Grace and Tolerance

What is courage?


Courage is not the absence of fear. Anyone who is fearless is clueless. The world is a dangerous place, and anyone who knows no fear is liable to have a short lifespan. Anyone who is not afraid of God's wrath is a fool, too.

Courage is not fearlessness, but having fear and doing what is expected anyway. It could be argued that courage is only possible in the presence of fear, since it takes more courage to do the right thing when you know full well the hardships and dangers it may entail. It is that ability to face our fears that is true courage.

This article is not about courage in general, though, but about that particular kind of moral courage we call grace. Grace is the ability we share with God to show mercy to those who do not deserve it--including ourselves. Grace is the willingness to overlook a person's sin and love them anyway.

Courage is not being fearless, but what we do in spite of our fear. Grace is not being non-judgmental, but being willing to recognize the sin in others, and love them anyway. Grace is something we give in spite of our feelings and opinions, not because of them.

Our culture is unique in being the only one to regard tolerance as its highest virtue. No one who exists in Western culture can miss the constant drumbeat of tolerance. This is not true of the cultures that are less pluralistic. Muslims certainly do not understand our worship of tolerance, neither do the Chinese or Russians. Even so, there is not a single place in this world that has not been exposed to the cry of nonjudgmental tolerance. Our movies, television shows, books, and even news programs proclaim it loudly. In fact, the only sin our society recognizes is being judgmental. We condemn racism, sexism, homophobia, and exclusive religion wherever they exist, and often where they do not. Modern society cringes when someone says their religion is superior to others, even though any thinking person must regard their opinion to be true, and others false. We do not tolerate intolerance.

This is a lie, of course. We are all judgmental to some degree, whether we like it or not. If we aren't, we need to be. Should we tolerate murder, theft, racism, or addiction? We were created to have judgment about what is right and wrong. Moral conscience and moral discernment are part of who we are.

Jesus did not just say "judge not," as most people think. He actually said that we should be judged with the judgment we judge others. We all judge, but Jesus warns us to be careful how we do it.

That's where grace comes into the picture as a kind of moral courage. Grace is the ability to love others despite our judgment of their opinions and actions. A person who lives by grace does not deny what is good or bad, but does not treat others according to whether they are good or bad. A grace-filled person can look at people with whom they sharply disagree or disapprove and recognize the image of God in them. Their sins and their errors are real, but we love them anyway, as God loves us.

This simple concept is all but forgotten in our modern culture. The world seems to believe that to love the sinner, we must also love the sin. Tolerance means accepting everything. Those who think this way  become incapable of real grace when they encounter an idea or action which they cannot stomach. Christian grace, however, is not so restrained. We are capable of separating the sinner from the sin, of loving accepting the former without accepting the latter. We love the sinner in their sins, while they are still sinning.

The so-called non-judgmenalism of the world gives us only two options. Either we must accept everything everyone does perfectly normal and acceptable, or we must shun him. If we don't agree that the gay lifestyle is normal, we must hate gays. If we don't agree with a man's politics, we want nothing to do with him. If have a friend who is promiscuous, we must either shun him or accept his alternate lifestyle. It's all or nothing with them. The intolerantly tolerant, project their own inadequacy of grace on Christians, because they are incapable of accepting them without stereotype or caricature.

Grace, however, is much more flexible and practical. It allows people the freedom to have opinions or to live lifestyles which we do not agree with, without our ceasing to love them. We aren't perfect, just forgiven and neither is anyone else.

Grace is demonstrated in the three great relationships in our lives.

First, it is demonstrated by God. "For God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were sinners, Christ died for us." Romans 5:8. Jesus was not tolerant of our sin, but he was tolerant of us. He denied the revulsion that must have risen inside of Him every time he saw the way people lived, and still sacrificed Himself for us. He did not wait until we were perfect. He did not tolerate sin, but he did love the sinner.

Second it is demonstrated by ourselves towards ourselves. Many Christians live under the mistaken impression that God cannot love them if they sin. They think that if they were ever to lose their sin, then God will start loving them. Nothing could be further from the truth. God loves us now, in spite of our sin. Furthermore, He expects us to love ourselves in the same way.

