Reflections of Solitude

A Bowl of Stew and a Birthright

2010-08-31T13:54:00.007-04:00

I sat with a dear friend this morning for a while. As our conversation sometimes does, it gradually drifted toward politics and specifically the made for television rally that just occurred in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I do not profess any real great interest in politics but try to follow it just enough to keep up with what's going on. So with great interest I listened to my friend describe the events in Washington. I honestly listened out of a great deal of respect that I have for him. I realized as we engaged in the dialogue that we probably couldn't be farther apart on our views of this event specifically and in other areas of politics as well. It doesn't really matter because I love my friend and respect his opinion.

To a good segment of believers in our country tt seems as though we just witnessed the possible beginnings of revival this past weekend. God, country, old fashioned values, freedom...it was all there except maybe the apple pie and Chevrolet. To the Evangelical faithful it was preaching to a choir on steroids. After all, how could one argue against turning America back to God? Lord knows we have fallen from our glory days as a nation and it seems as though we finally have a hero with enough influence to rally the faithful to do something about it. Beholding the supporting cast of celebrities, power-brokers, and influencers had to send a spike of spiritual adrenaline up the spines of many who had become weary in longing for the good ol' days.

The whole thing reminds me of the story in the scriptures of Jacob and Esau. Esau, a skilled hunter comes in from the chase one day extremely tired and hungry and longingly looks at the stew that his little brother Jacob had prepared and was undoubtedly eating before him. Caring only about the immediate need in front of him, Esau exchanges his future inheritance as the firstborn son for immediate gratification in the present. It seemed like the right thing to do at the moment until his appetite was sated. Once he had a chance to reflect on the swap from something other than a hungry belly it was tragic. An entire future of blessing sold for the comfort of a meal today.

The fact is, we are all Esau to some extent. We constantly trade off our sonship for bits and pieces of comfort, security, pleasure, possessions, and the path of least resistance. Every teen who gives up his or her virginity is Esau. Every individual who is in financial debt is Esau. Every family that buys into a lifestyle requiring two incomes just to keep up with the bills is Esau. Every person who dishonors the Sabbath rest is Esau. Every church that lowers scriptural standards just to increase its numbers is Esau. Everyone who places hope in political systems, human messiahs, and influencial celebrities is Esau. Esau's dilemma is our dilemma and it never goes away.

For much of the conservative church world the desire for a champion, a false messiah, a political hope that will ease the burden of life and taxes is the hunger pang that consumes all thinking. We already have a Messiah and his name is Jesus. But our Messiah leads in ways that fail to accommodate current fleshly cravings and quick fixes. His idea of progress is represented in the slow work of leaven carried out by his disciples no matter what country or political system they find themselves. We would rather have our cultural heroes and political alliances that will do the hard work of the kingdom for us and do it by November's election.

Make no mistake about this. Underneath all of the rhetoric being spewed out about God and Country, with a healthy dose of religious values on the side, is a concern for money. Money that is either sent to Washington to be spent, or money that remains in our pockets to spend. It is always about money. As J.P. McCarthy used to say, "It's not about the money...it's about the amount!" That is so true here. There have always been taxes and government spending, it is the amount that is being debated. Contrary to what most good Christians believe, our American Revolution was not about paying taxes. It was about taxation without representation and the last I checked the representatives of every people group in our country make our laws. We now have what we rebelled against England to get.

Politics is always about the money. The political stew that is offered for everyone's hunger comes in two bowls: Liberal bowls and Conservative bowls. Both bowls are simply not worth selling out our religious heritage over. In a blog that represents a view contrary to what most God-fearing Evangelicals believe Russel Moore brilliantly offers a unique perspective on the whole thing. He states, "There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship." (http://www.russellmoore.com/2010/08/29/god-the-gospel-and-glenn-beck//) To the liberal money is the means to power through redistributing wealth to the "havenots". To the conservative money is the means to power by promising the "haves" that they can keep theirs and even get more. In both cases it is a means to power. Even those who have reminded me on more than one occasion that "it's not about the money, it's about freedom" have to admit that in their christeo-religious foray they equate freedom to having money and the loss of money through taxation as loss of freedom. (I'm not sure at what percent of taxation freedom occurs but it is always less than what we are paying now.) It's always about money or as Moore puts it "mammon worship."

There are no quick fixes to our current situation in America. If tax rates are brought to zero it won't bring back the good ol' days. Reducing taxes won't fix the sights I see driving through our inner city. Oh...and by the way... ask the American Indian how the good ol' days were for them as we settled their lands. Ask the black man how it was when America was really at its best and the Founding Fathers were establishing "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for all. Check out the plight of the Hispanics ungraciously dubbed "wetbacks" by those who employed them for labor that caused their backs to glisten with sweat under the heat of summer for which a pittance is given in compensation. Sorry folks, we didn't get here by traveling the holy path of righteousness as some would have us believe and we didn't get here because the right or the left sold us out. We are here because we are sinful and sinful people always take the bowl of stew over the likes of justice, delayed gratification, generosity, sacrifice, discipline, and long term wisdom.

I wish Christians could get as excited about the words of Jesus as they do the rhetoric of the Tea Party. I wish that the ideas of justice for all, helping the poor and needy, living in contentment, and other gospel values stirred the passion of God's people more than a television or radio celebrity. I wish we could all find the words of a Jewish Rabbi to go and make disciples more riveting than the promises of politicians to make life better. I wish we could say "No thanks" to the bowl of stew that seems like the perfect answer to the life we crave and embrace the call to a kingdom that asks us to lay down our lives for Him.

My Big Fat Greek Problem

2010-08-27T15:08:00.005-04:00

The great philosopher Aristotle is quoted as saying, “If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.” Stated some 350 years before our Lord walked upon the earth, the foundational wisdom in this statement is still relevant today. I normally don’t put a lot of stock in Greek philosophers because I have my hands full trying to understand biblical wisdom. But in this case I find it ironic that a Greek mind would tell us something so important to our faith. Ironic because it is the Greek mindset that has led us away from the beginnings and development of scriptural faith. Let me try to explain.

I am sure that we all understand that the Jesus we see in pictures, movies, and murals is not the Jesus of scripture. He was not a white man. He did not have long hair. He would not have resembled anything we probably picture in our minds. He certainly did not walk and conduct himself within terms that we are comfortable with. Instead:

Jesus was Jewish
Jesus was a Jewish Messiah sent to lost sheep of the House of Israel
Jesus was raised in a Jewish home that faithfully practiced the Jewish faith
Jesus was circumcised the eighth day according the Torah (five books of Moses a Hebrew)
Jesus lived in a Jewish homeland called Israel
Jesus was from the richest area of Jewish faith in Israel called Galilee
Jesus was educated by learning Torah as a boy
Jesus participated in the Jewish feasts as a boy and as a rabbi later in life
Jesus wore Jewish attire including a Tallit (outer shawl or cloak) Tzitzit (four tassels on the corners of the Tallit) and Tefillin (two straps with boxes worn on the forehead and the left arm near the heart) Each piece a reminder of Torah and essential to the prayer and devotional life of a Jew.
Jesus observed the Jewish Sabbath
Jesus was most comfortable with and best received by the Pharisees with who he engaged in debate
Jesus taught mainly Torah and apart from the Tanakh (Moses, Prophets, and Writings) he had nothing to say
Jesus’ disciples were all Jewish – 11 from Galilee and Judas from Judea
Jesus trained his disciples in Torah (his yoke being his interpretation of it)
Jesus commanded his disciples to go and do the same with Torah in making disciples

These are our beginnings and the development of the Christian faith. Do we understand them? This is not exactly true. Actually the beginnings of our faith go all the way back to Abraham who was the first human being that God titled with “Hebrew”. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Twelve Tribes, Moses, David, Elijah, and Elisha were all Jewish. From Moses onward, these patriarchs form the foundation of our faith in living out the Hebrew way of life as defined by God in Torah. Hebrews 11 displays them before us in their acts of faithfulness and Hebrews 12 tells us that these are the ones who constitute the great cloud of witnesses that we now walk before in our faith journey. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul tells a gentile church, that “our fathers” experienced the very salvation and baptism we do and serve as our example. In doing so he emphatically states that a Jewish Israel is our heritage as Gentiles now in Jesus. In Galatians 3, Paul tells us that if we are in Christ, we are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to his promise. Do we understand these beginnings and this sovereign development that God chose to do his redemptive activity within?

Do we understand that some thirty years following Christ’s death on the cross that a zealous Pharisee named Rav Shaul, (Apostle Paul) himself a disciple of the great Rabbi Gamaliel, shares with his beloved disciple Timothy to “continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” These writings from his childhood were the Hebrew scriptures of the Tanakh (Old Testament) and that they were to make him wise in the salvation of Jesus. There were no “New Testament” writings to which Paul could have been referring to. And do we understand that it is these scriptures that the great passage that ensues about inspiration alludes to in “All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable…” Is it possible that the great Hebrew writings and Jewish practices actually have a place in a Christian world beyond stories, allegories, and bits and pieces of wisdom? These are our beginnings and our development that we should observe and understand.

The church labels 78% of its Bible as “Old Testament” implying that it is out-dated and irrelevant. The God of this Old Testament barely resembles the God that is worshipped in most congregations today. In fact most of us breathe a sigh of relief as we deem the Hebrew stuff as non-binding upon us as believers. That nasty law and that angry God have been replaced by grace and a loving Heavenly Father. But is that our beginnings and is that our development? What do we observe and what do we understand in its place? In displacing our roots, ignoring the olive tree we’ve been grafted into, and virtually celebrating our ignorance of all things Jewish from scripture, we have succeeded in creating a whole new faith. It bears little resemblance to the one we read about from our 22% of remaining text. What have we replaced it with? In short we have traded a Hebrew heritage rich in scriptural treasure for a Greek mindset of spirituality and thought. I hope to write more on this later.

I am not suggesting that we convert to Judaism, but I am suggesting that we embrace our beginnings and treasure our development in order to gain insight into the authentic faith brought to us by Yeshua Mashiach, the Hebrew equivalent of Jesus Christ. I am suggesting that the 78% that we consider “Old” is actually the key to understanding the 22% that we believe to be true. And I am strongly suggesting that we are clueless regarding that which we do believe as Christians without understanding the Hebrew framework that it rests upon. I also think that a Greek philosopher was warning us about the consequences of allowing his own Greek world to supplant the beginnings and development of our historic Hebrew faith.

Revisiting Obedience

2010-08-23T14:44:00.003-04:00

The theme of scriptural obedience will just not go away. I am still troubled by the fact that obedience gets so little attention in today’s church world. It certainly seems to be relegated to an optional activity that lies a great distance from the top of the spiritual food chain. Just believe in Jesus we are told. Have faith in Christ we declare to the masses. Trust in the saving work of the cross we are instructed. It is as if all of scripture has been reduced down to the activity that is known as believing and the entire plans and purposes of God are somehow summed up in a moment in which someone utters “some form of faith filled words” that signify that they in fact are now in compliance with God’s conditions for life now and forever.

While obedience may be alluded to, it is clearly a secondary theme in today’s gospel and certainly not something that carries eternal consequences with it. We wrap obedience up in terms that move it from the arena of holy requirements pleasing to a holy God into spiritual options that we might consider for living a better life. Obedience is now a pick-and-choose exercise that we might consider to better our marriages or families, our standard of living, our health, or our status in a church or community. Gone are the ideas of commandments, obligations, or duties that we must embrace and obey in order to live as God intends. Gone is the idea that obedience has any relevance to eternal life. Gone is the idea that what we do with our lives is of utmost importance both now and forevermore. We have successfully replaced faithfulness with faith and reconstructed faith to mean belief.

A brief overview of the teachings of Jesus suggests that scriptural faith is just the opposite of what we now celebrate. Here are a few of the words in red that might bear attention:

"Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!" Luke 11:28
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments” John 14:15
"If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him” John 14:23
“Whoever does not love me does not keep my words.” John 14:24
“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” John 15:10

Here are some words that are not in red that enforce the words of Jesus from other parts of our New Testament. We might want to reconsider our whole framework of what the faith should look like if we dare take these seriously:

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him” - John the Baptist
“It is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous” - Apostle Paul
“And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” - Writer of Hebrews
“We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands.” - Apostle John
“Since you call on a Father who judges each man's work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear.” - Apostle Peter
“Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” - Apostle James

My list could go on. It shouldn’t have to however. What we do matters to God. It is clear from Jesus and it is clear from those who interpreted him to others. And it is not as if we can just place obedience in the special category of “pleasing God” or “making God’s day” without any other connections to spiritual life. If we bother to think that idea through with any type of intelligent thought, we would need to believe that a displeasing life to God doesn’t really matter as long as we believe. We are called to obey God and this obedience has consequences. The difficult parable of the sheep and the goats that Matthew records from Jesus implies that eternal consequences rest upon the actions we take in living an obedient life. However much we wish to equate eternity solely with an act of faith, scripture leaves us with an uneasy testimony to the contrary.

Lest I give the impression that obedience is something that I have all figured out, let me say with conviction that I find it troubling. It is troubling to me personally and troubling to me as a leader. What are we to obey? What are the commands that we are obligated to embrace and live in order to please God? What are the commands of Jesus that we do to show our love for him? For those who wish to simply sum it up as “Love God and love others” I wish to extend some caution. If all of scripture is reduced to those five words, then it seems as though there is a great deal of wasted ink within scripture. I agree that all the Law and all the Prophets are fulfilled in these words, but it is not as simple as five words. Furthermore, what does loving God and loving others look like? How would I know if I’m doing it? We all exist with some form of legendary status in our own minds. It is only concrete things within the world of reality that force us to evaluate where we truly are. I may think that I could compete on an NFL football field; the fact that I may not be able to finish a 40 yard dash might suggest otherwise. Commands from Torah and commands from Jesus all point out specific applications that in reality form a series of 40 yard dashes indicating whether we in fact love God and others.

I wish I knew the parameters for obedience. A minister friend of mine suggested that Jesus’ commands are not binding on us since they were given before the cross at the concluding chapter of Jewish Law and before the onset of grace. I struggle with that. If the one I call Lord has nothing to say to me then something is wrong. Another minister friend suggested that Jesus lived the Law perfectly so I don’t have to. That grace is now the guiding force in everything we do. The implication to this is frightening as it suggests that we can do pretty much whatever we want because we are under grace (a state that resembles much of what is in practice in the lukewarm Christendom we see today by the way!). Others quickly point out that actual obedience to commands is not necessary as long as we want to obey. In other words, God knows our hearts and the feeling I have in my heart of love for Him and others are what counts. To be honest, that is terribly frightening as I sense God knows more about my heart than I do and what he knows is not favorable to the cause.

The answers are not easy ones for the call to obey must have something tangible to attach itself to. Otherwise judgment makes no sense. It makes no sense that is unless we see our judgment only as one of reward while those outside of the “faith” suffer the ignoble experience of being judged for their sins. That picture sends Christians to a wonderful fantasy world with visions of mansions, crowns, and divine “atta boys” for accepting Jesus as Savior. It also sends shudders down my spine. It makes the whole judgment process hinge on the question, “Did you or did you not believe in Jesus?” and transforms God’s justice and holiness into a judgment call on whether the person actually believed or not. On the basis of that, demons seem to have a shot because James suggests that they themselves believe (something that he invokes in his argument for the status of works and obedience within the parameters of New Testament faith). This issue demands a fresh visitation of scripture and more conversations with others around the table of spiritual community. It won’t go away. I hope that you will engage in the discussion and revisit this final frontier of Christianity.

