Sunday----Proverbs on Friendship, Part 3 with Dr. Tim Keller

If anyone loudly blesses their neighbor early in the morning, it will be taken as a curse. (Proverbs 27:14)

SENSITIVITY.  A third mark of friendship is sensitivity and tact.  Why does someone show inappropriate heartiness when others are just waking up?  Why do they use humor inappropriately or speak lightheartedly to grieving people with a heavy heart? It is because they are emotionally disconnected and therefore clumsy.  They don't know the other person's inner topography well enough to know what hurts or helps, what inspires or bores,  what stimulates or irritates.

If I can be content when you are sad, I'm not your friend. Friends voluntarily tie their hearts to one another.  They put their happiness into their friends happiness, so they can't emotionally flourish unless their friends are flourishing too.  Jesus  tied his heart to us so that even in his suffering he know joy because of the salvation he was bringing to us (Hebrews 12:2; cf. Isaiah 53:11).  The friendship connection may not be as emotionally intense as that which comes in romance, nor always as enduring as family ties, all the more reason friendship is so valuable, because such a link is both deliberate and voluntary.

Are you putting in the effort to be a friend?

Prayer:  Lord, our sin causes you pain (Genesis 6:6)  and our broken hearts draw you to our side (Psalm 34:18)  You love us more tenderly and sensitively than a nursing mother does her child (Isaiah 49:15)  Let me be so moved by your love for me that it makes me highly sensitive to the needs of those around me.  Amen

Congratulations To Vanderbilt Baseball Winner of College World Series Tonight!

NO DOUBT ABOUT IT,  Vandy baseball Coach Tim Corbin is one of the finest---if not THE finest coach of any sport in the nation. Way to go Vandy boys!   So well done as the Vandy team takes down Michigan 8-2 in game 3.

Sunday---Proverbs on Friendship, Part 2 with Dr. Tim Keller

@ DESIRING GOD: WHAT IS THE BAPTISM OF THE HOLY SPIRIT?

Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiples kisses.  (Proverbs 27:5-6)

TRANSPARENCY.  A second requirement for friendship is transparency. The King James Version renders the first part of Proverbs 27:6 as "faithful are the wounds of a friend."  What are "faithful wounds"? The phrase means that real friends do open rebuke, they tell each other things they need to hear even if they are painful. If you are too afraid to say what needs to be said, you are really of your friend's soul.

Have you ever listened to a recording of yourself and thought, "I don't sound like that."  But yes,  you do---you can't hear from within your body what your voice really sounds like outside.  And without the perspective of others we will never know our strengths and weaknesses. If you have a measure of status in the world, or if you have chosen friends poorly,  you may just be surrounded by flatterers. (29:5)  Transparency is scary, but we need it.  And to get courage,  look to the one who became so vulnerable for you that he died on the cross.  How faithful were the wounds of this friend for you!

How many real friends do you have----friends who will speak the truth in love to you?

Prayer:
Lord Jesus, you became a vulnerable human being to show us the truth about ourselves. You were faithful and constant even to death on the cross. Now, Lord, reproduce in me that same character and let me be a friend to others as you have been a friend to me. Amen.

The Greatest Show On Earth---Trump Dazzles In Orlando

TRUMP WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS ONE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST PRESIDENTS.  I cannot imagine him not winning a second term.

Proverbs On Friendship, With Dr. Tim Keller

IN HIS BOOK OF DAILY DEVOTIONALS ON THE BOOK OF PROVERBS,  God's Wisdom For Navigating Life,   Dr. Tim Keller does a series on friendship  which occurs in his book during the month of June.  It is wise and well worth pondering.  I believe real friendship takes in person contact and proximity to grow and deepen.  E-mails, texts and social media contact just doesn't get it for very long.  So old fashioned friendship today, as opposed to fast friendship, needs more than ever to be disciplined and intentional because of myriad distractions in today's hectic world. Real friendship is reciprocal though at times one person carries more of the load.

The best marriages are at their core deep friendship.

I'll be posting for the next few Sundays on some of the traits of real, long-term friendship from Proverbs.  Hope it's inspirational to you, as it is for me:

One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.---Proverb 18:24

INTENTIONALITY. This says that a friend can be better than a sibling---quite a statement in a culture that was far more family oriented than ours. But how so? Your family may be there for you but they may not really like you or understand you. And there can be long stretches of life in which you have no romantic partner or spouse. A friend, however, may stick with you over the years closer than a brother.

