Ein Berliner

No I am not actually a person from Berlin.  Neither am I a jelly doughnut.  (That's German humor.)  However, in a few hours I fly to Berlin to take part in the Europe South City Team Leaders' meetings.  Two years ago these meetings were held in Sofia.  Last year they were in Athens.  This year they are in Berlin.

Yes, I realize Berlin is not actually in southern Europe.  However, it is a bit of an experimental city for ReachGlobal, and just about all of us could learn something from the way things have been done there.  I have been following the Berlin city team's work since we lived just a couple hours away in Szczecin, Poland years ago.  I copied some of the early tactics of the Berlin Team when I started the Sofia Team.  I am curious to see how things are going for them and learning if there are any other ways we can emulate them.

I am also excited to see my fellow Europe South CTLs.  In a way, these meetings feel kind of like a family reunion.  For people who only see each other once or twice a year, we are a fairly close knit group.  I feel perfectly safe opening up to them as one would with a close family member.  I'm looking forward to seeing them all again and learning about how God is working in their cities and in their lives.

Well, I'm off! 

Farewell to Kenny

Today I woke up early, loaded up the car, and drove to the airport to drop off Kenny.  He has been our teammate since 2012, and an amazing teammate at that.

Last weekend, we threw him a going away party.  In attendance were about thirty people from four continents.  You don’t get that kind of sendoff unless you have truly touched people’s lives.

Kenny has been involved in several great ministries.  He has worked with refugees from several countries, he has been involved in Roam (Gypsy) ministries, and he has helped several young men in their spiritual development.  He coached a kids’ baseball team, and was involved in the Bulgarian baseball league.  (He even pitched in the Bulgarian Baseball Cup.)

We are praying for a replacement for Kenny to join us in Bulgaria soon.  In reality though, we probably need several people to replace all that he has contributed to the Sofia City Team.

We hope you had a safe flight back Kenny.  May God bless you in your upcoming marriage.  We will miss you.

Morality Quest Part 3

We have searched out the source of morality.  We have found it.  We now anxiously wait to learn how we measure up to it.

The answer is, we all fail.

According to Jesus, anyone who is angry at a brother or sister is subject to judgment similar to a murderer.  Anyone who offers a minor insult to a brother or sister is in danger of hell.  Any man who looks at a woman lustfully is guilty of adultery.  If anyone is not better than the spiritual teachers, he will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  (Matthew 5)

None of us measures up to the moral law, and this is why most of us do not like to think about morality.  According to the Bible, we all have sinned and fallen short of God’s standard (Romans 3:23).  The penalty for our sin is death (Romans 6:23).  Why did we ever start down this path in search of morality?  If we are condemned to death, at least let us go through life in the peace of ignorance.

The same God who orchestrated a way for us to know His moral law, is the same God whom we have disobeyed by breaking his moral law.  Yet there is hope.  He has also provided a way for us to be forgiven for our sins.  That is why Jesus came.  He came to forgive us of our sins.

Yet that was not the only reason he came.  John 1:12-13 reads, “Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.  Children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision nor a husband’s will, but born of God.”

Jesus not only grants us forgiveness of sins.  He also grants us adoption as children of God.  If you believe in Jesus, you are a child of God.  Your heavenly Father is King of the Universe.  That makes you a prince or princess.  You are royalty.

If you do not believe, why not?  You have been offered not only redemption, but unlimited access to God (whom you can now call “Father”).  The fear of approaching the Lawgiver is gone.  You have been forgiven and offered more than you ever could have dreamed.  Why would you turn that away?

Morality Quest Part 2

In the last blog I wrote about how morality is not a human construct.  I did so briefly, and in very little detail.  I am going to proceed with the assumption that morality is not a human construct.  If you want to read more on the subject, there are many books on the topic.  I personally recommend The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis.

If moral law is not human construct, one would suppose that it came from some entity beyond nature.  Thus we need to look deeper at reality.  We need to go beyond merely the physical world and into the spiritual and philosophical realms.

Millions before me have tried to delve into this topic, and we would be wise to read the thought of those who came before us.  However, this is a blog not a book, so I do not have the space to delve deeply into the thoughts of even a fraction of the sage men and women of times gone by.  Rather let me tell you what criteria I use to determine which teachings have the most authority.  This will narrow down the list and expedite our quest.

I would want teachings that admit that morality does not come from man.  I have already briefly demonstrated how this is a flawed assumption, and smarter men than me have done an even better job arguing this point.  Therefore, I rule out any philosophy that makes humanity the source of morality.  This essentially leaves us with religions.

I would next rule out any religion in which the supernatural entities are dependent on or derived from humanity.  If such forces are dependent on humanity then humanity has a say as to what is moral and what is not because we can manipulate the supernatural to do our bidding.  This would put us back in the realm of humanity being the source of morality.  Thus animistic religions fall short, as do most eastern religions.

I would also rule out religions that claim the source of morality to be a non-personal entity.  If the source was non-personal, the laws of morality would be mere facts of nature produced by random chance.  They would therefore, have neither real power nor a compelling reason to obey them.  This would leave us with a non-morality system which is, in essence, a human morality.

