Author Archives: Cameron Harwick

Hey, I’m Cameron, and I’m the Webmaster of the Campus Crossroads website. I’m a Poli Sci major at UNC, class of 2010.


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What is God’s Will for My Life?

Posted in Devotions By Cameron Harwick on

And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
Romans 8:28

With graduation fast approaching, the question gets asked very often: What is God’s will for my life? It plays out in any number of specifics: What college do I go to? What job do I take? Whom do I marry? Where do I move? The circumstances are endless, but the question remains the same.

The first thing to notice about this question is that it makes at least one assumption. The question is at its core asking, what is the best option for my life? The assumption that leads this question to be asked in terms of the will of God is that God has my best interests in mind. This is a good assumption as per Romans 8:28 (above), if I love God and am called according to his purpose. Therefore, the first thing to do when asking this question is to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12); “test yourselves to see if you are in the faith” (2 Corinthians 13:5). If “indeed you fail the test”, God’s will may not indeed be for your good. In that case, the importance of the question of foundational faith automatically trumps the question of life choices.

The second thing to notice is that it’s not (usually) a moral question, and it can’t be approached that way. Moral questions we can generally look to the Bible for clear prescriptive answers. What’s right, what’s wrong, and what makes it so? If we come to a choice of going in on embezzlement with a friend or staying out, the answer is pretty clear: “Thou shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15). If we get the notion that grace means license, we are rebuked in no uncertain terms “May it never be!” (Romans 6:1-2).

With a question like this however, one can only look to the Bible for general principles. After one is secure in one’s own faith, these are the first go-to in uncertain life situations. Principles like “do not be bound together with unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 6:14) and “bad company corrupts good morals” (1 Corinthians 15:33) automatically eliminate most of the marriage pool and friend stock from the running, for example. “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31) should serve to make us critically examine our intentions in making any decision, which may shed light on the most appropriate choice.

Internalizing these principles also assures that our definition of “good” does not differ from God’s: what we might call material blessing is not necessarily a blessing, and God may bless us by means that may otherwise look like curses. If we seriously want the will of God; if we seriously strive for our own good, then we cannot be weighed down by fleshly notions of the good. Material ambition will only distort one’s perceptions of one’s own interests, making the question of God’s will in reality no concern to the self.

But even Biblical principles do not always lead to a clear choice. Even the most spirit-filled Christian may be overcome by doubts and second-guessing. A job in Oklahoma and a job in Georgia will obviously present radically different ministry opportunities, but the Christian has no way of knowing which one he will be more fruitful in. Short of a vision from God, how is he to decide?

With the original question thus factored down to “what is good for my life?”, we can answer emphatically with Romans 8:28: “God causes all things to work for the good of those who love him”. The nagging worry that one has not fulfilled the will of God is most certainly not the will of God for the Christian. We can rest assured that if we are pursuing God and resting in him, that the decisions of life will not work to our detriment, whatever they may be. This is what Peter means when he says to “cast all your anxiety on him”: to rest in the faith that our path is not unclear, nor contingent on our own ingenuity in working for our own good.

This is where real faith departs from the standard “Christian” answer to this question. God does indeed work through circumstances. God does indeed “open and close doors”. But it is fruitless to look around at every situation as a sign from God regarding the decision in question. The standard “look for a sign” or “wait until you have a peace about it” line leads to passive Christians who are blown about by the winds of circumstance: signs will not necessarily come, and you will not necessarily get peace one way or another. The question of the will of God, beyond issues of Biblical principle, is so easy to use as a mask for indecision. Waiting on a sign allows us to abdicate the responsibility placed upon us to make a good decision.

Often the question cast in terms of discernment – discerning the will of God in one’s own or another’s life. Often this plays out in Christians asking what circumstances are signs from God for the decision, and what has nothing to do with the decision. What constitutes spiritual peace about a decision, and what is one’s own mind working? These are exactly the wrong questions to be asking. Our responsibility is to internalize the principles of Scripture and to deal with life on its own terms through that framework, not to imagine we can disavow responsibility for our own life decisions by looking outward at our circumstances.

