Last night Dana and I watched the 2007 clip of Tom Cruise browbeating Matt Lauer on the evils of antidepressants. Dana was blown away by the odd way Cruise sounded. She couldn't put her finger on it, but she really didn't think he sounded right.
Mr. Cruise was conned.
He bought into a very simple con job. He's a good guy (barring a normal dose of sin and a superstar level of narcissism) who really wants to make the world a better place. He cares deeply about things, and L Ron Hubbard's folk told him a shortcut to helping the whole world. On the subject of antidepressants, for example, they told him something like, "You could dedicate a lifetime of study to pharmaceuticals, or you can study what we've already learned about them. You can sift through hundreds of experts' opinions, and spend years trying to figure out which of these experts has sold out to big pharma, and eventually you'll work your way down to the results we've already compiled. Or you can study our results and start helping the world TODAY."
It's a shortcut, and it's an appealling one.
I've been there and done that.
Gene Edwards once told me I was the foremost expert in the world on church history. I'd very much imagine he's since rescinded that opinion (forcefully) but he appeared to say it in complete sincerity. And when he said it, I believed it might be true.
They say you can't sucker an honest man. They're right. Gene offered me a too-good-to-be-true deal, and I bought into it because of my inner dishonesty. He'd written a handful of books and gave us personal talks touting his incredible insights into a grabbag of subjects: family, church, Trinity, missions, child-rearing, psychology, emotional development. One of his core subjects was church history. I could either study hundreds of books written by hundreds of authors on the subject of church history and do the hard work of weeding out all their conflicting errors, or (for the amazing low price of a few of Gene's books!) I could have the world's most complete view of church history.
I placed my confidence in Gene the same way any mark hands his savings over to a huckster. I went all-in, as they say in poker, with a pair of deuces. (For non-poker readers, I gambled everything I owned on the weakest possible pair.)
One day, I took all my cheap brilliance to an Internet News Group dedicated to church history, and floated a couple leading questions their way. I remember asking what they thought the literacy rate was in first century Europe. Those historians answered me in ways I'd never imagined. I learned more about literacy from that one question than I'd learned in all my studies of Gene's work. Those men and women knew their history deeply and widely and verifiably. Gene's pitch was rich in promises and conclusions, but devoid of peer-reviewed data. I walked away from that news group knowing I'd been rolled, and the diploma Gene had spoken to me wasn't worth the air it had briefly disturbed. It was a sick, unsettling feeling, but I owned my loss and started the process of reevaluating my "investment."
What happened to me, and what I'm sure happened to Mr. Cruise, is that instead of learning a single subject from many perspectives, I learned every subject from Gene's sacred perspective. Instead of the humility that comes with learning to respect experts in their fields, I thought I could quickly rise above all the experts in every field because I had the magic feather of Gene's divine insight.
Beware the expert with divine insight into everything, and run in terror from the man who needs your trust. When a man needs your confidence, look closely to what he's offering. All too often that free lunch costs your life savings.
Showing posts with label Doctrine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doctrine. Show all posts
07 March, 2010
22 December, 2008
Honest Abe
There are those who insult Lincoln as America's Julius Caesar, who overthrew the Republic of Rome to make himself emperor, and accuse him of railroading America for his own fiendish purposes. They powerfully inveigh against his deconstruction of the Constitution, and the bloody war fought to satisfy his need to dominate the honorable men of the South. And those people are not defined by the fact they were raised Southern. They're dedicated Christians from all over the country.
You can find some of them here: http://www.theamericanview.com/
Just search for "Lincoln."
The argument is essentially this. America was formed as a union of sovereign states held together by a Constitution. In fact, the essential sovereign unit of American government was the state until Lincoln's power grab. When the South looked up and saw that their right to sovereignly rule themselves was being imposed upon by a self-important North, they resisted. They would not see the union, as orginally conceived, torn apart by Northern self-righteousness and arrogance. And Lincoln merely used those Northern vices in imposing his own power lust on the nation, and in sending many thousands of good American boys to their deaths.
The argument is disingenuous.
It ignores a handful of key points in building its airtight case. Actually, most arguments truly are airtight when seen from one perspective. The question, of course, is what one's perspective is, but that's the actual subject of this post and we'll get to it a little later. The history on this topic is of interest to me, so I'm going to carry on with it a little longer.
I was raised to believe that at times the American government was my enemy. I married a woman who sometimes believed the American government was our enemy. I buy food from a guy who believes the American government is sometimes our enemy. And I had immediate sympathy to this Lincoln as Caesar argument from the very first time I heard it back in the late '80's.
It was interesting to read an impassioned defense of this argument against Lincoln.
Then read 14 of Lincoln's speeches.
His arguments against secession went like this:
OK. Secede if you must. Just do it the right way. Don't do it by force of arms, but by force of election. The ballot formed the country, and only the ballot can splinter it.
Furthermore, it is right to give the entire country a vote on the secession of any part of the country, and that for several very good reasons. First, is there any contract which once formed can be broken by any one party at any time? The states have severally entered into contract together, and have profitably enriched one another in many ways. For the seceding states to take the wealth gained from the other states without compensation is theft. For the seceding states to close off the possible benefits of the contract from the remaining states is painful. They must honor their contract, even as they seek to end it.
Furthermore, there is no way to divide the nation that doesn't result in the overall impoverishment of each part. No matter how the country might be split, the states will have to deal with each other and the fallout of any separation. The final, resulting nations will be poorer for the division. So why divide with blood? If there must be division, why not equitable, legal, ballot-driven division.
Lastly, it is unthinkable that all of the states should decide to evict just one, and yet what is the difference between every state seceding from the one and every state agreeing to kick that one state out? The mean, selfish kind of a freedom demanded by the Southern states was an unjust freedom. The selfish acts of one member of a family have a depressing effect on every member. Sovereignty is not the same as freedom from obligation. When one member secedes from a marriage, it is not a simple and detached act of personal freedom; divorce is a devastating blow dealt to every member of even the extended families involved. The states are obligated to deal with the honest effects of their attempted secession.
These are reasonable arguments. To compare Caesar, who made himself Rome's destroying savior by marching his army into Rome and conquering the capital, against Lincoln who worked with the Congress and left the power of legislation in Congress' hands throughout the rebellion, is too much.
Lincoln made mistakes, and did things that caused questions in his time and ours. His suspension of Habeus Corpus is still talked about among people who talk about such things, but even at that it was only for a time and then Congress was given the reins. Lincoln was a man and not a god, and it showed in his mistakes. He was given a hard road to walk, and he walked it as honestly as I believe any man could. He took brave steps over and over and he saw the job through to its final stages.
But there are those who are not content for him to be a man. They need him to be an American Satan.
Why?
I believe it's because of their own desires. They desire their states to be free today in way they never will be again. Fair enough, but if they get their way in this will they be done? Or will they then want sovereign counties, and cities, and homes? (I'll tell you one thing. They'll love quoting that question within their own contexts.)
These are big questions. Where to place the dividing line between personal sovereignty and community good is contentious.
What I find interesting is that in 1861 this line was drawn by men who wanted to hold other men as slaves. The cry is loud and long that slavery was never the issue, and I hear that cry, but I cannot respect it.
In the end, Lincoln did not fire the first shot of the Civil War. The secessionists fired first on Fort Sumter. Lincoln had promised that he would not march on the South, and he never broke that promise. He proposed compromise after compromise, but the South would have none of it. They wanted the right to do what they wanted to do, and it cannot escape me that what they wanted to do was inarguably evil.
The first intended use of the lofty freedom for which those men of the South died was the continuance of a great evil.
And I believe I find a pattern in that. We are most usually willing to "fire the first shot" when we are protecting our right to do some evil after which we lust.
Having read Lincoln and his detractors, I am more impressed with Lincoln's character, courage and ideals than ever before.
My point of view has moved a lot in the last several years.
=========
I'm about to take a bit of leap, so be sure to come with me.
I believe this was my mistake in trying promote the home church. It was not enough for me to want to see the church done differently. I needed the steeple-churches to suffer demolition. Following Luther's example, I wanted to secede from all Christian organizations and I wanted their hierarchies blown to smithereens.
My point of view has moved a lot on the church, too.
I find myself wondering how many of the men manning pulpits under gaudy steeples are men for whom I'd have the utmost respect, if I only knew their story. Instead, I only know them by a single doctrinal stand they've taken somewhere along the line, and that as framed by their enemies.
May the Lord forgive my ignorance. And may He bless the men who stand for Him as well as they know how.
You can find some of them here: http://www.theamericanview.com/
Just search for "Lincoln."
The argument is essentially this. America was formed as a union of sovereign states held together by a Constitution. In fact, the essential sovereign unit of American government was the state until Lincoln's power grab. When the South looked up and saw that their right to sovereignly rule themselves was being imposed upon by a self-important North, they resisted. They would not see the union, as orginally conceived, torn apart by Northern self-righteousness and arrogance. And Lincoln merely used those Northern vices in imposing his own power lust on the nation, and in sending many thousands of good American boys to their deaths.
The argument is disingenuous.
It ignores a handful of key points in building its airtight case. Actually, most arguments truly are airtight when seen from one perspective. The question, of course, is what one's perspective is, but that's the actual subject of this post and we'll get to it a little later. The history on this topic is of interest to me, so I'm going to carry on with it a little longer.
I was raised to believe that at times the American government was my enemy. I married a woman who sometimes believed the American government was our enemy. I buy food from a guy who believes the American government is sometimes our enemy. And I had immediate sympathy to this Lincoln as Caesar argument from the very first time I heard it back in the late '80's.
It was interesting to read an impassioned defense of this argument against Lincoln.
Then read 14 of Lincoln's speeches.
His arguments against secession went like this:
OK. Secede if you must. Just do it the right way. Don't do it by force of arms, but by force of election. The ballot formed the country, and only the ballot can splinter it.
Furthermore, it is right to give the entire country a vote on the secession of any part of the country, and that for several very good reasons. First, is there any contract which once formed can be broken by any one party at any time? The states have severally entered into contract together, and have profitably enriched one another in many ways. For the seceding states to take the wealth gained from the other states without compensation is theft. For the seceding states to close off the possible benefits of the contract from the remaining states is painful. They must honor their contract, even as they seek to end it.
Furthermore, there is no way to divide the nation that doesn't result in the overall impoverishment of each part. No matter how the country might be split, the states will have to deal with each other and the fallout of any separation. The final, resulting nations will be poorer for the division. So why divide with blood? If there must be division, why not equitable, legal, ballot-driven division.
Lastly, it is unthinkable that all of the states should decide to evict just one, and yet what is the difference between every state seceding from the one and every state agreeing to kick that one state out? The mean, selfish kind of a freedom demanded by the Southern states was an unjust freedom. The selfish acts of one member of a family have a depressing effect on every member. Sovereignty is not the same as freedom from obligation. When one member secedes from a marriage, it is not a simple and detached act of personal freedom; divorce is a devastating blow dealt to every member of even the extended families involved. The states are obligated to deal with the honest effects of their attempted secession.
These are reasonable arguments. To compare Caesar, who made himself Rome's destroying savior by marching his army into Rome and conquering the capital, against Lincoln who worked with the Congress and left the power of legislation in Congress' hands throughout the rebellion, is too much.
Lincoln made mistakes, and did things that caused questions in his time and ours. His suspension of Habeus Corpus is still talked about among people who talk about such things, but even at that it was only for a time and then Congress was given the reins. Lincoln was a man and not a god, and it showed in his mistakes. He was given a hard road to walk, and he walked it as honestly as I believe any man could. He took brave steps over and over and he saw the job through to its final stages.
But there are those who are not content for him to be a man. They need him to be an American Satan.
Why?
I believe it's because of their own desires. They desire their states to be free today in way they never will be again. Fair enough, but if they get their way in this will they be done? Or will they then want sovereign counties, and cities, and homes? (I'll tell you one thing. They'll love quoting that question within their own contexts.)
These are big questions. Where to place the dividing line between personal sovereignty and community good is contentious.
What I find interesting is that in 1861 this line was drawn by men who wanted to hold other men as slaves. The cry is loud and long that slavery was never the issue, and I hear that cry, but I cannot respect it.
In the end, Lincoln did not fire the first shot of the Civil War. The secessionists fired first on Fort Sumter. Lincoln had promised that he would not march on the South, and he never broke that promise. He proposed compromise after compromise, but the South would have none of it. They wanted the right to do what they wanted to do, and it cannot escape me that what they wanted to do was inarguably evil.
The first intended use of the lofty freedom for which those men of the South died was the continuance of a great evil.
And I believe I find a pattern in that. We are most usually willing to "fire the first shot" when we are protecting our right to do some evil after which we lust.
Having read Lincoln and his detractors, I am more impressed with Lincoln's character, courage and ideals than ever before.
My point of view has moved a lot in the last several years.
=========
I'm about to take a bit of leap, so be sure to come with me.
I believe this was my mistake in trying promote the home church. It was not enough for me to want to see the church done differently. I needed the steeple-churches to suffer demolition. Following Luther's example, I wanted to secede from all Christian organizations and I wanted their hierarchies blown to smithereens.
My point of view has moved a lot on the church, too.
I find myself wondering how many of the men manning pulpits under gaudy steeples are men for whom I'd have the utmost respect, if I only knew their story. Instead, I only know them by a single doctrinal stand they've taken somewhere along the line, and that as framed by their enemies.
May the Lord forgive my ignorance. And may He bless the men who stand for Him as well as they know how.
15 November, 2008
Child's Play
I'm refering to Calvinism and PreMillenial Dispensationalism and Ecclesiology and all their brothers, sisters and cousins.
It's just a feeling I have right now, and not really a definitive thought, but I thought I'd articulate it anyway.
There's a chance I could be investigating a new church in a few months. My current church is wonderful, but my circumstances might make such a move practical. You know how I am about attending the church closest to my home.
As I considered what this might mean, one of the things that crossed my mind was that the new church I'd most likely consider is anti-Calvinist. This little detail reminded me of the awkwardness of starting at my present church in 2005. I awkwardly explained to the pastor that I was a Calvinist, Amillenialist, and home-churcher. I was happy that he was willing to let me be all those things in his church.
Doing that all again was unappealling.
And then I thought back on all the problems my Calvinism had caused in my present church. There was ... Well, really there just wasn't. Aside from the fact that I'd mentioned my Calvinism, it had never caused a single problem. I'm at peace with each person's need to choose God, so it doesn't trouble me when people use that form and formula for describing conversion. I think they need to believe God holds them by His unfailing choice when troubles crash in on them, but they are usually happy to believe that, too.
And so it happened that I had the thought that maybe I'm not much of a Calvinist any more. I still believe Calvin was right in most of what I've heard he said, but that doesn't make me a Calvinist. I still believe the key points of Arminius' disagreements with Calvin were in error, but that belief doesn't define my relationship to anyone.
When I call myself a Calvinist, I don't mean to separate myself from anyone but I absolutely do define my relationship to them. I commit us to starting our acquaintance adversarially. And that does not seem like a good idea.
So, I thought some more. It would be awfully convenient for me to find an excuse, any excuse really, to hide my true beliefs. That kind of dishonesty calls for deeper rationalizations. :-)
I thought about my current small group in this church. We meet weekly, and I'm not sure I've ever felt the need to make a specific point of my beliefs on Christ's return or how our hearts first learn to trust God. That's a lot of weeks and a lot of arguments and a lot of not once needing to base my contributions to that group upon the fact that I'm a Calvinist. It turns out, week after week the most important thing is knowing Christ and knowing my brothers and sisters and speaking and hearing wisdom as best I can.
(Maybe I'm becoming a Peoplist?)
