Tantalizing if True

“Doing theology” often implies that we understand God better than the apostles or their disciples, and Jesus would really have benefited from a background in textual criticism. But has everything orthodox already been taught? Continue reading “Is theology arrogance?”

If we want revival, the first requirement is to admit that we need revival. That we need more than we have now. Watchman Nee called it the Normal Christian Life. Revival is when people who have been experiencing the average Christian life or the typical Christian life begin to experience the normal Christian life. Continue reading “Revival is normal”

Changing your church’s spiritual temperature to match the world outside doesn’t make visitors any more comfortable than changing your church’s thermostat to match the weather outside.

“The early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.”

— Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail

Baptists usually believe in eternal security or persistence of the saints. That is, once you are saved, you’re always saved. Yet a Baptist prison chaplain says that he finds the same percentage of Baptists in jail as out of jail. Same percentage of Methodists, same percentage of Catholics.

So what’s the problem? A Baptist preacher once said, “We’ve spent too many years telling people they can never lose what they never had.”
Continue reading “False conversion”

If your grace is cheap, who paid for it? And how much did they pay? Everything that Jesus offers, he paid for with his life. If your salvation is cheap and ineffective, maybe you didn’t get it from him.

Surely the reason we don’t think we need an expensive savior is because we don’t think we are in any danger. We have gotten used to floors that are constantly wet, water seeping through cracks in the walls, bulkheads bowing inward, strange rumblings below deck, and the taste of sea water. We can’t admit our need because it would cost us too much to fix it. Because the alternative is inconceivable. Or uncomfortable.

To me, cheap grace doesn’t mean that it didn’t cost much, so much as it isn’t worth much. Still, sometimes there is a connection. The price of a car repair, or a surgical operation, is affected by how deep into the inner workings the professional will have to go. If you don’t believe you have a deep problem, or if you believe it’s already been fixed, you won’t pay the price needed to fix it. If your problem is termites and you won’t fix it, eventually you won’t have a house. If your problem is spiritual, you can patch over the holes, keep the telltale sawdust swept away, and ignore the swarms each spring. But in the end you’ll have no place to seek refuge from reality.

After reading my post Redemption and lift,
Tim McIntosh asked:

Has there ever been any empirical evidence that “redemption and lift” is a reality? There are many examples of poor sectors of countries that have had genuine revivals but no lift. The redemption and lift philosophy has been used to reject the idea of getting involved in holistic ministry.

Then what a bad use of the redemption and lift philosophy: to say that salvation has economic implications so we shouldn’t encourage them. That is, to paraphrase William Carey‘s critics, “If God wants to improve crop yields or reduce child abuse, he will do it without your help or ours.” If the Gospel affects the whole person, what kind of ministry is there besides holistic?

It turns out that in Donald McGavran’s Understanding Church Growth, one of the main points which he made in his chapter “Halting Due to Redemption and Lift” was negative, not positive: when poor people respond to the witness of the Gospel, they often want to leave the neighborhood, which leaves the neighborhood without their witness to the Gospel.

So I’m applying the term differently than McGavran did. However, you’re applying the term differently than I did. Notice that the examples I gave were on a personal/family level. When one man has more disposable income because he stops drinking, that doesn’t mean his whole community has more disposable income. However, if enough people stop drinking, some bars will go out of business, which affects the whole community. That happened in the 1905 Welsh Revival, documented by J. Edwin Orr.

Just a thought: you referred to “sectors of countries” but do the words “sector” or “country” (in our sense of those words) even appear in the New Testament mandates? The Gospel can transform sectors and countries, but it does that by transforming individuals, households, and people groups: all words which do appear in the New Testament mandates.

However, in the same way that lift can be promoted by redemption, lift can be thwarted by lack of redemption. If a “holistic ministry” focuses on fighting alcoholism among people who enjoy being drunk, that ministry is going to have some problems.

CNN reports that a coalition of non-religious organizations is running a atheist ad campaign in New York city subways, “designed to raise awareness about people who don’t believe in a god.”

The advertisements ask the question, written simply over an image of a blue sky with wispy white clouds: “A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?”

The ads are actually misleading. That 2008 survey cited by the sponsors, American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population, didn’t ask people if they were good. The word “good” doesn’t even appear in the report. It just asked about religious affiliation. True, the 15% who said they had no religious affiliation weren’t saying they were Christians who hadn’t found a good church, but they weren’t saying they were atheists either. Only 7% said they were atheists.

The most startling claim, of course, is that New York City has a million good people, period. I mean, I think the Chasidic Jews only estimate a dozen or two really good people worldwide. Maybe good people are naturally attracted to New York City. Still, if I were you, I would keep alert on the subway, and lock  my car.

But the ads ask a good question, even if they begin with an inaccurate statement. That is, they ask, “Are you good?” I suspect that, if they think about it, that question will make a lot of New Yorkers a little uncomfortable. I know it did that for me. And if the answer is no, there are organizations in New York City that can help. But I don’t think they’re atheist organizations.

The adjective extreme has become popular in recent years. People are proud of being extreme. They engage in extreme sports, listen to extreme music, and watch “Extreme Makeover.” Church youth groups even called themselves “Generation X-Treme,” which gives you an idea of how long the word has been popular in popular culture, since the oldest examples of Generation X are now over 40.

Continue reading “Extreme repentance”

How many times have you heard a Christian say, “Well, I really shouldn’t, but…” We often say this about dessert. I’ve been thinking about a former church, whose members sometimes said this about dessert. Even though they never said it about the Bible, when I look back, I get the sense that if we just couldn’t manage to obey the Bible right now, that would have been okay in our church. Really, if we felt we wanted to do something, nothing could have constrained us. We said we wanted to obey God in everything, and prided ourselves in that. But we could leave our wives if we felt the Spirit prompting us. A few of us did.

