This May Sting a Little

Some stories still amaze me. It doesn’t matter how many times I hear them, tell them, or read them. They are just simply amazing. I was looking recently at the book of Exodus. God accomplished some miraculous things. The people of Israel observed and experienced some miraculous things. But that was not enough.

In chapter 19, some really interesting things happen. The people of Israel have been out of Egypt for a mere two months. That means it had been two months since the parting of the Red Sea which clearly was a testament to the power of God. Now they find themselves at the foot of Mt. Sinai. God meets with Moses on the top of the mountain and says, “Now if you will obey me and keep my covenant, you will be my special treasure in all the earth, for the whole earth belongs to me.” The Israelites quickly agreed. God had already proven his might.

Then things get more interesting. God appears in mighty ways and gives them instructions and boundaries. “Do not touch or come close to my boundaries,” God says.“For if you do, you will surely die.” Then God gives the Ten Commandments and meets with Moses to give him ceremonial and cultural laws.

The Israelites get impatient with the amount of time that it is taking Moses to return. They have Aaron, Moses’ brother, make for them an idol of gold shaped like a calf, an image worshiped in Egypt. They are so anxious to worship something that they fall down before an image created from their own possessions and past experiences.

The modern application and relevance of this story is astounding. The more I study God’s word, the more I see that many of our failures (my failures) are a result of seeing Jesus as we want Him to be and not as He is. Too often, the Jesus that we worship is the one that we create. We take various attributes of the real Jesus (the ones that we like) and shape them into an image that we can safely worship. He is an image that we have shaped out of our possessions and past experiences. If the Israelites had named their image “Jesus” would it have made their worship any less idolatrous? Is that really any different in principle and practice from what we do?

I have some dear friends in Mississippi that own a home décor store. They offer great accoutrements for homes at fantastic prices. One of their better selling items is a picture of Jesus… as a black man. It should be noted that it is not just our brothers and sisters who have a darker epidermis layer who are comforted by an image of Jesus that closely resembles them. The fact is that this is a very visual demonstration of a multi-cultural reality. We all have a tendency to transform Jesus into our image as opposed to letting Him transform us into His.

The more I look at my life, the more I appreciate my Jesus. My Jesus understands me. My Jesus gives grace and mercy for my sins. My Jesus forgets all my indiscretions. My Jesus loves me exactly as I am. However, my Jesus is a lie. My Jesus is a lie because the reality is that my Jesus is my creation.

If I’m honest, then the above statements actually read as follows: My Jesus understands me but demands nothing from me. My Jesus gives grace and mercy for my sins but stands in righteous judgment of all others (the ones I don’t struggle with). My Jesus forgets all my indiscretions but remembers those who fail me. My Jesus loves me exactly as I am and does not expect me to change. For too long, we all have lived our lives by these bottom set of statements. We haven’t been truly transformed by his working in our lives because we haven’t really allowed him to work.

We haven’t allowed Him to work because we don’t really know who He is. We, generally speaking, would not allow an actual stranger into our lives to shape our character. Jesus, the real one, is a stranger to us, and we all learned at a young age not to talk to strangers. Of course the NAME is familiar. But what about the man…the Messiah, the Holy ONE of God…are we familiar with Him? I submit to you that we are not familiar with Him because we are not completely surrendered to Him nor do we really expect to be. And our lack of real accountability tells us that this is okay, that this is typical. And it is typical. That is the saddest thing of all.

But it is not okay. One of the traps of our “sinner saved by grace” identity is that we still give ourselves permission to sin. When sin is permissible, it is tolerable. When sin is tolerable, it is normal. The real Jesus’ expectations and standards were higher than that. Shouldn’t ours be?

One thing is clear. Jesus’ ministry was with the sinners. He made it habit of being with thieves and prostitutes. He was criticized and chastised for it. But when these people were in his presence they were changed. They surrendered their old identities, and He gave them new ones. When they departed, he usually gave the same command to each of them: “Go and sin no more!” He never once said, “Keep doing what you were doing!” But we allow that. It is normal.