I would not trade my knowledge of doctrine for ignorance. I just think maybe doctrine's a good thing to "do" in your youth. A real understanding of what God does and why is a great foundation and launching point for life. Knowing that God saves and then we are saved has been a tremendous comfort and compass for me. And I gleefully admit that I don't have a lock on any doctrine. I could be wrong or right for the wrong reasons, and I'm certainly lacking a lot understanding even of the things I know. Still, I have the basic comfort and compass of knowing the broad outlines of God's motions through history, and my part in them. That knowledge of the Eternal One has been a timely salvation for me over and over again.
It's just that I'm not cut out for dedicating my whole life to such knowledge. I'm cut out for caring about people, and giving my life to the Lord through them.
The most important thing a baby lion can do is play. One day that play will enable him to lead a pride and hunt massive wildebeests and elephants. Even so, my play at doctrine in my teens through thirties taught me to use the scripture as a man - to edify and heal. The people who taught me to make war with doctrine did me no favors, mind you, but the ones who taught me to seek the mind and ways of God showed me the way forward into His mercy.
Doctrine was life to me, just like play once was. I still play and I still study doctrine, but I seem to do both less and less.
I think it's a good thing.
It's just a feeling I have right now, and not really a definitive thought, but I thought I'd articulate it anyway.
There's a chance I could be investigating a new church in a few months. My current church is wonderful, but my circumstances might make such a move practical. You know how I am about attending the church closest to my home.
As I considered what this might mean, one of the things that crossed my mind was that the new church I'd most likely consider is anti-Calvinist. This little detail reminded me of the awkwardness of starting at my present church in 2005. I awkwardly explained to the pastor that I was a Calvinist, Amillenialist, and home-churcher. I was happy that he was willing to let me be all those things in his church.
Doing that all again was unappealling.
And then I thought back on all the problems my Calvinism had caused in my present church. There was ... Well, really there just wasn't. Aside from the fact that I'd mentioned my Calvinism, it had never caused a single problem. I'm at peace with each person's need to choose God, so it doesn't trouble me when people use that form and formula for describing conversion. I think they need to believe God holds them by His unfailing choice when troubles crash in on them, but they are usually happy to believe that, too.
And so it happened that I had the thought that maybe I'm not much of a Calvinist any more. I still believe Calvin was right in most of what I've heard he said, but that doesn't make me a Calvinist. I still believe the key points of Arminius' disagreements with Calvin were in error, but that belief doesn't define my relationship to anyone.
When I call myself a Calvinist, I don't mean to separate myself from anyone but I absolutely do define my relationship to them. I commit us to starting our acquaintance adversarially. And that does not seem like a good idea.
So, I thought some more. It would be awfully convenient for me to find an excuse, any excuse really, to hide my true beliefs. That kind of dishonesty calls for deeper rationalizations. :-)
I thought about my current small group in this church. We meet weekly, and I'm not sure I've ever felt the need to make a specific point of my beliefs on Christ's return or how our hearts first learn to trust God. That's a lot of weeks and a lot of arguments and a lot of not once needing to base my contributions to that group upon the fact that I'm a Calvinist. It turns out, week after week the most important thing is knowing Christ and knowing my brothers and sisters and speaking and hearing wisdom as best I can.
(Maybe I'm becoming a Peoplist?)
I would not trade my knowledge of doctrine for ignorance. I just think maybe doctrine's a good thing to "do" in your youth. A real understanding of what God does and why is a great foundation and launching point for life. Knowing that God saves and then we are saved has been a tremendous comfort and compass for me. And I gleefully admit that I don't have a lock on any doctrine. I could be wrong or right for the wrong reasons, and I'm certainly lacking a lot understanding even of the things I know. Still, I have the basic comfort and compass of knowing the broad outlines of God's motions through history, and my part in them. That knowledge of the Eternal One has been a timely salvation for me over and over again.
It's just that I'm not cut out for dedicating my whole life to such knowledge. I'm cut out for caring about people, and giving my life to the Lord through them.
The most important thing a baby lion can do is play. One day that play will enable him to lead a pride and hunt massive wildebeests and elephants. Even so, my play at doctrine in my teens through thirties taught me to use the scripture as a man - to edify and heal. The people who taught me to make war with doctrine did me no favors, mind you, but the ones who taught me to seek the mind and ways of God showed me the way forward into His mercy.
Doctrine was life to me, just like play once was. I still play and I still study doctrine, but I seem to do both less and less.
I think it's a good thing.
19 October, 2008
We Shall See Him As He Is
One day we will see Jesus face to face. All our dreams will come to fruit, and we stand right there in front of Him.
But oddly, it will be a human-sized experience in some way. It will be the opposite of a dream that can keep changing with every new thought. Jesus will be Jesus, and He'll never change. He'll be there in a body, just like our new one, and He'll definitely look like something. It's an odd thing, but He'll no longer be an amazing million possibilities. Jesus will be Jesus, and when we pass Him on the streets of gold, we will recognize Him.
In a sense, that might be a little odd. Imagine meeting the girl of your dreams for the first time. 999,999 possibilities drop away in an instant when you see the real thing. You could almost mourn the 999,999 girls that will never be, but then you can finally begin knowing the girl that's really there.
Getting to know the Jesus that's really there just might be like that. We might first have to mourn the Jesuses we imagined before we can love the Jesus Who's standing there in front of us. I think that will feel good and right.
And when it happens, I suspect an amazing thing will happen. We will be shocked to discover that we already know Him. We'll be shocked at how few surprises there are for us, because have already known each other. Jesus will reach out to us, and we'll know that gesture because Bob and Dan were just like that. And He'll laugh with us, and it'll be just like Charleen and Linda.
I think the biggest surprise of meeting Jesus will be the degree to which we are not surprised by the beauty we see in Him.
It's an exciting hope.
But oddly, it will be a human-sized experience in some way. It will be the opposite of a dream that can keep changing with every new thought. Jesus will be Jesus, and He'll never change. He'll be there in a body, just like our new one, and He'll definitely look like something. It's an odd thing, but He'll no longer be an amazing million possibilities. Jesus will be Jesus, and when we pass Him on the streets of gold, we will recognize Him.
In a sense, that might be a little odd. Imagine meeting the girl of your dreams for the first time. 999,999 possibilities drop away in an instant when you see the real thing. You could almost mourn the 999,999 girls that will never be, but then you can finally begin knowing the girl that's really there.
Getting to know the Jesus that's really there just might be like that. We might first have to mourn the Jesuses we imagined before we can love the Jesus Who's standing there in front of us. I think that will feel good and right.
And when it happens, I suspect an amazing thing will happen. We will be shocked to discover that we already know Him. We'll be shocked at how few surprises there are for us, because have already known each other. Jesus will reach out to us, and we'll know that gesture because Bob and Dan were just like that. And He'll laugh with us, and it'll be just like Charleen and Linda.
I think the biggest surprise of meeting Jesus will be the degree to which we are not surprised by the beauty we see in Him.
It's an exciting hope.
02 August, 2008
Terminator: Spawn of the Machines
In the heat of a fascinating discussion of whether a human can truly believe God, my son said that humans became self-aware at some point in evolution, and that when that happened evil became possible. He was countering my point that evil cannot be explained by evolution. Bad can, but not evil. His argument was that evil is a necessary possibility given self-awareness.
I basically had to concede the point.
Anyway, in a flash of insight, his statement brought back to my mind two things at once.
The first was that Adam and Eve "became self-aware" when they ate of of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In fact, from now on I believe that's the phrase I'm going to use to describe the fall. With the serpent's help, humanity became self-aware. It is out of our self-awareness that all manner of good and evil flow.
The second was the ominous history from the movie Terminator 2, "The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th."
For those of you, my faithful readers (and if you're still reading me at my blistering pace of 2 posts per month, then you are faithful indeed) who know the story of Adam and Eve a little better than that of the Terminator, Skynet was a massive supercomputer that became self-aware and began trying to destroy humanity. That's the premise of the whole Terminator series.
Hal is the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey that becomes self-aware and tries to destroy it's human operators. Wargames is about a computer that becomes self-aware and accidently tries to destroy humanity. I, Robot features a computer protected by the 3 Robotic Laws from ever hurting humanity that attempts to destroy humanity (yes, while obeying all 3 laws - that's the magic of Aasimov's work.)
What we have here, folks, is an archetype!
Of course, the theme is as old as Frankenstein's monster, but the thought was new to me. And I don't know how far Shelley really explored her theme. (Suddenly, I want to read the book. :-) )
On the 7th day of creation (I picture Adam falling on God's Sabbath; I don't know about anyone else) humanity became self-aware - and very scared of the Creator we were trying to supplant.
I basically had to concede the point.
Anyway, in a flash of insight, his statement brought back to my mind two things at once.
The first was that Adam and Eve "became self-aware" when they ate of of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In fact, from now on I believe that's the phrase I'm going to use to describe the fall. With the serpent's help, humanity became self-aware. It is out of our self-awareness that all manner of good and evil flow.
The second was the ominous history from the movie Terminator 2, "The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th."
For those of you, my faithful readers (and if you're still reading me at my blistering pace of 2 posts per month, then you are faithful indeed) who know the story of Adam and Eve a little better than that of the Terminator, Skynet was a massive supercomputer that became self-aware and began trying to destroy humanity. That's the premise of the whole Terminator series.
Hal is the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey that becomes self-aware and tries to destroy it's human operators. Wargames is about a computer that becomes self-aware and accidently tries to destroy humanity. I, Robot features a computer protected by the 3 Robotic Laws from ever hurting humanity that attempts to destroy humanity (yes, while obeying all 3 laws - that's the magic of Aasimov's work.)
What we have here, folks, is an archetype!
Of course, the theme is as old as Frankenstein's monster, but the thought was new to me. And I don't know how far Shelley really explored her theme. (Suddenly, I want to read the book. :-) )
On the 7th day of creation (I picture Adam falling on God's Sabbath; I don't know about anyone else) humanity became self-aware - and very scared of the Creator we were trying to supplant.
17 July, 2008
Idols in our Homes
I've been worried for a while about people calling too many things idols. It's all well and good to be against people watching too much TV, but is it really an idol? Or is it just an inferior amusement, sometimes used badly?
I've been reading in Isaiah, and God is clearly annoyed when His people turn to idols. There's a really great scene in which Isaiah describes a dude who's obviously pretty handy with wood tools. Our new buddy grabs a good-looking hunk of wood, and turns it into a table and chairs, then maybe a plate or two, finally takes the chips and scraps and lights a fire to cook his dinner. That last left-over piece, though, he carves into an idol to whom he can "say grace" for his meal. It's almost funny how God sees no difference between the activity of making dinner and a making convenient god.
That's an idol.
Faith, hope, and love, Paul says, are the three things that matter, and those are the three things the idolator poured into that last piece of wood.
Faith is a logical, conscious decision to live as if a god's promise will be kept based upon prior knowledge of his power.
Hope is the ability to hang on now because you know god will make enduring the present worthwhile.
Love is a commitment to think, feel and act in the best interests of your god.
I see all three of those things in the actions of Isaiah's unhappy wood-worker. He reckons that his god has given him today's food, so he exercises faith that his god will do it again. His hopes for the future are truly based on the way his god will make that future pleasant. And he has invested his time and passion into pleasing that god with his carved image and tiny offerings to it.
I don't see any of that in America's relationship with the television. We don't think the television brought us any good thing, so we don't rely on it to bring us anything in the future. We don't hope for a better future because of the television's oversight in our lives. Maybe we invest in that box, but all our offerings are to ourselves.
And therein lies the key, I believe.
Our idol cannot be seen, because we no longer believe in the invisible. We don't have to incarnate it any more. We look at history, and find we've gotten our own meals for our own selves, so that's where we put our faith. We hope for our future, because we have laid plans for it and because science keeps making it better every day. And we pour our love out to stir up more passion from within.
In other words, we've not moved a lick from Paul's day. We've made a god of our bellies, trusting our lusts to bring us every good thing and our strength to keep us against the day of trouble.
Don't rail against the television. It's just a little offering we make to our lusts. Our cars and our wide screens and our nest eggs, our jobs and our houses and our spouses, our movies and our shows and our nightlife; they are the little offerings we give to appease our god, the little sacrifices we make to ourselves. We sculpt our abs, sleep at our custom sleep number, and dine in every luxury we can afford in order to strengthen and prepare our god to conquer for us. When our body is strong and our minds are tuned and our attitudes are adjusted, we can make the best of all possible worlds for ourselves.
When the Living God sees us in front of a TV, He doesn't trip out. I'm sure He knows a better way for us to spend our time, a way to spend time together, but He's got big shoulders and He can bear for us to overdo some entertainment. Through Isaiah God tells us it's when He finds us wrapped up in the arms of another that He is angered. It's not Ba'al with whom we whore, though, it's our better selves.
We strive to have faith in ourselves. We hope to grow better and wiser. We practice loving ourselves. We've refined idolatry in much the same way we've distilled the cocoa bean into crack. Ba'al was harmless compared to our idolatry.
Do you want to send a message to America?
Trust God.
I've been reading in Isaiah, and God is clearly annoyed when His people turn to idols. There's a really great scene in which Isaiah describes a dude who's obviously pretty handy with wood tools. Our new buddy grabs a good-looking hunk of wood, and turns it into a table and chairs, then maybe a plate or two, finally takes the chips and scraps and lights a fire to cook his dinner. That last left-over piece, though, he carves into an idol to whom he can "say grace" for his meal. It's almost funny how God sees no difference between the activity of making dinner and a making convenient god.
That's an idol.
Faith, hope, and love, Paul says, are the three things that matter, and those are the three things the idolator poured into that last piece of wood.
Faith is a logical, conscious decision to live as if a god's promise will be kept based upon prior knowledge of his power.
Hope is the ability to hang on now because you know god will make enduring the present worthwhile.
Love is a commitment to think, feel and act in the best interests of your god.
I see all three of those things in the actions of Isaiah's unhappy wood-worker. He reckons that his god has given him today's food, so he exercises faith that his god will do it again. His hopes for the future are truly based on the way his god will make that future pleasant. And he has invested his time and passion into pleasing that god with his carved image and tiny offerings to it.
I don't see any of that in America's relationship with the television. We don't think the television brought us any good thing, so we don't rely on it to bring us anything in the future. We don't hope for a better future because of the television's oversight in our lives. Maybe we invest in that box, but all our offerings are to ourselves.
And therein lies the key, I believe.
Our idol cannot be seen, because we no longer believe in the invisible. We don't have to incarnate it any more. We look at history, and find we've gotten our own meals for our own selves, so that's where we put our faith. We hope for our future, because we have laid plans for it and because science keeps making it better every day. And we pour our love out to stir up more passion from within.
In other words, we've not moved a lick from Paul's day. We've made a god of our bellies, trusting our lusts to bring us every good thing and our strength to keep us against the day of trouble.
Don't rail against the television. It's just a little offering we make to our lusts. Our cars and our wide screens and our nest eggs, our jobs and our houses and our spouses, our movies and our shows and our nightlife; they are the little offerings we give to appease our god, the little sacrifices we make to ourselves. We sculpt our abs, sleep at our custom sleep number, and dine in every luxury we can afford in order to strengthen and prepare our god to conquer for us. When our body is strong and our minds are tuned and our attitudes are adjusted, we can make the best of all possible worlds for ourselves.
When the Living God sees us in front of a TV, He doesn't trip out. I'm sure He knows a better way for us to spend our time, a way to spend time together, but He's got big shoulders and He can bear for us to overdo some entertainment. Through Isaiah God tells us it's when He finds us wrapped up in the arms of another that He is angered. It's not Ba'al with whom we whore, though, it's our better selves.
We strive to have faith in ourselves. We hope to grow better and wiser. We practice loving ourselves. We've refined idolatry in much the same way we've distilled the cocoa bean into crack. Ba'al was harmless compared to our idolatry.
Do you want to send a message to America?
Trust God.
