Dr. Larry Crabb Answers
Dr. Larry Crabb Answers
Dr. Larry Crabb Answers
Message
The Hope that Purifies
Four truths about hope: 1) Hope stirs what is deepest; meaning and live. 2) What is deepest is the desire to know God. 3) Life that desires to know God will survive every trial we’ll ever experience on this planet. 4) True spirituality and how we discover our passion for God in order to live it out.
Message
Character, Pt. 2
Character develops by shifting from being controlled by fear to being controlled by truth. Live your life in such a way that if God’s Word isn’t true, you will be destroyed. Only by trusting fully in the promises of God will the truth of God become a reality.
Message
A Liberating Look at Gender, Pt. 2
Using the Hebrew words for male and female from Genesis 1:27, Dr. Crabb discusses what the implications of the definitions are for a biblical understanding of true masculinity and femininity. He shows how the core fears of men and women are related to God’s purpose in how each sex is to reflect His character.
Message
A Liberating Look at Gender, Pt. 1
Using the Hebrew words for male and female from Genesis 1:27, Dr. Crabb discusses what the implications of the definitions are for a biblical understanding of true masculinity and femininity. He shows how the core fears of men and women are related to God’s purpose in how each sex is to reflect His character.
Message
Crabb on Gender, Pt. 2
A conversation on what it means to release our souls to a true expression of gender. Emphasis in this talk is on true masculinity–after summing up femininity.
Message
Crabb on Gender, Pt. 1
A conversation on what it means to release our souls to a true expression of gender. Emphasis in this talk is on true femininity.
Message
From Confusion to Confidence
It is in the confusion of life that we discover the sovereignty of God. Rather than become bitter, we learn to tremble before a sovereign God in such a way that invites trust and rest. Dr. Larry Crabb uses the story of Habakkuk as an illustration of what it means to trust and know God.
Blog
Hanging On
When I was in private practice as a psychologist, a counselee would sometimes sense a door was opening into a long denied terror. And it was the fear of facing fear that would bring on what felt like a life or death struggle. In a quivering voice the counselee would then say, “If I let myself feel what scares me the most, I think I’d start crying and never stop.”
The writer to the Hebrews told us that Christ has :
“set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.” (Hebrews 2: 15 NLT).
For humans made in God’s image to live alive with God and for God, the fear of dying can be understood as the terror of living without love or meaning, the dread of an existence unprotected from troubles that could destroy all hope of deep satisfaction.
Right now, God’s ways are not making sense to me. Significant prayers, defined as requests not for health or wealth or success or recognition but only for the basics needed for me to feel safe from practical and emotional disaster, for some time have gone unanswered. I find myself enjoying a good television show more than God. I’m not in a good place.
Last night I picked a book off my shelves that I hadn’t read, a book I have no memory of buying. It’s a novel by G.K. Chesterton, one of my favorite authors, a book titled The Ball and the Cross. It’s a fanciful allegory about someone who believes in God arguing with an atheist. The Cross, of course, is the symbol of Christianity; the ball represents the globe, the world peopled with both Christians and atheists.
Early on, Chesterton has a godly man suspended above the ball desperately hanging on to a cross, swinging above “the sickening emptiness of air”. If the cross doesn’t support him, he will fall into nothingness, a pointless existence. Chesterton describes this man’s experience in a way that revived something in me. The man suspended by a cross above the ball
“… felt in the taut moment of such terror that his chief danger was terror itself… His one wild chance of coming out safely would be in not too desperately desiring to be safe” (my emphasis).[1]
I read this into Chesterton’s phrase: one chance of coming out safely from an unmanageable, soul-threatening challenge to faith in God “would be in not too desperately desiring to be safe.”
An old truth is coming into clearer focus. When I insist on feeling safe, I risk living in the darkness of fear that danger could destroy me. Things might not work out as I want them to, and I could be intensely discouraged. My desperate desire for safety, a demand for God to provide the basics necessary for me to feel safe, strengthens my fear to face what I fear that could leave me desolate. And that fear impels me to deny the darkness of potential desolation, a darkness that could weaken my faith in God when He makes no sense, when He remains unresponsive to my “reasonable” requests for what would let me feel safe.
