Church Voices

A recent commercial in my area says, “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to look your best.  After all, when you look good, you feel good.”

Really?

I find Christians using the phrase “There’s nothing wrong with…” a lot when they are trying to rationalize their choices.  But often it isn’t the choice that is wrong, but the heart/attitude behind the choice.  I think that ultimately, we know this and it shows in our trying to make something sound okay by saying that there is nothing wrong with it.  Whenever you hear that phrase, or one similar to it, ask yourself, “Is there anything wrong with…?”

So is there anything wrong with wanting to look your best?  Is this an issue that Christians should even care about?  I’ll post an update with my answer in a few days, but first I’d like to hear from some of you on the issue in the comments.

This article from the Sports Economist illustrates at least a little bit of the reason why God’s grace is so much larger than ours.

The author makes this note about the chances of baseball players who used performance enhancing drugs on getting into the hall of fame:

Beyond McGwire, what will be the fate of others caught up in the bad press? A Cincinnati Enquirer piece by John Erardi poses this question for A-Rod along with Bonds, Sosa, McGwire, Clemens and others. In a very small sample (10) of baseball writers who have Hall of Fame votes, 7 came out against any of the players while 2 were willing to consider a partiucular guy from their city

Then, from the general to the specific:

The trouble with that view is that players who did not use such substances stand at a disadvantage, albeit an arguable one. The Astros ace, Roy Oswalt, speaks very forcefully to the views of at least one impacted non-users on MLB.com:

“A-Rod’s numbers shouldn’t count for anything,” Oswalt said in a phone interview with MLB.com. “I feel like he cheated me out of the game.” … “The ones that have come out and admitted it, and are proven guilty, [their numbers] should not count. I’ve been cheated out of the game,” Oswalt continued. “This is my ninth year, and I’ve done nothing to enhance my performance, other than work my butt off to get guys out. These guys [who took PEDs] have all the talent in the world. All-Star talent. And they put times two on it.

Of course, like the writers, Oswalt is more gracious to a former teammate, Roger Clemens, than he is toward others.

So, it looks like whether you’re a baseball writer taking a principled stand against the exploitation of the game by dirty players, or a clean baseball player angry that your ability to earn is being reduced by talented players having an unfair advantage the familiarity with a player will result in having a softened attitude towards him.

Consider, then, that God is intimately familiar with each of us. He is our creator and our sustainer, we’re told he knows us well enough that the hairs of our head are numbered. Could it be that God’s intimate familiarity with us results in a grace towards us that is far greater than the grace we offer each other? The concluding verses of the book of Jonah seem to indicate this is the case:

Then the Lord said, “You feel sorry about the plant, though you did nothing to put it there. It came quickly and died quickly. But Nineveh has more than 120,000 people living in spiritual darkness,[a] not to mention all the animals. Shouldn’t I feel sorry for such a great city?”

If the church is going to be a place where grace is received and given among God’s people, it is necessary that we cultivate relationships with our brothers and sisters. Its easy to condemn unknown baseball players for outrageous sins against the game of baseball, its easy to condemn Christians we have never met for sins that are publicly revealed, it is easy to grow cold hearted towards people who sin against us who we only say hi to once a week before services.

But its very difficult to not offer grace to someone who we are so familiar with that we love.

To the ancient Greek mind you fell into one of two categories: Greek or barbarian. If you were Greek then you were cultured, sophisticated, concerned with philosophy, poetry, architecture and politics. On the other hand if you were a barbarian you likely spent most of your time hitting things with a club.

In 476AD some of those barbarians hit Rome with a club. Specifically, a Germanic tribe commanded by Odoacer did the hitting, and they just kind of took over. They maintained much of what was already in place, and occasionally went to war against various other groups. Eventually Odoacer went up against an army he couldn’t beat, it was commanded by a man named Theodoric. They signed a treaty to share power, and at the celebration feast Theodoric killed Odoacer with his bare hands.

Here’s the thing though, likely you’ve heard of the Roman empire and the Greek foundation it was built upon. In fact, it had such a profound impact on the history of the world that the founding fathers of the United States were, to a certain extent, obsessed with the Roman empire.

So why are the Greeks and Romans such a powerful influence in the way we think, and in the development of the western world while the architect of the fall of Rome is far more obscure, and has nothing in the way of modern influence?

Barak Obama touched on the difference between Greco-Roman influence and barbarian influence when he said,”know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy”. The Greco-Roman world is marked by creation. The creation of an empire, the creation of a republic, the creation of architecture, poetry, philosophy, roads, and ultimately the creation of an entire way of looking at the world. The barbarians, on the other hand, didn’t create much of anything. They destroyed, and they saw glory in their day, but ultimately they are mostly forgotten.

As tremendously powerful as the Greco-Roman world was it is, at best, a shadow of the ultimate creator, God. God created everything from nothing. Even salvation is offered in terms of creation: the creation of the church, through the work of Christ is ultimately about creation (oddly enough through the destruction of Christ’s life). Even when Jesus talks about defeating hell itself it is in the context of creation. In Matthew 16 he says, “upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it.” The creation of the church is held out by Christ as defeating hell, rather than a direct assault on hell itself.