In the early stage of your life, you were shaped most by your family.  But for the rest of your life you will be shaped largely by your friends. You become like the people with whom you spend the most time.  As we will see, you can't live without friendship.  But remember how deliberate friendship must be. Erotic attraction and family relationships push themselves on you in various ways, but friendship will not. It must be carefully, intentionally cultivated through face-to-face time spent together.  And in a busy culture like ours, it is one thing that is often squeezed out.

How have your best friends over the years shaped and influenced you? Who are your best friends now?

Prayer:  Lord Jesus, you befriended a handful of disciples and through those friendships you changed the world. Help me choose my friends wisely, cultivate them carefully, and learn all I should learn from them so I can grow into the person you've called me to be,  Amen.

Fathers Day Sunday

FATHERS AND GOOD MEN ARE THE GLUE THAT HOLD CIVILIZATION TOGETHER.

Sunday, Why Heresy Often Starts With Getting the Doctrine of the Trinity Wrong

Sunday, Monday: The Enticing Sin of Empathy---How Satan Corrupts Through Compassion

UPDATE: PRESIDENT TRUMP GOES TO MY CHURCH, MCLEAN BIBLE CHURCH IN TYSONS CORNER


THE TEMPTATION OF FEELINGS-BASED LIVING

DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR BLEEDING HEART LIBERAL DAYS WHEN YOU DID EVERYTHING MOTIVATED BY FEELINGS AND EMPATHY?  I sure do.  Feelings-based decisions are a national epidemic and regressing society, our culture and our families.  Here,  Joe Rigney shows how too much  empathy can twist and warp the best of intentions and cause more problems than  it sought to solve.  Please don't get me wrong:  feelings are important and can sometimes guide us. Yet when they become the ultimate force for living, rather than critical and principled thinking and acting,  feelings can take us down many  painful dead-ends.

Article by

Joe Rigney @ Desiring God and C.S Lewis,  The Screwtape Letters

Professor, Bethlehem College & Seminary

Really, Wormwood, I would have thought that a young and ambitious tempter would pay attention to the annual updates posted by the Infernal Philological Society. The fact that you had never heard the idea that empathy was a sin is enough to turn me into a centipede. 

Your confusion in this case, however, is somewhat understandable. I’ve always said you were a gullible devil. It seems the Department of Propaganda has been too successful. Even our tempters have been taken in. As a result, it falls to me to explain again some of the elementary doctrines of our Father Below.

When humans are suffering, they tend to make two demands that are impossible to fulfill simultaneously. On the one hand, they want people to notice the depth of their pain and sorrow — how deep they are in the pit, how unique and tragic their circumstances. At the same time, they don’t want to be made to feel that they really need the assistance of others. In one breath, they say, “Help me! Can’t you see I’m suffering?” and in the next they say, “How dare you act as though I needed you and your help?” The sufferer doesn’t want to be alone, and demands not to be pitied. This makes their emotional turmoil in suffering not only delicious to our taste, but also highly combustible and unpredictable.

Now, sufferers have been placing such impossible demands on others from time immemorial. In response, our armies have fought for decades to twist the Enemy’s virtue of compassion into its counterfeit, empathy. Since we introduced the term a century ago, we’ve steadily taught the humans to regard empathy as an improvement upon compassion or sympathy
.
Compassion only suffers with another person; empathy suffers in them. It’s a total immersion into the pain, sorrow, and suffering of the afflicted. Under our influence, we’ve taught the humans to think, “Only a heartless and unfeeling beast could oppose such a total immersion, such a generous act of ‘love.’” Our recent success in this conceptual migration has given us ample opportunity for mayhem.

Separate Truth and Feeling

Think of it this way: the Enemy’s virtue of compassion attempts to suffer with the hurting while maintaining an allegiance to the Enemy. In fact, it suffers with the hurting precisely because of this allegiance. In doing so, the Christians are to follow the example of their pathetic and repulsive Master. Just as the Enemy joined the humans in their misery in that detestable act of incarnation, so also his followers are to join those who are hurting in their misery.

However, just as the Enemy became like them in every way but sin, so also his followers are not permitted to sin in their attempts to comfort the afflicted. Thus, his compassion always reserves the right not to blaspheme. It seeks the sufferer’s good and subordinates itself to the Enemy’s abominable standard of Truth 
.
Our alternative, empathy, shifts the focus from the sufferer’s good to the sufferer’s feelings, making them the measure of whether a person is truly “loved.” We teach the humans that unless they subordinate their feelings entirely to the misery, pain, sorrow, and even sin and unbelief of the afflicted, they are not loving them.

