David Sliker's Blog, page 2

The New Era of Faith: The Greatest Generation (Gap)

This is the second article of a three-part series called, “The New Era of Faith”.  Monday we posted, “A Brief History of Fundamentalism” in which we looked back at how we’ve arrived at our current trajectory.  Today we explore “The Greatest Generation (Gap)”, and discuss the current cultural forces that divide two generations of faith in very historically unique ways.  Finally, we’ll end with, “A Church in Transition, But To Where?” and bring it all together and explore the future of faith in America. 

In our “Brief History of Fundamentalism”, we explored the emergence of Evangelicalism in America out of the holiness movement.  We also discussed the corresponding victory of Fundamentalist Christianity over the rising influence of external and internal challenges to the church in that era.  The external challenge of that hour was the introduction of evolutionary theory into mainstream thought.  The internal challenge was the rise of Higher Criticism and liberal Christianity from the seminaries of Europe.  Suddenly, conservative faith had a challenger in defining what Christians should believe and what the church should become.

A century ago, Fundamentalists were the definitive victors of the great ideological battle of conservative and liberal theology.  This happened, in part, because of the efforts of  two figures who emerged in that hour to raise up and equip an army that the liberal theologians could not match.  D.L. Moody mobilized an army across America with his aggressive evangelistic campaigns. R.A. Torrey equipped that army, as well as every rural pastor across America, with The Fundamentals. It was a definitive collection of the essentials of the faith, including essays on the virgin birth, a literal understanding of the book of Genesis, the infallibility of scripture, and the bodily return of Jesus to His church.

Between the reach for holiness and the reaction against liberalism, a very distinct expression of modern Christianity was born.  It spread farther and faster than liberalism could in those days.  The army of Moody, Torrey, and many others established a new denominational structure that reflected a conservative view of scripture and, eventually, an escapist eschatology that would lead to a subtle disengagement and separation of the church from the affairs of the world.  That expression has prevailed as the main expression of the Protestant Church in America for the past century.

We are in a very different era of history, one in which the church is undergoing another radical transition.  What has been seems to be quickly disconnecting from what will be.  Liberal Christianity has been given new life and a new army through both traditional and social media outlets. More believers than ever before have a voice in helping to shape their worldview and world in ways that have little to do with existing denominational structures and traditional beliefs.

More people are talking to one another about more subjects than ever before.  However, how we talk with one another, and how we hear another, is more complex and difficult as well.  A generation of conservative, traditional – and often, Republican – believers is giving way to a new generation, one born into a technological world that is advancing faster than any in history.  Obsolescence in technology now works in terms of months, and not years, decades, or centuries.  Young adults are learning to grow an adapt in a pace that mirrors the pace in which the world around them adapts.  In doing so, an entire generation – one that lived and experienced a much slower and simpler life – is quickly being left behind.

As one group adapts and the other entrenches, neither group really knows the other anymore.  This is the hour of perhaps the greatest generation gap in history.  The dynamics that surround “passing on the faith of our fathers” is becoming impossibly complex.  What does this mean for the future of the church?

Where are We Now?

Anger and fear have been as intrinsic to American Christianity as faith and love.  Woven into the fabric of American culture is a passion to express personal faith undisturbed by outside influences.  Faith and love thrive in a context in which a believer feels empowered and confident in the acceptance of Christ and His leadership over world affairs.  Anger and fear arise when our own personal status quo is disturbed and hidden insecurities are exposed – all generally in the context of powerlessness.  Nothing exposes our true powerlessness like the free will of our children.

The middle-aged theologian is rarely threatened by new ideas.  However, when those ideas threaten the idealistic and inexperienced young person, a certain sense of powerless can unexpectedly invade the heart.  The holiness movement was, in some ways, a reaction to antebellum excess.  The fundamentalist movement was a reaction to liberal deconstructionism.  Young men and women live out, on a daily basis, the fruit of the philosopher’s search for truth.  In a post-Christian nation, young people are interacting with the non-Christian world in far more intimate ways than their fathers and grandfathers.  Even more prevalent is the manner in which they are interacting with the anti-Christian world than ever before.  They may not be ready for the tricks their heart will play on them as they do.

As a young believers work to make sense of the world in which they live, they are less prone to react against challenges to their faith and more prone to think through the critiques, regardless of the source.  This is not a bad thing.  However, to do so without a sense of why the world is the way that it is and how it got here is a dangerous thing.  The great weakness of the modern young person is to be both keenly aware of their weaknesses – often in painful and transparent ways – while also being completely unaware of their weakness at the same time.  In other words, today’s young adult is both filled with awareness of their shortcomings, while simultaneously having little awareness of their limitations.

The narcissistic message of the day, built around self-help theology that promises therapeutic bliss, is the incessant cry to “believe in yourself”.  21st century America has settled for smaller dreams.  ”You can do great things” has slowly been replaced with, “You can get noticed”.  What this means is that we arrive at a time in which young people have an almost unprecedented sense of self and of personal weakness, yet do not think that those weaknesses are disqualifying related to their goals.  This is a new problem.  The age-old problem of “not knowing what you do not know” only exaggerates the new problem.

The other age-old problem is a reactionary establishment, afraid of what they see in the lives (and questions) of today’s young adult.  One of the great weaknesses of Fundamentalism is that it trains its adherents to react and not to respond.  Again we find a new problem intricately connected to an ages-old one.  The new problem is a visceral, emotional reaction to perceived cultural threats.  The old problem is not humbly listening and learning from the next generation.  Teachers and parents often have a hard time hearing from the ones they are trying to protect.

Yearning to Be Heard and Respected

There is no way to write these next few paragraphs without sounding exactly like my father.   It’s funny, though.  Beyond making peace with sounding like my father, I have to confess: I like it.  It’s not hard for me to appreciate sounding like my father when the lessons of his generation seem more necessary today than ever.  His generation was a very hard-working generation that fought unpopular wars and received little thanks from a very unappreciative “Generation X”.  Many of my father’s comrades played by the rules.  They saved.  They built.  They won for one another a quiet respect and a deep sense of accomplishment in the simplicity of faithfulness.  They often did not call attention to themselves, or their pain.  They often pretended to not be in pain.

My generation enjoyed the benefits of their hard work.  We were the slackers.  We filled the gap between the man and women born in the midst of unprecedented post-World War Two optimism and the “kids” that followed, born in the midst of technological enthusiasm and YouTube dreams.  It is too early to tell now how the men and women I grew up with will be defined, or what our legacy will be.  I already fear the ones who are following behind me, and how they might remake the world into their image.  I find that the fear that has helped to shape every generation that has gone before me is inescapable.  I wonder if this is the burden placed upon the forty year olds, still young enough to dream of the future, yet old enough to know that it is out of our hands?

The shaping of the immediate future has passed to a very different group than the young adults I used to know.  Things that were true about my friends that I grew up with – emotional truths and dynamics of the heart – seem amplified in this generation of young people.  Their issues seem louder.  Their desires seem to be both impossibly deep and astonishingly shallow all at once.  Their passions seem uncontainable at times, a whirlwind of possibilities that threaten to swallow them whole.  At the core of it all beats a restless yearning to be heard, to be understood, and to be taken seriously far sooner than ever before.  Far earlier than my father ever dreamed, a young man fights to cut through the noise and the storm and shouts his thoughts, cares, and ideas to his peers and his leaders and aches to be noticed.

Generation X was a self-absorbed group.  We expressed it in quiet ways, inwardly searching, wondering where we fit and whether or not our lives would matter.  In our search for significance and meaning, we forgot to give it to our sons and our daughters.  In our place, boldly and uncompromisingly, institutions did it for us.  Hollywood media, preschool programs, youth leaders, teachers, and many others stood in line and told our kids how much they mattered.  They told them that they were important.  Special.  World changers.  The problem with an institution replacing a father is that an institution is making an exchange and performing a service.  They lack the relational stability to say the loving thing, the hard thing, the right thing, and the encouraging thing.  They can only say the empowering thing.  Anything harder than that, and a child can gravitate towards a new leader, a different voice, a new show.

Only a father can say lovingly say the hard truths at the right times in a way that empowers.

Love and Lawlessness

A “Gen-Xer” is old enough to remember photos in wallets.  Pictures on the wall.  Imagine meeting a new friend, and he opens up his wallet.  Inside, as the plastic flips open, is a cavalcade of pictures – but not of family, or a boyfriend, or any friends at all.  Every picture is of the person you’re meeting.  They only carry in their wallet pictures of themselves.  You step into their home.  On the wall, it’s all the same: pictures of themselves adorn every room.  A generation of young people, many of whom love the sound of their own voice and adore the sight of their own face, have been handed the technological context to change their world.