Wikipedia says that porn creep is about sexually explicit content entering American pop culture. It was outrageous forty years ago, but we must not complain about it now, because we might sound prudish.

It reminds me of the common arguments for why society should allow anything that was banned until now, such as homosexuals or women in combat. The common argument is not that our society would be better and happier if we didn’t ban it. The common argument is that it’s been going on for a long time. For example, historians will tell you that some women and some homosexuals have served in early American battles. Pornography has been around for thousands of years, holding an important place in many dead civilizations.

By that reasoning, everything will creep. Everything will become acceptable, given enough time.

I don’t accept that reasoning. Time can’t turn wrong into right.

Anabaptist is a name invented by the enemies of the Anabaptists. One of the names they used for themselves was “defenseless Christians.”

One of my goals is to be a defenseless Christian. All of society and most of the church spends much of its time defending itself. When we’re attacked, that’s our natural response. But I want God to be my only defense.

Unfortunately, I spend much of my time defending myself as well. But, I mean, I probably have to. What if God doesn’t come through for me? When I really need him. he might turn out to be sick or busy. Or maybe not.

We look down on entertainers and promoters who have sold their souls for success. But the forces they yielded to are pressing on our souls too.

American institutions such as the free enterprise system and representative democracy were not established by people who trusted other people. They were founded by people who didn’t. That’s the point. People will not naturally seek what’s best for society. They will naturally seek what’s best for them.
Continue reading “Stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular behind”

Though American Christians may not believe that our culture is inspired, we often act like it. Some missionaries have actually helped reduce belief in the supernatural by teaching their Western worldview in contradiction to the Biblical worldview: “You don’t need to pray much about that, because we can give you a pill.”

I like what one village chieftain said when a Westerner explained that disease was not caused by evil spirits, but by germs that enter the body. He smiled and replied, “Okay, then what makes the germs enter the body?”

On a related note, some Bible teachers explain the Levitical test for an unfaithful wife by theorizing that a guilty person might be more likely to get sick.

In a real sense, the villagers had it right even before the missionaries arrived. Sickness is caused by spirits.

It’s a mistake to think that people choose their beliefs because of reason or revelation. Most people choose their beliefs for their own comfort.

B.F. Skinner remembers that his grandmother taught him about hell by showing him the glowing coals in the stove. He didn’t want to believe in a God like that, so he didn’t.

Mel White, who used to ghost-write for Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, is now a pro-homosexual activist. But according to his memoirs, the first step to his new career was not a renewed study of the Bible. It was his first sexual experience with a man, condoned by a Christian counselor. After that, somehow his beliefs seemed to change.

Other “Fundamentalists Anonymous”-type memoirs have a similar plot. Girl gets saved, girl joins evangelistic ministry, girl loses virginity, girl loses her faith. It was no crisis of faith, but a crisis of conscience. And faith lost.

John Bunyan wrote that the tempter often spoke to him, ‘”What, will you preach this? This condemns yourself; of this your own soul is guilty; wherefore preach not of this at all, or if you do, yet so mince it as to make way for your own escape; lest, instead of awakening others, you lay that guilt upon your own soul that you will never get from under.” But, I thank the Lord, I have been kept from consenting to these so horrid suggestions, and have rather, as Samson, bowed myself with all my might to condemn sin and transgression wherever I found it; yea, though therein also I did bring guilt upon my own conscience. Let me die, thought I, with the Philistines, Judg. 16: 30, rather than deal corruptly with the blessed word of God.’

Missionaries to Muslims (few though they be) sometimes argue over whether “Allah” is different from God. However…

• “Allah” comes from the same Semitic root words as “elohim,” “El Elyon,” and “El Shaddai.”
• Even before Muhammed came along, Arabic Christians (and they were not few) called God “Allah. They still do. I’ve heard them do it myself.
• The Qu’ran says, “We believe in what has been sent down to us and in that which was sent down to you; our God and your God is One; and we are submitted to him”. Surah 29.46
• To Muslims, “Allah” means the Creator of the universe. There is only one of those.

The problem is that Muslims talk about God in ways that we disagree with. But so do other Christians.

Let’s call him Titus Sung. When I met him, he was a young student who had already spent a year in prison in his native China because of his Christian witness. Yet his face showed peace and joy that is rare among American Christians.

I’ve thought much about Titus’s background. Why was his faith stronger and more effective than almost anybody I’ve ever met in church? Did he attend a better Bible college? Had he seen better Christian videos? Listened to more anointed cassettes? Owned better worship CDs? Attended more conferences? Sat under a more gifted singles minister?

It caused me to formulate a principle I’ll call “Sung’s Razor,” a subset of Occam’s Razor.

Means of sanctification should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

That is, if the Chinese Church doesn’t need it to be like Jesus, why do you need it? If it doesn’t make the Chinese Church more like Jesus, is it possible that it doesn’t make us more like Jesus?

As William of Occam is supposed to have said, “It is vain to do with more that which can be done with less.”

The typical American youth ministry of the baby boom generation resembled an animal feeder (or maybe an animal trap). It was attractive as long as the bait didn’t run out. It was assumed that youth wouldn’t follow God without bribery, and even then, that they wouldn’t follow God very far. In a youth-obsessed, youth-glorifying society, the youth ministry was a holding tank for large children, with the vague hope that they would grow up someday, probably, inexplicably. But not now.

