The Riches of His Glorious Inheritance

Ephesians 1:18-19

… having the eyes of your hearts enlightened that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to his great might …

Reading through this passage today, I was struck for the first time by the phrase “his glorious inheritance in the saints.” Before, when I read this verse, I had always associated it with another nearby verse that says that the Holy Spirit is “the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.” After all, they both use the word “inheritance.”

The other verse, Ephesians 1:14, is referring to what God has promised those who have become His children in Christ. This includes righteousness, a face-to-face relationship with God, and a position in the New Heavens and the New Earth. We get these in part today through the Holy Spirit (our “guarantee”), but we will not fully “acquire possession of it” until Christ’s second coming.

But then I realized that that isn’t what Ephesians 1:18 is talking about. The idea in verse 14 could be called “the saints’ glorious inheritance in Christ,” but verse 18 is about Christ’s glorious inheritance in the saints.

What does THAT mean? Christ is God and has complete control of everything in the universe. Furthermore, our salvation was completely from God’s grace, not because of anything we give God, as the rest of Ephesians 1 (and the rest of Scripture) makes clear.

I think it means that Christ’s “glorious inheritance” IS the saints. Just as Israel was “a people of [God’s] own inheritance,” the saints, God’s people under the New Covenant, belong to Christ. Note that “saints” when used in the New Testament means all those who believe in Jesus. For proof, you can look at Ephesians 1:1, where the letter is addressed to “the saints who are in Ephesus,” meaning the whole church.

This is absolutely stunning. It means that WE are Christ’s glorious inheritance. God sees us as glorious. And the text doesn’t treat this as some curious opinion God has. It doesn’t say, “the inheritance God thinks is glorious.” No, it says “glorious inheritance,” like the thing in question is objectively glorious. And Paul is praying that the Christians he writes to may know “the riches of His glorious inheritance.” He wants them to recognize that they, as Christ’s possession, have become glorious.

What is glorious about us? I think the phrases on either side of this one answer that question. First, there is “the hope to which he has called you” – God’s reliable promise to bring us into His glory. God chose us to “be holy and blameless before him” (Ephesians 1: 4), and when God decides to do something, it is as good as done.

The other thing that makes us glorious is “the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe.” God’s power has already started working miracles in our lives. He has raised us from death in our sins to life. And just as Christ was raised from death up to heaven where he is now seated at the father’s right hand, God will continue to raise up until we too are given heavenly authority.

Part of me wants to stop and qualify this saying, “of course, we’re not there yet. Christians do terrible things, just like everyone else, and in many ways we are far from glorious." This is true. But what God is making us is far more fundamental to who we are than anything we do. Christ may not have fully come into His inheritance yet – that is, He may not yet have complete control of our lives. But that doesn’t change the fact that our core identity has altered – we ARE Christ’s glorious inheritance.

Heart, Mind and Lies

The purpose of this blog, reflected in the title, is to combine the mind and the heart, intellectual truth (logos) with passionate love. I firmly believe that both of these are essential for our spiritual health.

The “mind” half of the equation has always come pretty easily to me. I have a hunch that this has something to do with growing up around two very intelligent and highly educated parents, one of whom is a college professor who taught me the word “omnivore” when I was 3.

The “heart” aspect of things is a bit more confused. I do have a passion for God, which I express best in my poetry and hymns. But I don’t trust my feelings as much as I do my mind. For years, I’ve struggled with painful emotions that seemed to have no connection to reality. I eventually learned to call these emotions “depression,” but that label didn’t help me to understand its cause. I still haven’t figured out all the factors involved, but one has become very clear to me recently.

I’ve realized that many of what I had called “emotional” problems actually began in my thoughts. At some point in my life, I bought into some lies about who I am, which have formed the unconscious background of my thoughts and feelings. Putting words to this idea is difficult, in part because it has been unexpressed for all these years. Many of my conscious thoughts reflect it, but they are only smaller manifestations of it, like in video games when the boss monster sends out smaller monsters to attack you.

The lie at the core of my problems is something like this: I am valuable only if I do everything that is expected of me perfectly. Once it is put into words, I see how ridiculous it is, and my mind comes to poke holes in it immediately. Here are a few problems with it:

1. All human beings are valuable, not because of ability, and not as something they earn, but in virtue of being human beings made in the image of God. I argue strongly for this when faced with many social issues, and I had thought it was an established part of my thinking.

2. I can’t do everything perfectly because I am not perfect. I am not God, and no one expects me to be.

3. This idea doesn’t mention exactly whose expectations I must live. In practice, this means that I try to please everyone I run into, both in big things like doing my job well and in small things like not admitting that I don’t like a movie they like. But it runs into contradictions when two people expect different things. In those cases, it is simply impossible to please everyone.

