At the risk of sounding anachronistic, I want to share something a friend, Jon McIntosh, posted to Twitter about 8 hours ago. I know, I know…in the world of Twitter 8 hours may as well be a year, but for me this article is telling and timely. Take time to read it and let me know what you think (my thoughts are below):

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/we-pretend-we-are-christians/

It’s a sad state of affairs when a non-Christian family has to pretend to be Christian just to find friends and have play dates for their kids. What a commentary on the problem of the overreligious South when our Christianity permits us to shun someone because they don’t share our faith. Are we not called to love them, befriend them, and to pray for them?

Religiousity claims the hearts and minds of millions in our culture, and unfortunately we are often party to the problem. We miscommunicate so much about the gospel (often without even realizing it) because we make Christianity about everything but Christ and the gospel about everything but God. We make Christianity about “going to church” rather than “being the church.” Or we make it about not doing certain things on a list, rather than loving our neighbor through serving them. What would happen to our communities if the gospel came alive in our hearts and our hands?

I hope that families who do not share our faith will never feel shunned by the people in our church. I pray that we will have the courage and the conviction of the gospel to love them no matter what, to invite them into our homes, and to partake of their friendship with the hope that we will win them to God who loves them.

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Father, take away my religion and give me Jesus, for if my theology and doctrine do not terminate at your throne it is useless. Stip away my pride and my need for human approval and acceptance. Fill me with gospel courage and grant me an unshakable faith in Jesus’ sufficiency.

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I’m very proud of my daughter and some of her friends for creating a devotional blog for teens.They’ve been at it for 5 months and are doing a great job. I encourage you to check it out: http://teensintheword.wordpress.com/.

I was looking at their Facebook group–’Teens in the Word of God’–and they have 113 members (more than our church’s fan page). If you have teenagers or need some encouragement by seeing what God is doing in the lives of some young people look them up and follow along as they seek God. You’ll be glad you did.

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Something has happened to me over the past five years. I’ve experienced a revolution. The chains around my faith have been broken and I now live in the freedom only Christ can bring. The chains were expertly fashioned, carefully reasoned; they were chains around my mind, mostly of my own making. I wish I could say they were completely gone, but in reality, I continue to discover a new link almost daily.

I’ve been in church most of my life. I sensed a call to ministry when I was 16, was licensed at 17, was ordained and pastoring my first church by 22. I’ve spent most of my life in the bubble of the church, speaking church language, and experiencing church culture. I went to a Christian university, attended seminary, worked at the seminary, and pastored a little country church while working on two seminary degrees. I thought I had everything figured out. I thought I knew what the church needed.

As I read old books (which is a good thing) I fell in love with another culture and deluded myself into believing that the great need of our day was to return to a simpler, more spiritual time in the history of the church. It doesn’t matter what time period I preferred because they are all the same, really. I committed an historical fallacy because I looked back upon history through the lenses of uninformed nostalgia and assumed that theirs must have been the glory days of the church. I am a Reformed guy, and I like reading and talking to Reformed guys, but Reformed guys have a strong tendency to fall for the same fallacy. It’s not intentional; it happens because we love books and we love truth. We read and study great writers who love Jesus and we passionately desire to glorify God in all we do.

The problem comes at the point where we fail to extract Biblical principles from culture and to realize that we can transport the principles but not the culture. For me, that meant that I sought to revitalize my church by isolating my people from the surrounding “worldly” culture and educating them in a better, distinctly “Christian” culture. This method led me to an inevitable conflict with the people I served because they were stuck in the culture of the 1950s while their kids were begging us to meet them in their own present culture.

Over time, I refused to listen to contemporary Christian music, preferring the old hymns instead; I rejected the use of technology as a viable medium for gospel interaction; I built walls around my mind and lived in the monastery of thought where I attempted to control the undeniable changes and cultural shifts all around me. I can only begin to list the links of my chain because I am still discovering them, and frankly, they surround me in a cloud of confused assumptions. What the links actually are matters less than the means by which they are strengthened, which is the key to their undoing.

My chains were fashioned not by the books I read, the songs I listened to, or the seminary I attended. They were fashioned deep within my heart where I failed to grasp the full implications of the gospel. I struggled because I desperately wanted to reach people for Jesus. I wanted to bring release to the captives and healing to the broken, but I did not know how to communicate the gospel to the people I wanted to reach. They lived in one culture while I remained in another. Yes, while pastoring a church I did not know how to communicate the message of the gospel to another human being because we were not speaking the same language. We both spoke some form of American English but we were not connecting on any level of understanding because I stood before them entrapped by the bonds of religiosity and they ensnared by their own cultural assumptions. One of us needed to move toward the other, and I did not think it was I that needed to move.