19 June, 2008
An Apologetic Moment
I don't care much for apologetics. It seems a silly thing to me to try to prove God exists when the issue is one of judgement and repentance. Preach the word and trust that the spark inside a man will declare God's reality more loudly than any bacterial flagellum.
That said, an apologetic article in Touchstone Magazine caught my eye last week. The author was attempting to prove that it was the atheists who were really stepping out on faith by not believing in God. The absence of proof is not the proof of absence and all that, you know. I don't have the article in front of me, so I cannot quote it. Sorry.
Man, he pointed out, really ought to have a hard time conceiving of God's reasonings. It doesn't make sense for us to grasp God's thoughts. If God were to decide to hide Himself from all but those who truly sought Him, the fact that it made sense to Him would be all the justification He'd require. We would have to adapt to His reasons, and not the other way around.
From there, I got to thinking about how ants and humans interact. They don't. They just interfere with each other. We keep accidently stepping on them, and they keep taking inappropriate notice of our picnics and kitchen counters. And so it's almost hard to prove to an ant that we're even real. They see our acts, the things we create, but they don't really see us. They could even invent a bunch of bizarre rationalizations for why a field became a strip mall, if they cared to put their little hive-minds to it.
But the analogy does not hold, because of scale. We're too close to ants in scale. Ants could interact with us if we only spoke in pheronomes instead of words. And really, they see us just fine when we plop a finger down in their paths.
Which led me to think of microbes. At that difference in scale, I found a much better analogy. Microbes literally don't know we exist. They share the world with us, and we can affect their lives with heat and pharmaceuticals and light, but we cannot step on them and they cannot steal our food. We live in different worlds, even as we share the same world. We can ferment milk to feed the microbes we like, or incinerate our meat to off a bunch of microbes we don't like, but we're never going to amuse ourselves by making a moat around a microbe-hill.
And that seemed a lot more like our relationship to God. The scale of our relationship is just more massively different than any other relationship I can describe.
But why stop imagining just there? :-)
More than merely being generic microbes, we are cells. Each of us is different, and we were meant to colonize with each other. We are meant to come together, with all our uniqueness in full bloom. Then, when we are all assembled, we will be a body - a body capable of interacting with God as peer-to-peer, at His scale.
As long as we live alone, we are nothing. We are not even viable tissue when we are alone. But together, here in this womb we call Earth, we are growing and changing. Little fingers are becoming distinct and a heart is beating. We are confused, because we see only the cells nearest to us (and how oddly misshapen they are!), but God sees things at His scale, even if He entered ours once and now understands it. He sees what we each are becoming, but He also sees what He is making us together, and He is patient in ways we cannot imagine. He'll wait until His perfect goal for us is fully realized.
One day the sons of God will be revealed.
That said, an apologetic article in Touchstone Magazine caught my eye last week. The author was attempting to prove that it was the atheists who were really stepping out on faith by not believing in God. The absence of proof is not the proof of absence and all that, you know. I don't have the article in front of me, so I cannot quote it. Sorry.
Man, he pointed out, really ought to have a hard time conceiving of God's reasonings. It doesn't make sense for us to grasp God's thoughts. If God were to decide to hide Himself from all but those who truly sought Him, the fact that it made sense to Him would be all the justification He'd require. We would have to adapt to His reasons, and not the other way around.
From there, I got to thinking about how ants and humans interact. They don't. They just interfere with each other. We keep accidently stepping on them, and they keep taking inappropriate notice of our picnics and kitchen counters. And so it's almost hard to prove to an ant that we're even real. They see our acts, the things we create, but they don't really see us. They could even invent a bunch of bizarre rationalizations for why a field became a strip mall, if they cared to put their little hive-minds to it.
But the analogy does not hold, because of scale. We're too close to ants in scale. Ants could interact with us if we only spoke in pheronomes instead of words. And really, they see us just fine when we plop a finger down in their paths.
Which led me to think of microbes. At that difference in scale, I found a much better analogy. Microbes literally don't know we exist. They share the world with us, and we can affect their lives with heat and pharmaceuticals and light, but we cannot step on them and they cannot steal our food. We live in different worlds, even as we share the same world. We can ferment milk to feed the microbes we like, or incinerate our meat to off a bunch of microbes we don't like, but we're never going to amuse ourselves by making a moat around a microbe-hill.
And that seemed a lot more like our relationship to God. The scale of our relationship is just more massively different than any other relationship I can describe.
But why stop imagining just there? :-)
More than merely being generic microbes, we are cells. Each of us is different, and we were meant to colonize with each other. We are meant to come together, with all our uniqueness in full bloom. Then, when we are all assembled, we will be a body - a body capable of interacting with God as peer-to-peer, at His scale.
As long as we live alone, we are nothing. We are not even viable tissue when we are alone. But together, here in this womb we call Earth, we are growing and changing. Little fingers are becoming distinct and a heart is beating. We are confused, because we see only the cells nearest to us (and how oddly misshapen they are!), but God sees things at His scale, even if He entered ours once and now understands it. He sees what we each are becoming, but He also sees what He is making us together, and He is patient in ways we cannot imagine. He'll wait until His perfect goal for us is fully realized.
One day the sons of God will be revealed.
16 June, 2008
That Sinking Feeling
Wow. Unanimity. What's that?!
:-)
I'm actually a little surprised that everyone agrees that "the answers" are not all in scripture. It's as if I'd figured out that the Earth is round ... yesterday. Being me, I'd let everyone know of my discovery by making some bold statement about how I was willing to sail past the sunset, confident that I'd return alive. Everyone else would look up from their newspapers and say, "Yeah. It'd be fun to sail past China and under the two great capes, Horn and Good Hope. Enjoy your trip!"
Fortunately, here in blog land, none of you could see my jaw drop. :-)
Well, and I'm still not used to people agreeing with me about much of anything. :-D
I was raised amongst three groups of Christians, all of whom shared basic doctrines and some theological differences, but all of whom were unanimously committed to scripture as the sole, final, absolute, complete, sufficient source for every question of life. Any question more complex than how to get to Arby's could be answered directly, completely and unambiguously from scripture.
Did I mention that my denominational background is, "Damentalist?"
And did I explain that Damentalism is what's left after you take the fun out of fundamentalism?
My Damentalist elders would have had a scriptural answer to my question, "How could I know not to marry a girl in 10 days." They'd have pulled something out of the scriptures (no, not those other places) about many counselors making for safe plans and the Lord not being the author of confusion and haste making waste (some of them would occasionally confuse Ben Franklin with Solomon), and assure me (and themselves) that had I only been firmly grounded in scripture I'd not have made a Gordian Tangle of my life.
Here's the problem, though. The kid sitting next to me would spend 12 years engaged to some poor woman, marry her, and divorce in two years, and they've have found every bit as strong scriptural arguments against what he did. And some other joker would call responsibly on a young lady, court her for 6 months, be engaged for 12 months and 3 days, and marry her with her father's blessing and muddle his life, and they'd have every bit as strong scriptural arguments against what he did.
The common factor is that their understanding of scripture's perfect guidance is clearest after-the-fact. They're like gypsies gazing into their crystal ball pronouncing the future as dim, until the dust settles and the weeping's begun. And suddenly, their wisdom doesn't taste like honey in my mouth any more. I just wish it were sweet in my belly.
So, as I look at the possibility that wisdom is something we learn, more like riding a bicycle than being born again, it resonates well against my experience. You all obviously agree with that intuition, and I think scripture would support us together.
But...
Have you thought about the tremendous burden and responsibility that puts on us all?
Hey! Being a Damentalist was easy. As long as I could not think of any scripture to stop me, or at least could plausibly explain it away, I could charge forward with my life like a rhonicerous on the scent of tasty daisies. I could examine the scriptures with an open heart, and whatever it they did not proscribe was fair game.
For example.
I could look at David snatching up Abigail and think 10 days was a LONGGGGG courtship. I could even be proud and thankful that I didn't have to collect the foreskins of 200 Cajuns as a dowry for Michal (and I didn't have to worry about the whole dying while trying thing, either. Those Cajuns can be mighty opinionated about their foreskins, I've heard.) I could even look at a handful of brothers maturing beyond the message of John the Baptist the very first time they heard Christ presented by Paul, and figure it was a wise thing to follow a man who brought a higher gospel.
The bible is full of stories of short courtships, immediate changes of doctrine, and droppings of everything to follow the leading of God.
Haste is commended by scripture over and over and over, if you're looking for that sort of thing. And my personality is always looking for a good reason to make haste. Always. Always. I'll even settle for silence on the subject that just lets me make my haste with a low-humming conscience. It doesn't strictly have to "quiet" for me.
But if the scripture is silent on some things, then I need to be cautious. I need to seek wisdom. I need to be sure I'm not being an idiot. Or simple. Or even a fool. If the scripture proscribes only those things that might show me to be evil, but leaves unmentioned some things that might show me to be simple or a fool, then I need to grow up.
It's a shame to have to learn that at 44, but I'm afraid I'll learn it again at 54, and again at 64. If the Lord is kind to burn this lesson into my memory through the fires of self-imposed experience, then maybe I'll only have to learn it this one last (major) time.
And I'll lay one more responsibility at my feet, and this one may fall at yours, too. As the church, as one of the three that agree on Earth (thank you, Missy!), I have a responsibility to those I see being foolish as I was foolish. I have a responsibility to turn my hard-earned wisdom into their narrow escape. And when I say responsibility, I mean that the church needs her holders of wisdom to step forward for those who need them. I mean that the Lord needs those who have received wisdom at His hands to pass it along to His sheep. I mean that He might hold us responsible for hiding our experiences from each other.
Perhaps the only purpose for my life is to serve as an example to others (http://despair.com/mis24x30prin.html) but I think maybe that's a pretty important thing.
:-)
I'm actually a little surprised that everyone agrees that "the answers" are not all in scripture. It's as if I'd figured out that the Earth is round ... yesterday. Being me, I'd let everyone know of my discovery by making some bold statement about how I was willing to sail past the sunset, confident that I'd return alive. Everyone else would look up from their newspapers and say, "Yeah. It'd be fun to sail past China and under the two great capes, Horn and Good Hope. Enjoy your trip!"
Fortunately, here in blog land, none of you could see my jaw drop. :-)
Well, and I'm still not used to people agreeing with me about much of anything. :-D
I was raised amongst three groups of Christians, all of whom shared basic doctrines and some theological differences, but all of whom were unanimously committed to scripture as the sole, final, absolute, complete, sufficient source for every question of life. Any question more complex than how to get to Arby's could be answered directly, completely and unambiguously from scripture.
Did I mention that my denominational background is, "Damentalist?"
And did I explain that Damentalism is what's left after you take the fun out of fundamentalism?
My Damentalist elders would have had a scriptural answer to my question, "How could I know not to marry a girl in 10 days." They'd have pulled something out of the scriptures (no, not those other places) about many counselors making for safe plans and the Lord not being the author of confusion and haste making waste (some of them would occasionally confuse Ben Franklin with Solomon), and assure me (and themselves) that had I only been firmly grounded in scripture I'd not have made a Gordian Tangle of my life.
Here's the problem, though. The kid sitting next to me would spend 12 years engaged to some poor woman, marry her, and divorce in two years, and they've have found every bit as strong scriptural arguments against what he did. And some other joker would call responsibly on a young lady, court her for 6 months, be engaged for 12 months and 3 days, and marry her with her father's blessing and muddle his life, and they'd have every bit as strong scriptural arguments against what he did.
The common factor is that their understanding of scripture's perfect guidance is clearest after-the-fact. They're like gypsies gazing into their crystal ball pronouncing the future as dim, until the dust settles and the weeping's begun. And suddenly, their wisdom doesn't taste like honey in my mouth any more. I just wish it were sweet in my belly.
So, as I look at the possibility that wisdom is something we learn, more like riding a bicycle than being born again, it resonates well against my experience. You all obviously agree with that intuition, and I think scripture would support us together.
But...
Have you thought about the tremendous burden and responsibility that puts on us all?
Hey! Being a Damentalist was easy. As long as I could not think of any scripture to stop me, or at least could plausibly explain it away, I could charge forward with my life like a rhonicerous on the scent of tasty daisies. I could examine the scriptures with an open heart, and whatever it they did not proscribe was fair game.
For example.
I could look at David snatching up Abigail and think 10 days was a LONGGGGG courtship. I could even be proud and thankful that I didn't have to collect the foreskins of 200 Cajuns as a dowry for Michal (and I didn't have to worry about the whole dying while trying thing, either. Those Cajuns can be mighty opinionated about their foreskins, I've heard.) I could even look at a handful of brothers maturing beyond the message of John the Baptist the very first time they heard Christ presented by Paul, and figure it was a wise thing to follow a man who brought a higher gospel.
The bible is full of stories of short courtships, immediate changes of doctrine, and droppings of everything to follow the leading of God.
Haste is commended by scripture over and over and over, if you're looking for that sort of thing. And my personality is always looking for a good reason to make haste. Always. Always. I'll even settle for silence on the subject that just lets me make my haste with a low-humming conscience. It doesn't strictly have to "quiet" for me.
But if the scripture is silent on some things, then I need to be cautious. I need to seek wisdom. I need to be sure I'm not being an idiot. Or simple. Or even a fool. If the scripture proscribes only those things that might show me to be evil, but leaves unmentioned some things that might show me to be simple or a fool, then I need to grow up.
It's a shame to have to learn that at 44, but I'm afraid I'll learn it again at 54, and again at 64. If the Lord is kind to burn this lesson into my memory through the fires of self-imposed experience, then maybe I'll only have to learn it this one last (major) time.
And I'll lay one more responsibility at my feet, and this one may fall at yours, too. As the church, as one of the three that agree on Earth (thank you, Missy!), I have a responsibility to those I see being foolish as I was foolish. I have a responsibility to turn my hard-earned wisdom into their narrow escape. And when I say responsibility, I mean that the church needs her holders of wisdom to step forward for those who need them. I mean that the Lord needs those who have received wisdom at His hands to pass it along to His sheep. I mean that He might hold us responsible for hiding our experiences from each other.
Perhaps the only purpose for my life is to serve as an example to others (http://despair.com/mis24x30prin.html) but I think maybe that's a pretty important thing.
26 April, 2008
Quantum Predestination
God is Light, and in Him is no shadow of turning.
The history of man's understanding of light is a physicist's rollicking, mud-wrestling fest of scientific goodness. I've forgotten all the details, remembering only the ebb and flow of hard feelings on both sides. The Wikipedia article captures all the major events, but overlooks the intense competition and fiery conflict involved. The best insight the article gives comes at the bottom when it quotes the rock-star scientist, Richard Feynman, telling his audience that light is particles - full stop - and Carver Mead telling his audience in equally confident terms that light is waves, and so is everything else. And those two quotes are from now, not nearly a century ago when the mud slinging was in full splatter. The war around man's understanding of light may be over, but cleanup actions continue apace.
The first guy to describe light mathematically did it with wave equations. The next guy did it with particle equations. The thing is, waves and particles ain't the same thing. A wave is something that happens in the ocean, and a particle is something you throw into the ocean. When you talk about equations that describe light, you're talking about differences that extreme.
+ Waves go around corners.
- Particles don't notice corners.
+ Waves interfere with each other. If two peaks meet, they make a single peak twice as high. If a peak meets a valley, they cancel each other.
- Particles bounce off each other.
+ Waves can be polarized so only one kind works, like maybe left/right waves work but up/down waves get smooshed.
+ Particles don't vibrate, so polarizing particles makes no sense.
+ Waves don't knock electrons out of solar panels and make electricity.
+ Particles make solar energy possible.
+ Waves don't have any good reason to make "quantum leaps."
- Particles, also called, "quanta," are the defining point of a quantum leap.
So, physicists had a religious war.