What kind of world will they make?

In the days of Moody and Torrey, conservative Christianity – fundamentalist faith – won the day because they were able to mobilize and equip a larger army.  That generation successfully passed down their faith to sons and daughters for almost a century.  Today, a generation is rising up and, through the unprecedented power of social media, raising their voice to throw off the bonds of fundamentalist error and excess.  I look at the faith of my fathers before me, and listen to the words of the children who are gaining strength after me, and stand between two worlds.  I stand in-between the largest generation gap in history.  I’m not sure who to agree with, who to side with.

I look to the young with compassion, understanding the role that fundamentalist faith played in shaping the world as it now exists.  The angry reactions of disillusioned youth feed a deep resentment of the weaknesses of their fathers who fearfully enabled or rejected them. I understand what they are rejecting and why.  They want to express the compassion that their fathers lacked.  They have a voice my fathers never had.  They have the means to rally an army – one that could rival the armies of Moody and Torrey.  I’m young enough to partially believe in their cause, and see and understand their pain.  I’m still impulsive enough to join them.  There’s only one problem, but it’s a big one: the voices crying out for a compassionate church have room in their heart to love everyone in the world, except for the fundamentalist fathers and mothers that came before them.

I look at my fathers with compassion as well.  I understand the reasons that caused them to fight the wars they fought, a tender desire to keep their world for the children they didn’t  know how to love.  When life is a fight from the beginning, slowly crawling from nothing to something, fighting becomes the primary way you learn how to love.  You might not be able to say it, but you can show it.  It would be like the returning from the Vietnam war, unappreciated, unloved, greeted by scorn and rejection for trying to do the right thing.  The kids might not fully understand why you fight, why you rally, why you vote the way that you do, why you react the way that you do.  It doesn’t really matter to you, if you’re trying to do the right thing.  One thing you do have that I so appreciate, is discernment.  You can tell when things are off course.  Here’s the problem that I see, however: discernment mixed with fear is easy.  Discernment with hope is much more difficult, but it’s what young men and women are longing to see modeled and mentored.

There is a difficult way ahead for a young leader, a young voice.  The power has shifted to the young leader far faster than ever.  For centuries, the young leader needed the old leader.  Today, the functional need for an old leader – one that can help empower and resource a younger one – is fading quickly.  A young man can go his way, alone.  He can have a measure of power and influence, cheaply, and immediately.  Whether he should have it does not really matter anymore.  No one has time for that argument.  It simply is, and that isn’t going to change.  It will be a relatively short time before the platform and the influence will have finances added to it.  Once this generation of young people have the financial resource to go with their people influence, things around the world will change even faster.

They can change apart from the traditional authority structures.  They can change outside of any authority at all.  The institutions that raised them have been inadequate, and are no longer necessary for them.  Their fathers have failed them.  They have committed, in this culture, the worst of sins: they believe embarrassing things, and will not listen when those beliefs are challenged.  Better for them to have committed adultery, or robbery, or anything other than the sin of obsolescence.  The world has, seemingly, moved on from the faith of  D.L. Moody and R.A. Torrey.  The liberal wing of the church is finally able to amass a compassionate army that has no use for the old fundamentals of another era.  Evangelicalism seems to be dying, and that may not be a bad thing for the new voices arising across our nation.

I think it is.  I think that we have much to learn from one another still.  We live in the era of the dogmatic overreaction.  We do not know how to disagree with one another.  How to listen.  The laughable irony is that the generation that longs to be heard has never been trained to listen.  It’s okay.  Our great-grandparents – and their parents – did not know how to disagree either.  The way forward isn’t found in new solutions for church life, and won’t be discovered by progressive new ways to reach the lost.  That’s not where it starts, at least.  It starts by loving your enemies.  It starts by embracing humility.  It all changes when you set your heart to learn from the ones that have the most to teach you – because you decided a long time ago that they had nothing to teach you.  If we can’t love the whole family of God, even the ones that we fear, or do not understand, or are embarrassed of, how can we love the world?

Coming Friday: the conclusion of the series, “The New Era of Faith”.  What will the church look like a decade from now?

The New Era of Faith: A Brief History of Fundamentalism

This is the first article of a three-part series called, “The New Era of Faith”.  Today is, “A Brief History of Fundamentalism” in which we look back and look at how we’ve arrived at our current trajectory.  Later this week, “The Greatest Generation (Gap)”, and discuss the current cultural forces that divide two generations of faith in very historically unique ways.  Finally, we’ll end with, “A Church in Transition, But To Where?” and bring it all together and explore the future of faith in America. 

Recent controversy across the body of Christ resurrected some old arguments which were, consciously or unconsciously, used as the framework to conduct new ones.  Marriage and media were merely this week’s context to hold, online and in real-time, centuries-old debates between the conservative establishment and the restless progressive.  However, the modern mode of ultra-fast communication has changed more than how we talk about issues of faith with one another.  The social media world has empowered a generation of disaffected, smart young thinkers like few other times in church history.  The pioneer faith of early America is transitioning to the progressive faith of the 21st century.  What will American Christianity look like a decade from now?

How did we get here?

The faith of our great-grandfathers had waned and mostly disappeared long ago, before many current young evangelicals were ever born.  Yet the echoes of what was known as the holiness movement still have an impact on faith in America today.  Some critics see the holiness movement as a mixed legacy of false piety and legalism mingled with a sincere desire to please God among its adherents.  There may be some truth to that side of the story.  

There is another side to it as well.  These believers were our grandfathers and grandmothers.  They represented the end of an era.  The faith passed down to them had enjoyed a long, rich history involving some of the giants of Protestant history.  Movements swelled and receded, only to swell again like the tides of the oceans. Denominations were born and are now fading from memory and influence.  For two centuries – from 1730 to 1930 – this movement of holiness had a profound impact on believers as well as early Colonial, and then later American, government, culture, and social reform.

Holiness adherents helped to spark revolutions and abolition movements, change laws and cultural norms, and even affected the American Constitution itself.¹  Its practitioners could often be found in the late 19th and early 20th century honoring the spirit of John Wesley, showing the love of Christ to the outcasts of society and bringing them tenderly into the kingdom of God.  I do not say this to endorse the holiness movement.  I say this because there is always more to the story than the ideas we disagree with and the expressions of faith that we reject.

I say these things because today’s Christians have, seemingly, lost some of their history and their heritage.  I don’t want to merely “chew meat” and “spit bones”.  I want to remember my family in the faith and love them, warts and all.  Learning to do so will help me practice the same love for my family in Christ today.  I want to learn how to disagree with honor and tenderness and humility while remembering the story of how we got here.

We live in the era of the dogmatic overreaction.  We do not know how to disagree with one another.  It’s okay.  Our great-grandparents – and their parents – did not know how to disagree either.

Roots of the 20th Century Fundamentalism

From the earliest days of the Protestant Reformation, you can follow a strand of piety in the lives and writings of the saints that ran from the Anabaptists through the Puritans to the Methodists.  Each group had their own motivations and distinctions, but these groups can all be connected to a common desire: holiness.

The Methodists, led by the brothers John and Charles Wesley, helped to spearhead a movement of holiness and a reach for perfection that rode on the wave of the First Great Awakening.  The spiritual awakening ignited by such theologians and preachers such as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield preceded the “Methodology” of the Wesley brothers to discover how far grace could take the human heart in living a holy life.  The call of the Methodists was a call to holiness of heart connected to the power of the Holy Spirit.

This movement of holiness moved throughout the body of Christ in America in a way that was not solely tied to the Methodist movement or any single denomination.  The later power of the Second Great Awakening to awaken and transform the lost across America – and the explosion of church planting and denominational growth – seemed to usher in a new era of faith in the American church which some imagined would usher in an era of righteousness and glory unlike any that Christians had ever witnessed.²

Then something catastrophic happened – a destroyer of dreams.  The brutality, carnage, and pure wickedness in the hearts of men were graphically expressed through the American Civil War.  What our generation forgets is that, for the generation that lived through it, a righteous end did not really salve the pain of the bloody wound that the Civil War ripped into this nation.  We rightfully and joyfully celebrate the ending of slavery in this nation.  Yet the steadfast abolitionists who won the day in their era were also personally scarred by the means to a national deliverance.

The Civil War seemed to bring an end to Christian dreams of a millennial paradise in America.  The promise of revivals past, however, fueled new dreams of a holiness revival that could again sweep through America as it had in the days of Edwards, Wesley, then Finney.  A sleeping church that had been awakened in the 1730′s had exploded in size and influence in the 1830′s.  Now, in the post Civil War era, the next generation of holiness preachers sought to advance the cause of holiness and fervent, authentic faith throughout the nation.