The problem wasn’t with me, I thought, the problem was the culture around me. Pride was all it was and all it is. I did not see then what seems so clear now. The gospel transcends all culture. That part I got. What I didn’t get, however, was that the gospel I believed was cluttered with the baggage of a religious culture. These religious barnacles concealed the gospel from my own heart, making it impossible for me to proclaim it to anyone else.

These gospel “extras” impose upon us standards and rules the Bible doesn’t. Whenever we identify the gospel with a particular cultural expression we lose the gospel in favor of the culture because it is easier to see the culture. When the culture begins to shift (which is inevitable) we rally to our defensive posture because we believe the gospel is threatened. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. It probably isn’t. If the gospel truly transcends culture then why do we waste so much time attacking and defending a particular culture? This reasoning is where I began to change. My defenses were dismanteld; my excuses were removed; my walls were destroyed. I stood naked before God realizing that I had been fighting the wrong war for the wrong side.

Broken, confused, and desperate I planted a church. I didn’t plant angry (by God’s grace), but I’m not sure I was ready. At first we attracted people who were like I had been, but over time we have begun to attract people who are moving with us toward our culture with the gospel. Our path is getting more clear, and our sense of mission is growing stronger. God has worked a revolution in my heart. I no longer want to stand in a pulpit and call the “worldly” culture around me to come to church; I want to go to where my friends and neighbors live, where my city plays and works, and where they make music in order to bring the gospel to them.

The transformation may not be readily apparent to anyone who has not known me for some time, but I feel it deep within me. For the first time in a long time, I feel myself in the midst of the gospel fight. A fight not with my brothers and sisters in the faith, but a fight within my own soul with residual self-righteousness and stubborn sin that clings tightly to me. I am renewed in my desire to honor Christ and see Him made much of in my world. Following Christ is much more about the trajectory of the heart as shaped by the Word of God than it is about conformity to religious preferences however good they may seem.

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I have a short memory much to the dismay of my wife. It’s frustrating and at times humiliating, but it’s a fact of life I’ve come to accept. I work at it with various levels of success and failure…mostly failure, but I don’t think I’ll ever overcome it.

Recently, I’ve been reading through Exodus in my daily devotion (which sometimes I forget to do…short memory, you know…or maybe you don’t if you’ve already forgotten the first paragraph). Anyway, I never cease to be amazed at the short memories of the Israelites as they made their journey to Mt. Sinai. Today, I was reading Exodus 17 where the people began grumbling against God and Moses for the lack of water. God had delivered them from Pharoah through a show of power and might, killed Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea after dividing the waters for the Israelites to walk across a dry sea floor, turned bitter water into sweet  at Marah, and provided bread (manna) for them to eat in the wilderness of Sin. Now, by the time they had reached the wilderness of Sin and had begun complainng about the lack of food it had only been about 45 days since their departure from Egypt (Ex. 16:1). God continued to provide the manna for 40 years until they finally reached the border to the land of Canaan (Ex. 16:35).

After all of that, you would think they would be fairly convinced that God had the capacity to provide for them. Nevertheless, in chapter 17 they pack up and move to Rephidim where they had no water to drink and immediately began complaining. God tells Moses to grab the leaders, walk out in front of the people and hit the rock of Horeb with it. Once done, water began to flow.

Before you get self-righteous and start criticizing the Israelites, you might want to check your own memory. How often does God provide your needs? How many times have you thought the end was coming only to discover that God was sufficient, yet again? I am ashamed to admit, that I often forget what a great God I serve. He has never failed me; He has never forsaken me; and, yet, I struggle to trust and obey.

What’s more amazing than Israel’s stubborness and forgetfullness is God’s grace in providing for them again and again. What’s even more incredible than my forgetfullness and complaining  is God’s patient grace to meet me again and again and to provide for my needs. Were God a man he would have given up on me a long time ago. Praise God that He’s God and I’m not. God’s grace trumps my sin, everytime. My prayer is that my rebellious heart will be broken by God’s grace and that I will rest in Christ.

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NO WAY! But it’s true. I was reading in Exodus 8 and came across an incident with Pharaoh that sounds much to like me. There are many great and wonderful theological truths wrapped up in the encounter with Pharaoh in Exodus and some very important questions like, “Who hardened Pharaoh’s heart?” When I read about the second plague (the one with all the frogs) I was shocked to find that I am just like Pharaoh in some ways.

The entire land had been overrun with frogs. Pharaoh’s wife was likely screaming at the sight while junior revelled in the new found joy of icky creatures everywhere (what boy doesn’t like to play with frogs). Face it, however, even in the Bayou you can only take so many frog’s legs before you just can’t take it anymore. Pharaoh and his people quickly reached that point, so he called Moses and Aaron back in for a chat. It went something like this:

“Okay, Moses, you win, I can’t take it. Get the Lord to kill all of the frogs and I’ll let you guys go worship the Lord.”

“No problem, Pharaoh. When do you want it done?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Got it.”

