Sycamore

I think Sally Struthers has given Americans a guilt complex.  (For those of you who don’t remember, Sally Struthers was the first actress to go on television commercials showing pictures of starving children across the world and ask you to donate 50 cents a day to help them).  Now, every time someone buys a cup of coffee, there’s a small piece of them that says they are a horrible, horrible person.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t feel horrible every time we buy coffee.  (Actually, I am, but that’s another post altogether - and everyone all hopped up on how bad it is to be a part of American culture, I’m generally with you, so don’t freak out).  Sometimes it’s good to feel the weight of being blessed as a steward to whom much is given.  But it seems like this guilt complex we’ve developed over being born in a part of the world that has the most money has had some unfortunate complications - oddly enough, the guilt we feel over having a “good life” seems to keep us from understanding just how good our life really is.

That’s the problem with people always trying to “put things in perspective” - they sit down and compare their problems with the problems of those in a third world country and assume that should make them feel better.  “Some people don’t even have enough food…I should be able to deal with my frustration at work,” etc.  But that rarely works - at least for me - because it never makes me feel better.  Actually, it makes me feel worse.  I already felt bad, now on top of that I feel guilty for feeling bad.

I think, though, that the problem isn’t with putting things in perspective per se.  It’s with the perspective we’re using.  It’s no good.

Real perspective isn’t about what other people have had to deal with.  That’s just making you feel like a wuss for not being able to handle your stuff better; it’s assuming that all people are very capable and you should just try to be more capable like people with bigger problems than yourself.  Real perspective isn’t recognizing how other people have it.  It’s recognizing how you have it - much better than you deserve.

You wonder why the Bible calls us to joy?  Because the authors of the Bible know where we ought to be, and where we are.  We ought to be facing eternal punishment for our rebellion against a good, loving, and very, very powerful King.  (If you’re one of those Christians that’s “over that” because you’ve heard it before, take a moment and let it sink in.  And if you don’t actually feel that way about yourself, then you’re probably not a Christian in the first place).  Instead, we’re not in punishment.  Comparitively, we’re doing quite well.  Even if our whole life is falling apart, we still have hope, and not just hope in this life but actual Hope as an inheritance purchased for us by the sacrifice of that same King.  We deserve to have no hope.  We have lots of hope, and of the type that’s imperishable, undefiled, and waiting for us.  We’re doing well, when you put it in perspective.

Lamenting is okay, and biblically justified at times.  Sorrow is in the Bible as well as joy.  But if sorrow dominates your life, something is wrong.  You’ve got the wrong perspective.  Take some time, get away from your routine, and think about the cross - what caused it, what happened on it, what happened after it, and what came from it.  That’s the perspective the Bible calls us to have every moment of every day.  And that’s why Paul can say, “Rejoice always.”

(aka: Tuesday is for Theology)

The Bible has hard stuff in it, bottom line.  For example: the idea that God picks out who’s going to heaven before time.  The main argument against election/predestination/what-have-you is basically this: if God is completely sovereign over salvation and elects people before they were even created, that means that He is implicitly sending certain people to Hell.

Yes. And explain to me how that is a problem?

Well, the answer goes, “How can you even ask that question?  What kind of a God do you serve?  God can’t be like that!”

Really?

Because, as far as I know, God can be however He wants.  He’s God.  If He says He chose certain people before the foundation of the world and predestined them for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ (His words, not mine), then I’m going to go with what He said and not what I think about it.  And when I struggle with the question, “Why does God find fault with us, when no one can resist His will?” then I’ll tell myself, “But who are you, O man, to talk back to God?”  (Again, His words, not mine).

And I will struggle with that, because these facts about God aren’t easy to digest.  I’m not in some sterile Christian bubble - plenty of people close to me aren’t believers.  I know intimately the fear and agony of thinking about where they are headed. But when I struggle and strain against it, and wonder why God would do some of the things He does, I’ll be in good company.  After Jesus told the world that “No one can come to me unless the Father draws him” (meaning, of course, that no one can come to him unless the Father draws him), everyone left.  No wonder.  Who wants to hear that?  And when Jesus asked Peter if the disciples would leave Him as well (after all, He did just drive away tens of thousands of people), Peter says, “Where would we go?  You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and come to know that you are the Holy One of God.”

