Choose To Follow Christ

"[M]any of us live our lives with the perpetual question, 'Lord, what do you want me to do; what is

my mission?' The common mistake is that we seek the answer to this question before we start walking the path of obedience. This is exemplified by nearly 50 percent of churchgoers who attend services a couple of times a month, throw something in the offering that is below 2 percent of their income, and hope to hear something that will get them through the week. They don't see themselves as disciples, learners, or followers of Jesus. They believe self-denial is for monks, missionaries, and ministers. They go through life being Christian without being Christlike. They never pick up their cross because they never submit themselves to true discipleship. In fairness to them, sad to say, often no one has taught them what following Jesus really means."

Bill Hull, Choose the Life: Exploring a Life That Embraces Discipleship

Can I Love The Sinner And Hate The Sin? It's The Only Way To Love

There has been a lot of talk recently about the Christian doctrines of love and sin, mostly in the shape of, “I no longer can keep up the unbiblical façade of loving the sinner and hating the sin. The Bible calls me to love, and that is what I am going to do.”

While I believe deeply that we are called to love in extravagant and radical ways – ways shown to us by God in Christ – I believe the recent talk about refusing to see people as sinners actually strips the Christian of the ability to love in this deep and transformative way. Contrary to the assertion that “love the sinner and hate the sin” is not in the Bible, it is necessary to the character and nature of God, and is, ironically, all over Scripture. It turns out that you are unable to love the sinner without hating the sin.

The first and most readily available analogy is the way a good parent loves their child. Any parent will tell you that they often live in the tension of loving their child while hating the things they do or the character traits within them that cause them harm. Have you ever known a parent in the middle of struggling over a rebellious teenager? In theological language, that is nothing more than loving the person prone to sin while hating the things in them that cause them harm. In fact, you might say the two sides of that parental disposition IS love. If you disagree, then you will need to convince most of the humans you know that a parent who allows their child to do each and every thing that will cause them short-term and long-term harm is a good parent. Obviously they are not.

And so it is with God. It is common for Scripture to speak of what God hates and why he hates it. Modern evangelicals don’t often think or speak in these terms, but maybe that is because many of us have been trained by our churches to conform the Bible to our current proclivities instead of the other way around. A small sampling of the Bible talking about God hating sin:

Isaiah 61:8 For I the Lord love justice; I hate robbery and wrong; I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.

Jeremiah 44:4 Yet I persistently sent to you all my servants the prophets, saying, ‘Oh, do not do this abomination that I hate!’

Zechariah 8:17 do not devise evil in your hearts against one another, and love no false oath, for all these things I hate, declares the Lord.

Christ-followers are people who belong to this kind of God and are thus expected to learn to interact with the world the way God does. As a consequence, we are expected to have the same kinds of loves and hates that God has.  For example:

Micah 3:1-2 And I said: Hear, you heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel!

Is it not for you to know justice?— you who hate the good and love the evil,

who tear the skin from off my people and their flesh from off their bones,…

Ezekiel 35:6 therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God, I will prepare you for blood, and blood shall pursue you; because you did not hate bloodshed, therefore blood shall pursue you.

Amos 5:15 Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate…

And then there is the passage in the New Testament which is cited most often to promote the idea of loving the sinner and hating the sin:

Jude 21-23 keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. And have mercy on those who doubt; save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.

Here Jude makes a direct link between the love of God, our acts of love and mercy, and snatching people away from the sin that so easily destroys us.

All in all, the evidence is pretty overwhelming – the best way to love people who sin is to hate the things in their life that cause destruction – sin.

This is radical love. To refuse to acknowledge or talk about sin is a weak and easy way to like people, but it is not biblical love. God’s love is often very hard to live out. If you have ever loved someone who is not exactly like Christ, you have loved someone who needs the kind of Christ-like love that makes sacrifices for sin and remains loving through all kinds of trials and rejections. Jesus loved Judas. Not in a way that refused to hate the sin, but in spite of the sin. Jesus loved the woman caught in adultery when he simultaneously saved her life and told her to go and sin no more. Jesus loved disciples who often misunderstood him. God showed steadfast love to a nation of people who were persistent in their rebellion against him.

God’s kind of love recognizes sin and rebellion in the human heart and shows unconditional love anyway. This is the kind of love the world needs to see in the church. This is the kind of love I am required by my God to show. This is the kind of love I need – the love that sees my sin and saves me anyway.

"When I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness"

Emotional exhaustion; physically tired. I didn't expect it to take so much out of me, but it did. I have done it over and over for nearly 24 years, but it still surprises me when I walk away drained to the bone.

