A Witness

I want to witness.  That has become a scary word hasn’t it?  When I was a kid, they used to make us go to flea markets and rock concerts and “witness”.  It was pretty awful.   We got emotionally beat-up.  I think we are called to be witnesses, but I think integrity should be put back in the word. 

One can only give witness to what one have seen or experienced.  All of the references in the bible to witnessing are people telling about what they personally witnessed.  I did not see Jesus born in a manger, dying on a cross, nor have I seen him raised from the dead.  I teach what is written in the bible.  I believe those things by faith.  I witness to my faith.  I witness to the truth I see in scripture and the experiences of my own relationship with Christ. 

The strength of a witness is not that someone knows the facts in toto.  When one witness claims to know it all, they could be the hero or the villain.  A witness claiming to have seen the accused make threats, purchase the gun, drive to the victims house, who watched through the window as the crime was committed and saw the accused bury the murder weapon, could be telling the truth or he could be the murder.  But if ten people each see just a little part of that story and you can string all of those witnesses together on the stand – You have the guy!  Nobody is making anything up to fill in the gaps.  The gaps are filled in by other people who don’t even understand how crucial their witness is. 

That is one of the reasons I believe the bible.  Moses writing about the Garden of Eden had no idea the whole story that was to come.  The people in the Old Testament did not understand the significance of the slain lambs.  But I see the same story of God, these themes of God’s love, his covering the nakedness of man all though the pages of the bible.

So today, I am going to do a little witnessing.

My goal is to encourage us in the truth.  Getting to the truth often requires the stripping away of layers of untruth.  Everybody signs up for that in abstract, but we all have untruths that comfort us.  It is a painful process, even if it is healing.  

I am a Christian.  I call myself a Christians because I have put my faith and trust in Jesus Christ.  I have entered into a wildly unique relationship, the daily workings of which are not well documented, explained or at all easily understood.  I live a life of faith, in and by the Spirit of God, but although I can say that, it is beyond me to explain it.

By faith, I believe there is a God.  By faith, I believe that Jesus Christ laid his life down on the cross.  By faith, I believe that my sins, faults and shortcomings, have been forgiven and that I have been given a new life of freedom and love in relationship with the one-true-living-God of the Universe. 

I, like many, believe that God gave us the bible, and that it is a holy and wholly unique book.  It tells of the great history of relationship between God and man and it tells of our great hope for the future.  It speaks of the fall of man, the desert wanderings, the Law, the birth of Christ, his death burial and resurrection and his ascension into Heaven.   It also tells us that life will not go on like this indefinitely.  That one day Christ will return and we will see him as he really is.  That this mystery will be made clear and that we will be in his presence in a way that we do not experience in our everyday lives right now.

Hopefully we do experience him, but the bible makes clear that one day we will experience him as he really is, that we will know, even as he now knows us.

In my experience, as we come together and read the bible and speak of its wonders; sometimes, most of the time probably, something gets lost in translation. 

Reading the history of how people wrestled in relationship with God or reading of a future to come – sometimes I get confused.  Am I to function like the people of the Old Testament?  Am I living in the time when Jesus is fully revealed?  What is it to live in a post-fall, post-Law, post-Calvary, post-resurrection, post-ascension, but pre-return in Glory time?  The majority of our bible teaches about a different time, either in the past or that is to come. 

Jesus sums things up with the imperative, “Love God and Love People”.  We are told to go and make disciples, but we did not get a whole lot of instruction about this life or how we are supposed to relate with God.  Evidently “faith” is to be the sinewy tissue that spans Heaven and Earth.

I am to live a life of faith, believing in things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1
1   Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

That word “certain” is usually translated “evidence”.   Faith specifically relates to the unseen.  Faith is not knowledge.  For faith to exist, it has to be cantilevered over the gulf, the peril, of doubt.

Our churches don’t seem to place any value on doubt.  The critical or the skeptical mind somehow is seen as a threat to the church.  But if we are a community of faith, then by definition, doubt is also our fellow traveler.  Not that we do not believe, but that we believe in spite of our doubts.