They were living on the memories of revivals past and Wesleyan ideals that were in danger of being lost in the era of Reconstruction.  The gains Charles Finney made in the “burned over region” of Upstate New York hinted at even greater shifts – not all of them positive – in the nature and expression of spirituality shortly afterwards.  These shifts included the boom in Freemasonry in Utica, the rise of the Millerites, the birth of Mormonism in Palmyra, NY, and the birth of Spiritualism in nearby Arcadia, NY.  There was a missionary zeal to see a new holiness movement emerge in America, and the camp meetings of the late-1800′s focused on this goal.

Out of these camp meetings two strands of this new holiness movement would emerge: the conservative expression, as embodied by the Salvation Army, the new Nazarene denomination, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, and the Church of God; and the more dynamic Pentecostal expression, which would later flow into the Latter Rain and later Charismatic movements.  Within established denominations such as the Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, churches and leaders were choosing allegiances and drawing lines to either join or renounce this new surge of holiness preaching.

At the same time as the rise of this new surge in exploring Christian Perfection, there was a surge in both global missions and social activism (woman’s suffrage and prohibition).  Also, a new school of thought was arising in Europe: liberal theology, Higher Criticism, and the emergence of the Social Gospel (as well as Liberation Theology within the Catholic Church).  The Holiness Movement is the seed-bed of modern American Evangelicalism; Liberal Theology, however, was a primary catalyst in the birth of American Fundamentalism.  Between the reach for perfection and the reaction against liberalism, a very distinct expression of modern Christianity was born.

Fundamentalism, for the uninitiated, coalesced around the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith, which include: the inerrancy of scripture, a literal view of Biblical history, the virgin birth of Christ, the bodily resurrection and physical return of Christ to the earth, and the substitutionary atonement of Christ on the cross.  A 90-essay, twelve volume work edited by R.A. Torrey, The Fundamentals, was financed and published to establish the foundations of the Christian faith in response to perceived attacks against traditional belief.  The flashpoint of this new ideological war was the Scopes Monkey Trial and the introduction of Darwin’s evolutionary theory into mainstream thought.

The Victory of Fundamentalism

In the early days of American Fundamentalism, the rural Christian stood firm against the cosmopolitan Christian.  Believers were clustered by region and by denomination.  You walked to your local church and submitted to your local spiritual authority.  Disagreement was difficult to navigate within closely knit communities bound together by similar moral value systems.  If you wanted to challenge the status quo, you often did so by boarding a train to leave town, not by staging a public debate.  New ideas were slow in reaching the masses, and rarely accepted by the masses when they did.

The war over an authentic expression of faith was fought primarily in the scholarly arenas and the activist societies that were born out of converted young students in primarily urban settings.  The ideas  and expressions of life borne out of the holiness movements – whether it be Christian perfection or a spirit-filled life – were far more accessible to the simple, rural Christian than the intellectual, liberal, activism-oriented faith being slowly imported from Europe.  They spread faster, went deeper, and solidified themselves culturally in the pre-information age of England and America.³

However, we are in a very new hour for the movement and transference of ideas worldwide.  The internet boom of the 90′s has led to an information age that is sparking upheaval and revolution like never before.  What does this mean for the old-time religion of Wesley, Finney, and Torrey? How will the next generation shape American faith in an era of ideological upheaval? While American Fundamentalism won the first victory in shaping and fueling 20th Century Christianity, the old ideas found in early 20th century liberalism have enjoyed a rebirth.  The ideas of Schleiermacher, Beecher, von Harnack, Bultmann, and Tillich have taken hold of a new generation – one with far more freedom, resource, and power to run with those ideas than ever before.

Will we run responsibly? What will we do with our newfound power?

We will look at the implications of the resurgence of liberal faith in a new generation in Part Two: “The Greatest Generation (Gap)”, later this week.

¹ Strong, Douglas M. Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999)

² Smith, Timothy L. Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1957).

³ Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford University Press, USA; 2nd Edition, 2006).

The Difficulties and Rewards of a Spirit-Filled Life

Stop and think for a moment: if you have been born-again, you have been filled with the Holy Spirit of God.  Christian faith has within it a number of truly outrageous ideas.  It is my experience that we become so over-familiar with these ideas that we forget how outrageous they are.  We believe that God became a human being and lived among us for awhile.  We believe that, as a human being, He died and rose again, and ascended to heaven to take His place upon His throne of glory.  We believe that, shortly afterwards, He opened up the heavens and sent His Spirit to invade the earth and dwell within His followers.  Us.

That is an incredible thought.  The Holy Spirit of God dwells within us.  In fullness.  The same God that created all things, upholds all things, will restore and renew all things, dwells in me.  The fire of a billion suns and beyond is exploding within my innermost being, incalculable power beyond measure alive inside of me.  Yet, because of the condition of my heart, my mind, and my emotions, I often forget that He is there.  I often forget that I enjoy union in the deepest part of my being with the Man from Nazareth.

Relating on His Terms

My relationship with the Holy Spirit begins, on a daily basis, with attentiveness.  In other words, the quality of my life in the Holy Spirit is directly connected to my conscious effort to remember that He is with me.  The more I think about Jesus, read, think about, or sing bible passages, talk about Jesus, or simply “fellowship with the Holy Spirit” (2 Cor. 13:14), the more I allow the Spirit to be active in my life.  As a born-again, Spirit-filled believer, there is continual activity around my life that I am not aware of.  God’s leadership through the Holy Spirit on my behalf means continual activity for my good.  An example of this includes Paul’s reminder that, when we do not know how to pray, the Holy Spirit groans and intercedes for us (Rom. 8:23-26).

However, like any relationship, the more we talk to the Spirit the more we will walk in the Spirit.  Simply remembering that the Spirit is alive within us is an act of faith that positions us to experience more of His leadership and power in our lives.  The more we connect with what is true about us – truth that we cannot often feel or consciously perceive – the more we will ask and engage with Jesus through His Spirit.  As Jesus told us, “ask and you shall receive” (Matt. 7:7).  James later reminded us in this light that, “we have not because we ask not” (James 4:2).  This is the simplest of scriptural principles: the more that you ask for (within the boundaries of His will), the more that you will experience in walking with God.

Attentiveness to the Spirit followed by engaging with the Spirit often requires a few other attitudes of the heart, however.  I have found that without humility, simplicity, and dependency – all heart attitudes that can be summarized as being “child-like” – I will go on my merry way without even thinking about the possibilities that come with connecting with God in prayer.  I can become so task-oriented and me-oriented that I forget that Jesus died that I might become “we-oriented”.  His sacrificial death and victory over sin was the culmination of His fight for intimate relationship with me.  It is His joy to offer me infinite power to grow and mature in the relationship.  I have the Eternal God fighting on my behalf – and dwelling within me – to help me to overcome all obstacles to life and godliness in relationship with Him.

If I am to love Jesus back with a tender, responsive heart of thanksgiving, I have to do so on His terms.  His terms are the ones that propel my life.  They simply work better than my terms.  Therefore, I have to continually fight for the three heart attitudes listed above.  When all three work in tandem, they help subdue my prideful independence, prideful love of my own opinions and conclusions, and my own distorted sense of self-importance and self-righteousness.  I can see Jesus – and myself – a bit clearer with a little more objectivity.  I can do so without shame, with confidence that I am loved.  In the process, I can receive real power to grow in love and authority in the Spirit.

I Want the Rewards of a Spirit-Filled Life Now

It is far too easy for me to become used to a life disconnected from actively engaging with the Holy Spirit.  I need to remember daily what life is like when the activity of the Holy Spirit is real and alive within me.  I want to experience the joy and thrill of hearing His voice related to those around me.  It might be a small impression, or a slight surge of tenderness – but I want to hear and feel more related to those He loves.  I do not want to surrender to a Christianity lived out merely within my mind.  I want the ongoing exhilaration of a life with Jesus lived out of the overflow of my heart as well.

I want a more active dream life.  I want to encounter the Lord in powerful ways even when I am sleeping.  I want to be surprised by the Holy Spirit at various times when I am awake.  I want my life and my heart to be constant candidates for an unexpected invasion of “more” of the Spirit of God in and around my life.  I want to see more people that I pray for experience healing.  I want more people that I preach to experience freedom, joy, and an increased spirit of revelation (experiential understanding) by the time I am finished.  I want more to happen within me and all around me as I remember to connect to the Living Fire that dwells jealously within me.