It's not bad - don't get me wrong. I have tried very hard to handle the Word of a jealous God to his people and simultaneously be faithful to it, to Him, and to them. And sometimes it takes the energy out of whatever reserves I thought I had. I never seem to sleep well the night before. Sometimes what the Word has to say is full of hope and joy, and sometimes I talk to people who are walking in darkness and pain. In either case, and every case in between,  my mind, body, and heart are left wrung out.

But it is for the good of the church, and of the people of God. At least I tell myself that. Maybe I missed the boat and everyone in the room walked away thinking, "That was nice. What's for lunch?" and I walked away ready for a nap. Maybe a life was stirred by my inevitably inadequate attempt to talk about the One True God and bring people to the foot of the cross or the threshold of an empty tomb. By the grace of God, may it be.

I do it over and over, like mowing my lawn or shoveling my driveway in the middle of a blizzard. There always seems to be a reason to do it again, a need that rises to the surface like a stubborn weed. Or maybe the weekly repetition has caused my words to sound like the ticking of the clock on the wall. It's there, and we know it's there, we just don't hear it anymore. But I tick on. Pastors keep keeping time according to the rhythms and motions of God's kingdom in a realm that listens to different clocks and follows flashier time pieces.

Nonetheless, the Word of God is sharper than any other tool we can use, and by the work of the Spirit of God, makes its way into the deepest recesses of the human soul. Deeper than we can even see within ourselves.

So, I will fitfully sleep, awake grumpy that I tossed and turned too much, but I will get up and go at it again. It is more important than some other, sleep-friendly substitute, and it is what I was called to do. So the fire burns and my bones quake, anticipating the next week.

Discipleship Changes Things - The Words We Use

When we become disciples of Jesus - or become serious about following him - all kinds of things are supposed to change. The Jesus way of life is a new way; a way of thinking, believing, and doing that is often radically different than other non-Jesus ways of doing things. So it would follow that discipleship to Jesus begins to transform our lives in ways we may expect, and in ways we may not expect. So, what kinds of changes might we expect if we begin to authentically follow Jesus? Over time I want to flesh out several changes, but here is one you might not expect.

Our vocabulary changes, and I don't mean we stop swearing. We may very well stop swearing when we become disciples, but I am thinking of a much more significant shift in the way we understand and use words. Words are powerful things. Language is more life-shaping than you probably think. At the very least, words signify things and ideas. When we use words we are verbalizing what is going on around us or within us. We express relationships between things in the world and we express what is going on in our inner states. We say, "The light is green," and we mean to say something about not only a certain colored light, but to also convey meaning. We are saying, "it is your turn to drive." We can say, "I feel anxious," and reveal something going on within us that another person may not know unless we say it, and we may be communicating a need for sympathy or reassurance. In either case, we use words in ways that we believe will communicate with other people.

So it is with our use of words and ideas that appear both in Scripture and in the common culture. What do you think of when someone tells you they spent Thanksgiving with their "family"? What ideas and images are conjured in your mind when someone talks about their "anger"? What about "friendship," "work," or "love"? The images and ideas that arise in your mind when people use those words with you are the result of years of contextual content-filling. In other words, those words have already been defined for you (in large part) by your background, education, language, culture, and so forth. Exaggerating a bit, you might say that whoever or whatever filled your vocabulary with meaning has also given you your view of how the world works.

There is an unavoidable tension here for the disciple of Jesus. Christian theology and practice wants to use words one way and the rest of the world wants to use them in another way. We live in a pluralistic culture, becoming more so all the time, and each corner of our culture wants to use words in different ways.  The more ways a single word is used, the more difficult it becomes to maintain a straightforward belief in the way "we" think that word ought to be used. To put it another way, if the church teaches you one thing about "love" for one hour a week, and media teaches you a very different thing about "love" 40-60 hours a week, which meaning will be easier to believe? And if you want to believe what the church teaches about "love" then you will need to work harder at it.

But then, it seems this is one thing the follower of Christ learns to do if they plan on being genuine disciples. If we are discipled by someone or something, we are taught a view of the world by them. The disciple is striving to learn the Jesus way of life, including the Jesus way of using words. This means that we learn how to begin with sound biblical ways of understanding words and their respective concepts and carry them into our respective niches of society. What normally happens is the reverse is the case. Church and Christian theology often feel odd or antiquated to us because we have let other things define the terms for us.

So, what does it mean for you to robustly learn and absorb the biblical meaning of "love" or "forgiveness" or "work" and then engage your world? We are all waiting to see, and we will all be better for it.

Is The "Pastor as Leader" Paradigm Destroying Pastors?