The lesson of recent history, however, have shown that baby boomers do not necessarily grow up. They may become politicians or even parents, but that doesn’t mean they become disciples. After being taught to live for themselves, to give God his fair share, and to keep the rest, they continue to follow the teachings of their youth. The church has become an endless youth group.

Instead of showing the earthbound world that, through God, they can fly, the Church prefers to show that the world that the Church, like the world, can walk.

And so that’s as far as we ever get. The Church proves that it’s like the world. The world nods, yawns, and believes us. But the world doesn’t believe God. The Church doesn’t ever show them God.

A generation is coming that will not follow the faith of their fathers. They will go beyond the faith of their fathers. Like King Josiah, they will look at the promise of God’s Word and the state of typical religion, and they will choose to follow God’s Word. They will strive to make God’s Word alive in their world. They will not seek to entertain themselves in their minds, but will entertain God in their homes and hearts. They will not compromise. They will not leave God’s work undone.

Many modern “New Testament” churches claim that “they only go by the Word of God,” that their authority is the New Testament. Except, for the actual New Testament church, their authority was Jesus. The New Testament hadn’t been written yet. Continue reading “Calvin for Apostle”

Certainly, you can believe what you don’t understand. But you can’t believe what you don’t know. You can’t believe what people tell you you should believe. You can’t make yourself believe by studying what you should believe. No one can pressure you to believe. No one can embarrass you into believing. You can’t conform or out-orthodox or out-fox yourself into believing.
Continue reading “You can’t believe what you don’t know”

When at 14, I first heard the claim that Jesus was the son of God (somehow my previous church had missed this teaching), I remember that I was most offended by the specificity of the claim, not by anything else.

I reasoned, “There are five major world religions. What are the odds that I just happened to be born into the right one?”
Continue reading “Jesus had an eye color.”

What makes the gospel offensive is sometimes not its message but its specificity. We aren’t bothered by generalities about spirituality, but we bristle at specifics about our own lives. Continue reading “Don’t get specific with me.”

God has a will and work for us to do, and it doesn’t really matter how we get treated by others along the way. But he doesn’t intend for his purpose to be replaced by someone turning us into a doormat. If I’m going to be a martyr, I want it to be because God commanded it. I have been known to turn the other cheek very belligerently: “I’m laying down my life for you because of what Jesus did for me, buster. This doesn’t mean you’ve won over him or over me.” But that’s not exactly the right attitude! Also, we can replace God’s compassion with human sympathy: “You know, if you really cared about your neighbors, you wouldn’t sleep until they had all been converted”… or until you were hospitalized with exhaustion.

I’m thinking that the most important thing is to know where to take guilt. “Oh, I’m much worse than you think, worse than you accuse me of being. But I’m not depending on my own righteousness for my self-worth, and I’m not depending on my own strength to change. Is there anything else you’ve noticed about me that I should be aware of?” But it’s also important to discern when I need to repent and when the other person is mistaken.

When I say something, my goal should be to communicate. I should try to understand how my message will be received by the person I’m communicating with. The fact that they may not understand it should affect how I communicate my message. The fact that they do not receive it might affect how I communicate my message. But the fact that they may not like it should not affect my message itself. Continue reading “The case against politeness”

Pro-abortionists like to taunt pro-lifers for being so sure of ourselves. But one of the most convincing things about our side, actually, is that we wish we were wrong. Continue reading “I wish I were wrong.”

The other night, it occurred to me how much the Christmas story is a tale of international intrigue. A head of state meets with visitors from another country and tries to co-opt them into providing sensitive information about a suspected security threat. But the conspirators are warned and escape to an African nation. Continue reading “Jesus the Spy”

Unjust things often happen to good people. Inconvenient things constantly happen to good people. Unpleasant things frequently happen to good people. Tragic things sometimes happen to good people. But nothing happens to God’s people that God doesn’t allow and bless. Continue reading “Bad things don’t happen to good people”

1. A strong sense of group identity and community
2. A belief that the group is somehow separate from the rest of society
3. A strong sense of group destiny and purpose
4. An unwavering adherence to the teachings of its founder, which may differ radically from the rest of society
5. A total commitment to the goals of the movement which overrides personal goals and comfort

Are these signs true of your church?

If not, why not?

Like a sword, the word of God is only powerful when it’s applied to a specific point, or along a specific line. Like a scalpel, its purpose is not to stimulate you generally, but to heal you precisely. It has to cut away something.

Small town weekly newspapers still print that old American slogan in their church news sections: “Attend the church of your choice.” Personally, I couldn’t trust myself to do that. Continue reading “Attend the church of God’s choice.”

Perhaps the most significant difference between our generation of church members and previous generations of Christians is that, if we even notice our low level of Christian experience, we aren’t desperate to escape from it. Continue reading “There must be more than this.”

Most American Christian activity is compensation for not actually having an intimate relationship with God. When you can’t hear his voice at every moment, you have to develop a theology that doesn’t require it. When you don’t have the power to do God’s will, even if you happened to know what it was, you have to make some adjustments.

Sometimes, personal evangelism reminds me of dubious multi-level marketing schemes, where the appeal is the desire for wealth without effort, not appreciation and enjoyment of a quality product. “Well no, it hasn’t worked for me yet, but if you can recruit people to sell it for you, think of where you’ll be someday!”

If you need to be coaxed into sharing your faith in Christ, maybe your faith isn’t worth sharing. Get a living faith and then you can’t help but share it.

Jesus thought of God as “Abba”; literally, “Daddy.” When the early Christians called God “Daddy,” it was an intimacy born out of gratitude and honor.

The infinite, awesome God is honored when his children love him without fear. But we want to love him without awe.

