Twelve Days of Advent – #12 Journeys in Time

“There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven.”

Ecclesiastes 3:1

It’s here! Christmas Eve. Presents are wrapped, delicious food awaits us, family and friends are close. We look forward to this evening and tomorrow morning all year. For some, the journey to Christmas morning is simply from our bedrooms to our living rooms. Others travel many miles to join in the celebration. In fact, AAA recently estimated that this year over 112 million Americans will travel in some form this Christmas.

One of our biggest concerns when we take a trip, especially during the holidays, is whether we’ll get to our destination on time. Crowded airports, busy highways, overbooked hotels … when will we get there? Our travel plans sometimes seem more pressing than our travel destinations.

A different journey

There is another journey we should remember today as another Advent ends. A journey made by our Creator spanning the infinite stretches of time and space, from thought to Word to flesh to Salvation. It is the reason we celebrate this day, the Eve “O Come” became “Emmanuel.”

The Jesus so often stylized in paintings and song seems at odds with the Jesus of history. He was not born to princely riches, surrounded by the comforts of an Eternal throne. His arrival was greeted with a brief night of fanfare and praise but then life took hold.

The Jesus of history was born to humble parents, a day laborer and young girl barely into her teens. They lived not in one of the great commerce centers of Judea amidst the religious elite, but a dusty town nearly 100 miles from Jerusalem. Many in his day would never travel beyond the borders of their own villages. And it’s likely few people worried much about timetables and schedules.

Jesus’ life commenced with a journey, a continuation of the journey his Father began so many eons before. His life would end with a journey, a journey that would take him from death to transcendence. A journey that happened precisely on time.

During his earthly life, Jesus took many journeys: to Egypt as a baby, throughout Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Every trip he made, every place he visited, Scripture records the travels not of an inveterate site-seer looking to check boxes for the ancient wonders of the world he visited, but rather, someone with a single purpose: to encounter us, engage with us, teach and minister to us, bring us the Good News of the coming of his Father’s Kingdom.

A visitor to all

A lot is written about Jesus’ focus on the downtrodden and the outcast, the forgotten members of society. And indeed, he did speak to the humble and the meek and poor, both in purse and in spirit. Yet, the remarkable thing about Jesus’ journeys was how he did not discriminate between rich and poor, famous or obscure. He visited with anyone.

An encounter with a rich young ruler mentioned Mark 10:17-27 is one example. The passage begins “As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to him and knelt before him, and ask him ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

Notice the passage begins with Jesus embarking on yet another journey! Jesus seeks those who seek him – in this case, a man of wealth and means. Rather than dismissing the young man simply because of his wealth, Jesus engages him. That encounter didn’t end as the rich young ruler hoped, but Jesus still met him where he was.

Mary Annointing Jesus’ Feet, Peter Paul Rubens, 1618

Another encounter from John 12:1-8, describes Jesus allowing Mary to anoint his feet with an expensive and fragrant ointment that would sell for $20,000 today. In this story, Jesus has just come to Bethany in preparation for his final Passover in Jerusalem. Mary obviously has the means to possess such an expensive perfume and so was clearly not destitute. Yet again, Jesus did not criticize or shun her.

Jesus made an inconceivable journey for all of us. He came for the poor and rich, the unknown and the famous. He was no stranger to poverty and hardship, yet he was comfortable with the powerful and wealthy.

Jesus embodied his Father’s desire to reconcile all of mankind, regardless of circumstances. He realized that even those with means face struggles. Temptation doesn’t discriminate. He made his journey to you and me because we all hurt, we’re all broken, we all have fear and doubt.

The real point

The point of Christmas is to awaken us to the infinite capacity of God to reach inside our lives and heal us, to offer us the love and forgiveness only a Father can provide. To remind us of the journey He took to reach us.

Scholars estimate Jesus traveled over 21,000 miles during his life – nearly the distance around the earth’s equator. Yet that very last mile he walked, the mile from Pilate’s palace the hilltop on Golgotha, was undoubtedly his hardest. A mile few of us would willingly walk. And he arrived right on time.

Tonight as we prepare to celebrate the blessings of Christmas, let’s not worry too much about our own timetables or schedules. Rather, remember instead the long journey God made to reach us. And remember the journey He asks of us to reach those around us.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Twelve Days of Advent – #8 Death and Taxes

“But He turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.’”

Matthew 16:23

A movie I’ve always loved for its intelligent writing and nuanced acting is “Meet Joe Black,” the story of wealthy news and media mogul William Parrish (Anthony Hopkins) who on the eve of his 65th birthday is visited by Death in the form of a man named Joe Black (Brad Pitt).

In a key scene foreshadowing the end of the film, Joe is in a conference room talking with the movie’s antagonist, “Drew.” Joe challenges Drew about the inevitability of a major financial transaction to which Drew responds “We all know this deal is as certain as death and taxes.” Pausing, Joe comments “Death and taxes? What an odd pairing.”

Death and taxes. Unless you’ve been on a remote island the last few years you’ve no doubt heard the annual hysteria around debates over tax reform – who has too much, who has too little, winners, losers, etc.

I won’t debate the merits or flaws of tax policy here (you can check out social media or cable news any day of the week to get an overdose of that). Rather, I want to focus on the flawed idea of believing anything – taxes, justice, politics, governments, etc. – is “certain” other than death.

Nowhere to hide

The whims and policies of man are transient and will change with the times, while the nature of God is eternal. As Jesus responded when asked about the morality of paying Caesar’s poll tax in Matthew 22, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”  What belongs to God will always be returned to Him.

There is simply nowhere to hide from physical death. We may fill our days with endless workouts, pad our diets with supplements and nutrition, slather our faces with creams and ointments, push retirement out another ten years but the truth is that each and every one of us has one appointment – an appointment with the end of our earthly days – we can’t cancel or reschedule.

Jesus also had an appointment. One scheduled from the beginning of time, foretold over generations of prophets, foreshadowed in the long wait between Malachi and Matthew. His appointment was certain. It was unchangeable. His appoint was with death.

Divine appointments

When Jesus finally revealed this divine appointment to his disciples, explaining he will suffer betrayal, trial and execution, be entombed for a time, and finally raised up on the third day, Peter would have no part of it.

He denied the inevitability of God’s plan.

He expects Jesus, the Messiah, the Anointed Christ, the Lion of Judah to raise a victorious hand against the oppression of Rome. Messiahs conquer, they do not succumb. And in an ironic twist, Peter foretells his own betrayal of Jesus following the arrest in Jerusalem by denying the very mission Jesus had announced.

“St. Peter’s Denial” by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1660

Jesus responds in the only way Peter will understand – implying Satan had possessed him and to go away. Peter simply had not comprehended the true oppression Jesus came to defeat … the certain oppression of sin and death. The great “waiting” of the Jewish people would be fulfilled in Jesus laying down his sinless life to atone for the flawed and sinful lives of all mankind. This was the appointment only Jesus could keep.

Turning the page

In rebuking Peter, Jesus tells us a much deeper truth. The problems of the world are infinitely greater than our politics, or our personal desires, even our own deaths. What we believe is the end of the story (death) is actually the turning of a page.

Jesus conquers the horrors of death so that we will never experience those horrors even as we face our own demise . We no longer need to hide, fearing and forestalling the inevitable. We no longer need fear the ravages of disease, the pain of broken relationships, the soul-crushing weight of financial ruin.

Rather, Jesus writes an entirely new chapter for us, telling us to embrace the death he suffered in our own lives, every day. To follow his example means willingly taking up our own crosses and running toward the death he calls us to experience: death to pride, death to apathy, death to unfaithfulness, death to hate, death to lying, death to hypocrisy, death to denial.

Jesus teaches Peter and his disciples that the only way to avoid our inevitable appointment with death is to embrace that very death while we live. Luke 9:24 recounts his words: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.

The price of life

Advent, this time of waiting and expectation, is also a season of understanding. We learn through enduring anticipation that God never meant His call to be convenient or inexpensive. Often, He leads us to suffer for His work. He challenges the strength of our faith. Being a Believer can be costly, lonely, disappointing.

Yet the clear message of Christianity is simply this: die to the selfish, vain, fleeting promises of the world and receive the assurance of eternity. Die to the whispered seductions and lies of the enemy and experience the radiant joy of unearned grace. Die to death and receive life.

The ultimate Good News is that Jesus has already paid the price for our lives. His death and resurrection were the tax we owed, the payment we should have made. The price for our lives is now … free.

Joe Black teaches William Parrish there is no fear or sorrow in death if we learn to live a life of service and sacrificial love. While we all suffer the same fallibilities of being human, our final breath is not a tragic failure of frailty but a transcendent triumph over death.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Twelve Days of Advent – #7 Stormy Weather

“Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

James 1:2-4

A while back, I was at dinner with a few guy friends. Predictably, we talked about typical guy things. Because we’re all of a “certain age,” our “guy things” talk was relatively tame. Relatively.

Credit: www.wisebread.com

However … one member of our party broke an unspoken “guy” rule in my crowd: don’t complain about the weather. Not the real weather, of course. Rather, the weather of our relationships, the weather of lives. The weather we can’t control but we can certainly anticipate. “Don’t blame the weather for getting wet when you forgot to bring an umbrella,” one of my, um, “older” guy friends fondly says.

Life is tough

Look, life is tough. We live in a world where the deck appears to be stacked against most of us. In Christian terms we call this a “fallen world,” a world where a very real and present enemy works to stain every part of our lives with fear and doubt and uncertainty.

Glass breaks. We get old (yeah, I know that’s hard to hear). Marriages fall apart. Loved ones get addicted to Opiates. Parents forget our names. Sexual harassment becomes an accepted norm. Alcohol and drugs are so common our children need rehab at 14 years old. A gun becomes a more persuasive argument than reason.

Credit: New York Times

In 1944 Ella Fitzgerald and the Inkspots released a single called “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall.” They borrowed the title from the poem “Rainy Day” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Both Ella and Longfellow spoke truth. But I prefer the original truth from Ecclesiastes 3 “For everything this is a season.”

Storm clouds are always on the horizon. Life pushes back. This is especially hard to accept during seasons of anticipation. Seasons like Advent when God may seem silent and unreachable. Seasons where we are asked to wait and trust.

The war inside us

The stormy weather of our lives should not be surprising, especially for those of us actively attempting to reject the temptations of the material world, the seductions of a physical life. It’s not easy to resist.

Paul tells us of the “Conflict of Two Natures” in Romans 7, a war being waged inside each of us. He reflects that in Galatians 5:17, writing “For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.”

Credit: www.kingdomrice.wordpress.com

The temptations of the world, particularly in seasons of waiting, are like tornadoes in Kansas. We anticipate the storm clouds, we feel the wind, we eventually see the funnel hit the ground yet sometimes we don’t seek shelter.

While we live in a fallen world and bad things happen to us, we always have control over how we respond – whether we bring an umbrella or head underground or simply give in.

Yet in every instance of adversity or waiting, we have a choice. We can choose to look backward or we can move forward. Notice we can’t actually go backward, only look there. And we really can’t stay where we are as life moves on around us. Look back or move forward.

Storms strengthen us

James tells us in the verse I began with that the testing of our faith builds perseverance. Surviving storms makes us stronger to future storms. Meeting and defeating temptation and doubt tempers us, transforms us, like hardening steel with fire.

We see this transformation in our choices. We can feel joy or bitterness. We can forgive or hold onto anger. We can trust or be suspicious of everyone. We can be filled with faith or plagued with fear. We can love or we can hate. We can offer mercy or seek revenge.

We can fill our hearts with hope. Or we can sink into despair.

Stormy weather and hard seasons are not meant to weaken us, but rather to strengthen us. They offer us opportunities to reinforce our trust and faith in God by hearing His voice and rejoicing in His salvation. Especially when the clouds are darkest…

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Twelve Days of Advent – #5 What Breaks Your Heart?

I have listened and heard, they have spoken what is not right; no man repented of his wickedness, saying, ‘What have I done?’ Everyone turned to his course, like a horse charging into the battle.” Jeremiah 8:6

What breaks your heart?

I’m not talking about a badly-ending relationship, or even the loss of a loved one to illness or tragedy although these certainly cause us to grieve. Nor do I mean family betrayals like Fredo in “Godfather II” – we saw how that ended for both Fredo and eventually for Michael!

The broken heart I’m referring to here is different. It’s that mourning of the soul, that gut-wrenching sorrow we feel at our very core when we’re connected to what breaks God’s heart.

Credit: www.chickensmoothie.com

The Bible offers many descriptions of how Holy heart is broken. Broken by those who are lost and refuse to come home. Broken because of those who are persecuted and have no one to share their distress. Broken from the cries of the poor who have no means of support. And broken by our disobedience.

Broken by rebellion

600 years before the birth of Christ, the Jewish people had once again become increasingly rebellious and obstinate. For generations, they had grown lax in following God’s commandments, eventually seduced by the attraction of Baal and other idols and squandering the promise and hope of the Torah.

Eventually, God removes His protection and Babylon conquers Judah, deposing their king Jehoiakim and sending much of the population into exile. By 587 BC, Judah was no longer a nation and the memories of greatness achieved by David and Solomon faded. It broke the hearts of a nation.

The prophet Jeremiah, seeing the wretched conditions of his fellow Jews, had just such a broken, aching heart. He saw the misery of his brothers and sisters, the children of Abraham, the Covenant People. And he knew what God had called him to do, the hard message he had to deliver to these same people: repent from their sins and return to God. Their rejection of his message the eventual exile of Judah ultimately led to his death by the very hands of those he tried to save.

What breaks your heart?

Many of us today simply don’t equate broken hearts with sin. The very word itself, “sin,” seems antiquated, unenlightened, uneducated to the modern ear. And when God asks us as he asked Jeremiah “Why have these people turned away? Why are they always turning away?” (Jeremiah 8:5) we simply … turn away.

What breaks your heart?

The answer to that question isn’t always obvious. So, perhaps we might start with a different question. What breaks God’s heart?

What breaks God’s heart?

There are many things we might find in scripture to answer this. In my own journey, a few come to mind. This is especially true for those who claim to know God’s heart yet still falter.

  • When we don’t turn from our shortcomings. Just like the people in Jeremiah’s day, God’s people today – you and me and those around us – have turned away from God, often refusing to hear Him. Jeremiah’s people, like us, should have known better. They knew, we know, when the path we’re on is wrong. Yet we continue down that path, oblivious to where it leads.

We may confess, we may have a moment of contrite remorse, but when the pain passes, we ignore Jesus’ admonition in John 8:11 to “Go and sin no more.”

