Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Grilling One Sacred Cow
I hate nostalgia. That's because nostalgia pines for "good old days" that exist only in people's imaginations. This punctures one object of nostalgia.
If You're Not Famous...Be Thankful
Rare is the person who can handle success, prominence, or fame. Fame often leads to a sense of entitlement and invincibility. Fame isn't good for a person's soul.
These lessons have been made clear as I, along with the folks of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, as part of our Read the Bible in a Year project, have been recently reading about Israel's first king, Saul, in 1 Samuel.
Saul was, by turns, diligent in his duties one moment and arrogant in the abuse of power the next.
Saul never seemed to fully understand that, through his anointing as king, he had been made a servant of God and of Israel, not just of himself.
This lack of understanding once led him to quake among the baggage when his people needed him to command them in war. It also led him to disobey God, employing his own faulty judgment instead of depending on God, all in a gambit to win the favor of those he led.
In time, Saul came to view his fame not only as an entitlement, but as an extension of himself and his personal identity. That, in turn, fed a paranoia that--among other things--caused him to seek the murder of his best and most loyal military leader, David, and to treat the members of his own family as chess pieces to be moved around for his purposes.
As I watched an excerpt of the tearful press conference of Representative Anthony Weiner yesterday, I thought of Saul. Maybe if Weiner weren't a six term congressperson from New York, he wouldn't have done the things to which he admitted yesterday. But fame and prominence, even the smallest whiffs of it, can make the most stable and sober of us think that we're "all that."
A sense of entitlement--an idea that whatever might be vices in others really aren't vices in us--can actually come to any of us at any time, even if our name is known to only a handful of people.
Narcissism, total self-interested self-regard, is something with which we are all born and which it's the job of every parent to wean out of their children.
This inborn trait is what the Bible is talking about when it teaches that we are all born in sin, sin being a condition of self-will over against loving consideration of God or others. (By the way, that's why Jesus says the Great Commandment is to love God and love others. And it's because we can't conquer the condition of sin that leads us to do all manner of stupid, hurtful things, that Jesus calls all people to turn from sin--or repent--and believe in, entrust their lives to, Him. Jesus can erase the power of sin over our lives and help us, in this lifetime, to be recovering narcissists, and in eternity, be utterly free to be the people God originally willed us to be.)
So, if you're not famous, be thankful. It can create such false notions of invincibility, power, and entitlement that it can close your conscience to heeding what's right or correctly identifying what's wrong at any moment in your life.
And if, like me, you're just another ordinary member of the human race, I hope that you can be honest enough to say that, even without fame, you've acted like a person of entitlement who treated God and others with contempt, as though they were bit players in the more important production of your life. If you can muster that level of honesty with God and with yourself, you'll be onto something. You'll be close to surrendering to Christ and His better will for your life.
Finally, if you're prone to join the late night talk show comics in laughing at Anthony Weiner, please don't. His actions are admittedly wrong, even childishly so. But what he needs more than our derision is prayer.
So do we all.
That, of course, doesn't mean that the people for whom we pray shouldn't be held accountable, if their actions are illegal or violate the ethics rules of their professions.
But we can pray for Anthony Weiner or any political leader of either party facing similar humiliation in the face of their own revealed bad judgments and hubris. In 1 Timothy, the first century evangelist Paul writes to a young pastor named Timothy:
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, 2for kings and all who are in high positions...That's what I try to do for all political leaders on a regular bases. If you're skeptical about including leaders in government in your prayers, consider this: It can't hurt!
And while you're praying for them, you can also thank God that you're not famous.
Sunday, June 05, 2011
Aiming Toward, "MIssion Accomplished!"
[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]
John 17:1-11
Please pull out the Celebrate insert from your bulletin and look at today’s Gospel lesson, John 17:1-11. Keep it handy.
In this lesson, Jesus does an extraordinary thing: He lets us listen in on His personal prayer to God the Father.
Now, I don't know about you, but there are things in my personal prayer time that I want to keep strictly between God and me. I don't want anybody listening in.
But Jesus has no secrets. The Word made flesh, is an open book.
The entire Bible, in fact, reveals that God has always been an open book. The New Testament book of Romans reminds us that, “…what can be known about God is plain…, because God has shown it…”
We see God's openness in other ways. The Bible affirms, for example, that God’s law—His will and His commands for humanity—has always been written on our hearts, giving all of us a strong hint, long before we even hear the Name of Jesus, that there is a God Who made and cares about us.