Unfortunately, many Christians act more like barbarian destroyers than they do like Greek creators. Their time and energy is spent trying to destroy political parties, theological positions, and individuals they disagree with. Most of these people will fail in their ultimate goal, but even for the few who are successful their accomplishments likely won’t have the effect they expect it will. Instead of leading to a glorious renewal of their values and churches, it will instead end up fizzling out and being forgotten like a wet firework the day after the fourth of July.

On the other hand, Christians who actually devote their efforts to building disciples, churches, schools of thought, and other ecclesiastical outworkings have the opportunity to create, in conjunction with God, things that will outlast their lives, and perhaps will shape the thinking of generations to come.

Cincinnati Christian University (formerly Cincinnati Bible College & Seminary) seems to be having a very difficult time lately.  In addition to their public relations problems, I know of at least a few students and former employees who became bitter about their time there.   But it’s not all bad.

Some of my most cherished relationships from my time at CBC are from those who challenged me and sometimes even argued against me.  Thanks to Tim Reed, co-student those many years ago and author on this blog, for not writing me off as a fundamentalist.  Thanks to Dr. Jon Weatherly for the insane intellectual stimulation and wry humor (I wish I had you for more classes, but then I would have had to do more work.)  Thanks to Dan Dyke for the deeply philisophical and yet somehow mostly meaningless (for all practical purposes) conversations.  Thanks to Jamie Smith for pushing us to think beyond our own little world (so that we didn’t all turn out to be fundamentalists).  Thanks to Johnny Pressley for showing us all how ignorant we really were.

Good friends, great teachers.

I visited a member of our church in the hospital this evening.  He’d had back surgery this morning and I had gone to the hospital for a few minutes to visit with his family while my premie son was at the doctors’ office.  The wife told me that I didn’t need to make a special trip later just to visit and she repeated herself when I visited this evening.  Now I know that they understand my family situation and that they wouldn’t think twice about me not showing up tonight, or tomorrow for that matter.  But as it turns out, I can’t go tomorrow and so I decided to go visit tonight.  I admit that I visited that couple in the hospital tonight because it is a part of my job.  That’s not the only reason, but for the past six years it has been the driving reason. 

It occurred to me this evening as I was coming home that I was doing no less than a family member would do.  For that matter, I was probably doing no more than a person’s in-laws would do.  And yet the Church is supposed to be a family.  So what would it look like if Christians actually thought of each other as family?

I think we’d certainly spend time with each other at the hospital.  We might even go out of our way to do it.

For the last 20 months I’ve been on a theological crash course that’s illuminated the scriptures for me almost more than any other experience in my life. That crash course is called fatherhood. Interestingly enough one of the statements that has been made repeatedly to me is how great it would be to be a baby. Everything is taken care of for you, you’re fed, everyone loves you, and you have no responsiblity.

I don’t think this is true.

It must be incredibly hard to be a baby. You have no idea why you’re being taken to the places you’re being taken to, you have no idea who most people are, or what’s going on at all. Every parenting advice book I’ve read has the same advice: babies need routine because they have no idea what’s going on.

Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
1 Corinthians 13.9-13

These verses are often quoted in the context of discipleship, usually in terms of discussing what someone used to do or used to believe, with the implication being that anyone who does those things, or believes those things are still immature and will grow out of it if they are truly disciples.

These verses have absolutely nothing to do with discipleship.

Instead these verses describe our life here, and our life in eternity. Here we don’t have any idea what’s really going on. Like babies we have a very limited knowledge about how God is working, about what is happening to us, and about how the world works. The terrible irony of how this verse is wrongly used is that those who claim to now be knowledgeable, unlike their previous child-like state are people who are unaware of how much we can’t possibly know.

That’s not to say that we can’t know anything. Even babies know something of their world.

Babies know their parents love them.
Babies know when they hurt.
Babies know when they’re hungry.
Babies know their family members.
Babies know when they’re not at home.

Not to stretch the metaphor too far, but I think its fair to say we know the rudimentary make up of what’s going on. We know who loves us, we now what He did to save us, but much of the how and why of what’s happening, especially when we hurt isn’t clear. Sometimes a baby hurts because a doctor has administered a life giving shot, other times a baby hurts because he has a life threatening illness, and no baby alive has figured out which is which.

Any number of short and simple descriptions of a Christ-follower’s life is available to us in scripture (to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God is my favorite of the bunch), but how and why this world and how and why God operates in this world often isn’t clear, and all too often the things obscured by the cloudy bits of the mirror are what separates us from each other. We have been given a clear command that we are to love each other and we will be known as His disciples by that love, meanwhile churches split, relationships dissolve, and no clear disciples of Christ are known because of arguments about what is behind those clouds have been allowed to dominate the focus, energy and ambition of the church.

Children can be a wealth of insight.

Ellianna asked me as we were driving to the doctor’s office, “Is this real or is this a dream?”

I replied, “Is what real or a dream?”

Elli: “Me.”