Third, it is demonstrated in our love to others. The story of the Good Samaritan illustrates this beautifully. The Good Samaritan did not have to know or approve of what the man who was beaten on the road did. He didn't know if he was straight or gay, Jewish or atheist, a law-abiding citizen or a criminal. All that mattered was that he was broken and bleeding. This is not to say that if the Samaritan knew what the man did or what he believed, that he would have approved. It's just that the Samaritan saw a person hurt, and had to help.

No one said it is easy to love in the face of sin, any more than it is easy to have courage in the face of fear. But that difficulty is what makes it grace. It takes no love to love the lovely. It takes divine love to love the ugly. That love is called grace. It far better than mere modern tolerance. It is far more honest, too.

The Walking Wounded

The 2011 synod was a much more pleasant experience than the last one. It seems that the storm clouds which gathered over last year's meetings, though they not completely gone had mostly cleared and patches of sunlight shone through. This certainly was the result of the diligent prayer of so many members for unity. The leadership of Steve May and Andy Putnam had a lot to do with it. I think that many of those who were so angry last year simply came to their senses and backed off. We all lose our heads in battles, but only the wise admit it.

I'd be tempted to say that such theological and moral debates as we had last year were over and forgotten this year. But this is not so. Even if the majority of us had stopped fighting the effects of those battles are still with us. World War II, Korea, and Vietnam are over, too, but we still have wounded veterans.
Theological battles are like cannon barrages--we all line up and spout off our angry words, but we do not see the human damage they do to the other side. We are shielded the results of our words by emotional distance.
When a professor is accused of heresy, he does not only feel the sting, but so does his wife, children, parents, and friends. His loved ones often take it harder than he does. Friends become enemies, students suffer, and reputations are permanently marked. A minister forced from his pulpit loses not only a job, but his church family, friends, home, security, and emotional support. A trustee is accused of being a poor influence, he takes is personally, whether or not the accusation is shouted or spoken calmly. They never completely forget the slight. It does not matter if we think the accusations are true or not, they take a serious human toll. There is no such thing as loving if we are not willing to walk with that person through the pain of recovery. There can be no true Christian concern if it does not involve real human contact. It's easier to pretend that the pain we inflicted is not our responsibility than to actually come to grips its results.
The reason I am writing about this is because of two friends I saw this week. Both I have known as loving, easygoing Christians, with a strong faith in Christ, a desire to win the lost, and a strong faith in the Lordship of Jesus and His infallible Word. Both had been hurt in the battles of the past two years. Not only were they hurt, but their families, their friends, and their churches were also hurt in the process. Neither has been able so far to get beyond the pain. Both were still struggling to get beyond the hurts and forgive. I do not blame them at all for having a hard time with letting it go. Forgiveness is a process, not a declaration.
I once heard it said that the church was the only army that shoots it wounded. It is easy to let the past go, but we have to remember those who are still experiencing that pain. Maybe eventually they will get over the hurt of the Erskine debacle, but not now, not yet. We should keep them in our prayers, our thoughts, and our hearts

Remembering and forgetting

The enemy of faith is not doubt. The enemy of faith is forgetting.  Faith requires we remember.  Faithlessness happens when we forget.  This is the secret of Christian life and discipline. 

One of my favorite passages is 2 Peter 1:5-9

" For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge;  and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness;  and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. "

Peter lists  the fruit of the Spirit--those qualities of Jesus that the Holy Spirit adds to our nature.  These graces grow one after another out of the heart that is continually watered by Christ.

In other words, spiritual fruit does not need to be manufactured.  It just grows as we are attached to the living vine of Christ,  who Himself is attached to God. 

But what if the fruit do not appear.   What went wrong?

Verse 9 "But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed from his past sins."

If the fruit does not appear, then  we have forgotten the cleansing of Christ.