This is where the doctrine of the sovereignty of God stops being an arcane theological point and becomes a matter of faith or lack thereof. Faith not only in the final resurrection, but faith that God is in control of even one’s own decisions. Faith that God works all things to the good of those who love him.

There are also, on the other hand, those who would like to relieve such stress by asserting that God works to our good as we make our decisions; that God does not have one single set-out plan for our life – as if God “makes do” with our decisions ad hoc. They are right in refuting the fancy that God would be disappointed in a decision made completely in line with the principles of scripture, but they sacrifice the sovereignty of God in service of that, and in doing so commit an even graver error. God does have a single plan laid out for everyone’s life, but unlike the standard Christian line, the burden is not upon us to find it. God’s will will be done, not as long as we make good decisions, not after our decisions, but through our decisions and including our decisions.

It is helpful here to distinguish as Calvin does between the will of God and the precepts of God (Institutes, 1.18.4). The precepts of God are our responsibility – the principles and commandments of scripture subsumed by “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:6-40). The will of God (by which he means the secret will of God), on the other hand, is not our responsibility, and will come to pass regardless of our decisions. It is this will that assures us that our final good is in store.

The purpose of Romans 8:28 is that we know our decisions will work to our good so long as we make them in accordance with the principles of scripture – so long as we are earnestly seeking after God. We cannot absolve ourselves of the responsibility of making decisions by seeking a sign of the secret will of God (Matthew 16:4), but we also rest assured in the knowledge that God is in control even of our internal state of mind. Knowing that God uses all means – even our own volition – to work for our good so long as we have faithfully “put on the whole armor of God” (Ephesians 6:11) frees us from the worry of future regret.

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The Balance

Posted in Devotions By Cameron Harwick on

The balance concept of works is one of the most bedeviling concepts in pop religion. The idea goes, if I do more good things than bad things, God will accept me. It’s essentially Karma stripped of its Eastern flavor. Lacking the despair of one’s own salvation that is ultimately necessary for salvation, the balance model makes a lot of sense to the unregenerate mind.

Unfortunately, even Christians all too often buy into the balance model. Not so crude a balance model as exists in pop religion – we take James 2:10 “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all” to mean that even one act of sin outweighs all the good works in the world. This is passably true on the surface, but it is still fundamentally a balance model. Ask most Christians if a person were to live a life entirely by the law, never breaking it and yet not knowing God, would be saved, they would say yes. It’s the loophole in their faith – an unattainable loophole, granted, but a loophole nonetheless.

Such a concept takes depravity as a matter of works, and salvation as a matter of belief: that we are lost because we act badly, and we make up for it by believing, since it’s impossible to right the balance by good works. God removes the sin from the balance, allowing us to effectually weight the other side with good works (if I’m not mistaken, Roman Catholic doctrine states – or at one point stated – this explicitly).

This conception, however, misses the nature of our salvation: neither depravity nor salvation are matters of works. There is no balance at all, even a balance irrecoverably weighted by sin. Our actions, both good and sinful, mean nothing in themselves, except as they indicate our nature. The essence of depravity is not that we do sins, it is that our desires are not for God, which leads us to sin. The essence of sanctification is not that we are freed to do good, it is that our desire is for God, which leads us to good.

That is not to say that actions are not significant as indicators of our desires; only that they have no significance in themselves. Thus our hypothetical man who lives by the entire law for its own sake is nonetheless unfit to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Though his outer face is clean, even completely clean, his nature is nevertheless fleshly. His desire is not for God. There are no loopholes.

That means that neither is our own salvation an ad hoc salvific loophole created by God for those who could not keep the law. It is not as if keeping the law is the preferred method of salvation, and barring that, God lets us get on with a salvation by grace through faith. There is no “option”, as if we could either keep the law or trust in Christ to the same effect. All salvation at all times is only effected by the apprehension of the value of God, even if that apprehension is imperfect here on earth. The law is only the outward manifestation of such a valuation, and is always powerless to save – even in its perfection.

