we make it too hard

I've been wondering lately if we don't make this walk with God too hard. When I read the Gospels and the accounts of Jesus life, I am continually impressed with the simplicity of His ministry. He had one basic focus - I do what I see the Father doing. He had two basic commandments - Love God and love people.

Jesus never seemed to spend time building a great ministry structure. (Although we know He had a treasurer). Jesus never talks about fundraising in any of the recorded accounts. (Even though we know people supported Him out of their personal means). He never gave Himself a lofty title. In fact He referred to Himself as the son of man. He certainly could have legitimately pulled rank and demanded that people acknowledge Him as the Son of God. Yet that was and is not the Jesus way. He never needed certain perks for validation.

What did Jesus do? He healed the sick, gave hope to the hopeless, and mingled with needy sinners. He washed dirty feet, fed the hungry, and blessed the kids. Ultimately He gave His life for the benefit of people. And while this sacrifice culminated at the cross, it was not just at Calvary that He demonstrated this attitude. His entire "ministry" consisted of pouring Himself into broken people. He did not minister to people because He had a grand ministry structure. He ministered to people because He cared.

What would happen today if His followers began to simply pour their life into the life of other people. What would happen if we quit trying to build great ministries with great conferences and events and began to love people in a practical way? What would happen if we quit trying to get people to come to us and we went to them and washed their feet? What would happen if we began to discern the work of God in the world and then began to participate in that work? What would happen if our only code of conduct was - Love God and love people?

on immaturity and being offended

As I reflect on my observations of the church world over the past several years, it seems to me that Christians are some of the most offended people in the world. We seem to be hurt at every turn. We are hurt because someone didn't acknowledge us. We are hurt because someone disagreed with us. We are hurt because someone dared mention the truth about us or our circumstances. We are hurt when someone dares to follow Christ regardless of the cost. Church splits happen because of hurt, people refuse to communicate with others in a civil manner because of hurt. And the one that amuses me most - people angrily deny that they are hurt!

Quite frankly, our propensity toward being hurt is a sign of our immaturity. When one enters the kingdom of God, we give up the right to be hurt and offended. That does not mean that people won't inflict pain upon us. That does not mean that we won't feel hurt by the actions of others. However, we give up the right to allow the hurt to dictate our actions. When our hurt dictates our actions toward others, it reveals that we have not really entered the kingdom of God. Instead the self-god is alive and well, demanding retribution and attention.

I am convinced that God will send people to offend us so that we might learn to die to self. I experienced a time in my life when it seemed as if everyone opposed me. There were a lot of untruthful accusations leveled against me. For a person whose default self-nature is defensiveness, those accusations crushed me. Everything within me demanded exoneration. To make matters worse, I sensed the voice of God in my spirit telling me that I could not defend myself; He would be my defender. That season of pain became a portal for a deeper understanding of the kingdom of God. And yes - God did vindicate me in his time!

If we are going to arrive at a place of maturity, we must first come to the place of relinquishing the right to be hurt

are we irrelevant?

I just completed an eight day stretch of working in the security department for the PA Farmshow complex. While I don’t spend much time working there anymore, for the week of the Farm Show, they needed help and I agreed to help out. For eight days, I was deeply immersed in a largely godless culture. Like usual, I had ample time to observe people.

I fear that the church has become almost completely irrelevant to the world in which we live. Rather than influencing and transforming society, the church has relegated herself to isolation from the real world in which most people find themselves.

The things which are important to most of the church world are not important to our society in which we live. We have made ourselves irrelevant by our power struggles, by our efforts to build our own kingdoms. We say we value people; however it seems to me that we only value people who can benefit us, if they will come to our meetings and fill our buildings. We grasp for position and power, displaying ungodly behaviors if our positions are threatened.

All the while, people want to know how to do life. They have questions about God, about what He wants from them. They wonder if they have significance. They hurt from the self-destructive behaviors in which they engage all the while hoping that somehow they can escape the treadmill of hopelessness.

And what do we offer? Come to our meetings…Help us build our church or help me fulfill my vision…Instead of leading them to interact with the transforming Jesus, we enroll them in a program or a class. We use guilt and manipulation so we can be assured that they will faithfully become part of our program. We invite them to a church fractured by our territorialism. (Quite frankly, the church frequently is more vicious than the world in which they live. Some of the most ungodly behaviors I have observed have been those of church leaders and members)

We have made ourselves irrelevant because we have forgotten about Jesus. We have departed from His mission. Our priorities differ from His. We care not about people unless they can benefit us somehow. We no longer heal the sick, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. We no longer reconcile people to God and to the image of God in which they were formed. I wonder if our situation in the church has not degenerated to the point that our irrelevancy to God’s work equals that of the religious leaders of Jesus day.

fruit?