Moses and Aaron leave, Moses cries out to the Lord and the frogs die. The people start cleaning up, piling the dead frogs higher and higher. Now comes the moment of truth, here is the real kicker. It’s Exodus 8:15: “But when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite, he hardened his heart and would not listen to them, as the LORD had said.”

Man! I’m like Pharaoh! How often have I been faced with affliction and trials which bred holiness within me only to see it fade the moment the pain subsides? It pains me to realize that God works in my life to make me holy, to draw me near to himself, and to magnify His love to me only to behold my heart grow quickly cold toward Him and warm toward my sin when storm passes.

I don’t like suffering. I don’t know anybody who does, but I do know this: the Bible teaches that suffering in the hand of God is a good thing for me.

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, laking nothing” — James 1:2-4

I don’t like suffering, but I don’t want to be like Pharaoh, anymore, either. I don’t want to trust God in the darkness and live like a wretch in the sunshine. I want my heart to be pure. I want to walk with God in the daytime and live for Him in night. I want my life to be so completely consumed by Him that suffering and affliction have their intended result–steadfastness and holiness.

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My friend John shared the following link with me. It is an excerpt from a message Mark preached on October 7, 2007 entitled “The Rebel’s Guide to Joy.” I think it’s worth sharing with the 2 or 3 of you who read this blog. I would also encourage you to take the time to view the entire message at Mars Hill’s webite: http://www.marshillchurch.org/media/rebels-guide-to-joy/the-rebels-guide-to-joy

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A little perspective goes a long way with most things. We’ve been living in the surreal recently as one thing after another presents a challenge to faith. We’re working on a re-launch at the church and mobilizing to get out into the community to generate relationships for sharing the gospel. God has been good to provide our needs as we’ve been able to invest in some updated material, etc. In the midst of all this, however, a number of our people have been facing some serious challenges.

Yesterday, Kristin and the kids were returning from piano practice when another driver  t-boned our van just above the rear wheel. The damage is not too terrible, but we just got it back from another repair a little over a week ago. After getting all of that sorted , we were greeted with rising temperatures inside the house. We’ve been struggling with our A/C all summer, and I’ve been hoping and praying that it would last through the season. No joy! After borrowing a friends guages I discovered that the unit is out of refrigerant, likely due to a leak. So…call a repair guy, but we can’t afford a major repair at this point.

Needless to say, I spent much of last night feeling sorry for myself and wondering how we are going to make it through all of this. Then I got a little perspective.

The son of one of my dear friends had brain surgery last week to remove a tumor and they are awaiting pathology reports this week. They know the tumor was malignant, but they don’t know what the future holds, yet. Pray for them. They are a great family who love Jesus and have been through a lot. They lost a daughter to a similar scenario just a few years ago.

One of our families had a young lady hit their retaining wall last weekend and they are getting ready to do some misison work in Guatemala. Some of our people are facing financial pressures; some are having issues at work; others are just feeling a lot of general pressure.

Monday afternoon, I visited with a mother and her 28 year old son who is dying of cancer. Another family we are trying to help had all four tires on their only vehicle slashed (this happens to be his work truck, too).

And to top it all, I read a letter from a pastor in Pakistan regarding the recent Muslim attacks on Christians in the town of Gojra (read more). Since the beginning of the month, over 300 families have been displaced, many are dead including children simply because they worship Jesus. While I’m living without A/C and with a dent in the side of my car my brothers and sisters in Jesus are suffering persecution, homelessness, and death.

My heart is broken and I repent for placing too much value on creature comforts and the firewood of this world.

NOTE: If you would like to know more about what is happening in Gojra, go here. Even better, if you can help, please do. For $150, less than the cost of a Wii or a weeks groceries or a month’s worth of electricity you can help provide the basic necessities (beds, supplies, food, and clothing) for one of these families.

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“Missions makes this point: it is not about us and our preferences. It is about his mission and the fact that he sends us. We want to practice our preferences. We want things to be the way we like them. But God wants us to be on mission with him, to be sent to some group of people somewhere, and to minister in a way that meets their needs, not promotes our preferences. When we are functioning as God’s church sent on mission, we will go into different cultures, contexts, and communities. We will proclaim a faithful gospel there in a culturally relevant way, and we will worship in a way that connects in that setting. When the connection is made, the code is broken. God does not tell us that we will always like it. He does say that we will always need to function as his missionary church.” — Ed Stezter & David Putman, Breaking the Missional Code (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2006), pg. 32

I read these words, yesterday, and I re-read them, today. I am convicted and concered. It is so easy to craft our churches in the ways that we prefer supposing our preferences will prove to be missional by default in our given context. Then we scratch our heads wondering what’s wrong when it doesn’t work. Stetzer and Putman are dead on.

We need to think missionally about all that we do and carefully consider how we are connecting with lost people around us. Are we guilty of imposing our preferences and waiting for lost people to submit to them, or are we actively engaging them where they live and work with a desire to lead them to Jesus?

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