Posted on by Abe Austin

Taking Accountability- The Responsibility of Us All

A Tragedy and an Evil)

I don’t typically comment on world events or change my post lineup for special days. The way I see it, gospel study should be a constant in life, something steady and reliable, no matter what else is going on. So, whether it’s a special day or a mundane one, whether a happy day or sad, studying the gospel remains my rock through it all, and I try to have this blog reflect that.

But I recently saw a connection between something I wrote a couple weeks ago, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and I thought it might be instructive to talk about it.

First of all, let me emphatically renounce the assassination itself. It was evil, and cowardly evil at that. As Isaac Asimov said, “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Anyone that feels any sort of satisfaction from the occurrence, and celebrated it, is also evil, and cowardly evil. Those that commit and celebrate violence upon the innocent are devolving from the divine to the animal.

In the face of such abhorrent evil, it is only natural to ask, “how did we get here?” and “what can we do about it now?”

And these are the questions that brought me back to my post from two weeks ago. On September 5, I shared this simple prayer:

May my first reaction to every problem in the world 
And every problem in my personal life
Be "What did I do to contribute to this?"

Taking Accountability)

Well, that was my prayer at the time, but will I actually hold to its ideals in this moment? Will I say that only people other than myself need to change? Will I comfort myself with the assurance that I’m ‘one of the good ones’ and that I contributed nothing to what transpired? Or will I try to find some piece, even if it is small, that I can take accountability for?

Over the next three days I want to take my intentions and make them into actions. I want to look at this terrible thing that happened and see what I can change about myself as a response to it. I want to take ownership for the ways that my behavior has helped build a culture that produces tragedies such as these. I want to be realistic, and pragmatic, and honest.

I want to do this, because I truly believe it is my responsibility to do so. I believe it is the responsibility of us all. Only by focusing first and foremost on our own accountability will we become innocent of the world’s evil and transcend it. If enough of us take accountability, then we will transcend the world’s evil by changing the world so that events like these don’t happen anymore. Or, if not of us take accountability to accomplish that, we will at least transcend the world by no longer being part of the cycle that creates moments like these. Either collectively or individually, we can only create a better world by each of us taking accountability for ourselves.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Ascend, Decline, or Plateau- Hidden Movements

Hidden Decline)

In my last post I spoke about my personal experience with living on a spiritual plateau, one where I was basically good, but not making any real or notable sacrifices, not really living any differently than any other “good citizen.” To anyone looking at me from the outside, I was stagnant and consistent.

But that was only from the outside perspective. The truth is, at this time of outer stagnation, I was on a moral decline in my private life, crossing new barriers in my descent into deeper and deeper addiction. So, in reality, I wasn’t holding steady at all. I was in a moral freefall, and every day of external normalcy was just another lie digging me deeper beneath the surface.

My experience has made me wonder how many people really do live on a moral plateau. Is it actually primarily two groups of people, the truly striving and the downward falling, and it’s just that some of the downward falling put on a facade of plateau normalcy?

I do believe that there are some genuine plateau-dwellers, but I’ve definitely learned that people can be making invisible movements beneath the surface for a long, long time before there is any outward sign of how they have degenerated. When their moral life seems to suddenly collapse into a sinkhole, you can be sure that that didn’t just develop overnight.

Hidden Ascension)

But what about the other way around? Is it possible for someone to be improving morally in invisible ways, suddenly thrusting up to new heights seemingly out of the blue? I think so. I believe that we see this exact sort of pattern many times in the scriptures. Think of Moses, fled from Egypt, spending an entire life herding sheep for his father-in-law in Midian. We don’t hear of any great moments of huge moral development during that long sojourn, but it seems likely that he was being prepared, bit by bit, until he was ready to lead God’s people.

Perhaps as Moses abandoned his Egyptian way of life, he learned to surrender any personal plans. Perhaps while tending to the sheep, he developed a sense of leadership. Perhaps in his daily prayers, he developed the ability to obey God in everything, even if he might grumble along the way!

It seems likely to me that Moses was slowly accruing moral fortitude, and then when the divine call came, it appeared to the outside world that he was suddenly surging forward with new spiritual conviction and power!

This is why judgment of the soul is impossible to the mortal man. Only God and our own conscience can tell us how we’re moving beneath the surface, whether we are sinking into secret sin, or building silent strength. One day it may be clear to everyone, but until that pivotal moment, everything is a mystery from the outside view.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Ascend, Decline, or Plateau- Different Ways of Being

Ways of Being)

In my experience, we tend to be in one of three states in our moral development. The first is ascending, which means that we are progressively becoming better and better people. We are overcoming our bad habits, extending roots of determination and commitment, and moving forward to the sort of man or woman that we want to be.