  • When we don’t live God’s Word. Like the Scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ day, many professing Christians today talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. We have our Bibles, we may go to Bible studies, we may debate and argue Scripture – but do we live it? Do we spend time the poor? Do we take in orphans? Do we look after widows? If we the only Bible those around us ever see, what does that Bible look like? And yes, I’m writing these words to me.
Credit: www.modernsurvivalblog.com
  • When we don’t realize how short the time is. Jeremiah commented “Harvest has passed, summer has ended, but we have not been saved.” (Jeremiah 8:20). A farmer who misses harvest time will starve. He knows how short the time is.

There’s a similar urgency in our lives. According to a recent study there are 2.1 billion        people in the world who don’t know Christ. Every year, 16-20 million die ever without hearing the Gospel.  This is our harvest, yours and mine. And the harvest season is upon us, this season of Advent, this season of preparation.

  • When we self-destruct. In my mid 20’s, one of my closest high school friends spiraled out of control, eventually taking his own life. Many of us at the time asked ourselves what we might have done to change our friend’s course, to ease his burden. There was likely nothing we could have done, but the key pain was that we did nothing at all.

God holds this mirror up to us constantly, reminding us that we are surrounded by    self-destruction. Where are we in taking the hands of others to help them through their struggles? The addicts, the prisoners, the lost.  How often does our heart break for those we see right in front of us?

  • When we refuse to let God heal us. Jeremiah cries out in 8:22Is there no balm in Gilead?” In Jeremiah’s time Gilead was a place of hope, famous for balm from a local tree resin that cured illness. Jeremiah was equating God’s voice and commandments to a healing cure for our broken lives, a salve for spiritual illness. Yet, the people refused.

How many people have you known who refuse treatment for their own sicknesses?  Perhaps a friend whose marriage is in tatters but won’t seek counseling. Or a work  colleague who is unable to perform but too prideful to has for help. Or an acquaintance who is spiritually lost but will not follow God?

Prepare by acting

Advent is about many things including waiting, expectation, hope. And it’s also about recognizing how God has given us this season of preparation to discover where our hearts are not with His, where we’ve hardened ourselves to what breaks God’s heart. When we see people from every walk of life ignoring the warning signs, ignoring how time is running short, refusing to turn back from the wrong paths of their decisions, refusing help … our hearts should also break.

This Advent Season, take a look around. See your neighbors, your loved ones, your adversaries, yourself. Where can you bring hope and preparation and expectation to the broken hearts of others? Where can you bring healing to your own broken heart?

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Who, Me?

“[God] said, Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains I will tell you about.” Genesis 22:2

We hate chores. They remind us of unpleasant things we have to do, like eating all the overcooked spinach on our plates when we were kids. Or finally tackling that little garage project we’ve been promising our spouses we’d get to for two summers. Or (my favorite) scheduling that colonoscopy the doctor’s been nagging about.

Chores. They “pretty much suck,” as one of my daughters used to say.

Yet chores also serve a meaningful purpose. Chores remind us that things don’t “get done” without somebody actually “doing them.” Chores also remind us that what has to “get done” is sometimes not our choice, but someone else’s.

When God Calls

God continually asks us to “do something.” Sometimes, it may be an easy thing, like “Hey, why don’t you check out the big building down the street with my logo out front? I hear there are some pretty cool people there!”  [/irreverent mode]

Other times, not so much. Like the passage above from Genesis. Anyone who ever attended Sunday School knows the story of Abraham and his son Isaac. Abraham, in a moment of supreme testing, is instructed by God to do something unthinkable: sacrifice his own son. And not just any son – this was Isaac, the son Abraham and his wife Sarah had prayed for God to provide them for decades. Now, God is telling Abraham to kill his own son.

Some people struggle with this story. “How could a God so insistent on love,” they ask, “demand something so cold-blooded and harsh?”

Others, particularly scholars practicing allegorical interpretation, reduce every story in the Bible to mere fable. For these folks, Abraham’s challenge was nothing more than a story designed to teach the original audience of Genesis something very important about God. Human sacrifice was common and prevalent in Abraham’s day. This story, in their eyes, was created to show that the God of Israel was unlike other Gods. The God of Israel had no interest in the sacrifice of humans.

Hard Choices

Regardless of one’s theological view, no fancy semantic doubletalk can make God look like the “Good Guy.” In this passage it’s quite clear God asks Abraham to murder his innocent son, an obedient you man who had grown strong in his father’s faith. Isaac probably never asked Abraham “who, me?”

God could have asked Abraham to go into the desert and find his other son, Ishmael, the boy he fathered with Hagar the maidservant of his wife Sarah and whom he had sent away when Isaac was very young. Instead, God singled out the beloved son, the son in whom Abraham had placed his hopes.

The people of Abraham’s time would clearly understand the moral dilemma, perhaps in ways impossible for the modern mind grasp. In those days, the death of an only son would be unimaginably treacherous for the family.

“Sacrifice of Isaac,” Caravaggio, 1603

Abraham was old (scripture tells us he was 100 when Isaac was born) and the likelihood of his fathering a son remote. With Isaac’s death, there would be no heir to Abraham’s estate. With no heir, God’s promise to bring a great nation out of Abraham in the land to which God had led him would be jeopardized.

This was serious on many levels.

Why would God lead Abraham out of Haran and into an alien land, have him endure trials at the hand of Pharaoh, survive the devastation of Sodom and Gomorrah, and finally grant him a son he must then sacrifice? And in the sacrifice, forego his own legacy and future?

On the surface the request seems incomprehensible. Abraham, however, was ready and willing to answer God’s call, regardless of the task. He did not ask “why,” he asked “how?” “How can I please you, God? How can I follow your bidding? What shall I do?”

At the last minute, of course, God stays Abraham’s hand, convinced of Abraham’s complete, unquestioning faith in God’s wisdom and sovereignty. It was this very readiness to give up everything precious to him and obey the will of God that ultimately spared Isaac’s life.

Sacrifices of the Heart

God had no interest in the sacrifice of Isaac (maybe the scholars have that part right). God has no interest in anything material we offer Him. Instead, God was interested in Abraham’s heart. What God really wanted Abraham to sacrifice was his personal will. God wanted Abraham to fully trust in His divine presence and providence. It’s the same request He makes of us.

There’s another story in scripture, found in the New Testament, where a similar request is made by Jesus of a rich young ruler. This time, the request is to abandon everything the young man holds dear – his money, his possessions, his “things” – sell it all, give the money he receives to the poor and follow Jesus. Where Abraham passed his test, the rich young ruler sadly failed his.

Every day God asks each of us to do something just as hard as what he asked of Abraham or the rich young ruler.

Every day He asks us to give money to others when we often don’t think we even have enough for ourselves.

Credit: “Self Sacrifice” by josephacheng on DeviantArt

Every day He challenges us to change our attitudes, to see beyond our prejudices.

Every day He taps someone on the shoulder – maybe you, maybe me, to go minister to a bunch of strangers.

Every day He asks us to lay down our lives for a friend in need.

Every day he nudges us to let go of the fears we cling to and embrace a future brighter than anything we can imagine.

God calls us out of our comfort zones to follow His will. A friend once told me that every time I get comfortable, I’ve probably quit doing what God wants me to do. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time, but I’m beginning to understand now.

Abraham reminds us that God sometimes asks hard things … things that may even seem impossible. More importantly, God asks us to simply trust that we’ll get through those hard things because through Him all things are possible. It’s like this paraphrase of something I read the other day – “loving and trusting God is like floating … so amazingly simple, but if you fight it, nearly impossible.”

What is God Asking You?

Tomorrow morning, as you busy yourself preparing for the day, pause a moment and think about this question: “What has God asked me to do that’s hard?”

The answer is different for each us. For some, it may be to focus on a pressing family matter we keep ignoring. For others, it may be to lay down a troubling struggle with addiction. Still others may find they are too concerned with the world and not enough on God.

Or perhaps it will be something even harder. I have no idea. I do know when God asks us to do hard things we must decide if we’re willing to sacrifice the “everything” we cling to, like Abraham, just to follow God.

Viewed this way, God’s will no longer seems so much like a chore. It’s a pathway to Salvation.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Love, It’s That Simple

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:34-35

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

A moment ago, the world was ordered. Plans were in place. Victory was at hand. Three years of constant travel to endless towns, encountering people at every turn craving the promise of hope they had waited generations to hear was about to pay off. Adoring crowds had hailed their entrance into the city with an extravagant parade.

The Kingdom … had finally … arrived.

Earlier, the group of brothers had assembled in an upper room away from throngs crowding the city streets below, watching with odd curiosity as their leader stripped off his outer garments, grabbed a nearby basin of water and a towel, and proceeded moving from man to man, gently washing their feet in an astonishing display of humility and service. “Women and slaves do this,” they whispered to one another, “not the Messiah!”

“The Last Supper,” Leonardo da Vinci, 1498

During the ceremonial meal, celebrated each Passover in remembrance of God’s Deliverance of His people from bondage, the man for whom these men had left behind everything and followed shocked them into momentary silence.

“Betrayal?” “Leaving us?” “What about the Kingdom?”

This simply couldn’t be. It was just … wrong.

An Act of Love

Every Christian knows this story from the Last Supper. My high school friend and extraordinary Christian artist, songwriter, and teacher Michael Card penned an amazing song memorializing the moment (“The Basin and the Towel”). The Supreme Savior of the World assumes the lowliest of positions to demonstrate the power of a servant’s heart to his disciples.

Today is known around the Christian world as “Maundy Thursday.” The term comes from the Latin word mandatum in John 13:34 meaning “command.” Jesus instructed his disciples in a new commandment following this episode to “Love one another.” Foot washing, while an ancient custom of hospitality in the Middle East, was redefined by Jesus as an amazing act of service and love.

But it was not the ultimate act of service. That would come later in the evening, foretold during the Passover meal by Jesus. He revealed to his disciples how he would demonstrate an infinitely more meaningful act of love and sacrifice in willingly walking into the hands of the Jewish and Roman authorities to suffer their sham trial, conviction, and execution in atonement for sins of the world.

The last meal Jesus shared with his disciples is described in all four canonical Gospels (Matthew 26:17-30Mark 14:12-26Luke 22:7-39 and John 13:1-17:26). In addition to the foot washing episode uniquely depicted in John, the key events in the meal included preparing the apostles for Jesus’ imminent departure, predictions about Judas betraying Jesus, and the foretelling of the upcoming denial of Jesus by Peter. As the evening unfolds, the scales eventually drop from the eyes of the apostles as Jesus calmly, lovingly explains the meaning of all they had seen and heard the prior three years.

He Didn’t Run

He wasn’t running. He wasn’t fighting back. He wasn’t raising an army to storm the Roman garrison housed at the Fortress of Antonia overlooking the Temple. He wasn’t ushering in a sweeping movement of retaliation, or vengeance, or eye-for-eye justice.

Instead, Jesus offered his incredulous apostles an entirely different message. Away from the thousands that followed him wherever he went, Jesus looked into the eyes of his twelve closest friends and brothers and taught them a new meaning of Messiahship: love.

Jesus was blameless. His ministry was built on non-violence, healing, raising the dead, and freeing those held hostage to sin. He brought hope to the hopeless and life to those dying in darkness.

But on this evening, he told his followers the shattering truth: no one would thank him. No one would celebrate his acts of mercy and kindness. In less than 300 minutes, he would be arrested. Within 21 hours he would be dead.

Wrong. Just, wrong!

The smoldering ember Jesus planted in the hearts of his apostles that night in a tiny room a few feet above the streets of Jerusalem was resisted by every man sharing the meal with him. Yet within a few weeks it would erupt in a blazing wildfire that would spread the to the length and breadth of the known world.

The Ultimate Weapon

Because ultimately, Jesus demonstrated how goodness, kindness, and compassion could overpower the oppression and authority of the world more than any weapon or army. He revealed the most overwhelming and radical insurgency movement the world had ever known: a kingdom built on love, not vengeance.

In today’s world filled with sensationalized violence, hatred raised to an art form by endless media and wall-to-wall news coverage, celebrity-inspired self-aggrandizement pouring out of Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, this simple story of love wouldn’t “go viral.” It wouldn’t last an entire news cycle, shouted down by voices more interested in self-promotion and personal agendas than lasting, profound changes of the human heart.

Muslim protestors, credit Walid Shoebat

But ultimately, Jesus’ story of love transcends all of those things. Because this simple story of love is not about one man but is about all of us. It’s the story of what happens when a world gone mad does everything it can to extinguish hope through violence, and hatred, and fear, and yet is overcome by the triumph of sacrificial love. In the words of Reverend Dr. Emily C. Heath, “It’s a story of love that was rejected and buried, and yet was still too strong to stay in the ground.”

What If?

What if the world knew us as Christians not by the Bible we carry, the cross hanging from our neck or the church we attend? What if Christianity was not defined by size of our amphitheaters or the production value of our music-filled services? What if our faith wasn’t identified by what we say we believe about Jesus, or how self-righteously we portray ourselves in blog posts?

What if, instead, we were known as Christians by our love?  What if we could show the world what Jesus showed his disciples that night, a world where we are united in spirit, walking beside each other, working together to build Kingdom-filled communities founded in love rather than dividing lines?

Tonight, as you reflect on what a simple act of feet washing memorializes, as we pause to join in the solemnity of a Passover dinner shared by a condemned Savior and his weary followers 2,000 years ago, take a moment to remember. Take a moment to remember not just what this night or even the coming weekend of Easter means, but what it means to be a Christian in the world of the Fourth Day, the day after the Resurrection, the day when light emerged from darkness.

Remember what it means to be a truly Christ-centered Believer. Remember Christ’s commandment from John 13 – to love each other as he loved us.

Love, it’s really that simple.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Safe Places and Other Modern Myths

“You will not be afraid of the terror by night, or of the arrow that flies by day; of the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or of the destruction that lays waste at noon.” Psalm 91:5-6

The news hit midmorning on, of all days, the start of Advent and Valentine’s Day: “Active shooter in Florida school.” Every day since, cable news and social media have been wall to wall with saturation coverage, shrill screams of “enough is enough,” student walkouts, and lockstep cries for yet more manmade faux solutions to manmade real problems.

Yet every proposed “fix” seems, in the grand scheme of things, hollow and sadly lacking any real core curative ingredient. Appeals for “safe places” in a world of unsafe reality.

How did we get here? Why do our daily lives seem and feel so much less secure than 10, 20, or 30 years ago? Are there really any safe places anymore?

In times of hardship or tragedy there is a natural desire to seek instant answers, immediate solutions ensuring we can step safely outside our door. We build houses with safe rooms. We pass laws to eliminate every perceivable type of danger. We legislate, regulate, and adjudicate every conceivable facet of life to make ourselves “safer.”

No Safe Places

The truth is no place on earth is safe enough to protect us from the inescapable certainties of life. No amount of money can shield us from the ravages of aging, disease, and death. No one we know, no where we go can ultimately protect us this truth: human life has a 100% mortality rate.