You want real biblical faith?  That’s what it looks like sometimes.  “I don’t like this.  I don’t understand this.  But where else am I going to go?  You’re God.  You’re all I’ve got, You’re all I trust.  If You say it, then I’ll take it.”  Plenty of disciples did leave that day, after that “hard teaching.”  But where exactly did they go?

Not towards God.  And as hard as it gets, I won’t follow them.

One of the things I’ve been embroiled in for a long time (though I didn’t know the name for it until recently) is the study of theological method.  Basically, theological method is the study of how we “do” theology.  It answers questions like, “how does language work?” so that we can better understand how to let the language in the Bible teach us about God.  The study of how we interpret the Bible, how we know truth, how we incorporate truths from different parts of the Bible, all of this falls under the umbrella of theological method.

I love it.  Seriously.  And that’s mainly because so many people get so worked up over opinions they have about God or the world that are based on bad method.  Usually it’s not the people that are at fault - they’ve never thought about their methodoology, they just assume everyone does theology the same way and so they think people that don’t share their opinions are either uninformed or stupid.  But really, at the root of so many problems in theology (and living the Christian life) today come from bad theological method.

So Mondays are now going to regularly hold a post about theological method - it’s what I’m thinking about, plus, I’m hoping to convince you readers (yes - all two of you) to take an interest in method as well.  While it won’t show up in a sermon - every sermon is based on good method, but it won’t come up directly - I still think it’s one of the most valuable things a Christian can study.

So, here we go: in one of my classes, I’m studying the emotional life of God.  While most people take for granted that God has emotions (”Of course God loves me!”), there are a lot of pretty intense consequences to the idea that God can feel things.  For example: if God is unchanging, how can He move from angry to happy?  And, one that is pretty significant for most people is this biggie: how can God feel wrath and love at the same time?  Does He switch between them?  How do all these emotions fit together?  If they’re hard to understand in humans, trying to understand how they function in God can get real hairy real fast.

B.B. Warfield, in an essay on the emotional life of Jesus, writes the following trying to help us understand Jesus’ displays of anger when he was on the earth:

The holy resentment of Jesus has been made the subject of a famous chapter in Ecco Homo. The contention of this chapter is that he who loves men must needs hate with a burning hatred all that does wrong to human beings, and that, in point of fact, Jesus never wavered in his consistent resentment of the special wrong-doing which he was called upon to witness. The chapter announces as its thesis, indeed, the paradox that true mercy is no less the product of anger than of pity: that what differentiates the divine virtue of mercy from “the vice of insensibility” which is called “tolerance,” is just the under-lying presence of indignation. Thus — so the reasoning runs, — “the man who cannot be angry cannot be merciful,” and it was therefore precisely the anger of Christ which proved that the unbounded compassion he manifested to sinners “was really mercy and not mere tolerance.” The analysis is doubtless incomplete; but the suggestion, so far as it goes, is fruitful. Jesus’ anger is not merely the seamy side of his pity; it is the righteous reaction of his moral sense in the presence of evil. But Jesus burned with anger against the wrongs he met with in his journey through human life as truly as he melted with pity at the sight of the world’s misery: and it was out of these two emotions that his actual mercy proceeded.

It’s a cool concept - In order to give mercy, Jesus’ had to be angry at that which was oppressing the objects of His affection.  You could take it one step further and say that if Jesus loves, inside of that love is required to be both affection/compassion for us and anger/wrath at those who would stand in between us.  The idea that our God is a jealous God seems to fit well here.  And if wrath aimed at sin is an necessary result of love for men, then God’s punishment makes a lot more sense - men who side with sin, and therefore against God, must be punished not because God is just.  In order for God to be loving towards those who pledge their allegiance to Him, He has to punish those who would side with the very thing trying to destroy them.

See?  Method is cool and helpful.  More to come on language, the Bible, and all sorts of other cool stuff.

I’m prepping tomorrow’s message at Novel Cafe, and since Los Lonely Boys are on the XM radio station that’s blaring, I’ve put in my headphones and pumped some of the new tunes I picked up from emusic.