But more than that, God has taken the time and effort and sacrifice to live out His love for us and make it possible for all who turn from sin and believe in Him to live with Him eternally. God has lived His love for us out loud for everyone to see!
In the prologue to his account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, John the Evangelist says, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
John goes on to say of Jesus, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, Who is close to the Father’s heart, Who has made Him known.”
Jesus has no secrets. Jesus is in the disclosing business.
So, what exactly does He disclose to us in today’s Gospel lesson?
First: He discloses a heart filled with celebration.
One of my nephews, Andrew, is graduating from high school. There’s going to be a celebration later today. The unspoken theme will be: mission accomplished. That's the theme of all graduation parties!
(And sometimes, their theme is "Shwew!")
In His prayer in today's Gospel lesson, Jesus takes a victory lap. He exults in His accomplishment on earth even before He goes to the cross or is raised from the dead.
Jesus knows that He already is what He was sent into the world to be: “the way, and the truth, and the life,” the only way for human beings to know God and the only way to the life that the life-giving God of the universe gives to those who repent and trust in Christ.
Look at what Jesus says He has already accomplished at the moment He utters His prayer.
In this prayer, Jesus rejoices in the strength that God the Father and God the Holy Spirit had given Him to accomplish it all and He prays, in essence, “Father, mission accomplished!”
As He prays, Jesus knows, of course, that He has one thing left to do on this earth, one more definitive act disclosing Who He is and Who God is.
He must die.
He must give His life for those given to Him by the Father.
This is the ultimate thing that Jesus discloses to all who are open to the truth. Martin Luther said that if we want to know what God is like, we only need to look to Jesus on the cross.
And that’s why with jubilation, Jesus, God on earth, intent on doing God’s would, on the Friday we call Good, having fully disclosed the heart, mind, and will of God, decide on the cross the moment at which He would breathe His last, call out to the Father, “It is finished,” (“My mission is accomplished.”) and then give His life to God.
The Father wouldn’t let this be the end for Jesus, though. The sinless Savior Who offered His perfect life as the perfect sacrifice for our sin could not remain dead. He had to be raised up so that all people would know about their chance to turn to Him (turning away from their sin), entrust their lives to Him, and live with God eternally.
So, in this prayer, Jesus celebrates what He accomplishes for the glory of the Father and for our eternal good.
And then: Jesus discloses a request to the Father.
In verse 5, Jesus asks, “Father, glorify Me in Your own presence with the glory that I had in Your presence before the world existed…”
The glory of God was displayed in Jesus in many ways. It was seen when...
And yet the glory of God disclosed in Jesus on all those occasions and others we might name, were mere hints, dim reflections, brief tastes of the glory Jesus once enjoyed as God the Son in the halls of heaven before the creation of this world!
Now, in this prayer, having accomplished all that He had set out to do in taking on human flesh, Jesus asks the Father to give that glory back to Him again.
The Father will do just that when He raises Jesus from the dead on the first Easter Sunday and so, makes the Name of Jesus the Name to which eventually, every knee will bow and every tongue confess, “that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father.”
(It turns out that even those who reject Jesus and will tragically, live with the consequence of their rejection of “the only Son of God” will also, in the end, acknowledge the glory of God seen in Jesus.)
If there is one thing more than any other that Christ’s Church needs today, it’s a renewed sense of the glory of God!
I’ve mentioned before the woman who approached me after worship one Sunday in a former congregation. She was upset with the words of Psalm 111:10: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom...” (The same words appear also in Proverbs 1:7 and 9:10.)
She affected that voice that some people use when trying to show their piety and said, “I don’t think that we should be afraid of God.” Look, Jesus says that we are His friends when we keep or strive to honor His commandments. He promises to stick closer to us than a brother.
But Jesus, God in the flesh, is not our buddy, not our rabbit’s foot, nor our ATM, nor our good luck charm.
He will be there to judge us at the end of history.
Paraphrasing Bill Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable, Jesus brought us into this world and He can take us out.
He is God almighty.
He alone deserves all our allegiance, honor, loyalty, and thankfulness because, through His “amazing grace,” He saves all who trust in Him from sin and its consequence, death.
We must understand that the God disclosed in Jesus Christ is not a salesperson with whom we can negotiate a price, but the Lord of the universe and that to have Him and the eternity only He can give, we must bow, we must surrender to Him.
It's when we understand this that we’ll be on the road to the wisdom that leads to life.