As you can see, my mind is more than capable of trashing the lie once it is exposed to the light of reason. But of course, it isn’t that simple. This idea doesn’t step out and face a direct battle with my other beliefs and ideas. Instead, it sits in the shadows, sending out negative thoughts and painful feelings like bullets from a sniper. I hope that now that I know it’s there, I can be on my guard against it. I’m trying to fill my mind with truth about my identity and my value, leaving no shadows in which this lie can hide.

It’s obvious that lies affect one’s mind. The whole point of a lie is to get one to believe something false. But these ideas affect our hearts too – they cause us to react in unhealthy ways to the experiences and challenges of our lives. What lies might you have bought into that affect how you think or feel about things?

Literally the Best Blog Post Ever! (part 2)

A while back, I wrote about the word “literally” and how it has sadly been stripped of most of its meaning. I think this trend might point to a larger issue relating to the issue of truth.

People today tend to think of science as the surest guide to truth. Some even go so far as to say that anything that can’t be proven by science can’t be proven at all. (To which I say: prove it.) Scientific truths are considered facts, while truths about morality, religion, and even the meaning of language are consigned to the realm of opinion.

Strangely, even professors of the humanities have accepted that science is the only guide to truth. Apparently, they don’t mind spending their lives studying something that isn’t true. They resolve the tension this creates by claiming that their interpretations of texts are true for them, while someone else may have a different truth. Unfortunately for them, this requires distorting the meaning of the word “truth” beyond all recognition. Until recently, truth has always meant something that corresponds to how the world actually is. In fact, in real life, it still has this meaning. When a father says to his child, “Tell me the truth – did you punch your brother?” he wants to know whether the child’s fist actually connected with his brother’s face, not only the child’s thoughts or feelings about the last few minutes.

Science is a very literal discipline. Until you start getting into advanced physics, the data is actually there for everyone to see, and the results of a given experiment are clear. If the experiment shows that mixing baking soda and vinegar causes carbon dioxide to bubble up, that is literally what happens.

But if science is the only guide to truth, then anything that is true must be literally true. I think this is why people began to use the word “literally” whenever they want to show that they really mean something. If someone really turned the world upside down, they must have done it literally because doing it any other way would be meaningless.

The problem with this is that figurative language can express truth. When I say my cellphone “knows” what word I’m trying to type when I’m texting, that’s figurative language. My phone is not literally conscious. But everyone still knows what I mean.

Similarly, other truths can be expressed clearly in figurative language. In fact, some truths might only be able to be expressed figuratively, especially if they deal with things that are beyond human comprehension, like God. These statements require a bit more thought, but they are just as valid as literal truths.

The Foreigner in Your Midst

As most of my readers probably know, I moved to a Chinese-speaking country about six months ago. Adjusting to the new culture has been much more of a challenge than I had originally expected.

 For the most part, adjusting to a new culture is the same no matter where you are. The social customs, the way stores are laid out, the technology used in everyday life and in many cases the language are different from country for country. But as a white person living in Asia, I have the added complication of sticking out like a sore thumb. When I enter a store, people either start speaking to me in English, without giving me a chance to even try speaking Chinese, or they run and hide behind an aisle, a counter or a coworker who speaks better English than they do. When I am with Taiwanese friends, people usually speak to my friend even if they are responding to something I said. Small children tend to stare at me on the subway (but I can’t get mad at them because they’re so darn cute). I’ve started to look around whenever I hear the word “waiguoren” (Chinese for “foreigner”) as if I’d heard someone say my name. For the most part, I don’t mind being noticed as a foreigner, but this situation makes it impossible for me to forget that this is not my country, which intensifies any homesickness I’ve been feeling.

I feel homesick on and off. I felt it a lot around Christmas time, and it’s always most common when I’m feeling physically sick. In fact, the reason I decided to write about this now is that I have a cold and am missing home quite a bit.

During one of the hardest periods for me, I was doing my daily Bible reading, and I came across a group with the word “foreigner” in it. Needless to say, that got my attention. I looked around a bit more and realized that the Bible has a lot to say about foreigners, especially in the Old Testament law.

About half the time, the law is saying that foreigners have to follow the same laws as the Israelites in things like the Sabbath. This makes sense because it’s hard to run a country where certain people are exempt from some of the rules.

The other half, though, were concerned with stopping the Israelites from oppressing the foreigners who lived among them. To pick one of the many examples: “Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge.” (Deuteronomy 24:17) The thing that struck me most about these verses is that they often group foreigners together with orphans and widows.