The God Who Is

2010-08-07T13:11:00.005-04:00

My thoughts today are centered on the God of scripture. By scripture, I mean all of scripture. Who is he? What is he like? Why does he do what he does? Where does he reside? How can I know him? These are just simple questions but the answers are more complex than we think. This is especially true when we dare examine more than just a few select passages from our Bibles. If God is a loving heavenly father who welcomes us into his presence as scripture teaches, then he is also a consuming fire that we are to fearfully consider as taught by the same scriptures. (Both concepts come from the New Testament by the way.)

I have become convinced in recent months that unless we understand the world from which scripture was originally written and engage our hearts and minds with the mindset of those who first heard its message, we are in danger of missing the main points and more critically in danger of redefining our faith in terms outside of scriptural faith. How we in our modern world naturally think and process and interpret is radically different than the audience that would have heard Jesus speak. We are even more removed from the those who participated in the faith during the times of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and David. We cannot dismiss those people and their ways as being irrelevant to us. It is wrong to suggest that those patriarchs of the Old Testament participated in a faith that is radically different from ours or knew of God in terms that we now know are archaic compared to our New Testament status.

We assume that the Bible is a book of facts to be learned. We also assume that it fits together into a logical framework that ultimately produces a "How to do Life" manual. In fact, in today's most celebrated churches, the Bible is simply a source of information to deal with the felt needs we encounter in doing life. Many churches design their presentation of scripture around the felt need of the week. The really ingenious churches actually spend time polling people as to the felt need of the week and then utilize scripture accordingly. But that is not how and why scripture was written down and certainly not the revelation that prevails of God's person and God's modus operandi.

I ran across this quote from a book I'm reading that goes like this, "it pleased God to reveal himself not through timeless teachings, or some heavenly knowledge, but through the events of a particular history, and to and through people who were caught up in that history, and who were in every case people of like passions with ourselves and subject to the limitations of our flesh." The truth of the matter is that these people were Hebrews and the language and culture that they possessed is the framework within which any relationship with God must be understood. We ask for definitions; we receive pictures. We want defined doctrines; we are given stories. We covet black and white facts; we are given images. We require information to make tables and graphs and charts; we are presented poems and prophetic prose that requires its own unique thesaurus and dictionary. Unless we understand this fundamental fabric in which our scriptures are handed down to us, we will be spiritual versions of Dumb and Dumber without a clue to the scriptural world around us.

For example, how did Pharaoh's heart get hardened? Believe it or not, we in the western church divide over this question. We have to know and we have to know the truth. Scripture tells us that God hardened Pharaoh's heart (Ex. 7:3). That settles it! Oh but it tells us that Pharaoh hardened his own heart just a chapter later (Ex. 8:15). Don't mess with us...tell us one way or the other! But God doesn't reveal himself that way. We are not satisfied until we settle on an "either/or" stopping point that we can be confident of. God is either sovereign and predestines or man is free to choose and God must await the fruit of that decision. What happens if God is both sovereign and awaiting our decision? I would argue that the Hebrew world flowed easily within an "and/both" paradigm and never concerned themselves with its doctrinal ramifications. Rather, they viewed Pharaoh's situation as a warning to avoid becoming hardened themselves. They were as comfortable with the idea that God could and would fix some one's destiny as they were with moral responsibility and the idea that one could change God's mind.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace yet he tells us that "he did not come to bring peace to the earth but rather a sword." Which is he, the Prince of Peace or the one with a sword? Like all good westerners, you will probably side with the Prince of Peace idea because it fits what we want from God. Perhaps we need to become more eastern in our understanding and frame the Prince of Peace as one who requires a man to leave his family or forsake his parents in order to follow him...a forsaking that could bring untold grief and heartache to those who choose not to follow. The peace he gives is incredible. The conflict he causes is painful. God is not simple. Jesus is not simple either. There is no box to contain Him.

God is near to everyone of us. David declares in Psalm 139 that he knows every intention of my heart and there is no place that I can go from his presence. Yet the prophet places God enthroned in the heavens with earth as his footstool. All of creation cannot contain him. He is both intimate and transcendent. When Moses encountered God on Sinai, what he saw was a God who revealed himself as, "a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin" (Ex. 34:6-7a). Ah....we like that! The very next thing that God reveals about himself "but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation" (Ex. 34:7b). So is God merciful and forgiving or is he holy and exacting justice upon future generations of a people whose actions go without remorse? Because of our enlightened mindset, we demand to have it one way or the other. I suggest that the God of scripture feels no obligation to accommodate us and exists as the God who is. We, like those who have gone before us, must believe that he is both merciful and just.

My point to all of this is that rather than accommodating our need to identify and qualify God in terms that we can easily embrace and be comfortable with, we must place ourselves in his story. This means in all of the story...Old Testament included. Rather than serving as public relations people who seek to create a God from the pages of scripture that culture can be comfortable with, we must press on to know and represent the God of mystery. As the psalmist wrote some years ago, "Our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases." He doesn't have to explain why he loved Jacob but hated Esau. He doesn't have to apologize for choosing Israel and judging the Hittites. He does not have to answer his critics who demand an explaination for his partiality toward David, a man tainted by murder, adultery, and deplorable domestic skills, while finding easy reason to bring his predecessor Saul to an inglorious death.

We are the ones that need to change in our understanding of who he is. Until we embrace the words of scripture within the context from which they were written and seek to understand the world and culture that God chose to pen his eternal words we will be left with a make-believe God, created from select scriptures, who is comfortable, manageable, and predictable. We will build our systems of doctrine and our assurances of heaven while missing out on the amazing God of scripture and his call to include us in on his story. May we never settle for less than amazing.

Random Thoughts from a Funeral

2010-07-30T17:45:00.002-04:00

The captain of the ocean liner bound for Europe gently knocked on the door of one of his passengers and requested the man join him on the bridge of the ship. Upon arrival, the captain spoke softly to the gentleman, “A careful reckoning has been made, and I believe we are now passing the place where the Ville de Harve was wrecked. The water is three miles deep.” The passenger turned and walked out onto the deck of liner and leaned over the rail peering into the water and allowed the fullness of moment to flood his mind and captivate his heart. Slowly but surely, words began to come to him and taking a pencil and tablet he penned the following words:
When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
These words and the verses to follow have since been immortalized into the hymnals of churches everywhere regardless of denomination or nationality.

What is behind these words and why are they so powerful? Perhaps the other details of the author’s life would help us understand their significance then and their significance now.

Horatio G. Spafford was a very prominent and successful attorney practicing law in Chicago in the 1860’s. He married his wife Anna and together they established themselves as an integral part of life amid Chicago’s hustling and bustling ethos. His successful law practice allowed him the financial resources to secure a large portion of real estate along Chicago’s famed waterfront. As a couple they befriended a young preacher named D.L. Moody who would go on to become a world renowned minister in the mold of Billy Graham today. To this man, they became close friends, Horatio became a close confidant, and together they both became among his most ardent supporters. They also began their family by giving birth to a son and four daughters. Their lives reflected financial, emotional, social, spiritual, and parental success. They were living the American Dream.

But then things began to unravel and circumstances would deliver some of the harshest consequences anyone could be asked to endure. In 1870, their four year old son contracted scarlet fever and died. In 1871 the Great Chicago Fire destroyed every one of Horatio’s valuable real estate holdings along the waterfront. Aware of the hardships that his friends had faced, Moody invited them to England to help him in a great evangelistic campaign that he was conducting in 1873. They decided to take their friend up on his request believing that by getting away they could enjoy some much needed rest, they could put some distance between themselves and the tragedies back home, they could spend time as a family enjoying the sights and sounds of London and its surrounding country, and though deeply suffering themselves they could help their friend whose success in ministry was flourishing.

So off to New York they went, hearts set on the excitement before them, with full intentions to board a French steamship that would take them to England. However, just prior to sailing, news came to Horatio that he was needed back in Chicago to attend to an important business matter that couldn’t wait until his return. He made the decision to put his wife and four daughters on the ship, return to Chicago, wrap things up as quickly as possible and catch the next ship to join his family. Having said his goodbyes, he departed back to his city where 9 days later he received a telegram from his beloved Anna. It simply read:
“Saved Alone”
You see, on November 22, 1873 the French ship Ville de Harve collided with the British vessel named the Lochearn and sank in only 12 minutes claiming the lives of 226 people. His bride Anna stood bravely on deck with daughters Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta clinging desperately to her as the ship sank. Her last memories were of the violent waters tearing her youngest from her arms…the very waters that Horatio now fixed his focus upon. Only a plank that somehow floated beneath her unconscious body kept her afloat. Upon being rescued and realizing the fate of her daughters she broke into total despair until a small voice spoke to her, “You were spared for a purpose.” She would later recall to a close friend, “It is easy to be grateful and good when you have so much, but take care that you are not a fair weather friend of God.”

So we rejoin our story where we started and see a man who in three years time has lost a son, lost his fortune, and now lost his four daughters and he is staring out over the waters at the very location where the latest tragedy took place. With the grief of a father occupying one side of his heart, a vibrant faith residing in the other, and pen in hand he began to write. Let 's reread the words of the first verse again and maybe you will be able to connect the dots better:
When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
These are amazing words when placed within their context.

Life is broken. We all know that. Our world is full of broken relationships, broken families, broken health, broken motives, broken promises, broken morality, broken culture, broken…..you get the picture. We live in a broken world. To live in denial of it is to be like the proverbial ostrich whose head is found firmly entrenched in the sand. And it’s not as if our positive thinking can fix it either. We can’t wish it to go away and we can’t find a refuge that protects us from it. The truth is we take brokenness with us wherever we go, because if we are honest, we all know that we ourselves are broken. Scripture tells us we need a Savior, someone to restore what is broken. Christianity informs us that it is God himself who assumes that task.

All of the brokenness around us erodes a most critical fundamental pillar to life itself. It drives a stake in our hearts that lays claim to an idea that God, if he exists at all, is above all of this and doesn’t really care. We are told throughout scripture that God is good and God is faithful. The essence of scriptural faith is built upon these two important aspects of God’s character. He is good! He is faithful! Our broken world does its very best to get us to question that. From the very first days in the Garden of Eden, the seeds of discontent before God have been sown calling his goodness and faithfulness into question. These seeds of doubt demand that we abandon that belief and declare our independence with questions that ring of … “How could a good God allow…? and … Where is He in all of this mess?” The result is a loss of hope, or worse yet a sense in which… “I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure I get mine and I really don’t care about the rest.”

You see…It is what we do to navigate the brokenness in life that is important. It is how we handle the broken places in life that makes up our legacy and defines our ultimate contributions to family, friends, and society. Three years of heartrending brokenness sent their best shots into Horatio Spafford’s heart demanding that he yield to the doubts they brought about his God. And seized the deepest grief that a man could imagine, he turned to his Creator and with brazen faith declared “It is well, it is well with my soul.” His recognition that God is good and God is faithful at a time when brokenness was screaming its loudest, seized the moment and carried him through his broken landscape. His loss was redeemed by God to be our gain in such a way that for the past century and beyond, we in the church can declare with him that same refrain. “It is well, it is well with my soul.” To this day, I cannot sing this great hymn without being overcome with its message and I try to affirm its truth each day of my journey before I retire at night.

We are reminded from scripture that brokenness does not win. In a place called Gethsemane some 2000 years ago, a man stared straight into the face of all of the world’s brokenness. The sight caused such anguish that we are told that he sweat drops of blood. The reality of the world’s brokenness was so great that he cried out to be rescued from its weight. That same brokenness was later placed upon him as he hung on a cross with such crushing weight that he cried out, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” It was on this cross that the scriptures tell us that Jesus absorbed the totality of brokenness and offered something called Shalom to our world in its place. The cost to us for this Shalom is to believe in that event and then live as if it’s true. Our faith in this act of eternal redemption begins the process of healing the brokenness in us so that we might heal the brokenness in the world around us.

In the glorious resurrection of our Lord Jesus that was to follow, God has forever declared that sin is ultimately defeated and that death will ultimately be destroyed and that the new heavens and new earth will one day usher in a Kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy that will reign forever. We affirm this truth over and over with the words, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” when we recite his prayer. It was in this truth that Horatio Spafford staked his claim when he penned those words.

What we do today has consequences, good or bad, that carry over to tomorrow. I urge you to make today count and take a step toward mending the brokenness that exists in your world. Perhaps it is restoring or renewing your faith in the good and faithful God. Perhaps it is mending a broken relationship, or helping to restore a broken family. Maybe it is to comfort those with broken health, or to question those with broken motives. It could be to make right a broken promise, or to change some broken morality. Maybe it is to help reform a broken culture. It starts with the little things. My prayer is that at the end of this day, as you close your eyes, and welcome the sleep that brings refreshment to your life, you will be able to join Horatio Spafford with all honesty and sincerity, and declare, “It is well, it is well with my soul.”

My Reformation Proposal

2010-07-13T08:54:00.004-04:00

For the past twenty five years my life has been shaped by the reformation. The great reformers such as Luther and Calvin have shaped my faith and given me the tools to frame life within the basic teaching of scripture. I consider them heroes; particularly Martin Luther, who risked his life in taking on the only known expression of Christianity and the most powerful entity in the world. His words, "Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me." still echo within my soul. Not as words of defiance, but as words of resolve and commitment to the truth of scripture in the face of church practice.

What were the conditions existing in the church of his day that brought out such heroic actions and such powerful words? I suggest that several prominent themes were behind the wayward activity of the church needing this kind of radical reform. Among these themes were several of note:

Church leaders who left the radical call of Jesus to serve their churches by making disciples for the promise of power, influence, and prestige that lay waiting for them. They became infatuated with big, infatuated with wealth, infatuated with privilege, and infatuated with the influence they could wield in the world of political power.
A prevailing theme of heaven and hell that crowded out the more prominent matters of faith and obedience established in the first covenant with Israel, confirmed by Jesus in his call to the Kingdom, and fleshed out by the apostles in the Epistles. Ultimately heaven became a commodity that was bought and sold with the proceeds going to the church. The church became the only official means in which heaven was attainable. The Great Commission of the church to go and make disciples was supplanted with an obsession to transport the masses to heaven regardless of the spiritual condition of their lives.
A process that transformed the rich tradition of the biblical text into an organizational and missional manual to support church practices, structures, activities, and dogma. The richness of the Story of God was contorted into a slice and dice compilation of principles that were used to build a faith empire. The result was an empowered church to which people owed their allegiance, service, money, and talents.

These three themes along with numerous others all worked to produce a church that needed awakening. That awakening came in the form of a call to return to the simplicity and discipline of scripture. The question we must ask today is are we now in need of another awakening? It seems to me that we are dangerously close to many of the very things that evoked that historic protest years ago.