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Godliness and Godlikeness

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We often think of the Christian life as becoming progressively more like God – in character, if not in substance. Though this is true in some respects, it is not an appropriate description of the whole of sanctification. Indeed, through the process we are to become less like God in certain respects, for naturally we are afflicted with a multitude of inappropriately Godlike dispositions.

The crux of the problem is that we relativize our references when they should be absolute. Take the following examples:

-God values Himself as the highest good.
-We value ourselves as the highest good, as if we were gods ourselves. Our reference to Good must be absolutely like God’s, and not relatively so: we must value God as God values Himself, not value ourselves as God values Himself.

-God’s love desires for its object that which comes from Himself, which is their highest Good.
-Our love naturally desires for its object that which comes from ourselves, as if we had their highest good. C.S. Lewis wrote much about love corrupted in this way – explicitly in The Four Loves, and implicitly in The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces. Our reference must point our objects absolutely to their highest good, not relatively to ourselves.

-God’s wrath is incited by a slight to His own glory.
-Our wrath is incited by a slight to our own dignity. Instead, proper anger on our part is to be directed at sin – intended slights to the glory of God – our own dignity being counted as nothing (c.f. John Piper’s post on anger without sin).

This is the difference between the intended Godliness of the saint and the intended Godlikeness of Lucifer. Where Lucifer desired, as our flesh often does, to lay claim to the object of these references, we must know that they can only be absolute and immutably pointed at God. Without that absolute reference, our values are idolatrous, our love is corrupt, our anger is unjust, and who knows what other categories I’ve neglected to include. I suspect there are many more. It is ultimately the difference between pride and humility, and the root of all sin.

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The Necessity of Depravity

Posted in Devotions By Cameron Harwick on

Idly scouring the internet as I sometimes do, I came across an article about 50 NES quotes one should know. I’m no gamer and have no emotional connection to the games of olde like most in gamer culture, but I (correctly) assumed most of the quotes would be funny, and was also keen on being able to make references to old school video games besides “Do a barrel roll!” and “Abort/Retry/Fail?”. And while the article was a success in that regard, the main revelation was gleaned from an offhand comment beneath the fourth page of the article:

Christianity says that people are inherently good and that deep down we all want to do the right thing. Video games prove the opposite is true.

This is not a nitpicky point. This is not a quaint theological issue. This is, quite literally, the first point in the Gospel message: people are inherently not good (Romans 3:10, Isaiah 64:6, 1 John 1:8, Isaiah 53:6). This is the very reason we need a savior (Hebrews 9:22, 1 Peter 3:18, Isaiah 53:5) – because we are unable in our own strength to bridge the gap of sin between ourselves and God – even to make motion in that direction (Romans 3:23, Romans 3:11). It is the foundation and purpose of the entire Christian faith that people are totally, though not irreparably, depraved.

This is the difference between Christianity and generic religion. This is the distinguishing feature that must be emphasized above all the self-help masquerading as trite religion, and the failure to communicate this point is the reason first of all that Liberal Protestantism is virtually extinct, and furthermore the reason for the continuing decline in the quality of what now passes in the Church: it makes itself irrelevant without this point. People see Christianity as just another self-help mechanism, and no one is telling them any differently – some false teachers have even exacerbated the problem by broadcasting from within that Christianity is about self-help (you may have culled from previous articles my scarcely concealed contempt for Mr. Osteen).

The Church loves to talk about “cultural relevance” – engaging the culture where it’s at. Unfortunately this misguided attempt at relevance just makes it indistinguishable from all the other voices. The Church must preach not only Jesus, but why Jesus. Relevance – not only cultural but trans-cultural – requires that we be unmistakably clear on the fundamental issue of depravity.

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Thankfulness

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With Thanksgiving fast approaching, I think it would be a good idea to take a look at thankfulness. What should we be thankful for? Are there things we should not be thankful for? In previous articles I’ve insinuated that material prosperity is not necessarily a blessing. Should we nevertheless be thankful for it?

