The Donkey of the One Who Hates You

I stumbled upon this jewel in Exodus today. I would prefer to avoid my enemy. This verse gave me conviction to repent, to love, and to rescue my enemy, his donkey …and myself.

The Decline and Fall of Evangelicalism?

I was sent this article by my Dad. It's worth the read. Don't choke on the CSMonitor source, Spencer is certainly no C-Scientist, and the article is a summary of a series he had on his own blog. I have run into Spencer's articles in various place in the past year or two. He's definatley thought provoking. I'm not sure I agree with every point in this article of course, or the causality of said implosion. ...but that's nitpicking. The bulk/substance is some pretty solid criticism and reminds me of some books I read by Os Guinness, and others years ago. It has come true. Evangelicalism is in a downward spiral.

Evangelicals are notorious for chicken little political and cultural analysis, but I think what is different here is that Spencer's analysis is less prophet of doom and more state of the union.

 

I came across this video on a friend's website a while back,
Piper puts it pretty clear...



...I think I have the same fear.

For the church today, doctrine is optional, knowledge is personal experience, wisdom is often personal intuition, community is conditional, and felt need and "what can this passage do for me?" shape most preaching. "Relevance" rules, and today's churches are probably more culturally shaped than Gospel formed.

I grew up a church kid, and I used to wonder how there could be a great falling away? How could people leave the Church? Desert the Gospel? I thought, 'that must be in a future whose preconditions are a long way off' .... but now I think they might be uncomfortably close to home in our age. Like Piper I fear that many people in evangelical churches don't know the Gospel. They have come to Jesus for dubious self improvement reasons, not because they are sinners, wholly lost in sin and bound for hell apart from the Grace of God in Christ. 

I have had some discussions over the past two years with my students and various others regarding "The Way of the Master" evangelism series by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron. It's an approach to evangelism that emphasizes a need to show a person their sin and utter separation from God first. Only when a person knows their hopelessness can the hope of the Gospel be clearly seen without distraction. 

It is interesting what a discussion of this approach has revealed about the understanding of the Gospel among Christians from Bible teaching churches. Putting the Holy standard of the Law up front so that sin is revealed is a shocking approach to many in evangelical culture today. (Those of us who hung out with Martin in His small catechism immediately sense the binary Biblical pattern of Law and Gospel.) The fact that the message of the Law is shocking to many makes me wonder what they are used to hearing, and what they personally understand they were saved from and saved to.

Evangelical culture has tended to put the personal benefits of salvation front and center, both in evangelism as well as church life. I once heard a pastor say that what you use to draw people, you will also use to keep people. If we have drawn people with the promise of Jesus as the key to a better life, what will we keep them with? We invite people to come to Jesus so they can get their life straightened out, then continue with preaching that presents Jesus as the key to the maximized life. It's not about what the text says, but what it can do for you.

What Joel Olsteen shamelessly places in the center of his sinless-self-improvement christianity, is probably the subtle mantra woven into much preaching and church culture: Evangelical culture is all about our Best Life Now. It's what I sarcastically refer to as the church of Pimp my Ride. No Sinners in the hands of an Angry God in church today.

So...who's in church? What do they believe? What are they here for?

The question my discussions with these students and others has brought up is the question of what is it that is preached in most churches today? What "Gospel" are people getting "saved" into? As Ray Comfort rightly questions, does the self improvement Gospel really save? Maybe I've read too much Luther and Bonhoeffer and Paul (...is that possible?) but I have the same question; can you preach the Gospel without first preaching the Law?

...Or is that Cheap Grace? ...and therefore not Saving Grace?

When things get tough, when Gospel fidelity becomes costly, and the church no longer appears "self improving" to the masses, we will experience 2 Timothy 3. I think that is what Spencer is getting at.

The hope is, as always, abiding in The Vine. The Source of true life is there, not Church. But we cling to that vine in clusters because that is how we are made to grow. Contrary to our hyper-individualistic self-determining culture we need each other. We need to be where the Gospel is faithfully proclaimed in a way that holds us accountable to it. Teaches truth and doctrine that form us, not principles we extract from it. We need to be among Gospel formed people forming a Gospel formed accountable Christian community ...not just "families of association" or community of convenience (Bonhoeffer's Life Together springs to mind as a definition) and then faithfully living, witnessing, and proclaiming the Gospel.