Have you ever read the Exodus from the Bible?  It is amazing that the Israelites so easily forgot the hand of God in their lives..  They saw the ten plagues,  walked across the Red Sea on dry land, were fed by miracle food,  watered from a moving rock,  and led by a pillar of fire, yet they kept forgetting. They worried that they were going to die of hunger or thirst or be destroyed by enemies less than a tenth their size.  They forgot the miracles they saw right in front of their eyes.  The nation of Israel forgot the commandments over and over.  The disciples  forgot about Jesus' miraculous power and worried.  They forgot His promises of resurrection. The church forgot salvation by grace for fifteen hundred years. Even today we don't seem to able  to remember God's promises.

A man goes on a business trip, and meets an attractive woman.  Suddenly, he forgets his wife and his wedding vows.  A dieter sees a tasty snack and forgets he cannot have it.  We see other people's sins and forget our own.  We see dangers and forget God's protection. We face death and forget eternity.  We face life and forget His blessings.  We have amnesia  of the soul, and forgetfulness of the heart.

There is only one cure for our forgetfulness--constant repetition.  We need to keep praying, keep rejoicing, keep reading, keep singing,  and keep worshipping.  The moment we look away, we will begin to forget, and that could have disastrous results. 

That's why we keep praying worshipping and reading the Bible--not so that we will learn, but so we won't forget. 

Have we forgotten we are brothers?  Have we forgotten our own sins?  Have we forgotten that we follow in the footsteps of Jesus?  We cannot keep what we cannot remember. If we remember,  we still forever need to be reminded. 

Maundy Thursday Message

I became an ordained minister 31 years ago.  Since then, I have led or assisted in almost two hundred communion services. In most of them I read the “words of institution,” as they are found in 1 Corinthians 11:23-32.  Not until a couple of years ago, did I come to question what I thought was it meant, 27-32

 Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.  A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup.  For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment.  When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world.

Let’s face it--how many people have you known who have gotten sick or died because of communion? How can communion make you sick?

Yet here it is in the Bible. According to Paul, communion caused some to be sick and others to “fall asleep” that is, to die. 

One interpretation is that if we take communion with a guilty conscience we are cursed by it. But I have known many unrepentant sinners to take communion, yet none of them have gotten sick by it.  Besides, if sinlessness were required for communion, none of us should take it.

Another explanation is that if we take it without understanding we are guilty. But again, there are ignorant people in every church. Some whole denominations misinterpret communion, in my opinion yet you don’t see them getting sick because of it. 

Here’s where I think we have it wrong. The ritual of communion was in Paul’s day very different from what it is today. In the early church, communion was the culmination of the agapae or love feast that came after the formal service. The church fathers, such as Ignatius of Antioch, Pliny the Younger, Hyppolitus of Rome, Tertullian, and many others.  Everyone shared a full meal together.  It was what we call today a covered dish dinner, eaten as a symbol of unity and love.

Anyone who has ever attended a church social knows what a great time it can be.  But we also know what headaches they can cause, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11: 17-23.

In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good. (In other words, Paul was really ticked off.)

18-19 In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it. No doubt, there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God's approval.

Have you ever been to a covered dish in a church where people were not getting along?  The fellowship hall becomes a war room, full of whispered conversations and angry looks.  One group sits together at one table, while another group sits at another. 

Disagreements don’t bother Paul.  On the contrary, disagreements in the church are a healthy way of arriving at the truth. What bothered him was how they expressed their disagreement. Instead of seeing disagreements as opportunities for the common edification and growth, they were an occasion for pride, jealousy, even violence.

I once heard an elder threaten to lay a tire tool to the skull of another over a “theological disagreement.”

Some disagreements were over doctrine or practice. Some were over racial or ethnic differences. Many had to do with the way the church should relate to the world around them. Some were divisions between rich and poor.  All were harmful to the peace of the church.

But these divisions were not the only problems--they weren’t even the worst problem.

20-21 When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper you eat, for as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else. One remains hungry, another gets drunk.

People seemed to have forgotten that this was a “love” feast. In their minds, it was just another covered dish. They were not asking the question “How can I used this as an opportunity to show my brothers and sisters how much I care for them?”  Instead they were saying “How do I keep Peter from eating all the biscuits?”

The result of this was that those who were slower got nothing, while those who were faster got too much. So instead of it being a love feast, it was a gluttony festival—an all-you-can-eat night at Shoneys.