We don’t come to him as a small dependent child would. We come to him jauntily, careless of our need, careless of what he would give us if we would come to him as our Daddy.

When Isaiah saw God high and lifted up, did he pray casually, as we do? Could you pray casually, if you saw God?

What do you see?

I’m told that we learn to talk by imitating our mothers, and that disturbs me. I don’t think I sound much like my mother, nor do I want to. I thought I sounded like air naturally passing through my larynx and past my tongue and lips. Maybe that isn’t so.
Continue reading “Imitation Me”

For years, I was involved with Christian theater. In fact, three of my acquaintances became Christians through evangelistic drama and films. Later, the first became a Marxist. The second became a Rotarian. The third murdered his wife.

If you don’t know, maybe you weren’t saved at all.

Somehow we decided that we don’t need to be like Jesus if we’re right. Or that if we’re right, we’re like Jesus. Or that if we’re right, we don’t need to be righteous. We got confused.

Can you say, “I’m putting this bullet through your heart because I love you with the love of Jesus. Because God’s Word commands me to do this.”?

If you seriously think you can, if you ever feel the need to kill someone, call me first and let’s talk about it.

I don’t want to hire a river guide who’s just like me, a nice guy who knows the river as well as I do, who never tells me what to do.

I want a river guide who is wiser than me, who knows the river better than I do, who’s willing to tell me what I should do.

I want to hear about the river, not what I want to hear. Or I could drown.

I would rather be uncomfortable and find the truth, than be comfortable and find nothing.

In a previous article, I hinted about my background in the theater. Sometimes it was hard being a better playwright than actor. Faced with difficult lines, mediocre actors (like me?) are tempted to change them.

“I don’t understand what the line means”… but presumably the playwright does.

“That isn’t something I would have said”… but is it something the character would have said? How well do you know the character yet?

The great actors can perform great plays without changing the lines. Instead, they change their attitudes and understanding, trusting in the author’s intent.

Good advice for followers of Jesus as well.

I worked in a bookkeeping department for about a year. Every week I had to make one large bank deposit. I totaled up the checks, recorded their bank routing numbers on the deposit slip, then totaled them up again.

My first day on the job, the two totals didn’t match. I was angry and frustrated. This isn’t fair, I thought to myself, this is somebody’s fault. Continue reading “Repenting as a bookkeeper”

It means very little to say that we need a new kind of church if we can’t show it to anyone. Otherwise, freedom from tradition becomes an excuse for freedom from obedience. Jesus came to empower us as well as to liberate us. Without his power, we aren’t free from anything. Until the church of Jesus is restored, we are in desperate straits, and desperation is appropriate.

Satan desperately wants to say that God isn’t big enough. He can only redeem certain kinds of people. He can only fix problems with a certain degree of difficulty and no more.

Satan rejoices to see a church where only certain people feel welcome. If its members can handle only one kind of music, he likes that.

Satan enjoys it when Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or agnostics can convince themselves that Jesus isn’t for them. He enjoys it even more when Christians agree with them.

Satan is ecstatic when a church can’t provide healing for emotional or social hurts, and must send its members to experts who aren’t even part of the church.

Becoming defensive if someone questions your spiritual maturity is like becoming defensive if your parents tell you that you haven’t opened all your birthday presents. It’s a good thing, not a bad thing. God has more gifts for you. Open your presents.

Calmness is common among those who are ignorant of impending disaster or approaching victory.

Calmness would be appropriate if there were nothing at stake.

Some Christians have said “faith is not a feeling” too many times. They mock spiritual passion and praise religious niceness.

Though the apostle Paul groaned, and all creation groans, we feel we don’t need to.

Calmness is appropriate for those who are not in love. Passion is appropriate for those who are in love.

The Sunday School was created to educate children who had no spiritual instruction at home.

I suppose that’s why we send our children to Sunday School today?

The commands of the Bible tell us what we can do, not what we can’t do. If God commands it, he promises it. And that’s exciting. The commands of God are all promises.

We secretly mock those who want to be spiritually pure, but we penalize those who sell gasoline that isn’t purer.

Somewhere in Martyrs Mirror, an Anabaptist prisoner anticipating his execution (probably by fire) writes that, while his spirit yearns for the day when he will receive his new body, his current body is naturally attached to itself and prejudiced against being burned to ashes. Continue reading “The flesh shrinks back”

My wife loves me so much, sometimes she scares me. The other night she kept looking at my hand, wondering if she could find an art student who could make a life-size marble sculpture of me. I protested that I don’t know anybody besides her who would want a marble sculpture of me, and that it would probably be incredibly expensive – thousands of dollars.

But there’s somebody who has already spent much more than thousands of dollars for me, and for you. He’s given his life, and spent my entire life, to make something beautiful of me, because he finds me that valuable.

I’ve never read Rudolph Otto‘s 1917 book “The Idea of the Holy,” but it sounds like Western Christians have something to learn from him. Otto might say that much conventional orthodoxy and theology is like going to a restaurant and eating the menu. Otto pointed out that Christians tend to “flatten out” their faith, to make it more tame and manageable. Sounds to me like a religious shampoo/conditioner. Instead, Otto sought a mystical excitement in religious experience that was missing from 20th century Protestantism. It seems to be largely missing from 21st century Christianity as well. Would you like cardboard with that, sir?

For me, the scariest worship service is one where the congregation waits on God alone to speak and act. The minutes pass, and you can’t fill in your uneasiness by reading the bulletin, because there isn’t one. You can’t wait for the next part of the program to begin, because there is no program. Nothing at all happens unless God speaks, and you can’t break the tension by sharing your own pious or clever thoughts. It won’t work, because the leaders are mature enough to tell if it was God who spoke through you, or man.

