Soma

I may be a part of the problem by re-posting this, but I believe that if you take 7 minutes to watch this video from Josh Harris it will save you ten times that much time this week…at least if you’re willing to listen.

HT: Josh Harris

As I stood on the bus this morning and the hordes of high-schoolers poured into and out of the seats, I had a realization that put a smile on my face: my life’s changing.  I realized that in the past month, there have been a number of ways that the knowledge I have gained (whether directly from the Word of God, or in the context of my pre-existing understanding of the Word of God) has changed my life.

A couple of weeks ago I read an article about kidney transplants that challenged the way I thought about loving my neighbor as myself.  Now, I have an appointment early next month to do a bunch of tests and see if I can be a kidney donor.  A week or so before that (I can’t even remember how!) I stumbled across a post on a blog (a blog for women, mind you,…seriously I can’t remember how) that talked about the discipline of getting up early and preparing for the day by spending (un-rushed!) time with the Lord.  I was convicted about how my mornings had become rushed and my spiritual preparation limited, and within a week both Lara and I were getting up an hour to an hour and a half earlier than we had before (we are also going to bed earlier and not wasting as much time at night).

In addition, after being convicted by the truth regarding the tongue in James, I have consistently been less mocking, joking, and un-eddifying in the way I speak.  This has caused me to talk less, and even be a little less funny (as if that was possible!), but it has been a necessary step towards obedience.  This past week, I realized that it’s cheaper for me to ride the bus to the places I need to go than to drive and that I can meet far more non-believers that way than I can alone in my car (where I’m annoyed by them) so I’m trying that out as well (it’s still in the experimental stage).

I could continue on, but I think you get the point.  My goal in sharing these things with you is not to demonstrate how great I am (the fact that these areas needed to change is demonstration enough that I am still a desperate sinner), but to demonstrate the reality that our lives should always be changing.

Too much of the time we hear truth or gain knowledge and it doesn’t change us at all.  We like what we hear, and may even be “moved” by it, but it never changes our day to day lives.  We just put it in our “knowledge” bank and go on our mery way.  James also has something to say about that:

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.  For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror.  For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.  But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.

So, what about you?  Have you learned something this week?  Have you read the Word of God?  Have you heard a sermon?  If so, how have you changed?  What is different about your life after hearing what you heard?  Is anything?

I plan to learn something tomorrow when I open my Bible.  As a result, I plan to change tomorrow.  I plan to become more like Christ tomorrow.  Because, if I learn something and nothing about the way I live changes it means I’ve forgotten who I am.

So, after reading this post what is going to change about your life?  Is anything?

…kidney?

As I sat down for lunch today (that rare lunch alone can be so sweet!), I pulled out the Wall Street Journal, skipped past all the articles screaming, “The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!”  And checked out the front page of the “health” section (it’s a weekly section).  There on the front page was a story about “Kidney Transplant Trains.”  It was telling the story of a woman (right here at UCLA) who donated a kidney to a person (she didn’t even know!) who needed one.  That recipient already had a donor lined up, but they weren’t a match.  So, the lined-up donor, instead of going home happy he didn’t need to have surgery, decided to still donate his kidney (in honor of his relative who wasn’t a match) to someone else who was a match.  The WSJ story explains the “train” like this:

Transplant chains have the potential to help many more kidney patients…A chain starts with an altruistic individual who wants to donate a kidney to help a stranger in need. The anonymous donation goes to a recipient who has lined up a living donor, but who isn’t biologically compatible. In turn, that donor’s kidney can benefit other patients who have also lined up living donors who ended up being incompatible, each time passing an extra kidney down the line.

What an incredible impact!  One person donates a kidney and 10 people (one story actually recounted that many people in the chain) who didn’t have a match get kidneys!

This kind of blew me away.  For some reason I always assumed that the only people who could donate a kidney to a person were blood relatives.  Apparently, that’s not true.  You always hear about it being blood relatives because no one would go through that kind of surgery and donate a part of their body if they didn’t really love the person.

But, what does that mean for me as a Christan?  I’m supposed to really love my neighbor the way I love myself.  I mean, I have Christ as my example.  He gave his life.  Am I willing to give my kidney?  There are 77,000 people in the United States alone who need a kidney transplant, and are waiting for a donor.  And here I sit, with an extra one that I don’t need just chilling right inside my ribcage.