In his refreshing book, Replenish: Leading from a Healthy Soul, Lance Witt collects several distressing statistics regarding pastors and their vocation:

1,500 pastors leave the ministry permanently each month in America. 80% of pastors and 85% of their spouses feel discouraged in their roles....Over 50% of pastors are so discouraged they would leave the ministry if they could but have no other way of making a living. Over 50% of pastors’ wives feel that their husband entering ministry was the most destructive thing to ever happen to their families. 30% of pastors said they had either been in an ongoing affair or had a one-time sexual encounter with a parishioner. 71% of pastors stated they were burned out, and they battle depression beyond fatigue on a weekly and even a daily basis. One out of every ten ministers will actually retire as a minister.

There is a lot to be said about what these stats represent, and Witt does a wonderful job talking about the importance of restoring the pastor's soul and leading from the depths that can be created by God. But there is something more to be said. It is a frustration I have with the 'pastor as leader' model that has become a kind of talisman in the evangelical world over the past three decade.

Pastors are not CEO-style leaders. Yet they have been treated as such and expected to lead and produce results like captains of industry. My working theory is that one significant reason pastors have such an incredible failure and dropout rate right now is that they are pressured to be the kinds of things they are not by nature. Here is a nutshell version of how my theory works.

1. Our culture and our churches have almost completely lost a biblical definition of the role of pastor.

2. Our culture and our churches are enamored with the seemingly magical techniques of corporate management.

3. Because we lost the one and learned the other, we imposed corporate-style management on pastors.

4. That kind of leadership requires a certain kind of leader to make it "work" and most people called into the pastorate are not that kind of leader.

5. Hence, most pastors quickly become frustrated, depressed, and angry.

So, there it is. I hope over the next few days to tease out each assertion and make more sense of what we have done to pastors and the church and how, God willing, we can reverse course.

How To Avoid Discipleship - Mishandle Doubt

Doubt is natural in every human life on nearly every conceivable level. In human relationships there are doubts about loyalties, loves, behavior, and intentions. In education there is doubt about value and truth. In business there is doubt about decision making, markets, and people. And on the story goes.

Certainty, genuine certainty, is rare. Often, when humans project certainty they are ripe for a dislocation of their beliefs unless they have already processed their doubts. False certainty is a thin defense against the inevitable waves of doubt. A Christian will not settle their doubts or the doubts of others by pretending to ‘have it all together’ or acting as if they have all the answers to all the difficult questions.

In my experience, doubt is not only universal, it can be a powerful teacher. If doubt is handled well it can lead us into genuine insight and a deeper relationship with God. If doubt is handled poorly, it can lead either to a false and thin confidence or a shipwrecked faith. Here are some quick thoughts on how not to handle doubt.

Do not pretend they don’t exist. This may be the first line of defense when a genuine issue arises within our hearts and minds or in conversation with a friend, but the tendency to act as if the doubt does not exist or is not significant actually gives more weight to the doubt. Over time a person will begin to think that because they or their Christian friends were unable to even admit the doubt, it must be scary enough to be true.

Do not give or accept trite, quick answers. This has the same long-term consequence as refusing to admit they are real. Simplistic answers do not suffice to deal with significant issues or problems people face, which raise doubts about God and his nature. Suffering and loss are significant, and so should be the process of dealing with them in light of the existence of a good and providential God. Feel enough confidence in God’s active care of people to take time and wrestle with real issues.

Do not give in. The Christian faith is true; it’s all true. Giving in is common among those who struggle with doubt, but that need not be the case. Others have been where you are and others have been in more dire situations than you and they have found God to be just and true. You can, too. God knows we struggle with doubt, so he meets people in deep and powerful ways when they seek him in the midst of their personal darkness. I found a God who cares in the depths of feeling minuscule and I no longer worry about his loving attention. Let your doubt lead you to a revelation of his unchanging character. You cannot do that if you give in.

What About Living As If He Really Does Exist?

So now we have an ex-Christian pastor turned atheist after an experiment in which he lived a year as if God did not exist. This gives me reason to wonder what might happen if people resolved to live as if God did exist. And not just any god, but the God revealed in the Christian Bible. What would happen to a skeptic if they obeyed all the things Christ commanded us to do? What if the ex-pastor had resolved to live a year as a genuine disciple before experimenting with atheism?

What if Christians themselves resolved to live a year as if their God really did exist and really did give them power to live his kind of life here on earth? Have a hard time imagining that? I guess you and I are not alone.