That is why we sound so shrill and anti-intellectual when we scoff at those who doubt.  We laugh at those who “don’t get it”, all the while lying about the extent to which we “get it”.  God is seen as Machiavellian in nature.  Somehow he must be honored when we lie; the truth not being a good enough sales pitch.

 I want to start a movement to change the Disciple Thomas’ nickname.  Rather than calling him “Doubting Thomas”, with its disparaging connotation, I think we should begin to call him, “Honest Thomas”.  He wasn’t the only one in the room with doubts; he was just the only one brave enough to say anything.

You know the story.  Jesus rises from the dead and Thomas says he will not believe that it is him until he places his finger in Jesus’ wounds. 
John 20:25-28
25   So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
26   Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, “Peace be with you.”
27   Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.”
28   Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”

I am quoting from the Revised Standard Version.  The NIV really is not a great translation here.  We have this history of calling him “Doubting Thomas”, so they oblige by using the word doubt, but that is not really what Jesus said.  The Greek text records Jesus as saying, “ apistos alla pistos”.   Jesus said, “be not without faith, but have faith”.  He uses the word we translate as “faith” and its antonym.

The difference is important.  He is not saying that to be skeptical of the miraculous is wrong.  He is saying, “Have faith that I can do the miraculous!”

Then Jesus speaks of us in John 20:29:
29   Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”  (RSV)

We are in this wildly unique relationship:  there is a lot of history, there is a lot of future hope, but in this present age, there remains a lot of mystery.  We don’t like mystery.  We want God to quietly stand down as we judge one another, as we are compassionless toward the poor, as we turn a blind eye to the fatherless, but we expect him to snap to attention when we pray for a parking space closer to the front door of Wal-Mart.

What if God is above us?  What if his mind is higher than our minds?  What if to our intellect he seems silent for a time?  Well, we just don’t allow that. 

If God seems silent, we will provide him with a voice.

We do this in several ways:

1.  Many follow false prophets.  Some use circa 1611 King James English in an attempt to sound godly.  Others will use any dialect you want as long as you send them money.
2. We use the bible like a Quija Board.  I want to know what the original writer was actually saying to the original audience in the then usage of the original language.  In other words, “What did he mean when he said that?”   Why we think that it is more spiritual to take the bible out of context than it is to take a street sign out of context is totally beyond me. 
3. When God doesn’t answer or when we don’t like his answer, we have an incredible ability to justify our plans as God’s plans.  In the absence of an answer from God, I have no problem going forward with my plans, but that is very different from saying that they are God’s specific plans. 

We have been sold this bill of goods that if the church cannot explain away all mystery, then we are irrelevant.  That if the church does not speak a new authoritative revelation from God on a regular basis, then the church has no purpose.  Never mind the possibility of being a supportive community of faith.  That we might hold up the arms of the weak, care for one another as Christ did the church and be a testimony, a witness, of lives changed by faith in an ever present but unseen God.  That even though we do not know everything or get everything right, we by faith and by the power of the Holy Spirit express love to others, unconditionally and without merit, just as God has expressed that love, His love, towards us.

Can we have faith enough to find truth in the midst of mystery, or must we avoid mystery so that we can seem competent declaring a false truth?

When I was a kid, I went to a church that was big into magic and very little into mystery.  To be honest my Sunday school teachers spoke to us as if God had just given the Law to Moses and nothing else had ever been said about it.  It was simpler that way and easy to explain.

We were to be good soldiers in the army of God, marching through the wilderness of temptation, keepers of the law to the Glory of our God.  There was little talk of redemption, liberty, freedom or grace.  Only that Jesus would come back soon to punish those who did not honor him by keeping his law.      

The past was defined by the giving of God’s law and the future was defined by reward for the faithful and the punishment of those who flouted God’s law.  Today, the here-and-now was primarily defined by discipline, not consorting with sinners and awaiting the final judgment.  Jesus might forgive you of your sinful past, but that just gave you entry to the opportunity to earn your way into Heaven.