The problem with most of us (me included) is that we want the best of both worlds. We want some of the things that Jesus esteems as virtuous and moral. We desperately want the heavenly reward after life is over. But we don’t really want to give up the things that matter most to us. The result is a hybrid Jesus that rewards us but doesn’t demand too much. We surrender to THAT one. It doesn’t cost us anything.

In Matthew 13:44-46, Jesus tells two parables about the kingdom of heaven. “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that a man found hidden in a field. In his excitement, he hid it again and sold everything he had in order to buy the field and get the treasure. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a pearl merchant on the lookout for choice pearls. When he discovered a pearl of great value, he sold everything he owned and bought it!”

I recently did work at an equestrian center. The owner of this facility told me of a horse recently purchased by one of his borders for $400,000.00. “Do you want to see it,” he asked. I have rarely seen anything worth that much so I readily accepted his offer. The horse was beautiful. But it wasn’t that much bigger or prettier than other horses at the facility. “What makes a horse worth that much,” I asked, expecting a brief lesson on horse husbandry. “Two things,” he answered, “The idiot who sets the price, and the idiot who pays the price.”

The transaction that Jesus wants to make with us is incomparable to this. He is offering something priceless for something worthless. We are the idiots if we don’t take the transaction. But until we become convinced that what he offers is worth much more than what we currently value, we will never make the trade. We will just come up with more reasons why we really don’t have too. We want our crown of gold without accepting our crown of thorns.

The truth of Jesus’ parable in Matthew is hidden from our Sunday school books and bumper stickers. In those, salvation is free. And that is true enough as it relates to our hybrid Jesus. But the real Jesus says that in order to experience salvation we must trade our old life for a new one. That means that we DO NOT get to keep any part of it. Truthfully, it means that we don’t even want to. The extent to which your new life looks exactly like your old one determines your degree of surrender…sort of. In actuality, if you are 90% surrendered then you are really not surrendered at all. It just means that you didn’t value the 90% you gave to Him. The real value of your life is in the 10% that you hold so tightly to.

In Philippians 1:20, Paul writes that he lives “in eager expectation and hope that I will never do anything that causes me shame…” Is that your expectation? We have lowered our standards so much that we have made the word of God impotent in our lives. Falling at the feet of our hybrid Jesus doesn’t cause us to change. It only causes us to make concessions that the real Jesus would never permit us to make.

Thankfully, the real Jesus still has a ministry with sinners. The bible makes it clear that “when we sin we have an advocate.” (1 John 2:1) Please understand, surrender does not mean perfection. Surrender means taking up our cross daily. We have unintentionally sanitized the gruesome reality of the cross. The cross was an instrument of death and torture. To take our cross up daily means that we choose to place our “selves” (pride, preferences, and pretenses) on that cruel instrument. In other words, we die to self. We truly surrender. It is not easy. In fact, it is torture. But it is worth it. We only need convince ourselves of this.

P.S. If the skin color of Jesus really matters to any brothers and sisters with a white epidermis layer (or any other color), then you aren’t in love with the real Jesus…just your version of Him. It doesn’t really matter how you mentally picture Jesus, as long as you allow Him to change your mentality.

THAT Was Never the Intention!

In a previous post, I stated that we would look more closely at how we view the church. But first, we need to look at how God views the church. Ephesians 5 speaks in great detail about Christ’s love for the church. He loved it so much that He gave his life for it. He presents it to himself without it having a spot or wrinkle. It is holy and without blemish. God took steps to insure that His church would prevail eternally. He will defend it vehemently. I will not be one whom He must defend it against.

But let me be clear, the church is NOT a building, a program, an agenda (political or otherwise), or a concept. Somewhere along the way we have lost track of who we are. I remember as a child putting my hands together in such a way as to be able to say: “Here is the church and here is the steeple. Open the doors and see all the people.” The church does not exist because of a building or its steeple. It is the people. And sometimes people stray.

I am constantly finding myself challenged to define what I think church should be. I think I am pretty clear on what it is…what it has become, but what should it really be? The inappropriate wording of that question is driving me bonkers. Let me correct it. What should “we” be?

Like many who are or have been in professional ministry, I have studied every new paradigm within the church for the past 20+ years. We (the American church) are absolutely fantastic at replicating whatever formula we deem most applicable. The result is that we either change our identities at a fervent pace, or we stay exactly who we’ve been since 1946.