Standout is Greg Laswell (myspace).  I love me some melodic stuff, poppy enough to be catchy but tasty enough to be respectable.  Here’s some Laswell love:

Also, if you haven’t checked out Brett Bixby (mypsace), he’s got some great stuff.  Enjoy.  (the song starts about a minute in)

If there’s one thing that most people will agree with, it’s that the Bible pictures true worship, especially musical worship, as an authentic response. It’s a response to God’s character, His person, and His redeeming work in the world and in our personal lives. At least, that’s what it’s supposed to be.

The implication is that when worship isn’t like that, it’s not good worship. And while many people agree with this in theory, their cynicism takes over when the rubber meets the road. If you’ve ever preached on worship, or been a worship leader talking to a congregation before a Sunday service, you’ve probably been in the following position: talking to people about how worship is supposed to be a response and seeing half the congregation say in their heads: “yeah, that sounds great and I agree, but is that realistic? I mean, how do you get to that place every Sunday?”

The answer that no one says: you get that by not just showing up on a Sunday and expecting it to be there when you haven’t spent more than five minutes with God all week.

If worship is a response, then it means you need to be responding TO something. And to respond TO something, you need to encounter it in some way shape or form. It’s hard to respond to someone you don’t interact with. Harder still to respond to something you ignore.

If we want musical worship during a Sunday morning service to be anything near the biblical standard, it means that we have to be interacting with God during the week. If we don’t, there is absolutely no reason to think that worship on a Sunday will be a response to anything but the worship leader, the music, and the emotion we might experience. And isn’t that the problem with most musical worship today?

The answer to solving our celebrity-worship, self-centered, experience-only oriented musical worship has very little to do with Sunday mornings. It has everything to do with Monday’s devotions before work, Wednesday night bible study, and prayer after breakfast on Saturday.

Rob Harrison knocked one out of the park today.  Here it is, reprinted in it’s entirety because it’s that good:

I’ve posted this quote from Markus Barth, from his book The Broken Wall, before, but I think it bears repeating:

When no tensions are confronted and overcome, because insiders or outsiders of a certain class or group meet happily among themselves, then the one new thing, peace, and the one new man created by Christ, are missing; then no faith, no church, no Christ, is found or confessed. For if the attribute “Christian” can be given sense from Eph. 2, then it means reconciled and reconciling, triumphant over walls and removing the debris, showing solidarity with the “enemy” and promoting not one’s own peace of mind but “our peace.” . . . When this peace is deprived of its social, national, or economic dimensions, when it is distorted or emasculated so much that only “peace of mind” enjoyed by saintly individuals is left—then Jesus Christ is being flatly denied. To propose, in the name of Christianity, neutrality or unconcern on questions of international, racial, or economic peace—this amounts to using Christ’s name in vain.

This is, I think, the litmus test for all of our schemes and programs and ideas to grow the church: if we’re just creating conditions in which “insiders or outsiders of a certain class or group meet happily among themselves,” we may have great success in growing an organization—done skillfully, that sort of approach is certainly the path of least resistance in doing so—but what we’re producing won’t be the church.

Christian unity costs us something. It costs us our egos, our comfort zones, and our ease. It calls us not to avoid those with whom we disagree, or with whom we have issues, or with whom we’re in conflict, but rather to confront them head-on—and to do so not with anger, or self-assertion, but with love and grace. This is not to say we must do so with approval; there are times when rebuke is necessary, and refusing to speak the hard truths is a violation of unity just as much as refusing to repent of our own sin and ask forgiveness. It is to say, however, that we cannot hang back from the work of reconciliation, and we cannot let mere disagreement become grounds for disunity. We may be rejected by others—but we cannot in good conscience be the ones to do the rejecting; and though there are times when God calls us to correct one another, even correction must be offered with open arms.

J.D. Hatfield is a guy worth reading, and his last post is a good one:

You need to handle the bread and milk before you try and eat the meat, it is for the mature, those that aren’t will mess up with the meat, they will choke, and you don’t feed a one year old a steak. The problem is that they are unskilled, they stay babies, or they reverted back, because they are not exercising with the milk they have. People want to go from toddler to titan without even knowing or living what the Bible teaches. That makes growth based on them not God, they act the part, they get a lot of superficial knowledge and can maybe quote a lot of verses or perhaps they can even teach, but there is something missing, and they will fall when tested. A giant baby is still a baby. It hasn’t cut its teeth, and it needs milk. Milk produces righteousness and then you are ready for meat when you become skilled by practicing and can discern truth.