We spoke of the triumphant or victorious Christian life so much that one dared not mention the difficulty of the journey, our personal failings, our private thought lives and the temptations that refused to subside. 

And though I spoke to God faithfully in daily prayer, he did not seem to respond with the vigor or the immediacy that the traveling evangelists said he would.  I prayed for my brother to walk, but he didn’t.  I prayed for my mother not to die, but she did.  I prayed that I would be a good man, but I wasn’t….

It came to a head for me when I was a sophomore in college.  I was back at my home church functioning as a youth intern and participating in a discipleship training class.  We were expected to abstain from a myriad of worldly pleasures and concentrate on spiritual disciplines such as fasting and memorizing scripture.  Eventually the day came when we were to be tested.  We were to recite the scriptures that we had memorized and give account for our fidelity to these spiritual disciplines.

My roommate and I gave a quick look to each other a couple of hours before we were to give account.  We jumped in his car, drove a couple of hours away, drank ourselves into oblivion and slept in the car.   I didn’t go back to the church for several weeks.  I realized that I was never cut out for leadership in a church.

I got married and soon my wife became the beneficiary of my hit and miss faith.  I believed in God, but everything – anything – seemed more relevant to me than the proclamation of a victorious Christian life that saw little victory.

I believe that I would have increasingly attempted to walk away from the faith if it were not for the ruthless record of scripture.  As I began to read the bible for myself I found that almost all of the major bible characters, the heroes of the faith, also would not have been cut out for leadership at my old church.   I might not have had much in common with the sinless superstars that led the discipleship class, but I had a lot in common with Moses, David, Peter, and Honest Thomas.  We shared a fallen DNA.  I might not be able to pass the discipleship training class at my old church, but I looked a lot like the disciples that Jesus handpicked.

And then, I found the Psalms, more specifically the psalms of lament; theologically they saved my life.  I could recite, the 23^rd Psalm:
Psalm 23:1-4
1        The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.
2        He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters,
3        he restores my soul. He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
4        Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

It is a beautiful psalm, but I was taught it as a promise.  But if it were a promise, no one ever taught me about the promises God evidently made in psalms like the 88^th Psalm:
Psalm 88:3-8, 13-14
3        For my soul is full of trouble and my life draws near the grave.
4        I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am like a man without strength.
5        I am set apart with the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom you remember no more, who are cut off from your care.
6        You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths.
7        Your wrath lies heavily upon me; you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.
8        You have taken from me my closest friends and have made me repulsive to them.  I am confined and cannot escape;
13      But I cry to you for help, O LORD; in the morning my prayer comes before you.
14      Why, O LORD, do you reject me and hide your face from me?

No one ever taught me to stand on that promise!

My mother, wishing me only the best, taught me to memorize the 1st Psalm:
Psalm 1:1-6
1        Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
2        But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.
3        And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
4        The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.
5        Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
6        For the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish.  (KJV)

But to be honest it was psalms like the 22^nd Psalm that let me know that in spite of the terror in my heart, I was still not outside of the grip of God’s grace.        
Psalm 22:1-2
1        My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?  Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
2        O my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer; and by night, but find no rest.  (RSV)

I said that my purpose was to encourage us.  I personally find great encouragement in the truth of God.  That he is good, that he loves with a capacity that I do not possess, that he is nearer than a brother and faithful in our time of need. 

I also believe that His ways are higher than my ways and that His thoughts are higher than my thoughts.  That he alone is God and that I am not.  Thus neither do I control him, nor am I overlooked by him.

May we be a true community of faith.  The Christian journey as I have experienced, being in relationship with God, is a symphony that is often played like a solo.  But, I believe it to be music to the ears of my Father. 

May our commonality be the acknowledgement of our desperate need of a Savior.  May our strength be the honest reflection of his love.  May our worship be both in Spirit and in Truth.

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: 

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

This week…

This week begins what many Christians refer to as Holy Week.  My hope is that we would come to see this week as holy for many reasons.  This week was lived out in the shadow of the cross.  This week held many more questions for Christ-followers than it did answers.  The Resurrection is ahead, but let us not skip past this week.  This week wherever we find the reality of our lives, we can also find our story lived out this week by the Apostle Peter:

Some of us in ignorance are swearing that we will never deny Him.