...There are still some of these around, precious few, but there are some new clusters forming on the vine with this awareness and intention in mind. But is going to take a counter-cultural... maybe even counter-evangelical-culture commitment to create, maintain, and defend such a creed and community.

The real Church existed before there was Evangelical, Relevant, Emerging, Emergent, or Contemporary and it will exist after all that is dust. We should make sure we don't mistake one for the other.

Oops...51 Words, but good ones.

"In our Lord's life there was none of the press and rush of tremendous activity that we regard so highly, and the disciple is to be as his Master. The central thing about the kingdom of Jesus Christ is a personal relationship to Himself, not public usefulness to men."
Oswald Chambers

Who Would Jesus Smack Down?

“Driscoll’s New Calvinism underscores a curious fact: the doctrine of total human depravity has always had a funny way of emboldening, rather than humbling, its adherents.”

Summary observation from an interesting NYT article on Mark Driscoll.

Gospel Toxic Comfort

If the warmth of my bed, flannel sheets, and Hudson’s Bay Blanket make me lulled, drowsy, and indifferent instead of awake, fighting, and praying. What might the ease, convenience, self-indulgence, entitlement, and distractions of America keep me from?

The Comfort of The Incarnation

If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;
Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;
We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow,
We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars.
The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;
In all the universe we have no place.
Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?
Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim Thy grace.
If, when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,
Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;
We know to-day what wounds are, have no fear,
Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign.
The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.

Jesus of the Scars by Edward Shillito

Shillito was an English minister who wrote his poetry in the trench horrors of World War I.

I am currently teaching the book of Hebrews at CCBoise SOM. If one can have a favorite book of the Bible, this might be mine. I am captivated and intensely comforted by Hebrews' central image of Jesus as our scar-bearing High Priest. The book uniquely magnifies the full deity and full humanity of Jesus, and both are essential to His ministry as our intercessor. Many Christians understand the importance of Christ's deity, fewer understand or appreciate the importance of His full humanity, and the need to hold the truth of both of His nature's fully, and preciously.

It is not simple to hold the truth of both,

but it is sublimely precious and essential.

Sometimes though, we take what is sublime and try to make it simple,

...and in the process can loose a truth.

That's how the first heresy in the church started. The Greek mind had a hard time understanding Jesus as both God and Man. They made him simpler to understand, not by diminishing His deity, but by diminishing His humanity. The Gnostics believed Jesus was only human in form, but not in experience, essence, or will. Their "Jesus" was insulated from a personal experience of suffering and temptation because he was not fully man. The Gnostic Acts of John quaintly records that 'Jesus walked by the seashore but left no footprints' ... a Jesus was not quite fully connected.

Christians rarely adopt a structured heresy like Gnosticism....unless some JW's beguile them. Most Christians I meet will say that Jesus is both God and Man...at least that's what they have heard. But since that is hard to get your mind around, many Christians practically emphasize or understand one nature more than the other, rarely both in unity.

(...You know? a little Catechization might go a long way....but I digress.)

A Biblical, orthodox understanding of Christ's incarnation fully articulates and rejoices in the fullness of both of His natures. If you emphasize one to the diminishing of the other, or if you have a murky or drifting understanding of either, you can quickly slide into heresy... in either direction. Jesus Christ is fully God fully Man...a creed the first three church councils fought to make unequivocally clear, and an essential truths for which people have died ever since.

As I said: It is not simple to hold the truth of both,

but it is sublimely precious and essential.

We might not diminish His humanity in the same way or for the same reasons as the Gnostics, but I often hear phrases about Jesus that make me uncomfortable in how they disconnect and distance Him from human experience. It seems agreeable to most Christians that Jesus experienced a bit of poverty or hunger... a bit. But for Jesus to fully and personally experience trials that tested, temptations that tempted, desires that distracted, anger that threatened, despair that darkened, betrayal that wounded, a will that conflicted?