Though no one is asking me, here are my suggestions for a new reformation:

Restore the radical call to make disciples. This is hard tedious work in which church leaders are transformed from corporate CEO's or privileged clergy into servants who impart the faith, the whole faith, to others. This will require a transition from organizational power and clergy privilege to relational servanthood.
Restore the rich Jewish heritage of the faith. The church's departure from Judaism begun by Constantine has radically altered the faith. In replacing the Hebrew mindset for a Greek mindset we have become a faith of assent rather than transformation. Mix in the values of the Enlightenment and Modernity and you see a faith that has become little more than moralism on the one side or transcendentalism on the other.
Restore the importance of the whole of scripture. Rather than starting with where we are and using the Bible as handbook for a better life, we need to move into the story of scripture. For most people, the Bible goes from Genesis 3 straight to the Cross and then to Revelation. This has resulted in an ongoing tragic unfolding of misinformation and an unfortunate rewriting of faith history.
Restore the preeminence of the biblical theme of Kingdom. The Kingdom of God was the message of Jesus and his words were directed to life in that Kingdom. Replacing Kingdom with heaven has caused churches to rewrite their mission statements from making disciples to issuing travel tickets to the other world.
Restore the importance of spiritual communities of believers who live missionally together in order to impact their world. Take back the ideas of salt and light from the clutches of institutional program and restore it to the tough work of loving one another and our neighbors. By this will all men know we are his disciples.
Restore the idea that Christianity is hard work and only advances through the hard fought efforts of people paying the price to be holy. While grace was at the heart of the first reformation, obedience needs to be at the heart of this one. Because of the grace that is ours, we can be different and being different makes the ultimate difference.

Well...that's my list. To add another would make seven and that would imply that it is perfect. Six will do for now. I feel so much better now that I have fixed the church. Now....if I can only figure out how to love my enemies...

Longing for Home

2010-07-03T09:44:00.001-04:00

The theme of exile is the theme of the entire Bible. From the opening pages of scriptures until its final chapters, exile dominates the Holy Spirit's dictation. In Genesis we are sent into exile. In Revelation we are returned to the new heavens and new earth made possible by our glorious Lord Jesus. If we understand this scripture takes on significant meaning. If we fail to grasp this, we are left with bits of pieces of text that we somehow try to arrange into a road map for living that has no true destination.

We are exiles. Make no mistake about it. The word means to be absent from one's home our country. When I say exile, I do not mean we are absent from heaven, our true home. Scripture never assigns the place we call heaven as our true abode. Our "citizenship is in heaven" as the Apostle Paul says to the Philippians, but it was not from heaven that we were sent packing when the whole problem of sin emerged. We are exiles from a Garden and that Garden was on earth.

Exile involves more than just a geographic place however. While it is true we were created to live in the Garden of Eden, located somewhere in the Mid-East, we were created for a certain kind of life as well: the Garden life. We were created for life lived in the presence of God in the midst of a good creation of which we were to steward for our Creator. Rebellion sent us packing from this place and cherubim keep us from returning at the moment. Exile not only means absence from a physical Garden but also from a way of life known most fully by the conditions within that Garden.

The conditions that define our exile are described best in the Hebrew concept of chaos. Within a short time of being exiled from the Garden, a brother kills his brother, weird relations emerge between the sexes, hearts become increasingly evil, a flood wipes out the earth, a tower is built to reach into the heavens, and so on. Chaos is the term used to describe life in exile. Its counterpart, shalom, is Hebrew term used to describe life as we imagined it in the Garden or life as it was meant to be within God's blessings.

The theme of exile is graphically portrayed in God's Story involving Israel. Israel existed under a system of chaos known as Egypt where life was hard, tyranny reigned, and slavery was the way of life. From this place of chaos God promised to bring his people into the land promised to Abraham, a land of plenty, a land of milk and honey. These are terms used to evoke the idea of shalom. Their training in the wilderness was for the purpose of preparing them to live in the land enjoying shalom. Their lives were to be ordered by the Law of Moses, a reflection of the original Creator's divine nature. The existing chaos of the land represented by the pagan nations and their practices was to be destroyed and everything that represented life outside of God was to be removed. Chaos was to be set aside and shalom was to be the rule. It was a picture of God returning his people from exile into a land and a calling resembling the original Garden we were made for.

Most of the history of the Old Testament centered on Israel's failure to remove vestiges of the pagan world of chaos. They did not drive out the pagan nations, they did not remove the pagan idols of human rebellion, they did not live according to the laws of God that framed a life resembling the original homestead. Life in the Promised Land became no different than life in exile. Despite a new geographic residence, the exiled lifestyle of chaos held dominion. It held dominion until God had enough and sent them packing into exile once again to the pagan nations that they were meant to influence. If they were to live the exiled lifestyle, they could live it in a place of exile. Chaos ruled!

Various shades of that exile existed for Israel until the day that Jesus was baptized and declared that the Kingdom of God was at hand. In that day Rome served as the host of chaotic life in exile. While Israel lived in the land that they were promised, they did so under the heavy hand of Roman rule and in the midst of pagan idolatry at its most developed state. Every genuine Hebrew longed for the promised visitation of their God to end their exile and restore them to their rightful place of prominence in their land of promise. (Read Psalm 126 for a sense of this longing.) It is to this cry that Jesus devotes most of his teaching and applies most of his miracles. He was the One who would restore shalom and end chaos. He was the One who would bring God's people back to the Garden and end the exile for good.

That is the message of the cross and glory of the resurrection. Jesus has secured shalom on our behalf. He has brought an end to chaos. We catch glimpses of the Garden here and there when we pray, or when we worship, or when we read, or when we gather, or when we break the bread and drink the cup. In Christ we are offered a life of shalom and freedom from the bondage of chaos. When the scriptures tell us we are free or have freedom, it is in this sense that it is referring. Someday we will experience the full view of what the small glimpse we now have teases us with. Until then we are called to live within the reality of shalom while exising in the chaotic world in which we find ourselves.

If you are like me, you long for the fullness of shalom in the new heavens and new earth. It is what we were created for. Like the people of God who have gone before us who were strangers and pilgrims in our world, we long for a city whose maker and builder is God. Every time I pray, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" I sense a stirring for life as it was meant to be. I fear that many who belong to God however, think that life in exile is actually pretty good. The ethos of chaos is somehow strangely mixed with the promise of shalom into a strange blend of lukewarm faith in a faux land of promise. Like the Israelites who adapted to the pagan lands that took them captive and became pagan themselves, many mistake the American Dream for shalom and end up serving some sort of money, sex, or power instead of the risen Messiah.

When life becomes comfortable in exile, we are in a bad place. When the daily desire to see, even if only a glimpse, a chaos-free world for everyone is missing, we know that we have sold out. When we are not wrestling with how to live within the scope of shalom to our neighbors, spiritual communities, places of employment, and families we betray the cross to which all of this chaos ultimately must answer in humble submission. When we are not troubled, stirred, awakened, and moved to action in dealing with the chaos we find in our own lives through the spiritual disciplines, we are shirking our calling to be light and salt to the chaos around us. Whatever the case, we must recognize that we are exiles in a pagan world called to live as though we are in a Garden that we can only see in bits and pieces. Shalom!

Come Back Little Shema

2010-06-30T11:09:00.005-04:00

I have a confession to make. It is a strongly held confession and packed with deep seated sense of angst. It comes as the result staring at the simple command of Jesus and asking myself the tough question as it relates to the command. I am not a lover. I am not someone who loves God and loves others as I should. I thought I was, but I am not. Furthermore, I don't know what to do about it!

Love for God and love for others are the two actions that all of scripture is framed around. The totality of the Law of Moses was summed up in these two actions. The theme behind all of the admonitions of Israel's Prophets was a call to return to an ardent love of God and a call to walk in love toward others. The message of Jesus is summed up within the concepts of loving God and loving others. The Apostle Paul declares that all the Law and all the Prophets are fulfilled in the concept known as love.

So if I am not a lover, what am I? If anything, I am a selective lover. I choose times where God is held in the esteem he so richly deserves. I choose people who I demonstrate affection toward. I choose moments or events where the fortunate chosen ones may receive my bestowal of charity. I may even have a day here and there where I hold God in high regard and show love toward someone at the same time. Those are good days. No, those are really good days. They are special and rare and I hope that someone is watching and taking note of it. I hope that they see this as normal. But that is not my normal. My normal is preoccupation with life, with challenges, with struggles, with busyness, with things, with television, with computer, with......you get the idea.

For purposes of this writing, I want to deal with God's call to love him. Love is a funny word. Everything in me as a 21st century western culture participant wants to equate love with emotion. I want it to be something that I feel. As a young man, I remember falling "in love" with a girl for the first time. It was wonderful. I tingled. If I had been a peacock, my tail feathers would have fanned without any effort at all. But that really wasn't love. It was a bunch of chemicals in my body being awakened and creating a hormonal high. It was that and more but it wasn't love as God defines it because love is not an emotion; it is not a hormonal or chemical reaction. Love as God defines it is active obedience and heartfelt devotion to Him.

Common to the faith of Israel was and continues to be the reciting of several passages of scripture upon awaking in the morning and retiring for bed at night. These scriptures form what is called the Shema. The Shema begins, "Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your might." It served as a morning reminder that today belongs to God and I must spend it in full devotion to him and as an evening reminder that the day just lived belonged to God and asks if I spent it in full devotion to him. It was a solemn reminder that God was central to everything called life and the primary responsibility in everything was to love him.

Shema 's command is to love God with every part of heart, soul, and might. By using the term love, the text implies that these truths must be fulfilled through relationship rather than through cognitive affirmation. In other words, love is not what I affirm, or think, or feel, but something that I express out of relationship to God. This relationship passionately transcends legal obligation and demands the mobilization of all the dimensions and resources of one's being. How is this love preserved and guaranteed? The answer: by intentional, structured mindfulness.

So what is heart within the concept of Hebrew text? What does it mean to love God with all of my heart. Heart is desire. It is that part of us that sets affection or attaches significance to things like sports, family, hobbies, food, or chocolate. Desire generates enthusiasm, passion, and devotion. Shema says that all of this desire belongs to God first and to everything else second out of the overflow of the first and because of it. Jesus confirmed this with his difficult statement that "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." He is simply interpreting the Shema for his followers and declaring that God has first rights to our desires and affections.

The Hebrew understanding of soul differs a bit from our Greek model that we are most comfortable with. Soul to the Hebrew was a person's life. To love God with one's soul was to give oneself totally in all that one did to the action of loving God. We could apply the word loyalty to this and understand the concept partially. Shema says that everything we do even to the point of death must be done with a loyalty and devotion to God regardless of the consequences. In this sense, martyrs demonstrated a soul-love for God as they chose to be loyal to him and him only at the cost of death. Short of martyrdom and in a more practical sense, to love God with all of our souls requires of us a determination to faithfully serve God through obedient choices. In other words, there is no such thing as compartmentalizing life into sacred and secular. Or to put it more plainly, loving God is a 24/7 proposition rather than an hour on Sunday. When Jesus spoke, "For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it." he was declaring his interpretation of loving God with the soul.

The Hebrew understanding of might is something that we might not suspect. To love God with all of our strength or might is love him with our resources. Shema demands that our love for God be expressed in generosity. Our possessions and material goods are the means to actively loving God with our strength. The idea of strength goes back to the idea of the "sweat of our brow" or labor in making a living. What we get through our efforts are to be offered to God first and if required, offered to God in totality. Jesus' statement to the rich young ruler to sell everything he had and give it away was simply an application of this aspect of Shema.

So here I sit contemplating my response to the Holy Spirit's quest to engage me with the call to love. I haven't even gotten to the love your neighbor as yourself part of the equation and I'm reeling a bit. I take only slight comfort in the Heidelberg Catechism that deals with the Shema in question #5 "Can you live up to this perfectly?" and answers "No, I have a natural tendency to hate God and my neighbor." The comfort comes in knowing that my lack of love is real just like yours and that it is being addressed through the cross of Christ. In my Gethsemane moments I wrestle with this deeply. I can state that I certainly love God more today than ever. My prayer is that I would be consumed with this love even more in the days to come.

Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up

2010-06-29T08:42:00.003-04:00

I was thinking last night about Jesus. Who is he? Why did he come? What do I need to know about him? That may sound strange from someone who claims to have known him for the past thirty-six years but it is never-the-less an accurate reflection of my thoughts last night. The Jesus I know today is vastly different than the Jesus I was introduced to thirty some years ago. He is vastly different than the Sunday School pictures and stories I had before me fifty years ago. He is different than the Jesus I knew last year. Is that important? I don't know but it has gotten me to thinking.

Early on in church history a battle broke out concerning who Jesus really was. Docetism was a belief that redefined Jesus as a spiritual being only having the allusion of a physical body. Because the prevailing belief that physical matter was evil ergo Jesus could not have taken on physical matter, docetism created a Jesus that was totally spiritual. The Gnostics also had their way with defining Jesus. Again the crux of the matter was literally the evil nature of matter, and as such, the real god was separated from evil matter by layer upon layer of aeons or lesser gods. Jesus fit cozily into this framework as the aeon chosen to exist as the bridge between spirit and matter. He was a human who was descended upon by a god-force upon his baptism and abandoned just prior to the crucifixion. The end result was spiritual wisdom and secret knowledge that he taught while embodied by the divine. In both of these cases, the Apostle John's seeming target in his gospel and his epistles is the distorted Jesus that these impostors presented.

But I need not go back that far into history to see the effects of remaking Jesus into something that he was not. Abandoning the historical Jesus of scripture, Nazi Germany effectively reshaped Jesus into a Jew hating figure and transformed its churches into instruments that helped to frame the holocaust. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (The Cost of Discipleship - a must read for any serious Christian) was one of the lone dissenters of this movement and it cost him his life in martyrdom. The Jesus of South Africa was a white Jesus that justified treating people of dark skin as animals rather than human. Churches openly celebrated the disturbing practice of enslaving and dehumanizing a group of people based on skin color. Jesus was again distorted for popular reasons and for monetary, political, and social gain.

I believe that this is always the danger with Jesus. He is easy to recreate into an image or figure that serves the current social agenda of a nation, culture, or even a religious movement. It is not as if the religions outside of Christianity ignore Jesus; they simply recreate him into something that fits into whatever it is they need him to be to further their cause. To Islam he is a prophet held in some regard. In Hinduism, he is a great teacher. Even Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses have a place for Jesus. We just don't recognize that place as legitimate. Their Jesus is outside of the boundaries of acceptable orthodoxy. But all of this begs the question...what about our Jesus?

I mentioned several weeks ago that we picture Jesus as some white guy with long wavy hair and a beard in the course of a sermon. (The picture of Jesus hovering over wall Street is absolutely precious!) Someone afterwards came to me and sincerely asked me, if he is not that, what is he? I suggested he probably resembled the people we see on television representing the Mid-Eastern culture and probably had a big nose. They were unimpressed. While I don't think we need a clear picture of what he looked like, I do think it is important to have a clear picture of who Jesus was and who Jesus is. Or to frame it this way, we cannot assume that the Jesus we worship is the real Jesus just because we worship him. The 1940's Germans, 1980's South Africans, the modern Jehovah Witnesses all assume(d) that very thing. They were and are wrong!

If I am at all nosing around something important, then we must ask ourselves, is the current American Jesus of the 21st Century the real Jesus of scripture? Or have we recreated him into something that serves our social, political, economic, and spiritual agendas. Twenty years ago I was convinced Jesus was a Republican. Many today still are. The popular Jesus today is a personal savior who is the means to a better life. For many, he is the guarantee of "your best life now!" On the other side of the coin, for a few but growing number of people, Jesus is emerging as something altogether different. He is the Jesus of the Kingdom whose commands we cannot ignore.