I remember one holiday season when I summarily stopped going to the gym.  I stopped exercising altogether, and replaced it with eating mass quantities of complex carbohydrates.  And after a month or so, I noticed that I got weaker.  Muscles were smaller, waist size was bigger, and I was asking my roommates to open jars for me.  Then, I showed up to play a pickup basketball game.

Needless to say, it didn’t work out too well for me.

When you don’t exercise, you lose what you have.  Physical muscles atrophy.  Spiritual ones too.  And that’s why I think J.D. is on to something here.  He’s talking about the biblical command to grow up past milk to solid food (Hebrews 5:12-13), and most people take that as a command to “get past milk,” and move on.  But really, it’s a command to use the milk you have, because if you don’t you won’t grow at all.

He finishes with this:

So the path to becoming more discerning, to becoming mature, to being able to handle the Word of God and sense when something’s a fraud is not to jump from milk to meat, but to learn how to drink the milk. Even then you are still not supposed to be teaching some deep truth yet. You apply yourself, stop being lazy, stop thinking you’ve heard this before, stop thinking you know it all, stop thinking you are ready for meat, stop looking back, start exercising what you know, submit your will, become obedient, practice, become skilled. Learn to eat the food on the table, and stop dropping it off your plate onto the floor and waiting for the goodies. You don’t recognize how good what you have already is, and when you do, then you will grow from that instead of thinking it isn’t enough, and then you will become mature.

Amen.  As Shoreline begins our Everyday Faith series on the book of Proverbs, maturity is our goal.  But no matter how much we learn, if we don’t use the milk we have now, it won’t end in maturity - just really, really big babies.

A bit back, we talked a bit about the effect of the internet and the idolatry of options that can slip into our lives if we’re not careful.  But there’s more to it than that - it’s not just idolatry of option, but idolatry of ease that can slip into our lives if we’re not careful.

By providing information with little to no effort, the internet has made diligent scholars more efficient and effective, but most people aren’t diligent scholars.  Most people haven’t used the internet to increase their productivity, they’ve used it to decrease their effort - the same way some people read books to learn, but others read just to pass the test (or just buy the cliff notes).  By providing social networking with little to no effort, you allow some diligent people to increase their community and stay in touch with more people.  But for most people, you simply dumb down the community forming process, and allow them to put in minimal effort and receive a community that almost like the real thing.  The problem is that almost isn’t good enough when it comes to learning, community, or just plain thinking.

As Christians, and as the church, we’ve got a responsibility to use the tools available to us to aid and increase our ministry.  But when we use those same tools to try and get away with almost the same ministry, just with a lot less effort on our parts, we’re idolizing ease and efficiency over real world ministry.  And we’re not nearly as efficient as our speed leads us to believe.

If you haven’t read it, Scott wrote an excellent post on the “facebook culture” that’s getting in the way of real relationships:

…I know that Phil is tired, Meredith and Karina are having lunch on Friday, and Amy has a new job.  “What’s wrong with that?” you ask?  I have spoken to these people lately, in fact they’re all my friends.  However, I haven’t talked individually with any of them about these facts…yet I know them.  I have a relationship with these people, but it feels more involved and intimate than it is.  I know things about them, but we haven’t really talked since those things happened.  It’s weird… Because of the tools at our disposal, we develop a false sense of intimacy with each other that doesn’t really deepen our relationships at all (and is definitely not the kind of relationship God desires for His church).

Facebook can be a great tool to aid community and ministry, if it’s used correctly.  But it can also be a temptation to feel like you’re building relationships at lightning speed when really, it’s just a convincing illusion.  The same applies to the way we learn, the way we study, even the way we think - the information at our fingertips tempts us to skim, not to reflect; to grab a few facts we can stream together, not to immerse ourselves in knowledge - or apply it.  Worship extends even to how we learn and think.

