Flirting

"Flirting is a cheap way to make a friendship. It makes you feel closer to a person faster but the relationship is not as deep as a real friendship built upon shared experience and good conversation. So its a faster way to make friends and a quicker way to lose them. It has its purpose but its purpose is not making friends"

This is my niece and she's about the coolest niece I've ever had.

     The point of this post is not to make some sort of moral judgment on the actions which most people associate with flirting. Things such as touching, teasing and other forms of non intentional, pleasure based interaction are not what troubles me. All those things have their place and so can be used either in that place and so be “right” or out of place and so be “wrong. The actions themselves are just actions and to judge them would be impossible. I leave those decisions to God and the person to work out between themselves. What I would like to do is look past those physical actions and see inside the heart problem that leads to flirting and then further to more undesirable ends. So lets begin at the beginning, a logical place to start.  

     God desire or what God pleases is always good. Morality is subject to God’s desires and so morality, right and wrong, good and evil are as changeable as the desires of God.. Goodness is always what God likes and evil is always what God dislikes. Mathematically this means. Goodness = God’s pleasure. Evil = That which angers God

     Another fact is that we are made in God’s image that means we have many of the same traits of God. One of the most powerful traits which we have from that image is to want what pleases us. God wants what pleases Him but He is wise enough to know what is helpful to Himself and what isn’t. We have inherited this desire to please ourselves but we haven’t inherited the wisdom which is necessary to satisfy it. This is why God tells us to trust Him, so that He can orchestrate what is best for us, which is the same as what pleases Him which as the same as good. That may be hard to follow, but basically I’m saying  that humans have a natural desire to do what is best for themselves, this desire we inherited from the image of God BUT because of the fall we have forgotten that what is best for ourselves is actually to do what God says. This is the reason we have such a great disturbance in the world. We have billions of people trying to satisfy this healthy desire but they are lacking the necessary wisdom and humility which tells us to submit to God.

     With billions of people not satisfying their primary desire it is natural to assume that problematic confusion and conflict would arise. The confusion and conflict leads to people being lost, they lose track of themselves, their purpose, their origin and their destiny. Without the fundamental questions of life being answered people wander lost in a world full of danger. Now people have a desire to do what is best for themselves but without knowing who they, why they are here, or where they are going they have lost all ability to know what is actually best for them. Imagine a runner in a race who doesn’t know the start line or the end line. Imagine that then add to it the fact that the runner thinks he’s a swimmer. This person will surely not win the race. This is exactly the state of most people today and even many Christians who “know” the answers but never realized their significance are in the same quandary. So then the majority of people are merely seeking what is most pleasing to themselves. This is because we have a desire which tells us to seek what’s best for us and we inhabit a culture and a society that tells us that what is best for us is what is pleasing to us the majority of people are merely seeking what is pleasing to themselves. Hopefully you understand a bit more about current human nature. With this understanding we can now understand flirting.

 

     To flirt means to take something serious and play with it. In human relationships it means to make light of a relationship basically to play with a person.  Flirting is simply a word which people associate with certain actions, playful actions. These actions are either meant as seductive or loving depending on your motive. This is why I can not say what most people call flirting is right or wrong. Most people can’t tell the different between a friend who uses flirting to cheer someone up out of love and a person who merely wants attention or someone to touch them and uses flirting as a seductive tool. It is not right to judge action rather we must judge motive. The motives for flirting are rarely something someone else can figure out from the outside, its something internal. It’s a question of whether you would be able to look God in the eye and say I did what I did out of love for you.  

     So the point is not to say “flirting is wrong” but it‘s to understand why people flirt. If you flirt because you are the sort of person I described earlier, one who does not know himself and just wants purpose and meaning then not merely flirting but everything you are doing is wrong and damaging to yourself, as well as those around you. If you are a Christian, who knows your identity in Christ and knows himself well enough to know how to love others by loving Christ then you can flirt, just as long as it is helping the person you are doing it with.  

All things are lawful for me," but not all things are helpful. "All things are lawful for me," but I will not be enslaved by anything

Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.