The wave guys did math and experiments using diffusion grates and frequency-energy relationships, while the particle guys calculated about reflections and interactions. Then the wave guys came up with complex, hard to follow equations that fully explained the particle stuff in wave terms if you held your mouth just right and squinted just so. That's when the particle guys had to give up (except Mr Feynman, I gather). The particle guys could poke little holes in the wave-guys' equations, but they couldn't write equations that would explain all the diffusion grate and frequency stuff.
In the end, though, everyone had to swallow a little bile because the wave guys couldn't really make their equations work either.
And the reason no one's equations would work is really quite simple. Light is a particle-wave. Light is made of particles that vibrate like waves. The physicists were forced to say, "We're both right," and that breaks any debater's heart. But they only said because they actually were both right. Light particles seem to be kind of big and squishy and vibrating in a perfect frequency. So, when you shove them through diffraction gratings they act just like waves, but when you run them into solar panels they act just like particles.
It hurts to admit that the other guy is right, but it's not too bad once you've gotten over the initial shock of admitting that you were wrong. What's deadly difficult is admitting the other guy is right while you still have not been proven wrong at all.
That's what happened to our mud wrestling physicists, and that's what should be happening to our mud wrestling Calvinists and Arminians, too.
I hate to say, "We're both right." I really do. In most things mathematical, one person is wrong, and I tend to extend that thinking to theology. That's a mistake on my part.
The odd thing is that I still don't think the Calminians are right. Calminians tend to jetison the rightness of both sides and end up with a wishy-washy God and semi-responsible people. I think the truth is harder than that.
God does predestine, and does so absolutely. God chooses those whom He saves, and is not panicking over those whom He might have been able to save if only we'd evangelized more/better/perfectly. Those who are not saved are those whom God knew would not be saved before He ever created. He knew how it would end for each of us, what His actions would be that would influence us, and what He could have done it differently, and that He would do everything exactly as He has done it. If that's not absolute predestination, I don't know what is, but it's a little different from saying God created some people for some bizarre pleasure He might take in damning them.
To me, those are the wave equations.
The particle equations are true too, though.
Every man must decide, and there is no crutch upon which he might lean. The decision is his and the responsibility for that decision is his. God made us with a will that bestows on us the right to suffer the consequences of our actions. And God only judges us on our own actions. Neither the sins of the father for any previous generations, nor the decisions of our great Creator before time will be weighed in the balance. On the one side will be the requirements of our own conscience (gentiles) or of the law (Jews), and on the other will be our performance against those requirements (unsaved) or Christ's performance of those requirements (saved.) We must choose Him.
The thing that stirred me to write was not some new insight into the scripture, but into physics, so please forgive me if I don't state the two positions any more clearly than that. You've all heard it too many times any way.
The thing that interests me is that the physical world gives such a great example of a complex duality. There is not a human being alive who can understand or picture what light really is. We cannot hold the idea of a wave and a particle in our mind simultaneously when trying to describe something so ubiquitous as light. The first thing ever created is so bizarrely complex that we cannot picture in our minds, though we sense it every waking second.
Light fills the void of space, transmitted from every direction and into every direction, and exerts its influence on things as random as plant leaves, microwave dinners, radio towers, and my mood on a gloomy morning, yet the brightest of our minds cannot tell us what it really is. It exists and behaves predictably, but not definably. One set of equations defines half of what it does, while another set of equations defines the other half of what it does, and the two sets of equations seem both to exclude the other set.
It's not enough to say, "The truth is in the middle." There is no middle between equations. Equations are either true or they are false. If you find some happy camping ground between two equations, it's either because the new equation is true, or because you're living in a fantasy world.
[Amusingly, quantum physics, the deep science of light, says the same thing. Light exists at discreet energy levels, and never in between them. Imagine that your car could go 5 mph or 10 or 25 or 50, but not 17.3 or 26.1 or anything in between those 4 speeds. That's why they talk about a "quantum leap." It always takes a quantum leap for light to change energy levels because while it might change speeds from 5 to 10 mph, it will do it without ever going 7.5 mph. It leaps from one energy level to another.]
There is only truth. There is no space between truths for convenient half-truth. The truth is that God predestines absolutely, and the truth is that we are fully responsible for our actions. I am comfortable saying that those two things confuse me, but I'm not able to toss either of them aside, even if they seem to be unable to live together. And the science of light gives me permission to be that stubborn.
Does that help or hurt anyone's thoughts about predestination?
The history of man's understanding of light is a physicist's rollicking, mud-wrestling fest of scientific goodness. I've forgotten all the details, remembering only the ebb and flow of hard feelings on both sides. The Wikipedia article captures all the major events, but overlooks the intense competition and fiery conflict involved. The best insight the article gives comes at the bottom when it quotes the rock-star scientist, Richard Feynman, telling his audience that light is particles - full stop - and Carver Mead telling his audience in equally confident terms that light is waves, and so is everything else. And those two quotes are from now, not nearly a century ago when the mud slinging was in full splatter. The war around man's understanding of light may be over, but cleanup actions continue apace.
The first guy to describe light mathematically did it with wave equations. The next guy did it with particle equations. The thing is, waves and particles ain't the same thing. A wave is something that happens in the ocean, and a particle is something you throw into the ocean. When you talk about equations that describe light, you're talking about differences that extreme.
+ Waves go around corners.
- Particles don't notice corners.
+ Waves interfere with each other. If two peaks meet, they make a single peak twice as high. If a peak meets a valley, they cancel each other.
- Particles bounce off each other.
+ Waves can be polarized so only one kind works, like maybe left/right waves work but up/down waves get smooshed.
+ Particles don't vibrate, so polarizing particles makes no sense.
+ Waves don't knock electrons out of solar panels and make electricity.
+ Particles make solar energy possible.
+ Waves don't have any good reason to make "quantum leaps."
- Particles, also called, "quanta," are the defining point of a quantum leap.
So, physicists had a religious war.
The wave guys did math and experiments using diffusion grates and frequency-energy relationships, while the particle guys calculated about reflections and interactions. Then the wave guys came up with complex, hard to follow equations that fully explained the particle stuff in wave terms if you held your mouth just right and squinted just so. That's when the particle guys had to give up (except Mr Feynman, I gather). The particle guys could poke little holes in the wave-guys' equations, but they couldn't write equations that would explain all the diffusion grate and frequency stuff.
In the end, though, everyone had to swallow a little bile because the wave guys couldn't really make their equations work either.
And the reason no one's equations would work is really quite simple. Light is a particle-wave. Light is made of particles that vibrate like waves. The physicists were forced to say, "We're both right," and that breaks any debater's heart. But they only said because they actually were both right. Light particles seem to be kind of big and squishy and vibrating in a perfect frequency. So, when you shove them through diffraction gratings they act just like waves, but when you run them into solar panels they act just like particles.
It hurts to admit that the other guy is right, but it's not too bad once you've gotten over the initial shock of admitting that you were wrong. What's deadly difficult is admitting the other guy is right while you still have not been proven wrong at all.
That's what happened to our mud wrestling physicists, and that's what should be happening to our mud wrestling Calvinists and Arminians, too.
I hate to say, "We're both right." I really do. In most things mathematical, one person is wrong, and I tend to extend that thinking to theology. That's a mistake on my part.
The odd thing is that I still don't think the Calminians are right. Calminians tend to jetison the rightness of both sides and end up with a wishy-washy God and semi-responsible people. I think the truth is harder than that.
God does predestine, and does so absolutely. God chooses those whom He saves, and is not panicking over those whom He might have been able to save if only we'd evangelized more/better/perfectly. Those who are not saved are those whom God knew would not be saved before He ever created. He knew how it would end for each of us, what His actions would be that would influence us, and what He could have done it differently, and that He would do everything exactly as He has done it. If that's not absolute predestination, I don't know what is, but it's a little different from saying God created some people for some bizarre pleasure He might take in damning them.
To me, those are the wave equations.
The particle equations are true too, though.
Every man must decide, and there is no crutch upon which he might lean. The decision is his and the responsibility for that decision is his. God made us with a will that bestows on us the right to suffer the consequences of our actions. And God only judges us on our own actions. Neither the sins of the father for any previous generations, nor the decisions of our great Creator before time will be weighed in the balance. On the one side will be the requirements of our own conscience (gentiles) or of the law (Jews), and on the other will be our performance against those requirements (unsaved) or Christ's performance of those requirements (saved.) We must choose Him.
The thing that stirred me to write was not some new insight into the scripture, but into physics, so please forgive me if I don't state the two positions any more clearly than that. You've all heard it too many times any way.
The thing that interests me is that the physical world gives such a great example of a complex duality. There is not a human being alive who can understand or picture what light really is. We cannot hold the idea of a wave and a particle in our mind simultaneously when trying to describe something so ubiquitous as light. The first thing ever created is so bizarrely complex that we cannot picture in our minds, though we sense it every waking second.
Light fills the void of space, transmitted from every direction and into every direction, and exerts its influence on things as random as plant leaves, microwave dinners, radio towers, and my mood on a gloomy morning, yet the brightest of our minds cannot tell us what it really is. It exists and behaves predictably, but not definably. One set of equations defines half of what it does, while another set of equations defines the other half of what it does, and the two sets of equations seem both to exclude the other set.
It's not enough to say, "The truth is in the middle." There is no middle between equations. Equations are either true or they are false. If you find some happy camping ground between two equations, it's either because the new equation is true, or because you're living in a fantasy world.
[Amusingly, quantum physics, the deep science of light, says the same thing. Light exists at discreet energy levels, and never in between them. Imagine that your car could go 5 mph or 10 or 25 or 50, but not 17.3 or 26.1 or anything in between those 4 speeds. That's why they talk about a "quantum leap." It always takes a quantum leap for light to change energy levels because while it might change speeds from 5 to 10 mph, it will do it without ever going 7.5 mph. It leaps from one energy level to another.]
There is only truth. There is no space between truths for convenient half-truth. The truth is that God predestines absolutely, and the truth is that we are fully responsible for our actions. I am comfortable saying that those two things confuse me, but I'm not able to toss either of them aside, even if they seem to be unable to live together. And the science of light gives me permission to be that stubborn.
Does that help or hurt anyone's thoughts about predestination?
20 April, 2008
Yahweh's Love Interest
The Biblical Archaeology Review has an article in this issue regarding "A Temple Built for Two." The inspiration is a little house shrine evidently showing a 2-seated throne. One of the seats they suppose to be for Yahweh, and the other for His consort, the local fertility goddess, Asherah.
The article does a fine job evaluating the possible meanings of the idol, and makes a good argument that, yes, in the local popular religion (as opposed to the intellectual religion of the priesthood) Yahweh did not abide alone. One of the chief points the article makes is that the prophets all spent reams of parchment decrying Asherah. The prophets' complaint that sanctuaries to "The Queen of Heaven" were "on every hill and under every green tree," is about as good a proof as one needs that Asherah was big medicine. The little house shrine portrayed in BAR merely gives an indication that the Israelites came up with the usual way of reconciling their conflicting deities.
The point that occurs to me while reading this article is that Yahweh is the only God I can remember who has no mate, except His people, and them as a whole. I can think of many examples of gods who are mated to other gods. I can think of gods who have been taken with individual humans. I can think of gods who have every human romantic problem. I cannot think of a single other god who mates himself to all willing humans as a single entity.
Yahweh calls Israel His wife, and mourns her departures. He brings Israel gifts, protects her from enemies, nurtures her, and makes life promises to her that are unique in all religious history so far as my memory recalls. Ours is a God Who loves inhumanly. He loves a being no human has ever imagined as an individual before, the church, with a pure grace no human has ever conjured up in any religious fiction.
As the heavens are above the earth, so His love is above our love, His intent above our intentions.
We are so much more than lucky to be so loved. Praise the Lord our King.
The article does a fine job evaluating the possible meanings of the idol, and makes a good argument that, yes, in the local popular religion (as opposed to the intellectual religion of the priesthood) Yahweh did not abide alone. One of the chief points the article makes is that the prophets all spent reams of parchment decrying Asherah. The prophets' complaint that sanctuaries to "The Queen of Heaven" were "on every hill and under every green tree," is about as good a proof as one needs that Asherah was big medicine. The little house shrine portrayed in BAR merely gives an indication that the Israelites came up with the usual way of reconciling their conflicting deities.
The point that occurs to me while reading this article is that Yahweh is the only God I can remember who has no mate, except His people, and them as a whole. I can think of many examples of gods who are mated to other gods. I can think of gods who have been taken with individual humans. I can think of gods who have every human romantic problem. I cannot think of a single other god who mates himself to all willing humans as a single entity.
Yahweh calls Israel His wife, and mourns her departures. He brings Israel gifts, protects her from enemies, nurtures her, and makes life promises to her that are unique in all religious history so far as my memory recalls. Ours is a God Who loves inhumanly. He loves a being no human has ever imagined as an individual before, the church, with a pure grace no human has ever conjured up in any religious fiction.
As the heavens are above the earth, so His love is above our love, His intent above our intentions.
We are so much more than lucky to be so loved. Praise the Lord our King.
21 March, 2008
Calvinism is Like Long Division
Most people don't like, but it's not like it's calculus or anything. It's just kind of hard to grasp, harder to work through, and prone to error if you're not careful. And really, as you go through all the higher math, higher education, and real life that the world can throw at you, how often do you use long division? Most people can get by fine without it.
But when you need it, nothing else will do.
But when you need it, nothing else will do.
18 March, 2008
The Quietness and Confidence Myth
... in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength ...
How many ways have you heard this verse stretched? It's like laffy-taffy. If someone wants you to enter into a type of prayer, or get over some heart-rending tears, or quit doubting authority, out comes the exhortation to quietness and confidence.
But what's the context?
Isa 30:12 ¶ Wherefore thus saith the Holy One of Israel, Because ye despise this word, and trust in oppression and perverseness, and stay thereon:
The opposite of quietness and confidence is trusting oppression and perverseness.
Doubt, or crying out to God, or even tears of anger are not opposed to quietness. Trusting sin is the opposite of confidence.
Isa 30:13 Therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant.
And that sin looks like a wall, but really it's rotted at the core.
Isa 30:14 And he shall break it as the breaking of the potters' vessel that is broken in pieces; he shall not spare: so that there shall not be found in the bursting of it a sherd to take fire from the hearth, or to take water [withal] out of the pit.
He will break that iniquity, though. The sin in which they trusted will fall apart.
Isa 30:15 ¶ For thus saith the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel; In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not.
Do you see? The ONLY quietness and confidence is to stop trusting in sin.
Isa 30:16 But ye said, No; for we will flee upon horses; therefore shall ye flee: and, We will ride upon the swift; therefore shall they that pursue you be swift.
They refuse to trust God. Instead, they will trust anything else.
Isa 30:17 One thousand [shall flee] at the rebuke of one; at the rebuke of five shall ye flee: till ye be left as a beacon upon the top of a mountain, and as an ensign on an hill.
But when we place our confidence in tricks and subtlety, we are constantly afraid that someone might trick us. We find we are vulnerable to every little whisper and rumor and fear. We flee when no one pursues at all. (I won't pretend to get the whole "beacon/ensign" thing.)
Isa 30:18 ¶ And therefore will the LORD wait, that he may be gracious unto you, and therefore will he be exalted, that he may have mercy upon you: for the LORD [is] a God of judgment: blessed [are] all they that wait for him.
But the Lord is willing to wait. He WILL bless His children, and since their desire is to be holy as He is holy, He will bless them with holiness.
What more could we want?
How many ways have you heard this verse stretched? It's like laffy-taffy. If someone wants you to enter into a type of prayer, or get over some heart-rending tears, or quit doubting authority, out comes the exhortation to quietness and confidence.
But what's the context?
Isa 30:12 ¶ Wherefore thus saith the Holy One of Israel, Because ye despise this word, and trust in oppression and perverseness, and stay thereon:
The opposite of quietness and confidence is trusting oppression and perverseness.