But here is why skeptics will not do it. If you actually decide to live like that, even for a short period of time, you are accountable to a moral system that goes deeper than fakeable surface behaviors and does not change when you wish it to. If you want to live like an atheist you are accountable to no moral system in particular. For all the bluster about atheists living moral lives, the term 'moral' in that assertion is up for as many interpretations as there are individuals and situations. Our ex-pastor may have chosen a vague Western system of (ironically) Judeo-Christian values, but he would have been equally justified in picking militant Central American Communism to guide his steps and kill the next capitalist he saw. Without God, both are equal choices. The problem for humans is, with God, they are not and we are responsible for the lives we lead to Someone more powerful and eternal than us.

That bugs the skeptic. It, in fact, bugs every human heart until that human realizes how good it is to live the way the Manufacturer laid out the plans. God is Supreme Lord of all, but he is also irrevocably good and his mercies are new every morning. His disposition toward us now is patience; his very nature is love. Nothingness provides me with none of that, and all the whistling in the dark and making my own meaning without Him still leaves the darkness in charge.

So what might you have to do in order to live a year as if God really did exist? Here is a smattering of commands given to the follower of Jesus Christ. Try them on for size.

"Follow me." Jesus

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength....You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Jesus

"If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." Jesus

"Put to death what is earthly in you....Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience." Paul

"Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God...casting all your cares on him, because he cares for you. Be sober-minded; be watchful." Peter

"Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind." Peter

"Do nothing out of rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves." Paul

"Little children, keep yourselves from idols." John

We could go on nearly ad infinitum.

It is easy for the human psyche to make the decision, "I'm going to unchain myself from the responsibility I have living under the sun, but I will continue to use it for fuel." It takes a hard-core soul to say, "I will unchain myself from the sun and live as if that really just happened." But what if a human soul recognizes what the sun is and why it is there? What if we make a decision like, "I live under the sun and receive life itself from it, so I will live as if that really is the case."

A Vision of God Changing

"I don't expect less of him, I just assume less."

My friend has a very bright, analytical mind.  He grew up in a good Christian home, his father was a pastor in a small town for many long years before he passed away, and my friend's faith is strong and deeply rooted.  But if you were to talk with him seriously about his faith he would have posed questions that cause most Christians, especially those raised in evangelical homes, to squirm a bit.  "If the Bible says we pray over the sick and they will be healed, why aren't they?"  "What about those untold numbers of people who have died because of evil in the world, especially if they have never had the chance to respond to the Gospel?"  He was never punchy or pushy, but he was always honest about these kinds of questions.

For the last year or more he has suffered a great deal.  His body has not done well.  Some might even call his condition a kind of long-term death sentence.  But he was strong and healthy when he got sick, so what has been taken away from him was room his body had to spare.  There is no denying, however, that it has taken its toll.

We had not met for lunch in a long time so it was good to be able to get together and talk over how things have gone over the last few months.  The last time we talked was not long after the diagnosis and there were still questions to be answered and programs of treatment to be prescribed.  Now, on the other side of a year, things were different.  What was once an unknown has now become a murky burden.  It seems the more complex the diagnosis, the harder it is to settle in on a single, obvious means of treatment.  What were once hopeful medical prescriptions have become semi-successful, body-draining events.

Suffering is changing the way he understands God and life under God. But that is a good thing.  His mind is still sharp and searching, but this time he sat across from me and answered the question about how things have gone between him and God over the last several months by replying, "I don't expect less of him, I just assume less."  I think this statement reveals a deep and helpful shift toward trust in God that we all need to hear.

Instead of simply assuming that God will act in certain ways because we think he ought to, can we be ready to take what life and God give and remain confident in him?  Must we have all our questions answered to our personal satisfaction before we give God the privilege of our belief in his existence and goodness?  What does God have to do for you (that you find acceptable or beneficial) before you will let him off the hook?  And if God is in our personal defendant's chair waiting for the jury to come in, then who exactly is the god we worship?

Hundreds of years ago three young men were persecuted in a pagan land for their belief in the God of Abraham.  Their unswerving devotion to him brought them to the hearth of a fire built to burn people alive and they were asked to change their minds.  They answered that God was powerful enough to save them from the fire, but if he chose not to do it, they knew he was God anyway and they would not recant.  Here is a belief in the reality of the existence and goodness of God that has nothing to do with what we get from him or how he meets our personal, felt needs.  It is a belief that is grounded in reality - in truth itself.  God exists, he is good, he deserves my worship, and he has made provision for his children in this life and in the one to come.  So then, why would I change my mind on the edge of the fire?

Pastor and Trauma - Seriously?