Bev and I received "A Band of Brothers" as a Christmas gift. We spent a number of evenings since Christmas watching each episode. I was deeply moved at the end of episode ten when the narrator told us what happened with some of the surviving soldiers after the war. What moved me most deeply was the account of George Luz.

After the war, George lived in Providence, RI. At first glance, he lived a rather ordinary life. He was a handyman, or as his family put it, a maintenance consultant. Yet there was a great deal of significance in his ordinary life. How do we know? At his funeral, over 1600 people showed up! He never had an important title or position. He was not famous (at least not before A Band of Brothers was produced). Yet his life quietly impacted a large number of people.

For those of us in the church, there is a lesson to be learned from George Luz. Far too frequently we measure fruit by the amount of people we can motivate to attend a meeting. We strive to be important, to be noticed. We like to highlight our ministry achievements. We may have our moment of glory but that is the extent of our reward.

True fruitfulness can never be measured by the amount of people in our meetings. My experience has been that many people who sit in our meetings are never transformed. They might be impressed with our teaching ability and they may praise us for it. We may have a semblance of fruitfulness but the lasting transformation never occurs. Because we focus on building something impressive (at least by human standards), we frequently fail to impact people with the practical example of our life.

For a lot of years, I tried to build an impressive church and ministry. In 2005 God showed me that while Bev and I had created an illusion of successful ministry, we never really discipled people. As I looked at the example of Jesus, I realized that His most lasting impact was not with the crowds but with individual people. We began to change our efforts from building ministry to building the lives of people through deep heart to heart interaction. (Interestingly as we refocused from building a ministry to practically impacting individual lives, we received criticism for not having fruit in our lives. Oh well - religious people never change!)

People like George Luz impress me deeply. They spend their life in relative obscurity, all the while impacting those with whom they come in contact. They care not for the trappings of success. They shun the spotlight, choosing the way of the yeast in the dough, of the mustard seed in the soil. Religious people ignore them because of what looks like insignificance. Yet the true significance of their life will be revealed long after the heartless efforts of the religious have faded away.

the word in flesh - hearts exposed

This Christmas season I have been thinking about the effect of "God with us", the "Word in Flesh". Jesus' birth immediately shook the culture into which he was born. As He grew older, He became an increased threat to the religion system of His culture. I find it interesting to note that the Jewish religious system of His day was actually birthed from God. In the midst of that system we do find a few people who recognized the hand God creating a new way of worship. Simeon, an elderly man who the scriptures say was just and devout, recognized Jesus as the Son of God immediately. Anna, a prophet recognized Him as well. Some thirty years after His birth, John the Baptist recognized Him.

Yet most of the leading religious leaders did not recognize Jesus. Not only did they not recognize Him, they actively resisted Him to the point of attacking Him. What differentiated Simeon, Anna, and John the Baptist from the religious leaders? I think for Simeon and the like, their Jewish worship was an outworking of their devotion to God. For the religious leaders, their system of Jewish worship was their God. The system of worship birthed from the heart of God had become more important than God Himself. Perhaps more accurately, they were in love with themselves and God's plans for worship were hijacked by them to create an appearance of Godliness. In reality, their paradigms were anything but godly.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than the amount of scripture that they broke in conspiring to kill Jesus. For people who claimed to love the law and the scriptures, they sure displayed a great deal of disregard for those scriptures when it was convenient to do so. Their actions toward God's unfolding plan exposed their hearts. They did not care about the scriptures, they did not care about the work of God. They were deeply in love with themselves. Their professed love of the law and the scriptures gave them a veneer of respectability. Not only did they reject "God with us" they rejected "the Word in Flesh" However, the entrance of Jesus, the example of the scriptures in real life (the Word in Flesh) caused their hypocrisy to be seen. Is it any wonder that they so violently opposed Him?

I have discovered that the entrance of Jesus into our lives today still exposes our hearts. Additionally, active practical application of the scriptures discerns our motives quickly. Jesus' presence in my own life and the interaction with the scripture (the word becoming flesh in my life) has forced me to recognize my self-centeredness. At the point of recognition, I have been forced to choose whether I will reject His revelation and continue to act in a self-centered manner or whether I will embrace the revelation, crying out to Him for help.

It amazes me how powerfully the self-god is rooted in us. An e-conversation with a man who would call himself a Christian illustrates the deceptiveness of this self-god. When I pointed out a contradiction between his words and the way he was living, he became somewhat indignant. He left me know that he was moving ahead with God and his walk with God had nothing to do with me. He wanted me to stay out of his life. There was no mistaking the animosity toward me.