Doubt, or crying out to God, or even tears of anger are not opposed to quietness. Trusting sin is the opposite of confidence.
Isa 30:13 Therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant.
And that sin looks like a wall, but really it's rotted at the core.
Isa 30:14 And he shall break it as the breaking of the potters' vessel that is broken in pieces; he shall not spare: so that there shall not be found in the bursting of it a sherd to take fire from the hearth, or to take water [withal] out of the pit.
He will break that iniquity, though. The sin in which they trusted will fall apart.
Isa 30:15 ¶ For thus saith the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel; In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not.
Do you see? The ONLY quietness and confidence is to stop trusting in sin.
Isa 30:16 But ye said, No; for we will flee upon horses; therefore shall ye flee: and, We will ride upon the swift; therefore shall they that pursue you be swift.
They refuse to trust God. Instead, they will trust anything else.
Isa 30:17 One thousand [shall flee] at the rebuke of one; at the rebuke of five shall ye flee: till ye be left as a beacon upon the top of a mountain, and as an ensign on an hill.
But when we place our confidence in tricks and subtlety, we are constantly afraid that someone might trick us. We find we are vulnerable to every little whisper and rumor and fear. We flee when no one pursues at all. (I won't pretend to get the whole "beacon/ensign" thing.)
Isa 30:18 ¶ And therefore will the LORD wait, that he may be gracious unto you, and therefore will he be exalted, that he may have mercy upon you: for the LORD [is] a God of judgment: blessed [are] all they that wait for him.
But the Lord is willing to wait. He WILL bless His children, and since their desire is to be holy as He is holy, He will bless them with holiness.
What more could we want?
06 March, 2008
The Precious Blood of Christ
I'm probably not going to talk a lot about the Precious Blood conference. It was a nice conference, and all the information handed out was reliable. I have to admit to being somewhat distracted during the entire weekend, but even at that, the messages just weren't "news" to me. In another mood, I might try to be amusing, but the men who presented were honorable, and the messages they delivered were edifying. Derek Thomas did an especially encouraging job, and I'll report the majority of the conference attendees were bubbling with joy at the gift of the whole weekend.
I have to confess that I attended the whole weekend with a specific message in mind, hoping to hear a type of message. That was probably not fair of me. I was expecting too much. And then, those men are theologians, and they may find error in the message that was on my heart. Who knows. With no further ado, here's the message I typed on the flight home.
Living fluid fell from Abel's veins and landed on the hard, cold dust. Even as it spilled, each cell kept trying to absorb oxygen, carry food, and collect waste products. Red and warm, the blood was delivered out of Abel into a starkly bright, cold, windy, forbidding world, as alien to it as an infant, only it was a world to which blood could never belong.
Abel's living blood would die there in that field.
And there was no rescuer. There was no one to scoop the fluid up nor mourn its passing. There was only Cain, and whatever tool he used to strike his brother. He probably dug a shallow pit to hide his own kith and kin and, after dumping Abel's body in, shoveled all the tainted soil into the new depression. Abel was not rescued. He was not even found. The place where Cain left him to rot looked like any other part of the field.
And Abel's blood was now in the dark and cold of the forbidding earth.
Helpless, it cried out to God.
Genesis 4:10 & 11
And [God] said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now [art] thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;
Abel's still-living blood screamed. Abel's life was in that hole, and it cried out against the evil. Abel cried to God, begging resurrection, begging peace, begging life for life.
Cain walked the earth.
The only satisfaction Abel could accept was Cain's blood beside his own. The cry of Abel's blood to God begging justice was a right cry, and God agreed. God demanded blood be shed for blood. Our God would not deny Abel justice.
Genesis 9:5 & 6
And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.
And if the blood of man becomes precious because of the image of God, how much more precious is the glory of God?
Rom 3:23
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
The most profound statement I heard this weekend was that the verse says it is sin to fall short of the glory of God. The "mark" that we all "miss" is not blameless behaviour, it's the glory of God. We are responsible to bring God glory.
Cain's was not the last nor the worst sin. Cain was merely the first of a line into which, in my time, I thrust myself. I have wished my brothers dead, and I have lusted, and I have loved God my Father and Provider with less than all my strength. His glory has exceeded my reverence. I have fallen short of the glory of God.
Rom 6:23
For the wages of sin [is] death;
When His glory demands my all, and I withhold the best for myself, I drag God from His heaven and trample Him here on His Earth. I have place the noxious vapor of my lust above the glorious beauty of His golden presence. I trade His precious gifts for a bong-hit of sewerage. I lust against Him, with angry tears, to be given a scorpion instead of His bread of Life. Earthly kings, mere shadows of divine Glory, torment and kill greater men for less offense than mine against my God.
My life is justly forfeit before God, and my blood deserves to be poured on the flames of God's wrath forever. He is my Just Judge and Condemner.
Only He does not condemn.
Neither does He excuse.
He is my Just Judge and Condemner, but He makes Himself "jthe Justifier" of sinners without violating His own justice.
How?
The blood of men and the glory of God lie buried in the cold, dark soil of my memories, concealed by my hardened heart. How does He not condemn me? How does He justly allow my to walk here another day?
Many don't wonder that at all. Many wonder why God, Who is Love, does not willingly forgive all. It is a fair question, but not a mature one. A child might ask why someone doesn't just buy all the hungry people enough food. It's a nice wish, but it cannot be done. Someday, maybe that child will grow up to help with the problem of hunger, but no one can make it go away.
God cannot make our guilt go away. He cannot. He must not. If someone kills my little girl, can I allow her blood to go unassuaged? May it never be. God cannot, can never consider, allowing the demands of the offended to be mocked. Blood must answer to blood. And falling short of the glory of God is an offense against Him which demands satisfaction. God cannot cease to be just.
No, God is not merely forgiving. God remains just by making Himself the Justifier.
The blood I have shed during my walk and the glory I have disdained are answered with Jesus' precious blood.
2000 years ago, Jesus' blood was delivered from His righteous body and spilled out upon the hard rock of Golgotha. Warm, living blood fell from His innocent veins onto deadly wood and unflinching granite. His blood fell, spilled guiltily by guilty men, and left to dry and die without a thought.
His blood, His precious blood, cried out.
Jesus' blood cried, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Jesus' blood cried, "Father, forgive my brothers and sisters; forgive Your children, for my blood is given in place of theirs."
Jesus' blood cried, "I know what I give, and I know why I give it. It is my Life, and I lay it down for the prize I covet, the prize You covet, a heritage to Your glory."
Jesus' blood cried, "Remember Adam. Adam has sinned against You and against men in Your holy image. Adam has trampled Your glory underfoot and hated Your fleshly image. He has hated his God and his brother. His blood is forfeit, but take Mine. My blood is sufficient. My blood is a just price. Adam hated his wife, and when she cried for justice her cry was righteous. But count Adam's punishment against me. Here is my blood. Eve must be satisfied when I bare my back for Adam's stripes. My punishment exceeds Adam's crime. And when Adam turned his back on You, Father, He became guilty of all the law. His blood is forfeit. He is worthy to be stoned, to die under two witnesses without mercy. Here, Father, is my blood. Here is my life, taken without mercy, given with Your grace. You must forgive Adam when You see my perfect Life offered in his stead. This punishment is enough for Adam's sin."
Then Jesus' blood cried out for forgiveness for Eve, and for Seth, and for each man and woman after them who would call on His Name. Jesus' blood cried out for forgiveness for you, if you call on His Name.
Lay your hand on the Head of the Lamb. Throw off your own hopes of pleasing God. Give over trying to satisfy the law's demands. Listen as Jesus stands before His Father pleading His blood in place of your sins. Hear Him call justice down on Himself for the times you've dishonored your mother, the times you've stolen, the times you've handled the Name of your God without honor. Hear Him confess to your guilt and profess your innocence to His holy Father.
Then hear the Father ask whether you agree. Listen as the Father looks to you, and asks whether His Son's death is imputed to you. Do you claim the purity, the cleanness the Lamb's blood will afford? Or do you choose to stand before Him on the merits of your own case? Do you submit yourself to One Who loves you and gave Himself for you, or are you one for Whom the death of the Lamb of God means nothing.
Claim His precious blood now. Praise Him for the gift of His expensive, so expensive mercy, bought at the highest price in all the universe. Give yourself to that which was given to you. Give yourself to God's Life.
Or do you imagine that you can ignore His blood? Do you imagine that you can tread heavily on the glory of God, hate people whom He has created, and today spurn the price He paid in His own suffering and death. Do you imagine the Judge will look away as you scorn gift upon gift, and scorn even the gift of a life given for you, and not bear the full wrath of the Creator of the Universe? It is known even to the least that if someone sacrifices his life for you, you are forever in his debt. Can God sacrifice His Life for you, and you not respond?
Hebrews 10:26 - 31
For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, But a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries. He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace? For we know him that hath said, Vengeance [belongeth] unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people. [It is] a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
The blood of the Son of God still cries out. It cried against sin, and now it cries for you to rest yourself wholly in its strength on your behalf. Curse your pride, and cripple your own strength. Let your neediness drive you. Let Him meet your need. Know that you need Him. Know that you need His blood.
Or are you already safely in His blood? Are are already in Christ? Praise Him, then. Remind yourself of the incredible power in His Life given for you, His blood given for the remission of your sins, His body beaten, His Sonship set aside, so that you might be adopted into His family. Praise with every song and prayer the work of the Son for you, and you will find yourself established against every trial and hardship. If He did so much for you already, could he fail to carry you the rest of the way home?
Plunge yourself under the healing, covering power of the blood of Jesus. Let the destruction of His Life be the birth of your own. Let the soiling of His holiness be the cleansing of your own. Let the death of the Son be the birth of your new life. Accept the free gift of God, and become rich for the first time.
The blood of Jesus has borne so much sin for so many, and carried it away forever, and still the blood remains. Still the blood of Jesus has never run dry, and still there is supply enough for you. There is supply enough to cleanse you of your guilt, and supply enough to bind you together to an army of brothers and sisters who shared your guilt and now share your salvation. When you allow the blood of Jesus to rescue you, you do much more than merely become innocent. You become one with the risen Jesus, and with every man, woman and child who has given themselves to Him. You join the fellowship of the redeemed, and join a local family of believers who are discovering Him just like you will.
Come with us. Come to the Lamb. Come to the blood of His eternal promise. Come to Life that will never end.
Come and welcome.
I have to confess that I attended the whole weekend with a specific message in mind, hoping to hear a type of message. That was probably not fair of me. I was expecting too much. And then, those men are theologians, and they may find error in the message that was on my heart. Who knows. With no further ado, here's the message I typed on the flight home.
Living fluid fell from Abel's veins and landed on the hard, cold dust. Even as it spilled, each cell kept trying to absorb oxygen, carry food, and collect waste products. Red and warm, the blood was delivered out of Abel into a starkly bright, cold, windy, forbidding world, as alien to it as an infant, only it was a world to which blood could never belong.
Abel's living blood would die there in that field.
And there was no rescuer. There was no one to scoop the fluid up nor mourn its passing. There was only Cain, and whatever tool he used to strike his brother. He probably dug a shallow pit to hide his own kith and kin and, after dumping Abel's body in, shoveled all the tainted soil into the new depression. Abel was not rescued. He was not even found. The place where Cain left him to rot looked like any other part of the field.
And Abel's blood was now in the dark and cold of the forbidding earth.
Helpless, it cried out to God.
Genesis 4:10 & 11
And [God] said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now [art] thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;
Abel's still-living blood screamed. Abel's life was in that hole, and it cried out against the evil. Abel cried to God, begging resurrection, begging peace, begging life for life.
Cain walked the earth.
The only satisfaction Abel could accept was Cain's blood beside his own. The cry of Abel's blood to God begging justice was a right cry, and God agreed. God demanded blood be shed for blood. Our God would not deny Abel justice.
Genesis 9:5 & 6
And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.
And if the blood of man becomes precious because of the image of God, how much more precious is the glory of God?
Rom 3:23
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
The most profound statement I heard this weekend was that the verse says it is sin to fall short of the glory of God. The "mark" that we all "miss" is not blameless behaviour, it's the glory of God. We are responsible to bring God glory.
Cain's was not the last nor the worst sin. Cain was merely the first of a line into which, in my time, I thrust myself. I have wished my brothers dead, and I have lusted, and I have loved God my Father and Provider with less than all my strength. His glory has exceeded my reverence. I have fallen short of the glory of God.
Rom 6:23
For the wages of sin [is] death;
When His glory demands my all, and I withhold the best for myself, I drag God from His heaven and trample Him here on His Earth. I have place the noxious vapor of my lust above the glorious beauty of His golden presence. I trade His precious gifts for a bong-hit of sewerage. I lust against Him, with angry tears, to be given a scorpion instead of His bread of Life. Earthly kings, mere shadows of divine Glory, torment and kill greater men for less offense than mine against my God.
My life is justly forfeit before God, and my blood deserves to be poured on the flames of God's wrath forever. He is my Just Judge and Condemner.
Only He does not condemn.
Neither does He excuse.
He is my Just Judge and Condemner, but He makes Himself "jthe Justifier" of sinners without violating His own justice.
How?
The blood of men and the glory of God lie buried in the cold, dark soil of my memories, concealed by my hardened heart. How does He not condemn me? How does He justly allow my to walk here another day?
Many don't wonder that at all. Many wonder why God, Who is Love, does not willingly forgive all. It is a fair question, but not a mature one. A child might ask why someone doesn't just buy all the hungry people enough food. It's a nice wish, but it cannot be done. Someday, maybe that child will grow up to help with the problem of hunger, but no one can make it go away.
God cannot make our guilt go away. He cannot. He must not. If someone kills my little girl, can I allow her blood to go unassuaged? May it never be. God cannot, can never consider, allowing the demands of the offended to be mocked. Blood must answer to blood. And falling short of the glory of God is an offense against Him which demands satisfaction. God cannot cease to be just.
No, God is not merely forgiving. God remains just by making Himself the Justifier.
The blood I have shed during my walk and the glory I have disdained are answered with Jesus' precious blood.
2000 years ago, Jesus' blood was delivered from His righteous body and spilled out upon the hard rock of Golgotha. Warm, living blood fell from His innocent veins onto deadly wood and unflinching granite. His blood fell, spilled guiltily by guilty men, and left to dry and die without a thought.
His blood, His precious blood, cried out.
Jesus' blood cried, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Jesus' blood cried, "Father, forgive my brothers and sisters; forgive Your children, for my blood is given in place of theirs."
Jesus' blood cried, "I know what I give, and I know why I give it. It is my Life, and I lay it down for the prize I covet, the prize You covet, a heritage to Your glory."
Jesus' blood cried, "Remember Adam. Adam has sinned against You and against men in Your holy image. Adam has trampled Your glory underfoot and hated Your fleshly image. He has hated his God and his brother. His blood is forfeit, but take Mine. My blood is sufficient. My blood is a just price. Adam hated his wife, and when she cried for justice her cry was righteous. But count Adam's punishment against me. Here is my blood. Eve must be satisfied when I bare my back for Adam's stripes. My punishment exceeds Adam's crime. And when Adam turned his back on You, Father, He became guilty of all the law. His blood is forfeit. He is worthy to be stoned, to die under two witnesses without mercy. Here, Father, is my blood. Here is my life, taken without mercy, given with Your grace. You must forgive Adam when You see my perfect Life offered in his stead. This punishment is enough for Adam's sin."
Then Jesus' blood cried out for forgiveness for Eve, and for Seth, and for each man and woman after them who would call on His Name. Jesus' blood cried out for forgiveness for you, if you call on His Name.