I am trying to work through this very question. In doing so, my picture of Jesus has changed. For one thing, my Jesus was extreme in his deity and light on his humanity. He is now very human (his divinity is still in play but his actions, emotions, thoughts, and prayers are human rather than divine). Just this shift makes every gospel account come alive in an altogether new way. "how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him" said Peter in presenting Christ to Cornelius and his household. How you see Jesus is everything in how you might see yourself in this. The divine Jesus would have been unique in doing this because he was God. The human Jesus was just like us, empowered by the Holy Spirit to do kingdom work. Why am I not following in his footsteps?

If I understand Jesus at all at this point, he is first of all Jewish. Secondly, he is a Jewish Messiah; the true Messiah amid many would Messiahs of that day. Thirdly he is a Jewish rabbi who unveiled his grasp of the Torah, the Temple, and the Kingdom through his teachings and actions. Fourthly, he is the true suffering servant who would die on the cross at the hands of Rome and be raised bodily from the grave. Fifth, he is the resurrected human King seated at the right hand of the Almighty who rules in his Kingdom and advocates on behalf of his people. Sixth, he is the one who will return to establish this kingdom on earth as it is in heaven that will endure forever. Who is Jesus...I want to know now more than ever.

Rolling Along

2010-06-26T10:01:00.002-04:00

At the beginning of a book I just opened, I read these words, "The only thing more difficult than finding the truth is not losing it. What starts out as new and precious becomes plain and old....The chief theological task now facing the Western Church is not to reinvent or to be relevant but to remember. We must remember the old, old story. We must remember the faith once delivered to the saints. We must remember the truths that spark reformation, revival, and regeneration." I think that these are thoughtful words in deed.

My current world is uniquely divided between the denominational world linked to a 500year tradition and the non-denominational world that is renown for innovation and recreating the faith on an ongoing basis. On the one hand is something connected solidly to the past through creeds, confessions, and tradition and on the other hand is something that exists totally oblivious to these same things. The one honors the faith of our fathers, the other seeks to "roll its own" rather than inhale from a recognized brand. Both have their moments...both have their problems.

The problems of those connected to the past through the great creeds, confessions, and traditions passed down are not, as many would conclude, their connection to the creeds, confessions, and traditions. These great standards in many regards represent time-honored truths that still serve us well. Most of the problems associated with traditional churches is that while holding to some form of verbal assent to the hand-me-down standards, they have in fact long ago departed from them in practice. They have eroded the truth with new ideas, and while giving lip service at the front door are talking and doing something completely different at the back. They have sadly embraced something other than what they claim to adhere to.

The problems of the "roll your own" group, (of which I most readily identify) are not as easy to diagnose. At the crux of the biggest issues I have had to work through in my journey as a believer, is the rebuilding of the faith that I rejected in the creeds and confessions and traditions that have gone before. I remember encountering the real Jesus in a dramatic conversion and thinking to myself, "Who needs an Apostle's Creed, or the Heidelberg Catechism, or the Westminster Confession? Who needs to study church history? I have Jesus! It is people like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Wesley who brought about the whole denominational bondage that has kept me from Jesus!" So off I went like so many others who equated "luke-warmness" with tradition and rolled a new faith that was alive and vibrant and free from the dreaded practices of the past.

Off came the rules. Off came the rituals. Off came the liturgies. Off came the yearly church calendar. Off came the hymns. Off came anything that resembled the tradition of the churches that were not alive and vibrant and free like us. I joined countless numbers of people in our country who became as proud of our "non-denominational" status as any Lutheran might have been of his or her status. It was a badge of honor declaring that we were what God was doing and everyone else was some poor sap stuck in bondage to tradition. I still hear it today, especially from those who venture into the "roll your own" world from Roman Catholicism. It is stated in words like, "I was a Catholic but now I'm a Christian."

With the "roll your own" label comes an instant aversion to anything representing traditional faith. We always swing to extremes in our responses things. Mention the idea of confession of sin and former Catholics flee like roaches exposed to light. Mention obedience or works and the "roll your owners" immediately recoil and begin to hyperventilate until the word "grace" is repeated enough times to calm their fears. Dare to recite the Lord's Prayer or Apostle's Creed or some Psalm together in public worship and everyone is wondering if a minister's robe can be far behind. My question is, "What has all this aversion to tradition and disdain for our roots gotten us?" What have we "rolled out" in the past several decades that is not itself riddled with problems?

This dilemma was underscored by a conversation I had with someone close to me. He is a young man now with multiple children and is concerned that he is clueless as to his responsibilities to raise his children in the faith. What do I teach them he asked me. I thought about it a minute and said, "I'll get back to you." You see, for the most part all we currently have to show for our the crudely rolled butts that we have created is a declaration that we have accepted Jesus as personal Savior. His admission was that he didn't know much about the faith that could be passed on to his children except that he had a savior who secured heaven on his behalf. I suppose that securing some similar sort of decision from a "roll your own" child would satisfy the requirements of being a Christian parent under this scenario.

Is that all there is? God instructed Israel to teach their children his words, to set up stones and create altars to refer to when instructing their children of the faithfulness of God in days gone by, and celebrate yearly the great feasts that represented their history together. The instructions found in the epistles are to teach the things taught to you by others to others in order to perpetuate the faith to the next generation. The first several centuries of the church were dominated by something called "oral tradition" whereby those taught by Jesus verbally taught others what he said, who taught others what they said, and so on. It seemed to be enough to get the church through the most horrific season of persecution in its history. Could it be that those who have gone before us have something to say to us?

To deny the great creeds, catechisms, confessions, and traditions passed down through the ages is to insist that each of us is better able to hear from God ourselves and understand his will. It is the greatest of all issues of pride that suggests that I will know more through my personal relationship with God or we will know more through our contemporary collective personal relationships with God than those who have gone before us. I can think of a number of churches who specialize in "roll your ownism" who think exactly that. It is to suggest that in reading scripture, each individual will arrive at the right conclusion of truth from what they read. It is acknowledged that this might look different to each individual so we label it personal truth which is cause for great celebration in "roll your ownville". I am not overstating the fact that many believe that to read outside sources on scripture is to somehow tarnish or corrupt the scriptures. And so we "roll our own." If Martin Luther could see what we have done to the priesthood of the believer he would have a whole new set of theses to tack on the walls.

I am determined to connect with past. I am determined to revisit much of what I threw out early on. I am determined to understand the scriptures in their original context and to understand how each generation applied or deviated from that original context. I am determined to be open to voices and ideas of those who have gone before me. I am tired of "rolling my own" and am troubled by what is happening to the faith by "roll your own" churches. After all, there is a great cloud of witnesses who have paid the price to bring us a faith that was passed down to them. They deserve to be heard and followed as we follow Jesus.

A Little Water, a Little Grass, Some Sheep, and a Shepherd

2010-06-25T07:54:00.003-04:00

I have been ruminating for some time on the concepts of faith, trust, and dependence. The unfortunate and misguided emphasis in the church today of our faith being about an afterlife that is accessed by a one-time crossing of the line of faith (whatever that means)has given Christianity an extreme makeover that is not flattering at all. This makeover has robbed us of the power that faith should generate and moved us away the very God who calls us to Himself. Even a casual look at the spiritual landscape of our Western World will reveal a church that is badly damaged and if you bother to examine that landscape more closely, you will notice the presence of life support. We are gasping at a time when we should be getting ready to sprint. This is all the result of bad theology over the past century made worse by un-biblical application and practice.

All matters pertaining to faith and practice according to scripture are defined within a present tense paradigm. In other words, relationship with God is always a present tense affair. The idea that something I did at some point in the past is somehow carrying me today or guaranteeing me something tomorrow is not within the biblical framework. While it is important that I obeyed God yesterday, or last week, or last year, it is more important that I obey God today. Paul tells us this in 1 Corinthians 10 with the example of Israel. They all left the bondage of Egypt through the blood of the Passover (salvation) and passed through the Red Sea (baptism) and experienced Christ in the water from the Rock, but they were overthrown in the wilderness and failed to enter the Promised Land (kingdom). The kingdom made possible by the blood and baptism of years prior was rendered void by the disobedience and unbelief of today. The application and warning is clear, "Let anyone who thinks he stands, take he lest he fall." (vs. 12)

Salvation is always present tense as far as application goes. Trust is present tense. Obedience is present tense. Forgiveness is present tense. Commitment is present tense. Today I live for God. Today I choose to worship, pray, read, obey, trust, surrender, give, love, hope. Today I work out my salvation with fear and trembling, knowing that He is at work within me. Today I examine myself, to see if I am in the faith. As the scripture so plainly states, "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion..."

I sense some of you already labeling me but my point is not about whether you can lose your precious salvation and end up burning in some eternal fire somewhere; that is where this always goes because that is the only point that we have left to discuss in an otherwise rich faith that has gone bankrupt. (It is the only point to this whole thing now that Evangelicalism has gone to seed and produced tares.) To read these words and immediately think, "You mean I might not go to heaven?" means you don't get it. You might as well add two plus two and ask why it didn't total green.

What I am arguing is that salvation and baptism in this sense are not the goal. They are the means to being restored to our God so that we can walk with Him like in the very beginning. They open the door to the all important concepts of obedience and faith that were inaccessible prior to being awakened by God. They are the enabling means to becoming the stewards of creation that God ordained at the outset. Jesus is not the goal; He came to restore us to the Father. He came to restore us to abundant or God-centered (gr. zoe) life. He came to set us free from the bondage of sin in order to powerfully and completely serve the Living God. He came to insert a new master to which we are to be enslaved (Romans 6). You say, "I've got Jesus!" Good. Now what will you do with Him? Or, as James puts it, "you say you have faith, good show me your works."

This whole concept is beautifully portrayed in the traditional Hebrew concept of shepherds and sheep. Psalm 23 comes to mind with its familiar, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters." We in our western culture immediately turn these words into images of glacial pools amidst lush knee deep grass and clover. We imagine that salvation is being set free to roam wherever we desire to go in abundant provision of food and water, while doing as we please under the good shepherd's loving approving eyes. But this is not the picture that anyone writing or reading this text would have imagined. What they would have imagined coincides perfectly with what I have stated above.

They would have imagined the grim reality of what to our eyes would look like desert or wasteland. This desert would seem to be devoid of life to the casual eye. But this desert would experience a daily natural phenomena in which the cool night winds from the sea would meet the hot dry soil and sprout blades of grass with the early morning dew. These are the green pastures of the Psalmist. The shepherd would know where the winds would blow and where the grass would sprout and the sheep or goats would follow to graze the offerings before the heat of the sun would burn it off. The quiet water would be pools left behind by flash floods that were momentarily safe because of the shepherd's knowledge of the next arrival of raging waters that would otherwise destroy the flock. They would have imagined a picture of the daily dependence and devotion of a flock that had to trust and obey its shepherd at all times for sustenance and survival. They would have pictured the essence of biblical salvation.

The difference is striking. Autonomous sheep frolicking in abundance and blessing under the loving and approving eyes of Jesus on the one hand and dependent sheep relying upon the ongoing loving provision and protective care of Jesus on the other. The first group says thank you very much for what you did in giving us this blessing we'll take it from here; the other in absolute dependence and daily obedience says I will follow where you lead me to experience protection and provision for today, and through faith the same tomorrow. I'll take the latter thank you.

To oBEy or not to oBEy: That is the Question.

2010-06-02T09:13:00.003-04:00

It seems absolutely daffy to me that I should be sitting this morning and pondering the question of obedience and the role it has in the faith we call Christian. After all obedience seems like a no brainer...a slam dunk...a given doesn't it? And yet after teaching several times on the subject I admittedly confess that the questions connecting obedience to works and the dreaded idea of earning salvation, have rattled around inside my head. I have come to believe that for most of Christendom, obedience is considered an optional commodity. Salvation comes through faith in Christ and is a gift of God's grace. Anything that adds to or takes away from this important principle is simply error. And obedience is an add-on.

But is this true? Is there a place for obedience in the faith? And if there is, what place does obedience hold? Does it impact salvation? Can someone believe, shun obedience, and still get the bus ticket to heaven? What happens if we disobey? Is God angry with us? If we are caught in blatant disobedience at the point of death, do we forfeit our bus ticket? If not, why bother with obedience at all? If heaven is for those who have "crossed the line of faith" through some prayer or confession or silent affirmation or whatever it is that we offer these days in order to evangelize, why does obedience matter? If you and I both "accept Jesus" and you live a life of obedience to God in gratitude for God's grace and I just go about my business (my business is messy!)does it change anything? If God loves us as sinners, which is the darkest state of disobedience, does he love me more if I become obedient? Does he love me less if I don't? I'm sure you've thought of at least one of these questions. If you think of them all, then you're like me a messed up individual.

Ever since Martin Luther declared that "the righteous shall live by faith" the subject of obedience has become a messy one. In truth, we are more devout in upholding the concept of "sola fide" or faith alone than we are of upholding scripture in some cases. As Protestants, we are wary of Catholic practices and beliefs knowing only that they are wrong, but not really sure why. Catholics believe in works and obedience...we are not Catholic...we don't believe in works or obedience.

Those of us who teach God's Word handle obedience with infant-like gloves knowing that a works based salvation is death. I have always maintained that obedience is a fruit that is produced by the Holy Spirit in those who have experienced the new birth. I sort-of encased my theory in the idea that when we are made new by the Spirit, we are given a heart that wants to obey God and over time if we cooperate, we will do just that. In my mind, this made obedience a gift of God's grace and ensured that he not me got the glory for any good thing done.(This makes eternal rewards a bit tricky!) Others encase obedience in an overwhelming sense of joy and appreciation we have toward God and something we offer in response to his grace and mercy. In other words, obedience is something we offer out of our love for God.(This makes Romans 7 rather difficult I think!) Others just simply treat obedience as a form of dogmatic duty, a legalistic expression of do's and dont's that are observed in a fashion peculiar to each denomination.(This makes the whole meaning of grace a threatened species ready for extinction.)

I have come to realize that my approach is wrong, or at least incomplete. Too many "born-anew" creatures simply never get around to doing what seems to be natural in the Holy Spirit. I'm not sure of the other two responses. There simply seems to be too many "ungrateful/unappreciative" people around for option number two's reign to be complete. I hope that the third option is wrong as it seems to represent a form of Christianity that gets down right ugly. Let's face it...obedience is simply messy. It gets even messier when the words of Jesus are allowed to weigh in.

The most haunting words of Jesus on this matter come in the form of a question that is captured for us by Luke in his sixth chapter. Jesus is declaring that what a person does reveals what a person is or in faith lingo, what a person says he believes will be evident by the things he does with his life. Then he suddenly pops the question, "Why do you call me Lord and do not do the things that I say?" Because obedience is so messy, we get around this by separating Jesus Lord from Jesus Savior. Jesus Savior is essential for heaven. Jesus Lord is an option for the really serious. I assume you find this to be less than adequate as I do and if so, what does Jesus mean? When you add this to Matthew's offering in chapter seven of his gospel the plot thickens. "Not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of my Father who is in heaven." Again, the obedience mess is before us and even messier here, so we get around this by defining the "will of my Father" as believing. Only those doing the Father's will, and that will is summed up in "believing on Jesus" will go to heaven. Again do you find this adequate?

