Book Review: When People Are Big and God Is Small by Welch

October 20th, 2009

A RESPONSE TO “WHEN PEOPLE ARE BIG AND GOD IS SMALL” BY ED WELCH

This book starts off with a story that I completely identified with.  Too often I would sit at awards ceremonies wishing that they would not call my name because I was afraid of what everyone would think of me.  Would they think I was a know-it-all?  Would they think I had cheated?  What would they think?  I didn’t want to win anything.  But as soon as the ceremony was over and they had not called my name, I immediately was upset that I didn’t win anything!  I would wonder all over again what people thought of me.  Would they think I am dumb?  Would they think I am lazy?  I was constantly controlled by the opinion of other people.  I really liked that Ed Welch began with a story that made it very clear that we are controlled by what is important to us, and for most of us, people are most important.

In chapter two, he addresses shame as an avenue of the fear of man.  We feel shameful because of our sin.  This became very real to me as I read.  I thought about my own life and how I often am afraid of other people because I am afraid of being found out.  He says that often there is a large gap between your private life and your public life when you fear man.  This has been true many times in my life.  I can definitely see how the fear of man would cause you to have a different private life than public.  You would try to make people think that you are better than you really are.  We all sin, and we all are aware that we all sin.  But somehow we still try to prove to other people while we are in front of them that we are the exception to that rule. We value their opinion of us so highly that we are actually willing to live a lie in order to make them think better of us.

This bleeds directly into peer pressure.  He talks about how highly we view the opinions of others.  Sometimes we value them so highly that we would rather sin than look stupid (p. 40).  We will go out with some friends on a weekend knowing that our parents have told us to be home by 10pm.  When our friends want to go to a movie that we know will not end until after 10pm, we just go along instead of doing what is right because we know that if we say something, we will no longer be “cool.”  Being “cool” is more important to us than being holy.

He also says that other people control us by telling us that we are victims.  We are not responsible for our actions because someone else made us do it.  We are victims (p. 74).  We then become blame-shifters.  Nothing is our fault anymore, and because we idolize man’s opinion so much, we actually believe that.  This is a way that we are controlled by man that I didn’t realize until he brought it to the surface.

When he moved into talking about the fear of God (p. 95), his words started to really change my thinking.  I understood that I feared man, and at this point he begins to present the solution.  Our problem is that people are too big in our eyes.  God is just a dot on the radar of our life, and people are the whole map!  When we start to see who God really is, we begin to fear Him more than anything else.  We stop fearing the creation when we learn who the Creator really is.

He presents a flow chart of how our fear of God often works.  This was eye-opening.  The fear of God starts with terror, then dread, trembling, astonishment, awe, reverence, devotion, trust, and finally worship.  This is similar to the progression that we follow when we make anything “god” in our life.  The only difference is that God deserves all the forms of fear that we could give.  He is worthy of terror, dread, and trembling.  He is the all-powerful God.  He controls the wind and the waves.  When we see a demonstration of God’s power, it often brings us to the point of astonishment and awe.  We stare at God’s handiwork, and we are awestruck.  As we really get to know Him, we begin to revere His character and His person.  We begin to trust this almighty entity whose character far surpasses our understanding.  And finally we worship God with our whole hearts.  This progression is essential for us to really fear God the way we ought.  This kind of fear is the only remedy for the fear of man.

Part of the solution comes from understanding what God does on our behalf to help us to fear Him rather than man.  God wants us to delight in Him as he fills us (p. 171).  This is a great point that Welch makes.  God forgives our sins and covers us with His love.  Those things that we are afraid to have exposed before mankind, we are also afraid to have exposed before God.  But God does not expose us if we put our trust (fear) in Him.  He forgives us.  This changed my thinking on the way that we fear man.  We fear man because we can see him and relate with him and because he judges us based on our performance.  God will do the same to all unsaved men.  Man is more tangible to us, and his reactions to us feel more real, so we fear man instead of God.  What we forget is that God will forgive our sin and will accept us in love.