But that darkness could be my friend. I think that is Chesterton’s point. Darkness is my best opportunity to see light, but only when I give up the desperate desire to feel safe on my terms. Of course I’ll tremble when God’s ways make no sense. The passion of my demanding spirit of entitlement could lead me as I tremble into the quagmire of resentful resignation. Or legitimate trembling over life’s disappointments and difficulties could lead to settled trust that somehow His sovereign love is working all things together for the good that He understands to be my deepest good, what I long for the most, to know God and to rest in His sovereign goodness and love. Maybe the Cross will do what needs to be done. I’m betting on it.
I hope my counselees from years ago have come to know what now encourages me: if I let myself feel what scares me the most, I can seize the opportunity of darkness to believe that God is shining light on a path that leads to life. I might cry, buy not for long.
[1] G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross, Dover Publications, N.Y., first published in 1909-1910; republished 1995 p8.
Blog
Five Seconds
“I have something I want to share with you. I’m not very comfortable with this kind of language, but – well, here goes – the Lord spoke to me last night”.
I was all ears. I sometimes close them when others say something similar. Neither this women who was speaking to me nor I are fans of “easy-believism”, especially when it takes the form of sharing with a happy smile that God told them what they most wanted to hear. But Debbie, that’s what I’ll call her, had remained faithful to God during good times and bad, aware that the spirit of entitlement that plagues every Christian needs to be resisted. God’s ways don’t always make sense to us. We can’t count on God to respond favorably to every item on our wish list. Entitlement thinks otherwise.
Debbie was stunned by what she heard from God, stunned both by how foolish she was and grateful for God’s call to yield to her God-honoring desires that remained alive within her. Before (with her permission) I tell you what she heard from God, let me first tell you why I do so, I fear being misunderstood by something I wrote in my most recent book When God’s Ways Make No Sense. Debbie’s story clarifies what I meant. In Chapter Seven, I refer to myself as a Christian deist. Deists believe God made everything, set up natural laws like gravity, then washed His hands of any further involvement with what might happen in the world and among the people He created.
I am emphatically not a deist. I believe God is involved, interested, caring, compassionate, and sovereignly engaged in all that happens. *But it doesn’t always look that way.* Nothing escapes His attention, and nothing blocks the advance of the good story He is telling, not the holocaust, not a failed marriage, and not a stubbed toe. All things do work together for good to people who love God and remain confident that a larger story is unfolding in every detail of the smaller story we can see.
But such confidence finally depends on faith, not visible evidence. The lie of deism sometimes, too often, looks to be true: God seems distant and uninvolved. But things are not as they seem. Appearances really are deceiving. But now and again, always on God’s perfect timetable, we get a glimpse of His lovingly purposeful involvement in our lives, His commitment to our deepest well-being.
This is where Debbie comes in. For years she privately struggled with an addiction, a bad habit that curved her energy in on herself, an addiction that brought temporary but intensely pleasurable relief from the felt emptiness of life with all its worries and disappointments. It felt like she was struggling against her sin with no help from God. Was deism true? Was God really uninvolved in her struggle?
But then, after years, after God’s “little while”, she heard Him speak, meaning words suddenly rose up in her mind, uninvited but clear and powerful:
“Debbie, you are sacrificing the joy of giving yourself fully to your husband, children, and friends for five seconds of deliciousness.” Those four words hit her like a liberating thunderbolt.
Five seconds of deliciousness; five seconds of enjoying narcissistic contentment and unmitigated pleasure that left her alone, uninvolved with either God or others; five seconds that numbed the deepest thirst in her Spirit-indwelt soul, to love well. How foolish! She felt both broken over sin and released to live, to love.
I’m no deist. God is always advancing the plot of His story. Sometimes His ways become obvious. Trust Him when they don’t. Celebrate when they do.