Lay your hand on the Head of the Lamb. Throw off your own hopes of pleasing God. Give over trying to satisfy the law's demands. Listen as Jesus stands before His Father pleading His blood in place of your sins. Hear Him call justice down on Himself for the times you've dishonored your mother, the times you've stolen, the times you've handled the Name of your God without honor. Hear Him confess to your guilt and profess your innocence to His holy Father.
Then hear the Father ask whether you agree. Listen as the Father looks to you, and asks whether His Son's death is imputed to you. Do you claim the purity, the cleanness the Lamb's blood will afford? Or do you choose to stand before Him on the merits of your own case? Do you submit yourself to One Who loves you and gave Himself for you, or are you one for Whom the death of the Lamb of God means nothing.
Claim His precious blood now. Praise Him for the gift of His expensive, so expensive mercy, bought at the highest price in all the universe. Give yourself to that which was given to you. Give yourself to God's Life.
Or do you imagine that you can ignore His blood? Do you imagine that you can tread heavily on the glory of God, hate people whom He has created, and today spurn the price He paid in His own suffering and death. Do you imagine the Judge will look away as you scorn gift upon gift, and scorn even the gift of a life given for you, and not bear the full wrath of the Creator of the Universe? It is known even to the least that if someone sacrifices his life for you, you are forever in his debt. Can God sacrifice His Life for you, and you not respond?
Hebrews 10:26 - 31
For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, But a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries. He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or three witnesses: Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace? For we know him that hath said, Vengeance [belongeth] unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people. [It is] a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
The blood of the Son of God still cries out. It cried against sin, and now it cries for you to rest yourself wholly in its strength on your behalf. Curse your pride, and cripple your own strength. Let your neediness drive you. Let Him meet your need. Know that you need Him. Know that you need His blood.
Or are you already safely in His blood? Are are already in Christ? Praise Him, then. Remind yourself of the incredible power in His Life given for you, His blood given for the remission of your sins, His body beaten, His Sonship set aside, so that you might be adopted into His family. Praise with every song and prayer the work of the Son for you, and you will find yourself established against every trial and hardship. If He did so much for you already, could he fail to carry you the rest of the way home?
Plunge yourself under the healing, covering power of the blood of Jesus. Let the destruction of His Life be the birth of your own. Let the soiling of His holiness be the cleansing of your own. Let the death of the Son be the birth of your new life. Accept the free gift of God, and become rich for the first time.
The blood of Jesus has borne so much sin for so many, and carried it away forever, and still the blood remains. Still the blood of Jesus has never run dry, and still there is supply enough for you. There is supply enough to cleanse you of your guilt, and supply enough to bind you together to an army of brothers and sisters who shared your guilt and now share your salvation. When you allow the blood of Jesus to rescue you, you do much more than merely become innocent. You become one with the risen Jesus, and with every man, woman and child who has given themselves to Him. You join the fellowship of the redeemed, and join a local family of believers who are discovering Him just like you will.
Come with us. Come to the Lamb. Come to the blood of His eternal promise. Come to Life that will never end.
Come and welcome.
20 February, 2008
Jesus Calls
As if giving myself to Elizabeth Prentiss were not enough, I've started reading Frances Ridley Havergal's devotional.
I cannot sigh deeply nor contentedly enough in a blog post to begin to communicate how comfortable and at home I feel reading these two ladies. Prentiss is a gorgeous Puritan sweetheart and Havergal is a fiery Arminian (sounding) dervish. Both of them hail from a day when love to Christ was expected to pour out from one's hands and feet, when a man was only a man if he were holy in deed and thought. They set the bar too high for me, and assure me Christ can make up the difference. Their words are so different from anything I hear in this age, and there is a tinkling of gold in hearing them.
I've not yet handed out all 15 copies I bought of "Stepping Heavenward," but I'm getting closer.
As I read Havergal the other night, she said one of the simplest things to a reader she imagined was under the conviction of the Spirit. She said that Jesus calls, and if Jesus calls you don't you believe it is safe to come?
And she is so right.
The thing is, He does not quit calling just because we go and "get saved." He calls us forward into and through the most frightening of nights. He calls us to stop and wait in the loneliest of deserts. He calls us to plunge off cliffs in the dead of night once in a great while. And in those times, we doubt whether it's Him calling or whether our mind is just playing tricks in the silence again. Sometimes we know it's Him.
One afternoon he called Peter to take and eat of the unclean food. We underplay that. We don't understand it. He might well have asked one of us to raw chicken, eggs and fish left in a warm broth on the dash of a car for two days in the Georgia summer. The food was unclean. And it was not only his stomach or his life that might be put at risk, but his relationship to God - forever.
Jesus called him. It was safe.
The fear of offending Him Whom we love wrenches our bowels, but His blood has covered our offense. The fear of appearing before Him undoes us, but His righteousness has covered our nakedness. We fail to reach even that level of wisdom we can grasp, but He bears fruit in us anyway.
When Jesus calls us, it is safe.
I cannot sigh deeply nor contentedly enough in a blog post to begin to communicate how comfortable and at home I feel reading these two ladies. Prentiss is a gorgeous Puritan sweetheart and Havergal is a fiery Arminian (sounding) dervish. Both of them hail from a day when love to Christ was expected to pour out from one's hands and feet, when a man was only a man if he were holy in deed and thought. They set the bar too high for me, and assure me Christ can make up the difference. Their words are so different from anything I hear in this age, and there is a tinkling of gold in hearing them.
I've not yet handed out all 15 copies I bought of "Stepping Heavenward," but I'm getting closer.
As I read Havergal the other night, she said one of the simplest things to a reader she imagined was under the conviction of the Spirit. She said that Jesus calls, and if Jesus calls you don't you believe it is safe to come?
And she is so right.
The thing is, He does not quit calling just because we go and "get saved." He calls us forward into and through the most frightening of nights. He calls us to stop and wait in the loneliest of deserts. He calls us to plunge off cliffs in the dead of night once in a great while. And in those times, we doubt whether it's Him calling or whether our mind is just playing tricks in the silence again. Sometimes we know it's Him.
One afternoon he called Peter to take and eat of the unclean food. We underplay that. We don't understand it. He might well have asked one of us to raw chicken, eggs and fish left in a warm broth on the dash of a car for two days in the Georgia summer. The food was unclean. And it was not only his stomach or his life that might be put at risk, but his relationship to God - forever.
Jesus called him. It was safe.
The fear of offending Him Whom we love wrenches our bowels, but His blood has covered our offense. The fear of appearing before Him undoes us, but His righteousness has covered our nakedness. We fail to reach even that level of wisdom we can grasp, but He bears fruit in us anyway.
When Jesus calls us, it is safe.
03 January, 2008
Getting Church Right
Prov 21:2
Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the LORD pondereth the hearts.
I had to let that sink in a little the other night, before it began to speak to me.
EVERY way of EVERY man IS RIGHT in his own eyes.
Can you compute that? Mitt Romney is right in his own eyes, even though he's passionately defended opposite positions several times in his career. Hilary Clinton is right in her own eyes even though she's never changed her mind on anything.
I'm right in my own eyes. I humbly thought through everything I believed 27 years ago, and was convinced I was right. Since 1981 I have changed positions on 'most every doctrine I affirmed. (Quiz me, I dare you.) And when I sit down and humbly assess myself in 2008, I'm still right on all of them again. Amazing how that happens.
You know what? That's not a sin. That's not pride. That's not a blind spot. That's simple math. If I thought I was wrong about one of them, I'd change my mind about it. From past experience I'd say it'd take me between 1 day and 6 months to change my mind on that thing, but I'd change it and guess what? I'd be right in my own eyes again.
There's no sin in thinking I'm right.
And yet all my rightness could be traded at profit for a plugged nickel. I've been right for 43 years now, and had to abandon settled positions over and again. My current doctrinal positions have learned to wear the crown uneasily.
Fortunately, that doesn't matter. God ponders the hearts. Most versions say He "weighs" the hearts. Whether He ponders or weighs, God doesn't condemn our hearts, and He doesn't count our mistakes in this judgement. God loves right past our ways, and weighs our loves.
We must do the same with ourselves. We must ignore our "rightness" and watch our actions to learn about our hearts. Do we suffer long with brothers? Are we kind? Do we not vaunt ourselves and not seek our own benefit? Do we give and bless and labor for others when it's in our power?
How weighty is our heart?
Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the LORD pondereth the hearts.
I had to let that sink in a little the other night, before it began to speak to me.
EVERY way of EVERY man IS RIGHT in his own eyes.
Can you compute that? Mitt Romney is right in his own eyes, even though he's passionately defended opposite positions several times in his career. Hilary Clinton is right in her own eyes even though she's never changed her mind on anything.
I'm right in my own eyes. I humbly thought through everything I believed 27 years ago, and was convinced I was right. Since 1981 I have changed positions on 'most every doctrine I affirmed. (Quiz me, I dare you.) And when I sit down and humbly assess myself in 2008, I'm still right on all of them again. Amazing how that happens.
You know what? That's not a sin. That's not pride. That's not a blind spot. That's simple math. If I thought I was wrong about one of them, I'd change my mind about it. From past experience I'd say it'd take me between 1 day and 6 months to change my mind on that thing, but I'd change it and guess what? I'd be right in my own eyes again.
There's no sin in thinking I'm right.
And yet all my rightness could be traded at profit for a plugged nickel. I've been right for 43 years now, and had to abandon settled positions over and again. My current doctrinal positions have learned to wear the crown uneasily.
Fortunately, that doesn't matter. God ponders the hearts. Most versions say He "weighs" the hearts. Whether He ponders or weighs, God doesn't condemn our hearts, and He doesn't count our mistakes in this judgement. God loves right past our ways, and weighs our loves.
We must do the same with ourselves. We must ignore our "rightness" and watch our actions to learn about our hearts. Do we suffer long with brothers? Are we kind? Do we not vaunt ourselves and not seek our own benefit? Do we give and bless and labor for others when it's in our power?
How weighty is our heart?
02 January, 2008
Random Thoughts on Blooming Where You're Planted
(Every night I have to ask, "How can it be so incredibly late so very early?!" I hate clocks and how they just keep running. Oh well.)
First, I don't know how many times this has happened to me. I reject folk wisdom over and over only to find after a careful, years long inquiry into the issue, that the folk were right. They usually are.
The recommendation that a man should bloom where he's planted is as old as the hills. I realize it is somewhat dense for me only now to be catching up to it's wisdom. Still, I am beginning to see why it's so right. And this part has happened to me countless times too. I can usually profit a little beyond the folk wisdom because I forced myself to find out why it was wise. We'll hope I have not just wasted twenty good years figuring this stuff out.
Second, I think I see why doctrine creates such division amongst Christians.
We need doctrine. We ALL need doctrine, and there is only one true doctrine, but none of us has it. We just have our view of the facts, and our best guess of what God is like. That alone makes it obvious why doctrine must create divisions. But there's more.
I'm going through the exercise of writing a book on the basics of being a Christian. I'm targeting something in the 70 page range and describing what one does to become a Christian and to "do" being a Christian the right way. It was inspired by the way my tennis game improved when (after 30 years) I was taught the right way to hit each shot. Learning the right way to strike the ball made everything else to work, so I'm trying to teach the right way to strike the iron in life.
As I approached the end of the first draft, it dawned on me that nowhere in the book is it obvious what my doctrines are. I could not tell from my own book what I believe about anything outside of the rawest salvation, and I think I know why. All of us, every true Christian, basically believes the same things about what we can do for God. We only argue about what God can do for us, and what we have to do to free Him to do those things for us. Since I'm writing about what we do, I've never needed to open a single controversy.
We only fight about what God can do for us.
Predestination versus Free Will?
- Can God save us apart from our decision?
Eschatology?
- Will God pull us out of the fire at the end of everything, or will He help us endure it?
Sacraments?
- Does God infuse us with grace through physical actions, or by invisible spiritual acts?
The Trinity?
- Is it important for God to have 3 personalities to reach out and save us?
Home church?
- Can God work in the world when the church is so buried in fithly lucre?
Caring for the poor?
- We all agree we should do this.
In fact, we all agree about almost everything we should do as Christians. We should pray. We should care for the saints. We should avoid the evil that's in the world. We should reach out to the people oppressed by that very evil and give them the Truth of Jesus' work.
And that's why going to the closest church is so important. We agree with those people about what we should be doing. We only struggle with them over what God is doing for us. Why let our confusions separate us? We should open our hearts and lives to them as freely as to someone who agrees with us.
Bringing me to the third thing, we are a geographical species.
My son noted something the other day. He was in the break room with six other people, and they were all talking ... but not one of them was talking to anyone in the room.
Wow.
We live a cellular life these days. We are completely separating ourselves from our geographical "place." But we are a geographical species. We naturally connect with where we are, and with the people we expect to see in our places. To do most of our connecting with a TV screen, a cell phone, and a computer monitor is neither natural nor healthy, and yet we are almost there. How many people are fighting for the privilege of telecommuting these days? When work contact is gone, what's left? And when we add the windshields of our cars to the church equation and drive there 3 times a week, we are only shooting ourselves in our God-given, natural, geographical feet.
We were built to connect with the living people around us. Life is connection, and connection happens best across a table or a fence, not a down modem line or up a cellular tower.
The church has the fantastic opportunity to be the last thing in America that NEEDS eyeball to eyeball, handshake to handshake, living connection. We can become the single American place people go when they want to remember what it's like to touch someone and be loved - well that and singles bars, I guess. But we cannot give this to ourselves, much less to anyone else, when we all drive 20 minutes for the chance.
Fourth, I thought about the phrase, "boots on the ground."
That's such a pregnant sentence. God has chosen to fight His war against this Earthly insurgency with precious few boots on the ground. Each of us needs to love to maximum efficiency. We need to give ourselves every opportunity to strike a hug for the cause. And where can we have more effect than in a church where we're a little different? Where can we have more effect than amongst our own neighbors? Where can we have more effect than face to face with people whose hearts are silently calling out for real connection with people who'll really care?
---
I know none of this makes much sense, and I've hardly made a cogent case here. I just cannot seem to find the time to post, so it's either spray out these random thoughts or burst from keeping them inside for weeks. I cannot think of a time I've been more excited about the real possibilities standing open before the church. I cannot think of a time I've felt more like an idea might really be possible, doable, and even going to happen in some degree.
I've spent years wrestling with myself over how to fight the church and build it at the same time. Even as I started this series it was with fighting the church in mind. I wanted to fight the evil paper that was choking the church, but somehow that's just not right. It's like when us soldiers would talk about the Geneva convention. You were not allowed to shoot a 50 caliber machine gun at people, it was too big for the rules, but you could shoot it at the equipment they happened to be carrying. Shooting at the paperwork in the church might meet the letter of the law, but it's still not right, and I've known it all along.
As my mind is gnawing on this whole concept, an odd thing is happening. I am coming to consider the paperwork in the church to be an exact manifestation of the sin of the Nicolaitans in the Revelation. Therefore, it is a manifestation of a common sin within the church, and therefore it should be pitied and healed rather than assaulted. Rather than waging war against paper, I need to do exactly what I'd do in any other case of sin: exhort, encourage, rebuke, and most of all, love and forgive.
I'm not sure I'm ready for all this growth.
Ain't life grand. :-)
First, I don't know how many times this has happened to me. I reject folk wisdom over and over only to find after a careful, years long inquiry into the issue, that the folk were right. They usually are.
The recommendation that a man should bloom where he's planted is as old as the hills. I realize it is somewhat dense for me only now to be catching up to it's wisdom. Still, I am beginning to see why it's so right. And this part has happened to me countless times too. I can usually profit a little beyond the folk wisdom because I forced myself to find out why it was wise. We'll hope I have not just wasted twenty good years figuring this stuff out.
Second, I think I see why doctrine creates such division amongst Christians.
We need doctrine. We ALL need doctrine, and there is only one true doctrine, but none of us has it. We just have our view of the facts, and our best guess of what God is like. That alone makes it obvious why doctrine must create divisions. But there's more.