If God's will is ultimately boiled down to one thing, "belief" then there are a good deal of wasted pages of a very lengthy book called the Bible that speak to things outside of God's will. That's the kicker for me. The Bible. Over ninety percent of scripture is devoted to two things: the first, what God has done and continues to do in creating, sustaining, and redeeming the world and its people and second, what we as his people have done and are commanded to do in response to God. Very little is dedicated to the world to come or even about how to get there. Why is there such an emphasis on human obedience, disobedience, and the consequences for both?

It is not just Jesus who reminds us of a role that obedience might have in life. Consider these passages from the New Testament that refuse to go away:
"For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil. or So then each of us will give an account of himself to God. or He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. or Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. or Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. .

Shall I go on? I think that you get the point. Obedience is no little matter in scripture, even in the part of the Bible that is exclusively devoted to Jesus and our salvation. In other words, obedience is a big deal beyond the Old Testament and its imposed irrelevance to the Christian world of today. These scriptures and more exist in and around the marvelous passages that we have underlined in our Bibles dealing with the free gift of God's salvation. They are there...what do they mean? I don't know to be honest.

I believe that obedience is the reason that God has saved us by his grace. He didn't save us to save us but rather to bring us into relationship with him so that we might obey him. Obedience has always been the standard that God required of the creature called Human. It was required of Adam and Eve, of Israel, of Jesus, and is required of us. It is not optional. It never has been. Until we begin to take obedience seriously, we will not participate in the Kingdom of God. These are things that I believe. As for how it is linked to the bus ticket to heaven, I do not know. I'm beginning to have doubts about the whole bus deal to be honest.

In the mean time, I have more questions. I wonder how many of our prayer requests are in fact pleas for God to undo or mask over the consequences our disobedience? How important is the concept called repentance in this whole process? Can we presume upon God's grace without acknowledging our disobedience? It seems to me that the person who refuses to obey God in giving to him first has little justification to ask God for more. In stating this have I now come to the place of earning God's blessings? I hope not. Make no mistake, we are abundantly blessed by God beyond what we deserve through his grace. But we certainly cannot continue to walk in disobedience and expect grace to abound can we? Paul states an emphatic "NO!" to this. We should to.

For now the questions will have to remain mostly unanswered. I sense that something is essentially wrong with our modern proclamation of the faith called Christian that makes this as messy as it is. I sense we have confused something or emphasized something disproportionately in order to get to where we are. Martin Luther campaigned for the removal of the Epistle of James from the Canon of Scripture because its emphasis on works and obedience messed up his developed theology of grace and faith. We all do that in some ways with those things that don't fit or cause discomfort or mess with our well-framed theology. But it doesn't work that way. James is still there and it's "faith without works is dead" still reminds us that obedience is not optional. Now what will we do with that?

Of Swirlies and Solitude

2010-05-22T10:12:00.010-04:00

Do you ever remember going through something called orientation? It might have occurred in the process of getting your education, serving in the military, or being hired at a new job. Freshmen orientation occurred for me in the fall of 1968. It was a day that we as freshmen entered high school before the dreaded upperclassmen came back. It was designed to help us get familiar with the layout of the building, location of our classrooms and lockers, meet our teachers, and get a feel for life at the new level of near-adulthood. It was also a day where those who had older brothers or sisters shared stories of what seniors did to freshmen (we were told to avoid restrooms where swirlies were sure to be given). It was a day devoted to doing life with a whole group of peers that we were somewhat familiar with before the dreaded arrival of the villainous veterans the next day.

Orientation at the military level is called boot camp and is exponentially more severe than anything we observed as freshmen. Those going through it tell stories that those of us outside of military can never quite relate to. The severity of it is necessary to prepare people who will experience the horror of war and life under the most dire of circumstances. Basic training is a severe jolt of reality that life is about to change. Job orientation is probably somewhere in between. In it, the new hiree is informed of the business culture associated with the job. Even those working in a similar field, receive instruction on the differences that are peculiar to each employer. Most anyone going to a new job can testify that the first few weeks are a significant learning curve and a difficult transition until the new normal takes over.

The point to the orientation process is to help condition you for life at a new level or under new terms. The need for orientation is based on the premise that what one is about to engage in is different and requires significant adaptation in order to function properly. It is a systemic shock absorber that sets the terms for expectations of the new life. Life for the one undergoing orientation is about to change and change drastically. It is interesting that once orientation is over and individuals begin to experience life in their new environment, a new normal takes over. By the time I was a senior, high school life was routine, the building was boring, and I was looking for some freshmen to share the meaning of swirly with.

What was shocking to us pre-orientation becomes normal through the ongoing, habitual, routine of the new environment. In time if we fully cooperate, we engage in life at the new level as second nature and without much thought. The environment conditions us to a new normal. The new normal or routine become life.

Our orientation into human life comes with birth. I don't remember anything about it but I'm told that I came into my new environment kicking and screaming. Life in the womb was over and my new environment was not to my liking. I needed constant care to orient me into my new world. My cord was cut. I was cleaned up. I was fed. I was burped. My diapers were changed. I was bathed. I was dressed. In the most complete and lengthiest orientation process ever experienced, I was directed from total dependency on others into some form of self-sufficient functionality in life. Through parenting, interaction with peers, and yes surviving swirlies and the entire education process, I became conditioned to the life around me. It is now normal and the womb I came from is not. It is life as I know it. It is the same for you.

The habits of mind, emotion, and body are all developed from our close ongoing connection to this life. Without knowing it, we are shaped and molded by our environment over time. It is what defines normal for all of us. My normal is probably not your normal, but it is still normal. Without our knowledge, we are involved in a habitual reinforcement of life that pounds away at us without relent. There may be no bright light shining in our face, no tools of torture or overt brainwashing, or no interrogator telling us, "We have ways of making you talk!" but we do experience ongoing routine influence and indoctrination by the social setting around us. I want to emphasize the words routine, ongoing, and habitual. It is everywhere and it is without interruption. The result is that we embrace life without much thought as we simply live out life as it is seen and absorbed in the environment around us.

But Jesus calls us to a different life. There is a life defined by the Kingdom of God that is as different for us as any other stage in life that required orientation. How do we break free from normal in order to experience life as Jesus promised us? How do we orient ourselves to the Kingdom of God and life under the new paradigm that is found in scripture? To think that it will automatically occur is to ignore the power of environment. It appears that a weekly one hour orientation called church service is not very successful as well. Bible study, prayer, and church attendance seem to have little effect on soul transformation, at least as we currently observe culture. These things while helpful, simply don't have the power to overcome the routine, ongoing, habitual, influence of life around us. The relentless social influence we encounter is simply too much for most of us to experience life at a new level or under new terms. In some cases it is so overwhelming that believers don't even know that a new level or terms are needed.

I believe that the answer is found in solitude and Sabbath. Only as we break away from routine for lengthy periods of time can we effectively quiet the voices of culture and re-orient ourselves to the Kingdom. I never thought I would say this but I believe that solitude is perhaps the most difficult of all things that God asks us to do. Periods of silence, space for reflection, and hours spent doing nothing but quiet are the most difficult things to embrace as a life style. This aspect of spiritual orientation is the toughest of all. Part of the reason is that no one is doing this for us. No parents, no school administrator, no drill sergeant, no person from human resources. It is up to us and to be honest, we would rather be busy and engaged than silent and disengaged.

When we have time, we make the phone call we've been putting off, watch television, read a book, surf the web, catch up on emails, or engage in Facebook. These things are the activities of "my time" and what I treat myself to when I'm not busy. But these things keep me connected to the very world that I must leave to orient myself to new life. Solitude is a choice we make and a discipline we must learn to effectively enter into the life that God has for us. It is the catalyst to all other graces that effectively enables us to live life differently. Generally speaking, God does not compete for our attention. He will generally leave us to our own devices of obsession and exhaustion. He calls us to be "still and know" that He is God. In quietness and solitude he makes himself known and in this knowledge he redirects our thoughts, emotions, and actions.

The silence of Jesus is probably as important as his words in some respects. We see him going off alone. We find him apart from people. We find him in the disciplined space of solitude to be with God. If he needed it, how much more do we? But how do we pry ourselves away from a world that is discovering new ways, more seductive ways, more powerful ways to come at us? An hour a week of hyped up or hyped down church doesn't cut it. A daily devotion that is forgotten by the time daily responsibilities begin is not the answer. Our orientation requires more...and that more is less. I challenge you to take the solitude test. Find time to spend doing nothing but silence, doing it alone, and doing it undistracted. See how hard it is. Dare to take a day each week where you spend the bulk of it in relationship with God and away from everything else. Dare to put solitude and Sabbath back into your life so that your life can be re-oriented in the direction of the Kingdom. Perhaps in doing so, the Kingdom life can become second-nature to all of us.

The Language Barrier

2010-05-15T11:56:00.007-04:00

I've recently become aware of the struggles we have in relating to the message of scripture. Obviously scripture was written in languages other than our own and getting the message from the original language into our language is more complex that we imagine. Scholars have given their whole existence to parsing the Hebrew or the Greek for the true meaning of the text and then moving that meaning into Latin, or English, or whatever language that people use. It is not a simple enterprise.

When Jesus suggested that not one "jot or tittle" of the law would be set aside, he was referring to the minute punctuation marks of the Hebrew language that would ultimately determine a word's meaning. Imagine with me that a simple dot could change a word's meaning completely and the whole text with it, and that these dots were provided by scribes who hand copied and recopied the ancient texts for people to read. Then imagine this process being duplicated over several thousand years and then translated into our language. Then further imagine with me for just one moment the additional process of creating what seems like a hundred different translations in our language that either clarify or simplify the text for our understanding. How close do you think we are to the original thought that the Holy Spirit inspired the writers to pen in the first place?

I know, most of you don't want to go there. Most of us prefer to believe the book we call the Bible fell from heaven in tact, in the translation we prefer, and contains accurate information for us to follow today. You will be relieved to find that this article is not about that. I am going to save that for another day. I might even couple that subject with the history of how the sixty-six books we claim as authentic actually came to be and further rattle the proverbial spiritual cages we choose to do life in. For the present, lets assume that what each of us read is correct and exactly represents what was written long ago and that our NASB, KJV, NKJV, NIV, NIVR, NLT, GNT, ESV, LB, Message, or other personal translation of choice somehow say the same thing. I believe that we still have a significant language barrier to overcome in understanding and applying scripture today. Key words within our own language used in the undergirding our faith have been redefined over time. The result...a faith that is radically different from that of scripture and of history.

Let me give an example. When I say the word believe, we see believing or faith totally different than others before us. Believing or faith in the scripture had to do with the idea of trust. People who believed in God centered their whole existence around him and trusted in his intervention in their lives. The back end of Hebrews 11 explains how believing was experienced by the people of scripture. Believing today is more appropriately aligned with being accepting of or giving assenting to a truth than with active trust. We can believe today without any additional corresponding action. Other than assenting to the facts of the cross and accepting its forgiveness believing has no ongoing connection between God and his people. Faith is something that can be held apart from corresponding action and in total isolation from life in general. Compared to the use of faith or believing in scripture in which lives clung to the living God in life and death matters, we have something new in the way faith is defined.

How about the word disciple? Disciple is an archaic word. When we say disciple today we see it as something totally different than its original context. We have nothing in our culture today that resembles a disciple. In scripture disciple was a relevant term used in everyday to describe one who left everything to learn at the feet of a rabbi. Since we no longer use that term in our everyday living, we replace the word disciple with the word believer. In some circles a disciple is simply labeled a convert. What is a convert or a believer? Someone who has believed or accepted Jesus! Compared this to the language that Jesus defines disciple with...taking up our cross, hating our lives, hating our family (I need to be careful with these words...in comparison to our love for him), losing our lives, etc. No wonder we stick with believer!

What about Kingdom? My pastor friends and I have been engaged in the task of coming up with a metaphor for Kingdom. We are struggling. Why, because we are not monarchical in our thoughts. We are Americans. Monarchs rule and reign in kingdoms, the citizens do not. Citizens of kingdoms obey their king. Because we are Americans, we vote for our king and then believe that he is obligated to serve us. If he doesn't we vote for a new one. That is the American way. But what about Kingdom? The Kingdom in scriptural language is summed up in this question, "Why do you call me Lord, and do not do what I say?" Since we don't understand Kingdom, we replace it with something called heaven. We've swapped heaven for Kingdom. In reality we are no closer to understanding heaven than Kingdom but we at least have pictures to help us define heaven. We have images of cute little cherubs, an endless banquet table, a massive gated community of mansions, or a throne with a bearded, long-haired Jesus on it to help us define heaven. Besides, heaven is for life after death so why sweat it. So Kingdom means heaven and heaven is made up of disciples...excuse me believers...who have accepted Jesus into their lives.

Now we get to a key word...freedom. What does freedom mean. Scriptural freedom implied liberty and applied liberty to the idea of liberation from bondage. Israel experienced freedom when delivered from the oppression of Egypt in order to serve God through obedience. Paul says we've been called to liberty, but we are not to use our freedom as an occasion for selfish living but instead become slaves to others. The good news of freedom in scriptural language, is that the bondage to sin, oppression, death, fear, etc. is broken so that we can freely serve God with all of our hearts. But freedom today is nowhere near this idea. Freedom instead is seen as autonomy. Freedom is Independence to choose and act as we see fit. Freedom is the concept that liberates us from responsibility and enables us to pursue life as we see fitting. (That is one of the reasons that we are experiencing trouble in America, because we have wrested the word from the intentions of our Founding Fathers!) So the freedom found in the Gospel is realized in choosing Jesus and expressed by living autonomous lives in the grace of God.

What about God? How does our language with its definitions work when it comes to the Big Guy Upstairs? Scriptural language reveals God to be the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, holy, jealous, transcendent, imminent being who created this whole thing. But the thought of defining each of these terms is more exhausting than its worth. Instead, lets define God as love. He is the being that loves everyone and hopes that they out of their freedom will love him in return. Some try to define God as angry as well but adding a second term to the definition overly complicates things and so we pretty much need to stick with love. Because God is love, he is considered a friend, a buddy, a pal, a source of help when times get tough. He is warm, fuzzy, comfortable, approachable, and even cuddly at times. So this loving being invites us to heaven where everyone who accepts Jesus eats at an endless banquet table with cherubs...or something like that.

It gets more interesting when we begin to define things like the love of God. In scripture, God's love was always a mystery that somehow cut through his transcendence and found its way into undeserving and often unappreciative human beings. It was his charity in action through his undeserved favor that was defined by grace. But love doesn't mean that at all today. Our language today shows that love means feeling really good about something. If we feel really good enough, and deeply enough about someone, we might live with them and if we are radical in how we feel, we might actually marry them. When we stop feeling it, we move on to hopefully find the feeling for someone else. Love is a feeling that incorporate into the lyrics of our music, dialogue of our movies, and hope that someone will bestow upon us. It is the emotion behind gratuitous sex in romance stories and the target that Madison Avenue hopes to strike in getting you to buy something. The love of God then is the biggest emotion of all that tells us that God feels really really good about us. As the song goes, "like a rose, trampled on the ground...he thought of me above all."

There are other important terms that I think we could deal with as well. That may come at another time but these terms will have to do for now. It is difficult put all these definitions into practice let alone add others to it. I think I have it down though. Let's see...Because God is loving and good He has very special feelings for me that he hopes that I will enough to accept Jesus and as a believer experience heaven when I die.

