Introduction
There’s a song currently towards the top end of the music chart which I have listened to over the past month or so, on the radio as I drive back and forwards to Manchester each week and it causes me to think. You see initially the song appears to be quite Christian in its outlook and message if not in all the details. Indeed when I suggested using the song as a basis for a sermon with some of my Christian friends, they immediately picked up on the idea that it was quite a Christian song. To save my self having to keep repeating “the song” in this way I’ll tell you what it is. The Song is “Where is the Love?” by the Black Eyed Peas. However, I don’t actually think that it is a Christian song. And this has nothing to do with my dislike of rap music actually the tune is quite catchy. But anyway back to the lyrics. When you get down to it the ideas in the song are not really Christian, oh they quote some Scripture and even refer to God a few times, but they quote out of context and presuppose their own answers. However, if we ignore what the Black Eyed Peas want the song to mean and replace their rhetorical questions with real questions then we can actually learn something. But enough talking in generalities. I’m guessing most of you will have heard the song at least once, but for those of you that haven’t and for those of you that haven’t really thought about it much, I’m going to play it for you. Listen out for the intended message of the song and see if you can find the Christian questions hiding behind the unchristian assumptions. If you listened to the Bible readings they might give you a clue what your looking for.
The Negative – against pacifism
First the negative. The song seems to be putting forward the idea that pacifism is the correct way to act. It certainly seems to be anti-war, both in general and specifically against the 2nd Gulf War. It also portrays an attitude that sees the USA as no better than the terrorists who planned and carried out the September the 11th attacks. If you want to find out why I think pacifism is not Biblical, is hopelessly naive and what I think the Bible says about war, then come to the Bible Study on Wednesday.
The Positive – the problem
The song starts with the line “what’s wrong with the world, mama?” It begins where we all begin, there is something wrong with the world. The song suggests various ways that the world is not the way it is supposed to be, terrorism, racial discrimination, hate, war. In many ways this section is perhaps unnecessary, the fact that there is something wrong the world should not come as a great revelation to anyone. All those things the song listed are true and are things wrong with the world. But we already knew that. We look at the way our government is run and we say this shouldn’t be the way things are. We look at the way international relations work, we look at the way some other countries work and they’re even worse than ours, at least we get a vote and if we don’t like the government we can get rid of it.
And yet it doesn’t stop there with the big things. If we forget all about the big picture and just concentrate on our experiences day by day. We look about the town we are in and what do we see, we see the big problems with drugs. Where in whole communities it is normal for kids to use drugs and abnormal not to. We see vandalised property. When I first had my my little Panda (the car not the animal) and I moved to Pen-y-cae, some people tried to break into it and smashed up some stuff when they couldn’t, it was really rather pathetic when you think about it that they couldn’t even break into a Panda, my ex-youth club from Longsight would have been most ashamed of them, firstly for going after a Panda and then for not succeeding. They just taken out one of the bus routes through Pen-y-cae because the buses were being attacked too much. We don’t need to go to far to see there is something wrong.
But we can go even further than that. You see that streak of selfishness, of self gratification that runs through governments, countries, leaders, through youths that cause them to use drugs and steal to feed their habit, to destroy other’s property, is not restricted to others, to those who cause all the problems. That same selfish streak runs deep within us as well. You might never have done any of the “really bad” things, but the same root cause is right there, selfishness and it finds many outs in our day to day life.
The proposed solution
But the song doesn’t stop there. It proposes a solution or at least attempts to point us in the direction of a solution. To quote the song
man ya gotta have love, this’ll set us straight
take control of your mind and meditate
let your soul gravitate, to the love ya’ll
In one sense this is a very Biblical answer, love. It was Jesus who said that the two greatest commandments were to love God with everything and to love your neighbour as your self. Indeed where read from the 1 Corinthians which describes love as the greatest gift of God. If the problem is selfishness then its solution is love, the opposite of selfishness. If we could all just live like 1 Corinthians 13 then all the problems in the world would disappear. There would no longer be war, famine, discrimination, terrorism, or even vandalism, assault and theft. In short there would be no selfishness and all of its consequences. Great so the problem is solved. The solution is love. Except, of course the problem isn’t solved. There is a difference between saying that the address of the place I want to go to is in London and me actually getting to arrive there. If we all agree that love is the solution, the question becomes how do we get there.
Well the song proposes 3 ideas to help us along. Firstly if we all just change our attitudes and love. The bit I mentioned before suggests this. Just take control of your mind and meditate, let your soul gravitate to the love. If you haven’t achieved this level of love yet, it simply because your not trying hard enough. If you just focus a bit more and try a bit harder then you can love and get rid of selfishness.
But if that’s not enough then the song makes another suggestion. This time the suggestion is truth or understanding. “the truth is kept secret, and swept under the rug, if you never know truth, then you never know love” and “lack of understandin leading us away from unity”. Didn’t Jesus himself say that the truth will set you free. However, here the idea is that if we just understood the truth about each other then we would all get along. If we could just understand, if we could just know the truth then we would love. If we could just walk in their shoes, if we just understood where they were coming from then we would understand and we could love.
But if that’s not enough the song also has some more advice. “father father father, help us need some guidance from above”. It tells us to ask God for advice. It kind of ties in with the last idea, if we can’t work out the truth or understanding then we can ask God to tell us.
So, the song gives us 3 solutions to the problems of this world. 1. Try harder. 2. Try to understand other people. 3. Ask God for guidance.