But even that was not the worst.

Don't you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you for this? Certainly not!

People watched what the others brought. Those who brought a lot thought they were getting cheated.  Those who brought nothing resented those who did, because they were not bringing more.  If people did not contribute to the meal they sent them home or made them get to the back of the line. Those who brought a lot got to go first. 

Paul contrasted their attitude with Jesus’ at the Last Supper

23-26  For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread,  and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me."   In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me."   For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Paul begins. “The Lord Jesus On the same night he was betrayed.’

Why betrayed? Why not on the same night he was arrested?  On the same night he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane? Why not on the same night he washed his disciples feet?

Jesus knew Judas was betraying him, but he washed his feet anyway. He made sure the Judas got a good meal before he went out to betray him. He loved him and continued to love him whether he betrayed him or not.  Jesus gave Judas a sop from his own hand, which meant that Judas had to be near Him in a place of honor.  Love people regardless of what they do to you.  Love your enemies and care for those with whom you disagree. 

He broke bread and said, “this is My body.” Jesus was saying he is going to have His body broken for us just like that bread.  He took the wine and said, “this is My blood.”  He would bleed for us, because He loved us. If Jesus can be broken and bleed for us, maybe we can be a little bit nicer to each other. 

For whenever you eat this bread or drink this cup, you show forth the Lord’s death until He comes.

Whenever you sit down to eat together, remember who you are. You are Christ’s Body, held together by the sacred sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. He bled and died for each one of us.  When you sit at the table, we show ourselves to be His family.

In this context, verses 27 through 32 finally sense.  I have never seen anyone get sick of die because he or she did not understand the mysteries of communion, but I have seen people get sick and even die because of bitterness, jealousy, and unforgiveness.  I have not seen people get sick and die from grape juice and crackers, but I have seen churches get sick and die because they were forgotten by the people in the pew next to them, who regarded them not a sister or brother, but as a set decoration for the drama that is their more important lives.

When we have communion, where is the Body of Christ?  The answer is easy--we are it.  The Body of Christ are the people with whom we share this feast.  When we don’t see Him there, and instead  see them as merely human, then we miss the reason for communion and might as well eat juice and crackers alone in our rooms. 

I urge you to look around this room, and see the Body of Christ, not just eating juice and crackers together, but  humbling ourselves before the Lord in repentance and sorrow. Then we discern the Body together. This is the body that should concern us, not food and drink, but flesh and blood.   

For God So Liked the World

One of the first religious books I remember reading was CS Lewis' The Four Loves. Lewis describes four kinds of love based on four Greek words for love--Sturge, Eros, Phileos, and Agape.


Here they are in grossly oversimplified terms.

Sturge is a passing enjoyment, such as "I love baseball" or "I love chocolate."

Eros, is a sensual, consuming passion, obsession, or addiction.

Phleos is friendship love, the love in commonly shared relationship or experiences.

Then there is agape love. This divine love is only possible fully through Divine intervention. It is a sacrificial love, as Christ loved on the cross. It is not a love because of liking anything about a person, but liking in spite of everything unlikeable about a person. This love is the blessed, chaste love of a true saint.

When I read that book, I wanted to be a true saint. (I still do, though I have never achieved it.) This was the love I longed to have--a love that does not depend about liking anything about people, but only depends on the love God has for poor lost sinners such as ourselves.

Agape love is not so much an act of he heart as of the will. It is, as Finney put it, a "decision to seek the highest good of another." I can decide to love my enemy, and seek his highest good without having to like him. Agape love is sacrificial, giving ourselves to others.

That was my understanding in my days of youthful idealism.

Since I have grown older, though, I have come to realize that agape love, though it may be the highest, is not the only kind of love God wants us to have for others. Agape allows us to love people we do not like. But it does not settle the issue of whether or how we should also like them.

We need to be careful about "sloppy agape." That is a general and ideal love, but not personal and specific. It is not enough tolerate the lost, but to welcome them. We may claim we love a person in Jesus, while detesting everything about them. This kind of love is not love at all, but paternalism and condescension--a misuse of the doctrine of Christian charity.

