How Can We Help Jesus?

A common phrase used when entering a restaurant is, “how may I help you?” Underneath this is the ever present question, “What can I do for you?” Is this the sum of the Christian lifestyle? Doing and striving for God and others?

I believe in doing good deeds. It is essential in our walk with Christ.   But I do not believe I can accomplish anything truly good without outside help. This is where Jesus comes in.

When I first met Jesus, I had a feeling of a peace and joy that the world could not duplicate. After a time, it seemed to leave me. Sound familiar? Some would say that this is a normal occurrence because you are maturing in the Lord. I believe the exact opposite is taking place.  Losing his peace in your life is the first sign that something is wrong with your walk in Christ.

It is at such times many are tempted to compensate for this by doing good works apart from his grace. We ask the question, “What can I do for you Jesus? How may I help him?” He is standing behind us, not with demands but a simple request to return to his peace and joy. The bible says it this way, “As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith.” This means the same faith you used to receive him is the same faith you walk in to abide in him.

Christians who simply “do” often miss the other side of the coin. They don’t have a full understanding of the grace of God, walking in the Spirit, or abiding in Jesus and his love. The reality of life is this, doing things only gets you so far. Jesus knew this and so taught us a deeper reality.

Christians don’t increase their faith in Christ by doing things.  Doing is a symptom of faith.  We don’t focus on good deeds alone. Buddhist, Muslims, and many other religions already focus on doing good. Christianity is different. It isn’t so much about doing good works as it is about receiving the good news of Jesus abundant life, and then spreading it to others. This is done by focusing on Jesus, by resting and abiding in his finished work.

This doesn’t mean sleeping on the couch. It means to lean not on your own understanding but in all your ways acknowledge him and he shall direct your path. No matter what situation we are in, we can have peace that Christ will direct our paths. We can trust him. Out of this rest, we cannot help but do good for others.

But what about the law? Shouldn’t we focus on acting good towards others and ourselves?

The truth of the law is this. Only Jesus could do it. So in that we abide in the only man that could fulfill the law. Sometimes our desire to do great works has blinded us from the source of the greatest work. Abraham was not great because of what he did. Paul says it was his faith in God that made him great. Out of that faith great works came fourth in abundance. For us the source of great works is Jesus himself and not the law. Jesus finished his work on the cross and resurrection so that we might have an abundant life, full of his love, peace, and grace. It is from this revelation that we go and love others.

Many Christians do this backwards.

In John 15:12 Jesus commands us to love one another as he loves us.  But before this, in John 15:9-11, he says that we are to abide or remain in Jesus and his love for us. It is out of this that we love one another.

1 John 3:11 also says that we should “love one another”. Before this though, in 1 John 2:20-27, it says (paraphrased) that after receiving the Holy Spirit who is to teach you truth… we are to remain in fellowship with Christ so that when he returns we will be full of courage instead of shame. Then it says in verse 28: “Since we know that Christ is righteous, we know that all who do what is right are God’s children.” It only says this after commending us to remain in fellowship with Christ.

James 1:22 is an often quoted verse that says you aren’t supposed to just listen to the Word of God but you must do it also. The previous, less-quoted verse states, “You must humbly accept the word God has planted in your hearts, for it has the power to save your souls.” So in this verse you find the power to salvation comes from God’s word and not by your works.  Only when that power is realized does James asks you to do.

Here is something I read on a well-meaning church’s website.

“WE BELIEVE…Sanctification Initially Occurs at Salvation and is not only a declaration that a believer is holy, but also a progressive lifelong process of separating from evil as believers continually draw closer to God and become more Christlike.”

I really like this wording. It has all the main points, “Sanctification occurs at salvation”, “separation from evil”, “draw closer to God”. But I don’t think it is clear enough for us to use in a practical since. It could tempt us to see our works as bringing us further from sin and closer to God. The last part should read thus, “a progressive lifelong process of drawing closer to God and from that becoming more Christlike, which will separate you from evil.” The focus is no longer on separating yourself from evil, which only Christ could do successfully. It is now on Christ’s finished work of power in your life that separates you from evil.

I spoke to someone about this who claimed I was worried about semantics. I disagree. He and I may believe in the same things, but where we differ is which part should be focused on first. He focuses on doing good works for Jesus and therefore becoming righteous like him. I, in my faith, focus upon Jesus himself and what he has accomplished on the cross and resurrection. Then it is not my righteousness but his. This is the key to an abundant and peaceful life. This is what makes all the difference.  I think Jesus said it best in John 15:5, “apart from me you can do nothing.” If you are not resting in Him then you are not abiding in him.