I can’t understand people who seem to say that, because they talked to Jesus once when an evangelist asked them to, they now have a relationship with Jesus, with whom they hardly ever talk now.

One of the clearest depictions I’ve ever read of my Christian liberal arts college, ca. 1980, is Joseph Bayly’s story “Ceiling Zero.” It’s the sequel to “I Saw Gooley Fly,” which can be found in a compilation called A Voice in the Wilderness. In these stories, Herb Gooley can’t do much of anything right – but he’s the only one on campus who flies. Continue reading “Talk the talk, but can you fly?”

I’m skeptical about society. Most people in churches assume that the world is innocent until proven guilty. I believe it’s guilty until proven innocent. So most people consume most mass media, perhaps being cautious about some content, but asking few questions. But I assume that most television, film, advertising, and popular music were not created to glorify God, and I’m cautious about taking it into myself unless I feel good about a specific product. One reason I like international music is that it can get my feet moving without triggering sinful responses from my own culture.

As a gardener, I’m notorious for only planting what can be eaten. My family, however, is fond of pear-less pear trees. They are called “ornamental pears.” They have nice white blossoms, but they have been carefully bred not to produce any fruit. Ornamental fruit trees have become quite popular. So have ornamental Christians.

Our culture is poorer for having segregated some useful ideas into a religious ghetto, isolated from society’s mainstream. One such concept is salvation. For most Westerners, the word “salvation” conjures up images of sweating American preachers in tent revivals. But “salvation” is simply the noun form of the verb “to save.” Continue reading “Salvation is a secular concept”

The originator of “Method acting,” Russian theatrical director Constantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938), taught his actors not to ask, “How should I position my eyebrows, hands, and mouth to express this line?” but rather, “If I had a domineering father, an ambitious wife, and coarse underwear, how would I express this line?” Continue reading “The Stanislavsky Method of Biblical Interpretation”

More than anyone else, I guess, I’m concerned for people who seem to have no motivating force in their lives. They remind me of marionettes without a puppeteer. In the hands of a master, nearly every string of a marionette is taut, ready for action, ready for movement. In the bottom of his box, every string of a marionette is slack, not only unmoving but unready to be moved. People who are empowered by the Holy Spirit seem ready to respond to their master’s slightest motion, without the slightest warning.

It’s good to claim the Bible’s promises, but most of them are conditional: either explicitly conditional, (“If we confess our sins” I John 1:9) or implicitly conditional (“and the peace of God… will guard your hearts” Phil. 4:7)

A Bible promise for which we have not met the conditions is not a Bible promise that applies to us. Continue reading “You are not in the Bible.”

Now that my former boss Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom has been sentenced to 25 years in prison, it’s become easier to think of him as a ruthless criminal instead of a Baptist Sunday School teacher. It’s more comforting that way. Continue reading “Safer to separate the sinners from us nice people”

The problem with loudly claiming the Bible as your only guide to faith and practice is that, at the same time, you may be quietly claiming your own intellect as your only guide to the Bible. If you aren’t, what other guide to the Bible do you claim? Can’t think of one? I suspected as much. Continue reading “Worship the Bible and worship yourself”

Originally, about one hundred years ago, some people wanted to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, so they tarried and prayed and repented until they felt themselves immersed with the power of God, and spoke in tongues. Continue reading “A flippant history of the charismatic movement”

My family heard about the gospel of salvation and the authority of the Bible around the same time. Like many evangelicals, we assumed that they always go together. Then I observed that people can be orthodox but lost. And I learned that in previous centuries of American history, almost everybody believed the Bible had authority and that Jesus was the Savior of the world. The Deists believed that too, but didn’t claim to have experienced personal conversion.

A controversy during the Reformation was whether a priest could properly serve the Lord’s Supper if he was living in sin. Continue reading “The perils of leading worship”

One of the most transforming concepts for me is that people are body, soul and spirit, not just body and soul. The soul has been defined as the mind, emotion and will. The spirit is the part of us that related to the spiritual world. I don’t want to confuse emotion or intellect with the movement of the Spirit.

Do the powers of our soul compete with the spirit? Because they can compete, they do compete. If we have the skill to pretend to be spiritual or powerful when we’re not, we constantly have to refuse to do that.

New perspectives help us to see our faith more clearly, and they are desperately needed. I find new perspectives from two sources. One is historical: people used to act like us and it didn’t work out, or people used to not act like us and it worked better. The other is cultural: Christians in China don’t do that/have that/need that and they do better than us.

In one sense, truth is static, written in heaven, but our understanding of it is imperfect so not static.

In another sense, truth is relational. What is good news will change depending on the needs of the hearer. The broken-hearted need mercy, and the unrepentant need law.

Some Christian artists believe that anything done for God is acceptable, even if it’s artistically flawed, if it quotes enough scripture or something. And others confuse spirit and soul, and believe that as long as it stirs your aesthetic sensibilities, it’s acceptable as Christian art. One approach is to think of ourselves as craftsmen instead of artists. Our job is to make well what needs making. Our job isn’t to fit some stereotype of an artist, or to expose our inmost expressions (express our fascinating self) to the world. Continue reading “Art or craft?”

All real art has a vision behind it. Characters take on a life of their own, paintings turn out differently than you planned. You can’t go against this vision without completely changing the work, and probably making the work less believable. Continue reading “Mind of the Maker”

Referring to religious traditions that forbid any practice not commanded in the New Testament, a friend of mine proposed a witty slogan: “If we wrapped ourselves up any tighter in rules, we’d likely choke.” But there can be humility to considering such rules. Or you can look at them from the cultural perspective I like to practice. If people experienced the power and authority of God while following certain rules, we don’t need to abandon those rules to experience God ourselves, and they may turn out to be more than just rules.