All of these things snowball and multiply if I stay with it.  Then, I get distracted, off-track, a little dull, and disconnected.  That can snowball, too.  I can get stuck in a rut for quite awhile if I forget that this Christian life was meant to be so much more than what it is now.  I don’t want to stay here.  I want to remember.  I want to believe.  I want to run, and be fully alive.  The best part is, we can run together into more of His Spirit, today.

Let’s go.

Ordinary.

American pop culture is a continual celebration of the extraordinary who rise above the rest.  These extraordinary ones soar to magnificent heights of human achievement, showing the rest of us what is possible if we pursue our dreams. Wealth, influence, fame, and the affections of the masses await any who break through to the other side of ordinary: out of the mundane, into the spectacular.  We dream of the spectacular.  Who longs to see a movie about the standard, average man?

You Are Special.

Average, simple, mundane life wars against everything we were told during our childhood and everything the American dream is about.  Someone will be great, why not you?  Intellect, ability, humor, the ability to capture and hold the attention of the crowds – these are the things that are worthy of our sweat and our sacrifice.  Be special! Stand out! Get noticed! Be someone! A parent can admonish and urge their child to be great, and in the YouTube, Instagram, Buzzfeed era of the bored and boring, longing to witness someone’s 45 seconds of special, everyone has their shot.

It seems as if, in some segments of the body of Christ, there has been a shift towards the modern cultural ideal – celebrating the extraordinary.  The value system of personality-driven, celebrity-obsessed love of fame and the famous has found a foothold within segments of the church.  Leaders are revered for reasons that rarely involve sacrificial living, prayerful devotion, or provocative love and humility.  This love of the gifted ones and  of a cultural definition of greatness can be seen in our love of numbers as a measure of impact.

The language of the modern church reflects a worldview that is slightly different than the Bible’s definition of success.  The cry is often heard at youth gatherings and conferences: “You’re special.  You’re powerful.  You’re great.  You can change the world!”  There is a major difference between having a positive outlook and preaching unbiblical positivism.  Unbiblical positivism has another name: flattery.  Flattery initially feels good to the soul, but is ultimately very damaging to the heart over the long-term.  The problems with flattery lie within its vanity and powerlessness to equip the heart for the toils and snares of life.

You Are Vain?

“The best thing about Jesus was that he had a mom that believed he was the son of God,” says self-help author Wayne Dyer at his seminars. “Imagine how much better the world would be if all of our moms thought that way.” In other words, we should all be raised to believe that we are the second coming of Christ— God’s greatest gift to mankind.¹

Paul the Apostle warned us, nearly two thousand years ago, that the days were coming in which men would be “lovers of themselves” and “covetous” in 2 Timothy 3:2.  I wonder if he could have envisioned the explosion of self-expression that has taken hold of society today.  Today, the “selfie” is a normal reflection of what is on our minds – all day long.

Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell have been studying the recent explosion of narcissism in our culture.  In their book, “The Narcissism Epidemic”, they explain the modern obsession with self-love well:

A quick search on Google reveals 191,000 hits for “how to love yourself” with such tips as “Make a note every time someone says something nice about you,” “Stop all criticism,” and “Look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘You look great!’” Some sites even recommend caressing your body. Others are eager for your self-admiration to lead to their self-money, selling “Love Yourself Affirmation Cards,” a “Love Yourself, Heal Your Life” workbook, or a “Soaring Self-Esteem” subliminal audio recording. You can buy T-shirts that say “I ME” or “Love Yourself.” Sports stars regularly credit “believing in yourself” for their success rather than the more likely reasons such as God-given talent and years of hard work.²

From a young age, children are not taught to look at God.  They are taught to look at themselves.

You Are Disillusioned.

The greatest problem with a culture that exalts “extraordinary” while encouraging self-fixation is the eventual disillusionment that comes when reality sets in.  The messages and platitudes of our youth are easily exposed, as life plods on, as both flattery and hype.  The messages that felt so good in our younger days contained promises that we can never fulfill.  We simply cannot live up to the expectation that “extraordinary” places on us.  We have to, at some point, grapple with how not extraordinary we actually are.  We have to be honest about our weakness, our brokenness, and most of all, our ordinary, mundane lives.

Some refuse to face the truth about their daily life.  They cling to the fantasy they bought wholeheartedly in their younger days, which makes the eventual collision with truth more painful.  When life comes crashing into the one who believed the flattering words of a self-absorbed messenger, the consequences are tragic.  The heart hardens quickly.  Cynicism and bitterness are the beginning of the new life that awaits the disillusioned.  Compromise often follows.  What causes someone to arrive at such a tragic destination?

I believe that it is important to recognize the role that self-importance has in shaping our worldview.  If we are told all of our lives that we are special – that we are important – and, therefore, that we will do great things, then we receive information through a very different filter than what the word of God intends.  We hear prophecy and promise through a self-centered lens, and are often trained to read the scriptures in the same way.  The story is about us.  Ironically, I do believe that, as believers, we will “do great things”.  However, I want to embrace and value what Jesus defines as “great”.  Greatness, as defined by Christ, is almost always very small.

The fundamental problem with society’s definition of greatness and importance is that it prepares us to despise what Jesus defines as “greatness”.  We are raised to imagine that we are better than that.  Quietly, we also believe that we deserve better than that.

Of course, “better” never, ever comes.  Real life destroys unscriptural, ego-driven fairy tales every time.

You Are Loved.

The gospel carries with it a simple, powerful, liberating truth: God loves to love the ordinary.  The small.  The weak.  The broken.  The simple.  The plain.  We did not have to become something or someone to motivate God to love us.  We do not have to be someone today in order to be loved and cherished by Him now.  The beauty of the gospel is that we get to be us – the real us.  The ones we were made to be, and as we were made to be loved and to love in return.  We get to enjoy the simple rhythms of a quiet life, with no pressure to be “the ones whom the world is waiting for”, no pressure to be “special”, no expectation of being important, or someone who matters.  We already matter.  We’re already important to God.

The power of the gospel is that it is not about being loved into becoming someone significant.  The power is found in becoming significant because we are loved.  The power of the gospel isn’t that it makes you into a “world-changer”.  Being “more than conquerors” doesn’t mean that we conquer with extra awesomeness.  We were rescued by grace in order to be conquered by love.  Now we get to spend the rest of our lives watching its power conquer those around us.  We get to be something more than a self-seeking, ambitious, ladder-climbing, vain conquerer of worlds that will eventually crumble into dust.

The power of the gospel is that it gives dignity and beauty to the simple, quiet acts of love.  Washing the dishes takes on a new form of beauty when it is motivated by the love of Christ to serve and love another.  Bandaging a child’s cut becomes something priceless when the power of the Holy Spirit is radiating through a simple act of tenderness.  The ordinary becomes extraordinary when the love of Christ permeates and infuses it.

Life is small.  It is simple.  God designed the course of history in a way that defies any attempt to change the world alone – whether it be the person with “big dreams” or the generation that imagines “they have arrived”.  God has big plans for a very large family by which everyone plays a very small (but to Him and for Him, very important) part.  We are all valued members of a global symphony made up of every believer who has ever lived, and God adores our little note.

I love that some of you that are reading this today had, at some point, a “powerful prophetic word” over your life.  I want to affirm to you that I believe it.  You will be great.  In fact, this morning, when you brushed your teeth and wiped the sink down because it blesses your spouse, you already were.

 

¹Twenge, Jean M.; Campbell, W. Keith (2009-04-04). The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (Kindle Locations 239-242). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.

²Twenge, Jean M.; Campbell, W. Keith (2009-04-04). The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (Kindle Locations 242-248). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.

 

How to Marry the Right Person for the Right Reasons

I consider the decision to marry (and who we choose to marry) the single most important decision a person can make, apart from saying “yes” to the grace of God working in our lives unto salvation.  Some Christians have a deterministic view of marriage.  This means that they believe that God picks their spouse and leads them to that person.  Then, the Lord moves their hearts to fall in love.  This view is problematic for many reasons that are best addressed at another time.  For now, it is easiest to simply say that part of the beauty of romance and marriage genuinely delights the Lord.  He loves to watch romance that we initiate unfold and love grow in our hearts for another. 

It is mysterious and amazing that God leaves the single most important decision of our lives in our hands.  He will help us, lead us, and serve us in the process.  He will not, however, make the decision for us.  This is a terrifying thought for many Christians.  I have personally witnessed very emotional reactions to this idea.  It does not have to be terrifying, however.  There are a few very simple principles that can help us navigate the steps of dating, courtship, and marriage victoriously.

The Way of Love

In terms of decisions that we make before the Lord, there is no bigger decision we will ever make than our decision to marry.  Who we choose, and why we make the choice, plays perhaps the largest role in our spiritual growth and daily life in the Spirit than any other single decision we will make over the course of our lives.  As simple as this sounds, it is amazing to me how often this point is forgotten in the whirlwind of romance.  There are a number of emotional dynamics that contribute to the “whirlwind”.  Some of them are not positive or healthy, even if the romance feels good.

