Let’s be honest, sometimes it’s hard not to trust in horses and chariots. I am often reminded of my friend, Scotty, who would say, “Sometimes I just need somebody with skin on.” I feel that way much more than I care to admit. I can see horses and chariots, I can hear them, I can smell them, and I can touch them. It just seems natural that we would trust in what we can see, hear, smell, and touch.
Trusting God does not sit well with our natural tendencies, and we are powerfully tempted to resist resting in God. However, trusting God often proves to be my only alternative. When the horses are Egypt’s and the chariots are Pharaoh’s I can rely on them about as much as I can rely on the strength of a rotting wooden bridge. Apart from God every thing upon which my life may reside becomes precarious. I cannot trust the stock market; I cannot trust my portfolio; I cannot trust my health; indeed, sometimes I cannot trust my friends and I certainly cannot trust my own desires.
So, what am I going to do? Do I crawl up into a hole and wait it out? I would like to sometimes. I try to sometimes. It does not work, however. Life has a way of finding you wherever you try to hide. Sin catches up with you; your guilt travels with you as you always pack it when you leave.
So, what am I going to do? I am going to trust God. Regardless of how I may feel from time to time, God is trustworthy. He has never failed, and he always shows up. My sporadic emotions are no indicator of the faithfulness of God; His track record stands over my recalcitrance.
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.
(Psalm 139:7-12 ESV)
The saying is trustworthy, for:
If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he also will deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
for he cannot deny himself.
(2 Timothy 2:11-13 ESV)
For those of you who prayed and/or supported me financially, thank you. More to come…
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.
And they crucified him and divided his garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take. And it was the third hour when they crucified him. And the inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.” And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left. -Mark 15:24-27 (ESV)
And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And some of the bystanders hearing it said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.” And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” -Mark 15:33-39 (ESV)
This is probably not the scripture you expect to read on Christmas Day. Yet, it fits. Why? Because this is the reason Jesus came to earth. This is the reason we celebrate because Jesus Christ was born to die for our sins. Of course that’s no the end of the story.
When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. -Mark 16:1-8 (ESV)
Hallelujah! The Savior is Born! Praise the Lord! He has died for MY sins! Hallelujah! The King is risen! This is the true story of Christmas. As a matter of fact, it is my favorite part of a great and wonderful story of God’s love. To remember the cross at Christmas, my family has a very special tradition. Next to the trunk of our Christmas tree hangs a long, iron nail. This nails that were used for crucifixion. We hang this nail on the tree to remind us of the true story of Christmas, Jesus was born to die.
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.
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.
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.
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.