It is about Jesus and not about us. If we even try and do what Jesus did without his power and strength in us, then we fall headlong into self-righteousness. By trying to do works for Jesus before learning to be full of his restful peace, we are trying in our own strength to be righteous. This is how Christians lose that initial peace and joy in Christ.

Doing deeds for Christ doesn’t necessarily mean that it is done through him. The Crusades are perhaps the greatest extreme of self-righteousness. They entered Jerusalem claiming they were fighting for God and country. They claimed they were doing all sorts of things “for Jesus”. All the while they were killing and raping innocent civilians. Many Muslims, Jews, and Christians who lived inside Jerusalem were killed by the “righteousness” of the crusades. Was this the righteousness that Christ was talking about? Of course not!

If you are doing a “good deed” no matter how good it looks and feels to the world, if it is done apart from Jesus then it will amount to nothing in God’s eyes. Sure you can cast out demons in his name, heal people in his name, and put on the appearance of goodness, just like the Pharisees did. But because you do it for Jesus instead of by and through him, you are doing nothing. In the end he will say that he never knew you.

It is like trying to relate to be a servant when he has asked us to be a friend. If God only wanted servants than he never would have sent his son to die so that we could be more. We would still have the old law to try and follow, something that only Jesus could accomplish.

God has done all good things through you. Even the supposed goodness that is done for others by a self-righteous man have come through Jesus and not of their own strength. This is how a pastor cheating on his wife can still be used by God to heal others. It is for the others sake that God uses the sinner. If he only used perfect people, than no one would be used at all.

Even a selfish Christian’s manipulative deeds can be used to help others. This is because it has never been about us. It’s always been about Jesus and what he has done for us.

And so what needs to happen? What is it that many Christians are missing? They are missing Jesus and the abundant life he has for us. How do you receive it?

All you need is faith in Christ!

Trying to be a Christian apart from faith is a hard way to live. There is no abundant peace or joy without faith in him. Was his pure and innocent death enough to cover our sins? Was it enough to save the world? Can we ever do enough to thank him? Does he ask us to do enough to thank him? No. He asks us to simply rest in faith in his finished work. Then that finished work does a work within us. Paul calls it being transformed by the renewing of the mind.

Jesus is enough! Abide in his love then go and love others as he has loved you. Love them with a powerful love, based upon your relationship with Christ.  This is how we can help Jesus.

The Revolution of eBooks and the Next Indie Art

Just read an interesting blog by Michael A. Stackpole, author of many books including the Star Wars X-Wing series.  He talks about the harsh reality many authors face in the publishing world.  At the end of his blog he brings up an alternative rout the author can take, self-published eBooks.

The eBook is a downloadable book you can read in your hand held Blackberry, iphone, iPad, Nook, or Kindle.  This may not seem like the ideal way to read something that is 300+ pages.  But it turns out with the Nook and Kindle at least, E ink is paving the way for electronic reading that looks as real as any page.

But what about the quality of eBooks? You can already download many well known authors out there that have been tested through the fires of a publishing company.  I’d like to discuss a more intriguing prospect though.  Aspiring authors have the ability to write a book so that it is directly downloaded for anyone to buy thanks to companies like Smashwords. This means, no publisher at all stands between the hallowed transaction between writer and reader.  Authors would be indie and self published.

A valid concern with beginning authors (like myself) adding their hordes of stories, is there would be less editing going on.  Thus the quality of well-written books could go down.  Can you imagine?  All the horrible indie writers you would have to trudge through just to get to a good one? I’m talking about shelves of them with catchy names and covers, but soulless mundane stories within.

Unfortunately, this already happens in bookstores all over the world.  It is a huge risk to buy a brand new book without any prier knowledge of its quality, daring to take a chance on something that looks interesting. This is why buying books on line has already taken on so well.  Online stores offer you the chance to read what other people thought before you buy it.

Another concern, you need the publisher to make sure it is a well written novel.  I once entered a bookstore and bought a book thinking the very same thing.  The back cover was a glowing description of intrigue.  I flipped through the first few pages, seemed like a pretty nifty story. Then I bought the book, went home and read it. Turns out that with all the editors that looked through it, all the time the author may have put on it, all the effort it took for the publisher to publish it, all the trees that died to make it, all the paint the painter used to compose the front cover, all of this and still the book sucked. I wasted 8 dollars and a few days of my life to uncover this atrocity.