I find that one of the greatest dangers in romance and dating among young people stems from how shortsighted we become.  Modern media and imagery urges us to “live in the moment” and be “swept off of our feet“.   If we are really lucky, then we will experience “love at first sight” as we encounter our “soul mate“.  One of the greatest problems that young people face in the early stages of romance is the trivialization of the very idea of love itself.  Because we have, as a society, taken our eyes off of the very source and definition of love Himself, Jesus of Nazareth, we have repackaged love into a storm of emotions that barely resemble the biblical ideal.

Beyond trivializing and diminishing love, our culture has shifted our focus from love from God, for God, and for others to “love for ourselves”.  Our greatest pursuit must always be the knowledge of God and encountering His love.  As we pursue the One who has found us, loved us, and saved us we are empowered to love Him back with all of our hearts – which must be our highest priority and greatest goal.  If these words define the rhythm of how we live our lives, then we will express true love deeply and authentically.  Love, for the one who is in Christ, is something far deeper and more powerful than a Hollywood romance.

We must define and express love by the One who gave all to fight for our present lives and ultimate destiny in Him.  We can define love through the lens of the incarnation (He pursued us in humility) and the cross (He fought for us in a costly way).  We can define love through the lens of the gospel (He values our lives and cherishes our love) and His ongoing intercession for our destiny (He prays for us and prophesies over us).  There is much that could be said beyond this about His glorious leadership in our lives and the way that He directs and cares for our heart in the journey of knowing Him and loving Him back.

The subject of the love of Christ is a vast one that has many chambers to explore and get lost in.  Few young people discover the treasure and the riches of this subject in a detailed way that leads to real fascination.  For many believers, the subject of the love of God touches them on an emotional level and not in a revelatory way.  Therefore, when a new romance develops which touches them on a similar emotional level, a young person often loses their way in Christ to focus on the new relationship.  The revelation of the love of Christ – the experiential knowledge of it –  instructs us in how to love well and serves as an anchor that holds our hearts firm during the storms of life.

The Dark Side of Romance

I’ll say it again: Jesus loves romance.  He loves the dynamics of a man’s heart awakened to love for a woman.  So many good things happen when a godly man falls in love with godly woman.  When my wife and I realized we were falling in love with one another, our conversations changed a bit.  As good friends, we talked about life, the future, Jesus, and many other things.  As romance began to blossom, we began to share deeper things from our heart to one another.  We prayed together.  Dreams of the future that mostly involved “me” now involved “we”.  What would our lives be like together? How would our calling and destiny work together in pursuing God? A whole new journey of discovery opened up to us.  It was beautiful, and beautiful to God!

We did not walk out romance and our dating life perfectly, by any means.  We both walked through real immaturity, inexperience, and conflict – together.  One thing that we worked at together was to enjoy the romance and the journey of falling in love with one another while keeping the big picture of the rest of our lives before us.  The great joy of romance is the thrill of new-found, growing love that touches and awakens deep places in the heart.  The great danger of romance is the temptation to cast aside restraint to simply live for the moment.  We can become led by – even driven by – our emotions and desires in ways that can be very costly.  How the person we are falling in love with makes us feel – and not who Jesus says they are and where He wants to take them – begins to govern the relationship if we are not careful.

The great challenge of romance is to enjoy it as a gift from the Lord without elevating it above the Lord.  We want Jesus to continue to govern our values and vision, which empowers us to govern our emotions and maintain a godly perspective.  We do not want to be governed by the fear of being alone, the fear of rejection, or the fear of failure.  We want to be governed by the love of Jesus and the power of His gospel as we seek to grow in love for the person we are interested in marrying.  As we do, we can grow in a prophetic spirit and a servant’s heart for them as we gain understanding about how Jesus loves them, what He thinks about them, and how He made them to love Him back.

Jesus’ Vision for Marriage

How then do we make such a huge decision? As we begin to grow in understanding the love of Jesus, it is easier to grow in our understanding of His vision for our marriage.  Allowing our vision for marriage to originate in the heart of Jesus is so liberating and exhilarating! When Jesus has the idea, then He provides the resource and the power to bring it to pass.  We do not have to fear that we will “miss out” or choose the “wrong person”.  Jesus is committed to transform our definition and understanding of the “right” person, which makes it really hard to”follow our heart” to the wrong place.

Jesus’ vision for marriage is found in Ephesians 5:15-33, as Paul describes what it means to “walk circumspectly” (carefully) in the fear of the Lord, understanding His will.  In that passage, he calls us to “submit to one another in the fear of the Lord”.  In the very next passage he calls wives to “submit to their husbands”.  I find that husbands in particular focus on the “what” of this passage without considering the “why” of Paul’s assertion.  What is Paul asking wives to submit to?

The answer is found in more than a call to submit more than a person – but a process.  Wives are invited to submit to a process within marriage whereby husbands love their wives “just as Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for her.” (Eph. 5:25) Paul is gospel-oriented in the way that he views marriage.  In the same way that Christ loved us first – empowering us to respond and love Him back – husbands are to be the ones who “love first” in marriage in a way that empowers wives to confidently trust their leadership and love well in return.  In conflict, in disagreement, in serving, in giving, the husband is commanded to love first in a way that establishes a safe context for his wife to love him back.

Another part of the process is the command that the husband love freely - with no thought of what he “gains” in the exchange.  Whether or not his wife loves him back, a husband is called to love sacrificially.  He is to give all of his heart to honor, cherish, and value the one whom God has joined him to, regardless of behavior, circumstance, or emotions in the moment.  The commitment of the husband to his bride must be defined by something greater than the behavior of his wife.  In the same way that the husband is loved freely by Jesus, he is to be empowered to love his bride in the same way.

Finally, the husband is invited to love his bride fully - fighting for her destiny and future with all of his might and resource.  A husband does not have to fight for his own destiny – Jesus is fighting for him with great grace and fierce loyalty.  Thus a husband is free to fight for his bride and the godly desires of her heart.  He does not view his wife as a resource to make his life work, or to make his calling great.  He is free to view his bride through the eyes of Christ and, by grace, fight for what Jesus envisions.

Choosing the Right Person for Life

With these truths in mind, how then do we make the right decision about marriage?

Men have Proverbs 31 as their “guide” in discovering the incomparable worth of a woman to Jesus and where life can go for her by the grace of God.  The greatest question, as it relates to marriage, is simple: does she want to go there? What defines success for her? What is life about? Dating is a great time to search out the answers to these questions to discover if the first “seeds” of romance will ultimately blossom into respect in the years to come.  ”Is this a woman who I will be attracted to?” is the wrong question to ask – the “laws of attraction” will change as the heart matures.

The right question is, “Will this be a woman I respect in the decades to come?” Is she interesting and potentially fascinating in ways that go far beyond physical attraction? Is she about the right things for the right reasons, and does she have the potential to follow through on those convictions consistently over time? She may stumble, and she may have many moments of weakness in the years to come – but is she oriented rightly in her heart towards Jesus, and is her life vision wrapped in His loving gaze?

For women, Ephesians 5 serves as an able guide.  That young man who is seeking to win your heart – where is his heart going? While he may be a rough stone in the moment, is there a jewel underneath waiting to be discovered? A young man can have the right values and the right convictions without the present maturity to walk them out.  A vision for growing in love must be connected to a vision to grow in respect on the bride’s side of things as well.  Is this a man that desires to pursue the love of Jesus – experiencing it, understanding it, and expressing it? Is this a man that has integrity of heart to keep reaching for this goal even when he fails? How does he handle failure, and hardship? How does he govern, lead, and serve?

The secret I always give young women is a very simple one: watch how that young man treats waiters and waitresses when you are out to eat together.  How does he treat “the help”? Is it about him, or does he have the capacity to be about others? Are they “beneath” him related to his money and temporary power over them, or does he treat them with kindness, dignity, and genuine interest? I find this secret test of the heart to be a far more effective one than the “mom test” that can be deceiving.  ”Failing” this test is never a “deal-breaker” in the relationship, but the brief window into the heart is a great way to ask certain questions related to how he views you, your future, and your destiny.

Permission to Do it Badly

When I share on these truths from scripture, I often hear a small but real twinge of regret from those who are married.  Usually, it is a simple confession: “I wish I had heard this sooner in life.”  I never heard these things either, but learned them later on.  The glory of the kindness and mercy of God is that His grace is enough for the truths we believe today.  When we did not know better, He helped us get through our ignorance.  While we may know “better” today, He still helps us grow through our immaturity in walking out what we now know.  God takes our marriage covenant more seriously than we do.  Therefore, He is infinitely committed to helping us walk it out regardless of how much ignorance and immaturity we walk in.