To be sure, we try.

We seek safety in more government oversight from our elected officials. Perhaps we seek safety in our churches and pastors. We seek safety online and on social media, with like-minded people saying like-minded things. Some even seek safety in barricading themselves behind walls and storing entire arsenals for protection.

Is there really safety in numbers?

In each of these, a common thread emerges: we seek safety in ourselves, in human devices. And almost always, we are disappointed and even heartbroken.

Jeremiah spoke of the dangers we face in placing our trust in each other (or even, as seems to be wildly en vogue the last few days, our children) rather than in God:

“Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord. For he will be like a bush in the desert and … live in stony wastes in the wilderness, a land of salt without inhabitant.” (Jeremiah 17:5-6)

There is no safe place in surrender to fear. There is no safe place in blaming politicians or organizations for doing exactly what their constituents allow them to do, abdicating the responsibility of citizenship for creature comforts and diversions. There is no safe place in trusting our own so-called wisdom.

Yes, Evil is Real

Here is truth: evil is real. Since the first lie planted in the hearts of man turned us away from God’s perfection in the garden, we – mankind – have chosen to do evil things. It’s hardwired into our collective psyche.

Paul writes in Romans 5:12 “just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given.” Insert “evil” for “sin” and the picture gets clearer.

Credit: NBC News

Which brings us back to the events in Florida last week. A nineteen-year old broken soul, barely an adult, chose to live out the evil infesting his heart. He meticulously planned the slaughter, executing his deed with cold precision. He succeeded in shattering the illusions of safe places for those who simply expected another school day. 

No Easy Answers

Should we ask how? Dare we ask why? Of course.

Yet before we look for easy answers from the hearts of broken men and women grasping at something, anything, to prove they are not impotent in the face of evil, perhaps we should look at other things.

No doubt we can question the relatively frictionless accessibility to firearms guaranteed by our Constitution, and whether the time has come to reconsider its intended wisdom.

Or we can study the impact of a disconnected culture addicted to devices in the palms of its hands or at the other end of violent video game consoles.

Perhaps we should look at homes with single parents or no parents at all where boundaries and expectations and love for our children are absent.

Maybe we should explore the impact of ubiquitous psychotropic drugs and untreated mental illness all in the name of nonjudgmental tolerance.

Or even dig into the rise of bullying and the coarseness of society where social media allows anyone to say anything at any time with no consequence.

We should look at all these things and more.  And once we’ve analyzed and scrutinized and examined how man has turned creation into what we read in the headlines every day, we should remember that the influence all these things is not the same as the root cause for human suffering.

Wishes Don’t Work

Evil cannot be wished away, it cannot be legislated into extinction. Like water, it will seep through the cracks of even the most civilized and orderly society. Believing in manmade safe places is, simply, an illusion, a myth perpetrated by an enemy wishing delighted as we shake our fists at the sky saying “Enough! We are in control!”

Simply put, there is only one truly safe place: the will of the living God. As surely evil hides and walks amongst us, this is also goodness in our midst – vastly more than the media or our news feeds will ever tell us.

God has a design for each of us, and while we may not understand, He has a plan for any evil we create or endure. “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose,” Paul tells us in Romans 8:28.

God’s Purpose Can Never Be Defeated

No one – regardless of how deranged or evil – can succeed in blocking God’s purposes. Yet, when we remove the light of God’s Truth and replace it with the world’s standards, we are left to wander blind on our own paths of disobedience.

And sadly, sometimes that disobedience hurts even the innocents, the bystanders. Such is the consequence for a world in denial searching for safety where none exists.

There are no adequate words of comfort we can ever give to the parent of a child lost so senselessly, just as there is no easy consolation to someone suffering from a terminal disease or a spouse suffering betrayal.

Brothers and sisters, safety is found in the shelter of God’s love. “I the Lord do no not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed,” God speaks through His prophet in Malachi 3:6.

Take comfort in knowing His love never diminishes, His Light is always right there with us.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

A Bad Day

More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.Romans 5:3-5

I recently had a call from a friend who needed to vent. He was having a bad day. His wife was nagging about how he didn’t help out around the house, one of his kids was having problems in school, his boss was on his back about performance, and his beloved football team hadn’t made it into the playoffs. To top it off, his golf game was suffering. It was truly an apocalypse.

Every day we’re bombarded with stories of hardship. Some of these tug at our heartstrings: mothers losing their children needlessly to senseless crime; cancer ravishing the lives of families who must face unplanned catastrophes; the unimaginably impoverished barely surviving in far-flung places where even food and water are rare.

“Honest, officer, I just needed a quick place to park.”

And then, there are the fabricated stories of hardship. Tales of illegal immigrants who have been deported multiple times but are still being “persecuted” when they return to this country and break the law. Christians who claim they are being unfairly judged because of their scriptural interpretations. Culturally-sensitive types who reject any commentary they find specifically offensive to their delicate psyches.

A Tame World

The world today is, in many ways, tame. Creature comforts we deem as “bare minimums” would have been seen as impossibly extravagant luxuries a mere 100 years ago: large screen televisions in multiple rooms, smart phones permanently attached to our hands, churches wide open on every street corner offering whatever flavor of Christianity a consumer-oriented seeker desires, regardless of how authentically it follows scripture.

Perhaps I’m being harsh. No doubt some might find my framing of this topic already tainted with bias. Yet as I reflect on the unique 21st Century sentiments of those who feel life is treating them unfairly, I’m reminded of the struggles of 14 very real and very specific individuals who pledged their lives to proclaim Truth into the world nearly 2,000 years ago.

When Jesus ascended 40 days after his resurrection around 33 AD, there were exactly 11 Apostles and approximately 500 total followers in the entire world. 511 people who heard the ministry of Jesus and believed his Gospel. Almost immediately, Jesus’ followers were subject to the most horrific forms of persecution. They were hunted, beaten, sometimes stoned, almost unanimously ostracized. They had every reason to run from the call God placed on their hearts for an easier life, but they did not.

Persecuted for Faith

And what of Jesus’ Apostles? Consider what happened to each of those who were closest to Jesus life and ministry in the short 30 years following his resurrection:

  • James, older brother of John, is run through with a sword by Herod Agrippa in Jerusalem
  • Philip is crucified upside down in Asia
  • Bartholomew is skinned alive and beheaded in Armenia
  • Thomas (who doubted the resurrection) is stabbed to death by Hindu priests in Punjab, India
  • Matthew is martyred in Ethiopia
  • Simon and Jude are martyred in modern day Beirut
  • Mathias is stoned to death in Jerusalem after evangelizing in Armenia
  • James the Just (brother of Jesus) is thrown from the walls of the temple in Jerusalem by an angry mob and stoned to death
  • Andrew, brother of Peter, is crucified on an x-shaped cross in Patras, Greece
  • Simon Peter is crucified in Rome upside down
  • John the Evangelist is thrown into a boiling vat of oil, emerging unharmed but then exiled to Patmos
  • Mark is martyred in Alexandria after becoming its first Pope
  • Paul is beheaded in Rome

Credot: www.catholiccompany.com

These men and hundreds of thousands of followers since pledged and gave their lives defending a Truth so many today take for granted. They didn’t look for comfortable lives, easy faith. They didn’t water down Scripture to meet the sensitive ears of the people around them.

John’s Gospel describes the final night Jesus spent with his Apostles during the last supper. Afterwards, he encourages his followers by telling them not to let the coming trials of the world stop them from their mission. “Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, also believe in me,” he begins in John 14. “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated me before it hated you,” he continues in Chapter 15. He closes Chapter 16 with “In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”

Life in Context

Friends, my message today is very simple. In the scheme of things, how difficult is your life? An IRS audit? Bills to pay? Your political candidate lost? Grumbling spouses? Someone’s Twitter feed makes you angry? Your preacher said something you found insensitive? These kinds of things are what stand between you and an unclouded relationship with God?

“For our present troubles are quite small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us an immeasurably great glory that will last forever,” Paul wrote in his second letter to the Corinthians. Every hardship we suffer today, even in the worst of times, prepares us for a future in eternity if we remember Christ overcame the world on our behalf.

When we put our lives in context, our “bad days” might be seen as “best days” for others. Instead of looking for reasons why our lives are not perfect, perhaps we should consider how filled we are by the Grace of God’s love and the sacrifice Jesus made at Calvary.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

 

Why Transformation is So Hard

“And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” – Romans 12: 2

Transformers hit theatres in 2007 to the delight of 12 year olds (and some former 12 year olds) everywhere.  Over the next ten years and five movies, the franchise earned nearly $4.9 billion worldwide, proving that colorful toy cars – and Megan Fox – can sell movie tickets.

“I swear that was a ’76 Camaro five minutes ago!”

The heroes, Autobots hiding among humans as vehicles, transform into saviors to fight the villainous Decepticons in a battle for the Earth. This war between Good and Evil has obvious parallels to Scripture – a malevolent force with one purpose seeks to destroy God’s plan for redemption. God’s heroes from Scripture are like the Autobots (go with me on this), ordinary human beings transformed into extraordinary agents of God’s Holy Spirit.

A Common Theme

We’re moved by stories of overcoming challenges and obstacles. For Judeo-Christian Believers, the transformation motif is familiar: David transformed from a shepherd into a King by slaying a mighty warrior twice his size; Job transformed from a wealthy man to a pauper and back again; Jacob’s son Joseph transformed from prisoner to supreme administrator of Egypt; Mary transformed from a scared, unwed teenager into the mother of God’s only Son; Saul the Christian persecutor transformed into Paul the Evangelical powerhouse.

The lesson is the same in each example: the conditions of our human birth don’t define us. We aren’t confined by the things of the world simply because we find ourselves in a place or time we did not choose.

Is Positive Thinking Enough

What separates those who break free from their origins from those who don’t? In almost all cases the answer is “attitude.” Secularists call this the power of Positive Psychology (“positive thinking”), but regardless of the label, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests an attitude of positive energy and optimism defeats a dark view of the world.

There’s a great deal of angst in the world today, especially among those who see the past year’s events as apocalyptic. Social media and blogs are filled with the naysayers preaching dire circumstances and end times-like catastrophes. These are the same folks who speak so highly of self-identification and positive affirmations when the political winds blow a different way.

Credit: www.yourerc.com

They just can’t break free from mindsets holding them captive to a world to which they’ve conformed.

Amidst a deluge of self-help gurus, libraries filled with how-to books, endless diets and financial systems, exercise plans for every body type, why are so many of us unable to every truly transform? Why do we continually jump from half-measure to half-measure?

If the power of transformation lies in the application of attitude, how do we remain unchanged?

Where We Place Our Belief

Perhaps the answers lies not in what we want to believe but rather in where we place that belief. Paul reminds us in Romans 12 that when we entrust our belief in things of this world (“conforming”), we receive things of this world. Still we crave more – a new body, a bigger house, a more expensive car, a better personality. We’re never satisfied because we are never transformed.

Christians are no different than non-Christians in their need for transformation. Yet we struggle as well. Why is this the case? Perhaps because this need for transformation is the single barrier the Enemy has to keep us from God. The less satisfied we stay, the more we need rather than experience transformation, the the greater hold Satan has on our lives.

In my own journey, I’ve found four areas I must continually revisit as I strive for Transformation. These are mine – yours might be different.

 1.  Insisting on my will, not God’s.

It’s tempting to think of God as a kind of spiritual ATM: we deposit spiritual credits and we withdraw them on demand. The more “x” we put in (the more we give to the church, the more we show our “goodness,” the more mission trips we take), the more blessings we’ll receive. But the world doesn’t play fair. It pushes back, asking for more every time we give.

God doesn’t equate transactions with transformation. To receive God’s transformational grace we must first understand and seek His will, not our desires. Until we ask God for discernment into His will we will remain untransformed.

2.  Looking to the Church to transform me.

Today’s church can be a wonderful, affirming, and catalyzing place for transformation. But the church itself is not the source for that transformation. In Galatians 6, Paul reminds the congregation in Galatia that the church – both traditional Jews and Gentiles – is nothing except the affirmation of God’s power to transform: “For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.

When we look to the Church rather than to God for our fulfillment, we miss His point that we should be focused vertically first, not horizontally.

 3.  If I try a little harder, I can make change happen.

As a professional and an executive, I’m all about the power of initiative and effort. Yet when I allow that to spill over into my Faith life, I’m often disappointed. Life pushes back. People resist. Our efforts are thwarted.

We can’t force Christianity to transform either our lives or the lives of others. It never works that way.  Instead, we should follow Paul’s advice in Galatians 5:25: “If we live by the Spirit, let us walk with the Spirit.” Following the Spirit enables us to bear the fruit Jesus describes in John 15.

4.  Earning my way to transformation.

Think of the caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly. The process is effortless for the caterpillar once it starts. The caterpillar is living on the outside what it knows to be true on the inside. The same is true for us. When we believe ourselves undeserving of grace in our hearts, we often attempt to overcompensate in our actions, trying to earn God’s love. Or worse, we try to earn acceptance from other sources.

The truth, and the truly Good News of the Gospel is that God has already done the heavy lifting. He’s already completed the hard work of transformation. We can add nothing to the perfection of His forgiveness. No effort on our part can “earn” what has already been freely given – we simply have to receive it and let it happen.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that we are all being transformed into God’s image when we take off our masks and contemplate His glory. Not our will, but His. Not our church, but His Spirit. Not our efforts, but His work.

In the end, we’re not simply Hollywood-created Autobots who magically transform ourselves into humanity-saving heroes. As Christians, we need reminding just as the new church did in Paul’s time that the only true transformation comes through the Will and Spirit of God.

This week, let go of your belief in self-transformation. Remember that God has already done the work. Simply allow that work to change you, spread your wings, and fly.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Twelve Days of Advent – #12 Journeys in Time

“There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven.” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

It’s here! Christmas Day. Presents, delicious food, family and friends. We look forward to this day all year. For some, the journey is simply from our bedrooms to our living rooms. Others travel many miles to join in the celebration. In fact, AAA recently estimated that this year over 100 million Americans would travel in some form this Christmas.

One of our biggest concerns when we take a trip, especially during the holidays, is whether we’ll get to our destination on time. Crowded airports, busy highways, overbooked hotels … when will we get there? Our travel plans sometimes seem more pressing than our travel destinations.

A Different Journey

There is another journey we should remember today as another Advent ends. A journey made by our Creator spanning the infinite stretches of time and space, from thought to Word to flesh to Salvation. It is the reason we celebrate this day, the day “O Come” became “Emmanuel.”

The Jesus so often stylized in paintings and song seems at odds with the Jesus of history. He was not born to princely riches, surrounded by the comforts of an Eternal throne. His arrival was greeted with a brief night of fanfare and praise but then life took hold.