A purely ideal concept of love lacks both passion and staying power. We may be able to love those we do not like, but we cannot keep it up for long. Sooner or later, no matter how pious we may act, our love needs to grow into real, honest affection or it will not last.

Think about broccoli for a moment. Many people hate broccoli. (Not me, I actually like it.) Those who hate broccoli may be determined to eat healthy, and they know broccoli is good for them, so they force it down their throats. But how long can they keep doing this without either developing a taste for it, or dropping it from their menus?

Or take marriage. A person may marry another as a result of prearranged marriage or out of a sense of duty. But unless that person develops a geniune liking for their spouse, that marriage will be unsatisfying for both. This is not to suggest that people should divorce if they do not feel love, but rather that we find something likeable about our spouses if we do not already have it. If ideal love does not turn into honest affection, then that marriage is doomed.

We can suppress our feelings, but it will wear us out in the end. No one can work at something they do not like to do forever without respite. We will not stay with people we honestly do not care for, without making them and us miserable. At some time, our feelings will conquer us.

This idea of liking as well as loving is absolutely essential for the spreading of the Gospel. For hundreds of years we have been preaching evangelism. Also for hundreds of years, the majority of Christians have simply ignored the call. They love the world, in a spiritual sense, and do not want to see others go to hell. But they do not like the world. Many Christians find the current age so abhorent that they want nothing to do with it. They move into fortresses of their own making, isolating themselves from "sinners" so they will not be contaminated by the things of the world, whether or not that world has anything to do with the gospel itself. We make excuses for hating the world around us, condemning aspects of music, dress and language that do not fit our cultural, non-spiritual norms. We do this to further emphasize our differences with the culture around us. We do this for the same reason teenagers of my generation wore their hair long or dressed in miniskirts--because we wanted to be different from our parents' generation. It's not that we didn't love our parents and grandparents. We just didn't like them, or anything about them. As we grew up, we learned better, when our children did the same to us.

John 3:16 begins "For God so loved the world." God does not just love the world, he honestly likes it. God may not like what the world does or what it believes, but God, like the parent of a rebellious teenager, sees something of Himself in them. He experiences genuine affection for us, as well as loving us in an esoteric sense.

Many Christians cannot grasp this. That is because many of us have an "all or nothing" mentality regarding our likes and dislikes. If we do not like a man's politics or religious opinions, we drop him in a bin in our mind that is labeled "Don't like." If we agree with a person, we drop him in the "like" bin. I don't believe God thinks this way. He recognizes the fact that there is very little difference between those we like and don't like. We have the same DNA. We were created in God's image. We are affected by the same sinful nature. There are actions, ideas, and attitudes which we should not like, that's true. But it up to God to decide who is or is not condemned in their sin. Even in the worst of us, there is something to like and admire.

Phileos love, that is friendship love, is built on commonalities. Our common interest, passions, and failures make us far more like each other than different.

We share similar interests. Among men, it may be more effective evangelism goes on at the lake or on the golf course than in the church. Christians who golf with non-Christians forge a friendship which provides a bridge for the Gospel to get to their hearts. Those places where we share neutral activities with others--the gym, the mall, or the marketplace, become those places where we come to like unbelievers, which leads to loving them. Some Christians are more afraid of unbelievers affecting them than they are excited about affecting unbelievers themselves. We share the same passions. Not long ago, I was asked to hold a funeral for a relative of someone in my church who had been a lesbian. The grief of her "significant other" was no less real than our grief for a spouse. Pain is pain no matter who has it. A sensitive, caring believer will recognize the pain in others, whether or not that pain is theologically justified. Jesus wept over Lazarus, even though He was about to raise him for the dead. He did not chide Mary and Martha for their lack of faith. Our own pains enable us to understand the pains of others.

We also share the same sins. We once lived in the same apartment building with an unmarried couple who were addicted to drugs. We got to know them and talked to them about their problem, even though we never used drugs. But I found that my own struggles with food were not that different in form from their struggles with drugs. It differed only in consequence and intensity.