(Every once in a while I rehash an old post and republish it because I’m thinking about it again, think it might help some people out, or just because I want to.  Usually it’s one of the first two.  But sometimes not. This one is from January of this year.)

I remember when I was in high school and thought that I had the corner market on everything. Being a Christian didn’t have to be bible belt rules and hypocrisy, and I was happy to adjust Jesus and the Christian faith to make them sound better to whoever would listen.  (Don’t worry, I was far from overeager in my evangelistic zeal. I was much more worried about being a cool Christian than I was about my friends’ souls, so very few people actually heard what I was spewing).

Since then, I’ve realized that the battle cry over legalism and hypocrisy in the church is a little too easy. It doesn’t take much thought to call someone a legalist, and it’s often played like a trump card — the Bible frowns on legalism, so the minute that stigma is attached you’re obviously wrong. It’s a clean and easy way to tell someone who’s making you uncomfortable with their piety that they can’t push their morals on you, and that somehow their radical lifestyle is more sinful than your lukewarm one.

But being a pastor has given me some new insight on the “you’re too legalistic” argument. Mainly, it’s taught me that most people — and a lot of pastors — don’t actually know what legalism is.

A professor once told me as much. I was in a biblical ethics class in seminary, and someone wrote a paper on gambling, or alcohol, or something like that, and the term legalism was thrown around a lot in the discussion, and the professor stopped us and said something like the following: “Be very careful using the word ‘legalistic.’ Legalism is using works to purchase more favor from God. Legalism is a false gospel. Legalism is not me having more rules than you.” Stopped me right in my tracks.

Rules don’t equal legalism. Most Christians cry legalism the same way the Mel Gibson cried freedom in Braveheart. “You can’t tell me how to live. That’s legalism. There’s freedom in Christ!” And like any good rebellious teenager, they go get their ears pierced — or move in with their girlfriend — to prove that you can still be a Christian and not live by the rules. Often times it’s more. It’s to prove that living under the “rules” quashes freedom, but living free avoids the sin of legalism and allows us to fulfill our real potential. After all, it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship. And if our relationship with Christ is like most of the ones in today’s pubescent version of adulthood, it doesn’t actually require any constraints on what we want to do.

When we think that way, all we’ve really done is take a lack of submission and a lack of commitment to the way God desires us to live and clothed it in Christian lingo. It sounds great to avoid “legalism,” but what we’re really avoiding is discipleship. Paul called himself a slave to Christ. He never once said being a slave to the desires of God is legalistic.

In fact, it seems that the boundaries God places around us — the ‘rules’ we’re so quick to dismiss as counter to the gospel — are what actually free us to enjoy our life. Justin Taylor pointed me to this quote from Chesterton a while back:

“We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.”

If you think that your good works make God love you, then you’re a legalist.  Repent.  But if you don’t want to do what God tells you, you’re disobedient.  Repent.  I’d prefer to live with the wall and enjoy my life rather than live without it in fear, or ignore that it’s gone until I fall. All of this begs the question: what in my life am I rebelling against and pretending like it’s holy? What parts of God’s will, clearly spelled out in His word, am I avoiding, or neglecting, because I think it’s impinging on my freedom? And, most importantly, what kind of joyful life am I missing out on because of it?

I’d upload some of these pictures to this blog, but they’re too big to fit and they’re better in their original setting anyways.  Check it out, you won’t regret it.

A while back I mentioned in a sermon that I don’t really look up anymore.  When I was a kid, I feel like I looked at the sky all the time, but lately as a grown up I pretty much keep my eyes straight ahead or scouting for things on the ground that might trip me.  A few weeks ago, Scott said that one of the reasons we don’t look up anymore is because there are building in the way of the horizon…your eyes don’t naturally wander out to the horizon and then up to the sky.  He’s right, and it’s a shame, because the sky is really, really pretty most days.  Even rain clouds have a certain beauty to them.  And when we miss out on that, we miss out on some of the simple ways that God has made our life really, really good.

People can take away your money, your job, your place to live, and those losses are serious.  But no one can take away the sky, or the mountains, or stars or flowers.  God has provided us with a lot of beautiful things, and a beautiful place to live, just by giving us the earth.  If this planet can be so beautiful, it makes you wonder what the new heavens and new earth is going to be like.