How can opening another avenue for authors to sell their stuff be any worse then this? More importantly, how could the indie author be better off than the published one?

Cut out the middle men and a much cheaper alternative presents itself.  With publishers you have people trying to sell books. That is it. You’d think they would always want good books to sell because that would only make since. The problem is, they have to make money. With good books few and far between they have to sell whatever is standing around.

Micheal Stackpole pointed out in his blog that it doesn’t even make a business since to sell tree-books.  5% of all authors in a publishing house make 100% of the profit.  That means less then 1% are made from cold sells, which is grabbing a book from a random author and buying it.  Since a writer only makes 80 cents for every tree-book sold, it even means less money for the aspiring new author to have.  All of this makes eBooks much more inviting to the bookstore and the author.

The indie writer would make more than half of what he/she sells.  They also choose how high they wish to sell their product.  This is because the book is completely owned by the author, which gives him more incentive to write something worth selling. He doesn’t have to fret about what a hundred executives are telling him to do.  He doesn’t have to accept a crappy book cover. He chooses his own editors.  He can use blogs and the internet to advertise his work.  In the end, it is up to him wither the book sells or tanks.

What about all the crappy eBooks that will be written? This is where we the people come in. We must all be the critics. Through the internet we can compose lists of indie authors we enjoy reading. By sharing that list via word of mouth, we promote the better ones. A few wise guy critics are bound to make a site where they give their reviews. Sure enough as sure as butter meets bread, you have a revolution where the reader and the author are that much closer. With a vocal consumer, only the most most well-written literature would make it.

This is only the beginning though.   There is no telling where indie eBooks will go.  Indie films are still not making as much as Hollywood movies.  Indie music seems far behind the music industry in sells.  But with indie books it isn’t quite as complicated.  There is no need to hire directors and actors, musicians and sound men.  Every major bookstore chain is willing to distribute your work, from Amazon to Barnes and Nobel.  All you need is a word processor, a clever way to advertise it, and a willingness to write.

How J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter Book Series

Spoiler free!

As an aspiring author it is my duty and joy to read great books.  I have done so rather diligently knowing that the best way to find my voice is to imitate another’s.  In my quest to achieve this end, I analyze what the author wrote and how he or she wrote it.  There will be no spoilers here.  Just a very brief commentary on how J. K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books.

Let us first examine her overall plan.  She wrote the first book knowing how the seventh would end.  Everything was detailed and written out beforehand.  This gave her an incredible freedom to add little bits and puzzles that she could put off solving until later.  Some of the smaller puzzles even I, as the reader, forgot about.  But she was very thorough.  She did her job and solved them all, bringing everything to an immensely satisfying close.

Each book had a strong moral theme at its core: friendship, working together, facing death bravely, falling in love.  How the characters faced these morals was haunted by a mystery (sometimes more than one) that must be solved.  This was done using an episodic formula.

The first episode of the book was before school started, Harry’s horrible life with the Dursleys.  The tension of this episode was built around the fact that he might not even make it to school.  Would this book even begin to start?  Or would it be thwarted by the Dursleys’ scheming ways?  These questions carried through the first part of the book all the way until it ended with the train to Hogwarts.

The second episode was the first semester of school.  It began with the sorting hat and ended with Christmas.  During this time the main mystery was reveled and the search for clues began.  The third episode, the second semester, ended with the mystery solved and a grand battle that Harry would face alone or with his friends.

The last episode was the resolution.  It would end after Harry had faced death and won to tell the tale.  Then he’d go back home to the Dursleys’ who could care less about his exploits.  Moving from the joy of overcoming death and the disappointment of living with Dursleys’ ended the book on a certain sort of uneasy tension.  In fact Rowling used a lot of tension with all her various plots and between all her characters, a tension that was eventually and always released.

The first three books followed this formula very carefully.  Everything was brought into a satisfying close.  The last four books, beginning with The Goblet of Fire, varied from the formula and did not end as satisfying.  There was a hook that led you onto the next book, until the seventh book, The Deathly Hallows, which ignored the episodic formula almost completely.  The stakes were always raised higher and higher as each book progressed in connection with Harry who grew stronger and stronger.  These stakes made a leaping high jump from book three to four however.  Everything and everyone was in trouble and about to face death.  It was much more likely Harry would die, or miss the train to Hogwarts, or lose his friendships.  I cannot explain further without giving anything away.  Suffice it to say that doing this created a since of urgency (a tension) that was not resolved or released until the very last word was read.