Our part is found in sincerity – the earnest desire to love God and others well.  We say, “yes” by faith to His definitions and value systems.  We grow in grace by grace.  We start out in a very rough way, but things smooth out over time as we stay with it.  The great thing about being introduced to new truths is that there is no such thing as “too late” in the kingdom of God.  Repentance always brings us into a fresh start as we seek to walk out truths that are new but newly dear to our hearts.  If you are fearful about your future, your marriage, and your weakness in relationships, today is a great day to turn again to the mercy of God and the riches of His grace.  It is His joy to overwhelm you with kindness and incomparable help in laying hold of His heart for you and your relationship.

The Problem With Gay Marriage

Marriage Began Within the Heart of our Creator

Here’s the problem with gay marriage: there is no such thing. It doesn’t exist.

How could I say such a thing? I am by no means attempting to be inflammatory or sensational. My goal is to be simply truthful: marriage is not a man-made institution; thus man has no right to define, redefine, or transform what God has ordained and established in His sovereignty. Marriage is from God, belongs to God, and is a prophetic declaration that He wants to make to the human race about His relationship with us. Therefore, we need to tread carefully and fearfully around this subject. It is precious to Him.

Hear me now: I don’t want to talk about civil unions, and the rights that homosexuals can receive from our government related to cohabitation and life together. It’s an entirely different issue that merits healthy discussion, as it relates to the subject of what our government should, or should not, sanction and promote within American society. In that arena, a discussion on the issue of basic human “rights” and privileges granted by our society is proper to discuss and debate. These civil issues of American governance fall within our God-given “sphere” to work through together as a nation.

Marriage, however, falls outside of the boundaries of debate and human “rights”. No one has an intrinsic “right” to redraw boundaries that God Himself has drawn and defined. The subject of marriage, why it exists, and what it was originally intended to display is not something we get to speak into or shape; it is a part of a storyline that God Himself jealously guards. It is as immutable a truth as grace itself, or mercy, or love. We are not allowed to define any of those truths – we must encounter them by the power of the Holy Spirit and be instructed. In the same way, we must encounter the Bridegroom God to truly understand marriage and what it shouts to the nations of the earth.

How Can True Love Be Denied?

The secondary issue related to a gay man’s “right” to marry is the cry, “How can true love be denied?” Again, both the issue of “rights” and “true love” are beside the point. Outside of intimate relationship with Him, the Father has given men the freedom of choice and the freedom to walk in a way contrary to His will. However, calling that free expression of the heart “love” does not mean that God now approves, sanctions, or desires to fill the earth with homosexual relationships. His opinions do not evolve, and His boundaries for men and women are clear.

Therein, however, lies the heart of the matter. If this was truly only a fight for “civil rights” within a free society, then the issues at hand could be contained within a political, or legal, debate. If rights within a free society are being denied to men, then citizens must work together to see that all men and women are treated equitably, charitably, and honorably. However, it is not really about what is ethically, politically, or legally permissible. This debate is about – and has always been about – what is morally and spiritually permissible.

What lies at the core of the debate is not the right of men to live with other men and enjoy civil and political rights and privileges; it is about men being able to engage together in intimacy and have that union considered as holy and sacred as the union between a man and a woman in “holy matrimony.” In other words, the greatest desire in redefining marriage is the redefinition of morality itself, what is sin and what is not, and what is shameful – and what is not.

That is the greatest problem with the “gay marriage debate”. We conduct the discussion from within a man-centered arena as we look to present the most compassionate arguments for our “side”. Beloved, God is not on “our side” of the debate. The plumb line and final test – in the fear of the Lord – is whether we are on His side.

The Primary Issue: the Knowledge of God

“What do you think, Father?” This must be the primary question on our hearts and minds – we must work to align ourselves with His heart and not bolstering our wise-sounding opinions. We must not succumb to wisdom that is not from above – wisdom that is “earthly, sensual,” and, ultimately….”demonic” in nature. This kind of wisdom breeds confusion and “every evil thing”. This kind of wisdom destroys the very lives compassionate, well-meaning folks are trying to save, and help.

I know this – the church cannot be passive on this issue. We can be loving, we can express love, and we can treat men and women struggling with immorality (homosexual and heterosexual) with compassion, tenderness, and kindness. What we cannot do is redraw God’s boundaries in the name of compassion. That is not compassion. That is compromise. It is not loving. It is fearful.

This is not the hour to be fearful, but to be loving as God is loving and declare the wisdom of the boundaries He has drawn – in relationships, in marriage, and in love. To do this is the only true way to serve, love, and honor those who are hurting, broken, and trapped in the shame of immorality. To be faithful to declare the truth of God’s word, God’s heart, and God’s plan is to take part in His means to true freedom and joy for all who turn to Him.

How Do We Conduct This Conversation in a Secular Society?

For me, it’s a matter of “first things first.” In other words, my sphere doesn’t include other religions and their beliefs on the matter at hand.  The only thing I can do is labor to serve the Bride of Christ as she stands as a faithful witness for God’s viewpoint on the matter. Our sphere isn’t really even a nation with a pluralistic viewpoint – it’s the church, from which there should be one viewpoint. If we can unify behind God’s heart on the matter with clarity, compassion, and authority, we end up serving as true “salt and light” that hinders moral decay and puts Jesus on display powerfully.  I want to see God’s idea of marriage shine so brightly than any other version seems pale and powerless in empty vanity.

As such, this is not an article about how the church should address the government.  This is also not about how we should talk with a non-Christian about these issues.  These are my thoughts about how the church should address the church.  I am writing this as a believer in Jesus Christ, to my fellow members of the family of God.  My primary concern is that the believer’s zeal for marriage (God’s heart, will, and definition) exceeds their zeal to be compassionate. There is real intimidation surrounding this issue, which is only going to intensify in the days ahead. We need clarity, confidence, and compassion on this subject within the church – in unity with God and His word - first.

How I talk to a believer (and what we talk about) is different from how I address those who refuse the grace of God, or are ignorant of it.  For example, I do not talk to a homosexual about morality – I talk to them about Jesus. To the church, I talk about morality.  The New Testament scriptures are curiously missing any mention of how to discuss Rome, Roman government, and the social issues of the day.  Paul was eager to meet Nero, Emperor of Rome.  However, his zeal was about the privilege of sharing the gospel with him, not discussing Roman policy related to the poor of the empire.

Who Am I to Judge?

It is important to understand that I am not placing myself in the seat of judgment about anyone outside of the body of Christ who is struggling with areas of brokenness and sinful behavior.  As I have written elsewhere on this site, judging matters of the heart is far beyond my ability to carry out.  Evaluating the lifestyle and behavior of people outside of the body of Christ is also something that I have little interest in doing.  Someone who does not know Jesus is going to act, unsurprisingly, like someone who does not know Jesus.

This may be a bit surprising, but I do not want anyone reading this to believe what I believe.

What I want is for everyone to know Jesus, and to believe the truth.

It is critical that all who love Jesus cling faithfully to what is true, and have the fear of the Lord about that point.  Those who profess faith and love for Jesus Christ are within my sphere to “judge”, as it relates to doctrine, lifestyle, and fruit.  In “judging” as a shepherd and leader in the body of Christ, I must do so with compassion, tenderness, and a heart that loves and enjoys mercy.  We are all growing in the faith together, and all working towards loving Him well in agreement with His heart.  I don’t want to “push my view on every American”.  I want those who say that they love Jesus to actually love what He loves, the way that He loves it.  We don’t get to vote on those matters, and God is not particularly interested in our opinions – He desires our loving obedience.

For those who do not know Jesus, their sexuality is not the priority – experiencing the loving-kindness of the One who made them is.  Pressing someone who lives outside of the transforming grace of the love of Jesus to behave according the church’s standard positions the church to be judged by the world according to her behavior.  We must never strive to draw the world to our morality.  We must always seek to connect the world to our Jesus.

The Dark Side of Devotion

The Apostle Peter’s second letter is a very important one for the modern believer.  Peter was near the end of his life, and the new movement he had helped to pioneer was entering into its third decade.  Peter’s thoughts on spiritual growth and maturity, truth and error, and the motivations of godly and ungodly men all combine to express one of the most important works on perseverance in the faith ever written.