The Jesus of history was born to humble parents, a day laborer and young girl barely into her teens. They lived not in one of the great commerce centers of Judea amidst the religious elite, but a dusty town nearly 100 miles from Jerusalem. Many in his day would never travel beyond the borders of their own villages. And it’s likely few people worried much about timetables and schedules.

Jesus’ life commenced with a journey, a continuation of the journey his Father began so many eons before. His life would end with a journey, a journey that would take him from death to transcendence. A journey that happened precisely on time.

During his earthly life, Jesus took many journeys: to Egypt as a baby, throughout Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Every trip he made, every place he visited, Scripture records the travels not of an inveterate site-seer looking to check boxes for the ancient wonders of the world he visited, but rather, someone with a single purpose: to encounter us, engage with us, teach and minister to us, bring us the Good News of the coming of his Father’s Kingdom.

A Visitor to All

A lot is written about Jesus’ focus on the downtrodden and the outcast. The forgotten members of society. And indeed, he did speak to the humble and the meek and poor, both in purse and in spirit. Yet, the remarkable thing about Jesus’ journeys was how he did not discriminate between rich and poor, famous or obscure. He visited with anyone.

An encounter with a rich young ruler mentioned Mark 10:17-27 is one example. The passage begins “As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to him and knelt before him, and ask him ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

Notice the passage begins with Jesus embarking on yet another journey! Jesus seeks those who seek him – in this case, a man of wealth and means. Rather than dismissing the young man simply because of his wealth, Jesus engages him. That encounter didn’t end as the rich young ruler hoped, but Jesus still met him where he was.

Mary Annointing Jesus’ Feet, Peter Paul Rubens, 1618

Another encounter from John 12:1-8, describes Jesus allowing Mary to anoint his feet with an expensive and fragrant ointment that would sell for $20,000 today. In this story, Jesus has just come to Bethany in preparation for his final Passover in Jerusalem. Mary obviously has the means to possess such an expensive perfume and so was clearly not destitute. Yet again, Jesus did not criticize or shun her.

Jesus made an inconceivable journey for all of us. He came for the poor and rich, the unknown and the famous. He was no stranger to poverty and hardship, yet he was comfortable with the powerful and wealthy.

Jesus embodied his Father’s desire to reconcile all of mankind, regardless of circumstances. He realized that even those with means face struggles. Temptation doesn’t discriminate. He made his journey to you and me because we all hurt, we’re all broken, we all have fear and doubt.

The Real Point

The point of Christmas is to awaken us to the infinite capacity of God to reach inside our lives and heal us, to offer us the love and forgiveness only a Father can provide. To remind us of the journey He took to reach us.

Scholars estimate Jesus traveled over 21,000 miles during his life – nearly the distance around the earth’s equator. Yet that very last mile he walked, the mile from Pilate’s palace the hilltop on Golgotha, was undoubtedly his hardest. A mile few of us would willingly walk. And he arrived right on time.

Today as we celebrate the blessings of Christmas, let’s not worry too much about our own timetables or schedules. Rather, remember instead the long journey God made to reach us. And remember the journey He asks of us to reach those around us.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Twelve Days of Advent #8 – Death and Taxes

“But He turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.’” Matthew 16:23

A movie I’ve always loved for its intelligent writing and nuanced acting is “Meet Joe Black,” the story of wealthy news and media mogul William Parrish (Anthony Hopkins) who on the eve of his 65th birthday is visited by Death in the form of a man named Joe Black (Brad Pitt).

In a key scene foreshadowing the end of the film, Joe is in a conference room talking with the movie’s antagonist, “Drew.” Joe challenges Drew about the inevitability of a major financial transaction to which Drew responds “We all know this deal is as certain as death and taxes.” Pausing, Joe comments “Death and taxes? What an odd pairing.”

Death and taxes. Unless you’ve been on a remote island the last few days you’ve no doubt heard the hysteria around the debate in the US on the Tax Reform Bill that was just passed by Congress.

I won’t debate the merits or flaws of that legislation here (you can check out John Pavlovitz any day of the week to get an overdose of that). Rather, I want to focus on the flawed idea of believing anything (taxes, justice, politics, governments, etc.) is “certain” other than death.

Nowhere to Hide

The whims and policies of man are transient and will change with the times, while the nature of God is eternal. As Jesus responded when asked about the morality of paying Caesar’s poll tax in Matthew 22, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”  What belongs to God will always be returned to Him.

There is simply nowhere to hide from physical death. We may fill our days with endless workouts, pad our diets with supplements and nutrition, slather our faces with creams and ointments, push retirement out another ten years but the truth is that each and every one of us has one appointment – an appointment with the end of our earthly days – we can’t cancel or reschedule.

Jesus also had an appointment. One scheduled from the beginning of time, foretold over generations of prophets, foreshadowed in the long wait between Malachi and Matthew. His appointment was certain. It was unchangeable. His appoint was with death.

Divine Appointment

When Jesus finally revealed this divine appointment to his disciples, explaining he will suffer betrayal, trial and execution, be entombed for a time, and finally raised up on the third day, Peter would have no part of it.

He denied the inevitability of God’s plan.

 He expects Jesus, the Messiah, the Anointed Christ, the Lion of Judah to raise a victorious hand against the oppression of Rome. Messiahs conquer, they do not succumb. And in an ironic twist, Peter foretells his own betrayal of Jesus following the arrest in Jerusalem by denying the very mission Jesus had announced.

“St. Peter’s Denial” by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1660

Jesus responds in the only way Pete will understand – implying Satan had possessed him and to go away. Peter simply had not comprehended the true oppression Jesus came to defeat … the certain oppression of sin and death. The great “waiting” of the Jewish people would be fulfilled in Jesus laying down his sinless life to atone for the flawed and sinful lives of all mankind. This was the appointment only Jesus could keep.

Turning the Page

In rejecting Peter, Jesus tells us a much deeper truth. The problems of the world are infinitely great than politics, or our personal desires, even our own deaths. What we believe is the end of the story (death) is actually the turning of a page.

Jesus conquers the horrors of death so that we will never experience those horrors even as we face our own demise . We no longer need to hide, fearing and forestalling the inevitable. We no longer need fear the ravages of disease, the pain of broken relationships, the soul-crushing weight of financial ruin.

Rather, Jesus writes an entirely new chapter for us, telling us to embrace the death he suffered in our own lives, every day. To follow his example means willingly taking up our own crosses and running toward the death he calls us to experience: death to pride, death to apathy, death to unfaithfulness, death to hate, death to lying, death to hypocrisy, death to denial.

Jesus teaches Peter and his disciples that the only way to avoid our inevitable appointment with death is to embrace that very death while we live. Luke 9:24 recounts his words: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.

The Price of Life

Advent, this time of waiting and expectation, is also a season of understanding. We learn through enduring anticipation that God never meant His call to be convenient or inexpensive. Often, He leads us to suffer for His work. He challenges the strength of our faith. Being a Believer can be costly, lonely, disappointing.

Yet the clear message of Christianity is simply this: die to the selfish, vain, fleeting promises of the world and receive the assurance of eternity. Die to the whispered seductions and lies of the enemy and experience the radiant joy of unearned grace. Die to death and receive life.

The ultimate Good News is that Jesus has already paid the price for our lives. His death and resurrection were the tax we owed, the payment we should have made. The price for our lives is now … free.

Joe Black teaches William Parrish there is no fear or sorrow in death if we learn to live a life of service and sacrificial love. While we all suffer the same fallibilities of being human, our final breath is not a tragic failure of frailty but a transcendent triumph over death.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Twelve Days of Advent – #7 Stormy Weather

“Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”—James 1:2-4

I was recently at dinner with a few guy friends. Predictably, we talked about typical guy things. Because we’re all of a “certain age,” our “guy things” talk was relatively tame. Relatively.

Credit: www.wisebread.com

However … one member of our party broke an unspoken “guy” rule in my crowd: don’t complain about the weather. Not the real weather, of course. Rather, the weather of our relationships, the weather of lives. The weather we can’t control but we can certainly anticipate. “Don’t blame the weather for getting wet when you forgot to bring an umbrella,” one of my, um, “older” guy friends fondly says.

Life is tough.

Look, life is tough. We live in a world where the deck appears to be stacked against most of us. In Christian terms we call this a “fallen world,” a world where a very real and present enemy works to stain every part of our lives with fear and doubt and uncertainty.

Glass breaks. We get old (yeah, I know that’s hard to hear). Marriages fall apart. Loved ones get addicted to Opiates. Parents forget our names. Sexual harassment becomes an accepted norm. Alcohol and drugs are so common our children need rehab at 14 years old. A gun becomes a more persuasive argument than reason.

Credit: New York Times

In 1944 Ella Fitzgerald and the Inkspots released a single called “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall.” They borrowed the title from the poem “Rainy Day” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Both Ella and Longfellow spoke truth. But I prefer the original truth from Ecclesiastes 3 “For everything this is a season.”

Storm clouds are always on the horizon. Life pushes back. This is especially hard to accept during seasons of anticipation. Seasons like Advent when God may seem silent and unreachable. Seasons where we are asked to wait and trust.

The War Inside Us

The stormy weather of our lives should not be surprising, especially for those of us actively attempting to reject the temptations of the material world, the seductions of a physical life. It’s not easy to resist.

Paul tells us of the “Conflict of Two Natures” in Romans 7, a war being waged inside each of us. He reflects that in Galatians 5:17, writing “For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.”

Credit: www.kingdomrice.wordpress.com

The temptations of the world, particularly in seasons of waiting, are like tornadoes in Kansas. We anticipate the storm clouds, we feel the wind, we eventually see the funnel hit the ground yet sometimes we don’t seek shelter.

While we live in a fallen world and bad things happen to us, we always have control over how we respond – whether we bring an umbrella or head underground or simply give in.

Yet in every instance of adversity or waiting, we have a choice. We can choose to look backward or we can move forward. Notice we can’t actually go backward, only look there. And we really can’t stay where we are as life moves on around us. So, we can look back or move forward.

Storms Strengthen Us

James tells us in the verse I began with that the testing of our faith builds perseverance. Surviving storms makes us stronger to future storms. Meeting and defeating temptation and doubt tempers us, transforms us, like hardening steel with fire.

We see this transformation in our choices. We can feel joy or bitterness. We can forgive or hold onto anger. We can trust or be suspicious of everyone. We can be filled with faith or plagued with fear. We can love or we can hate. We can offer mercy or seek revenge.

We can fill our hearts with hope. Or we can sink into despair.

Stormy weather and hard seasons are not meant to weaken us, but rather to strengthen us. They offer us opportunities to reinforce our trust and faith in God by hearing His voice and rejoicing in His salvation. Especially when the clouds are darkest…

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Twelve Days of Advent – #6 The Most Impossible Mission

“I am a representative from him, and that One sent me forth.”—John 7:29.

My sister Shari is an amazing woman, and a fellow Believer after whom I’ve modeled much of my adult Christian walk. I’ve never actually told her this so the news will come as some surprise. Every year she takes one or more of my nieces and nephews on missionary trips to Central America to make a difference in the lives of people most of us will never meet. She touches the hearts of everyone around her.

In ways she may never appreciate, Shari missioned Christ to me …and it worked.

The Work of Missionaries

What do you think of when you hear the word “missionary?” Perhaps you see a scrubbed face Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon acolyte ringing your doorbell asking if you have found God. Maybe you think of a group of college students taking the annual trip to Nicaragua to paint houses and serve meals. Or even that couple from your church who suddenly announced they were packing up and moving to China last year.

“Hi – we’re missionaries here to save you!”

Regardless, the role of missionary is firmly established in the modern church to serve preaching the gospel “in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations” (Matthew 24:14). Most who are called to the missionary life, while facing adversity, are rewarded with successful missions. Lives are changed, hearts are touched, souls are saved. What they do works.

Although Scripture doesn’t include the word “missionary” in that form, there are numerous stories of those “being sent” (the Latin word is “mitto”) to do God’s work. Moses, Jeremiah, Nathan, Zechariah, Samuel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, the Minor Prophets, the Apostles, Paul – all were sent out by God for various purposes. And their efforts, across history, successfully unfolded the life-changing message of salvation and redemption we know as Christianity.

One True Missionary

And then someone different was sent by God, a missionary whose purpose stood above all others, whose coming had been foretold and awaited, yet whose mission should by any measure have been considered impossible. An impossible mission given to Jesus of Nazareth.

One of the most well-known scriptures in the Bible, especially appropriate for Advent Season, is John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”

Credit: www.msafropolitan.com

Think of his mission: born to save all who believe in him from eternal death. Born to redeem all of mankind. Born to pay the ultimate price for our transgressions. I mean really, what could go wrong with that?

Since that moment in the Garden when man stepped away from God’s perfection by virtue of his right to freely choose, God has tried to invite us home. Jesus, as God’s “Word” prior to his human birth, spoke on his father’s behalf through the centuries, breathing life and inspiration into prophets, martyrs, faithful men and women.

And man’s response remains obstinate. Like the scribes and Pharisees of Matthew 23:23, we too often neglect “the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness.”

Yet still Jesus prevailed. For uncounted years while man wanders in wildernesses of his own making, Jesus has persisted in his mission. Through a willing spirit, enduring patience, and an unconditional love of creation, Jesus personifies the perfect character of God. He reflects the forgiveness, grace and salvation of a waiting Creator.

Miracle of Free Will

Advent is a season of waiting, a season of humility. A time for each of us to reflect on the unfathomable humility of Jesus, who “emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.” (Philippians 2:7)

Jesus achieves the fullness of his impossible mission by using the very thing man used in rebellion to God’s purpose: free will. Through his sacrifice and intercession, Jesus asks us to freely choose his invitation. No coercion, no forced conversions. Simply believe, repent, receive, and return home.

My sister taught me the humility of being a Christ follower. Jesus teaches us all that no missions are impossible when God sends us.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Twelve Days of Advent – #5 What Breaks Your Heart?

I have listened and heard, they have spoken what is not right; no man repented of his wickedness, saying, ‘What have I done?’ Everyone turned to his course, like a horse charging into the battle.” Jeremiah 8:6 

What breaks your heart?

I’m not talking about a badly-ending relationship, or even the loss of a loved one to illness or tragedy although these certainly cause us to grieve. Nor do I mean family betrayals like Fredo in “Godfather II” – we saw how that ended for both Fredo and eventually for Michael!

The broken heart I’m referring to here is different. It’s that mourning of the soul, that gut-wrenching sorrow we feel at our very core when we’re connected to what breaks God’s heart.

Credit: www.chickensmoothie.com

The Bible offers many descriptions of how Holy heart is broken. Broken by those who are lost and refuse to come home. Broken because of those who are persecuted and have no one to share their distress. Broken from the cries of the poor who have no means of support. And broken by our disobedience.