I help run an organization that works closely with girls rescued from human trafficking.  We are trying to do the hard work of providing long-term solutions for them including ministry and spiritual support.  In this world of working with girls 'in the system' and who come to us with a lot of complicated and life-altering issues, there is a lot of counseling and therapy for everyone involved.  Our training, for instance, has tried to prepare our workers for the realities of working with minors with all kinds of baggage by providing crisis management techniques, intervention rules, and tools for self-care.

But I have also learned that we can neither neglect nor under-emphasize the role of pastor in the lives of our girls and our workers.  With all the work we have done with the state, child placement agencies, and county human services, it is easy to rely too heavily on the techniques provided for us that have nothing to do with the state of their souls.  I do not want to ignore the importance of counseling either, but we live in a social atmosphere that tends to neglect the role of spiritual care in favor of the more scientifically driven therapeutic care.  After all, do we really know what a pastor does in a situation that involves serious trauma, the kind of trauma most would think needs medication?

An appointed counselor is a periodic support and dispenser of self-regulation advice (among many other things).  Very often they are a tremendous and practical help with extraordinary conditions and situations where most of us simply do not have the experience or the tools to deal with people and emotions well.  We ought not to ignore what that kind of expertise and input can do for people.

But where is the pastor?  Where do we think spiritual support fits into some of the most complicated and long-term problems of life?  I would argue that we rank that kind of support somewhere between a good bowl of ice cream and a long nap.  We might say - literally say with our mouths - that we believe spiritual wisdom and suppo

rt to be very important, but where do we spend our time and our money?  Probably, therapist first, ice cream second, pastor third.

If, however, the Christian is serious about how their worldview orders reality they need to learn to pay more attention to the states of their souls.  After all, we are embodied souls, eternal spirits who will one day be reunited with a resurrected body.  We are everlasting beings whose souls have the opportunity to be renewed day by day while our earthly bodies decay.  A soul is a terrible thing to ignore, but we do it all the time.  To make a horrible turn of phrase, we are practical soul-neglectors.  We believe they exist, but we act as if they do not.

Is good counseling helpful in traumatic and complicated situations? Of course it can be.  Will you thrive in the long-run as a follower of Jesus Christ if you use that as a substitute for the care of your soul? I really don't think so.

Our Senses and Prayer

I was recently struck by a poem written by Gerard Manley Hopkins I had not read before, The Habit of Perfection.  It was written early in his career and so several commentators do not see it as refined a work as his later poetry, but I find it of incredible value when viewed through the lens of prayer and interaction with God.  Hopkins was a devoted Christ-follower, so it is entirely appropriate to read his work with Christ and discipleship in view.

As a whole, the poem treats all our bodily senses ironically as means of interacting with God.  As a result it is good advice to the believer who is wondering how to pray.  The first stanza:

Elected Silence, sing to me

And beat upon by whorled ear,

Pipe me to pastures still and be

The music that I care to hear.

Here, we catch a glimpse into how to use our ears to better hear God - and we begin with the fact that our ears are battered with cacophony, and thus are tuned to hear all the wrong things.  We grow accustomed to the constant din of meaningless - or even worse, destructive - noise.  We learn to process meaninglessness because we listen to it all the time.

So the power of silence becomes the power of re-tuning our ears to hear "The music that I care to hear."  Ironically, in silence from the noise of this world we find another song, and this time it is a symphony instead of cacophony, and our ears become attuned to a different sound.  God is not in the whirlwind of advertising or the earthquake of 24/7 news and social media.  He can be heard, however, in a whisper.  But I can only hear a whisper in silence and when I am listening for that voice.

Silence takes time.  Most of us are unaccustomed to silence - many of us find it hard to find.  But we ought to cultivate it.  For the good of our minds and souls we should find ways to disconnect from the noise of the world around us and learn to listen for a different voice.  Take the Word of God with you into silence - not to be read, but held in your mind and heart.  God has spoken through his written Word and the more comfortable you are with that language, the better positioned you will be to hear his spoken Word.

The music of the other world is beautiful - beautiful and transformative.  Find it and your life may begin to sing it.

Learning To Talk Again

Larry Crabb, SoulTalk: The Language God Longs for us to Speak (Nashville: Thomas Nelson,2003). 266 pages.

The pressure to find solutions for people in pain is powerful.  A friend comes to you with a need or an emergency in a relationship and you feel put on the spot to come up with a piece of advice that will help ‘solve the situation.’ The pressure is even more powerful if you are a Christian talking with another Christian about the stresses and strains in life.  We have created an atmosphere of therapeutic solution finding that has put all of us in a bind.