    Application:  Let us evaluate ourselves and seek God’s mercy. Most people are so caught up in the habit of flirting or of playing with serious things that they don’t even realize what they are doing or why they do it. This is another problem which comes from not knowing ourselves and from not practicing intentional self evaluation. Comments are much appreciated. I’m new to a world where flirting is common and most of what I write is based on thinking not experience.

Thoughts From Spending a Night on the Trampoline

What if God doesn't care about YOU? *gasp* What if He loves the world but He only loves you to the degree that you incorporate yourself into His plan for the universe at large? A scary notion it is true but one I think you would be hard put to prove wrong. I've been thinking alot about God recently, making my way along that endless ray of beauty, attempting to insure that the God I place my trust in is actually the God which exists and is not a god I created for myself to suit my fancy and my worldview. It is this journey which makes me ask questions like I posed at the beginning.

So during my meditations of God I've realized something. This something is simply phrased not so simply applied. It is this:

That forgiveness of God is not so hard to get but unless you have Godliness being forgiven isn’t worth much. We often talk about the gospel and about God's grace but only in respect to their forgiving power; never in respect to their ability to change the very nature of who we are and how we act. I have never heard a preacher say, "accept the gospel so that you can stop hating your parents and stop being peer pressured and stop displeasing the God who creates Hurricanes." What we here is "accept the gospel so that you can be forgiven for hating your parents, for being peer pressured and for displeasing God."

The problem is not in one statement being false is that in separating them and only talking about one side of the gospel we remove the supports and our theology begins to crumble when applied to real life. If the only purpose for the Jesus coming to earth is to forgive us of our sins then I have no need to do anything else but sit passively and be forgiven. When the "impregnable" forces of selfish desire, passion and pride assail my soul why should I not let them carry me along in a rush of good feeling? I have no reason to resist and even if I wanted to resist I couldn't because all I've ever been taught is that the blood of Christ forgives me of sins. Herein lies the problem and herein is a primary reason for our weakness as churches, families and individuals. We don’t understand that godliness which is the being the character of God is so very essential. For some silly reason we think the only think important in life is to be happy. For secular people we see this in all the selfish means people use to acquire self worth and happiness. Christians, are also focused on being happy so they talk about being forgiven. They say, “we have to suffer through this life, obeying all sorts of rules but it will be ok because when we die we are going to heaven” Christians wonder why people call them hypocrites.

Well I was telling God all this yesterday. Basically God said, "yeah you can do that if you want, I will forgive you when you come back to me BUT if you continue to live in sin I will not help you as you walk through life. If you(Caleb) believe that you can do your life better on your own, then you run it as you like and the blood of my son will wash away your sins on judgment day." The point is that we have a backwards view of life in general. If we can step back for a moment and step out of a worldview which tells us, “the purpose of your existence is your own happiness” and see that what our purpose ought to be is, “to see the kingdom of God fulfilled” then we will be able to make sense out of Jesus’ which before made no sense.

I look at history, watch the news, observe the modern theories of worldly philosophers and feel like I’m eating raw tofu wrapped in slugs. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to here a well respected, doctors and professors proclaiming evolution which at its core means, that one drop of my own fat must be dearer to me then the accumulated lives of tens of thousands of my fellow primates.

Life without God is just not worth living. If you don't live for God you have to ignore things to be happy or be depressed because their is absolutely nothing you can do about the child who dies every two minutes because of starvation or about the millions of people around the world who live their lives in slums, garbage dumps and communes without any hope of being freed from their unofficial slavery. So maybe it is easy to be forgiven of our sins. Perhaps its true that we can get away with an awful lot without anyone ever finding out but doesn’t it all seem like such a waste when you compare the greatest life ever lived by any non Christian, compare that life to the idea of spending a life in service to a God who can point his finger and send constellations into the sky. Would we rather serve ourselves assuming everything we did went right or would it be better for us to sacrifice our lives and serve a God of power and might, who makes the earth shake and the mountains tremble, waters the earth and grants the stars their light.