I’d never noticed this before, and I don’t think I’d have understood it if I did. But now, it completely makes sense. Even in this age of Skype, Facebook and other easy ways to communicate, traveling to another country separates one from one’s loved ones in a way that can be quite painful. That would have been even more true in Biblical times when there wasn’t even a reliable postal system!

It’s been a great comfort to me to know that God understands how difficult it is to be away from one’s family and in an unfamiliar place. Finding evidence of culture shock in the Bible (though not expressed in those words) has helped to remind me that I’m not alone and my feelings are legitimate. It also provides yet more evidence of the Bible’s psychological insight that speaks to most issues that people face even today.

Jesus’s teaching, as is often the case, took the Old Testament law a step further. Instead of just not oppressing foreigners, he expected people to welcome them (see Matthew 25:35). Fortunately, I have been surrounded by a group of wonderful new friends who have done just that. In fact, I spent this past week having a great time traveling to their family homes for the Lunar New Year. Moments with these friends have convinced me that however challenging this time of transition may be, it will all be worthwhile in the end.

Literally the Best Blog Post Ever! (part 1)

Almost everyone I know either loves or hates grammar. Either you think it’s a bunch of boring, picky rules that teachers use to annoy their students, or you think it is an essential part of The Way Things Should Be Done. Linguists usually fall into the first category, since they use the way native speakers actually talk as guidelines for determining what is grammatical. So for instance, if native speakers end their sentences with prepositions, that’s OK, even though grammar rules say that prepositions are bad words to end sentences with. (Yes, I phrased it that way intentionally.) But in spite of all my linguistics classes, I have one grammar-related pet peeve that nothing has shaken.

That pet peeve is misuse of the word “literally.” “Literally” is the opposite of “figuratively,” so it means without exaggeration or figurative language. This means that if something is literally a hundred feet tall, you can measure it and it will be that height. If this is literally the best blog post ever, as the title says, then no blog post ever written is better than it. If someone literally turns the world upside down, that would mean they have changed the way the planet Earth rotates, and so on.

However, most people use the word “literally” to intensify some figurative language they’re using. Much to my dismay, I even found this second usage in some online dictionaries! However, I feel I must dispute with the dictionaries on this.

Why do I feel so strongly about this word? What could motivate me to argue about language with a dictionary? The reason is that if we use “literally” to describe things that are not literally true, then the word has no meaning. If “literally” can mean either without figurative language or with figurative language, then in a given sentence containing the word, one must figure out from context which type is being used. Most people are capable of doing that, but they could do just as well if the word “literally” were taken out of the sentence. Thus, the word itself has no meaning. Moreover, there is no other word that means “literally,” so if “literally” loses its meaning then English has no way of expressing that idea.

The other problem is that this makes it hard for me to know how to respond when someone asks me whether I take the Bible literally. The fact is, even the staunchest Fundamentalist does not take everything in the Bible literally. Throughout history, people have debated whether Jesus was God and even whether he was human. But no one has ever argued that he was a young sheep, a fruit-bearing plant or a piece of wood with hinges. If one takes the Bible literally, Jesus would have to be all those things, because the Bible calls him the Lamb of God, the vine and the door.

On the other hand, most people who ask whether I take the Bible literally don’t mean to ask whether I think Jesus was a plant. They mean to ask whether I think the events and ideas recorded in the Bible are true. The answer to that is a resounding “yes!”

You see, it’s possible to believe that everything the Bible affirms is true while acknowledging that it sometimes uses figurative language to make a point. And just because something is figurative or symbolic doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Broken Stories

I recently read the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. I really enjoyed reading it, but I was surprised at how dark it was. It left me with a vague feeling of sadness, one which I think speaks to a universal human desire.

The sadness I felt at the end of The Hunger Games reminded me of the way I felt when I finished reading The Lord of the Rings. The books are similar in that their respective main characters, Katniss and Frodo, endure great suffering, physically, mentally and emotionally.

Both books were well-written enough that I felt a strong emotional attachment to the characters, so I reacted when they were in danger or suffering. But when I was in the middle of the books, I didn’t feel sad for them as much as I felt afraid for them. The darkest and most dangerous parts were the ones I read the fastest, because I wanted to find out what happened and make sure the characters would be safe. In fact, I almost screamed when I got to the end of The Two Towers, (when Frodo is almost dead and captured by orcs) and then saw that The Return of the King began by talking about what was happening with a different set of characters.