Whatever happened to the God whose presence caused men to faint as though dead and whose very being provoked fear and awe? Whatever happened to believing that translated into such trust that a man's own son was placed on an altar in total all-out devotion to God? Whatever became of the idea that our liberation was to better serve? Whatever happened to the Kingdom made up of disciples who were so committed to the risen Lord that they "loved not their lives to the end" and embraced the King at a cost of martyrdom? Whatever happened to a Kingdom whose claims were to be carried out "on earth as it is in heaven" by obedient disciples? Whatever happened to the idea that love was about charity, measurable in acts of kindness, generosity, obedience, and virtue? I guess that maybe these things were meant for another language. I wonder how our language will define these things in another twenty years. It is frightening to think about.

I've Got an Eerie Feeling

2010-05-08T23:55:00.000-04:00

The birthday of the church is coming up in the next few weeks. You probably didn't know that and if you are like most people, you haven't made any plans to celebrate it in any special way. Fifty days following the events of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus the Holy Spirit was poured out upon all flesh and the church was born. The event occurred on the day for celebrating the Old Testament Feast of Weeks. The Greek term for this feast is Pentecost referring to fifty days from the Passover.

What is interesting for me as I reflect on the events of Pentecost, is that the events associated with Calvary were necessary for the procurement of the church, but it was the gift of the Holy Spirit that created the church. The disciples were given specific instructions to do nothing but wait in Jerusalem until they experienced the power of the Holy Spirit. And, experience it they did. He wasn't really subtle upon his arrival. In fact his attendance was marked by loud rushing wind, commotion, fire, and a bunch of people so inebriated by his presence that they were accused of being drunk at nine in the morning. The faithful group that had waited the ten days from Jesus' ascension until that moment experienced the new life of the new covenant from the newly coronated Lord of Glory and in doing so became the newly constituted Israel or people of God. Is that a big deal? I think so.

We've never really known what to do with that. I secretly think that most people would be far more comfortable with the idea that the church was launched out of a meeting where an agreed upon doctrine and set of rules were hammered out. Others probably wish that the church would have been born directly at the foot of the cross the moment Jesus died with the followers immediately going to everyone to tell them that Jesus just died for them and inviting them to live for him. But that is not how it all began. It began with a mighty demonstration of Holy Spirit power that drew outsiders with curiosity and emboldened insiders to embrace the Messiah's call to radical discipleship. It began with the unexplainable being explained by the very man who couldn't even admit to knowing Jesus a few short weeks prior.

There is a spiritual element to the church. We may not know what to do with it, but nevertheless it exists and it is what makes the church unique. How do we define spiritual, or better yet, how do we relate to the spiritual side of the church. All adherents to creedal Christianity admit to there being a Holy Spirit. We give him one line in the creed, "we believe in the Holy Ghost" and thereby satisfy the conditions for being orthodox or proper in our faith. But is that all that there is? Let's face it, for what we believe and experience in faith today, we wouldn't know if the Holy Spirit was at work or not. We live with a confession that bears little application when all is said and done.

I have noted after working in a large attractional church, that the less one believes in the working of the Holy Spirit, the more one must do in order to get the results that we believe the Holy Spirit wants. Modern services require hundreds of thousands of dollars to create the right environment with lights, cameras, music, sound, videos, and staging. Well polished speakers, professional musicians, and scripted services all become necessary ingredients for hearts to be moved in God's direction. Oh, and of course the Holy Spirit does his part. But what is his part? I sense that we have arrived at a place where it is strongly believed, though never publicly stated, that the Holy Spirit can't do his thing, or can't do his thing best unless all of the above elements are present. It is simply assumed that the Holy Spirit's work is dependant upon a mega-budgeted, ultra-talented, well-polished presentation of a felt need oriented message. But is that what we see on the Church's birth date? It sure seems to me that the historical record has it the other way around.

When we move from one side of the pragmatic spectrum that can work with or without the Spirit's involvement to the other side of pneumatic infatuation, it doesn't really get any better. The opposite side of the spectrum holds to a pseudo-spirituality that is spooky in nature. This side believes in a spirituality that is downright eerie in its devotion to the Spirit, spirits and spiritual things. The spiritual label that serves as the banner for this expression of faith is a Christianized Zen Buddhism that is other worldly-in scope. Life is other-worldly. Truth is other-worldly. Final destination is other-worldly. Even Jesus himself is other-worldly. While there is an element of truth in each of these "other-worldlyisms" that element can't keep the whole thing grounded enough in real life to be of any good. The old adage is here changed a bit but applies very well: "He's so spiritually focused he is of no earthly value." These people and churches operate as mystics without substance, or worse yet, in the mold of the worst Christian television personalities, mystics without intelligence or values.

Whatever dynamic the Holy Spirit operated in during the opening chapters of the church, we must admit that the dynamic was supernatural in its unfolding with miracles, signs, wonders, and power. It also was transformational. The people who were impacted by the Holy Spirit did life a different way. We need only look at the first six chapters of Acts to realize that people don't sell their stuff and hand over their monies for distribution to the entire community without some spiritual dynamic at work. Gentiles worshipping with Jews. Slaves serving alongside their masters. Males and females sharing in the grace of God as equals. The spirituality brought about by the Spirit was experienced in the miraculous and in the everyday way of doing life.

Dallas Willard states that spirituality exists as a result of the new birth in Christ and consists of active cooperation and interaction with God and the Kingdom. A person is spiritual and a church is spiritual "to the degree that its life is effectively integrated into and dominated by God's Kingdom or rule." In other words, spirituality can only be explained by the Holy Spirit's activity while at the same time can only be validated by transformation. Spirituality will always manifest the supernatural life of God in our souls and in our churches by the thing we call transformation. Jesus told Nicodemus that the Spirit is like the wind, we can't see it but we can see its effects. Everywhere we see the Spirit at work, we notice bits and pieces of the Kingdom left behind.

I've got an eerie feeling that the Spirit and spirituality today is misunderstood and misapplied. I refuse to believe that he is inept without our help. I also refuse to believe that he is so other-worldly that he can't be appreciated. I choose to believe that he must once again reveal himself to us in power, holiness, boldness, and humility. I fully expect that God will visit us again to make our future birthdays look more like the first and less like the last. Maybe he will get more than one line in our statements of faith in the days to come. Whatever the case, we must wrestle with questions like, "Where is the supernatural today? Where does the Spirit's role begin or end? How do we walk in the Spirit? What are the greater works that we will do because the Spirit has come? or If what I'm doing for God can be done with or without him, should that bother me?" I have more questions than answers at this point. I hope you do to.

More than We Imagine

2010-05-03T16:39:00.006-04:00

The cross of Jesus is cosmic in its scope. We usually see the cross as the place where Jesus died for my sin. But we must not escape the fact that the cross stands as a once-and-for-all claim that the kingdoms, and authorities, and rulers of this world have been severed from their power and are awaiting their final destination in the second death. The consequences of man's rebellion in the garden are not limited to man alone. All of creation has been impacted by sin. The heavens as well as the earth suffered the effects of Eden's rebellion and the cross of Christ stands as the restorer of this damage as well. To fail to see this, is to rob the work of Christ of the glorious scope and magnitude of what was actually accomplished.

The various entities that the old King James labeled principalities and powers were all created by God and for God according to Colossians 1:16. In other words, nothing has ever existed outside of the deliberate will and purpose of God, even Satan and his demonic host. Though we are not given the details, following the fall of man spiritual powers co-opting with human institutions and powers, became fortresses of haughty opposition to the Creator. Their work is what scripture calls "darkness". And without much detail, we are also informed that the purpose of God all along was for the Messiah to inaugurate a Kingdom that would crush all of the other kingdoms and the power of darkness that they ruled with (Daniel 2). Paul makes it clear that through the cross and resurrection, "He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him."(Colossians 2:13-15)

Unpacking this is where the fun starts. Obviously man's fall in Eden brought about a comprehensive corruption to everything including the entities that make up the principalities and powers. What was declared good by the Creator in the very beginning is no longer so good. The fall of humankind stands as the great divide. The authority given to the first humans to be God's stewards of his creation, was breached and handed to the co-op of influential entities that Paul lays out for us in Ephesians 6:12. Behind this distorted ragtag conglomeration of authority was Satan himself who indicates to Jesus in the wilderness of temptation that the kingdoms of the world now belonged to him (Matthew 4).

Spiritual forces, powerful personalities usually in the form of a ruler, and cultural institutions quickly became established in the earth to create an environment that was so corrupted that human thoughts were only evil continually. Enter the flood. Following the flood, we see these same principalities and powers at work to create a tower that would reach into heaven in defiance of God. Rampant idolatry and sorcery followed permeating all nations with a smorgasbord of various gods and goddesses complete with their sordid practices. Within all these nations the creational virtues of justice, beauty, peace, and joy (what the scriptures refer to as Shalom) were distorted into bondage, slavery, pleasure, conflict, and injustice.

The principalities and powers that were created by and for God, now like drunken sailors on shore leave perpetuated the sinful rebellion initiated by man across all creation. Paul tells us that all of creation, heaven and earth, was subjected to bondage and corruption (Romans 8:19-22) because of man's fall from grace. The landscape everywhere varied only in the degree of wickedness that was enacted by the principalities, not in whether or not wickedness was present. I remind you that Camelot only exists in the imaginations of man.

It is perhaps strange to think that humans are not the catalyst for the ongoing darkness. Their rebellion opened the door to darkness but what continued to unfold was a partnership between men and darkness. Spirits need human beings and institutions to operate through and humans need a spiritual catalyst in order to think, decide, and act. Fixing the mess from Eden requires action to be taken on a scale grander than me and Jesus. Sorry to burst the bubble of your own self-importance, but God's plan is bigger than you. God's action to remedy the Edenic fallout begins with a people brought about by a covenant made between the Creator and a man named Abraham. From the start, the remedy would be cosmic in scope and God would set about implementing this remedy through a people called Israel.

When God set his sights on Israel, he ordained a people, his people, that would live free from the principalities and powers that ruled the world. They were to be his people. He was to be their God. They wouldn't have human personalities rule over them, but God would be their leader directing their affairs through his prophets. Their law that governed them was perfect, free from oppression, injustice, and slavery that trademarked the governments of darkness. Their culture was to be permeated with reminders of the One and Good Creator, generosity and justice toward one another, and strict commands to avoid being like the corrupted nations around them. Under God, Israel was to become a "principality-and-power" free zone that was to shine a light to those nations who were not.

But most of you know the story. Israel wanted to be like other nations rather than a light to the nations. They opted for a king just like the other nations. They instituted customs and practices of the darkened cultures around them. Before a couple of centuries had passed, they were just as influenced by the principalities and powers as the most heathen of nations around them. The nation set aside by God to offer hope to the world became the neediest nation of all. If we are to learn anything from them, it is that the powers of darkness are seductive, powerful, and unrelenting. Only a people firmly committed to faith and obedience can ever experience life apart from their grip.

When Jesus sets foot on the banks of the Jordan following his baptism, he proclaims a message of the Kingdom (Matthew 5:17-25). This Kingdom is the antithesis of the kingdoms represented by the principalities and powers. His Sermon on the Mount was about living life apart from the powerful forces of darkness. His words were blatant, radical, declarations that life could and should be lived free from injustice, tyranny, bondage, conflict, and sinful pleasure. His message was about Shalom. His message was shared with the people who were now totally enslaved in darkness. It was also directed to the heart of the powers of darkness and its representatives. that they were put on notice that their days were numbered.

Everywhere he went he was opposed by the evil spirits that manifested in and through people. The powerful religious institution of an empty Judaism and the unrivaled power of the great Roman Empire conspired to do away with him. Even his own disciples, who were fully versed in the cultural expectations and prevailing faith mindset of the day opposed him often. He met each head on and proclaimed and demonstrated that the Kingdom of His Father could and would overcome the kingdoms of this world. The principalities and powers that had never been seriously challenged were now suddenly confronted by One who could not be bought by them. With his "not my will but thy will be done" in Gethsemane's Garden he was fully obedient to God to the point of death. With his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection, he became the holder of "all authority in heaven and earth". The powers of darkness never saw it coming.

You say this is a good story, perhaps a sort of fiction, and not the real essence of Jesus' mission. I heartily disagree. The cross was about disarming the rulers and authorities and putting them to open shame. Paul tells us that our salvation is actually being delivered from the domain of darkness and being transferred to the kingdom of his beloved Son(Colossians 1:13-14). Regarding the cross and God's wisdom in it he states, "none of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (2Corinthians 2:8) One modern writer describes Good Friday as "the moment when the principalities and powers overreached themselves." They thought that they ended the existence of the threat to their power only to find that they ignited the very power that would destroy them.

We have been set free from enslavement to the very forces that keep our world broken. We have been issued a kingdom transfer as Paul stated above. And not only that, but we also find ourselves involved in a God-given mission "that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places." (Ephesians 3:9-11) This wisdom is the plan of God to join Gentiles and Jews as his new people into which he dwells by his Spirit. We now stand like ancient Israel as the people of God that are live a darkness-free life before the rest of the world and be a part of God's repairing his creation.

Like Israel of old our calling is to live under the powers-of-darkness-free zone called God's Kingdom. In doing so we shine our lights to a world held captive to darkness. What if we fail? What if we so crave the things that the principalities and powers offer to the culture around us that we become just like the culture we are called to redeem? Greed, covetousness, strife, betrayal, revenge, and the other things that define our world are not to be named among us. The words of Jesus call us to live differently, uniquely, as citizens of another Kingdom.

It is time to take these words seriously. When we are just as materialistic as those around us, when we divorce our spouses, when we satisfy our covetousness with consumer debt, when we pledge allegiance to a political party, when we split and divide in our churches, and when we continue to do life as the principalities and powers dictate, we forfeit our heritage before God and our mission to the world. Jesus died and rose again so that we might be instruments through which God's Kingdom would come and God's will would be done, on earth as it is in heaven. When we live to do this, we declare to the principalities and powers that they do not reign and that there is a Lord whose name is Jesus who does.

The Oreo Cookie and Jesus

2010-04-28T10:55:00.004-04:00

The inventors of the Oreo cookie should be commended. They created a cookie that redefined what cookies are about. With apologies to Sunshine, the makers of the Hydrox cookie and other substitutes, they simply don't merit what only belongs to the Oreo. Since its debut in 1912, about 370 billion of these cookies have been enjoyed by human kind. They have been dunked in milk (how long you keep them floating in the white liquid oasis is part of the fun and subject to your personal tastes), twisted apart and consumed layer by layer, nibbled at teasingly, or just plain popped into the mouth whole and enjoyed as a total experience. One of life's biggest guilty secrets that we each own but rarely divulge, is how many of these things have we eaten at one time once the bag is opened and no one is around.

It is really a simple invention. Two chocolate wafers on the outside encase a rich white creamy filling on the inside. It is the combination of outside - inside that makes the cookie what it is. While we may twist it open and consume the white creamy filling on its own, we rarely toss the wafers away after doing so. Neither do we purchase Oreos to remove the filling and eat only the wafers. It is the combination of the two parts, wafer and filling, that is the brilliance of Oreo. When one considers the idea of a double-stuffed Oreo brilliance becomes ecstasy and we experience cookie paradise.