The solution fails
But as I said in my introduction, the problem is, the song is not Christian. Their suggestions don’t work. They’re not enough. Some words from Romans chapter 7. Romans 7:14-19. This kind of blows the above advice out of the water. Trying harder doesn’t work, no matter how hard we try to love and do right we don’t. It isn’t a matter of understanding or truth either. Paul says it’s not because we don’t know what to do that we sin, it’s because we do know what to do but we don’t do it. Finally, even asking God for advice is not enough, because its not a case of not knowing what to do. Paul says that even the Old Testament law, where God clearly laid down his requirements weren’t enough because people simply couldn’t obey it, the history of Israel clearly showed this. What good is a direct law from God telling you what to do, or even giving you prefect understanding if you are a slave to sin and cannot avoid sinning.
But we don’t even have to go to the Bible to work out that trying harder and understanding are not enough. Even the very best people, with the best intentions fall short. We remember John Lenon’s great words about peace and love and also remember that he beat up women. We could look at the United States of America, which started with some great words in their deceleration of independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And yet despite all of these great words and understanding, they practised slavery for many years where some men were not equal and did not have a right to liberty or even life in some cases where the life of a slave was the owners to dispose of or keep as he saw fit. It took a civil war to drive this point home. And yet even despite this there is still a lack of all men and women being equal. Ask a young unemployed black man from a broken home in Brooklyn if he is treated equally with a rich white man. There may not be the inequalities of Lords and peasants but there are inequalities of rich and poor, black and white and others. This is not to knock the US, but to point out that even from such a great starting point and even from the righteous point of view of having fought for the rights of slaves, even given all of this great stuff they still can’t live up to their great words, shows how bad we all are.
The song mentions the values of humanity as fairness and equality. Where did they ever get the idea that fairness and equality are values of humanity? Look at the evidence unfairness and inequality are what has dominated human history. The strong have always persecuted the weak. Usually the only ones who call for anything different are the weak. While you might occasionally get a strong person standing up for the rights of the weak, it is by far in the minority and is much more of an aberration than the norm. To describe this as the values of humanity is to vastly misrepresent humanity. There may have been a few that have espoused these virtues but most of humanity has rejected them out of hand. If not openly and with great fanfare, then in their dealings with their inferiors they try to grasp as much as they can and exert as much pressure and leverage as their strength allows them, while of course being all for fairness and equality with those who are stronger than they are. Selfishness is the rule.
God’s solution
And so we get to the place where we can finally discover the true truth contained in the song. It is not by accident that it is titled, “Where is the Love?”. Because the writers of the song can’t find the love. When we discard the false but attractive naïve answers we are still left with the same question. We know the answer is love, but where is the love? How do we get it? How do we move beyond knowing the truth to living the truth, as Morpheus from the Matrix might say? How do we live the life of love. Unfortunately, too many in our world are left with the experience of Romans chapter 7 and think that this is all there is. While others call from the sidelines that if we just try that bit harder or just get this extra bit of knowledge whether from God or somewhere else we can do the right thing. But the fact is we know its not. And so does everybody else and those who think else wise are just deceiving themselves and others. But is that it? Even many Christians think that is the best we can get in this life. But Paul didn’t think so, because he wrote Romans 8 to follow Romans 7.
The truth is that we can escape this selfishness. It is often described as the sinful nature in many translations of the Bible, the KJV just transliterates the Greek and uses flesh. A better translation would be the mind set on the flesh, in other words selfishness. The selfishness of humanity. Don’t be put off by all the theological words and terms. What Paul is talking about is the innate, inherent selfishness of humans, from which there is seemingly no escape. Until that is Jesus.
Romans 8 tells us that through Jesus, God has destroyed sin’s control over us. No longer does selfishness need to dominate our lives. Now we can love. Like 1 Corinthians says, love is one of God’s gifts to us. Not just in the sense that he loves us but that he also made it possible for us to love as well. No longer are we doomed to fail not matter how hard we try to love. Now we can love. Des Frost as he was here last week was right when he said that so many Christians don’t know what God can give them. He was wrong to suggest that Jesus wasn’t in this Church and in some of the people in the church. He was wrong to suggest that we could do something about it by working harder and harder and seeking harder and harder. The Black Eyed Pea’s solution maybe to try and work harder, but God’s solution is to have faith in Jesus and to be led by the Spirit.
As a Christian you now have the option of being led by the Spirit, of turning over control of your life to the Holy Spirit. And if you do this, then the power to love is yours, as gift from God. Now learning to turn complete control of your life to the Spirit may take a while. It may involve hard choices and yes hard work, but it is possible. Paul exhorts his readers not to some unattainable goal but to something that God is calling all his people to. How do we do it? We surrender, we give God complete control of our lives, we listen to and obey the Spirit and we trust in God. It is not through our power that we love, but through God’s power. Your still going to make mistakes, sometimes your actions will not result in the best loving action because you do lack the knowledge element, but you can act from love. Sometimes you get it completely wrong and sometimes others might not have a clue that you are in fact acting from love, but if you are being controlled by the Spirit you can act in love. And yes, sometimes you might even slip up and not act from love, but you can repent and you can act from love. It is possible to live a life controlled by the Spirit and flowing from love, but only through trusting in Jesus.
Conclusion
And so in conclusion what can we say. Where is the love? It can only be found in Jesus. Only through the power of the Holy Spirit is it possible to live a life of love. In the future Kingdom of God when we are resurrected only though who have put their trust in God will be there and they will then all be Spirit controlled and act from love. That is the only way that we will put an end to the killing, the dying and the suffering. Because only when all are acting from love will this be the case. But here and now there is the option that we can act completely from love. We might not be able to sort out the whole world but we can sort ourselves out. Or rather God can because its not from working harder or more knowledge but from giving control of our lives to the Spirit. It may take a life time to learn to do this but it doesn’t need to. If you would just give your life to God now, it is possible, right here and right now. Where is the love? With God and he is willing to make it available to us if we just trust him.