In this prayer in today's Gospel lesson, Jesus, Who laid His glory by for His time on earth, is reclaiming that glory.
But here’s the really astounding thing.
It’s a theme of the New Testament that the life of Jesus is replicated, reenacted, in baptized believers in Him. All who are baptized and live in daily repentance and renewal can say with the New Testament, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ Who lives in me.”
This is what Luther was getting at when he said that whenever the devil came knocking at his heart's door with temptations, announcing that he was looking for Martin Luther, Jesus went to the door in his place and said, "Martin Luther used to live here. But now I live here. Now, go away and don't come back any more!"
It was because of Christ living in him, that the first century preacher Paul, before his death, could write to the young pastor Timothy with the same sense of fulfillment and jubilation we see in Jesus’ prayer in our Gospel lesson on the brink of His death.
Listen closely to Paul's words (this is from The Message translation):
In taking this attitude, millions of Christians turn a deaf ear to the needs of 4.5 billion people who may die today without ever hearing the Good News of new life through faith in Jesus Christ.
And in thinking that Jesus’ call only applies to some spiritual elites, we also deny ourselves the very sense of fulfillment and the enjoyment of God’s glory that Jesus exults in in today’s Gospel lesson and that He wants us to have!
We, each of us, need to consider how we can restructure our personal lives to fulfill the mission Christ has given to each of us, so that we too can exult in the sense of fulfillment from a life spent in giving God glory.
We may not be able to go to foreign countries in pursuing God’s intentions for our lives.
But each of us is called to fulfill the whole mission of Christ’s Church in our own individual lives. Our sponsorship, through World Vision of three year old Toiba in Kenya, involvement with CHAP, the 30 Hour Famine, the PPSST Food Drive, the upcoming local mission trip, Friend Day in November, upcoming servanthood evangelism events, and above all, our personal willingness to share Christ with the spiritually disconnected, are all ways in which we can lead the life of purpose that gives God glory that Jesus Christ wants each of us to experience.
We need to encourage one another in living out our Christ-given mission to the whole world. It’s to help us fulfill this single mission that Jesus prays in verse 11: “Holy Father, protect them in Your Name that You have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
When I come to the end of this life, I want to be able to pray with the same sense of jubilation and fulfillment we see in Jesus in our Gospel lesson.
I want to be able to look back on a life in which I loved God, loved the world, and took my part in making some disciples of the world’s 4.5-billion unreached people.
I want to be able to say, “Mission accomplished.”
How about you?
If it’s your desire to fulfill God’s purposes for your life, ask Christ to live fully in you…and then go wherever He leads you. Amen
John 17:1-11
Please pull out the Celebrate insert from your bulletin and look at today’s Gospel lesson, John 17:1-11. Keep it handy.
In this lesson, Jesus does an extraordinary thing: He lets us listen in on His personal prayer to God the Father.
Now, I don't know about you, but there are things in my personal prayer time that I want to keep strictly between God and me. I don't want anybody listening in.
But Jesus has no secrets. The Word made flesh, is an open book.
The entire Bible, in fact, reveals that God has always been an open book. The New Testament book of Romans reminds us that, “…what can be known about God is plain…, because God has shown it…”
We see God's openness in other ways. The Bible affirms, for example, that God’s law—His will and His commands for humanity—has always been written on our hearts, giving all of us a strong hint, long before we even hear the Name of Jesus, that there is a God Who made and cares about us.
But more than that, God has taken the time and effort and sacrifice to live out His love for us and make it possible for all who turn from sin and believe in Him to live with Him eternally. God has lived His love for us out loud for everyone to see!
In the prologue to his account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, John the Evangelist says, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
John goes on to say of Jesus, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, Who is close to the Father’s heart, Who has made Him known.”
Jesus has no secrets. Jesus is in the disclosing business.
So, what exactly does He disclose to us in today’s Gospel lesson?
First: He discloses a heart filled with celebration.
One of my nephews, Andrew, is graduating from high school. There’s going to be a celebration later today. The unspoken theme will be: mission accomplished. That's the theme of all graduation parties!
(And sometimes, their theme is "Shwew!")
In His prayer in today's Gospel lesson, Jesus takes a victory lap. He exults in His accomplishment on earth even before He goes to the cross or is raised from the dead.
Jesus knows that He already is what He was sent into the world to be: “the way, and the truth, and the life,” the only way for human beings to know God and the only way to the life that the life-giving God of the universe gives to those who repent and trust in Christ.