It’s so hard to minister to someone without being tempted to feel patronizing or holy, and others may not help much with resisting the temptation. Whenever somebody told me what a wonderful person I must be because I was a missionary or because I take care of my grandmother, I have tried to say Thank you and ignore their compliments. Why should people fawn over me for doing what I enjoy doing? Do they think that if you really obey God, it has to be unpleasant?

I don’t believe in mental illness, per se, even though it’s a common diagnosis in my family. Sometimes symptoms are caused by character or spiritual problems; often by physical or chemical problems. But it’s a mistake to consider it a disease that some people (i.e. other people) have. I see it as an extreme version of problems that all of us have. All of us can be irrational at times. Most of us can control it. But none of us think clearly or feel accurately all the time. We are mistaken if we take our own minds too seriously. Insanity is more common in ourselves than we think, and less common in others than we suppose.

I once rehearsed a play in which I served as the “voice of God” replying to a delightful little girl saying her bedtime prayers. I frustrated the director. “No, say that line more majestically.” “No, say it more warmly.”

I never got it right. I should have retorted, “What do you want me to be: both God and man?”

It’s rare to find someone who can do that successfully.

Conservative preachers oppose going beyond what the Bible says. But everybody does. Even someone who simply reads the Bible aloud is interpreting the Bible, with his inflection, his volume, his speed, his tone. (People who read the Bible silently are also interpreting the Bible – we just can’t tell how they’re interpreting it). Reading the Bible in ponderous tones means you think that God is ponderous. Reading in casual tones means you think God is casual. Your inner theology determines your reading style, unless you have trouble reading out loud or trouble being honest about your theology. Pick a difficult passage of Scripture, such as one about the wrath of God. Try reading it aloud while incorporating all that you believe about it. I think it will bring you to your knees as you realize the limits of your faith.

Now that I think I understand a little about post-modernism, it’s transforming my thinking — but maybe not in the way you’d expect.
I realized that deconstructionism applies to deconstructionists too. That is, the writings of post-modern thinkers aren’t idealized, objective truth anymore than the writings they criticize. But it occurs to me that this concept can be applied much more broadly – though not as broadly as they would want. We can’t trust human wisdom, but there is another kind of wisdom. Continue reading “I am a deconstructionist.”

How far are we willing to go to see God’s will be done? Are we willing to give up musical styles that only we appreciate? Are we willing to give up religious terminology that only we understand? Are we willing to give up Bible dialects that even we can’t fully comprehend? If our traditions cause innocent seekers to stumble and fall before they can enter the narrow gate, our traditions might as well be millstones around our necks. We might as well drown ourselves now.

The Christian leaders I’ve associated with have always said they want to be a New Testament church. But usually, they mean they want to be a New Testament congregation. Paul, however, clearly wrote about authority and involvement in multiple congregations. (Of course, maybe you believe that God put things in the Bible that don’t apply to us today). Continue reading “Beyond congregationalism”

The deconstructionist philosophy says you can’t know what’s true because everybody who talks to you about truth is biased. Well, that’s equally true of deconstructionists. They are also biased. Hence we can’t trust them either. Thank you for your time.

However, I know someone whom you can trust. Who? That’s for me to know and you to find out. Except that he says, “The heart is deceitfully wicked, who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9). Hmm, he must be a deconstructionist, you think?

Practical universalism isn’t very practical. It doesn’t help people become godly, anymore than hiring blind umpires makes baseball more exciting. The umpire can’t grade on a curve. He has to decide if the runner arrived before the ball, or the ball before the runner. But if the runner never arrives, he doesn’t have to decide anything. The answer is obvious. It doesn’t matter how fast a baseball player ran from second to third, it doesn’t matter how sincerely. If he doesn’t make it to home plate, he doesn’t score. It doesn’t count. If you never become the kind of person who wants to spend eternity praising God, it doesn’t matter how close you got to it. You won’t be forced to spend eternity praising God.

First of all, hypocrisy is indefensible. Jesus criticized hypocrites, he didn’t criticize sinners. But we’re all hypocrites in one sense. We don’t live up to our ideals.

However, some ways of dealing with our hypocrisy are better than others. One way is to stop claiming to believe what we don’t practice. As in, I ain’t no hypocrite, I know I’m a sinner.

But something’s lacking there. The other way of dealing with our hypocrisy, much harder, is to stop practicing what we claim we don’t believe. Until I can do that, I’d rather be a hypocrite.

The truth is hot and hard to touch. Unless it has lost its power, it will sometimes hurt you. The truth is salt and you have wounds. Unless it has lost its savor, it will sometimes hurt you. You can avoid this pain at the cost of your soul, but not forever.

It only takes a minute to form a tradition. Otherwise, we would have to face ourselves or our Master more directly. A tradition is like a callous, in that sense. As a callous makes it harder to feel, a tradition makes it harder to hear. You don’t need to hear or obey God if he no longer needs to speak. Then you can replace his word with your own ideas. The drive constantly pulls on us to control our own consciences and lives instead of letting God do it. Like the Pharisees, we have already acquired our own reward, and there is nothing left for Jesus to give us. For we believe we are some variety of saint, and he only came for sinners.