Did Jesus suffer these same things that I do? ....if so, He might be able to really understand me. Could He suffer these things and be sinless? ....maybe then he has power to help me.

Those questions might take some thinking, some effort, some study to understand...

but it would be sublime.

But before we have to think hard things, someone inevitably spares us the trouble and simplifies the Sublime with something like "...well, He was God you know..."

Simple.

...right?

...and "click," Jesus gets disconnected from human suffering ...distanced from our suffering. We are left to assume that the difficulties of human life that weary, that shame, that pain us were not actually difficult for Jesus. The hope of a sympathetic Savior withers...

He was God you know...He walked an inch off the ground...He wasn't really here.

Taking the edge off his humanity might also provide a fig leaf to cover our exposure, and distance Jesus from our own human weaknesses. Our weakness is our shame, because it is inseparable from our failure. If Jesus experienced our weakness...wouldn't that be shameful? Especially for us. So, maybe it's better to keep Him at a comfortable respectful distance. He doesn't have to understand all our weaknesses right? A slightly less human Jesus would be safely distanced from the messiness of this human experience, and it would save Him the inconvenience and the shame of having to come all the way down.

But we are too late to save Him. Too late.

He humbled himself and became a man. He has drawn near, touched the ground, and got his feet dirty. He was hurt, weary, cold, shamed, hungry, weak, angry, exhausted, tempted, conflicted. He sympathized, literally; suffered alongside, and was in all ways tempted, yet without sin and is thus able to comfort us in our familiar weaknesses.

We thought we might save Him the shame of human weakness...

but forgot that He does not fail.

Job and I are eternally grateful.

Job cried out for one who would be a mediator between us...one who can lay hands on us both. I know Him as Jesus, the Perfect Scarred Mediator. He is able to lay priestly, compassionate, experienced, interceding, hole-ly hands on both God and man because He was a Man of sorrows, fully acquainted with grief. He is sublimely precious, and is able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him.

He ever lives to make intercession for me.

Thank you Father, for the Jesus of the Scars.

The Dead Horse

Young Chuck in Montana bought a horse from a farmer for $100. The farmer agreed to deliver the horse the next day. The next day the farmer drove up and said, "Sorry son, but I have some bad news.. the horse died."
Chuck replied, "Well, then just give me my money back."
The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it already."
Chuck said, "Ok, then, just bring me the dead horse."
The farmer asked, "What ya gonna do with him?"
Chuck said, "I'm going to raffle him off."
The farmer said, "You can't raffle off a dead horse!"

Chuck said, "Sure I can, Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he's dead."
A month later, the farmer met up with Chuck and asked, "What happened with that dead horse?"
Chuck said, "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece and made a profit of $998."
The farmer said, "Didn't anyone complain?"
Chuck said, "Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back."
Chuck grew up and now works for the government.
He's the one who figured out how this "bail-out" is going to work.

Anyone know a Creed?

A student once answered me; "Yeah, I like their old stuff."

I think churches should give tall-carmel-chocolate-vanilla-skinny-soy-decaf-latte's to anyone who can say the Apostles Creed.
...and a Crispy Cream if can define any of the articles.

Shameless Commerce

One of the blogs I subscribe to was holding a promotion (though it is not really that kinda blog) ...and I would recommend them even if posting these blog links didn't increase my chances of winning.

22 Words

Molly Piper

22 Words is just that, a 22 word post...usually random, usually thoughtful.. he calls it "experiments in getting to the point." 

Well, I need more than an experiment, I need therapy. A recent post provoked me to embark on a similar writing exercise (therapy) I am calling 41 words. Shameless rip-off hun? 

Last but not least, it is also the source of a funny post on worship music How's that for bait?

Compare and Contrast…

"Israelite evangelism never suggested that neighboring idolators start worshipping the true God because Yahweh would give them better crops than their idols. Instead, people were and are called to turn from their idols because idolatry is (sin) against God.”

p.149 When People are Big and God is Small, Edward T Welch