Crisis
I am happy this morning, I am joyful. Not because my week has been easy. This has been a tough week for me. Some weeks you can kind of coast through, some seem like a parade, some like a dance across the floor and some – well, they are just a struggle. A short night’s sleep is met with more issues than you went to bed with and a hard day does little to clear things off the plate.
I, of course am weird. Weeks like these illicit from me a couple of possible reactions. I can hide, I can fill my time with some non-productive or counter-productive dissociation or I can lean into it a bit try to discover if God is still on his throne and maybe he is trying to love me through or teach me something. Some times I just learn that it is not all about me! I really love those!
Tough times can be very revealing. Tough times reveal the truth of our faith. The old saying goes, “there are no atheists in a fox hole!” Maybe, but you know what, there are a lot fewer happy confident Christians during relationship problems, financial problems, emotional problems or major car repair!
Tough times reveal something of our FAITH. It makes you take inventory and look deep down in the well of our souls and see how much true belief is in there. Tough times supersede our posturing and our labeling. I have seen the “super spiritual” reduced to a quivering mass and I stood in awe as people who “I” had marginalized grow in their faith in the midst of tremendous adversity.
We say that our “Faith” changes us, and yet we resist change at almost all cost. We say that we put our lives into God’s hands and yet we squall, murmur and complain when life does not go according to our own omniscient plans.
I want to make clear three things that I believe on the deepest level of my being that I know how to access:
- God is good! He is out for our best and not our demise. Because he knows the end of the story and we don’t, He is willing to go to lengths that we are not willing to go in order to bring about what is ultimately best for us.
- God’s grace is absolute for those who are in Christ. God will continue to love us regardless of how we chaff against the bit. The grip of his grace is one of the most awe inspiring, amazing, unconventional, “it would have to be God”, kind of thing. We can not over speak it. We have yet to hear too many sermons on it. We will go to our graves never full comprehending the magnitude and the magnanimousness of it. God loves us just the way we are. Nothing that we can do in our own strength will ever cause him to love us any more, nor cause him to love us any less.
- We have to change.
We have to change. We are not stagnant beings. We are either headed for life or headed for death, but we are headed somewhere.
I am serious as a heart-attack. If you are not just a little worried that my theological view of the grace of God is so all encompassing for those who are in Christ that it just might be heresy; then you do not understand how fervently I believe in the grace of God. Standing in absolute agreement with that is my belief that our “faith”, “belief”, demands that we change. Or maybe better put – it is totally incongruent with not changing. We believe that God wants better for us. That statement in and of itself dictates change. People who are good people, who love us, want us to change. A perfect God, who perfectly loves us, will move us toward change.
Only people who do not have faith or believe in a better future should be this in love with the status quo. Does that mean that we should try to devoid ourselves of our current personalities, relationships or what we might think of as our personhood? NO! God is not in the process of killing me; he is in the process of redeeming me!
The Christian life is not one of the grave, but one of rebirth. God does not want relationship with someone other than me; he desires relationship with what is truest of me. Me without the baggage, me, but me free!
I said three things a while ago: God is good, Grace is real, & we must change. I am convinced that we will never come to terms with the last two, unless we come to truly believe in the first. “Grace” remains an illogical fairy tale and “change” a torturous stripping of personhood, unless God is good.
Do we believe that God is good? Really believe that God is good?
We kick around these words like “Faith” and “Belief”. Our carelessness is probably something like playing soccer with an atom bomb:
Mark Twain was once asked if he “believed” in infant baptism. He answered, “Believe? Hell, I’ve seen it!” Obviously a lot of people use this term “believe”, a lot of different ways. There is a significant difference between saying that we “believe” that God is good, and believing in his goodness in a way that we can put our trust in the change process. Saying that we believe in change and putting our lives in his hands, truly trusting that he is out for our good are two vastly difference concepts.
I believe that enjoining God or life in general with any measure of honesty will ultimately lead us to a “crisis”. A crisis of faith or a crisis of belief, if nothing else a crisis where “something” has got to give, a change is inevitable, scary but inevitable. We speak of crisis usually as a negative concept. We don’t like crisis. We avoid crisis.
I come today in praise of crisis. I looked up the definition of the word crisis. (This is the point where as a pastor I am supposed to reference the Latin root and derivation…. I looked it up on Dictionary.com)
A Crisis is “a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events, esp. for better or for worse, is determined; turning point.”
Medical Definition of Crisis: “the point in the course of a serious disease at which a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death.”
Friends and loved ones, we are of value greater than gold, we are dearly and passionately loved. God laid his life down that we might be redeemed and restored, but we are soul-sick.
Mark 2:17
17 …Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Jesus came for you and he came for me.
Jeremiah 29:11-13
11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.
13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
I have a dear friend who once told me that he thought that I had the gift of faith, a gift that he said that he personally did not possess. I deeply long for my friend to receive the gift of faith. He has built the wonderful and sturdy life of a good man, but into that life will come both crisis and pain.