Broken by Rebellion

600 years before the birth of Christ, the Jewish people had once again become increasingly rebellious and obstinate. For generations, they had grown lax in following God’s commandments, eventually seduced by the attraction of Baal and other idols and squandering the promise and hope of the Torah.

Eventually, God removes His protection and Babylon conquers Judah, deposing their king Jehoiakim and sending much of the population into exile. By 587 BC, Judah was no longer a nation and the memories of greatness achieved by David and Solomon faded. It broke the hearts of a nation.

The prophet Jeremiah, seeing the wretched conditions of his fellow Jews, had just such a broken, aching heart. He saw the misery of his brothers and sisters, the children of Abraham, the Covenant People. And he knew what God had called him to do, the hard message he had to deliver to these same people: repent from their sins and return to God. Their rejection of his message the eventual exile of Judah ultimately led to his death by the very hands of those he tried to save.

What breaks your heart?

Many of us today simply don’t equate broken hearts with sin. The very word itself, “sin,” seems antiquated, unenlightened, uneducated to the modern ear. And when God asks us as he asked Jeremiah “Why have these people turned away? Why are they always turning away?” (Jeremiah 8:5) we simply … turn away.

What breaks your heart?

The answer to that question isn’t always obvious. So, perhaps we might start with a different question. What breaks God’s heart?

There are many things we might find in scripture to answer this. In my own journey, a few come to mind. This is especially true for those who claim to know God’s heart yet still falter.

  • When we don’t turn from our shortcomings. Just like the people in Jeremiah’s day, God’s people today – you and me and those around us – have turned away from God, often refusing to hear Him. Jeremiah’s people, like us, should have known better. They knew, we know, when the path we’re on is wrong. Yet we continue down that path, oblivious to where it leads.

We may confess, we may have a moment of contrite remorse, but when the pain passes, we ignore Jesus’ admonition in John 8:11 to “Go and sin no more.”

  • When we don’t live God’s Word. Like the Scribes and Pharisees of Jesus’ day, many professing Christians today talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. We have our Bibles, we may go to Bible studies, we may debate and argue Scripture – but do we live it? Do we spend time the poor? Do we take in orphans? Do we look after widows? If we the only Bible those around us ever see, what does that Bible look like? And yes, I’m writing these words to me.

Credit: www.modernsurvivalblog.com

  • When we don’t realize how short the time is. Jeremiah commented “Harvest has passed, summer has ended, but we have not been saved.” (Jeremiah 8:20). A farmer who misses harvest time will starve. He knows how short the time is.

There’s a similar urgency in our lives. According to a recent study there are 2.1 billion people in the world who don’t know Christ. Based on annualized death rates, 16-20 million die every year without hearing the Gospel.  This is our harvest, yours and mine. And the harvest season is upon us, this season of Advent, this season of preparation.

  • When we self-destruct. In my late 20’s, one of my closest high school friends spiraled out of control, eventually taking his own life. Many of us at the time asked ourselves what we might have done to change our friend’s course, to ease his burden. There was likely nothing we could have done, but the key pain was that we did nothing at all.

God holds this mirror up to us constantly, reminding us that we are surrounded by self-destruction. Where are we in taking the hands of others to help them through their struggles? The addicts, the prisoners, the lost.  How often does our heart break for those we see right in front of us?

  • When we refuse to let God heal us. Jeremiah cries out in 8:22Is there no balm in Gilead?” In Jeremiah’s time Gilead was a place of hope, famous for balm from a local tree resin that cured illness. Jeremiah was equating God’s voice and commandments to a healing cure for our broken lives, a salve for spiritual illness. Yet, the people refused.

How many people have you known who refuse treatment for their own sicknesses? Perhaps a friend whose marriage is in tatters but won’t seek counseling. Or a work colleague who is unable to perform but too prideful to has for help. Or an acquaintance who is spiritually lost but will not follow God?

Prepare by Acting

Advent is about many things including waiting, expectation, hope. And it’s also about recognizing how God has given us this season of preparation to discover where our hearts are not with His, where we’ve hardened ourselves to what breaks God’s heart. When we see people from every walk of life ignoring the warning signs, ignoring how time is running short, refusing to turn back from the wrong paths of their decisions, refusing help … our hearts should also break.

This Advent Season, take a look around. See your neighbors, your loved ones, your adversaries, yourself. Where can you bring hope and preparation and expectation to the broken hearts of others? Where can you bring healing to your own broken heart?

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Twelve Days of Advent – #3 Why?

“The righteous person may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all.” Psalm 34:19

Pain. Loss. They’re difficult.

In the past 14 months I’ve lost my beloved mother, my amazing father-in-law, four high school and college classmates and two friends from church. Eight losses in such a short span of time. And if my social media feeds are any indication, multiple other friends and acquaintances are suffering from any number of afflictions.

In many ways, this Advent Season feels very much like a Season of Suffering.

It’s in times of suffering and loss that many of us get closer to God. Or, sadly, farther away. Things happen. Sometimes unexpected. Sometimes expected but dreaded. Sometimes pointless and preventable. Sometimes unspeakably tragic.

As Believers, how do we cope with such losses? Our immediate and understandable reaction is “Why, God? Why did you let this happen?” Often, we echo the words of the prophet Habakkuk who wrote 600 years before Jesus’s birth:

How long, O Lord, will I call for help,
And You will not hear?
I cry out to You, ‘Violence!’
Yet You do not save.” (Habakkuk 1:2)

It’s natural to want explanations, to seek answers. If we can understand God’s Will and His purpose, we can accept His plan. When we don’t have those answers, we often remain trapped in a cycle of “if only” and “I/he/she/they should have.”  Without an explanation, our lives can splinter into 10,000 fragmented pieces impossible to put back together.

Answers give us closure, and closure allows us to move on.

Unthinkable Trust

It often seems God asks the impossible of us. To simply trust Him when we have no way of understanding how or why. To turn our lives over to Him in complete obedience, submit to His sovereignty when nothing is certain. To accept His purpose even when we can make no sense of what He wants.

Unthinkable trust. Unreasonable faith. Unfathomable belief.

This isn’t what many of us expected when we accepted the baptismal call. God never mentioned trust in Him might require surviving illness, death, shattered marriages, lost jobs, ruined finances. With every tragedy, our faith is tested, raising the familiar questions of those around us who don’t share our beliefs. “How can a loving God let this happen? Why do you believe in fairy tales? Why don’t you realize the truth that we’re alone in this world?”

Freedom Through Trust

Trust us difficult. Trust requires unnatural reactions to what the world throws at us. We want to question, to revisit, to blame. With every passing moment, our efforts to understand make us more anxious, more angry, more hurt. The very thing we try to help us through the pain makes that pain more real.

Yet with every moment God is whispering to us that His will is in motion, His purposes are at work. If we simply trust. Eventually, through acceptance and trust and submission and belief something amazing and transformational happens – we begin to heal.

The Sacrifice of Isaac by Caravaggio, 1603

It’s a mystery, a paradox. The same process we fight against is the very process that frees us. Jesus tells us in John 8:32 “and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” That truth, the only real Truth, is that when we trust in God and His infinite wisdom – as hard as that might be – we find peace and purpose.

God is the Answer to Our “Why?”

As strange as it seems, suffering invites us to see God in ways we’ve never imagined. Just as Job learned to trust in God more deeply and completely after his trials and tests, we learn how possible it is to trust God with our own lives through grief and suffering.

When we place our trust in God, even in the face of things and events we may never understand, a beautiful transformation takes place. Although we may not have a concrete answer, we’ll find peace that God truly does cause “all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28)

There are always “whys” to our suffering, no matter how difficult that suffering might be. While we may never fully understand the reasons for our grief, during this Advent Season we can take comfort in one ultimate truth. When we surrender our “whys” to God, He will always answer with the perfect answer: Himself.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

 

Twelve Days of Advent – #2 Numb

“Because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved.” Matthew 24:12-13

I travel. Like, a lot. As in nearly 200,000 miles on planes and 129 nights in hotels this year alone. A good 1/3 of my life is spent on the road either going to, participating in, or returning from business meetings. It’s a grueling pace.

One inevitable topic of conversation with new acquaintances is “how do you do that?” A more pointed version is “why do you still do it?” Ignoring the implied age reference, the second question is easy: I love what I do, and I’m fairly good at it. The answer to the first question? Technology. I confess: I embrace technology in every facet of my life where it can help me be more productive.

I’m old enough to remember not having a device in every hand. No texting, no smartphone with GPS and Google Maps, no social media, no Uber at my beck and call. I chuckled several years ago when my youngest daughter innocently asked “Dad, what grade where you in when you got your first cell phone?” I jokingly replied “Um, 20th grade?”  I was 26 before I ever saw my first cell phone, one of those Dick Tracy in-the-car monstrosities used by the CEO of the company I worked for and charging $12 per minute.

What does technology have to do with Advent?

Convenience. Pure and simple.

We live in the Convenience Revolution. Digital assistants organize our lives. Amazon delivers our most immediate “gotta have it right now” same-day urges. Skype or Google Hangouts allow us to reach out and “touch” someone face-to-face from our kitchen tables. We pay our bills from our cell phones. Selecting that “special” gift for a friend or loved one now is as easy as 15 minutes on Etsy.

For the truly connected, we’ve eliminated any need to deal with stress, boredom, discomfort, or pain. We can talk with distant friends and family on a whim – or just as easily avoid them. We can secretly laugh at those old classmates who haven’t “aged” all that well. Or (perhaps even more secretly) covet the “great family lives” they share on social media.

There’s another side to this coin, of course.

Technology and convenience have created an entire generation of human beings with virtually no basic human socialization skills. Uncomfortable with real interaction, many of us spend hours every day “interacting” online. We choose Netflix over the messiness of Cinemark. We live in gated communities with wifi-powered camera systems ensuring we never actually have to see our neighbors. Homework and research? Just download it.

Sadly, this also seems to have found its way into our churches and our relationship with God. We crave convenient sermons about topics that won’t make us too uncomfortable. We prefer tech-savvy “worship experiences” with pyrotechnics and high entertainment value over intense, prayer-infused scriptural examination that might ask us to look just a bit deeper into our own lives. We pass the peace of Christ to our neighbors, never even knowing their names.

We’ve become culturally addicted to stimulation and easy rewards without the need for  relationship investment. Worse, in the words of Facebook’s former vice president for user growth Chamath Palihapitiya, we’ve substituted “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops (including the hearts, likes, and thumbs up of various social media channels)” for real life, destroying how society works.

We’ve Become Numb

In short, we’ve become numb. Numb to struggle, numb to pain, numb to God’s voice, numb to the Holy Spirit’s longing for our hearts. Numb to anything except convenience, stimulation, and endless commentary on everyone else’s shortcomings.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Immediate gratification inevitably leads to longing for greater levels of stimulation. Where a Toyota once met our desires, now a Lamborghini satisfies our need for speed. Yesterday’s Coach Messenger Crossbody In Signature Jacquard Bag is replaced with today’s Christian Louboutin Cabata East-West Tote. (Ok, I’m a little scared I even know what those are.)

The funny thing about numbness is that the more we have of something, the more numb we become to it. We forget the yearning hearts of our youth, when simple things satisfied us. Sadly, for many of us this same thing happens to our relationships with God.

Remember when we started, when the feeling was new and we were ALIVE with passion for God? Stories in the Bible leapt off the page at us, speaking truth into our lives with every read. Sermons had us talking for days and our pastors were AMAZING.

Then, something happened. We allowed our relationship with God to become, well, casual. We got numb. What once held us in awe now barely amuses us. We lost the wonder, the reverence. We forgot David’s words from Psalm 147: “The Lord favors those who fear Him, those who wait for His lovingkindness.” (emphasis mine)

The same God we once revered became a God we now critique. The same God who saved mankind through the sacrifice of His only son is no longer big enough to save us from the world of man without a serious makeover. We redefine His words. We water down (or, in modern language, “edify”) His commandments. We demand the God we selectively deign to worship change to see us through our eyes, agreeing with who we believe ourselves to be.

Veneer, not Faith

Soon enough, our faith becomes little more than veneer, a love grown cold. We transform into the very people Jesus describes in Matthew 23:27, appearing whitewashed and beautiful on the outside, but on the inside full of “dead bones and uncleanness.” This type of faith, while not deeply fulfilling in our souls, works in the 21st Century because it doesn’t require much commitment.

Funny thing – we don’t see the irony. Yes, something has changed. But that something isn’t God, it’s us. We have changed, wanting immediate satisfaction. God is the same as He told us in Malachi 3:6 and Hebrews 13:8 and Revelation 1:8.

What has changed is that we’ve become numb to God’s voice. We don’t want to wait and anticipate, we want to receive and appreciate.

God’s promise is for all of us. He never asked us to live passionless (or painless) lives – just the opposite! His love for us surpasses our understanding. He provides an endless supply of all we need to walk in the fullness of His life.

During this Advent season, push beyond the numbness. Wait with the same fresh anticipation you felt when you first discovered His love.  Renew the expectation of His promise for peace and salvation in your heart. And let go of the idea that convenience is in any way a synonym for God.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

 

Twelve Days of Advent – #1 The Waiting …

For from days of old they have not heard or perceived by ear, nor has the eye seen a God besides You, who acts in behalf of the one who waits for Him.”  Isaiah 64:4

I’ve always loved music – any kind of music (well, I draw the line at Polka, but that’s a different post). Earlier this year, Tom Petty, a musical hero of my 20’s, passed away. In 1981, he released a song called “The Waiting.”

There’s a line in the song that says “You take it on faith, you take it to the heart, the waiting is the hardest part.” Many of us can identify with that sentiment, especially when we’re younger – I know I did. Waiting is, well, hard.

Stretching the analogy a bit farther, “the waiting is the hardest part” also describes much of what the season leading up to Christmas – and, ultimately, the season all Believers have been in since Christ’s ascension nearly 2,000 years ago – feels like.

“Pssst … Santa, you up there?”

As kids, we “wait” for Santa and his magical sleigh. As adults, we “wait” for gift-giving and Holiday parties. For Christians, Advent is a season of expectation, a time of preparation. Advent reminds us to wait and prepare for the inevitable return of Christ just as he came during that first Christmas season so long ago.

Yet, I’m also reminded this time of year of a different kind of waiting; a waiting more immediate, more real, and perhaps more painful for many – both during Christmas and throughout the year.

Prayers of Waiting

This kind of waiting relates directly to prayers and the cries of our hearts. Prayers for intercession, prayers for healing, prayers for miracles we so desperately need. Prayers that the divorce our spouse just asked for doesn’t happen. Prayers that the doctor’s diagnosis of cancer isn’t real. Prayers that “what is” might become “what if?”