Crabb believes we are missing the boat entirely.  He is not against finding solutions as such, but he is clear that we miss the mark more often than not in that we simply do not know how to talk with each other out of the depths of what God is doing in each of us.  We like to talk across the surface of things.  It is just easier to do that.  We feel the urge to jump into a conversation and offer some soothing piece of comfort, offer accountability, or the magic pill that will offer the solution to a deeply complicated problem.

So instead of talking out of our own wit, wisdom, or fear, Crabb offers a new way of looking at relationships and life – SoulTalk.  SoulTalk is his way of leading us into a conversation where God is at the center of every life and every relationship in every situation.  He argues that we do not really know how to talk this way and his book offers a series of steps that help us break bad, religious habits and enter into God’s way of working in people’s lives.

I found Crabb’s formulation of SoulTalk to be deeply freeing and rightly prioritized.  In my role as a pastor I am often with people who find themselves in over their heads, or who have finally decided to talk about God when life falls apart, and the unspoken expectation is that a conversation or two might just do the trick.  His advice is to stop talking and start learning how to listen to what the Spirit is doing and wants to do in an individual’s life.  The primary goal in each SoulTalk conversation is not empathy or solution-finding, but Spirit-finding.

Along the way he has a lot of things to say about the place of God in the Christian’s life that simply need to be heard in a Christian culture where we have exchanged Christ’s life for an expectation of blessing and prosperity.  What would happen if intimacy with God for Christ’s sake were more important to us than the cure to our cancer or the ‘fixing’ of a deeply hurting situation?  According to Crabb, when we put these kinds of things first, we find the greatest thing possible, and God begins to do the work in our souls that is needed.

I highly recommend this book for any believer interested in deepening their discipleship, understanding how to relate with others in Christ, and how to learn to listen to the Spirit in all things.

This review is also posted on Amazon. Like if you found it helpful.

People of the Book Who Don't Read

Christians have been called ‘People of the Book’ for centuries, which is ironic now because so few Christians read.  You might object that more and more books are sold through Christian book stores and online than ever before, but I would counter that most of what is sold is largely shallow and often even less useful than that, and how much of that is actually read?  I often run across Christians who want prayer and input on difficult situations in their lives and it is common for me and people in my position (pastors, etc.) to suggest books to help with the process.  More often than I would like to count, I receive the response, “I’m not a reader.”

It is an oxymoron for a Christian, someone whose faith is explained in the pages of a book, not to be a reader.  There are a myriad of reasons for why people read less and less, but I’m interested here with what happens to you when you don’t read – the Bible or good books.  You can’t not read and get away with it.

So, what happens to the Christian when they do not read?

Over time they can no longer understand their Bibles.

There is a lot of information in a Bible.  There are a lot of themes that trace themselves over hundreds of pages, through dozens of stories, several different forms of literature, and in plenty of doctrines and exhortations.  If a Christian’s primary source of analysis of the world comes in 6-minute increments with commercial breaks severed into even smaller segments then biblical comprehension will be difficult to say the least.

Over time they will misunderstand their Bibles and their faith.

Years ago I was teaching a college/young adult Sunday school class of about 60 people.  We did an exercise in which we traced a quotation from the Old Testament in the New Testament.  The plan, which I thought was highly useful, was to read the context of the OT passage and use that to help us understand the quotation in the New.  The first reaction I received was from a young school teacher who asked, “What do you mean by the context?” The exercise went downhill from there.

Modern media is almost utterly without context, or is at least designed to be consumed without context.  Sitcoms need laugh lines every few seconds.  Linear thought is unnecessary to consume most pop culture.  Popular songs are 3 ½ minutes long as opposed to the popular orchestral pieces played to the masses 250 years ago.  A Christian must fight against the soul malformation that happens in pop culture, tune out of it, and learn to read and think.

Over time they will be mislead about what their faith teaches.

Your Bible requires attentive reading.  Without it individual passages become bludgeons in the hands of all kinds of nefarious and heretical schemes.  Many aggressive atheists do not understand Scripture because they believe they have a handful of knock-down passages which show the Bible to be awful and irrational.  Every one of those I have encountered have been squeaky toys in the hands of children – a lot of annoying noise, no real damage done.  Cults twist passages in ways that make sense to Christians who don’t read.  Pop culture mocks Christianity in ways that frighten Christians who don’t read.

Over time they will stop reading their Bibles altogether.

Why continue to read something so large and difficult to understand when I can get a minute-long devotional from my favorite teacher addressing a practical need in my life which does not even need to reference Scripture or theology?  Isn't it all the same if I come out OK, act like a nice person, and learn how to be a better husband and manage my money a little better? A proof text without context is practically useless.