I'm going through the exercise of writing a book on the basics of being a Christian. I'm targeting something in the 70 page range and describing what one does to become a Christian and to "do" being a Christian the right way. It was inspired by the way my tennis game improved when (after 30 years) I was taught the right way to hit each shot. Learning the right way to strike the ball made everything else to work, so I'm trying to teach the right way to strike the iron in life.
As I approached the end of the first draft, it dawned on me that nowhere in the book is it obvious what my doctrines are. I could not tell from my own book what I believe about anything outside of the rawest salvation, and I think I know why. All of us, every true Christian, basically believes the same things about what we can do for God. We only argue about what God can do for us, and what we have to do to free Him to do those things for us. Since I'm writing about what we do, I've never needed to open a single controversy.
We only fight about what God can do for us.
Predestination versus Free Will?
- Can God save us apart from our decision?
Eschatology?
- Will God pull us out of the fire at the end of everything, or will He help us endure it?
Sacraments?
- Does God infuse us with grace through physical actions, or by invisible spiritual acts?
The Trinity?
- Is it important for God to have 3 personalities to reach out and save us?
Home church?
- Can God work in the world when the church is so buried in fithly lucre?
Caring for the poor?
- We all agree we should do this.
In fact, we all agree about almost everything we should do as Christians. We should pray. We should care for the saints. We should avoid the evil that's in the world. We should reach out to the people oppressed by that very evil and give them the Truth of Jesus' work.
And that's why going to the closest church is so important. We agree with those people about what we should be doing. We only struggle with them over what God is doing for us. Why let our confusions separate us? We should open our hearts and lives to them as freely as to someone who agrees with us.
Bringing me to the third thing, we are a geographical species.
My son noted something the other day. He was in the break room with six other people, and they were all talking ... but not one of them was talking to anyone in the room.
Wow.
We live a cellular life these days. We are completely separating ourselves from our geographical "place." But we are a geographical species. We naturally connect with where we are, and with the people we expect to see in our places. To do most of our connecting with a TV screen, a cell phone, and a computer monitor is neither natural nor healthy, and yet we are almost there. How many people are fighting for the privilege of telecommuting these days? When work contact is gone, what's left? And when we add the windshields of our cars to the church equation and drive there 3 times a week, we are only shooting ourselves in our God-given, natural, geographical feet.
We were built to connect with the living people around us. Life is connection, and connection happens best across a table or a fence, not a down modem line or up a cellular tower.
The church has the fantastic opportunity to be the last thing in America that NEEDS eyeball to eyeball, handshake to handshake, living connection. We can become the single American place people go when they want to remember what it's like to touch someone and be loved - well that and singles bars, I guess. But we cannot give this to ourselves, much less to anyone else, when we all drive 20 minutes for the chance.
Fourth, I thought about the phrase, "boots on the ground."
That's such a pregnant sentence. God has chosen to fight His war against this Earthly insurgency with precious few boots on the ground. Each of us needs to love to maximum efficiency. We need to give ourselves every opportunity to strike a hug for the cause. And where can we have more effect than in a church where we're a little different? Where can we have more effect than amongst our own neighbors? Where can we have more effect than face to face with people whose hearts are silently calling out for real connection with people who'll really care?
---
I know none of this makes much sense, and I've hardly made a cogent case here. I just cannot seem to find the time to post, so it's either spray out these random thoughts or burst from keeping them inside for weeks. I cannot think of a time I've been more excited about the real possibilities standing open before the church. I cannot think of a time I've felt more like an idea might really be possible, doable, and even going to happen in some degree.
I've spent years wrestling with myself over how to fight the church and build it at the same time. Even as I started this series it was with fighting the church in mind. I wanted to fight the evil paper that was choking the church, but somehow that's just not right. It's like when us soldiers would talk about the Geneva convention. You were not allowed to shoot a 50 caliber machine gun at people, it was too big for the rules, but you could shoot it at the equipment they happened to be carrying. Shooting at the paperwork in the church might meet the letter of the law, but it's still not right, and I've known it all along.
As my mind is gnawing on this whole concept, an odd thing is happening. I am coming to consider the paperwork in the church to be an exact manifestation of the sin of the Nicolaitans in the Revelation. Therefore, it is a manifestation of a common sin within the church, and therefore it should be pitied and healed rather than assaulted. Rather than waging war against paper, I need to do exactly what I'd do in any other case of sin: exhort, encourage, rebuke, and most of all, love and forgive.
I'm not sure I'm ready for all this growth.
Ain't life grand. :-)
28 December, 2007
Choosing a Church in which to Bloom
I have already said each of us should attend the church nearest our home, and given incontrovertible reasons. There is, however, one reason not to attend the church closest to your home.
You should only attend a church that's alive.
How can you tell whether the church nearest your home is dead, and that you should attend a little further away?
The Revelation of Jesus Christ, chapters 2 and 3 give us a pretty look at 7 churches. Let's see what Jesus has to say about each of them. If you'll forgive me, for the sake of brevity I'm only going to focus on the negative.
Ephesus left their first love. They quit loving Christ Himself. That's MASSIVE. But it was not too late for them to repent, do the first works again, and stay in the presence of the Lord. That surely means they are alive. I would not pass on a church because they had grown a little cold in love. If you join them and let the fire of your love burn, who knows what might happen?
Smyrna was faultless, but poor and about to enter a fearful time of persecution. It might take courage to join a Smyrna, to join a church in a difficult neighborhood perhaps, but there's a crown of life in it for those who dare.
Pergamos holds false doctrines, commits idolatry and fornication, and has a serious clergy problem. Join or run? This one is truly a tough call for me. I think I'd go in with about the same attitude Jesus seems to show. I'd join and let my specific concerns be known to people with power to promote repentance. There's still a spark of life there, so I'd have a hard time passing them by. There's one thing I'd watch for ... but more about that later.
Thyatira suffered a fornicating prophetess to teach false doctrines and develop a following. I'd join that church in a heartbeat, though, because Jesus says He only has anything against those who follow her. That church is definitely alive. Entertaining such seduction is not a sign of death.
Sardis teaches more about attending the nearest church than any other. Sardis is all but dead. There's almost no reason whatsoever to even give wretched Sardis a chance. But Jesus doesn't see them as dead; He sees them as alive and dead. There are just a few with clean garments, and He sees that as long as those few are there, the whole body might still return from their long winter. You see, the only way those few could leave their church would be to pack up and move to Philadelphia or Smyrna. They were stuck. But Jesus holds out a hope of life to them. Even a church alive and dead might still be vibrant one day.
Philadelphia is tiny and weak, but she's earned the commendation of the Lord. Maybe those couple Sardisians really SHOULD move! Personally, I'll take a tiny church any day, but that's a personal thing. I don't like crowds. I like to know everyone, and feel connected to everyone, and even at 90 people that's a stretch for me. So, I'm all over the tiny churches.
Laodicea receives not one word of praise. They are lying to themselves about their riches, about their vision, and about their beauty. They could hardly be more messed up. Really. Think about Laodicea being the church nearest to you. Laodicea would talk about their mission to the community while they shooed beggars out of their shadow. They would look at their beautiful stained glass and confuse it with spiritual wealth. They would beam proudly in all the city celebrations while everyone around them depised their hypocrisy. Could you join this church? Should you join this church? I don't know, but Jesus had this to say to them, "As many as I love, I rebuke...."
5 of these 7 churches had real problems, dirty problems. They had the kinds of problems that cause people to say, "You know, I still haven't found a church where I feel at home." But the Lord was still dealing with all seven of them. The Lord had not walked out.
On this basis, I would honestly consider attending a church that suffered the evils of lovelessness, false doctrine, idolatry, fornication, bad clergy, renegade prophets, death, poverty, tininess, or hypocrisy. (Probably not all 10, though.)
There's one thing, though, that I'd watch for in any church. If I saw it deeply entrenched I'd probably move on - peace.
If I see a church at peace, I'm out of there.
Peace is what the dead rest in. Even in the best church, peace means no one is thinking any more. Whenever you have three people thinking about anything, you're bound have an argument, so if there's no struggle, I'm probably getting nervous.
Pergamos and Laodicea were the worst of the lot. If I had to choose between the First Church of Pergamos on my block and the Laodicean Church of Jesus right next door, I would visit both and the one that was still fighting is the one I'd join. Fighting is awful, stressful and bad, but fighting means there's life and passion nestled somewhere in that body. There's still a fire to blow into a flame.
When there's sin but no fire, the sin has won and it's time to move on. Up until that point, it's fair to hope the Lord might blow on that spark. And if the Lord might blow on the spark, don't you want to be there to help?
If:
1 Cor 7:14
For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy.
How much more might a church be sanctified by each of the people who give themselves to her?
You should only attend a church that's alive.
How can you tell whether the church nearest your home is dead, and that you should attend a little further away?
The Revelation of Jesus Christ, chapters 2 and 3 give us a pretty look at 7 churches. Let's see what Jesus has to say about each of them. If you'll forgive me, for the sake of brevity I'm only going to focus on the negative.
Ephesus left their first love. They quit loving Christ Himself. That's MASSIVE. But it was not too late for them to repent, do the first works again, and stay in the presence of the Lord. That surely means they are alive. I would not pass on a church because they had grown a little cold in love. If you join them and let the fire of your love burn, who knows what might happen?
Smyrna was faultless, but poor and about to enter a fearful time of persecution. It might take courage to join a Smyrna, to join a church in a difficult neighborhood perhaps, but there's a crown of life in it for those who dare.
Pergamos holds false doctrines, commits idolatry and fornication, and has a serious clergy problem. Join or run? This one is truly a tough call for me. I think I'd go in with about the same attitude Jesus seems to show. I'd join and let my specific concerns be known to people with power to promote repentance. There's still a spark of life there, so I'd have a hard time passing them by. There's one thing I'd watch for ... but more about that later.
Thyatira suffered a fornicating prophetess to teach false doctrines and develop a following. I'd join that church in a heartbeat, though, because Jesus says He only has anything against those who follow her. That church is definitely alive. Entertaining such seduction is not a sign of death.
Sardis teaches more about attending the nearest church than any other. Sardis is all but dead. There's almost no reason whatsoever to even give wretched Sardis a chance. But Jesus doesn't see them as dead; He sees them as alive and dead. There are just a few with clean garments, and He sees that as long as those few are there, the whole body might still return from their long winter. You see, the only way those few could leave their church would be to pack up and move to Philadelphia or Smyrna. They were stuck. But Jesus holds out a hope of life to them. Even a church alive and dead might still be vibrant one day.
Philadelphia is tiny and weak, but she's earned the commendation of the Lord. Maybe those couple Sardisians really SHOULD move! Personally, I'll take a tiny church any day, but that's a personal thing. I don't like crowds. I like to know everyone, and feel connected to everyone, and even at 90 people that's a stretch for me. So, I'm all over the tiny churches.
Laodicea receives not one word of praise. They are lying to themselves about their riches, about their vision, and about their beauty. They could hardly be more messed up. Really. Think about Laodicea being the church nearest to you. Laodicea would talk about their mission to the community while they shooed beggars out of their shadow. They would look at their beautiful stained glass and confuse it with spiritual wealth. They would beam proudly in all the city celebrations while everyone around them depised their hypocrisy. Could you join this church? Should you join this church? I don't know, but Jesus had this to say to them, "As many as I love, I rebuke...."
5 of these 7 churches had real problems, dirty problems. They had the kinds of problems that cause people to say, "You know, I still haven't found a church where I feel at home." But the Lord was still dealing with all seven of them. The Lord had not walked out.
On this basis, I would honestly consider attending a church that suffered the evils of lovelessness, false doctrine, idolatry, fornication, bad clergy, renegade prophets, death, poverty, tininess, or hypocrisy. (Probably not all 10, though.)
There's one thing, though, that I'd watch for in any church. If I saw it deeply entrenched I'd probably move on - peace.
If I see a church at peace, I'm out of there.
Peace is what the dead rest in. Even in the best church, peace means no one is thinking any more. Whenever you have three people thinking about anything, you're bound have an argument, so if there's no struggle, I'm probably getting nervous.
Pergamos and Laodicea were the worst of the lot. If I had to choose between the First Church of Pergamos on my block and the Laodicean Church of Jesus right next door, I would visit both and the one that was still fighting is the one I'd join. Fighting is awful, stressful and bad, but fighting means there's life and passion nestled somewhere in that body. There's still a fire to blow into a flame.
When there's sin but no fire, the sin has won and it's time to move on. Up until that point, it's fair to hope the Lord might blow on that spark. And if the Lord might blow on the spark, don't you want to be there to help?
If:
1 Cor 7:14
For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy.
How much more might a church be sanctified by each of the people who give themselves to her?
27 December, 2007
Philosophical Answers
My boy asks me philosophical questions. I always answer, though not always with the same degree of sincerity.
Regularly he has asked for years now, "What is the meaning of life?"
My answers have ranged all across the board, from hot dogs to knowing God and loving Him forever.
The other day he asked, "What is the meaning of death?"
To this, I had a ready answer - separation. Death is being separated from anything irretrievably.
Then our eyes lit up. If we KNOW what death is, then don't we know what life is? Life must be connection, right? Or more properly, the meaning of life must be to connect. Period. I can't find anywhere that answer doesn't fit snuggly.
It was pretty cool.
Regularly he has asked for years now, "What is the meaning of life?"
My answers have ranged all across the board, from hot dogs to knowing God and loving Him forever.
The other day he asked, "What is the meaning of death?"
To this, I had a ready answer - separation. Death is being separated from anything irretrievably.
Then our eyes lit up. If we KNOW what death is, then don't we know what life is? Life must be connection, right? Or more properly, the meaning of life must be to connect. Period. I can't find anywhere that answer doesn't fit snuggly.
It was pretty cool.
24 December, 2007
A Blooming Christmas
My pastor surprised me with an opportunity to share for a few minutes with several other saints at tonight's Christmas Eve service on, "What we can give to Jesus?" WooHoo! I'll put my thoughts together here.
---
The song Mary (name changed) shared with us yesterday really moved me. Singing to us how God had a beating, human heart was beautiful. God gambled the fate of the universe on a simple human heart beating against every ploy of Satan, every curse of the fall, and every random chance that can stop it. It's a scary thought, but the human heart must be a pretty amazing thing if God was willing to invest so much in one. And it's still beating today at the right hand of the Father.
Jeff has asked what we can give to God, after He has given so much to us. After Jesus suffered so much for us, and overcame. When all the cattle of a thousand ranches are His, and we can do nothing that He did not do better, what can we give Him?
We can answer His prayer requests.
We know Jesus' prayer requests. We know what He prayed, and we know He wanted us to keep praying for the same things after He left.
Jesus prayed that we would know His Father. He prayed that His name would be treated as a holy thing in all the Earth, and that His kingdom - His church - would come to Earth. He prayed that the will of God would be done here, and that His children would receive daily bread, find forgiveness from sins, and be protected from temptation.
Jesus wanted all these things for the Father's sake, and the first step in seeing the Father get all these things was for one tiny heart to start beating in Bethlehem. Jesus came that all these things be given to His Father.
And now there are fifty beating hearts in this room, brought here for the same reason Jesus was brought to Earth - that God might be made All in All.
We can bring Jesus' prayer requests to life on Earth. We can live as a people with a Father in heaven. We can honor the Name of our Redeemer. We can do the works of healing and love that define His kingdom, and do His will by reaching out to those in need around us right here in North Columbus. We can make sure every one of His children has bread, someone to laugh with, and a shoulder to cry on. We can confess our sins to one another, and find forgiveness in presence of His brothers and sisters. And we can see His children through times of trial and temptation.