What does all of this have to do with Jesus? It is simple. The brilliance of Jesus is found in the two bookends of his life: his virgin birth and his death and resurrection and in the part that comes between. We must hold equally both parts of the Messiah if we are to experience the scriptural Jesus. For many of my friends and in many of the churches that I personally know this is simply not done. It is a truly difficult task. To hold both parts of the Messiah in equal fashion redefines him and his mission and forces us to redefine what our lives lived for and how we live them in a radically different way.

For many, Jesus is seen as the virgin-born Son of God whose mission was to die on the cross for personal forgiveness and assurance of heavenly salvation. He is as it were two wafers of Christmas and Easter with nothing in the middle. What he said, what he did, why he said it and why he did it, and how the things that he said and did fit within history are simply not that important. His words are difficult they say. His actions are to prove his divinity for the greater purposes of the cross they hold. His gathering disciples, fulfilling prophecy, and proclaiming a Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven are things that those who waste their time chasing theology and deeper teaching are hopelessly caught up in. The stuff between Christmas and Easter simply isn't where its at. Or if we consider for a moment that the stuff between the wafers might be important, it is only for the purpose of furthering the importance of the wafers.

For others that I engage with, the wafers of virgin-birth and the bloody cross and resurrection are not really what's important. The human Jesus as a teacher, activist, and role model is what is important. The stuff between the wafers is where it's at. Jesus doesn't have to be divine, the cross was unfortunate, and the resurrection might be a myth. The teachings of love, justice, peace, reconciliation, caring for the poor, the sick, and the needy are the causes worth living for.

But as I stated earlier, the brilliance of Jesus is found in both parts of the spiritual cookie. The wafers of virgin-birth and resurrection only make sense when applied to the teachings and activities of Jesus. The cross is the Kingdom's cross and what was accomplished on the cross goes beyond personal forgiveness and personal assurance of a heavenly home. The stuff between Christmas and Easter can only make sense in light of God coming to earth in human flesh and suffering on the cross to reconcile a creation held in bondage back to its Creator and through bodily resurrection set the stage for the day when God recreates all things through Christ the King in the new heavens and new earth.

Kingdom without cross is pure idealism and wrongly guides its sheep to conclude that humanity holds the key to future progress through political, social, educational, and cultural revolution. The cross without the Kingdom is misguided escapism that abandons human responsibility to our current world in exchange for a bus ticket to the world beyond. It wrongly guides its sheep to conclude that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, let's rescue as many as possible. Kingdom without cross denies the power of God. Cross without Kingdom denies the purposes of God.

It is interesting to note, that Jesus himself spends little time talking about heaven as we know it. The words "eternity" or "eternal life" had no reference to Plato's concepts of the soul's immortality in another space. They were instead references to the future Kingdom of the Messiah: a kingdom by the way that was before them personally in the humanity of Jesus and was to have no end. Instead, Jesus spends his time demonstrating the Kingdom through the miraculous and teaching the Kingdom way of living through radical devotion to God and others. His miracles declared to everyone that God was visiting His people with the Kingdom in which every tear would be wiped away, the blind would see, the lame would walk, and the captives would go free. His teachings declared that God expected a new way of living before him that could only be expressed by those willing to embrace the call to lose their lives in him. This is the stuff in the middle.

How is this "stuff" to be lived out? By believing that Jesus was and is the Messiah through whom these things would come. By accepting the fact that he and only he as the perfect human representative would fulfill God's plans and purposes that included a bloody atonement for sin on the cross and a bodily resurrection from the grave. By being obedient to the teachings of Jesus through the power of an indwelling Holy Spirt that was to come as a result of the Messiah's death and resurrection. The means to his Kingdom vision could only be achieved through the cross. The Kingdom's inauguration could only be launched by the resurrection. The Kingdom's manifestation only through the Spirit-empowered church of Pentecost.

Kingdom and cross are inseparable. You can twist them apart and eat only the parts you want. But why would you do that? You lose the beauty of what is the most celebrated life in the history of mankind. Keep it together and you get to experience the wonder of doing life now in a Kingdom that promises righteousness, peace, and joy to its followers and hope to a darkened world held captive by another kingdom. You get the added blessing of a Kingdom that will one day be revealed in all its glory with an end to death, a resurrection of our bodies, a New Jerusalem, and ruling and reigning with the King.

I'll take my Oreo in it's original form (no double-stuff, no chocolate or white coating, and no colored or flavored filling) and a glass of cold milk please.

Wright, Right and Wrong

2010-04-26T11:25:00.005-04:00

N.T. Wright is always a source of fresh thought provoking insight from scripture. In my reading today, I enjoyed some time with his thoughts on the subject of evil. Evil is one of the issues that Jesus requires that we deal with in the Lord's Prayer. "Deliver us from evil" is something that Jesus tells us we must pray. On that basis alone, it is something that we must address.

But what is evil? How do we respond to it when we see it? How conscious of it are we to be in our daily living? Is it something out there in others or is it in me as well? For some the answer of what it is or what we should do with it is obvious. Evil is a politician, (I can think of one that most people easily mark and vilify today!) or a political party, (Again, this is way too easy for most people!) or a boss, or management in general, or big business, or unions, or environmentalists, or...well I think you get the point. And what are we to do with these evil things? For some that answer is simple as well. We are to complain about them, bad-mouth them, or listen to our favorite talking head complain and bad-mouth them. Perhaps we even take things to the next level and encourage everyone to join our on-line group "I'm opposed to evil and hope you are too!" But is that what Jesus had in mind through his platform of prayer

It is interesting to note that we find ourselves in multiple camps when it comes to evil. We locate ourselves somewhere on an evil scale consisting of two extremes. One extreme states that evil is something to be ignored. If we ignore it, it goes away. After all, we have enough things to worry about without adding evil to the list. Simply accentuate the positive in people and in life and the result is a glass that is at least half full. The polar extreme, evil is everywhere and what evil we don't see yet is certainly being thought of by someone right now for later deployment. The glass here is seriously leaking with no hope for a refill. Demons exist everywhere and some of these demons even have human faces and names.

Anthropologically we see these themes expressed in the belief that man is basically good and humanity enjoys the possibility of improving things with the proper education, environment, and political agenda on the one hand and seeing humans as totally depraved or comprehensively corrupt with no chance for anything good apart from the cross of Jesus. Escatologically we see evil's extremes in those who believe we can build a better world or kingdom on the one hand and those who believe in Armageddon that is unavoidable on the other. Evil, and how we think about it is a most important ingredient in how we see humanity, history, and the future; and how we approach life and what we ultimately live for.

I believe that scripture presents to us four groups of people who all saw and dealth with evil in different ways. Jesus was well aware of each of these groups and their response to evil. In his message and mission he provided a response to them that is still appropriate to today. Evil is evil and has always been evil. It's remedy is timeless as well. I want to briefly discuss these groups and their approach to the subject of evil. I then want to explore Christ's approach to evil as well.

First of all we have the Sadducee's. These elitists among Israel's ranks were firmly entrenched in power through the Sanhedrin or Jewish Council. Evil existing as a moral or social condition was given minimal attention in their ranks. Evil existed primarily in the form of opposition their agenda; an agenda entrenched in political and social ties with Rome. In a strange twist of irony Jesus embodied evil, because he threatened their existence as players at the table of progress in the future of Israel. As Caiaphas rightly declared under this premise, "it is better that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish" they saw evil as an opponent of progress. For them, evil wasn't in the hearts of humans necessarily, certainly not in their own hearts, but rather in ideals defined by their agenda.

We next have the group known as the Essenes. This lessor known group withdrew from culture in order to live above the evil that everywhere existed. They noted evil's presence everywhere and countered it with a radical lifestyle of celibacy, communal ism, and practices of purification. Their call to holiness required their members to renounce most everything involved in normal living as evil in order to be pure and unstained in their life before God. All of life was defined by evil and demanded a strict code of behavior to rise above it. For them evil was everywhere, permeated everything, and only austerity could remedy its hold on life. Withdrawal and asceticism was the only appropriate way to combat the omnipresent forces of evil. Jesus embodied evil because he ate and drank with sinners earning the label "a glutton and winebibber".

The Pharisees represent a most highly recognizable response to evil. For them evil was associated with the masses in the form of uncleanness. Evil was a force that needed to be guarded against through laws and religion. Their outward preoccupation with evil became a analgesic numbing these devout practitioners from the reality of the inward presence of evil that was rooted in their hearts. For them evil was present in everyone who didn't practice the faith as they had developed it and was present in Jesus because he didn't honor the traditions of the elders. Building a system of rules and laws was the only solution to evil's threat. The real irony in their position was that Jesus was evil for healing a paralytic man. Why was he evil...because he happened to do it on the Sabbath in violation of one of their rules.

The final group was known as Zealots. Like their name suggests, they were permeated by a radically zealous approach to solving evil's existence. For them evil was embodied in Israel's enemies and the answer was the sword. Those who were not a part of Israel were the enemies of Israel and their presence was the very presence of evil itself. There could be no compromise, no co-existence, no partnership with those outside of Israel. The only remedy to evil's presence was eradication. Retribution, retaliation, militant action were all righteous actions whereby the evil would be exposed and dealt with in theocratic fashion. Peter's embracing the sword in Gethsemane was the picture-perfect solution to the problems that evil presented. The irony for this group was demonstrated by the utter evil represented in Jesus dying at the hands of Roman soldiers on a cross instead of leading the armies of God to unseat Roman rule.

And then there is Jesus. He didn't minimize evil, nor did it maximize it. He didn't order new laws to prevent it. Nor did he suggest a holy war to eliminate it. He didn't advocate withdrawal from society as a means to cope with it. Nor did he suggest that a social platform could build upon what was already in place in moving things forward from evil. To him, evil was beyond legal, political, military, or religious remedies. Evil could only be dealt with by coming into a head-on collision with the Kingdom. The reality and power of evil could only be solved by the reality and power of the God's Kingdom reigning in men's hearts. His call to repent and believe were the cornerstones of taking the fight to evil in eternal terms.

The Kingdom's call to generosity, trust, contentment, forgiveness, charity, and justice would powerfully oppose the inroads of greed, covetousness, anxiety, lust, revenge, anger, and lust. The forces of evil that result in poverty, enslavement, disrespect, injustice, abuse of power, and self absorption can only be nullified by the obedience of those whose lives are defined by the cross (where the power of all evil was met with convincing defeat). Jesus conquered evil by submitting to the cross. His suffering as the just for the unjust dealt a lethal blow to evil and the principalities and powers behind it. His resurrection sealed evil's fate forever in the second death.

We become the opposition force to evil's reign when we embrace the call to live as citizens of another Kingdom in the midst of a broken world. When we turn the other cheek, give water to the least of the brethren, remember the poor, forgive those who hurt us or spitefully use us, practice extravagant generosity, and live as servants we become God's response to evil. When we mourn, hunger, thirst, endure, suffer, and take up our crosses we declare that evil's space is limited in this world. When we bless instead of curse, give instead of take, forgive instead of retaliate, serve instead of demand, trust instead of control, obey instead of reason, and humble instead of exult ourselves we embrace the calling to be light and salt; both of which cripple evil's influence.

Someday in the future the Kingdom will be fully manifested and all evil will forever be dealt with. Death will be no more. The Tree of Life will use its leaves for the healing of nations. The lion will lay down with the lamb. Swords will be beaten into plowshares and the righteous will shine like lights. We can't make this happen with more laws, or with political alliances, or by retreating to our secluded bunkers prepared for Armageddon, or by a militancy that justifies war or the destruction of our enemies. Liberal and conservative politics both exchange romantic trysts with evil suitors. Bombing abortion clinics is more evil that the evil it tries to eradicate. Social engineering in order to build on the good already present in humans is a total denial of reality. Fundamentalism and its legalistic rules and scriptural literalism breed more evil in the form of intolerance and selfrighteousness than it ever thought about doing away with. Only Kingdom works. Only the cross behind the Kingdom shows us the way.

I Love to Tell the Story

2010-04-23T13:18:00.008-04:00

To imagine that God has a story is wonderful, to be a part of the story as it continues to unfold is incredible. For most followers of Jesus the story starts with the cross. Those who guide unbelievers into the faith begin the story with the cross and most who begin there never go too far from there. The simple version of this story states that Jesus was born and Jesus died on the cross to save people from their sins so that they can go to heaven. A few of Jesus' parables may be added to enlarge the story. But the story that Jesus came, Jesus died, accept him as Savior and go to heaven is the story that we have told. The really brave ones (or crazy depending on your beliefs) may venture into the Book of Revelation to help guide people into how the story ends, but most people stick with the simple story. But that is not the story; at least its not God's whole story. The story that belongs to God begins long before the cross.

The real story begins with God who is the Creator of a good creation that he revels in and enjoys. We are the most prized of all this creation as human beings and play a leading role in the story. The creation is altered in a most-horrible way by the rebellion of his most prized creature, but the Creator doesn't abandon his work or his creature made in his image. He seeks instead to fully restore his human creatures and then use them to fully restore the creation that they brought the darkest of consequences to. This is important to the story but very little space is actually given to it.

The bulk of the story is about how this plot to redeem and restore unfolds. It begins with a man named Abraham and quickly moves to his descendants called the people of Israel who are chosen through sovereign election to be God's people. These people were to be the Creator's treasured possession shining light to a darkened world and spreading salt to a decaying creation. These people were his hand-picked spiritual community through which he would show his gracious nature and restore his creation to its original glory and purpose. But just as the patriarch and matriarch of all humanity rebelled against its good and gracious Creator in the very beginning, Israel, miraculously created from the faith-filled heart and the barren womb of the new patriarch and matriarch of God's choosing, would also rebel and bring further deterioration to the already broken creation.

The story weaves its way through a miraculous emancipation from captivity, a wilderness journey, a code of conduct known as the Law, a Tabernacle and a priesthood, a Promised Land of plenty, Kings and Prophets, a Temple of glorious renown, tragic idolatry, and ultimately to a most dreaded state of exile and slavery. At the completion of the story's darkest chapter the whole creation is without hope because the creatures designed to care for it not only betrayed it, but refused to embrace the offer of the Creator to be his tools to fix it.

At its darkest point a light begins to be seen of God's new creation. The long awaited Messiah: the one who would come as the Promised Seed of Abraham, the Prophet spoken of by Moses, the King promised to David, and the Messenger of Isaiah, was introduced by the words of a young virgin and confirmed by a faithful old priest. The One who would fix everything was coming! God would visit his people with salvation and shalom would reign again!

This is where the chapter containing the simple version of the whole story gets written. The story we shared to begin this writing is in reality only a chapter, howbeit the most significant chapter, in the epic that is God's Story. The chapter containing Jesus coming and Jesus dying is incomplete without the story that has gone before it and that are to follow. And yet the chapters both before and after have no purpose without this amazing chapter. In trying to make the Jesus chapter the whole story we alter the story's plot and misrepresent the Author's intention for the story's ending. If we tell the story without the Jesus chapter it is only a tragedy of the worst kind with no hope or redemption whatsoever. Both what went on before and what transpires as a result of the chapter on Jesus are important to the story.