She soon clarified the question was in reference to the particular trip we were taking, but still, it was one of those moments where as a parent, you realize that your children at the various stages of childhood have all the insight and wisdom of man.  A lot can be learned from children, but we aren’t to rely on the wisdom of man but the wisdom of God.  Our children can come up with man’s conclusions on their own, they need us to show them who God is.

Bob Myers over at the BHT notes:

During the Phillies N.L. Championship series, manager Charlie Manuel’s mother died. (His father was a Pentecostal minister who tragically committed suicide when Charlie was in high school.) Statements about his mother looking down on the game, watching it, being the 10th player on the field etc. are rampant on Sport’s talk radio here and they have provoked a littany of others sharing how their deceased loved ones who are Phillies fans manifest their presence when they attend a game or watch it on television.

He goes on to say its interesting the universality of such beliefs as they likely came from evangelicals, Catholics and agnostic types. He makes a couple of observations.

So much for the argument that people in Bible times were gullible, but we moderns live in a scientific age…

We can’t bear to believe any one that we loved is simply “no more”. And this stubborn notion that leads to sentimental superstition is correct. This clearly demonstrates that there’s something against death in our nature. And it makes me have compassion on all who walk around with sorrow in their hearts over a death that occured decades ago.

The second observation is, to me, far more interesting than the first, and one many Christians often overlook in their zeal to look forward to the life eternal. Death is always tragic. It is tragic because we weren’t created to die, and is a reminder of the power and horror of sin. It is also tragic, even when it happens to a saint, because we are without that person and they have left a void behind in our lives. I suspect many Christians feel guilt over their sorrow because they’ve been told its a happy day that their loved one has entered eternity. I also suspect that same impulse prevents many Christians from going to a counselor when sorrow deepens into depression.

I’ll add a third observation to this list. That observation is that no matter what we may think we never make an intellectual decision about what we believe. Oh, I realize you read that sentence and probably think it applies to other people who are not you, but we all do this. Our feelings, perceptions, biases, and other factors that are decidedly outside the intellect form our beliefs as much as the intellect does. This, of course, has application for both evangelism and discipleship and Christians ignore it at the own peril.

Why do people who claim to know Christ think that they are being good Christians by forwarding e-mails?  I claim here and now that they are being anything but Christian by forwarding those e-mails; they are being lazy, ignorant, timid, and fearful gossip mongers.  (I realize that many have been slowly deceived and pulled into this practice by others, but come on.  Take a minute to think before you act.  Just because it’s easy, doesn’t make it valuable.)

Instead of forwarding an e-mail that you haven’t checked the validity of by taking 30 seconds to look up on snopes.com or simply google it, why don’t you take that 30 seconds to do something useful and forward a dollar for every person on your e-mail list to our brothers and sisters in severe need in Asia (or some other continent) through one of these ministries: International Disaster Emergency Service, Gospel For Asia, Voice of the Martyrs, etc.

Every once in a while I’ll preach a sermon or part of a sermon in what many people consider to be a Hellfire and Brimstone style.  Some people like this type of preaching.  Some just want some kind of passion and energy, but many that appreciate these types of sermons want the anger, the exposure of sin, and the railing against our wrongs.  These sermons/approaches can have their place, but I’ve found that many times you get some amens (often from those that need to apply it but only apply it in judgment to those around them) and some guilt (which is not a part of the role of the preacher).  Because of these responses, I often desire to utilize other techniques to help encourage transformation during Sunday mornings (one of the best is to provide an immediate and tangible opportunity to act, which of course as Chad pointed out in the previous post, is not always applicable).

Sometimes I just feel like offending people.  Mind you, not for the sake of offending people, but to wake them up, to get them thinking, and hopefully to inspire action.  I think it benefits us at times to get a bur in our saddle.  You don’t see people hearing about a need or problem in their lives or the life of a neighbor saying “Oh that’s just terrible” and then doing something about it.  But get somebody upset enough, and they might just take action.

So to that end, I would like to share a list of things that have come to mind over the past few years of ministering in the midwest that will offend many Christians in our country:

• It is sick how much money you spend on crap every year that you don’t need when brothers and sisters in Christ are starving to death.
• This country is not a “Christian” nation.  The only nation that is truly Christian is the Kingdom of God/Heaven.  A.k.a. the Church.
• You may disagree with certain political views, but national policy is not dictated by scripture.
• People from other countries need Jesus Christ.  If I hear one more person say something to show the attitude that they are more important than somebody from Mexico, India, or China, I’m going to punch them in the face.  Let the government system do what it needs to do and let the free market run its course, as for you, love your neighbor as yourself.  Ask yourself, “What is good for my (insert other nationality here) neighbor?”
• Your preacher is not a vending machine.
• Grow up and disciple other Christians.  Seriously, if you’ve been a Christian for more than 3 years, you should be mature enough to help others grow in Christ.  If you’ve been a Christian for 30 years and you’re still doing what you’ve always done (or you’ve slacked off), you never matured.  Find somebody to help you grow up.

If I think of more, I’ll try to offend you again sometime.