We believers are comfortable with the fact that we are sinners. We just don't like to admit we have sinned, or have anything in common with those we consider to be really bad sinners. Our sins are small, but their sins are big. We regard ourselves as sinners in a general, esoteric sense, but do not like to admit to any particular sin. Yet it is our admission of our fallenness and failures which helps the unbeliever believe that God means it when he says "I forgive." It is our failure, not our successes that give us the ability to befriend the lost. We were lost, and now are found. We still sin, but we still find grace.

God doesn't just love the world. He likes it. He enjoys the enjoyable things about it, even though he hates the things that are broken. If we follow in His footsteps, then we ought to do the same.

Miracles

I have a quirky fascination with pseudoscience--UFOs , bigfoot, ancient aliens, etc. I don't believe in any of it, but it's fun to see what passes for proof on tv these days.


I have friends that take all this very seriously, though. They really do believe that there are aliens in the sky, giant apes in the woods, and ghosts in the attic. These are intelligent people --sometimes even brilliant people--but they seem ready to take extraordinary claims at face value with less than ordinary evidence.

The biggest mystery about these tales is not the what, but the why. Carl Sagan once famously said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Though there may be unexplained evidence, there is no evidence of any of it that rises to the level of extraordinary. In spite of the lack of good evidence, why do we keep looking for ghosts and aliens?

I think is because we were created that way. God placed in us the knowledge that the world we see is not all there is. There are forces beyond out imagining, and that those forces affect our lives today. Even people who have rejected religion seem to want to believe in something beyond the ordinary. They would rather believe, like atheist Richard Dawkins, that intelligent design by God is impossible, but that it is entirely possible that aliens created life.

The modern fascination with the supernatural I believe is due to the decline of a belief in a supernatural God. Much modern religious thinking discounts the miraculous, and focuses on naturalistic religion.

In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, Western culture adopted a mechanistic view of religion in which all things happen according to the laws of logic and physics. Deism is of course the extreme of this view, but that is only the far edge. Before we get to deism there are many scholastic approaches to Scripture which assert that nothing supernatural happens today.

This is unfortunate, because the supernatural is precisely what the world yearns for. That desire to touch the divine was built into us by our Creator. When we exclude the divinity from our world view, then the supernatural is all we have left. In the old days it let people to believe in ghosts and leprechauns. Today, it is bigfoot and aliens. Ether way, we are looking for something for knowledge beyond our understanding.

Our knowledge of the laws of nature is not absolute, but fluid. Newton gave way to Einstein. A mechanistic understanding of subatomic physics gave way to quantum mechanics and strange attractors. Technological advances have come so fast that what we think is of as magic or science fiction one day become commonplace the next.

In such a world, is it really so hard to admit the possibility that there is a God? Or to admit that that God can play by different rules than we know? We must go further and admit that if there is a God, then He must operate outside of nature and be by definition supernatural. I would go even farther and suggest that a real God must make himself known by real miracles, by revealing himself through breaks in the natural order.

Reduced to it's core, the message of the Bible is this--trust God. Do not lean upon your own understanding. In return for this trust, God rewards us with the revelation of His supernatural Presence, which is above time and space.

The problem with modern religion, it seems to me, is that in our effort to make religion palatable to unbelievers, we have removed from our churches the one thing that makes religion attractive to believers and unbelievers alike--miracles. We have adopted a view that supernatural manifestations of Hiis divine power and presece were for ancient times, but not for today. We may tell the stories of those times, we may even believe them, but we do not seriously expect God to repeat them today. But in ancient times, it was those miracles which drew people to Christ. In a world obsessed with the supernatural, why is it unreasonable to expect God's miracles to draw people to Him today?

We need to pray for miracles and expect them, and not just for our own benefit. The world needs to see them, too. We need to get ourselves out of the way and expect God to show Himself to our modern world the same way He did to the ancient one--by His sovereign manifestation of His power.

Some random thoughts on worship

A few random thought on Christian worship




A couple who went to our church in Florida started attending a different church, a larger, more contemporary church.

She said "We love the people in your church, but the people, the service, and the programs at the other church are so alive."

I said "Did you ever see a sponge."

"Yes," she said.

"How about a cheetah?"

"Yes," she answered with a puzzled expression.

