Church Voices

The more we seek happiness, the more our search ends in depression. The more we pursue freedom, the more enslaved we become by our pursuit. The more we hunger for power, the more we starve by serving its limitlessness. The more pleasure we chase the more pain it engenders.

The common woes of life all result from a misguided pursuit for their respective virtues. This is because the virtues of life are necessarily byproducts of fulfillment of a deeper kind. Seeking the virtues for themselves is to put the cart before the horse. Their richest enjoyment is always incidental.

Seek the Kingdom of God above all else…. and all these things will be added to you.
Matt 6.33

“Teacher, of all the commandments, which is the most important?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and most important commandment.’
Matt 22.36-38

Paradoxically, our greatest earthly desires are only satisfiable when we no longer desire them.

Josh writes something that sums up what I’ve noticed about myself and thinking for the past year or so.

You really can’t sum up the life of Jesus with the doctrine of active obedience. That might be part of it, I guess, but his life isn’t a mask for a doctrine. I’m at the point in my Christian life now where I really don’t want to hear doctrines about Jesus anymore. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in them, as I understand the importance of the various orthodox dogmas. However, I feel like the stories in the Gospels themselves are far more important. I find myself more and more dealing with life by mentally referring to a Gospel (or sometimes OT) story than by referring to a doctrinal formulation.

Dan Goldfinch hit me with a book meme.

The rules are very straightforward and go as follows: 1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

This is from 1,000 Places To See Before You Die, by Patricia Schultz:

One of France’s most enchanting country hotels lies on 200-acre working ranch in the heart of the intriguing region known as the Camargue, along France’s southern coast. A microcosm of the area’s wild, rugged scenery, the ranch is both a government-protected bird sanctuary (known for its flock of pink flamingos) and the final frontier for the gardians, some of the last cowboys in Europe. you can ride out on one of the 300 snow-white Camargue horses, or help the herders gather the stocky black Camargue bulls, which are raised for races.

I’m supposed to tag five other people with this thing, but I think I’ll just hit up Christian Penrod and Chad McIntosh.

A 1980 Gallup Poll on religion concluded that

…we are having a revival of feelings but not of the knowledge of God. The church today is guided more by feelings than by convictions. We value enthusiasm more than informed commitment.

One of my favorite questions to ask Christians is “if you could summarize the message of the entire Old Testament in a sentence or two, how would you do it?” You’d be surprised by how…ludicrous some of the answers I’ve heard people give are. It makes me worry that there are a vast many Christians who have never even read the Gospels, for in them Jesus answers essentially that very question. Similarly, go up to your average congregant and ask definitions and explanations for the theological terms and concepts with which they wax eloquent, such as grace, mercy, atonement, justification, Trinity, repentance, incarnation, and most of all, faith. The inarticulate gibberish you’ll likely hear makes it seem like the 400 years of thinking the Church Fathers put into them were all for naught.

Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in My Word, then are ye My disciples indeed; And ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free. - John 8:31-32 (KJV)

Reading the King James Version of the Bible is akin to reading/hearing pirate speech.  Fun and humorous at times, but doesn’t help communicate so well anymore.

Why do we insist on making people learn a new language to know Christ?  Now, I’m fine with learning a new language because we know Christ, such as the desire to learn Greek and Hebrew, or simply the process of learning how to speak in a way that glorifies God, but otherwise we are putting up an unnecessary barrier.  I don’t care what you use for your own devotions (although there will be plenty of words in the KJV that will mislead you if you don’t know better), but to insist that everybody uses that version because it’s the one God ordained is rediculous.

During one of our gatherings one of our elders asked if anyone would like to share any of their favorite verses. One guy stood up and said the (pretty close) to the following:

As we were sitting here I recalled the passage in Isaiah which says “come let us reason together”, as we go about our day we carry out the great commission in conversations in our everyday life

Boy that’s awfully missional. It was spoken by a guy approaching his 60s, who was raised in a very traditional church in what is usually seen as a traditional non-denominational denomination.