I may have felt pity for the characters when they experienced particularly painful events, but that was nothing compared to the sadness I felt at the end. This may seem strange because (spoiler alert) both stories end pretty well, with the forces of evil defeated and most of the main characters still alive. But at the end of their adventures, both Katniss and Frodo are left with emotional and physical wounds that we know will not fully heal.

The scars that remain at the end of the stories made me sadder than the far more intense suffering the characters endure during their adventures. This is in part because it is more long-term, but I think there’s more to it than that. Before the end of the book, there is still hope of healing for the characters. Injuries, trauma and even death in some cases have the possibility of being resolved. But when you turn the last page of the last chapter and the pain remains, there is no more reason to believe that the characters will recover. We know that the characters will be haunted for the rest of their lives.

Leaving the characters with painful memories is a good choice on the authors’ part because it resembles real life. We should be used to this idea. But that fact that this makes us sad is a reminder of the universal human desire for wholeness and healing.

Ken Boa once said that we all have “broken stories.” The stories of our lives are filled with pain, sorrow and discouragement. But, “the way you fix a broken story is by … embedding it in a larger story that begins and ends well.”

If our stories consist only of our lives on Earth, we are left with wounds that never fully heal. Actually, it’s worse than that because all of our stories will end with our deaths. That’s why it’s so essential to look beyond ourselves, our pleasures, our goals and our desires. We need a greater story so that the worst things we experience will not be the last chapter.

Joy to the World – Including Taipei

This has been the hardest Christmas season of my life.

That’s not saying very much – most of my Christmases have been anything but hard. I love everything to do with Christmas – the music, the decorations, the Christmas tree, the food, buying wrapping and getting presents, etc.

But what I’ve always loved most is being able to spend extra time with my family , both because I had a break from school, and because when I was a child my family always traveled to visit family members I rarely saw. Which brings me to the reason this has been a hard Christmas.

Last summer, I moved to Taipei, where I will be working for at least two years. I enjoy my job and have many wonderful friends here. And yet … I find it hard to be completely happy because I still miss my family and friends from home. A lot.

When the Christmas season first started, it felt like I had an open wound. Anything that had to do with Christmas felt like someone had just touched that wound, sending a spasm of pain and loneliness through my heart. One day, I felt slightly depressed all day because someone had sung “I’ll be Home for Christmas” in chapel that morning. (I still think it was a weird choice because it talks about both being home and snow. Most of our coworkers are from Taipei, so they would not have snow, even though they will be home for Christmas. Those of us whose homes would have snow, wouldn’t be home for Christmas, except for two foreigners who took vacation. So the song really only applied to the two out of the 250 or so people in the room. But I digress.)

This Christmas season has included lots of good things too. I’ve grown less and less homesick as it has progressed. I’ve really enjoyed several parties with friends here, as well as an amazing Christmas performance put on by my coworkers. My roommates and I put up a Christmas tree, and I love seeing it every time I go into the living room. I went to a church service on Christmas Eve where we went onto the roof of the church and sang carols by candlelight. Spending Christmas in Taipei has been a great experience overall, so I don’t want it to sound like I’m always miserable here.

Nevertheless, the moments of homesickness have made me realize that, for all my talk about how I know that Christmas is about Jesus’s birth, in practice much of my love for Christmas comes from things other than the point of the season.

This isn’t to say that parties, food, music and family are bad – far from it. These are good gifts that God has given us, and we should receive and enjoy them with thanksgiving. But as I wrote in my Thanksgiving post, being grateful includes recognizing these blessings as grace – things we don’t deserve and wouldn’t normally get, not things that we are entitled to.

For me, that means enjoying Christmas even without my family and the other things that I don’t have here. Because as important and wonderful as family and all the trappings are, they are not something I’m entitled to, and they’re not what Christmas is about.

Christmas is about God becoming human and experiencing everything we experience. That includes the joys of delicious meals and time spent with family and friends, but also the sorrows of loneliness and poverty. This Christmas, I am taking comfort in the fact that God Himself knows what it is like, not only to move to a new country, but to do even more. He moved to a whole new planet, a whole new way of existing (as a physical, mortal human being). The Son of God, Who is so close to His Father that they are a single being, lived as a human, communicating with God only through prayer and the occasional message that God sent to him. And the purpose for which He came was to eventually be completely abandoned by the Father as he hung dying on a cross for us! As His follower, I enjoy the blessings of a new family with God as my father and the promise of perfect peace and eternal life. And this is true no matter where in the world I am.

So this Christmas, I am choosing to rejoice. I am basking in His incomprehensible love that gave up everything for me. May this love surround you and fill you with true joy this Christmas and throughout the year.