Jesus arrives on the pages of the story with the weight of centuries of Prophet-inspired expectations to restore Israel's fortunes and make her light shine once again. He would end injustice, wipe out poverty, set free her captives, heal hearts that had been broken, and restore Shalom to a people totally crushed by years of failed hope. He would shine a light in a world knowing only darkness. When he makes his first announcement, he embraces the Prophetic agenda with passion and determination and from his reading of Isaiah 61, boldly declares that He was the fulfillment of God's plan to heal his broken creation. He spoke of God's Kingdom, a Kingdom that would have no end, in terms that left no doubt of what God was up to. He demonstrated with power and authority that the Kingdom was now present in a new and dynamic way. He called without apology for everyone to reorient their lives to embrace this thing that God was doing and spoke of a day in which this Kingdom would take over all creation with the beauty, justice, peace, and joy that God had designed in the very beginning.

How would he do it? How would the Hero rescue the beloved creation and with it, the most prized of all its creatures, the ones who spoiled it to begin with? He would do it by being the One who would fully embrace the Creator's call to an obedience that would lead right up to death. He would do it by teaching, preaching, and demonstrating the radical elements of life as the Creator designed it (the Kingdom). He would do it by suffering. On something called a cross, where common criminals by the thousands faced death daily, the hero would suffer and die. In doing so, he would reconcile the creation to its Creator and set in motion the long awaited Kingdom. He would do it by being raised from death, the dreaded enemy introduced by the rebellion of the very first humans, and guaranteeing that the promise of the full restoration of all things spoken by all the prophets was now in motion. He would do it by sending the Holy Spirit in a dynamic way as a foretaste of this restoration, to empower his people to live in the Kingdom now and guarantee their life in it in the age to come.

The story continues on to the current day and beyond. The people of the story are still called Abraham's descendants, but they are his children by faith rather than blood. These people still experience the things that God's people have always experienced and still write chapters of triumph as well as failure. They still struggle in attempts to be faithful to the One and Only True Creator. They are still fascinated with idols and insist on doing things their own way. They still encounter amazing acts of grace and demonstrations of kindness from a faithful God. They are still endued with the responsibility to be light and salt to the world until the Kingdom is fully here.

The final chapter is yet to be written. How long the epic continues to unfold is known only to the Author. We do know however how it ends. The people of God, now fully restored with new bodies and sinless hearts, and God himself become united in this thing called the City of God and descend to the newly recreated earth with newly recreated heavens and experience life as the Creator originally intended. It is an amazing story of an Amazing God.

It is my story and I'm sticking to it.

The Tozer Nozers

2010-04-21T14:20:00.003-04:00

A.W. Tozer's writings have stood the test of time. I return to him every so often to be be stirred and challenged by what one of his contemporaries called "lazer beams of light" that his words conveyed. I am privileged to experience these light beams of heaven from time to time in my solitude. I noticed today that in a book he published in 1955, he was becoming alarmed at the reconstruction of Jesus taking place in Evangelical circles. In this reconstruction a Jesus was beginning to emerge that would best be described as "a Christ of Utility".

This Utilitarian Jesus was being unveiled as the One who would aid an athlete to run faster, jump higher, hit harder, and win more. Like an Aladdin's lamp, this Jesus would help a businessman land a deal, increase his profitability, or beat out his competitors. This was a strange Jesus to him in 1955. He called this an outworking of human imagination leading to a Jesus made in our image. He was a Jesus whose best served purpose was to do our bidding. He was becoming a Jesus that truly was to become mankind's functional Savior.

While this new Jesus might have been strange to Tozer in his day, he is the Jesus that is now fully entrenched in our church world today some fifty-five years later. Our prayers are permeated by utilitarian requests for the kind of life we all want so desparately. We ask him to give us a close parking space, the girl of our dreams, six-pack abs, children who sleep through the night, a promotion at work, a better marriage, a nicer car, or good grade on a test. Bruce Almighty wasn't too far from tragic reality. Jesus is most popular today as the one who serves up "Your Best Life Now" and to think of him in any other terms would be as strange to most of us as "Utilitarian Jesus" was to Evangelicals in Tozer's day. If he is not my personal utility man that fixes the things that go wrong or the things that stand in the way of happiness, personal goals, and the American Dream, who is he?

As Tozer points out, the entire purpose of God in redemption is to make us holy (or wholly His) and to restore us to the image and high calling given us in Eden as his unique creation. Through the cross and the ongoing ministry of the Holy Spirit God disengages us from earthly ambitions, sinful passions, and selfish pursuits; and "draws us away from the cheap and unworthy prizes that worldly men set their hearts upon." What we are to be drawn to is God Himself expressed in the ideals of Kingdom. To this purpose Jesus serves as both example and mediator as risen Lord.

Instead of Jesus serving our earthly pursuits we are called to serve his heavenly one. The record of those writing the Gospels shows that when people gathered for utilitarian purposes around the One who fed them, healed them, cast out their demons, and raised their dead, Jesus would leave and go to the next town. His purpose was to call God's people back to God and a heart embedded in His Kingdom. Attempts made to call God back to the people and their lives devoted to lessor purposes were invitations to go somewhere else.

Make no mistake, Jesus does serve us. He did not come to be served but came instead to serve and give his life a ransom. But he serves us for Kingdom purposes so that we might experience the fullness of God. He serves us by setting us free from sinful desires and the "cheap and unworthy" prizes that we try to win instead of the ultimate prize of the high calling of God.

I think Tozer knew something and was rightly concerned. A Savior who is not Lord becomes so casual that people think nothing of imploring his sacred power for worldly interests. I wonder what he would think if he saw us now? I think he would know why we have the current state of affairs with which we find ourselves. I think the Tozer Nozers and we should too.

Trading Spaces

2010-04-20T11:19:00.000-04:00

Trying to define the Kingdom is difficult. Jesus tells us that it is a pearl that is so beautiful that we sell all we possess to claim it. He tells us it is a treasure hidden in a field that one sacrifices all in order to purchase. Jesus said it is like yeast in a lump of dough. You can't really see it but you can see its effect. He describes it as seed growing up into a field of grain that we observe but don't know how it happened. He says it is like a large net of good and bad fish that is to be sorted out in the end. Or in another place a field of wheat and tares that will be harvested and separated in the very end.

It is not as if his descriptions clarify anything. But what does seem true about all of these expressions is that the Kingdom is not obvious to everyone, highly valuable to those who do observe it, at work around us, and at least at this point in God's plan occupied by both good and bad citizens that will be sorted out by God in the end. This should be of significant importance to all of us since we can now leave the question of who's in and who's out and why to others who have it all figured out.

I have recently been centered in N.T. Wright's idea that Kingdom is the expression used to describe God's space (heaven) particularly as it intersects with our space (earth). When Jesus announced that the Kingdom was at hand, He was telling one and all that God's space is near...it is at hand...and it could be experienced by everyone who would repent or be open to him and his call to change. In fact, he was the embodiment of the Kingdom. He was God sent to earth and was the full expression of God's space and our space being joined together in one person. When he cast out demons, healed the sick, raised the dead, turned water to wine, or commanded the forces of nature to obey, He was bringing God's space into the reality of human space. He was demonstrating the Kingdom and it's authority over our space. When he spoke about a new way of living, he was inviting us to live the principles of God's space in the space we now occupy on earth. He was proclaiming that the Kingdom meant living differently than we are accustomed to in our space. When he commanded us to pray that God's Kingdom would come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven, he was in essence inviting us to ask for and participate in an ongoing collision of these spaces.

The fact is, God's space has never been very far from our space. We see glimpses of it in the altars of the Old Testament, the burning bush of Moses, the cloud by day and fire by night, the tabernacle, the temple, the giving of Torah on Sinai, and the miraculous demonstrations of God's Prophets. These people, places, and experiences were all bits and pieces of peeks at the collision brought on by the invasion of God's Kingdom into the kingdom of this world.

The cross however stands at the epicenter of this collision whereby God's space and our space were formally brought together in a reconciliation that only the blood of Jesus could provide. The veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom in a symbolic demonstration that the Kingdom was now available to everyone who through repentance and faith would embrace the King of the cross. The resurrection, was the indescribable miracle that once and for all sealed the reality that God's space will totally engulf this space, recreating the heavens and the earth. Of this Kingdom there shall be no end.

We live between the resurrection and the future fullness of the Kingdom. We are called to live in the reality of God's space now while existing in our space. There is a tension in that. How do we trade spaces? How do we live as citizens of another kingdom, as aliens and strangers to our space and yet be responsible to the requirements of the space around us?

Jesus tells us that we have to be willing to trade spaces in our heart. We must trade whatever holds first allegiance in our hearts for the Kingdom of God. We must trade the seductive flirtation of money for contentment. We must trade our entitlement to retribution, retaliation, and personal justice for love and forgiveness. We must trade the natural pride we carry in being busy for solitude. We must trade our easily embraced yoke of anxiety for trust in a faithful God. We must trade our rights and privileges for meekness. When we trade spaces in these ways, we experience a bit of heaven on earth and become collision catalysts everywhere we go. May the collisions begin!

Chemistry and Christianity

2010-04-19T08:42:00.000-04:00

Chemistry is a bit of mystery to me. I did fairly well in high school in most subjects even without the discipline of study (a habit I would rue in college) until I met chemistry. I decided to monitor the class during my lunch hour since my schedule was already full of things like calculus, physics, mechanical drawing and other fascinating subjects. I sat there daily for a whole semester trying to grasp the concepts of the atomic chart and what it meant in combining elements to form new exciting compounds that would make the world of tomorrow a better place. I never got it. It was beyond me.

I did realize however that those who do get it go on to become highly paid professionals (as opposed to myself) who specialize in creating formulas that bring exciting new applications to this life. It is the formulas that fascinate me. Someone carefully writes down the exact process and steps that combine this element with that element under these specific conditions leading to a new creation. It is so exact that anyone can later upon discovering these notes duplicate the exact same creation. This science is duplicatable and because it is a science, it will guarantee the original results every time.

The results benefit all of us who take prescription, drink from plastic containers, nuke our food, drive our cars, and pretty much engage in everything else in our world. Formulas rule our world, or at least a good portion of it. It is the crowning achievement of the Industrial Revolution and the trademark of our modern enlightened culture.

You might say we are a formula driven society. We engage in the dating world by inputting our personalities into computer data banks that in turn crank out a dream match for our future spouse based on formulas. We have seven habits to being highly successful people. We have a ten step formula to making children mind without losing ours. We have formulas for better marriages, better sex, and better sex in marriage. We have formulas for attaining wealth, achieving our goals, and getting the corner office. We have formulas that make government the solution to our problems and formulas that promise us that less government is the solution to our problems. We even have four spiritual laws that formulate how to get to heaven.

Is everything in life a formula? What about the computer matched perfect spouse who turns out to be a wife beater or control freak? What about people who just aren't that gifted to begin with and can't make the seven habits stick? What happens when less government fosters unbridled greed that almost bankrupts a nation? What happens when the government program only adds to an already bloated bureaucracy that moves ever closer to financial Armageddon?

It seems to me that formulas work in science but rarely work in matters of life. Life as God designed it is more complex than the atomic chart and thermo-dynamics. If your formula gets you to where you want to go in life, it probably created a trail of broken pieces and sacrificed people or values along the way.

Perhaps most devastating in all of this is the notion championed by the Christian Community that things relating to God can some how be put into a formula. Sacramentalism when adhered to will repeatedly upon execution produce God's intentions. Liturgical readings and common confessions will repeatedly upon execution produce relationship with God. The Evangelicalsim's sinner's prayer upon recitation will guarantee entrance to heaven. Is this what it has all come down to?

We argue about and base fellowship upon whose formula is correct. The Sacramentalist declares their formula is correct having been discovered by the early Church Fathers through oral tradition. Their formula is 2,000 years old without interruption and if nothing else, longevity must stand for something. If "we are wrong, the masses throughout history are doomed and these consequences cannot even be considered." The Liturgist declares their formula correct because the Reformers discovered the error in the formula some 500 years ago and fixed the problem. The Evangelical knows that their formula is correct because its "in the Bible." They have 23 verses in scripture to prove it.

But the proof of any formula is always in the product. The most complex formula on a blackboard may be impressive to the uninformed mind, but if it doesn't produce a higher quality of plastic when executed, it is just hieroglyphic arrogance meant to impress. So I ask where is the product...the fruit that our post-modern expressions of the beloved faith are allegedly producing? It is time to ask God to forgive us for our theological arrogance.

God is beyond formula. Relationship with Him cannot be reduced to four spiritual laws or an entrance-level prayer. The passport to heaven cannot be easily stamped and the bus ticket to the Kingdom costs more than prayer. The God who sovereignly chose Abraham for indescribable blessing was also the God who called for him to place his son on an altar of sacrifice. The Jesus who invites all the weary and burdened to come and receive his restful yoke is also the who sits on the throne before whom everyone must stand and give an account. The One who says "Come" also says "Depart". God is beyond formula and our attempts to reduce Him to our formulas are beneath His high calling to be His people showing forth his excellencies to the world around us.

The treasure that we discover in Christ is such that for joy we sell all we have to secure the field wherein the treasure lies. There is no formula for this. It is a matter of heart and soul. It is a matter of devotion and commitment. It is a matter of relationship that is to be sustained through His grace until the end. It is a matter of life with the Creator outside of a labratory in a Kingdom that is permeated by righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. There is no formula for that.

The Kingdom Vs. Heaven

2010-04-18T21:37:00.000-04:00

Jesus arrived on the scene with a very simple message. "Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand." The expectations of an entire nation were riveted on the revealing of the Messiah, the One who would come from God to restore the fortunes of God's people in the world through a concept spoken by the prophets called Kingdom.

The One ordained of God to be this Messiah began his work by proclaiming "Repent". That seems a strange way to inaugurate a mission. No bells...no whistles...no publicist...no promises of revolution. Instead he begins with a message that required a radical shift in expectations of a long awaited retribution to Israel's oppressors, of restored political power, and the vision of renewed national prominence. His message spoke of life under a different paradigm. It stood opposed to the very concept that a whole nation had been led to set their hope in.

His Kingdom was not political. It was not about retribution. It was not about national greatness. Rather his message revealed a Kingdom centered in meekness, purity, spiritual poverty, forgiveness, sacrificial love, servant hood, and total, radical devotion to God. His Kingdom challenged their greatest treasure, the Temple; their greatest examples of faith, the Pharisees; and their deepest roots of spirituality, the Law of Moses.

The message didn't go over to well then. Hearts set on the wrong things resisted the simple message that didn't really offer much in the way of their idea of a better life. The irony is the message really doesn't go over that well today. Hearts set on the wrong things always resist the implications of the cross regardless of the generation they find themselves in. The cross is always at odds with human agendas, however good and right they seem.

I find my own heart at a crossroads when confronted with the reality of this Kingdom laid out by Jesus. The Kingdom is a whole lot messier than thoughts of heaven. It has a reality to it that cuts through the mystical imagery of a far off celestial place that is busy constructing mansions, paving streets with gold, and tuning harps. This Kingdom has a King. It is in our midst today requiring our attention and will be fully revealed in the future demanding our allegiance. It stands opposed to everything that I encounter in my everyday world. It demands of me the time and space away from my everyday world in order to experience it. It demands of me a heart that is willing to repent, to shift from its attachment to the sensual pleasures and demanding desires offered in my world.

So I return to the prayer Jesus gave us all to open our hearts to the Kingdom. "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." That is my prayer. Let it begin with me.