Some of us are fighting in our own strength, spilling other’s blood.

Some are deeply confused as Jesus washes our feet.

Some feel dejected and abandoned.

Some are denying Him.

Wherever we find ourselves, may we see this week in the shadow of the cross.  This week is not the end of the journey, but it is a sacred space along the path.

Mid-Life Crisis

We have all heard the stories – sports cars and bad hair dyes – “Midlife Crisis”.  Our culture has institutionalized this idea that for men, the fear of getting older brings on a momentous case of the “stupids”.  It is supposed to be based upon waking up one day and realizing that you will never be any younger, never be any more handsome, never be able to jump higher or run faster.   A failed and flailing attempt to recapture some aspect of lost youth.   I have met very few men that fit neatly into this category. 

Most of the men I know go through a very different kind of crisis.  At a certain point in life we simply grow tired of easy sounding answers and pathetic platitudes.  We long for meaning and a purpose that speaks to the deepest longings of our souls.  Tired of busy work and futile redundancy, we long for something progressive and expansive that holds out a hope for lasting significance.  I am not trying to recapture the physicality of my youth, but the honest questions of my youth.

I don’t need a “little blue pill” to recapture my potency, but a purpose.  I have proven everything that I felt I ever had to prove to other people.  Now, I need to know some things for myself.  Some real basic issues like, “Why do I exist?’’ and “Does my life have a larger purpose?”  It is a vernacular that for some reason sounds trite in the Board Room, but not in the stillness of my heart, “What is the meaning of Life?”  Nietzsche, Sartre, Pascal, Socrates, Jesus, the Beatles and Monty Python all wrote about it.

The comedian Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”  It is not that life is too hard, too short, or too brutal.  Most men are tough enough.  We can take it.  It is just that life is too long to have to continue it in futility.  Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”  I understand the concept of investment.  I can invest in my kids, I can invest in my wife, but not if their lives are also transitory and pointless.

             Jesus said, in John 10:10, that he came to give us life and that “to the full”.  Then in John 17, he defined that life as to know God and Jesus his son.   I know that God is supposed to be the biggest impetus to my life, but I don’t know Him well enough to consistently hear His voice over the clamor of distractions that I have continually used to fill the void.   I fear that if I don’t care to know God better, I may never be able to walk out my life with any residing sense of purpose and fulfillment.

             Maybe that kind of fear could also be the beginning of wisdom.  Not a fear of the heart of the Father, which the Bible says is passionately inclined toward me.  Just recognition that if I live my life out of sync with the Creator and the author of life, I may miss the greatest possibilities of life that God has for me.  That is the crisis.  That would be the tragedy.  I don’t want to live a life devoid of purpose, a life lacking in significance.

             I want my life to matter.  I want it to matter to my kids, to my wife, to the world and to myself.  I want to do more than pass a biological seed from one generation to another.  I want to have passed on a name – a name that God knows.  I want to know Christ and to be found in Him and to know Him well enough to walk out the calling that He gave me.  I want a purpose and a significance that is eternal.  No more busy work….

Un Uncommon Community

     The concept of community is simple in theory.  The word “community” comes from the Latin communis, meaning “common, public, shared by all or many.”  Our churches are communities.  We purport to have a shared belief system.  Each church community also has a culture that is the byproduct of their “shared belief”.  However, all too often our church cultures do not reflect our stated beliefs, but instead seem to suggest that we actually hold other things of higher value. 

     We often castigate the smokers (as if the Bible taught on the subject) and elevate the greedy and the gluttonous to the positions of deacons and pastors.  We believe that the phrase “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is actually in the Bible.  We trivialize sin as only what offends us.  We rail against the “caught” and applaud those still hiding.

     We should remember that Jesus defined “sin” as a condition of the heart rather than an act of the hands.  This clarified that it is impossible for anyone to be more “worthy” than another and soon the Pharisees began plotting to kill Him. 