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Book Review: Living Purely by Binney

October 19th, 2009

A RESPONSE TO “LIVING PURELY IN AN IMPURE WORLD” BY JIM BINNEY

Binney starts off the book talking about the basics of sin in our lives.  He says almost right away that there are only three causes for problems in the human experience: sin, sickness, and Satan, or a combination of these (p. 10).  This caught me off guard.  Right away I noticed that something was left out.  What about the problems that happen in our life apart from those three things?  What happens if something inconvenient and unexpected happens in our life and its cause cannot be relegated to either sickness or sin?  Do we automatically assume that Satan is the instigator of our problems?  I think we should reconsider this. Scripture seems to point to the fact that often our “problems” are direct results of God’s intervention in our life to test us and to draw us closer to Himself.  Maybe God is actually causing these problems in our life to change us into the image of His Son, Jesus Christ.  These are all things that make me think that the cause for our problems might be broader than we think.  We just need to be careful when making generalizations about our problems.  We just may miss God doing a work in our heart and trying to change us.

He discusses the extent of temptation in chapter 2.  He says that God knows what we can withstand and will never take us beyond that point (p. 27).  This gives great hope.  “Just at the time when you think it’s too much, He is there with His omnipotent power to control the winds lest they overcome you.”  God is so faithful that no matter how strong the temptation seems, and no matter how much you want to give in, He always provides a way of escape.  This truth has given me hope on many occasions.  God will always keep His promises, and He promises to give us a way out of temptation.  He is a loving God who wants us to be free from sin and to be like His Son.  This truth can be life-changing.

In chapter 6, Binney talks about how our actions are motivated by our beliefs (p. 65).  He says that we all recognize when a notoriously sinful group is sinning that their actions are motivated by their beliefs.  What we do not recognize is when that same thing happens in our own life.  We fall into sin, and we cannot figure out what led us there.  Too often, there is something that we believe about God that is not true, and that belief is leading us to choose sin rather than a loving Savior.  We need to regularly examine our beliefs to make sure that what we believe is in line with what God’s Word says.  Binney also says that if you want to know what a man believes, just look at his actions.  Our actions betray our beliefs.

Chapter 9 deals directly with the methods of the Devil.  This hit home with me because I have keenly seen Satan’s working even in my own family.  Satan is a liar and the father of lies.  His tactics are always the same.  They have been the same since the Garden of Eden.  He either flat out lies to us to get us to believe him instead of God, or he twists something God has said and gives us a half-truth making us question what God really said.  He lies to us to get us to fall.  His fiery arrows are lies that we believe easily.  Satan builds strongholds where he can get us to believe a lie (p. 115).  The more lies we believe that Satan is feeding us, the more entrapped in his snare we will become.  This is his method.  Binney has clearly identified this enemy.

His next chapter deals with our response to Satan.  How do we fight him?  Binney points out that God tells us often to resist the devil.  This seems like a difficult task.  How are we supposed to resist an unseen force that knows more about us than we know about ourselves?  He has been studying the human race for thousands of years.  He knows what we easily give into.  I agree with Binney when he says that our first response should be to submit to God.  When we are submitting to God, we are resisting the devil.  When this happens, he will flee from us.  God has promised that Satan will flee from us when we resist him.  We must then submit to God.  This promise gives us hope when we realize that many of the sins that we commit are because we have believed the lie of Satan.  If we simply submit to God, the devil will be far from us.  This will free us from many of the temptations that we would not otherwise face.

Binney’s book gives hope to many people who are looking for the source of sin in their life.  God has told us in His Word where our temptations come from.  When we know where the battle will be, we can be better prepared to fight.