So what is a Christian to do?  Does it need to be said?  Read.  Read your Bible on a regular basis and read good books which help you understand what is going on in your Bible.  Read an entire New Testament Epistle in one sitting.  Learn to read everything through the lens of orthodox Christian doctrine.  Get used to finishing larger and larger books.  Find a few authors who are good at what they do and can challenge you to reach a little further.

You might be surprised how much better you will be for it.

Correcting Bad Ideas, Clearing the Path for Formation

The Good and Beautiful God: Falling In Love With The God Jesus Knows

James Bryan Smith

C.S. Lewis once wrote to a friend that people like him, who are interested in spiritual matters, typically all make the same mistake of talking a lot about it and almost never doing anything about it. Smith’s book – and the trilogy – sets out to change things. And he does a wonderful job.

In fact, you might say there are two things accomplished in these books at the same time. First of all, Smith addresses a lot of core issues in our understanding of Christian spirituality, and secondly, he associates these chapters with practical instruction in the spiritual disciplines. The form of these chapter pairings are roughly: a misunderstanding and how to rightly understand it, and then how to engage in a practice that will actually bring your life in line with the right understanding.

The first target of Smith’s book is captured in his subtitle, Falling In Love with the God Jesus Knows. To that end, Smith raises several common misunderstandings about God. The first chapter, “God is Good,” sets the stage for the template of the rest of the book. Smith discusses what he considers to be the false narrative of the “Angry God” and follows up with the correction of that notion. God is good, and the better we grasp this truth, the deeper our spiritual formation will run.

One of the unifying concepts in his book is that our spiritual formation is stunted by our misconceptions about God. If we misunderstand who God is and what he is like, we will relate to him and to his kingdom improperly, and thus we will fall short of what God intends for us. I think there is a lot to be said for this idea, and it leads the reader through a very helpful set of discussions about God and who he is.

The second target of Smith’s book is something that sets it apart from many books on spiritual formation. For each misunderstanding/corrected understanding, there is a corresponding activity for the reader to engage in. They are what Smith calls “Soul Training” exercises, and are crafted to be done in the support structure of a small community of people doing the same things. It is good to read a book that combines the “why” of the principles with the “what” of habit so well.

I have not yet completed the trilogy, but it is off to a great start. The book will be especially helpful in small-group and one-on-one discipleship settings where people will be able to engage in some of the disciplines in a supportive and intelligent fashion.

[Review on Amazon]

Beginning to Reflect on the Spiritual Disciplines

LHC is currently going through a coordinated curriculum dealing with the spiritual disciplines of the church, and it is prompting me to think a little more closely about what they are, how we engage with them and what they do (and don’t do).

There are a lot of good definitions and descriptions out there about what they are, and I have compiled my own kind of simple description from several of them. The spiritual disciplines are deliberate activities designed to put us in God’s way.

They are deliberate. We do not grow and mature as Christians on accident or from circumstance to circumstance. If we allow our soul’s formation to simply happen to us, we will be not be unformed spiritually, but malformed. Instead of the malformation available to us through our day-to-day lives, we decide to engage in activities designed to bring us closer to God and the kinds of things he wants to do with our lives.

They are designed. By this I mean there is a tried-and-true historical method we can be a part of. I do not believe it is the case that every activity is a spiritual discipline, though to the properly disciplined every activity becomes an act of worship and discipleship. So, prayer, for instance, is designed and guided by the Scriptures and tradition instead of the whimsy of personal experience. And in this way our experiences grow deeper and deeper as we step into God’s ocean instead of wading in our kiddy pool of subjective reality.

They put us in God’s way. I need to come up with a better analogy, but this one came to me years ago and it still communicates my point. The spiritual disciplines are not the things that “make us better people,” they are the things that get us out of the way and allow God to do his job of transformation. For example, if I want to be hit by a car (I told you it was a bad analogy), I will never succeed by sitting at my keyboard and thinking about it. But, if I get up and walk the few blocks to the interstate and put myself in the way of oncoming traffic, I will likely succeed. It’s the walking that makes the difference.

The spiritual disciplines are like taking a walk to put ourselves in God’s way. Sitting here thinking about life with God is nearly useless. But if I begin to take steps in the right direction there is no telling what God can do. The spiritual disciplines are those steps. They are not magic. They are not instant miracle cures to vice. They are the ways in which God gains access to me – to every part of me – so he can overcome my brokenness and make me into the image and likeness of his Son.

When is the Last Time You Thought About Self-Deception?

I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life
By Gregg A. Ten Elshof
Eerdmans Publishing, 2009.