Look at what Jesus says He has already accomplished at the moment He utters His prayer.
- In verse 6: “I have made Your Name known to those whom You gave me…”
- In verse 7: “Now they know that everything You have given me is from You…”
- In verse 8: “for the words that You gave to me I have given to them, and [they] know in truth that I came from you…”
In this prayer, Jesus rejoices in the strength that God the Father and God the Holy Spirit had given Him to accomplish it all and He prays, in essence, “Father, mission accomplished!”
As He prays, Jesus knows, of course, that He has one thing left to do on this earth, one more definitive act disclosing Who He is and Who God is.
He must die.
He must give His life for those given to Him by the Father.
This is the ultimate thing that Jesus discloses to all who are open to the truth. Martin Luther said that if we want to know what God is like, we only need to look to Jesus on the cross.
And that’s why with jubilation, Jesus, God on earth, intent on doing God’s would, on the Friday we call Good, having fully disclosed the heart, mind, and will of God, decide on the cross the moment at which He would breathe His last, call out to the Father, “It is finished,” (“My mission is accomplished.”) and then give His life to God.
The Father wouldn’t let this be the end for Jesus, though. The sinless Savior Who offered His perfect life as the perfect sacrifice for our sin could not remain dead. He had to be raised up so that all people would know about their chance to turn to Him (turning away from their sin), entrust their lives to Him, and live with God eternally.
So, in this prayer, Jesus celebrates what He accomplishes for the glory of the Father and for our eternal good.
And then: Jesus discloses a request to the Father.
In verse 5, Jesus asks, “Father, glorify Me in Your own presence with the glory that I had in Your presence before the world existed…”
The glory of God was displayed in Jesus in many ways. It was seen when...
- He fed 5000 people with a few scraps of bread and some fish
- He turned water into wine
- He raised His dead friend Lazarus from the grave
- He gave sight to a blind man
- He empowered a paralyzed man to walk again.
And yet the glory of God disclosed in Jesus on all those occasions and others we might name, were mere hints, dim reflections, brief tastes of the glory Jesus once enjoyed as God the Son in the halls of heaven before the creation of this world!
Now, in this prayer, having accomplished all that He had set out to do in taking on human flesh, Jesus asks the Father to give that glory back to Him again.
The Father will do just that when He raises Jesus from the dead on the first Easter Sunday and so, makes the Name of Jesus the Name to which eventually, every knee will bow and every tongue confess, “that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father.”
(It turns out that even those who reject Jesus and will tragically, live with the consequence of their rejection of “the only Son of God” will also, in the end, acknowledge the glory of God seen in Jesus.)
If there is one thing more than any other that Christ’s Church needs today, it’s a renewed sense of the glory of God!
I’ve mentioned before the woman who approached me after worship one Sunday in a former congregation. She was upset with the words of Psalm 111:10: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom...” (The same words appear also in Proverbs 1:7 and 9:10.)
She affected that voice that some people use when trying to show their piety and said, “I don’t think that we should be afraid of God.” Look, Jesus says that we are His friends when we keep or strive to honor His commandments. He promises to stick closer to us than a brother.
But Jesus, God in the flesh, is not our buddy, not our rabbit’s foot, nor our ATM, nor our good luck charm.
He will be there to judge us at the end of history.
Paraphrasing Bill Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable, Jesus brought us into this world and He can take us out.
He is God almighty.
He alone deserves all our allegiance, honor, loyalty, and thankfulness because, through His “amazing grace,” He saves all who trust in Him from sin and its consequence, death.
We must understand that the God disclosed in Jesus Christ is not a salesperson with whom we can negotiate a price, but the Lord of the universe and that to have Him and the eternity only He can give, we must bow, we must surrender to Him.
It's when we understand this that we’ll be on the road to the wisdom that leads to life.
In this prayer in today's Gospel lesson, Jesus, Who laid His glory by for His time on earth, is reclaiming that glory.
But here’s the really astounding thing.
It’s a theme of the New Testament that the life of Jesus is replicated, reenacted, in baptized believers in Him. All who are baptized and live in daily repentance and renewal can say with the New Testament, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ Who lives in me.”
This is what Luther was getting at when he said that whenever the devil came knocking at his heart's door with temptations, announcing that he was looking for Martin Luther, Jesus went to the door in his place and said, "Martin Luther used to live here. But now I live here. Now, go away and don't come back any more!"