Some people talk about God from personal experience. Others speak theoretically about God, as if they never expect to know for sure. The silliness of that approach becomes more obvious when you substitute your own name, or the name of your best friend, in place of God’s in these discussions. Do you “have faith” that your best friend is a Korean-American lawyer, or is your best friend really a Chinese-American lawyer? Philosophical beliefs about “your reality” won’t change the country his ancestors came from. Continue reading “Let me introduce you to my deity.”

Most people, despite their religious beliefs, are practical atheists. They can make plans without him, meet their needs without him, live the essence of their lives without him. Their prayers give them away. They cheerfully talk to God as if they didn’t really need anything. They may pray for God to heal a sick friend, but in their hearts, prayer is secondary to medicine and not really important at all. When sickness strikes home and medicine doesn’t stop it, their actions may begin to line up with their doctrines. Then their prayers might become prayers of desperation, the kind God can answer. At last they mean what they pray.

Religious people are accused of harping on fire, brimstone and damnation. They don’t usually. It’s rare to hear about such subjects in most religious gatherings. After all, talking about hell makes church people uncomfortable too, unless you’re talking about people going there whom they don’t know. They may believe in hell, theoretically, but it’s extremely rare to find anybody willing to apply such warnings to themselves. Everybody listening thinks they are already “in.”
Continue reading “All ye in come free”

Some of the most refreshing people to spend time with are converted murderers and recovered terminal patients. Someone who used to kill people has no illusions about what a nice guy he is, or what he would be like without God. Someone who was given six months to live has no illusions that he will live forever, or where his life comes from. Neither kind of person wastes as much time on themselves as the rest of us who haven’t yet come to the end of ourselves.

Agnostics and others tell me that I need to be more open-minded about religion. Okay. Will this prayer help?

“O God, I praise you. Show me if you’re not there. Make your nonexistence real to me. Thank you, God. I love you.”

The farther from God that you realize yourself to be, the closer you really become. Redemption is not a strain for him, as if you were helping him out by giving him fewer things to redeem. Being one of God’s people is not a matter of finding natural virtues in yourself and displaying them instead of your natural weaknesses. Continue reading “Defending yourself against God”

Consider this: if your fiancee loved you as much as you love God, would you break off the engagement? Soon God’s people will become his bride, though you don’t have to take part in that. Once the marriage takes place, if not before, his people will do nothing but worship him and praise him. Does that thought disturb you, of never ceasing to praise God? Do you have a hard time doing it now? Does the thought make heaven seem enslaving or boring? You don’t have to take part in that either. However, you may not like the alternative. There will be no alternative in heaven.

Why worry about the state of your soul? Why seek more from God? Well, why seek more from your marriage? The Bible compares God’s loving relationship to his people to a husband’s relationship to his wife. However, since love for God and love for spouse have both grown cold, it becomes ever harder for us to understand what God meant, or to even care. For some couples, it’s hard to imagine wanting to die for each other. For some Christians, it’s hard to believe (as opposed to mentally assent) that Jesus wanted to die for them. But when you were first falling in love, was a visit to your loved one an obligation, or was it joy? Did Romeo spend regular time beneath Juliet’s window to keep her from getting mad at him, or because nothing could have kept him away? Continue reading “I’m no Romeo.”

Did you know that your toothbrush is also an excellent tool for cleaning around the toilet? Except that once you use it that way, you’ll find it less effective and less pleasant in your mouth. That’s all that holiness really means. God wants to set you apart, sanctify you, make you holy (all mean the same thing) for his purposes. Yes, the mind, body and will that God made for his own purposes will also serve well for other purposes. God made them well. But, like a fine woodworker’s tools, the more you use them for something for which they weren’t intended, the more trouble you’ll have when you try to use them for the right purpose. A person who wants to be holy isn’t nitpicking or negative or arrogant or legalistic, any more than a person who wants to defend his toothbrush from me.

You can look through your glasses, but you can’t look at your glasses at the same time. Your perspective is the same way. Only God and your brothers and sisters can give you any different perspective. That’s why you don’t see your needs. We need community, a closer community than most have ever experienced, in order to break free and be healed. In most of our religious organizations, we don’t get close enough to really see each other’s needs, let alone really help them. It’s as if your cancer surgeon greeted you warmly, pointed to the tumor bulging through your skin, waved his scalpel with a smile, but never began operating. The scalpel has to get close enough to cut before it does any good.

Sociologists decry the weaknesses of single-parent families, but how many of them speak out against the socially-acceptable sins that made them common? Historically, repentance and conversion, not social programs, have been the only effective solution for a myriad of problems such as child abuse, child exploitation, poor working conditions, low incomes, high unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse and teen pregnancy. God helps a father to stop drinking and start working, God helps the father’s employer to provide job training and increase wages, God helps the employer’s teenaged daughter to seek love from himself instead of boys. Social scientists have even coined a term for the phenomenon: “redemption and lift.”

If I had cancer, I’d want to know in time. It wouldn’t be a kindness to wait until nothing could be done. Particularly when my soul is at stake. Nowadays few people think about their soul. As Jesus says, “What does it profit a man if he gain the world and lose his soul,” the world yawns. But the word “soul” means “mind, emotions and will.” As your “harmless sins” grind away at your unkept conscience, can you see that you lose your ability to think clearly, to feel deeply and to force yourself out of your rut into a decision?

Many people believe the age of miracles (etc.) has passed away. Others insist it’s still here. There is often little practical difference in the lives of these two groups. We all agree that some things haven’t passed away, such as faith, hope and love. But we read the non-miraculous parts of the Book of Acts, and we still aren’t experiencing the same faith, power, joy, love, unity and holiness – the same spiritual reality – that the early Christians did. If believers in miracles read the miraculous parts with an honest heart, we will likewise admit that we don’t see many miracles in our lives, and we have no good excuse for it.