The same prayers of anticipation the nation of Israel cried out during the 400 years between the prophetic writings of Malachi and the miraculous events in Bethlehem. Prayers of waiting …

Credit: www.iprayer.com

Sometimes God answers prayers immediately. We feel the imminence and power of His hand in our lives and reach out to tell everyone about the amazing goodness of His love.

But other times – perhaps too often for many of us – prayers seem to be answered with deafening silence, miracles hovering forever just over the horizon. As time passes and God doesn’t appear genie-like in response to our plea-filled conjuring, our faith can falter.

Why does this happen? If God truly is the God of Salvation, a Savior who actually saves, why do we often feel so alone, so empty, so … forsaken?  Where is this God of Jacob and Abraham who sent His son to take our place on a Roman cross of humiliation?

Two Occasions

On two occasions leading up to and in the midst of his Crucifixion Jesus himself speaks for those of us facing times of despair. The first occurred in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus prayed with such earnestness his sweat became like “great drops of blood, falling down the ground” (Luke 22:44). In this seminal moment of temptation, he asks God to take away the sacrificial cup, to spare him the trial and suffering to come.

We don’t read if God answers, because Jesus answers for Him, saying “yet not my will, but Yours be done.” Jesus knew God saw his heart, and knew his deepest desire was to follow God’s will.

“The Importance of Prayer,” Sebastiano Ricci c. 1701

How many times have we been able to ask and answer our own questions of God in confidence? Too often, our prayers seem like one-way streets, shouting to God to repair our lives yet stopping short of asking what God wants from us.

The second instance occurred on the cross. As described in Matthew 27:46, “About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’” Imagine the anguish of one who has been with God from before the beginning of time suddenly left alone, his prayers unanswered, his cries met with absolute silence. Yet still Jesus trusted.

Mother Teresa, writing in a letter to spiritual confident Rev. Michael van der Peet about the separation she experienced from Jesus, said “the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear, the tongue moves (in prayer) but does not speak … I want you to pray for me–that I let Him have (a) free hand.”

Hear the reflection of Jesus’ approach to God in her words. In the face of unanswered prayers, she acknowledges His sovereignty in all things.

As we grow in our relationship with God, more deeply understanding His purposes for us, our attitudes change. We come to realize how much God loves us and already knows the desires of hearts. Even when we’ve been waiting. Even when we think He isn’t listening.

The true meaning of Advent is this: Pray and Trust. Ask God for a need, show our faith in His Will, Trust in His provenance, and wait with expectancy and hope.

“My God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus,” Paul wrote in Philippians 4:19. His miracles are still here – Emmanuel still means “God is with us.”

During this Advent season, don’t fall victim to the belief hope is gone. Don’t build walls around your heart so you can’t feel God’s touch. Don’t deafen your ears to His call.

Trust in God’s promises. Lift Him up in praise and worship daily. Thank Him for the blessings and protections He provides and will yet provide.

Tom Petty passed away as all humans do.  God’s Word and His promises will never die.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Fearless

“The Lord is for me; I will not fear; What can man do to me?”Psalm 118:6

The first draft of this post was written during the devastating aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. At the time, I was reflecting on how helpless we often feel over things we can’t control, like natural disasters and illness. My theme was power and powerlessness. Recent events have changed my focus.

Instead, I want to shift to a different emotion: fear.

We live in a world of fear. Fear of tomorrow, fear of the unknown, fear of each other, fear of what might change us. We fear things in the dark, we fear strangers and people with different skin color or sexual orientation or religious beliefs. We fear our own mortality.

Credit: Reuters

The late hours of October 1 were erupted with the sound of gunfire as shots rained down on a large crowd of concert goers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas. As of this writing (one week later), 58 men and women are dead – as well as the shooter whose name I won’t sensationalize by repeating here – and over 500 wounded. A stunned world cried out in dumbfounded shock, expressing an urgent plea to do something, to bring sense to the madness. And underlying that urge is an ancient, primal instinct: fear that we can never be safe.

Fear surrounds us

I recently revisited Luke’s Gospel and was reminded of this passage: There will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth dismay among nations, in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting from fear and the expectation of the things which are coming upon the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” Luke 21:25-26

While the focus of this post is not end-times prophecy, doesn’t it often feel like we live in a period very similar to what Jesus described? Fear surrounds us, gripping our hearts and paralyzing our emotions. Many of us seem consumed by a sense of dread.

Why should fear be so deeply ingrained in us? If as professing Christians we believe in salvation why are we afraid of harm or death? Why can we not find the calm of David in Psalm 23, walking “in the valley of the shadow of death” yet fearing no evil?

As children, we’re taught to fear the first time we hear the word “NO!” When we mature, fear plants deep roots and grows, for many becoming a dark shadow controlling their lives. The writer of Hebrews tells us Jesus became flesh and endured death on the cross that he “might free those who through fear … were subject to slavery all their lives.” Hebrews 2:15

Physical fear, the fear of pain or death, is natural. When it doesn’t control us, fear can protect us from harm and danger, helping us make prudent decisions and avoid miscalculated risks. Yet when uncontrolled, fear can replace our trust in God, substituting belief in a personality ability to deliver ourselves from adversity through actions. We often begin to believe in our own invulnerability.

In the news coverage following the events in Las Vegas, I was struck by the image of a lone concert goer standing in the midst of the carnage facing the lone gunman while everyone around him crouched in fear. Granted, he had been enjoying adult beverages and his unique demonstration of fearlessness is not one I might recommend, but his defiance represented bravery to many. It reminded me of another story.

2,600 years ago, a young prophet named Daniel was thrown into in a lions’ den by Darius the Mede (known in scripture as “Darius the King”)  for disobeying an edict not to pray to YAHWEY.  Undeterred, Daniel defied the edict and continued to pray, showing no fear.

“Daniel in the Lions’ Den,” Sir Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1614/1616

I don’t know where the defiant concert goer in Las Vegas found his fearlessness, but I’m positive where Daniel found his. Trusting in God, Daniel faced down wild animals that would have devoured him, knowing the outcome would be God’s will.

Be anxious for nothing

Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians “Be anxious for nothing” (Philippians 4:6). David tells us in Psalm 55:22 Cast your burden upon the Lord and He will sustain you; He will never allow the righteous to be shaken.”

God provides deliverance from fear. He tells us not to let worry and anxiety grip us. In Jesus’ own words, who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life?(Matthew 6:27).

Does this mean we will never suffer tragedy or hardship? No. Does it mean we won’t be a victim in a tragedy like the one that took so many lives in Las Vegas, or Nice, or London, or New York? No. But it does mean that as Believers our salvation is secure and God will guide us on the path He has set for us. Equally important, we know the destination awaiting us.

This was the fearlessness that drove the Apostles, virtually all of which were persecuted and executed for their beliefs. The same fearlessness comforted Stephen as he was stoned to death for speaking the truth of Jesus. It fueled William Tyndale, a key reformer who was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536.

Fearlessness empowered Dietrich Bonhoeffer to stand against Hitler’s treatment of Jews, resulting in his 1945 hanging. It burned in the hearts of seven Egyptian Christians murdered in January 2010 as they left their church in Nag Hammadi, Egypt.

And unwavering fearlessness based on trust in God surrounded the nine victims at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina murdered as they stood to pray in June 2015.

Credit: NY Daily News

Each of these and thousands of other similar instances around the world speak to the power of defeating fear. And they share another common bond: enduring love. In his first epistle, John writes “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear,” 1 John 4:18.

Love drives out fear

Ultimately, fear is self-focused. When we’re afraid, we’re almost always focused on something about ourselves – what we might lose, what might be taken away from us, pain or hardship we might endure. Fear drives us to distrust those we love, look skeptically at our neighbors and colleagues, hate those around us who have more than we do.

On the other hand, love is always about someone else, and perfect love is solely about God. When we allow the perfect love of God to penetrate our hearts, there’s simply no room for self-centeredness or conceit. And where there is no self-focus, there is no fear.

There will always be loss and pain and even death for as long as we draw breath. But the promise of the Gospel is that God’s salvation through the sacrifice of Christ strengthens our spirits and souls and bodies, giving us triumph over our weaknesses and victory in the face of adversity.

Faith in God’s love emboldens Believers. As Paul wrote to Timothy concerning the nature of suffering and faith: God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline.” (2 Timothy 1:7)

Perfect love derives from the acceptance of Christ as our soul source of comfort and salvation. God’s perfect love for us, believed by us, replaces fear with love. And where loves lives, hate and fear can never take hold.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Living in Pits

“Which one of you will have a son or an ox fall into a well, and will not immediately pull him out on a Sabbath day?” – Luke 14:5

Ok, I admit it – I loved Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” Trilogy (aka “Batman”). Everything about the series was amazing. Yeah, Heath Ledger stole the show as the Joker in the second installment, but each film had its moments.

One of my favorite scenes from the trilogy was the intense build up to Bruce Wayne climbing out of the pit in “The Dark Knight Rises.” For those who’ve not seen it, click here – but come back!

The most interesting thing about this scene isn’t Wayne’s final emergence, but rather how he got there. Up to the moment of his escape, he believed he could be freed by relying on man’s inventions – the safety of a rope, the practiced skill of his own hand. It was not until he let go of his own contrivances that he could escape the prison of his own shortcomings.

How often are we like Bruce Wayne in that pit, relying on our own efforts, our own “good works” to free us from the pits and wells into which we inevitably fall?

We need saving every day

In the passage from Luke I began with, Jesus is explaining curing a man of dropsy on the Sabbath, a high sin in the eyes of the Pharisees. Jesus’ message was clear: saving a lost soul is never wrong even on the Sabbath.

Yet as I read this passage my sense is that Jesus’ point was not so much about his actions, but instead about our needs.  That is, man needs saving every day, including the Sabbath. And God, in His righteousness, saves us every day, including the Sabbath.

“Good God, man! Don’t you know it’s the Sabbath?”

Jesus often used the Sabbath to point out our dependence on God’s hand. Notice how he cast the unclean spirit out in Capernaum on a Sabbath (Mark 1:21-18). Or healing a crippled man at Bethesda (John 5:1-18). Or healing the woman in the synagogue (Luke 13:10-17).

The common thread in all of Jesus’ encounters – both on the Sabbath and other days – is how inadequate our role is in our own healing. Can our works or personal efforts save us? Do we really need God to work out our salvation? Where is faith?

Paul addresses this question beautifully in Ephesians 2, specifically verses 8 and 9: For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

We simply can’t pull ourselves from the “miry clay” of existence (Psalm 40:2). We need God to provide us His hand, His grace.

Works without faith are empty

There’s a long-standing debate (particularly between Catholicism and Reformative Protestantism) regarding the roles played by works vs. faith in salvation. For some, the question is in the interpretation of Paul’s writings from passages such as Romans 3:28 and Romans 4:5. These folks will split hairs over works of good vs. works of law. That’s the subject of a different post.

Others will point to the epistle of James where he writes in 2:26 For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.”

Which is it? Do our works earn our salvation or are we saved simply by faith in Jesus Christ as the one true way to God the Father, repenting of our past?

“The Sacrifice of Isaac,” Rembrandt van Rijn, 1635

This confusion is around context. In both instances, James and Paul use the Genesis 22 story of Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac to illustrate their meaning. Yet even as some might argue James and Paul disagree, they in fact support each other.

In the case of James, he isn’t claiming we have the ability to work out our own salvation but is instead distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate faith. Both are in a sense “faith,” but “perfected” faith goes beyond easy social media labels such as “#lovetrumpshate” and “#sharingiscaring” – instead, it extends into a way of life. Works without faith are empty.

James teaches that authentic faith is demonstrated by our actions, not that our actions win our salvation. Abraham’s righteous deeds (James 2:21-22) earned him nothing. However, his obedience to God proved his faith was genuine, “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

Right faith leads to right actions

Right faith leads to right actions. Paul contends that without trusting in God, Abraham could never have offered his son on the altar. He uses Abraham’s story to show that people are justified on the basis of real faith rather than their own efforts; James shows that Abraham’s faith was proven to be real because it worked itself out in his actions. Two halves of the same whole.

We each occasionally finds ourselves at the bottom of a soul-pit. All too often, we fall there through our own actions and decisions. Failed marriages, addictions, abusive relationships, depression, anger we can never seem to let go of, hatred of another because of their skin color or language or yes, even their definitions of love.

While it’s true that we can stop doing what dropped us into this pit or that well, an unrepentant heart relying on its own efforts is simply blind to the next hole into which it stumbles.

Without God’s extended hand to lift us from these self-made pits of the soul, we inevitably fall back into them, never truly escaping. Salvation doesn’t come from temporary acts of kindness trying to soothe our guilty consciences or show our Goliath-sized compassion, but by turning over our lives to a God willing to accept repentance, trusting in His will.

Bruce Wayne’s man-made ropes could never set him free. Nor can ours. Only faith – the right kind of faith – opens the narrow door to God’s forgiveness and our ultimate freedom.

What rope are you clinging to?

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Comfortable Church, Comfortable Christians

“These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.” – John 16:33

I recently reconnected with a high school friend whom I hadn’t seen in years. He missed our last two reunions but we’re connected on social media and after reading several of my recent posts on Miafede he reached out for an opinion, one I candidly felt a bit unqualified to answer. Still, he asked so I wasn’t shy in responding.

My friend and his wife were struggling to find a church where they could both “fit in” and feel “comfortable.” He mentioned how “boring and stodgy” some churches were, or how “loud and edgy” others seemed. They tried the Unitarian route but that felt a bit too “new age.” He also shared how his wife had grown increasingly sensitive to the questions of politically correct tolerance and how “uncomfortable” she was in any church she felt was too judgmental.

A few months ago, they visited another church on the recommendation of a friend. It was perfect! Great music, beautiful campus setting, a super cool, not-quite-sure-how-old-he-is Senior Pastor who wore hip v-neck t-shirts, had a great haircut, and shied away from any touchy subjects like same-sex marriage, abortion and deep scriptural introspection.

“Who, me? Naw, this is just my normal hairdo…”

Instead, this Senior Pastor masterfully interwove the Bible, the Quran, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism (don’t you love how the Zoroasters combine cosmogonic dualism and eschatological monotheism like the metaphysical bosses they are?), this-ism and that-ism (quoting the inimitable John Lennon) to create a beautiful tapestry of feel-good theology where every sermon somehow led to the inevitable conclusion that our old-fashioned Biblical notions of God are just too small and limited. And above it all, this church was just so … comfortable. My friend gave me his new church’s website and was curious what I thought.