The moral law can find its origin in either one person or more than one person provided that those persons are in such unity that they never differ in their opinions on morality.  A pantheon, like in ancient Greek or Roman religions, would not do because the gods in these stories are often depicted as being at odds with each other, and seem to have no set morality other than their own desires.  A “deist republic” would not suffice to produce a stable moral system.

It appears that we would have to find our moral lawgiver in a monotheistic religion.  This is somewhat problematic because there are several monotheistic religions.  To narrow down the field further, the thing to look for is unity.  Anyone can write a book about God and claim it to be true.  What we need to look for is books that have unity despite being written over a great period of time and in different cultures and languages.  This would demonstrate that the books find their source from something that transcends a specific culture and way of thought.  I find this in the Bible.

To understand my reasoning, it is important to realize that the Bible is not just one book.  It is 66 books.  These 66 books were written by about 40 different authors.  These 40 different authors did not all live at the same time either.  The 66 books of the Bible were written over about 1600 years.  They were also not all written in the same language.  The Bible was written in three different languages (Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic).  It was also written on three different continents.

So to sum up, the Bible is a collection of 66 books written by about 40 different authors over the course of 1600 years in three different languages on three different continents.  Yet despite this great diversity in time, geography, authorship, cultures, and languages, these 66 books are unified in their overall teachings and story-line.

Such unity through diversity leads me to believe that these books were divinely inspired.  Should anyone disagree I challenge them to duplicate this feat using any other books written throughout history, but remember the conditions: at least 66 books, at least 40 authors, at least 3 languages, at least 3 continents, and unity in content.

To further state my point, let’s look at a section of the Bible:

“He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground.  He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.  He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.  Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.  Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.  But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.  We all like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

If you know anything about Jesus, you probably recognize that this passage is about Him.  You would be correct.  This passage is about the Messiah.  Yet it was written hundreds of years before Jesus was born.

One might object at this point and say, “Sure, you claim that the books are diverse in origin yet unified in content, but how do we know that they were not doctored after the fact.  How do we know that the prophecy about Christ you just presented was not written centuries after Christ to improve the legitimacy of Christianity and then falsely ascribed to an ancient prophet?”

This is a fair objection.  None of the original manuscripts of the Bible exist as far as we know.  Yet there are manuscripts that date to before the time of Christ.  In the case of the passage above, the oldest existing manuscript (that I am aware of) dates to about 100 years before the birth of Christ.  There may be debate as to when the above passage was written, but no scholar would date its writing after Christ’s birth.

Reflect again on the passage above.  It was written hundreds of years before Christ was born.  Can you think of anyone else it could possibly describe?  If not, then we have a legitimate prophecy clearly pointing to Jesus as the Messiah.  What does this tell us about the authority of the Bible, and the person of Jesus?  I believe it demonstrates that they are both divine in their origin.

If the Bible provides us with God’s moral law, the next question is how we measure up to it.  This is the question we all fear.  I will answer it next time.

Morality Quest Part 1

In my last blog, I wrote about how throughout human history we have attempted to redefine good and evil along lines that make our actions seem good.  I proposed that we do so because we are afraid to compare ourselves to the true moral standard of the real moral law as given by the real moral Lawgiver.  We are afraid to do so because we all fear that we do not measure up.  Over the next few blogs, I am going to lead a quest to find the moral law and the moral Lawgiver.  In the end, we will see how we all measure up.

Where to Look?

The first question we must consider is where to find the supreme moral law.  To figure that out, we must determine where morality comes from.  If it comes from mankind then our quest is nearly done.  If people made the supreme moral law, then people can change it.

This also would mean that morality is as real as governing laws.  Every governing law was made by people and can be changed by people when it is convenient or necessary to do so.  That which humanity makes, it may alter.

However this also would mean that morality is not universal.  It is relative to the people in power at any given time.  In fact, the ultimate moral lawgiver would be the person or group of people with the most power at any given moment.

Let’s think about what this would look like for a bit.  In Asia, for most of the 20^th century, the Soviet Union was the major power.  Millions were killed in the name of the state for purely political reasons.  In the 18^th and 19^th century in the United States it was legal for black people to be kept as slaves.  In ancient Rome, men were pitted against each other in battles to the death for the entertainment of the masses.  If good and evil are mere human constructs, then there was nothing wrong with any of these things.  We may look back on these horrific events and condemn them, but there is nothing to prevent others from looking back on us and denouncing, say, our love of personal freedom or the practice of recycling as evil.

Additionally, this theory does not conform to reality.  Those in power do not set morality.  Rather, morality tends to check power.  In fact, morality is a weakness from a purely secular perspective.  This is why so many governments try to redefine morality to their advantage.  The fact that such governments are seen as corrupt when they try to do so is evidence that morality does not find its origins in human power.

Morality must be something larger than a mere human construct.  We need to look beyond ourselves to find the true moral law.

Thus, the quest continues.