The second is to be descending, where our bad habits are becoming more pronounced, and new ones are starting. We are willing to go to greater and greater lengths of immorality in pursuit of self-satisfaction. We either have no intention to improve or are declining in spite of our wishes to be better.

The third is to be on a plateau, where we are maintaining a certain level of morality. We may have some virtues, but we are not increasing in them. We may have some vices, but we are not increasing in those either. Perhaps we want to be better but aren’t able to make the change, or perhaps we’re just fine with where we’re at.

Of course, just because a person is in one of these modes of being on a particular day does not mean that they will always be so. There are many who have sought moral improvement, made some changes, then stagnated, then reverted back to previous failures. There are many who have started out a sinner, then paused when the toll on their soul became too much, then committed to a life of improvement. Thus, we can move up and down through these phases, and many of us do so many times throughout our lives.

How to Be)

With this study I want to consider how we find ourselves in each of these phases, why we move from one to the next, why we fail to improve when we really want to, and why we find success when we aren’t even looking for it.

These are no small questions. Psychologists have long noted the great divide between how people mean to be, and how they actually are, which is a very conflicting puzzle. Hopefully this study will be able to shed some light on the matter.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Forced to Fit- Part One

Prerequisites for the Divine)

We are a culture that approaches God by first establishing a foundation of worldly ideals that we believe in, and then trying to make Him fit them. We reject God or alter Him because He simply doesn’t match our modern presuppositions about what ultimate good is supposed to be.

Some require a God who isn’t patriarchal. Some require a God who doesn’t wage war on His enemies. Some require a God whose sovereignty doesn’t supersede our own authority. Some require a God who can be validated by scientific methods. Some require a God who is socially progressive.

In these cases, feminism or pacifism or individualism or materialism or progressivism are our first God, and for God to be God He must be in alignment with that first ideal, or He must not exist at all. He is forced to fit, or He is discarded.

This is, of course, an inversion of the proper order. When man recognizes that he has a different life philosophy than God he is supposed to change himself to conform with the Almighty, not change the Almighty to conform with him!

A Modern Lens)

Let us note that differences between God’s ideal and our own is inevitable. Even setting aside personal selfishness and flaws, our modern culture has been far removed from the Judeo-Christian ethic for a while now, and we have been immersed in that climate from before we had any understanding at all. Even if we were raised in a traditional, Christian home, it is certain that we have absorbed presuppositions that we are not even aware of, reasons why we feel that we cannot accept God entirely as He has been described to us.

I have never met the person who did not have some baked-in misunderstanding of the Lord, including myself. I have never met the person who did not struggle with some aspect of who God is declared to be. This is a common challenge that we all grapple with in one way or another. Indeed, we could make a case that most of our path of discipleship is simply us coming to terms with God as He is, surrendering our inclination to try and change Him, and choosing to change ourselves instead.

There is a little more that I wish to say on this subject, but I will save it for a second post tomorrow.

Posted on by Abe Austin

If God Can Do Anything

Because I believe that God can do anything, I believe that He can make any desired miracle come true for me! But even more impressive, because He can do anything, He can also make things work out without the miracle. Indeed, it requires less faith to believe that God can change the world to match my heart, than to believe that God can change my heart to survive in spite of the world.

Believe in the bigger God. Believe in the God who can make you whole, with or without the thing you most desire.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Tended Towards Ruin

A Heavy Loss)

There was a project that I once loved very much. It was a program oriented towards connecting men with God, helping them to bring their hearts back into His light. It was small and local, humble and unpolished, but it did truly miraculous things in the lives of those who attended it. Lately, though, I’ve found myself struggling to recognize that same institution from what it has become today. At some point, after about ten years of operation, the institution became a for-profit organization, and changes started being made for the betterment of the bottom line, not for the betterment of the men it served. Several of the original founders quit, due to personal disagreement with this new direction.

This has been a heavy thing for me to come to grips with, but as I have reflected on it I’ve realized that it was always going to go something like this. The special spirit of the old program had to meet its end one way or another, because that’s just the nature of things.

Tale as Old as Time)

I am reminded of the story of the tower of Babel. In it, a nation of people decide to build a great tower, reaching all the way to heaven. Bold enough to make themselves gods, they toiled and labored on this great elevation of man until the whole thing toppled to the ground.

We do not know exactly how high they built their tower, only that it fell before they could achieve their aim. Their construction became destruction, their order became ruin, and the people were returned back to the level of the fallen earth.