I'd like to thank each of you for the way you've done this for me. I commend you to the Father and to Jesus for making so many of His prayers come true for me. As individuals, many of you have blessed me, and as a church you have renewed my hope. May the Lord bless His church, and may we submit to Him to continue returning this perfect gift to Jesus in 2008.
Merry Christmas!
---
The song Mary (name changed) shared with us yesterday really moved me. Singing to us how God had a beating, human heart was beautiful. God gambled the fate of the universe on a simple human heart beating against every ploy of Satan, every curse of the fall, and every random chance that can stop it. It's a scary thought, but the human heart must be a pretty amazing thing if God was willing to invest so much in one. And it's still beating today at the right hand of the Father.
Jeff has asked what we can give to God, after He has given so much to us. After Jesus suffered so much for us, and overcame. When all the cattle of a thousand ranches are His, and we can do nothing that He did not do better, what can we give Him?
We can answer His prayer requests.
We know Jesus' prayer requests. We know what He prayed, and we know He wanted us to keep praying for the same things after He left.
Jesus prayed that we would know His Father. He prayed that His name would be treated as a holy thing in all the Earth, and that His kingdom - His church - would come to Earth. He prayed that the will of God would be done here, and that His children would receive daily bread, find forgiveness from sins, and be protected from temptation.
Jesus wanted all these things for the Father's sake, and the first step in seeing the Father get all these things was for one tiny heart to start beating in Bethlehem. Jesus came that all these things be given to His Father.
And now there are fifty beating hearts in this room, brought here for the same reason Jesus was brought to Earth - that God might be made All in All.
We can bring Jesus' prayer requests to life on Earth. We can live as a people with a Father in heaven. We can honor the Name of our Redeemer. We can do the works of healing and love that define His kingdom, and do His will by reaching out to those in need around us right here in North Columbus. We can make sure every one of His children has bread, someone to laugh with, and a shoulder to cry on. We can confess our sins to one another, and find forgiveness in presence of His brothers and sisters. And we can see His children through times of trial and temptation.
I'd like to thank each of you for the way you've done this for me. I commend you to the Father and to Jesus for making so many of His prayers come true for me. As individuals, many of you have blessed me, and as a church you have renewed my hope. May the Lord bless His church, and may we submit to Him to continue returning this perfect gift to Jesus in 2008.
Merry Christmas!
22 December, 2007
Bloomers Pt 3
It seems there's always someone looking for tips on how to choose a church, and I would like to talk about exactly that. But it seems like the wrong place to start. First, one must talk about what you want a church to do.
We universally want a church to feed us the good things of the word of God. On top of that, most of us want an opportunity to worship in a natural way, to receive the sacraments, to pray. A good number of us want to serve in some capacity. Lastly, a few of us want to really share fellowship.
And outside of our personal needs, we want the church to stand for something in the world. We want the church to defend the truth, to reach out in evangelism, to offer a hand of support to the needy, to keep the testimony of God holy. We want the church to be the bastion of truth against the encroachments of government, culture, and decay.
None of those things is bad, and I'm not getting ready to disrespect them. I will, however, reprioritize them. I see the church from a different perspective, and it causes me to see different things as most important.
The church is God's chosen means for answering His Anointed One's prayer requests.
In some ways, this is a pretty big leap. I'll forgive you if you think it sounds a little odd. Still, we do know Jesus' prayer requests because we've heard the Lord's Prayer. We know what He prayed for, and that He wanted us to keep praying for the same things after He left. Therefore, we can take some well-educated guesses at how He figured those things would come to pass. Since the Father believed the best way to start the ball rolling was for the Son to come to Earth, it's a pretty safe bet the best way to keep it rolling is for His children to continue the work Jesus began. That's a tall order, but God has a proven track record of giving tall orders to people. Fortunately, He is also known for following up with the grace to bring them to pass.
Facing heavenward, Jesus prayed we would know the Father as Father, that His Name would be treated as holy, that His empire would come to all the world, and that His will would be done. Facing humanward, He prayed that our needs would be met, that we would gain forgiveness, and that we would be kept from catastrophe and sin.
Those are our marching orders. The same way the Son prayed and worked, we pray and work. Every time we pray for the kingdom to come, we also must work to bring the kingdom. Every time we pray for forgiveness, we must forgive. The Father gives the grace, and we exercise the gifts we receive from Him. In the end, the manifold wisdom of God is revealed by exactly this process. (Eph 3:9-11)
The work of the church, based upon what we know of the Lord's Prayer, should look like this:
The church knows the Father, and lives as if they do. The church lives out the Name of God on Earth, so that all the world can honor it. For example, God is our "Provider," so the church should provide in His Name. That's how His Name becomes hallowed. The empire of God is an invisible kingdom of love, so the church loves, shining its gifts on both the just and the unjust just as He does. And it's the church that sweats to see God's plans and intents, His will, brought to full fruition.
The church also looks out for the daily bread, the needs, of all her children. No member of the church should be allowed to go hungry, and no member of the church should be allowed to go lazy either. The church has received forgiveness, so she should extend forgiveness to each of her members, and thus live without bitterness. And it's the church that should bear people up through every temptation and deliver each member from the evil and catastrophe working against us in the world.
Those are full-time, around the clock jobs for every member.
That's what the church should be doing. In order to prepare the church to do those things, she should engage in solid preaching, worship, and prayer. She should fellowship, take the sacraments, and do all those things that Christians do because those things prepare her to work. Just don't confuse the preparations with the work. Preaching prepares us to work, but it's to the work itself that we were called.
A jungle of red tape stands between the church and doing the work she was called to do. That red tape guarantees all the preparations happen - the doctrine is taught, the preaching is promoted, the worship is well coordinated - but at the expense of freedom. And it's free men and and women who provide, love, and work. It's in freedom that the church cares for needs, forgives, and comforts.
In choosing a church, I recommend you look right past all the red tape.
You could spend months finding a church that agrees with you on 90% of the doctrines you've studied out. You could search out a church that sings the right mix of songs, and worships with a comfortable degree of enthusiasm, and that prays for the things that matter to you. I ask you to consider, though, that this would be a waste of your time, and a waste to the kingdom of God. You might find a church with tape just the right shade of red and that makes oh so gentle chains, but you've missed the greatest blessing.
If you want the greatest blessing, choose the church nearest to you. You'll get everything that matters, and life to boot.
You've heard it said a hundred times, you get out of church exactly what you put into it.
It's true.
You know the church nearest to you. Picture it in your mind. You drive by it how many times a week? And you've always wondered what those people are like, right? But their red tape is boring or wrong or lazy. They're just not your type. You know why you don't go there, right? And you know you're right, right?
But what if you did go there?
What if you went there to do the work of the church in that church? What if you ignored their red tape, and lived out the high calling of God just blocks away from your home? What if you decided you're not going to church to receive, but to pour yourself out to God and His children?
If you live out having the same Father as those saints, if you live out the Name of God with those saints, if you live out the kingdom of love with them, if you do the will of God with them, if you care for their needs and receive care from them, if you forgive and are forgiven beside them, if bear each other up through every adversity, will you not change the world?
Let me handle a question now. "I could do these things in any church. Why not go to a church that is "as close to scripture"/"enthusiastic"/"dedicated"/"???" as possible? Why go to a church I'm not comfortable with just because it's closest? That seems like exactly the wrong way to choose a church."
I will give you two reasons to go to the church nearest you, and I cannot decide which is the more important.
First, you will be more likely to really get to know those Christians who live nearest to you if you attend a church near to you. The more of us start to fellowship nearer to our homes, the more our Christianity will work its way out of that building and into our neighborhoods. If you tell your neighbors you go to some church on the other side of town, what are the odds they will want to go with you? But if you tell them you go with a few families down the street?!? That packs a punch, because nobody does that any more.
Second, you MUST go to that church, because you won't fit in there. Our churches need more people who don't fit in! We're too comfortable with each other, and it's costing us dearly. The whole world has caught on to the importance of diversity but Christianity. Our emotional denominations need some intellect. Our intellectual denominations need some action. Our active denominations need some tenderness. The high churchers need some casual folk and the low churches need some precise people. We've split ourselves up into these cozy little comfort clans, but we need each other! We need more people who don't fit in.
That intellectual person in the emotional church right down the block is going to feel a little like he's personally desegregating the South. He'll worship differently than everyone else, and that's a hard thing, but it's a great thing. The active person in the intellectual church will squirm in the pew, and the emotional person in the intellectual church will want to burst. It won't be easy. And especially since they won't try to change the church. They're just there to be themselves, children of God amongst children of God - ignoring the paperwork that says they're not free to live to Christ the way they know they must.
If you should decide to attend that church nearest to your home and live the Lord's Prayer toward saints, you'll be really changing the world. More than any other single thing any of us average Joe's could do, being different in the church of Christ can make a difference. Just by showing up in that little body of believers (few people really live close to a mega-church anyway, so your church will be probably be little - and smaller is better for this idea) and giving them your heart, you will breathe life into that assembly. By being different and loving, you will challenge their preconceptions about your denomination and open their minds and hearts to a whole new world. By living close to them, you will encourage them to reach out to their nearest neighborhood. Could you do anything more important?
Most importantly of all, you will know that you're going to church, to that church, for a reason. You are going there to be an answer to the Lord's Prayer.
We universally want a church to feed us the good things of the word of God. On top of that, most of us want an opportunity to worship in a natural way, to receive the sacraments, to pray. A good number of us want to serve in some capacity. Lastly, a few of us want to really share fellowship.
And outside of our personal needs, we want the church to stand for something in the world. We want the church to defend the truth, to reach out in evangelism, to offer a hand of support to the needy, to keep the testimony of God holy. We want the church to be the bastion of truth against the encroachments of government, culture, and decay.
None of those things is bad, and I'm not getting ready to disrespect them. I will, however, reprioritize them. I see the church from a different perspective, and it causes me to see different things as most important.
The church is God's chosen means for answering His Anointed One's prayer requests.
In some ways, this is a pretty big leap. I'll forgive you if you think it sounds a little odd. Still, we do know Jesus' prayer requests because we've heard the Lord's Prayer. We know what He prayed for, and that He wanted us to keep praying for the same things after He left. Therefore, we can take some well-educated guesses at how He figured those things would come to pass. Since the Father believed the best way to start the ball rolling was for the Son to come to Earth, it's a pretty safe bet the best way to keep it rolling is for His children to continue the work Jesus began. That's a tall order, but God has a proven track record of giving tall orders to people. Fortunately, He is also known for following up with the grace to bring them to pass.
Facing heavenward, Jesus prayed we would know the Father as Father, that His Name would be treated as holy, that His empire would come to all the world, and that His will would be done. Facing humanward, He prayed that our needs would be met, that we would gain forgiveness, and that we would be kept from catastrophe and sin.
Those are our marching orders. The same way the Son prayed and worked, we pray and work. Every time we pray for the kingdom to come, we also must work to bring the kingdom. Every time we pray for forgiveness, we must forgive. The Father gives the grace, and we exercise the gifts we receive from Him. In the end, the manifold wisdom of God is revealed by exactly this process. (Eph 3:9-11)
The work of the church, based upon what we know of the Lord's Prayer, should look like this:
The church knows the Father, and lives as if they do. The church lives out the Name of God on Earth, so that all the world can honor it. For example, God is our "Provider," so the church should provide in His Name. That's how His Name becomes hallowed. The empire of God is an invisible kingdom of love, so the church loves, shining its gifts on both the just and the unjust just as He does. And it's the church that sweats to see God's plans and intents, His will, brought to full fruition.
The church also looks out for the daily bread, the needs, of all her children. No member of the church should be allowed to go hungry, and no member of the church should be allowed to go lazy either. The church has received forgiveness, so she should extend forgiveness to each of her members, and thus live without bitterness. And it's the church that should bear people up through every temptation and deliver each member from the evil and catastrophe working against us in the world.
Those are full-time, around the clock jobs for every member.
That's what the church should be doing. In order to prepare the church to do those things, she should engage in solid preaching, worship, and prayer. She should fellowship, take the sacraments, and do all those things that Christians do because those things prepare her to work. Just don't confuse the preparations with the work. Preaching prepares us to work, but it's to the work itself that we were called.
A jungle of red tape stands between the church and doing the work she was called to do. That red tape guarantees all the preparations happen - the doctrine is taught, the preaching is promoted, the worship is well coordinated - but at the expense of freedom. And it's free men and and women who provide, love, and work. It's in freedom that the church cares for needs, forgives, and comforts.
In choosing a church, I recommend you look right past all the red tape.
You could spend months finding a church that agrees with you on 90% of the doctrines you've studied out. You could search out a church that sings the right mix of songs, and worships with a comfortable degree of enthusiasm, and that prays for the things that matter to you. I ask you to consider, though, that this would be a waste of your time, and a waste to the kingdom of God. You might find a church with tape just the right shade of red and that makes oh so gentle chains, but you've missed the greatest blessing.
If you want the greatest blessing, choose the church nearest to you. You'll get everything that matters, and life to boot.
You've heard it said a hundred times, you get out of church exactly what you put into it.
It's true.
You know the church nearest to you. Picture it in your mind. You drive by it how many times a week? And you've always wondered what those people are like, right? But their red tape is boring or wrong or lazy. They're just not your type. You know why you don't go there, right? And you know you're right, right?
But what if you did go there?
What if you went there to do the work of the church in that church? What if you ignored their red tape, and lived out the high calling of God just blocks away from your home? What if you decided you're not going to church to receive, but to pour yourself out to God and His children?
If you live out having the same Father as those saints, if you live out the Name of God with those saints, if you live out the kingdom of love with them, if you do the will of God with them, if you care for their needs and receive care from them, if you forgive and are forgiven beside them, if bear each other up through every adversity, will you not change the world?
Let me handle a question now. "I could do these things in any church. Why not go to a church that is "as close to scripture"/"enthusiastic"/"dedicated"/"???" as possible? Why go to a church I'm not comfortable with just because it's closest? That seems like exactly the wrong way to choose a church."
I will give you two reasons to go to the church nearest you, and I cannot decide which is the more important.
First, you will be more likely to really get to know those Christians who live nearest to you if you attend a church near to you. The more of us start to fellowship nearer to our homes, the more our Christianity will work its way out of that building and into our neighborhoods. If you tell your neighbors you go to some church on the other side of town, what are the odds they will want to go with you? But if you tell them you go with a few families down the street?!? That packs a punch, because nobody does that any more.
Second, you MUST go to that church, because you won't fit in there. Our churches need more people who don't fit in! We're too comfortable with each other, and it's costing us dearly. The whole world has caught on to the importance of diversity but Christianity. Our emotional denominations need some intellect. Our intellectual denominations need some action. Our active denominations need some tenderness. The high churchers need some casual folk and the low churches need some precise people. We've split ourselves up into these cozy little comfort clans, but we need each other! We need more people who don't fit in.
That intellectual person in the emotional church right down the block is going to feel a little like he's personally desegregating the South. He'll worship differently than everyone else, and that's a hard thing, but it's a great thing. The active person in the intellectual church will squirm in the pew, and the emotional person in the intellectual church will want to burst. It won't be easy. And especially since they won't try to change the church. They're just there to be themselves, children of God amongst children of God - ignoring the paperwork that says they're not free to live to Christ the way they know they must.
If you should decide to attend that church nearest to your home and live the Lord's Prayer toward saints, you'll be really changing the world. More than any other single thing any of us average Joe's could do, being different in the church of Christ can make a difference. Just by showing up in that little body of believers (few people really live close to a mega-church anyway, so your church will be probably be little - and smaller is better for this idea) and giving them your heart, you will breathe life into that assembly. By being different and loving, you will challenge their preconceptions about your denomination and open their minds and hearts to a whole new world. By living close to them, you will encourage them to reach out to their nearest neighborhood. Could you do anything more important?
Most importantly of all, you will know that you're going to church, to that church, for a reason. You are going there to be an answer to the Lord's Prayer.
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