I’m beginning to wonder how loving my neighbor applies to a situation like this.  I’m beginning to wonder how the principles of stewardship apply to an organ that I don’t need, but that someone else does.  I’m beginning to wonder.

There is an intense debate that is raging in light of the current financial crisis and the US Government’s decision to spend upwards of a trillion dollars bailing out corporations who made bad investment decisions.  Aside from the betrayal of justice inherent in a move like this, there is a much larger question regarding economic philosophies at stake.  Now, I am no business savant, stock trader, or even an econ. major, but I read the front page of the Wall Street Journal and I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.  Regardless, a quote from MIT philosopher Noam Chomsky caught my attention in a BBC article.

The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialise cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice.

We live in a weird, hybrid society that desires for cost and risk to be taken on by the community (socialization), but for profit and benefit to be doled out to the individual.  If it works, I get the money.  If it doesn’t work, the community foots the bill (see: $1,000,000,000.00 bail out plan).  Strict capitalism desires for both the risk and the profit to be solely in the hands of the individual.  If it works, I get the money.  If it doesn’t, I pay the price.

So, in light of the gospel, which system models how we ought to live and participate in the society as Christians?  Neither!

The gospel calls us to follow the example of Christ which (in economic terms) “privatizes cost and risk and socializes profit.”  We are called to live radically different lives!  We are called to love our enemies, pray for those who hate us, and follow the example of Christ who “shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, [He] died for us.“  We are to love our neighbor as ourself, which means we will take on the cost of any kind of endeavor, not to benefit ourselves (or our own bottom line), but to benefit him or her.

Running your life (or your business) like that sure wouldn’t be the most financially advantagious.  But, in light of the gospel (and the incredible model of Christ), does any other “system” make sense?

This past weekend we had a good friend of ours, Matt Moore, come down to Shoreline as a guest preacher.  The message that he brought was an incredible challenge and an incredible blessing (to me personally and to all of us as there).  It’s one that every person at Shoreline should listen to…twice!  If you haven’t heard it, click here to listen to it.

His message brought back a powerful lesson that I learned almost three years ago as we were preparing to plant the church.  As Lara and I got ready to sell our house, change our health insurrance, have our first baby, plant a church with 20 people, and look for different ways to support ourselves financially, I heard a common refrain of advice from many people (Christian and non-Christian) around me: “Count the cost!”

Nobody likes getting halfway into a project, only to realize that they don’t have the resources to complete it.  And it some ways, it may have looked like that was exactly what we were heading into.  Counting the cost is a good suggestion, we all need to make sure that the numbers add up and that everything makes sense before we proceed with each new endeavor God would have us embark upon.  We need to plan and crunch numbers, we need to assess and make sure that the way we are serving and loving others is within our “ability” and won’t leave us in more trouble than those we are serving. I mean, it’s Biblical…right?  At least it sounds Biblical.

The advice came from multiple trustworthy sources in my life, so I didn’t want to disregard it.  But, for some reason it just didn’t sit right.  So, I decided to look it up in Scripture myself (novel idea!).  This search led me to Luke 14.  In verses 28-32 Jesus says this:

For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.

See, it is Biblical!  Or is it?  The problem is that we take this worldly annalogy and assume that Jesus’ point is that we need to make decisions that same way…we assume that that is wisdom.  However, if we look at the context (what another novel idea!) we realize that Jesus is making a very different point.  Here are the two verses (27 and 33) that contextualize this passage:

Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple…

…So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

Jesus point?  Count the cost before you become my disciple.  Counting the cost is not something we do every time we have a decision to make.  We are not to repeatedly ask ourselves whether or not the cost of obeying Christ and sacrificing our lives for his Kingdom is appropriate or not.  We are to ask ourselves (and answer) that question once.  You count the cost once. And if you are willing to renounce all that you have (your possessions, your finances, your career, your dreams, your family, your rights), you then spend the rest of your life not continually re-counting the cost, but simply making decisions in light of that one decision you made to let go of everything and follow Christ.

So, if you desire to follow Christ but have never truly thought through the significance of what it means for Him to be your Savior and Lord, I would invite you to count the cost.  And, if you have already counted the cost in light of the price Christ has paid for your salvation and freedom from sin, and have decided to be a disciple of Christ, stop re-counting it…and start living in light of that decision!

That’s not “Christianity”…that’s living like Christ!