This, of course, is a type for all manner of structures in the world today. And I don’t merely mean physical structures, either. Even more so it applies to structures of law, of government, of ideology, of any edifice constructed by the wisdom of man.

The Way of Things)

Every club, organization, corporation, and ideal is laid with ruin in its foundation. On the one hand, this might be because they are laid with carnal and earthly motivations, such as focus on profit or notoriety. Once making money is one of the organization’s pillars, then it is tied to the natural things of this earth, all of which decay, erode, and finally collapse. Through the years we have seen countless companies over-exploit their workers, consumers, and intellectual properties, killing the golden goose just to get a higher profit in the short term. We have seen countless governments siphon power and wealth to the highest class until they became too top-heavy and collapsed under their own weight. The compromises that were deemed necessary to make the enterprise possible eventually make its continued existence impossible.

But even without a foundation of earthly motivations, every structure of man is still doomed to fall due to our fundamentally flawed nature. Even our organizations that are built on ideal, and virtue, and purity of intention, gradually erode and eventually go wrong entirely. Even if a core principle is worthy, if it is taken slightly too far at the beginning, it will magnify and accelerate over time, eventually becoming a great evil. It is like stacking blocks to build a taller and taller tower, given enough time and distance every structure leans too far one way or the other. Given enough time and distance, every little flaw becomes a crushing error, and the whole thing will topple. So an organization founded with a focus on discipline will eventually become fascistic oppression, whereas a focus on liberty will eventually become gross hedonism. We sow the death even in the birth, it is simply our nature.

Even God’s church, once entrusted to earthly stewards, is tended toward ruin. The world was in a state of apostasy in the time of Noah, and in the time of Abraham, and in the time of Jesus. God has to refresh His word among His people repeatedly, not because His word has deteriorated, but because we people just keep losing our grasp of it. We know that even the believers today will once again be on the brink of ruin when God will have to refresh everything with the second coming.

What Lasts)

Ironically, what truly lasts is what seems most transient. Though man’s works are doomed to fail, along the way they house occasional sparks of something pure and genuine. There can be a nugget of God in the midst of all the stone. And though that nugget seems momentary and transient, it is only because we are perceiving it through a shifting lens. In actuality, each of those nuggets is anchored in something realer and truer than the structure it was found within.

There is an entity behind all those sparks, a constant certainty beneath every brief wonder. By fastening ourselves to these pearls, and following their threads to deeper things, we tie ourselves to the only thing that is actually eternal.

The man-made program I once loved may be gone, but the experiences I found within it have not. Those experiences introduced me to the One who hasn’t changed at all, and never will. In reality, I haven’t lost a thing.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Called to Wait

I have been guilty of being frustrated when God does not immediately answer the good desires of my heart. If I come to Him in faith, surrender my situation to His care, and believe in His power to do what is right, then why do I not receive the desired results?

And to be clear, I don’t mean going to God and asking Him to give me fame or fortune. I mean asking Him to change my heart, to cure my selfishness and addiction, to mend my brokenness so that I can be a better person. These are clearly good things, ones that I genuinely feel are in alignment with God’s will for me, so why wouldn’t the desire to change be answered with transformation?

Recently, though, I felt this impatience rebuked as I considered the precedent that is set for us in the word of God. I do not feel the scriptures justifies my opinion that God would immediately deliver every good thing that is sought for. Rather, the Bible is full of examples of waiting, sometimes for very long periods of time, before the realization of promised blessings are fulfilled.

Think of Abraham being promised that he would be the father of a great nation, but that not coming to pass for hundreds of years. Think of Jacob having to toil for seven years to marry the woman of his dreams, only to be deceived and committing to serving another seven years for her. Think of Joseph waiting long periods as a slave in Potiphar’s house and then in prison, even though he had done no wrong. Think of Moses trying to help the Israelites, failing, and then living decades in Midian before being called to try again. Think of the Israelites, freed from Egypt, but waiting in the wilderness 40 years before they would receive the Promised Land. Think of Job being left to wallow in his afflictions for a full measure before he was restored. Finally, think of those that Christ healed, and how many of them had been held by their afflictions for years before their deliverance. For the woman with the issue of blood it was twelve years, for the man at the pool of Bethesda it was thirty-eight!

