“I feel the one problem with the reception of the Message of the Gospel are people (sic) desire not to be told something.”

dh, you have encapsulated the entire argument with this statement, a truth as old as the Fall. We are warring, and have been from the beginning, with the self.

When I hear anyone attacking church teachings on a particular matter, the reasons given me are more often than not arguments advocating permission for permission’s sake, with a disregard for philosophy and the natural law, two of the faith’s strongest allies.

But where much of the contemporary church (i hesitate to say modern, or postmodern, we’re more accurately in a post-postmodern age, for which I don’t have a clever name) fails is in continuing to have a reactionary stance to culture, rather than a preactionary stance.

Postmodernism is a reaction to and modification of modernism; the very etymology of the term gives this away. And like modern Christianity, if we parade the adjective before the faith it modifies, our own approach is destined to die the death of the seed fallen on shallow soil.

Postmodernism being a reaction to modernism, and modernism dying out, means we can effectively start the countdown for postmodernism’s demise.

Truth is, we’re starting the battle too late. The human spiritual struggle against the powers and principalities of this dark world did not begin during the June and Ward Cleaver era; it began in the Garden of Eden. Our weapons should date back as far.

Paul, you are on target to cite Galatians 5. When one reads through the fruits of the Spirit, words like love, peace, patience, and self control leap off of the page, supercharged notions of the fullness of a Spirit-filled life. These qualities predate sin. Sin is only a negation of them, not a created thing. Original sin is not very original; it gets all of its ideas from purity.

But we would try to battle sin on its own terms, and not on the terms of the Holy Spirit. We forget Whose is the battle. We are not the usurpers; we are the rightful heirs to the Kingdom of God. Chastity is not a rethinking of perversion; it was chastity that came first. Perversion was second, and an effort to avoid perversion came third. The fight is best fought from the highest ground; and we put ourselves in a compromised position when we use merely reactionary tactics.

Two awsomely thought provoking soul stirring posts that I recomend you check out are on Jason Clark’s blog at the moment… The first looks at how there is a dominating religion in the world today – the pursuit of happiness – or theocapitalism as Jaso…

I think you do a great service by identifying happiness as the religion of the age – although i wonder whether this has changed much in life over the centuries – maybe the medium of consumerism is more a 20-21st century phenom for the western world…

I say this based on no evidence other than my own life – whereby my natural disposition is to make choices purely for me – my rights, my needs my wants, my way… and since i live in a culture with cheap credit and an abundant amout of social status attached to stuff then it is easy to get caught up in that… or with people to have relationships which support/give something to me and avoid giving of myself…

After all Paul warns the Galations in chpater 5:19-21

“is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on…”

He could be writing to me living in England today… I wonder about the challenge of Jesus’ call to die to self – is this an alternative way to live – to live forsomething more than me? The challenge of loving God and in deed anyone else is that love is a giving relationship not a getting one… its about others first rather than myself… and judging my the fight i had on friday I’m still not very good in doing that in a married context with 12 yrs of practice at it :)

Maybe then my natural positivity means that I am bit more optimistic than you are Jason about the situation. I think you are right to highlight grace and the Spirit of God but I am not so sure on the waiting front – humans have been me first for centuries and that hasn’t stopped people finding ways of enagiging and challenging that culture with the gospel… do we need to be prophetic about the flip side of me first living – the cost to the environment… the third world… each other… to speak truth but to also bring love and be be with people as they hit the hard times/pain of me first living..?

Afterall Paul offers an alternative to the Galatians frenzied lifestyle in v22-23 …

“But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.”

I think this is what you remind me of with your call to commitment, a call to belong to Jesus and each other… to offer this way of hope, peace, love, patience as we are being transformed by that…

I’m excited that its grace through Jesus that brings this… that it is not my effort… the challenge to live this life out… that as Paul says in v23-26

“Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified.

Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original.”

What we have is a capital city that is trying so hard to play catch up with the west and to observe it’s like trying to squeeze the past 50 years of cosumeristic western leanings into 15 years all this and yet it has the post soviet depresion holding it back like someone treading on a brides train. You can almost see the desire for consurmerism, like Riga is jealous that someone else has something that it doesn’t. Leave the city and it’s like a different world, and remember there’s only 2.5 million people in Latvia.

It’s hard to explain on a blog comment in a few lines but it’s a real melting pot of cultures divided by generations and wealth.

You might argue it’s a mess but it’s an interesting mess never the less.