Later this week I’m going to post an interview I did with Virgil Vaduva, in our post-interview conversation he told me that a minister that he is very close to made the comment to him that emerging/emergent had already been done 150 years ago in that same non-demoninational denomination.

Many of the emerging/emergent ideas that are viewed as controversial by outspoken critics are simply gems of the past re-discovered by the church. So much so, that when I’ve stripped out names of authors and buzzwords from many of these ideas and presented them to people who were raised in traditional churches there’s very little disagreement.

Christians treat God’s will as though it were some giant mystery or puzzle. I think there are a number of problems with this view, theological and Biblical. Most confusion about the issue of God’s will I think is due to conflating the following two questions:

(1) What is God’s will?
(2) What is God’s will for my life?

Consider the latter. It is by framing the question of God’s will only in the context of (2) it becomes shrouded in mystery. One problem with seeing God’s will thusly, for all practical purposes, is that it aids us precious little in life. Even if we think we’ve ‘figured out’ a part of God’s will for us, such wouldn’t seem to get us any closer to answering the larger question “what is God’s will for my life.” This is because you have no way of knowing how and if this smaller part even fits into the larger picture—and if you say you do, then you no longer treat God’s will as puzzling or mysterious. Knowledge of God’s will becomes arbitrary at best, more than likely resembling your own will than His. The only difference between the two is a false pretense of prostration.

Moreover, ask yourself “why would God make his will for your life puzzling and mysterious?” If he is really serious about us living accordingly, do you really think he would give it to us in the form of an enigma? If so, could we really be blamed for falling short? That’d be like entering a game without being told the rules only to be disqualified and ejected for reasons unknown to you. In short, the problem with (2) is its narcissism. Once we put the emphasis where it belongs (God) the question of God’s will is pretty straightforward:

For this is God’s will, your sanctification…
1 Thes 4.3ff

Therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.
Rom 12.1-2

God’s will is not some fated course of events. God’s will for your life is the same for everyone’s life: personal sanctification. Holiness. All the rest—what college you go to, who you marry, what pair of socks you wear—I am inclined to say God doesn’t give a crap. This presents the following paradox: The more in accord you are with God’s will, the freer you become in your own will. This is, I think, the gist of Colossians 3.23: “Whatever you do, do it enthusiastically, as something done for the Lord and not for men.”

Click here to listen to the interview Tim Reed conducts with XXXChurch.

From Steve:

So this really smart guy, the atheist, asks a question of the professor:

“What do you mean when you say the word ‘grace’?”

He had never really been exposed to the theological concept that is Christian grace.

I almost wanted to turn around and excitedly explain it to him myself. The professor did a decent job of defining grace in a textbook fashion, but I found it wanting because it was devoid of the personal encounter. As I think about it, I think she defined it without any reference to Jesus [which is entirely legitimate as grace was present in the Old Testament. But I’m not sure I would now converse about the topic without noting the importance of Jesus’ death].

Then again, I wondered, “if an atheist asked me, ‘what is grace?’ would I have an acceptable response?” As a minister with over a decade of theological schooling, I’m still not entirely sure how I would answer that question. This isn’t to say that I haven’t chewed on it myself; trust me, I’ve thought a lot about it. But I suggest that how we define grace ought to differ from person to person, i.e., we each view the grace of God differently in our own lives. And that’s one of the amazing aspects of the gospel message- there is no one true definition but it can be expressed in many different ways without losing it’s transformative power.

Perhaps there are times when we who are fluent in “Christianese” ought to beware that we assume people know what we’re talking about. Faith is a complex matter and it never hurts to double check to make sure you’re being understood.

O God, whom I praise,
do not remain silent,

for wicked and deceitful men
have opened their mouths against me;
they have spoken against me with lying tongues.
Psalm 109.1-2