     What should be our Christian church culture?  What should be the culture of a group of people who hold in common the teachings of Christ?   Gratitude and grace!  We should recognize the value of other’s journey to faith.  We should uphold the weak, lift up the fallen and quit thinking that the actions of others could ever be an embarrassment to us compared to the condition of our own hearts.

     Our commonality is our fallenness and our need of a Savior!  Among believers, our commonality should be our gratitude for having been rescued.  Our culture should be reflective of those souls just pulled into the lifeboats, still drenched, who reach out with an open hand to those still lost at sea.  Our petty vanities and smug self-righteousness make a mockery of the cross.

     When we fear the reality of who we are we must hide.  When we realize that we have been accepted, we can actually be present in our relationships:  physically, emotionally and spiritually.  It is one thing to act fake and be liked.  It is a wholly more beautiful thing to be fully known, fully loved and fully accepted. 

     When we genuinely have faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary, we gain a new and residing hope.  This hope is in Jesus Christ alone for the salvation of our souls.  We no longer have to vainly attempt to hoard up for ourselves tepid substitutes for a life apart from God.  We can walk in confidence that God holds us and will never let us go.  We can “approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” (Hebrews 4:16)

     Based upon our faith and our hope, we should be free to love others in a radical new way.  We should be free to love others as God loves – with mercy and with grace.  The culture of our churches should reflect the reality of our faith and the truth of our commonality.  Our communities of believers, our churches, should be the safest places on earth to walk into, expect to be valued and have grace extended.  May we never withhold love from those that Jesus died to save.  Thankfully, modern day Pharisees can still call Jesus “a friend of sinners” like me.

The Response to Love

“The longer you look at Jesus, the more you will want to serve him in his world.  That is, of course, if it’s the real Jesus you’re looking at.”
        – N.T. Wright (Following Jesus)

This quote got my attention.  I genuinely believe that if we had a clear view of who Jesus is it would change our lives.  I don’t just mean that if non-Christ-followers met Him they would be changed.  I mean that if we, the supposed Christ-followers, really understood His life, His mission, His purpose and His heart – we would be changed.

We dance around the periphery of a relationship with God, because we distrust Him.  We trust Him to holy, we trust Him to be powerful, we trust Him to be all-knowing.  We just don’t trust Him to be good.  We don’t don’t trust that He has a genuine affection for us.  Not really trusting His love towards us, we hesitate to get others involved.

Many of us deal with Christ like a sketchy investment.  We are gonna try it, but we would never suggest it to others, because it might go badly and then they would blame us.  But if we saw Him clearly, if the Spirit would give us the faith to see Christ accurately placed in eternal history, we would be energized.

We serve a God who draws near.  We serve a God who would willingly lower Himself to be wrongly accused, wrongly convicted, wrongly beaten and wrongly put to death on a cross, for one reason – to reconcile Himself to flawed but worthwhile people like us.

Many argue about end-times-theology never having grasped the greatest truth of history:
1 John 4:9-10
9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Building Update

Wow!  We closed on the new property at 2271 Matlock Rd. last Friday and the demolition and construction are well underway.  It feels like daily miracles to watch the progress.   When we first talked about our first service being at the building on November 16, we were hopeful, but now I believe!

When I take people to see the building, it seems strange to put so much emphasis on bricks and sheet rock.  To me the “church” has never been about a building.  When we were first meeting as a small group before we launched Life Family Church, we met together, we sang worshipful songs to God. we prayed together, we shared our lives and we shared our excitement about what God was doing.  I said then that no matter how big we got or where we met, we would never be more of a “church”.

I still feel the same way today.  It is not about a building, it is about being dearly loved children of God.  It is about a community of faith.  A real community.  Our commonality is our desperate need of a Savior and joy over the love our Lord has shown us. 

God has and is blessing our community.  We love God and we acknowledge His goodness whether we are in living room, a movie theater or a new building.  Our God is awesome.  As a community of faith we just want to shout out, “Come and see what God has done!”