In the second chapter, Peter focuses on false teachers.  He cares about the progression of maturity and spiritual growth for his audience, and sees false teaching as perhaps the greatest threat to holy and blameless lifestyles of faith.  These are sensual men, Peter warns, who offer beautifully wrapped empty promises that ultimately lead to “utter darkness”.  ”Sensual”, in the way Peter is writing, implies a self-centered pleasure-seeker.  A “lover of pleasure”, as Paul would later describe them – one who does not have a necessary “love of righteousness” and of God to anchor their passions.

A Time of Pleasure Like No Other

We live in an era of history that presents more options for pleasure and passion than any other.  The places where one can channel his or her passions are more technologically and culturally diverse than could ever have been possible in generations past.  The food and drink of the nations and peoples of the earth can be set before us effortlessly.  The pleasures of the nations are within the reach of more people than ever before.  It may be possible that  our capacity for experiencing pleasure is greater than any generation that has ever lived.

Onto this present stage strides the God-Man, Jesus of Nazareth.  The power of the New Covenant is the promise of union with Him by His Holy Spirit.  Within that glorious union is profound joy, rest, and satisfaction as one begins to experience the incomparable pleasures of being loved by God.  At His right hand, the psalmist promised, are “pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11).  There is no more pleasurable experience our souls can enjoy than the indescribable love of Jesus washing over our hearts (Romans 5:5).  For a pleasure-loving, pleasure-hungry generation, the offer of the gospel of Jesus is the most timely and beautifully pure means to experiencing the pleasure we were made for.

The Dark Side of Pleasure

Surprisingly, Peter introduced a “dark side” of the pleasures of being loved by God.  With the experience of the love of God comes, by grace, an increase in our capacities to experience even more.  (The Apostle Paul describes this briefly in his prayer in Ephesians 3:14-19)  Therefore, the other side of this expansion of our capacities is the risk of succumbing to the enticement of false teachers, and after choosing sinful pleasures with seemingly little consequence.  What is the consequence?

Peter tells us, hauntingly, in 2 Peter 2:19-22 -

For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning. 21 For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. 22 But it has happened to them according to the true proverb: “A dog returns to his own vomit,” and, “a sow, having washed, to her wallowing in the mire.”

The troubling part of Peter’s warning is the assertion that, “it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness“.  When an increased capacity by grace to experience the pleasures of God’s love is diverted to sinful pleasure, the problem lies in the increased capacity.  What I mean is this: what used to thrill us related to sinful pleasures, or even godly pleasure – will now bore us.  It will take much more to ignite passion and pleasure within the soul of a man who has been “ruined” by the love of God and the power of the Holy Spirit.

A stagnation, a type of paralysis, settles into the soul of a now bored and cynical believer who can remember the days of passion but cannot imagine returning to them.  A cold, sterile acceptance – like a loveless marriage – has crept in because life can never be the same again for the one who has “tasted of the powers of the age to come” (Hebrews 6:4-6).  What sounded beautiful to our ears in the early songs – “I will never be the same again” – can prove true in a tragic sense if that declaration is not followed through with later in life.

The secret is to set our lives – unapologetically – towards intensity and godly desire.  Grace is our escort and our means to move forward.  We cannot live a life of intensity because we want to.  We can live a life of intensity and passion because we believe that Jesus wants us to (“You shall love the Lord with all…”) and therefore, He will help us to.  A life of faith is a life of continually reaching for all that grace offers us.  How far can the grace of God take me? How radically different can I live because of the power of the Holy Spirit?  How passionate can I be?  The continual challenge is to be stirred by the words of Peter again, and get up when I stumble, believing that the grace of God can overcome my weakness, my unbelief, and my immaturity.

I invite you to “go again”, that we might present ourselves to God in a fresh way today, allowing ourselves to be victims of His glorious grace once more.  I pray that we never see the “dark side of devotion” that Peter described, but pursue and receive the grace of God unto its logical end in fullness.

The Most “Outside the Box” Way to Get Real Feedback that Matters

Whether we are workers, friends, husbands and wives, parents, or students, we all have the same question: “How am I doing?”  Honest evaluation and feedback is a part of any healthy relationship.  This is true in a workplace setting, a ministry, or in a family.  We want to know where we are doing well and where we are weak.  At the heart of every sincere friend of Jesus is the deep desire to love well.  However, we often stumble and fall short in loving others well and want to know how we can improve.

What makes improvement difficult – in communication, in serving, and in collaboration – is that we have many “blind spots” in our lives.  These are areas where we cannot see where we need the grace of God to help us change and grow.  In some areas, we are simply unaware of where we are coming up short.  In other areas, the problem is worse: we imagine that we are doing well when we are really a mess.  Not only do we need help to grow and to mature in various areas of our lives, we need help to know where we need help.

The normal mode of forward progress is lateral communication, meaning, find our peers and our leaders and ask them to point out areas of improvement.  Ideas, insights, and techniques to build healthy communication with others fills the bookshelves.  This subject deserves the “ink” that it has received.  Clear, insightful, and helpful communication that spurs growth and maturity is hard to do!

King David, however, had an incredible “outside of the box” method to obtaining feedback on his progress.  It involved vertical communication with God in prayer.  David was dependent on the Lord to help the growth process and find blind spots in his life and leadership.  The problem with this approach is obvious – how can an imperfect person that listens poorly receive and put into action great feedback from an invisible God?

This is what made King David’s approach so brilliant.  However, his approach was also quite shocking.

The prayer of King David (Psalm 139:23-24): “Search me…!”

23Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my anxieties; 24 and see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Ps. 139:23-24)

King David unlocked an important truth about himself in Psalm 139.  He realized – and this is powerful – that he did not understand the depths of his sin and the weakness and broken state of his heart.  How much does a mind still connected to wrong ideas get us into trouble with others? How many times does our dull, disconnected heart help to shape our choices, thoughts, and emotions?  The prophet Isaiah understood the depths of this problem when he identified his unclean speech as a means of defilement; yet he understood that his speech was in part of a culture of unclean speech that hid the problem from his sight.  In other words, Isaiah knew that there were areas of compromise in his life that he did not realize were wrong, because of the permissive nature of his culture.  

We are often too dull of heart and disconnected from God to truly and fully appreciate how dull of heart and disconnected we are from God.  Unperceived sin and pride are a content threat to standing confidently in truth and growing in love.  David’s prayer was a glorious admission that his transcendent Maker knew him fully and inescapably.  God knows us infinitely better than we know ourselves.  The prayer of David was about a desire to tap into the only real truth we can get about ourselves.  Only what God thinks and speaks about us is true.  No one gets to define me – not my friends, enemies, or even my family.  Even more powerfully, I do not even have the right to define myself.  Only God’s words, desires, and thoughts can define who I really am.

David asked God to do four things: to “search”, to “know”, to “test”, and to “lead”.  David opened all of his heart up to God’s examination with a desire for hidden things to be revealed through testing and trials.  The four parts of David’s prayer work together.  He wanted God to pick an area of weakness – a blind spot.  Now, here’s the outside of the box solution: based on God’s knowledge of how David was wired, he wanted God to shake up his life in a way designed to expose that area of weakness.  (Wow.)

Then, David opened all of his life up to God.  He wanted God to lead him by grace out of his sinful condition and wicked way.  David wanted to find an “everlasting way”, or superior way out of that area of weakness that would never fail.  Yes, David wanted true information about his heart condition.  However, he also wanted grace and help finding deliverance from it.  He was confident that, once difficulty revealed weakness, God would help him in a powerful way.  He felt safe with God’s leadership and love to ask for trouble and ask for freedom.  (Wow, again.) The knowledge of our heart and its condition has to be combined with the knowledge of God’s affection and love for us.  Together, this “divine feedback process” can allow us to exercise faith in saying a wholehearted “yes” to God’s dealings to reveal and God’s dealings to remove.

This method is not for the faint-hearted.  It takes real confidence in the love of God and His leadership to see this process through.  If we can give ourselves to this prayer and to the process that follows, we can have confidence that the fruit has eternal significance – both for ourselves and everyone who we connect with.

The Secret to Conquering My Hatred of Being Misunderstood

I find that one of the most powerful motivators in my life, as it pertains to relationships, is desiring that people understand me.  I want real and deep understanding – not just my words, but the intentions and motives behind them.  This desire informs my writing style and drives my conversations.  When I talk to people, I tend to take in what they are saying and ask many questions.  At the heart of that conversational style lies a deep desire to really understand the person who is talking with me.  I want to make sure that I know what they are saying before I respond.

I haven’t always been this way.  In the past, I was very quick to assume I knew what someone was saying, and race to the conclusion.  The later misunderstanding, and the pain that it caused, created more time than I was saving with my quick conclusions.  I have also been misunderstood myself, of course.  This happens often.  I do not like it when someone does not understand what I am saying.  I get even more agitated when someone moves forward – in a conversation, or when executing decisions – based on that misunderstanding.