But the church was originally an unstoppable force. In its current form, it is very stoppable. It can be stopped by something as insignificant as a change in musical styles or as trivial as improper placement of memorial flowers in the sanctuary. (Some of you actually think I’m kidding.)

At the end of Acts 2, we discover the original recipe for church growth:
“Everyone around was in awe- all those wonders and signs done by the apostles! And all the believers lived in a wonderful harmony, holding everything in common. They sold whatever they owned and pooled their resources so that each persons need was met.” Acts 2 The Message

Can you imagine that? I’m not sure which part is more amazing: that the believers had wonderful harmony or that they forsook personal wealth for the benefit of the whole. They were able to do both because they took seriously (and obeyed) the Lord’s teachings about loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind and loving your neighbor as yourself. They were able to pool their resources because they knew that everyone else cared as much about their family as they did. That is our first departure.

We have become selfish and untrusting, perhaps with valid reasoning. We have learned that “church people” (which is a bit like saying “chicken poultry”) are hypocrites who cannot be trusted. We would gladly consider giving more, though certainly not all, if the people were more worthy. The truth of the matter is that your issue is not with the people but with you…and mine is with me. Our discontentment is neither with the building where we “go to church” nor the people who go there with us. Our discontentment is internal. The church is hypocritical because you are hypocritical. (In my case, I am both hypocritical and hyper-critical.) Our departure causes us to distance ourselves from the bride that Jesus finds unblemished.

Another departure from the original church is the way in which we divide ourselves. We are not living in wonderful harmony because we do not hold all things in common. It used to be that we divided ourselves into Catholics and Protestants. Then we further sub-divided into denominations. Now, we split denominations because of our political leanings (liberal/ conservative) or our worship style (traditional/ contemporary). We do these things because we want our churches to “fit” us. We create or join whatever is most comfortable to us. When it becomes uncomfortable, we shop for another.

Never once do we count the cost of our “religious” consumerism. Never once do we realize that we do not grow past a certain point spiritually because when we get uncomfortable, we change churches. We don’t question our discomfort. We don’t stop to consider if our discomfort is from God so that we might change our character, not our church. God’s purpose for the church was NOT to “fit” any person or group of people. His plan and design called for people to find an undeniable, unquenchable love that provoked them to sacrifice everything in order to “fit.”

In Ezekiel 34, God tells Ezekiel:
“I will surely judge between the fat sheep and the scrawny sheep. For you fat sheep push and butt and crowd my sick and hungry flock until they are scattered to distant lands. So I will rescue my flock, and they will no longer be abused and destroyed. And I will judge between one sheep and another.” (NLT)

This is a great picture of what churches can look like. We go to church expecting to be “fed.” We sit and soak. We rarely act on the knowledge we gain; we just accumulate more and more knowledge. We end up fat and arrogant with our knowledge and self-righteousness. We battle each other for prime positions on committees or other service positions. It’s like we are building church service resumes with which we intend to circulate to whoever will listen. We have reduced church service to a line item on a resume or worse. Now no one is listening. We have the greatest message in all of history. It is disregarded largely because we deserve to ignored…not the message, but the messenger.

Our answer to this is to create churches that are cutting edge and relevant. However, the more I study current church methodologies, the more I realize that we are changing the exterior (the practices, methods, and programs) without addressing the problem. Practices, methods, and programs NEVER reach people. People reach people, and if we are unchanged internally, then no amount of cutting edge, relevant “window dressing” is going to make an impact. The problem with contemporary church is that nothing is sacred. The problem with traditional church is that everything is. And when everything is sacred, then nothing is. We have to realize that God himself is sacred…period! Everything else is preference.

The design of the church was not to create relevancy and edginess nor was it to remember our history and preserve our heritage. It was designed to create community and facilitate change. But the change that it facilitated was not in political or social arenas but in people, more precisely, it was in individual persons. We fail to realize how great our departure is from the original model. We have damaged the world’s image of Christ because we’ve departed from His unblemished bride.