Love’s Ransom Demands

This begins, of course, with the sufferers themselves. Our policy has been to teach sufferers to resent all resistance to their feelings. Any holding back, any perceived emotional distance — especially a distance that is driven by a desire to discover what would actually be good for them — must be regarded as a direct assault on their dignity and an affront to the depth of their suffering. As I said before, this is not difficult. A human in pain is practically primed to say, “You don’t love me if . . .” and then to place entirely unreasonable demands on others.

Our task is to give this impulse a little push. We want their unreasonable demands to become ungodly demands. Not only must comforters refuse to actually offer words of comfort (which even their sniveling shepherds suggest is sometimes a prudent policy in the immediate aftermath of some calamity), but we want sufferers to subtly but forcefully demand that their comforters not even feel hope or joy or faith themselves. Total immersion must be granted, or “You don’t love me.” Anyone who refuses to jump through the hoops isn’t being empathetic.


However, he also knows that he’ll only be able to help if he’s tethered to something strong and sturdy outside of the pit. And so he enters the pit with one foot, while keeping the other on the solid ground. He reaches for the hurting with one hand, while holding onto a firmly rooted tree with the other. This is where your patient is now, looking at the various instances of suffering and affliction around him and desiring to help, comfort, and encourage those in the pit.

Make Them Steerable

Your task is to compel him to jump in with both feet. As I’ve said, the sufferer will naturally be demanding it. You must increase the pressure by fostering in him a sensitivity to accusations of heartlessness. This is where our philological efforts have made your job much easier than you deserve.
By elevating empathy over compassion as the superior virtue, there is now an entire culture devoted to the total immersion of empathy. Books, articles, and social media all trumpet the importance of checking one’s own beliefs, values, judgments, and reason at the door of empathy.

To refuse to fully endorse the feelings of the hurting, however blasphemous and false, is to revictimize them. Maintaining the emotional independence necessary to rationally consider someone’s good is “unhelpful,” “heartless,” “contrary to the spirit of Jesus.” These terms can be used to browbeat your man into submission so that he never pauses to consider the true and lasting good of the one in pain, or the truthfulness and accuracy of their felt reality.

Once untethered from the truth, you’ll find that your man is eminently steerable. Things that he would have regarded as foolish, sinful, and ungodly under normal circumstances will sail right along under the banner of empathy. Rightly used, empathy is a power tool in the hands of the weak and suffering. By it, we can so weaponize victims that they (and those who hide behind them) are indulged at every turn, without regard for whether such indulgence is wise or prudent or good for them. 

When you can move your man from the bland but true belief that “feelings are important” to the false but potent impression that “feelings are all that’s important,” then you know that you have him. Properly conditioned and trained in this way, you will be able to steer him in any direction you choose.

Tyranny of Fusion

As in many things, we must always keep in mind the Enemy’s goals and ours. The Enemy aims to produce a fellowship of sufferings, with his Accursed Son at the center of it. But fellowship requires fellows; that is, it requires distinctness. Fellows say, “We are together, and yet I am still I and you are still you.” This is a kind of union, where one thing is united to another thing while still being itself.

In fact, if the Enemy is to be believed, creatures become more themselves when thus united. Of course, it is all lies, and in stoking empathy we are simply cutting with the grain of reality. Empathy goes beyond union to the more potent and dynamic truth of fusion, the melting together of persons so that one personality is lost in the other. Empathy demands, “Feel what I feel. In fact, lose yourself in my feelings.”

In my last letter, I told you that compassion, when untethered from patience and wisdom, becomes tyrannical and attempts to force the sufferer out of their sorrow against their will. Such impatient compassion attempts to seize the wheel of the sufferer’s emotional vehicle. 

In the present case, the seizing happens the other way. The sufferer demands to steer the emotional car of the one trying to help them. We are happy with either. It matters not which person is exercising the tyranny, so long as there is, in the end, only one car. What we want to avoid at all costs is a caravan, that fellowship of sufferings in which the hurting, the suffering, and the afflicted are all permanently tethered to the Enemy, and therefore drawn inexorably toward each other and toward the blazing and damnable light that marks his comforting presence. 

Excuse me, Wormwood. That last image has left me feeling ill. I think I’d better lie down.

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape

Joe Rigney (@joe_rigney) is assistant professor of theology and literature at Bethlehem College & Seminary and author of The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts. He is a pastor at Cities Church.