God Makes A Way

Walking with God requires a dependence that I chaff against.  I know that spiritually I am dependant upon God, theologically I know that, intellectually I know that, but emotionally I always sense a breeze fluttering through my skirt that makes me nervous.  Just as Christ was sacrificed naked on a cross, for me to pick up my cross and follow Him has a feeling of nakedness.

To be clothed in His righteousness, my fig leaves have to fall away.  I have to trust in His covering and His provision.  I have to use the whole of the gifts and abilities that He has given me, but I have to set aside my determining will.  I seek certainty and find the need for faith.

But there is a reason that we call Him the Creator.  His creative power is matchless.  Although I often set my jaw against the prevailing wind.  He breathes new life. 

As I see how well worn this trial I am following is, I begin to have a new sense of anticipation.  He didn’t ask my permission, but God is doing something.  Just about the time I counted Him out and once again began to take things into my own hands, His guiding hand passes me on the path.  Once again I have underestimated the Creator of the Universe.  Once again He smiles and calls me to Him.

Cogito Ergo Sum

Descartes said “Cogito Ergo Sum” or “I think, therefore I am”.  Even though he did not use these words, his larger point was “Dubito, Ergo Cogito, Ergo Sum”, “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”.  The thrust of Descartes’ argument was that certain things are inescapable.  The fact that Descartes doubted that he existed, caused him to think and the fact that he had independent thought proved that he existed.  He believed that perceptions were dubious at best, but his doubt distinguished him as an individual “thinking being”.

We no longer wonder about our existence.  Of course, we exist!  In our narcissism, other things only take on meaning as they relate to us.  We too would indict Galileo.  The world can’t revolve around the sun, because the universe revolves around us.  We scramble Descartes argument.  “Things only exist, if we think they do.”  “I think, therefore it is!”

Just as doubt was Descartes proof of existence, feelings have become our litmus test of truth.  “I feel, therefore it is true” or in the Latin “Cogito Ergo Ignoramus”.

But, if there is a truth, it is unchanged by how I feel about it.  It stands, as my feeling and fantasies swirl, unchanged.  Truth is unchanged by my perceptions, woundings and fears.   Whether I admit this truth or not, I cannot change it or control it.  (Romans 1:20)  We declare that there is no absolute truth only because we fear putting our absolute trust in anyone or anything. 

To out limited perspective, maybe the greatest truth cannot be defined a rational as much as it is relational.  Although my existence and individualism maybe evidenced by my ability to doubt, I must wrestle my identity and hope for growth in a battle with trust.  (John 14:1)

Breaking the Blog Rules

There are these unwritten rules about “Christian” blogs that say, “Always stay positive!”  I guess it is the fear of being misunderstood.  I know that when I wrote a blog about being frustrated in my pray life, I had good friends ask me if I was “okay”.  Not that it wasn’t true, but I was trying to make a comment of the vast difference between The One True Living Holy God and stupid people – like me.

It is easy to be misunderstood.  But I have my own rules, like “If it isn’t real let’s go play golf instead!”  I mean, “What?  You don’t have any problems?”  God did not come to save us from life.  He came to save us from our sin and to be with us in life.  Knowing Him gives us the possibility of “life to the full”.  Full includes all of texture, the drama, the heartbreak and the joy.  God redeems it all.

Here is an example.  This week has been hard for me.  I don’t know why, it just has been.  Low attendance on Sunday, I had a fight with my wife, I have a headache and my dogs bark too much.  And, no – I don’t think that God has left me.  What am I supposed to say about that?

Some think that if we are Christians, the way to forward the kingdom is to fake it.  “A pastor would never get into a disagreement with their wife!”  Really, and you would trust that guy?  My marriage is not “so good” I could fake you out.  My marriage is so good that even though my wife and I ticked each other off, I still have complete confidence in my marriage. 

When we put on a fake front and act like we don’t have any problems, we do a cruel and hateful disservice to the rest of the world.  As Christians it shows our insecurity with God and our contempt for others.  We leave others to feel like they must not have been saved, redeemed or forgiven by the same God, because they still have problems.

I have had a tough week.  God is still good.  Next…