Note that the first and last beatitudes are for those without any claim to prosperity. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 5:2), and “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:10). These are blessings which preclude the rich (one would assume that the persecuted generally forfeit their wealth). Obviously there is a special blessing for the poor, but is that a complement to a blessing of wealth, or is wealth not a blessing at all?

The first thing to realize here is that there is never a shortage of blessing for the elect. “We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). We have seen that this promise is not for material means at all, but a promise that any and all circumstances will cause the believer to be in the long run drawn closer to God. Likewise it is not a promise that one will lack material means. Neither richness nor poverty can come between God and His elect.

Essentially we are as Christians called to be completely agnostic to our material circumstances: our behavior and attitudes are constant regardless of our means. Paul makes this point in Phillipians 4:11-12: “I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need”.

There is an important difference between contentedness and thankfulness. There is a sense in which we are told not to be thankful, because it reveals in us a hypocritical heart:

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not like other men–extortionists, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess’. But the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
-Luke 18.10-14

What is interesting here is that the Pharisee is thankful, and the tax collector, whom we can assume to be relatively wealthy (it was a rather lucrative job), makes no mention of thanks. Yet the Pharisee was condemned, while the tax collector was justified. Why?

Thankfulness is the valuation for something on its own merit. “Thank you that I am not like other men” is thankfulness, but it is also pride. Closer to home, “Thank you for the raise I just got” is thankfulness, but it is also materialism. Truly the pharisee was not like other men, and surely God has given the raise, but these are rather things we are to be content in: thankful for the true blessing that the circumstance provides (Romans 8:28), but with the realization that these things themselves are not the blessing – rather a means to a blessing – as a vehicle by which God works good for His elect. Contentedness is a disconnected thankfulness – being wealthy as if one were not wealthy – “dealing with the world as if you had no dealings with it” (1 Corinthians 7:29-31). This is the spirit of the tax collector: he knew his wealth meant nothing were he to forfeit his own soul as a result (Mark 8:36). God had given him the wealth, but was it a blessing in itself? Or was it a blessing in the sense that it at some point caused him to cry out to God “Be merciful to me, a sinner!”?

This is the sense in which we are to be thankful: not for the circumstance in itself, but for the circumstance in its God-crafted goal, whether or not we know how that goal plays out through the circumstance. We are thus not to pray “Thank you, God, for a good family and plenty to eat” (if these things are true), but “Thank you, God, for a family that has encouraged my faith, and sustenance with which I may devote my energies back to You”. Not “Thank you, God, for placing me in a country with political freedom and free of persecution”, but “Thank you, God, that You have made the Gospel available to me through the means of political freedom”. God works good to those whom He has called both in prosperity and poverty, and over all the things we possess, this is the blessing we are to be thankful for.

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Blessing

Posted in Devotions By Cameron Harwick on

As Christians, we have faith that “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). As straightforward as this seems, the concept of good itself is more problematic than it ought to be: what is good in the first place, and what does Paul mean by good here?

The prosperity gospel as preached by such luminaries as Joel Osteen and the aptly named Creflo Dollar is often criticized by orthodox Christianity for emphasizing the material as God’s means of blessing the faithful. It’s easy enough to renounce blatant Prosperitism as materialistic and fair-weather faith, but how often do the rest of us fall, more subtly, into the same trap?

I cannot count how many times I’ve heard prayers thanking God for placing us in a country where we are free to worship Him. It’s a favorite theme of Patriotic Evangelicalism. But what is this saying? Thank you, God, for a comfortable life where I don’t have to make a real stand for my faith? Jesus says in Luke 6:22, Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man. Is living in America really a blessing in this light? Why would we thank God for withholding the blessing of persecution?

There is none good but one, that is, God.
-Mark 10:18

Many times we read a verse like Romans 8:28 without an understanding of what “good” truly is. And without that understanding, we substitute our fleshly understanding of good. What is good then? Our pleasure. Our comfort. Circumstances. Materials. The eternal might be good too, but what use is that to me now? We thank God for indulging our misconceptions of our own interests, all the while consciously avoiding any sort of more painful but infinitely higher and more profitable blessing that may otherwise be bestowed.