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Book Review: Depression by Welch

October 18th, 2009

A RESPONSE TO “DEPRESSION: A STUBBORN DARKNESS” BY ED WELCH

The first three chapters of this book were extremely eye-opening for me.  I have never known someone who was depressed and so have never interacted with the way that they feel and think.  Depression, to me, seemed as simple as the sin of not trusting God.  I thought that everyone who was depressed was going through the same thing.  Welch sheds much light on the subject and explains that this is just not the case. He says that there is both a severe and a less severe form of depression.  He also says that often people will generalize and stereotype the two different forms when seeking for a cause (p. 30).  He says that we must be careful not to come to conclusions too quickly as to how to deal with the depression.  There may be serious issues of the heart that the depression is pointing to, and these things must be resolved (p. 32).  This was enlightening.  If some people are more depressed than others, then it would seem to me that the more serious cases would involve more serious issues of the heart.  I agree with Welch when he says that the problem often lies in the heart.

I agree with Welch when he talks in chapter 5 about the fact that we live as if there is no God, but we universally affirm His presence when we are in trouble.  We all know there is a God.  We all know that we are responsible to Him.  We suppress this knowledge in order that we might be able to live our lives free of responsibility to that God.  This, however, produces a kind of guilt in our hearts that often leads to depression.  It is part of the suffering that Welch talked about in chapter 4.    Welch explains the role that Christ had in being our advocate by showing that His suffering was more extreme than ours in every way.  Welch is right on when he says that.  Christ understands our suffering more than we could know.  I agree with Welch when he says that the knowledge that Christ understands our suffering can bring hope to those who are suffering deeply.

Welch explains that spiritual warfare is ongoing.  In the midst of our depression, we are at war.  He says that when we realize that this is the case, even if we don’t feel like it is true, we are on the right track (p. 71).  I do not think I agree entirely true.  Though it is true that knowing that a battle is raging is important, if we do not engage ourselves in that battle, we will still lose.  I can see how knowing that the battle is fierce is helpful in planning a strategy, but I think that the knowledge alone does not put us on the right track.  We have to act on that knowledge.

Welch’s chapter on remembering was, to me, the most influential chapter in the book.  I think he hits the nail right on the head on this one.  He explains that remembering what God has done for us in forgiving our sins is essential to overcoming depression.  We have to see our sin in order to understand what forgiveness really did for us.  He spends time in this chapter explaining how important it is to see the sin in our lives.  When we recognize how egregiously we have offended the holy God, we begin to see the extent of the forgiveness that He has so graciously extended to us.  This recognition helps us to see the goodness of God.  When we understand that we are forgiven for all of those sins, the sense of guilt and shame is decreased substantially.  This is the beginning of hope.

Chapter 14 was also one of the best chapters.  Welch addresses the human heart.  He tries to expose our heart and its longings in a way that shows us what we worship.  I agree with him completely that unveiling the heart is an essential part of the process of change (p. 135).  He goes through the wilderness experiences of many in the Bible to show that these are the times that God uses in our lives to reveal our heart.  We suffer to expose our true allegiances.  He then discusses how we can have joy in the midst of the wilderness experiences.  He begins to explain that many authors in Scripture point to the need for joy in the midst of our trials.  Welch makes a connection here that I do not completely understand or fully agree with.  He says that joy is deeper than depression (p. 140).  He says that we can have joy amidst our depression.  I think he misapplies Scripture here.  He sees depression as a wilderness experience that will cause us to grow.  While I agree that depression certainly reveals the heart and in that way parallels the wilderness experience, I do not agree that they are the same.  Depression is not something that God leads us into so that we can grow.  Depression is something that we walk ourselves into by wrong thinking patterns and sin.  He spends the first half of the book explaining this concept to us and then leaves the concept to say that depression is thrust upon us by God in order that we might change.  I disagree.

This book was extremely helpful in shaping my understanding of those who are in the midst of depression.  It also helped me to understand what the possible causes and treatments are.  God used this book in my own heart to reveal patterns of thinking that are sinful and often a characteristic of those in depression.

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