It was because of Christ living in him, that the first century preacher Paul, before his death, could write to the young pastor Timothy with the same sense of fulfillment and jubilation we see in Jesus’ prayer in our Gospel lesson on the brink of His death.
Listen closely to Paul's words (this is from The Message translation):
I’m about to die, my life an offering on God’s altar. This is the only race worth running. I’ve run hard right to the finish, believed all the way. All that’s left now is the shouting—God’s applause! Depend on it, [God is] an honest judge. He’ll do right not only by me, but by everyone eager for His coming.In his wonderful book, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, Pastor David Platt talks about how many American Christians think that Jesus’ call and command for radical discipleship, including the call to love all the world and to carry the good news of Jesus to all the nations applies to other people, not us.
In taking this attitude, millions of Christians turn a deaf ear to the needs of 4.5 billion people who may die today without ever hearing the Good News of new life through faith in Jesus Christ.
And in thinking that Jesus’ call only applies to some spiritual elites, we also deny ourselves the very sense of fulfillment and the enjoyment of God’s glory that Jesus exults in in today’s Gospel lesson and that He wants us to have!
We, each of us, need to consider how we can restructure our personal lives to fulfill the mission Christ has given to each of us, so that we too can exult in the sense of fulfillment from a life spent in giving God glory.
We may not be able to go to foreign countries in pursuing God’s intentions for our lives.
But each of us is called to fulfill the whole mission of Christ’s Church in our own individual lives. Our sponsorship, through World Vision of three year old Toiba in Kenya, involvement with CHAP, the 30 Hour Famine, the PPSST Food Drive, the upcoming local mission trip, Friend Day in November, upcoming servanthood evangelism events, and above all, our personal willingness to share Christ with the spiritually disconnected, are all ways in which we can lead the life of purpose that gives God glory that Jesus Christ wants each of us to experience.
We need to encourage one another in living out our Christ-given mission to the whole world. It’s to help us fulfill this single mission that Jesus prays in verse 11: “Holy Father, protect them in Your Name that You have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
When I come to the end of this life, I want to be able to pray with the same sense of jubilation and fulfillment we see in Jesus in our Gospel lesson.
I want to be able to look back on a life in which I loved God, loved the world, and took my part in making some disciples of the world’s 4.5-billion unreached people.
I want to be able to say, “Mission accomplished.”
How about you?
If it’s your desire to fulfill God’s purposes for your life, ask Christ to live fully in you…and then go wherever He leads you. Amen
Friday, June 03, 2011
Christ or Culture?
Will we surrender to God or go along with the culture?
The daily need to answer that question has emerged as one of the major themes as we at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, spend a year reading the Bible together.*
In Exodus, God commanded His people to have no other gods but Him. Compassion, not egotism, is behind this command. Only God can give life, after all. To follow any other god, literally spells everlasting death. To spare ancient Israel, God's people, from such a fate, God called them to be "holy," a word that means set apart for God.
The ongoing challenge (and demand) God issued to His people is voiced by Joshua, the leader of the Israelites who succeeded Moses, when Joshua says:
But the Old Testament honestly reports that the lure of surrounding cultures repeatedly proved overpowering for Israel.
God called Israel into being to bring the possibility of new life from Him to all the world. Eventually, Christians believe, Israel gave birth to the Savior Jesus, God-in-the-flesh.
In Jesus, God issues the same command to all the world that He once issued to Israel. Before His death and resurrection, Jesus said:
But, as was true of the ancient Israelites, the lure of culture can sometimes prove overpowering. It's easier to follow the little gods you can see than it is to follow the God you can't see at the moment.
Besides, you're likely to find it easier going to go along with the culture than you will if you march to the rhythm of a different drum, especially if it's being played by God.
The contemporary American church isn't immune to going along to get along with the culture.
The conservative version of Christianity upheld by the "Christian Right" is a hyper American nationalism that uses the Bible to justify the rampant materialism and arrogance that non-Christians like Donald Trump readily endorse.
The liberal version of Christianity in vogue in "liberal Protestantism" attempts to put God's stamp of approval on cheap grace (that is, God's forgiveness without our repentance and salvation without trusting surrender to Jesus Christ) and, notably, the legitimization of sexual intimacy outside of marriage between a woman and a man.**
Whether done out of a well-meaning, but unintended, disregard for God's revealed will in Scripture or from an attempt to make their version of Christianity acceptable to a mass audience, both of these caricatures of Christianity are faithless.