What made the books so intriguing though?  The story world was vastly detailed and believable enough for a young-adults fiction.  Almost every character had flaws to overcome which made them fascinating to read.  The mysteries were masterfully produced by Rowling and cleverly explained.  All of these things drove the story forward.  They were all great elements to help create the whole.

What made these books the most intriguing, however, was the boy that she placed in the middle of it all.  Harry Potter was the conduit in which she used to explain all of these mysteries.  Everything was voiced from his perspective.  And he just so happened to be the most intriguing and fascinating character to the reader and to the other characters within the book.  This was not idly done now.  She made a conscious effort in forming her idea of Hogwarts.  She created a world on the brink of a war that would doom everyone, including us non-magical folk.  She told this story of a magical war through the eyes of the only boy that could stop it.  She chose to tell everything from Harry’s ignorance, also keeping the audience ignorant, even to the point of not understanding himself.  Only when he figured all this out could the reader understand and grasp how everything would end.

Rowling’s writing voice had a goal in mind.  She wanted to write a page-turner full of interwoven mysteries.  Very rarely did she separate her plot with her description of the world it all took place in.  In most cases they were in the very same sentence.  Because of this, her sentences were often very long and complex, yet simply written so that any could grasp them.  She never had too much detail in describing her world.  It was just enough to express the story.  Even though it was a fantasy, she used objects we know of such as cars, castles, and suits of armor– and transformed them into something extraordinary with magic.  By doing this she didn’t have to go into long pages of explaining how something looked or worked, which would not have gone over well for a young adult’s book.

I’d also like to add my personal tastes here.  Most books don’t go over well with pages and pages of explanation.  The author Michael Creighton is the only acceptation that I have found.  If I wanted things explained in such detail I’d read an essay, or a blog.  Fiction is to be first and foremost about telling a story.  On the other hand, you can also describe things too sparsely so that the reader doesn’t even know what is going on.  Rowling did a great job of balancing the two, or rather unbalancing it since the story far outweighed its descriptions.

The magical world and its mysteries were only the icing on the cake.  At the heart of her story were the characters themselves.  Whenever Harry Potter had to make a decision, his two best friends would act as Harry’s conscience.  Ron was his right hand man, often foolhardy, acting as the “devil” side of Harry’s conscience.  Hermione was clever, diligent and, very smart.  She acted as the “angel” side of Harry’s conscience.  Whenever Harry and Ron got into trouble it was Hermione that expressed how they needed to be punished.  But she also had perspective.  When things were at their worst, she would be the first one to break the rules for the sake of protecting a friend or saving the world.  Apart from playing as Harry’s conscience Ron and Hermione had their own personal flaws to overcome, which gave them depth.  The friendship of these three was a glue that connected the plot and moved it forward or, in some cases, held it back.

Harry’s villains were also very mysterious and fascinating.  The most fascinating of them being Professor Snape.  Valdemort was the ultimate evil it is true, but he was mostly hidden in shadow and only showed up as a lead character towards the end of the series.  I’d also like to add that Rowling made a conscious effort to make Valdemort comparable to Adolf Hitler, which added that much more depth to him.  It was Snape though who was there to antagonize Potter as his potions teacher.  Towards the end Snape only became more and more fascinating.  His role as an antagonist in Potter’s life, toughened the boy up for his greater role of defeating the ultimate evil of the “warlock Hitler” Voldemort.  I’d get into Dumbledore’s friendship with Potter and the fascinating relationship of Snape and Dumbeldor, but I promised no spoilers here.  That second triangle of trust and mistrust is wisely used by Rowling.

Rowling wrote for the present.  As her audience grew up so did the story.  The greatest difference was the fourth book, Goblet of Fire, which was almost twice as large as the third.  It was during this time that she also began to grow and expand her episodic formula.

There are so many things that I could talk about in this series.   I only wanted to highlight a few practical writing tips that she has taught me.  Here’s a review.

She worked everything out before she wrote the first book.

She used an episodic circular formula: Dursleys’, the mystery, it is solved, back to Dursleys’.

She used tension and release with her plot and characters.

Her story was written from the view of the most fascinating character Harry Potter.

She used long complex, yet simply written sentences, to compose a page-turning tale of mysteries and magic.

She used the friendship of three major characters to glue together the plot as well as the trust and mistrust of three others to… well, read the books!

She gave Harry equally fascinating villains to face and overcome.

She wrote for her present audience, as they grew older, so did her books.