"A cheetah is alive. Isn't it?"

"Yes"

"And a sponge is alive too, isn't it."

"Yes."

"Well, if God can make the cheetah and the sponge then he must like a variety of animals. Just because a cheetah moves fast, and a sponge does not move at all, does not mean that one is more alive than the other. God made us all to move at our own pace."

I was proud of that answer at the time. But in retrospect, it really was not very effective. People don't go to the zoo to see sponges. People want to see movement. People do not want to see an unmoving God, either. They want to see Him move--or at least feel Him and hear Him. People go to church to be reassured that God is present and alive.



Perhaps the reason so many of our churches are ineffective is that people come looking for a divine-human encounter, ministers come to get people to go do something.

They are here to worship, we are here to work. We are like the stage hands at a symphony, too busy arranging chairs and opening curtains to hear the music. We ministers have heard it all before, and our ears have grown too used to its hearing, so we no longer feel the Spirit as we preach.



The longer I am in the ministry, the more convinced I am that while the pastor displays Christ before the people, the people must also display Christ before the pastor. Pastors need to see Him revealed in the collective community just as much as everyone else. Public worship is a collective revelation of Christ. I don't know how we do that by onl letting the pastor speak and the choir sing. Occasionally, we see Christ revealed in congregational singing, but it's much harder to see it in the corporate mumble that constitutes most hymn singing. We sing as if we are ashamed to admit that we aren't sure about what we are singing. Corporate singing is so bad we must cover it up with loud organs or guitars and drums, depending upon our worship style. Where are the testimonies of what God has done? Where are the cries of a corporate desire for God? We have achieved an orderly, regular service by squeezing out of it all passion and spontaneity. Why can't the people testify to what Jesus has done for them? Why is it only the preacher and choir members who have a responsibility to exhibit the living presence of Christ?



If the reason Christ put us on earth was to build beautiful buildings, we have succeeded wonderfully. If the reason Christ put us on earth is to build a living tabernacle, then we have failed miserably. We are not in the building of preserving buildings and institutions, but in saving souls. Let realtors worry about buildings. Let's just be God's temple.



Theology is the yeast of the church. But who eats yeast. We have to put it in something and give it time to grow. The only time theology does us any good is when it is applied creatively and sincerely to the human condition over time in the warmth of the spirit.



Much of our worship makes me wish for the liveliness of a funeral. We cannot expect to move the living to God when our services resemble our mourning for the dead.



Why is the only principle we Reformed Christians discuss is the regulative one? Shouldn't there also be a creative one as well? Aren't we called to bring our whole being--our whole heart, gifts, talents, and imagination to Him? Is God more interested giving control and order, or in giving life? If we are created in God's image, and our creativity is part of that image, then are we really doing our best if we do the same thing in the same manner week after week, without even thinking about it? If we loved our wives with regulation and without imagination, it would be grounds for divorce.



Preachers and congregations have been at cross purposes almost from the first day we had preachers and congregations. The preacher want the congregation to be an army on the move. Congregations want the preacher to assure them that everything is all right already and they don't have to move. Preachers push people to action, congregations counter with inaction. They like it the way it is. More often than not in this tug of war, the congregation wins. In the end, the preacher usually gives in and gives up. That's why God finds us lukewarm.



Preachers do not move the congregations because they do not love them as they are. They love them for their potential, or they love them in a spiritual sense, but the do not see them as people who are just as they are worthy of God's love now. Preachers are like bad husbands who see their wives as people that they must improve before they the can give acceptance. Their constant drum of shoulds and coulds communicates guilt, not grace.



Why do we have to help God be majestic? We put a great deal of time and effort in the church trying to create an artificial sense of holiness with ritual, architecture, and music. We put preachers in high pulpits just to exalt the Word, but the people are not fooled. They know to exalt the preacher. God doesn't need all this. Our attempts to drum up a sense of the presence of God in worship are like ants trying to prop up an elephant. God is present. We need to get out of the way and let Him exalt Himself.



My greatest desire is to be in a congregation where no one has to say "the Lord is in His Holy Temple. Come, let us worship Him." because we will already experience His presence all around us.