They each are guilty of choosing favored cultural mores, rather than choosing to follow the God Who demands our acquiescence to His sometimes inconvenient truth. *
To be a "holy people," a people devoted to God, doesn't imply moral perfection. Christians are imperfect. We sin every day. As I've said elsewhere, we are recovering hypocrites who bring our lives before God each day in repentance, so that God not only can forgive us, but also perform reconstructive surgery on our souls.
To be a holy people, then, is to keep turning to God. It's to acknowledge the deep wisdom underlying Proverbs 3:5: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight."
Believers in the God of the Bible are called to be subversives who run counter to the culture. "Choose this day..."
The God revealed in Christ or the gods of the prevailing cultures? "As for me and my house..."
*We started on March 9. We read about three chapters a day. Today's reading is 1 Samuel 28-31.
**This is the route chosen by my own denominational body. I pray regularly that it will reverse course.
The daily need to answer that question has emerged as one of the major themes as we at Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, spend a year reading the Bible together.*
In Exodus, God commanded His people to have no other gods but Him. Compassion, not egotism, is behind this command. Only God can give life, after all. To follow any other god, literally spells everlasting death. To spare ancient Israel, God's people, from such a fate, God called them to be "holy," a word that means set apart for God.
The ongoing challenge (and demand) God issued to His people is voiced by Joshua, the leader of the Israelites who succeeded Moses, when Joshua says:
Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.
15
Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
But the Old Testament honestly reports that the lure of surrounding cultures repeatedly proved overpowering for Israel.
God called Israel into being to bring the possibility of new life from Him to all the world. Eventually, Christians believe, Israel gave birth to the Savior Jesus, God-in-the-flesh.
In Jesus, God issues the same command to all the world that He once issued to Israel. Before His death and resurrection, Jesus said:
32“Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; 33but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven." (Matthew 10:32-33)Again, God commands trust and obedience out of compassion, not egotism. Life only comes through the God made clear to the world in Jesus of Nazareth.
But, as was true of the ancient Israelites, the lure of culture can sometimes prove overpowering. It's easier to follow the little gods you can see than it is to follow the God you can't see at the moment.
Besides, you're likely to find it easier going to go along with the culture than you will if you march to the rhythm of a different drum, especially if it's being played by God.
The contemporary American church isn't immune to going along to get along with the culture.
The conservative version of Christianity upheld by the "Christian Right" is a hyper American nationalism that uses the Bible to justify the rampant materialism and arrogance that non-Christians like Donald Trump readily endorse.
The liberal version of Christianity in vogue in "liberal Protestantism" attempts to put God's stamp of approval on cheap grace (that is, God's forgiveness without our repentance and salvation without trusting surrender to Jesus Christ) and, notably, the legitimization of sexual intimacy outside of marriage between a woman and a man.**
Whether done out of a well-meaning, but unintended, disregard for God's revealed will in Scripture or from an attempt to make their version of Christianity acceptable to a mass audience, both of these caricatures of Christianity are faithless.
They each are guilty of choosing favored cultural mores, rather than choosing to follow the God Who demands our acquiescence to His sometimes inconvenient truth. *
To be a "holy people," a people devoted to God, doesn't imply moral perfection. Christians are imperfect. We sin every day. As I've said elsewhere, we are recovering hypocrites who bring our lives before God each day in repentance, so that God not only can forgive us, but also perform reconstructive surgery on our souls.
To be a holy people, then, is to keep turning to God. It's to acknowledge the deep wisdom underlying Proverbs 3:5: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
*We started on March 9. We read about three chapters a day. Today's reading is 1 Samuel 28-31.
**This is the route chosen by my own denominational body. I pray regularly that it will reverse course.
"Coincidences"
When the "coincidences" that just happen to answer your prayers start to pile up, you may want to re-categorize them as "God-incidences." Thanking God for all the God-incidences He's sent my way this week.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Unfortunately, He Saw The Trends Quite Clearly
William Booth, a nineteenth century Methodist preacher and founder of the Salvation Army, was evidently asked about what trends he saw unfolding in the twentieth century:
[Note: I remember that we read Vachel Lindsay's poem, General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, in high school literature class.]
“In answer to your inquiry, I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.” [Source]Praying that as the twenty-first century unfolds, God will reverse these trends through forgiven sinners who live in daily repentance and renewal.
[Note: I remember that we read Vachel Lindsay's poem, General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, in high school literature class.]
I Love New York!
And this new image of one of my favorite spots on the planet, Times Square, only makes me want to go back again sometime soon.
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