God being good, does not desire my friend to go through that pain alone, nor is he punishing my friend with pain, but he longs for the day that my friend might look to God in the midst of that pain and know that he is not alone, but that he is dearly sought after and loved.
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” - C.S. Lewis
Do we believe that God can be good in the midst of pain? Do we distrust God as child distrusts the doctor who comes toward him with a needle wanting nothing more than to heal him from his infirmity?
My first thought is, that is not very “nice” of God. I think a change of scenery is “nice”. I just never think the process of change in me always feels nice. I don’t know how to break this to you and me, but our spouses and our children are not the only bullheaded ones in our families.
I am a big fan of Levi’s 501 jeans. I have a habit of out growing them, but I like Levi’s 501’s. We all know the image of how tough 501’s are supposed to be. They are made with copper rivets. Originally all of the major stress points were made with copper rivets. (They still have them on the pockets) Most of us have learned through experience that the greatest stress point on a pair of jeans is the crotch. And originally Levi’s 501”s had a copper rivet located right in the middle of the crotch. In 1933, Walter Haas Sr., the president of Levi Strauss, went camping in his Levi 501’s. He crouched by a crackling campfire in the high sierras drinking in the pure mountain air. Having made this painful error before all of the cowboys around him just sat back and smiled and waited….
Ever heard of somebody getting a hot foot around the campfire? At the next board of directors meeting the copper crotch rivet was voted into extinction!
Some folks change when they see the light, but most of us change when we feel the heat. For some reason we have to have a significant impetus to change.
Maybe that is the way of things. A muscle must be torn to get stronger. To construct something, you have to deconstruct something. You can’t build a new house on an old house, you have to first exploit the weaknesses of the old house, tear it down and build something better.
I guess the question is do we trust the Master Builder or are we afraid that we will lose too much of ourselves in the process?
It is the question of artists, poets, playwrights, singer and the psalmist.
Is God good?
The Master sculptor Rodin, (all of us are familiar with his most famous work “The Thinker”) created a sculpture called “The Hands of God”. He also sculpted the “Hands of the Devil”
When we reflect on the sculptures the beliefs of the artist come to light. In “The Hands of God”, two gracious hands are creating man and woman out of formlessness or chaos. God’s hands, in artistic terms, reach through chaos and craft something beautiful. In the “Hands of the Devil” the idea is that the Devil is grasping the beautiful form of a woman and pulling her back into formlessness and chaos.
For Rodin, the artist believed that God was good. This forming process, bringing us out of chaos and giving us eyes for beauty, this sculpting process is seen as redemptive. It is for our good.
We are familiar with the analogy of the potter and the clay:
Isaiah 64:8 “Yet, O LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”
It seems like such a loving process, very tactile, a lot of touch.
But I got to tell you it doesn’t always feel that way.
Hosea 6:1-3
1 “Come, let us return to the LORD. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds.
2 After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.
3 Let us acknowledge the LORD; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.”
It ends with spring rains that nourish us, but it starts with being torn to pieces. There is both a wounding and a healing. An intervention and a cure.
The Psalmist David wrote:
Psalm 13:1-6
1 How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?
3 Look on me and answer, O LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;
4 my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
5 But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.
6 I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.
These are not the ramblings of a mad man, nor are they the fluff of a children’s story. These are the deepest yearnings of the human heart. “God, I want to call you good!” “God, I will call you good!” “Are you?”
The knock on those of us who teach what we believe to be the biblical view of God’s grace is that for the Christian it becomes a “license to sin” – an “excuse” – not to change. Of course it depends greatly upon your definition of change.
Is true meaningful and lasting change the humanistic whine, “I will try to do better….” “I will try and be good.”
Or does God seek a seed change, not someone who says with their mouth that they will be good, but rather someone who longs for good. Someone who desires to see good and who, like Jesus, celebrates goodness when they see it played out in the lives of both the sinner and the saint. Having been shown goodness and mercy, do we hunger to see goodness and mercy shown to others? Have we really developed an appetite for it?
Jesus said:
Matthew 5:6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.”
Are we merely, tepidly, trying not to sin, or do we hunger for good? Do we hunger for the good in our marriages? Do we hunger for the good in our relationships with our families? Do we hunger for the good with others?
Is Christianity only the self-righteous touting of our slightly lesser engagement in a few select sins, while we sit in self-sanctified judgment of the rest of humanity? If it is, I want nothing of it!
May God bring upon us whatever crisis is needed, that we would, like Christ, lay our lives down to reveal the heart of the Father. May we be conformed to the image of Christ that we may be instruments of His grace.
Matthew 21:42-45
42 Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: “‘The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes’?
43 “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.
44 He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.”
45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard Jesus’ parables, they knew he was talking about them.
May we fall upon the rock. May we be broken by the reality of a loving God. May we learn to allow Jesus to bind our wounds, that we might develop a hunger and a thirst to bind the wounds of others.
Tags: alone, Christianity, control, desire, faith, honesty, hope, passion, purpose, religiosity, transparent, trust
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.