Why do I get so agitated? Deep down, I want something more than being understood.  I want to people to evaluate me properly.  I want people who I care about to judge me according to truth, not sentiment.  Quick evaluations and assessments of my heart drive me crazy.

At the heart of it all is a God-given desire to know and be known.  I take great pleasure in being truly “understood” by someone, whether it be my wife or a dear friend.  When someone “gets me” it greatly blesses me.  When someone does not “get me” it troubles me.  The problem is that I will, for the rest of my life, be misunderstood by everyone I meet – including those closest to me.  There is no one on earth who will ever really know me – and evaluate me – the way that my heart craves.  Shockingly, this includes myself!

“Judge Nothing Before the Time”

Paul urged the Corinthians to “judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of the hearts.  Then each one’s praise will come from God.” (1 Corinthians 4:5)  Paul was clear – on the subject of, “how am I doing with God”, he did not even judge (meaning, “examine” or “investigate“) himself.  Paul knew an incredible secret – not only would others misunderstand him, and judge him wrongly (1 Corinthians 4:3) – he was no better!

This passage gives us the two parts to the secret:

The secret to conquering our desire for deep understanding and right evaluation – which almost always includes insecure comparisons – is to first, remember how dimly we see.  We see through a faulty lens, and are poor judges.  We are poor judges of those around us, and we are a poor judge of ourselves.  We will never, ever judge accurately or perfectly.  Even if we could have all the information on a matter, we would judge either too harshly or too leniently.

It is important to distinguish here that Paul is talking about judging matters of the heart, not behavior, fruit, or doctrine.  There are aspects of life together that believers must ”judge”, or look at and investigate.  Ungodly behavior, poor fruit, and destructive doctrine all fall within the “jurisdiction” of every believer to judge before the Lord.  The heart, however, is very complex.  The heart is beyond our ability to judge.  When it comes to the heart, our comfort and our justification is that, “He who judges me is the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 4:4).

The most powerful part of the secret to conquering our desire for understanding and right evaluation is the second part: I can rest in remembering that a tender God knows me better than I know myself.  My comfort and confidence is that the One who judges me has all the information, knows me fully, and is tender and merciful in His evaluation of my heart.  Jesus delights in mercy! He takes in all the information about me and fights for the best evaluation possible in a spirit of truth.  The One who judges me is also my greatest Advocate, Champion, and Friend.  This is why Paul ends this passage with the joyful promise, “then each one’s praise will come from God.“

Things I’ve Learned Along the Way: Forgiveness

Imagine a process of forgiveness so powerful that we rejoice the next time we are hurt by someone we love! How could this be possible?

Over the years I’ve come to learn some powerful things about forgiveness.  It started years ago, identifying what forgiveness is not:

Forgiveness is not “letting go”: Forgiveness is not about “letting go” of offense and hurt when wronged.  Pretending we can “just get over it” and move on ignores truths about the human heart.  Moving on without addressing the hurt at the heart level is very harmful to future relationships.  I’ll give one example of a young man named James.  James was hurt by a leader that he trusted deeply.  He knew that the “right” thing to do, according to Jesus, was to forgive the one that betrayed his trust.  However, he assumed that forgiveness meant burying his feelings on the matter and moving on from the pain.  The problem came later: it was very difficult for James to trust other leaders.  The hurts of his past caused his heart to lock up around new leaders in his life.  An bigger problem was that too much time had passed, and James was unable to connect his broken behavior with the past wound.

Forgiveness is not “releasing it to God”: “Releasing our offense to God” is the spiritual language version of “getting over it”.  Spiritual language that isn’t derived from scripture and biblical ideas has no power to help us.  Also, concepts that sound spiritual but are not grounded in the word of God have no real, practical connect points to help our heart find its way out of real trouble.  We live in a wild world filled with choppy waters.  We often have no control over what other people do to hurt us.  However, once they do hurt us, the right response is in our hands, not theirs.  As we saw in James’ story, “letting go” feels helpful in the short-term but leaves a damaged heart uncared for long-term.

Forgiveness is not reconciliation: Forgiveness and reconciliation are really two separate issues.  Not every point of conflict and hurt demands confrontation.  Grant was a student of mine who, like many, confused forgiveness with absolution and confession.  Grant felt wronged by a female leader, and so he went to her and unloaded his hurt as a means of “forgiving her”.  While he felt better getting his offense off of his chest, the woman he spoke to was left shaken and wrestled for many days with shame and condemnation.  Though Grant found satisfaction as the offended party, he gave no thought or consideration towards the frame of the leader he  confronted.  Forgiveness was only about him, and there was no examination of the facts to see if the leader had in fact done anything wrong (she had not).

Forgiveness is much more than “therapeutic”: There are emotional and relational benefits to forgiving others, but forgiveness is  much more than that.  There are emotional benefits because forgiveness is about more than the benefits of the action itself.  The attitude and life of the heart is a part of what forgiveness involves.  However, we must commit to something more than personal benefit.  We must commit to the health of our relationship with Christ and to healthy, loving relationships with others around us.  This includes those who have wounded or wronged us.

As I’ve navigated forgiveness both personally and pastorally over the years, I’ve come to realize a few things about what forgiveness is:

Forgiveness is a work of grace: True forgiveness does not come easily or naturally to a wounded heart.  There is real pain, bitterness, and anger that fester within the wound.  As James learned, that wound does not heal on its own.  It does not matter how often we replay the truth in our minds or tell the truths of scripture to others; if we do not involve God in the process of forgiveness, our heart will always go its own way in a relational conflict.  Forgiveness is not an isolated act of the human will, but the fruit of the grace of God in our lives as the result of an active dialogue with the Holy Spirit.

Forgiveness is a spiritual exchange: Forgiveness is the fruit of an active reach to connect with God by His Holy Spirit.  As we wrestle through the pain and the hurt, we do so with God.  We must set aside time to talk with Him and wait for His response.  In seeking to forgive those who have hurt us, we are not trying to “feel better”.  We must connect with the God that so generously forgave us when we wronged Him.  As we connect in prayer, we receive something from Him that aids the process significantly: a spirit of wisdom and revelation (Ephesians 1:17) that gives us clearer perspective on what happened to us and why.

As we reach to love God in the pain, we will also experience His love, affection, and tenderness towards us.  As we experience this – even a bit – love begins to “abound, still more and more” (Philippians 1:9).  The love of Christ has power for the heart and soul of a man in a way that is different from any other force in heaven or on the earth.  More than what we feel when the love of Christ touches our heart, what we think, believe, and even what we like begins to change.  This is what Paul meant when he prayed that love would abound “in knowledge and all discernment, that we would approve the things that are excellent…” (Philippians 1:10)

The grace of God and the love of Christ are the only way to escape the snare of bitterness, cynicism, and anger that follows a wounded heart.  In connecting with Him, we exchange our opinions on what happened to us for His wisdom, power, and emotions.  Forgiveness is not really about what we “release to God” but what we receive from God out of prayer and fellowship with His Spirit.

Forgiveness is an encounter with the heart of God: When we are touched by the love and power of God, we aren’t simply healed.  We are changed.  Our wounded heart becomes an opportunity to reach for God in ways that we never would have otherwise.  We can find Him in the deepest pain.  When we find Him, we have an invitation to encounter His presence and power.  Encountering the presence and power of Jesus always leads to becoming a little more like the person of Jesus.  We may have been grievously wronged.  We may have been deeply wounded.  However, as we fellowship with One who suffered great wrongs and deep wounds, we can encounter His tender heart.  If we do, we will never be the same again. 

Forgiveness is agreement with the heart of God: How do we know when we have entered into the process of biblical forgiveness? The fruit of engaging in the process with God, so far: increased perspective from the Holy Spirit and more tenderness towards God and those who wounded us.  We come to the other side of forgiveness when we are able to enter into agreement with the heart of Jesus towards those who have wronged us.  We begin to see those who hurt us through the eyes of Jesus.  We begin to feel what He feels towards them.  Best of all, we can begin to pray for them as He prays for them (Hebrews 7:25).

Jesus commanded us to pray for our enemies and bless them with our words.  We can do this during the entire process of forgiving them for what they have done.  As we do, we will find that we finish the process of forgiveness a very different person than we were when we began it.  At the end of the process, when we see the fruit of true, Spirit-filled forgiveness in our heart we can actually enter into what Paul wrote about in Romans 5:3 -

And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance…

This is how we learn to rejoice, even in pain and hurt.  Over time, we learn about the great joy and reward that is on the other side of pain.  This reward is ours when we choose to deeply involve God in the process of restoring our wounded heart.