Scripture doesn’t teach a comfortable Gospel

Honestly, I was surprised. I’d seen many comments from this Senior Pastor in recent months, outspoken and provocative opinions on what “real” Christians should be in this inclusive, post-modern age. His theology, while novel, was hardly scriptural. It felt like more of a “build my audience” social media strategy. But that’s just the industry I’m in coming out.

Repentance? What’s that? Change our behavior? Why would God want us to change? Narrow gates? Don’t you know all roads lead to Heaven? Treating others as we want to be treated? Yesterday’s news. Isn’t love for each other just as they are the only thing that matters? After all, enlightened 21st Century spiritual beings have rid themselves of judgmental attitudes and treat others as they want to be treated, not as we wanted to be treated. Apparently, this last bit is a real thing known as the Platinum Rule (click the link and look it up).

Comfortable church. I somehow missed that phrase the last time I searched scripture. But then, my Bibles – I have several – aren’t redacted with all conceivably-offensive passages removed or softened.

So yummy!

A growing trend in recent years has been for churches to design “worship experiences” and “conversations” to attract “Christians” and “Seekers” who reject traditional Christianity yet profess their spirituality. And yes, I overused air quotes for a reason. An increasing number of self-labeled post-modern Christians want a comfortable church, conforming to their personal beliefs about life. Just not the church Jesus built on the rock of Peter’s faith (Matthew 16:17-18).

Religious comfort for many is often about social classification – wealth, education, race, politics, gender, social justice, and race. We prefer to worship with people who look like us, share our views, demonstrate our values. We want to be comfortable in our moments of worship. Is this what Scripture actually teaches us?

True Believers surrender their slavery to the world 

Let’s start with Jesus’ own words: If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate … even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.” (Luke 14:26-27, 33)

Ouch. If I’m playing word association, those aren’t my first thoughts when someone says “Christian comfort.” Many contemporary preachers teach “peace and prosperity” theology or “revisionist” understandings of the Bible. “God is Love,” they exhort us, He doesn’t want His followers to suffer or be uncomfortable. God loves us just the way we are. One popular self-described “20-year ministry veteran” blogger went so far as to publish an article entitled 10 Things This Christian Doesn’t Believe About the Bible. Basically, the writer could simply have left out the first two and the seventh words in that title.

When tempted by Satan’s promise of a comfortable life, Jesus responded with: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God” (Luke 4:4). Predicting his role as God in the flesh he proclaimed that just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). When asked about the path to the Kingdom he replied Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able(Luke 13:24).

Jesus promised many things, but a “comfortable faith” wasn’t on the list. The Gospel Jesus preached and lived was anything but comfortable. Even with the adulating crowds of his first two years and the thunderous reception he received entering Jerusalem during his final week, Jesus’ ministry was under constant attack and ridicule by the authorities and doubters. Ultimately, his reward wasn’t a mega seaside villa in Caesarea. He didn’t graduate from the synagogue to a lucrative career headlining 1st Century Talmudic  conferences delivering lofty how-to lectures on living your best life now.

Rather, Jesus’ ministry taught the sober, uncomfortable truth that God’s way is different from ours. To follow Jesus likely meant persecution (John 15:20) and hatred from the world (John 15:18-19). There would be no inviting homes and get-away vacations (Matthew 8:18-22). Life would be buffeted by trial and storms (Luke 8:22-25). Ultimately, following Jesus might end in betrayal and death (Mark 13:12-13), just as Jesus’ own earthly life ended.

True followers of Christ don’t focus on comfortable sermons and vague spirituality. They don’t throw out inconvenient scriptural truth. They don’t shop for pastors or preachers who “tickle their ears, hoarding “teachers in accordance to their own desires” (2 Timothy 4:3). True Believers surrender their slavery to the world and are simply in the world.

A True Church doesn’t conform to comfort or personal desires. It doesn’t sample and poll to determine the next sermon series. A True Church teaches that we have been “crucified with Christ” and no longer live our lives but experience Christ who lives within us as we “live by faith in the Son of God” (Galatians 2:20). A True Church is made up of people living by the teachings of the Word, not by repackaged, watered-down socially-acceptable facsimiles.

“Seriously, can’t I just hear some great music and a rockin’ sermon?” (Photo courtesy Daily Mail)

Pastor John MacArthur puts it this way: “Only if the church hides its message and ceases to be what God designed can it make an unbeliever comfortable.”

I told my friend I was happy he and his wife had found a church. I also cautioned him to heed what the Bible actually says. To study and read for himself. To write down what he hears in a sermon and test it against scripture. Not simply trust the words of a well-spoken Senior Pastor promising an interpretive Gospel that doesn’t exist.

There is a True Church here on earth. That Church has one role: to call Believers and prepare them for eternal life. The True Church is doing God’s genuine work, inviting His chosen to repentance and the Kingdom. With or without the skinny jeans, fitted v-neck T’s, revised theology for a modern ear, or pithy blogs.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Lost

“If anyone, regardless of reputation or credentials, preaches something other than what you received originally, let him be cursed.” – Galatians 1:9

So, yeah – I’m a “guy” (apologies to the sensitive crowd who might consider that term unseemly in this age of identification correctness).

Let me explain.

  • I love football (the American kind – especially the Dallas Cowboys; don’t hate).
  • I consider well-made (vs. well-done, aka “burnt” in Texas vernacular) burgers a “Capital F” Food Group.

    Downlow Burger from Love & Salt (Los Angeles)
    Photo credit: la.eater.com
  • For me, a meaningful conversation with another “guy” can go like this: “Hey dude – what’s up?” “Not much, bro, you doin’ ok?” “Yeah, man, I’m great – wanna beer?”
  • It’s not a crime to wear the same gym clothes twice (ok, maybe more) without washing them.
  • And I have a genetic predisposition against asking directions.

See, it also turns out I have a love of all things technology. With fingertip access to what was once military-grade GPS systems on that little black appendage semi-permanently attached to the end of my arm, I feel no need to get help from passing pedestrians or especially my ever-faithful-passenger-seat companion (aka my wife) on where I took that last wrong turn. But then, I seem to take wrong turns … a lot. Another story for another post.

It is, however, a great segue to this post. Because it seems to me most of us make wrongs turns … a lot. And this is nowhere truer than in that messy family we call the Church.

It might be easy to support this statement by citing works from writers like Palmer Theological Seminary Professor Ron Sider in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience where he details how evangelical Christians are just sort of like the rest of society: same divorce rate, same indifference to the poor, nearly the same rate of unmarried cohabitation, etc.

If Christians are just as flawed as everyone else, what makes the Church so special?

So if Christians are just as flawed as everyone else, what makes the Church so special? This seems to be a favorite theme these days of en vogue “New Christian” bloggers, pointing to the flawed nature of humanity as Exhibit 1 in their argument that sin is our common bond and thus should be our commonly accepted bondage, freeing us from judgment of any kind.

Yet such easy arguments miss a vastly larger issue: over the last several decades the Church itself has lost its way. Consider what many churches look like today: vast amphitheaters catering to a “here I am, entertain me” mindset craving worship services more akin to rock concerts; in-house coffee shops with central casting baristas complete with just the right combination of tats and piercings; senior pastors delivering sermons tailor made for TED Talk cult status; painless sermons about the great things God has in store for us; empty rhetoric more concerned with talking about change than actually being change.

In many ways, the modern church has fallen victim to “cult-of-movement” worship. Where in the past the Church adapted to a culture and then worked to change it for the better, it seems that today’s church too often adapts to culture in order to be accepted by it as-is. Individualism and consumerism have replaced community and Kingdom. More “me” and less “He.”

Photo credit: theodysseyonline.com

This kind of worship promises fulfillment and purpose found in devout spiritual practice without awkward things like doctrine, teaching, commandments, sacrifice, obedience, or discipline. Jesus is preached more like a hip celeb with 2.2 billion Twitter followers than the Word in the Beginning. Personal relationships are promised with God, comforting and loving, just not sacrificial ones.

Today’s church too often adapts to culture in order to be accepted by it as-is

Credit: Gallup

For many, this type of “worship experience” fulfills their needs. Show up on Sunday (or Saturday night for the contemporary types), get a familiarly caffeinated dose of community, sing a few anthem songs, hear a killer sermon (a poll released by Gallup from April of this year indicated that 75% of worshippers say the sermon is their primary reason for attending church). All done till next week.

Don’t think I’m ridiculing these church-goers – this is where they are and God meets them right there, and their needs. It’s just that elevating the individual experience comes at the expense of God’s desire for real community (Ephesians 4:16). And opens the door for an errant Gospel.

For millions more, these attempts by the church to be more culturally relevant – through activities and missions nearly indistinguishable from secular social activism, to outspoken celebrity pastors taking positions more appropriate in a political campaign rally, to scripture-light series resembling Tony Robbins seminars – ring empty and hollow.

Credit: Business Insider

Which may help explain why less than 36% of the U.S. population now attends church yet when asked nearly 60% claim to be spiritual and to even pray regularly. Something seems missing from much of organized Christianity today for a vast number of believers.

There are, perhaps, a number of reasons for this drifting away from an Acts 2 or Galatians 1 vision of how Church and Community were designed to heed the Gospel. The need for cultural relevance might be a major contributor. As social activists grow louder in their demands for sloganeered “Social Justice,” accepting any and all points of view as equal, the appeal of a church doctrine which appears judgmental gets lost in the noise, relegated to the trash heap of “yesterday’s” religion. “All good paths lead to God and the Church just needs to get over itself,” claim the prophets of New Faith.

And as churches attempt to self-correct, adopting missions and messages deemed more “tolerant” irrespective of true Biblical inspiration, traditional conservative worshipers who feel these churches are straying from the Word may leave in search of something else – or even abandon church altogether; often transforming their faith from a light for the whole world into a lamp hidden under their nightstands (Matthew 5:14-15).

No easy answers exist for those who, to paraphrase Indian philosopher Bara Dada, “like Christ but reject Christians” (as represented by the Church). Perhaps the perceived hypocrisy of some modern Christians is too strong to overcome. Or perhaps folks have simply become inoculated from the real message of the Gospel, as Pastor Doug Ponder recently suggested in this post.

Regardless, if the Church is to emulate Jesus’ example of ministering to the lost, it must first find its way back. That means returning to the real meaning of Salvation, to the Truth that modern cries for Social Justice based on good intentions and actions often ignore the fundamental role of Faith in Christ alone.

Salvation, freely offered, comes at a cost

We can’t simply “feel” our way to God, nor purchase our way into Grace through good deeds or euphemisms. Nor do we earn Salvation by accepting God’s will; rather, we accept Salvation by following the commands and direction given to us by God.

Salvation, freely offered, does come at a cost, requiring that we turn away from actions and behaviors that may seem acceptable to the world but from which God hides face (Isaiah 59:2). This was the heart of Paul’s message to the Galatians in verse 1:10 Am I trying to win the approval of human beings or of God?

Scripture and Biblical instruction are not tired relics from an irrelevant past. They are, as Jesus tells us in John 15, what we must do to receive the gift God offers through the price of the Cross. And when we follow God’s will rather than what the world expects, we may be hated and rejected, criticized and ridiculed and accused, for we offer no safe harbor for sin.

Yes, to some this path seems rigid, even scary. No wonder there’s such temptation to dilute the Gospel message, to soften scripture’s message into one more palatable to modern tastes where no one is told what is right or wrong.

And it’s no mystery churches have lost their way trying to respond. Fortunately there’s a GPS (and even a few Apps) for that. It’s called the Bible. And within its pages are all the directions we will ever need to follow God’s call home.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Easter Thoughts: They Were No Heroes

“And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the saying of the Lord, how he had said to him, ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times.’ And he went out and wept bitterly.” – Luke 22:61-62

Note: This post was originally published in 2016.  I’ve condensed it here in honor of Easter week. It may take a strange turn or two, but stay with me.

David Bowie.  Whoa – that’s not a name one normally associates with Easter.  But follow me here and we’ll make the connection.  I grew up loving Bowie’s work – from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars to 1983’s Let’s Dance his music shaped my own formative love of creating and playing music.

Later, I would appreciate how influential Bowie has been on musicians across the spectrum.  Artists as varied as The Killers, Jay Z (that’s right, Mr. Beyoncé),Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta known professionally as Lady Gaga, Radiohead, Lorde, Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump, Arctic Monkeys, and countless others attribute much of their direction and style to one phase or another of Bowie’s career. 

(Parenthetical sidenote: for an entertaining read, check out this tongue-in-cheek story from the UK’s Mirror on how Bowie eerily predicted the Rise of Kanye West and the Destruction of the World. But I digress.)

Every year at this time, Christians remember their most sacred and Holy week: an ecstatic, triumphal entrance into Jerusalem laden with prophetic symbolism; the crescendo of confrontations with authorities; the somber and mysterious Thursday night dinner where Passover’s traditional ritual meal was replaced by a New Covenant; the poignant retreat to the Garden of Gethsemane symbolizing a fallen Garden of Eden for a final plea resulting in betrayal, arrest, and further betrayal; a sham middle-of-the-night trial before the self-important Sanhedrin and ending before a pompous Roman magistrate cowered into accommodating the mob; the humiliation of public flogging; a mocking, agonizing procession through the very streets so victoriously entered six days before; nailed and hung from a cross reserved for the most vile of offenders while guards laughed, drank and gambled over the very clothes worn during the ordeal; a final gasp and then … death, burial and sorrow.  Three days later, the impossibility of a promise fulfilled – resurrection and the defeat of death.

This is the story we share each Easter.  Filled with more excitement, intrigue, politics, violence, and redemption than the best Hollywood film.  Our focus is usually the same with each telling – Jesus’ destiny with his accusers and his overcoming their most heinous intentions and conquering sin.

Credit: Masayoshi Sukita

So what, then, is the connection between Bowie and Easter?  This is where we go on a bit of a journey.  In 1977, Bowie released his twelfth studio album, “Heroes.” The album and its title track “Heroes” remain among my favorite pieces by Bowie.  The original version, an up-tempo rocker, became an anthem of sorts, even though the lyrics have always been a bit murky.

In the 2013 feature film Lone Survivor I developed an entirely new appreciation for the song.  The final credits rolled over Peter Gabriel’s updated version and I began considering how the lyrics, with a bit of rewriting, could poignantly describe the experience of the first Apostles during the last hours of Jesus’ life.  And here we begin the connection.

How might that week have looked through the eyes of those closest to Jesus? We certainly get a glimpse in the Gospel stories, yet these retellings are always in the third person.  What must it have felt like to be Judas in the moments after he realizes the great tragedy his betrayal would hold; or Peter in the very moment of his denials; or Mary heading to the tomb Sunday morning not filled with hope but instead openly weeping and mourning?