In fact, after reading Malachi 1, I am left wondering how God feels about our unworthy sacrifices. God says that He wishes someone would shut the Temple doors so that these worthless sacrifices could not be offered. I wonder, for some of us, if our ultimate act of worship would be to “shut the doors to the temple (church building)” because we (the local church) have so dishonored our God by our worthless sacrifices. I say this because we have lost focus. We spend so much time and effort on trivial things. We debate theology and hermeneutics while the world, that we are supposed to provide light to, darkens.

In Matthew 25, Jesus is telling of the final judgment. He separates the sheep from the goats. “Depart from me, I never knew you,” he says to the goats who never fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, sheltered strangers, clothed the naked, cared for the sick, or visited the prisoners. “Lord, when did we not do these things,” they asked. They didn’t even notice. I’m sure they weren’t all negligent. Some were just too busy offering worthless sacrifices.

The sheep, on the other hand, when confronted didn’t realize that they had met needs either. “When did we do these things, Lord,” they asked. Funny thing! They didn’t notice either. They simply did. It was second nature. It was character reformation. When commanded to love, they obeyed. When a need arose, they met it because they had met the Master. They willingly sacrificed, not to build a service resume, but to build a kingdom.

The church is truly an unstoppable revolutionary force. It was designed that way. It accomplishes through love what military men can’t accomplish with armaments. It betters societies and destroys social barriers. If your “church” doesn’t do these things, then it’s time to change…yourself, not your “church!”

Pardon the Interruption

Please allow me a brief departure from talking about life in general to talking about my life specifically. Thirteen years ago at this very hour, my life changed in the most blessed of ways. She said “I do.” Words can not describe, even now, the ways those little words transformed my life.

I can remember like it was yesterday being a lonely misplaced freshman at Georgia Southern University who was looking for something, anything to keep his sanity. For three weeks, I had only ventured out of my one bedroom apartment to go to class. I decided to visit a campus student organization that was hosting a meeting that evening. I’m not sure you can appreciate the stretch that was for me. There is nothing more intimidating for me than a room full of people that I don’t know. I can teach them, just don’t expect me to interact with them.

She was the first person that I saw. I don’t think she was the first to speak to me or to greet me. She was just the first person that I SAW. When she smiled, it lit the room. (It still does.) As my eyes gazed in her direction, I think the whole earth stopped spinning while angels sang and rays of sunlight illuminated her. I was mesmerized. She, I think, was probably underwhelmed. Just doing what she does. She was excited by a room full of people that she really didn’t know, but would make certain that she did before the evening was done. I was just another guy in the room.

Weeks went by before a video camera and a broken rib would solidify our unique attachment. I stopped being just another guy in the room. I started being the guy in the room…that she would go to for “guy” advice. Such is my luck. I already knew that she was way out of my league though, so I was content simply be near her… for her beauty to radiate my life, for her smile to suddenly erupt and ruin a perfectly good pity party! (I can throw world class pity parties!)

Weeks went by, and our relationship grew. Our friendship grew more intimate (in the nonsexual way) and my attachment to her grew. I knew that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life without her. I just didn’t know what to do about it. I am awkward. You know the dork who can never figure out what to do or say as it relates to the opposite sex? I am that dork!

Eventually, with lots of encouragement from my brother, (Thanks Kev!) I kissed her. I can’t imagine heaven itself holding a sweeter event. My heart pounded! My spine tingled! I was way past smitten.

A couple of years later, I asked her to marry me. She said yes. I kept waiting for her to change her mind. What did a girl like that see in a guy like me? I still ask myself that. And I still don’t know the answer.

On August 3rd, 1996, we wed in a small church in Bostwick, Ga. We had no idea what life would have in store for us. We had no idea that medical conditions with our first child would try us beyond what we could imagine. We had no idea that those same medical conditions would take the life of our second child or that our third child would be a running tornado. We only knew that we were committed to each other. I only knew that my life would forever be better because she said “I do.”

We still don’t know exactly what will happen. We don’t know the curves life will throw, or what plans will fail. But we still dream together. We still plan together. We still raise our two beautiful boys together. Through it all we are committed, to God first and then to each other. I don’t deserve her, but I thank God for her.

I Love You, Dawn! Thank you for the best thirteen years of my life.

And thank you to those of you who have shared this journey with us. May god bless each of you greatly!