The Bible leaves no room for duality here. The entire rest of Romans 8 sets up a dichotomy between the spirit and the flesh, and the valuation of the self and its comfort is unmistakably fleshly living. What good is suffering if comfort is our good? What good is mourning if a perpetual emotional high is our good? No, good is so much higher than that. Suffering does not bring about our comfort; it destroys it. Mourning does not bring about happiness; it is the very opposite thereof. But suffering and mourning bring about a much higher good than either of these things: drawing nearer to God.

This then is the promise of Romans 8:28: not that Christians will prosper, not even that we will be comfortable – It is not in any respect a material guarantee. Rather it is that for anyone who loves God, any and all circumstances can only serve to bring him closer to God. This, more than any thing or circumstance, is the ultimate blessing.

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A Humble Spirit Before God

Posted in Devotions By Cameron Harwick on

I was out driving the other day with the radio turned to a Christian radio station, when a song lyric jumped out at me: Because you would rather die / Than to ever live without me. Lines like this have never sat well with me, but I always attributed my discomfort to a question of perspective – a focus on God versus a focus on man, for example. It was only that day it dawned on me that there is a fundamental error in this song lyric – the same that thousands of Christian self-esteem messages spring from; the same that tickles our ears with popular notions of self-worth and esteem. The difference between a haughty spirit and a humble spirit before God ultimately lies in how you answer the question, why does God love us?

The explanation for why God created the human race that I always heard growing up hinges on choice. First the question is posed, would you want a spouse to love you because she had to – a robot, if you will – or because she wanted to? The argument then goes on to contrast our worship with that of the angels: the angels are simply programmed to worship God and can do no other, the reasoning goes, while we can choose to love God – therefore our praise is preferable to that of the angels because ours is voluntary.

So God loves us because we have choice? This runs into several problems (we’ll even ignore the fact that Lucifer and a third of the angels didn’t adhere to their “programming”). First, our choice is constrained by sin. In the flesh – in our own effort – we cannot choose God (Romans 8:7-8). We have no capability in ourselves to love God. He enables us to love Him by the Holy Spirit for the very reason that we cannot by ourselves do so.

Second, this reasoning would imply that God loves us because of some innate good within us, namely, choice. There is nothing good within us that would commend us to God (Isaiah 64:6, Jeremiah 17:9), and we are certainly not in an inherently better position before Him than the angels. The belief that God loves us because we are made in His image – because we have some “spark of the divine” – even so far as to say that God loves us because we (can) choose Him, is to say that at some level we deserve God’s love, and this is fundamentally no different from the pride of Lucifer.

But God obviously loves us, as we see throughout the Bible (John 3:16). Why then, if we have nothing to commend ourselves to God, does He still pursue us? The answer is not within us, but in God. God does not love us because of who we are, but because of who He is. One thing I am indebted to John Piper for is the proof and justification of a selfish God (Deuteronomy 6:15): If God, being at the same time omniscient and the highest good in the universe, had as His ultimate aim anything other than the highest good in the universe, He would no longer be a good or perfect God. Therefore God’s ultimate goal can only be His own glory. His duty is not to us, but to Himself.

So how does mankind factor into God’s glory? God’s love of and offer of salvation to mankind is not so He can enjoy the pleasure of our company, but in order to demonstrate His power to redeem that which had nothing good of its own to boast. Paul tells us that salvation is entirely the work of God for this very purpose: “Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:9). The glory is entirely God’s.

With this in mind, our focus shifts away from ourselves and towards God. Prayer becomes less of our will and more “Your will be done”, in faith that God makes all things to work together for the good of those that love Him (Romans 8:28). Father, forgive me, not because I’m coming to You, but because You have brought me to Yourself. This is a humble spirit before God: unpretentious gratitude that while we were yet sinners, while we were enemies of God with nothing worthy of love about us, Christ still died for us.