For a person, who would consider himself as a leader in church, that was a rather interesting statement. I had to think of the words of Paul - the eye cannot say of the hand, I have no need of you. This man's paradigm was completely opposed to the way of God. One cannot claim to follow God and then reject other believers. Furthermore, in John's first letter to the church, John made following observation - If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?

While this man would profess to be following the scripture, his actions demonstrated that he rejected the scriptures. Like the religious leaders of Jesus' day, the scriptures are followed as long as they are convenient. The word has not become embodied in his life. The presence of or the lack of "word in flesh always reveals the condition of our heart.

There is a difference between an intellectual assent to the scriptures and the word becoming flesh in us. In an intellectual assent, we verbally agree with words of scripture. However, the verbal agreement does not necessarily translate in to actions. When the word becomes flesh in us, our actions reflect the words and the examples of scripture.

a tale of two churches

In the book of Revelation, we find Jesus addressing various churches. While He speaks to seven, two of them in particular stand out to me.

The church at Ephesus was quite a church. They were commendable for their work and effort. They were doctrinally sound. They recognized the error of false apostles. Their perseverance was admirable. I get the sense that today this church would be recognized for their dedication. Most likely they would be a case study for those in academia desiring to discover the secrets of growing a successful church.

Immediately following the description of the church at Ephesus we find another church. The church at Smyrna was certainly not nearly as successful. They were poor, experiencing tribulation and suffering. They faced persecution. If one reads between the lines, it would appear that they were a broken church; one that would never be held up as an example of a successful church.

Ironically, the church most reprimanded was the “successful” church. In all their activity they completely missed the point. The weak broken church elicited praise from Jesus once again pointing to the fact that the ways of God are drastically different from our paradigms of success.

For years, I attempted to build an Ephesus church. Over the years we succeeded in the endeavor. Pastors from other churches and communities began to ask me the secrets of our success. That’s heady stuff for a young man! Yet in the success something was lost. Like the church at Ephesus, I became focused on the activities and the dedication required to achieve the vision. As our labors began to bear fruit, we became even more focused on the vision. As vision becomes more focused it easily becomes the sole focus. No longer is it an outworking of our relationship with God, the vision becomes god.

It took God asking me to relinquish the position of leadership to begin the process of seeing the emptiness of our labors. Success according to God is frequently at odds with our humanistic ideals of success. We think big is better. Busy activity is esteemed highly. Yet God seems less impressed with our activity and our success than with our brokenness.

Today I interact closely with group of broken followers of Jesus. We are messy, and broken. Each of us clearly recognizes our weakness. When it comes to telling an impressive church success story, one would not point to our band of believers. Yet in the midst of our brokenness we have discovered the reality of God. No longer is He a simply an aloof figure in an intellectual theological framework. He is alive, interacting with us in our brokenness. His presence highlights our weakness; His healing grace highlights His goodness.

Is God in control?

This week I had a heart-wrenching conversation with a client. Earlier this year, his wife left him for a lesbian relationship. He spoke of the transformation of his wife into someone he barely recognizes. The woman she was has been traded for a new identity. At one point he asked a question that so many of us ask when our world disintegrates – Why did God allow this to happen?

I frequently hear people say, “Well…God is still in control.” That thought process leads us to question why God would allow terrible things to happen. In fact it deeply calls into question the goodness of God. If God is in control of the situation, then is it not His fault that children are abused, that women are raped, and that children destroy their body with drugs?

God never created people to be puppets on a string, involuntarily dancing to his beck and call. He created us in His image with the ability to control our own destiny. He gave us the ability to make decisions and the responsibility to suffer the consequences of those decisions. Unfortunately the impact of negative decisions extends far beyond the one making that decision.

Does God have the power to be in control? I am convinced that He possesses that power. However I am equally convinced that God has limited himself in the affairs of humanity. I believe that part of what it means to be created in the image of God is that we have the ability to create our own destiny. Most of the destructive events that occur in humanity are the result of people making destructive choices. Most of the blessings that occur in humanity are the results of people choosing to live life according to God’s pattern.

Is God in control of every situation here on earth? No. He is not in control when innocent people are killed. He is not in control of my client’s wife. She has chosen to reject God for a self-determined path. Is God in control when Christians act maliciously toward other Christians? No. The actions are a consequence of a self-centered heart.

It God is in control, then He is to blame for millions of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps. If God is in control, then He is at fault for the abortions of millions of babies. The very chaos of war and violence indicates that He is not in control.

Now do not hear me wrongly here. I believe that God could be in control. He has the power to do whatever He pleases. However, since creation, God has limited Himself in this world, allowing us to choose our own destiny. When we depart from His ways, He freely allows us to pursue our own ways. Conversely when we embrace His ways, we find blessings and peace.