The Calling of Peter and Andrew – Bernardo Strozzi

These were not extraordinary men and women – a few fishermen, a tax collector, a thief and liar, a Zealot or two with delusions of defeating Rome, a tent maker and Pharisee, a probable prostitute, a possible outcast from an ancient royal bloodline, various tradesmen, hangers-on from the lowest rungs of first century Palestinian life.  Broken sinners all – like each of us.

In the eyes of the Jewish Levitical Priesthood and their Roman overlords, a laughable, motley rabble of would-be revolutionaries; hardly the stuff of regime change.  Pontius Pilate thought Jesus was simply misguided saying “I find no basis for a charge in this man.”  Herod Antipas, the puppet ruler of Galilee and Perea, ridiculed Jesus and draped him in an ornate robe before sending him back to Pilate.

Yet the men and women making up Jesus’ inner circle each shared a common and ultimately unbreakable bond – they followed a leader whose unstoppable presence and force-of-will would topple empires.

During the weeks and months leading up to Jesus’ final week, their enthusiasm and confidence – perhaps even arrogance – emboldened them.  They were in the presence of the Messiah and the overthrow of earthly oppression was surely imminent.  It’s easy to understand how they would be emboldened. Jesus had calmed the storm, healed the sick, restored sight to the blind, raised the dead, fed the multitudes, rebuked the hypocrites … why should Jerusalem be any different?

Albert Einstein is credited with many sayings.  Two of my favorites are “Adversity introduces a man to himself” and “The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.”

I’m reminded of these in reflecting on the aftermath of the Jesus’ trial and execution.  Those same men and women buoyed with faux confidence saw their true characters revealed, and knew fear and shame and humiliation.  Not the traits of heroes, but more like the actions of frail, flawed, imperfect humans – just like each of us.

Jesus’ followers were not heroes from their actions before the Resurrection – they became heroes as a result of their surrender to the grace and salvation evidenced by the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus.

To believers, the miracle of the Resurrection is manifest and 2,000 years after the event a foregone conclusion.  Of course Jesus triumphed; what other outcome could there have been when the Spirit of God Himself takes on human form? But to the men and women of Jesus’ time, and to Paul, Timothy, Silas, Titus and hundreds and then thousands of disciples who followed them, their strength was anything but inevitable.  They were not heroes from their actions before the Resurrection – they became heroes as a result of their surrender to the grace and salvation evidenced by the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus.

Nearly all of the original Apostles and early disciples of Jesus followed him into death or exile.  They did so not with preordained knowledge of Cosmic Supremacy but through that uniquely, divinely-gifted human trait of Faith.  They believed and then were empowered to spread the Kingdom of God. They found the heroes within themselves when faced with the greatest tragedy they could ever have imagined.

If I were to rewrite Bowie’s “Heroes” I wouldn’t change that much.  I might alter
the 3nd verse to reflect Judas or Peter in the Garden.  Or perhaps the 2nd verse to reflect how the Kingship of Jesus redeems the Lost.  And maybe change the line “We could be heroes, just for one day” to read “Now we can be heroes, every day.”

The power of God’s grace can make heroes in faith of us all.  If we simply believe, accept, listen, and act.

One coincidental footnote – Bowie played a cameo role as Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film “The Last Temptation of Christ.” I doubt he connected the dots…

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Five Things You Think You Know (But Really Don’t) – #2 HAPPINESS

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

4:47 am. Thursday. San Francisco International Airport. Another early morning start and another first-thing-in-the-morning flight.  Yesterday had been long, and yeah, I was out a little later with a client dinner than I planned. So my 3 hours of sleep had barely put a dent in the desire to simply crawl back into bed for the rest of the morning.

Approaching the security line, I was greeted not by the typically nonchalant security folks who spend their time dutifully confirming the 7-year old (and 15 pounds lighter) picture on your driver’s license is actually you, but rather,  a living, breathing human replica of Tigger.

I’m sure you’ve met them – perhaps you’re one of them! Those infectiously happy and gregarious people who seem to have more enthusiasm than a Green Bay Packers fan on Game Day.  Now in full disclosure, I’m usually one of those folks who answers the checkout clerk’s question at the store on how my day is going with an exuberant “Ter-RIF-ic!” and a smile on my face … but not this morning.

No, this morning I simply wanted to get through security, grab a cup of coffee and get on my plane. And there, standing between me and my morning caffeine fix was Officer Giddily Enthusiastic.

Sometimes our faith can be like this encounter.  A smiling, ever-perky pastor providing uplifting messages of how God is interested first and foremost in our pursuit of personal happiness; that if we only cast off our cares and worries and really understand scripture we’ll surely see how God never wants us to suffer, never wants us endure hardship. Prosperity awaits just around the next corner because …

#2 GOD WANTS ME TO BE HAPPY

“10,000 years in a bottle gives you SUCH a crick in the neck!”

It’s a common belief to some that God is little more than a “personal genie,” that if we just rub Him the right way He won’t merely grant our obligatory three wishes but all of them!  We even convince ourselves clearly sinful actions are ok by saying, “It’s fine – God just wants me to be happy.”

What exactly drives this belief? Why are we convinced God serves at our whim?  Webster’s defines happiness as “a pleasurable or satisfying experience; a state of well-being and contentment.”  Happiness is an emotion of euphoria, a state of mind that can come and go. Today you’re smiling gleefully at the check out counter clerk and the next you’re staring bleary-eyed at an airport security officer.

In this sense, happiness is like a temporarily-quenched thirst – the water always needs to be replenished.  Sadly, we often require even more to quench it the next time. And herein lies the heart of the matter.

Nowhere in the Bible – even with the most liberal and progressive reading – do the words “Blessed are the deliriously happy” appear.  Rather, we find “Blessed are the pure in heart,” (Matthew 5:8), or “Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart,” (Psalm 37:4 – and note, the meaning of this is not that God will give you anything you want, but rather that He will place in your heart the desires He has for you), or “Blessed is the one whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty,” (Job 5:17).

The emotion of happiness is almost always based on circumstances, and circumstances constantly change. God never asks us to pursue being “happy,” nor does He promise us happiness. In fact Jesus himself tells us quite specifically: Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me,” (Matthew 16:24).

God’s plan is for us is not to achieve mindless “happiness” in the modern sense of the word. He never assures a blissful, stress-free life in this world filled with comfortable possessions and overflowing abundance regardless of our actions or desires.  Rather, He wants us to realize that none of these brings real happiness, just as Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well.

When we attach our happiness to the things of this world we become like the rich young ruler, possessed by our possessions

To be sure, God wants our lives to be filled with hope and joy – this is one of the fundamental messages of the Bible. Jesus himself personified joy and was criticized for it (Luke 7:34). But when we attach our happiness to the things of this world – people, possessions or life circumstances – we become like the rich young ruler, possessed by our possessions.

Scripture tells us the joy of the Lord is our strength (Nehemiah 8:10). We can live into that by cultivating the joy God has planned.

Over the next few days, try mediating on God’s promises to be our protector, our comforter.  Declare them out loud (well, probably best not to try that in an airport security line)! Press pause on chasing a fleeting emotional high and focus instead on the never-changing God of creation. You’ll find a serenity and fulfillment surpassing anything of in this world.

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

Delusion of Success

A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Luke 18:18

As a kid I loved Albert Einstein. You know – the crazy hair, the rumpled clothes he didn’t change for days on end (yeah, that’s where I picked up my wear-till-they-stand-on-their-own gym clothes personal hygiene habit), that funny accent and goofy moustache. Oh, and the little equation that got people so excited a few decades back.

During his life, Einstein allegedly said a lot of curious and interesting things. Some of these are just urban legends (like the infamous “no bees, no humans” blurb), although I suspect Einstein would have taken credit! Others, like God doesn’t throw dice with the universe” ring clear and true as the deep reflection of a brilliant scientist looking out at the vast cosmos trying to make sense of it all.

One of my favorites is: “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”

I love this quote. It’s great a example of why Einstein was such a hero of mine: he seemed unconcerned with the ways of the world. Einstein was Einstein – he really didn’t care what the world thought.

We see this same trait in people all around us, although not always through the lens of famous patents-clerks-turned-physicists. Like the guy at work we all know will “never go anywhere” because he doesn’t spend enough time kissing

Photo courtesy of Fodor’s

up to that ogre of a boss whose idea of career development is making sure you know all the syllables in her absolutely-must-have-mid-morning “Light-Iced, Double-Shot, Non-Fat, 8-pump, Sugar-Free Vanilla, Extra Caramel, Caramel Macchiatto.” Or your friend from college who’s completely happy in the same job he got in 1996 because who needs all the hassle with that responsibility thing? Or the neighborhood 6-year olds who can play outside on a Summer day for endless hours doing absolutely nothing…

Not caring for the ways of the world is a talent, a gift. Although instinctive in children, we tend to lose it during the whole “adulting” thing and recapturing often takes cultivation and effort, particularly in the face of a world idolizing achievement and image. Not measuring ourselves against the trappings of a material life is so counter-cultural that people who follow this path are often referred to as “losers;” or worse, they’re simply ignored by the privileged ones with clucking head shaking.  This seems especially so in the very pubic conversations of the last 24 months or so.

It’s tempting.  So many of us build empires of self-importance around our lives, filled with the noise of conference calls and flights to the next city and endless meetings with endless people wanting “just one more thing” and charity functions for “really good causes” and perfect houses in ideal neighborhoods and church obligations and, and, and … until we are often deafened to the simple, small voice of God within our hearts, quietly reminding us that the sum total of every material thing in our lives can never really measure our “value.”

Pause a moment and think about your own definition of success. What mental picture gets conjured? Big house? A couple of expensive cars? Flush bank accounts with your retirement and kids’ college tuitions fully funded? Exciting vacations to exotic locations every year? Maybe enough excess cash to give generously to charities of your choice and fully tithe at church? Or even 23 million followers on FB?

Love this guy…

Western culture seems to have somehow created an art form around chasing the successful life. We build shrines to wealth, sacrifice our souls on the altars of money and power, inevitably viewing ourselves as unique in history. And while we gain in material possessions and status, how easy is it lose sight of true meaningfulness?

Scripture offers us a telling view into a different measurement of value and worth – God’s measurement. Over and over we read of the corruption and deception the pursuit of material success can have on the weak heart.

One particularly pointed example comes from the New Testament, an brief conversation between Jesus and a wealthy member of the ruling Jewish temple aristocracy. This encounter, described in all three Gospels, is one of the clearest messages God gives us on the distinctions between earthly value and spiritual value.

In the story, Jesus is asked by the man what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus responds saying he should obey the commandments. Simple enough, check! The man is pleased, but senses there must be more, saying he has obeyed the commandments since he was a child. When he asks Jesus again, the answer is not so simple. “If you want to be perfect, sell all that you have, give the money to poor and follow me.”

That sound you hear? It’s the sound of tires screeching to halt. The man simply couldn’t do it. He couldn’t give up his identify in exchange for the eternal life he sought.

Could you? Could I? Could any of us? If God told us that what was standing between us and a relationship with Him was the house we are so proud of, or the job we work so hard to keep, or (as in the case of Abraham) a child we love above all else, how would we respond?

My heart goes out to the wealthy man in this story. He’s like you and me and so many others in the world. We fall victim to the trap of believing that success equals a blessed life. We play by the rules, go to church if that’s our faith, work hard, and reap the rewards.

We think God smiles on our accomplishments. We believe we’re living good lives. It doesn’t dawn on us that these material measurements of success, these trinkets of achievement, have actually become our idols, our substitutes for devotion to God. We follow the rules so that we may keep these things.

Some folks interpret this story to mean money and wealth are inherently evil, as though having them is always wrong – we should simply abstain from any form of success or wealth accumulation and commit ourselves to a life of poverty.

I have a different interpretation. In my view, the wealth of the man confronting Jesus was a proxy for something deeper, a yawning unbridgeable canyon separating the man from God. The man had made money and wealth his god – not Yahwey, the almighty architect of creation. Jesus understood this, and placed before the man the truth that his life was not about God or Godliness at all. It was the man’s love for money, not money itself that was at issue.

Every day, we are asked to choose between whatever idol we’ve made and our faith in God.

Each of us has our own form of separation, something we place above God. For some it’s certainly money. For others, it could be entertainment, or sports, or gluttony, or sex, or social standing. Or maybe even pride in our own righteousness. None of these is necessarily wrong, just as money is not inherently bad. Yet, when they keep us from salvation they destroy our souls.

Every day, we are being asked to choose between whatever idol we’ve made and our faith in God. Sometimes that question is direct, like the encounter between Jesus and wealthy ruler. At other times the question is more subtle, like asking us to compromise our beliefs just a little to get something we really want. In every case, God is reaching for us, extending His invitation.

Let’s try something together this week. Take a few moments to inventory our lives. What have we placed “first?” What can we not walk away from? If the answer is anything other than answering God’s call to love Him with all our heart and to love each other as we love ourselves, then I suggest that like that rich young ruler, we may never know true lives of value.

Oh, and be sure to tip your barista next time you order that oh-so-complicated mid-day pick-me-up!

Peace.
Colossians 1:17

The Grace of Silence

 

“But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.” Psalm 131:2

I was having drinks with a friend recently, a self-proclaimed “agnostic.” As an aside, my definition of agnosticism is someone who lacks the intellectual curiosity to learn what Faith entails yet also lacks the (fill in your descriptive term of choice) to outright deny the the existence of a Creator. And yes, I said this person was a friend and yes, we were having a drink.

Actually, I don’t determine friendships based on someone’s political, religious, social, or financial viewpoints even if they differ from mine. Many of my friends hold beliefs diametrically opposed to mine. In fact, I can easily befriend anyone as long as we can share a laugh, a vigorous debate, and a handshake (or hug if they have no personal space issues) over a meal or drink. Well, except Philadelphia Eagles fans and anyone who still has a pair of JNCOs lurking in the back of their closet (you folks know who you are). Sorry, but a guy’s gotta have his standards.

Back to the story. My friend had read a recent post of mine that contained a bit of a faith overtone. He chortled and said “wait – you don’t really believe God actually speaks directly to you or anyone else, do you?” I thought a moment and remembered advice I’d been given a long time ago. I told my friend “The way I see it, life is a school. There are many teachers and God comes to different people in different ways.”

He laughed off my answer and we changed the topic to football. Because, you know, Super Bowl LI.  (Editor’s note: can we TALK about that come back?”)

The truth is, God doesn’t have to speak to us through state-of-the-art sound systems, or even through disembodied booming voices from the heavens. The book of Job tells us “For God speaks in one way, and in two, though man does not perceive it.” (Job 33:14).

Rather, I believe God speaks to us in the silence of our hearts. In her book In the Heart of the World, Mother Teresa considers this subject. “In the silence of the heart God speaks,” she writes. “If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.”

Perhaps all of us need a bit more silence in our lives these days…

Peace.
Colossians 1:17