In some of these examples there was a period of waiting because the people were not ready, such as the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. In others, however, there was no personal fault, such as with Joseph, it was simply not yet the right time for his deliverance. So why could not either of these cases be the same with me? Maybe I’m not ready for my deliverance, but if I trust the Lord to prepare me eventually I will be. Or maybe I am ready, but it is not the right time according to the Lord’s wisdom, so I should rest in Him and let the better things come when they may. In either case, the fact that I have not yet been healed is not, in-and-of-itself evidence that something is going wrong. It may still be going exactly right. I might be rightly waiting in the wilderness, just where I’m supposed to be.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 12:31-33

31 And he called for Moses and Aaron by night, and said, Rise up, and get you forth from among my people, both ye and the children of Israel; and go, serve the Lord, as ye have said.

32 Also take your flocks and your herds, as ye have said, and be gone; and bless me also.

33 And the Egyptians were urgent upon the people, that they might send them out of the land in haste; for they said, We be all dead men.

It seems to me that Verse 31 is saying that Pharaoh did not even wait for the next morning to speak with Moses and Aaron. That he called for them by night seems to suggest it was within mere hours of discovering that his own firstborn had been slain, and also all the other firstborn of Egypt.

Pharaoh had previously declared that he and Moses would never again see each other face-to-face and Moses had agreed. So while it says that he called for Moses and Aaron, and gave them permission to take the Israelites out into the wilderness, I wonder if all this was relayed by a spokesperson, or whether Pharaoh kept his back to the prophet.

In any case, Pharaoh delivered very few words to the prophet. He only said enough to show that he was finally fully complying with the demands of the Lord. He was allowing for the men, the women, the children, the flocks and the herds to leave, the entire group with no exceptions. For the first time he was not trying to limit or compromise or go back on his word.

At the very end of his declaration he also made one small petition, “and bless me also.” This is a brief and piteous request, and I wonder if God would have granted it. However, as we will soon see, Pharaoh nullified any potential act of mercy by trying to wage war with the Israelites one last time.

For now, though, all of Egypt was united in its desire to be rid of the Israelites. It says that they were “urgent upon the people,” pushing them out in haste. Such a turn of events! Where once the Egyptians had refused to let the Israelites go, now they absolutely required it! This shows greater power in God than if He had slain every Egyptian and brought Israel out of the ruin. It is one thing to force someone to do something against their will, but it is a much more significant thing to change their will to your own.

Posted on by Abe Austin

It’s Hard to Change Your Story

It can be a hard thing to change the story we have told other people of who we are. Each of us suggests to others what our principles and priorities are, what we will and will not do, and what behavior they might expect of us. Sometimes we begin to shift who we are, though, and at that point it becomes difficult to explain to others this new emerging version of ourselves. This is true whether our change is for the worse or for the better.

For the Worse)

Let us first consider the example of a change for the worse. Suppose I am developing a bad habit, or that I’m trying to admit to a bad habit that I’ve kept a secret. In this case, then telling others about this new lifestyle of mine reveals any number of the following details about me:

  1. I was lying to people in the past.
  2. I’m ignoring my conscience to do something that I still know is wrong.
  3. I wasn’t nearly so firm in my past convictions as I pretended to be.

None of these are a pleasant thing to own up to. None of them show me in a very good light. All of them make me a fool and/or a liar. Any other principles that I still claim to maintain are now suspect, because I’ve already shown the capacity to abandon one of them. This creates a motivation to hide our vices, to let people go on thinking that we are still as saintly as they had assumed, thus adding another layer of deceit to our story.

For the Better)

Now let us examine the example of me giving up a bad habit, changing my life for the better. In this case, there is still a friction against changing my story. For one, I might have the sense that my present company have something over me in that they knew the old me, the worst me, the me who openly did the things I now say I don’t do. I might be worried that these people will see my new efforts as nothing more than an act, a forced performance and not my true character. They might be anchors, trying to pull me back to what they think is the “real” me, even though I am trying to reject that version.

Not only this, but if I have done these bad habits with others, they may feel judged by my rejection of that behavior. I might say that I don’t judge them for doing that which I now consider inexcusable in myself, but that is inconsistent. I am now opposed to a part of my old self that still loves on in my friends’ current selves, so in truth I am now rejecting a part of who they are.

These two factors create a pull back towards our old ways. We are motivated to undo our story rewrite.

Is Change Possible?)

Whether for the better or the worse, change implies that there something wrong and deceitful about yourself either in the past or the present. Making a change means admitting to your flawed nature, your unreliableness, and your uncertainty. Is it any wonder, then, that so few people seem to change? Some people even believe that no one can really change. They say that people can only alter their outer behaviors from time-to-time, but will still be the same person at their core.

I don’t think the situation is quite that severe, though the difficulty of true transformation should never be understated. I think it would be more accurate to say: a man really can change, even for the better, but more often than not it takes an act of God to do it!