Compared to the Kingdom of God and your part in it, does anything else you’re doing really matter? What should you do now? Should you turn off your computer? Weep? Repent? Click on a different link? Get a drink? We all have answers and goals. But most of the time, we’re answering the wrong questions, and reaching the wrong goals, like a Roman father in Pompeii who finishes remodeling the family room just before Mt. Vesuvius buries it in ashes. When we don’t know God’s will, we have to fill in the gaps with our own will and ideas. Or we can’t live. The alternative is to know God’s will.

Try this experiment: read the Bible as if you were an outsider. Pretend that these scriptures belong to a now-extinct sect that many admire but nobody follows. Imagine that someone loaned them to you and that you have no claim of understanding or even believing them. For once, don’t assume that you have the right to be encouraged by every encouraging word within their covers.
Continue reading “Now, pretend you’re a heathen.”

“Do not be satisfied with as much Christianity as will only ease your conscience.”

– J. B. Stoney

The Bible is most often read like a greeting card, whose only purpose is to warm the heart regardless of whether or not its sentiments apply to you. We bend the meaning of the Scripture to fit our own experience. When the Bible describes how God’s people must live, instead of asking, “Am I one of God’s people? Is that how I live?” we declare, “Since I am one of God’s people, that is how I live.” That we may not be part of God’s people is not considered a possibility.
Continue reading “Coming to God as an outsider”

If your fiancee loved you as much as you love God, would you call off the wedding?

– T.K. Soho

Man’s trust in himself has drawn him to the cities, where you can have food by paying for it without having to pray for rain, where you can ignore God’s judgment on you because you spend all your time with others who are ignoring the same thing. In the Third World, millions are moving from the country to the city, creating the world’s largest slums. Not that there’s more food in the city; after all, you can’t raise much wheat on concrete. Though in the Western world, many people are now moving from the city to the nearby country, it is not necessarily in repentance or dependence on God. They keep the city in their hearts even while God’s creation is before their eyes.

More people are afraid of dentists than they are of death. Maybe that’s because they believe dentists are more real than death. As much as possible, we want death to be handled by institutions such as hospitals and mortuaries. Otherwise we might have to face our own mortality.

Ironically, after years of sending medical workers to developing regions to teach that sicknesses are not caused by spirits, the western world has to admit that its own medical problems are overwhelmingly caused by spirits. It is because of their spiritual needs that Westerners engage in destructive behavior such as the use of mood-altering drinks and drugs, or overeating or oversmoking, or sexual promiscuity or perversion, or acts of violence. Call the problem low spirits, high spirits, or evil spirits. It isn’t treatable medically.

A friend of mine says, “I always thought grace meant you could do stuff.” As in, “It was hard to make it through, but God gave me grace.”

Cheap grace, on the other hand, means you can’t do stuff, but that it’s okay. It also means God can’t do stuff. It means that God can’t really change people, but He pretends that He has, and we call it grace because we don’t want to hurt His feelings.
Continue reading “Expensive grace”

Entertainment comes from the Latin words meaning “to hold between.” Do you really want someone to hold you between? No, you say, it’s not entertainment, it’s recreation. Then when will you be recreated and what will you do when you are? Or is it that God really has a purpose for only part of your time and you need to kill the rest, killing yourself as well? Did God give you too much time to keep your interest without artificial assistance? Do you want him to give you less time? Are you afraid that if you decide to serve him with your whole life, he won’t allow you enough rest to keep healthy and happy? Do you believe you need to steal breaks from him, as from an unreasonable boss who expects you to keep going until you collapse?

“You’d be bored to tears in heaven, if you’re not ecstatic about God now.”

– Keith Green

The professions of teaching and social work are respectable, but not because they can do a better job than parents. Like a dishwasher, they are useful as ways to automate parenting. An automatic dishwasher usually does an inferior job, but it works when a human dishwasher isn’t available. In the same way, no classroom, however well-equipped, can approach the student/teacher ratio, professional dedication or understanding of the students that a committed homeschooling parent can. Public schools stay in business because, like orphanages, they can do their work even without parents if necessary.

At root, many modern conveniences were not developed for people’s needs, but for the Industrial Age. Your automatic dishwasher was not designed for cleaner dishes, it was designed for automatic dishes. You have become used to washing the food off them before putting them in the dishwasher, precisely because it can’t clean dishes as well as you can.

“True conversion is a rare thing; but recovering from a false hope of conversion, after continuing in it for some time, is much more rare.”

– from Jonathan Edwards

You can’t drive north by always driving south. It doesn’t matter how quickly or carefully you drive. You can’t drive both east and west. You can’t drive north by always driving west. The residents of Helena, Montana, would love to have you visit, but you won’t get there if you never take the road to Helena. If you sincerely want to visit Helena but drive 100 miles to the east of it, you won’t arrive where you want to go, and it’s nobody’s fault but your own. In the same way, God doesn’t want to lose you, but if you go everywhere but to him, you shouldn’t blame him for what eventually happens to you.

Many founders of religious groups would hardly recognize their modern-day successors. That would surely be true of George Fox, the originator of the Friends (Quakers) movement.
Continue reading “Searching for George Fox”

If God hadn’t created the world, nobody would have known the difference, and he could have saved himself a lot of trouble.

We think we need God to add, but instead, we need to subtract. We need to turn around, to go home, to go back to become the people we were meant to be. “Fill my cup, Lord,” we sing, except that we’ve already filled it ourselves. “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah,” we sing, except that we’re already guiding ourselves.