It may happen more often than you realize, and you are probably aware of it more often than you are willing to admit. We deceive ourselves often, in many ways, and for all kinds of reasons. Ten Elshof has written a provocative book covering a character trait we don’t always deal with. It is a readable, insightful and even wise book. We need to think more often about how and why we deceive ourselves about our behaviors and beliefs, and we need to think more about how to handle our forms of deception.

But there is a twist. Is it possible that some measure of self-deception is not just a benefit, but a God-given benefit? Ten Elshof thinks so. I was originally leery of his attempt to defend a certain level of self-deception, but he handled the matter very convincingly. It now seems obvious to me.

The book opens with a brief overview of the matter of self-deception. Ten Elshof shows that it has been a long time since philosophers and the Christian tradition have paid attention to the matter, even though it used to be a topic of real concern. He sets the stage about our personal deal-making and then moves to five ways we self-deceive.

But we are not left without help. After a couple of rather deflating chapters (the honest reader will probably feel deflated), he begins to show us the ways through. First of all, self-deception may not be the end of the world – at least at first. And secondly, there are very good ways of working around self-deception to a healthy grasp of the truth about yourself.

Of particular value to me were the sections on avoiding group-think and the approach he calls, “Avoiding Hyper-Authenticity.” When Christians try to change their behavior through the imitation of Christ, are we being hypocrites? After all, we are behaving in ways inconsistent with who we “really” are. Isn’t that a form of self-deception as well? The hyper-authentic person comes “as is” and is brutally open and honest about who they are and what they feel. But is that just an excuse to avoid change for the better? Ten Elshof’s discussion at this point is very straight-forward and wise.

This is a great book on a neglected topic.

Our Work is Soulish

“The pastor lives on the belief that Christ holds everything together.” M. Craig Barnes

That line means more and more to me all the time. What pastors do is not predicated on our abilities to “make things work” or get people to do the things we want them to or look the way we want them to look. Our work is soulish. That means we can’t always see or touch what we work with, and just try and measure success!

The holiday season always makes for a busy benevolence fund, and this season is no exception with life so hard for so many right now. I sat across from a man the other day who had nothing but the clothes on his back and what he had in his hands. As we talked I was torn over what I could do for him. He needed the right place to say so he could look for work. He needed cash for a new ID and food stamps. He needed clothes and food. He simply needed about anything anyone could give him. What on earth could a shepherd of souls give a guy in his situation?

The more I let him talk, the more he revealed about his walk with God. Before he lost everything he called himself a Christian, but he let the simple success of his life become his god and he lost track of the One, True God. His life became wrapped up in his own vices, and they ate him alive. But now, with nothing, God had his attention. God is speaking through His Word like never before. God is waking him up at night to prepare him for what he needs to do. The more I prompted him down these paths, the more he sounded like the Psalmist. Over and over he would say that he was learning that it was better to have nothing and have God than have all the riches in the world and lose his Lord.

Before he left, we were able to find some clothes in the church and I gave him some resources and the number of our food pantry. He’s been there before and he will be back again. We did what we could on that day to help his immediate, physical needs.

But the pastor lives in the belief that Christ holds everything together. It isn’t the food, the half-way house, the clothes we gave him that will hold him together. It is Christ. Maybe he needs to be in the place because that is exactly where God wants him; it is exactly where God can speak to him. And if his future is going to be more God-breathed than his past, he needs to listen to the Lord in his poverty and brokenness before a job and money and a place to live tempt him to forget again.

Pastors and churches do what we can to help the immediate and very real needs of people and families. But if we forget that it is Christ that holds everything together, what have we given anyone?

Vomit and Spiritual Formation

Mark 7:14-15 MSG "Listen now, all of you— take this to heart. It's not what you swallow that pollutes your life; it's what you vomit—that's the real pollution"

It is frightening to learn sometimes that our external lives are a reflection of our internal health or dysfunction. What comes out of our mouth (our lives, emotions, hands, etc.) is an inevitable outcome of what we have going on inside of us. To be more specific, what comes out of us is what we put in. What else could it be?

To be as graphic as the Message paraphrase, we can only vomit what we eat.

This points us to a fundamental truth in spiritual formation: our souls hold onto everything we put in them, stores it all, our minds and characters get formed, and our lives inevitably follow. The good news is that now we know how (at least one crucial step) to change what we vomit. Change what you eat.

What does your soul take in on a regular basis? You may say you are a follower of Christ, but who has most of your attention during most of your days?

My own hobby horse compels me to wonder about a lot of the “vomit” from pulpits on Sunday mornings. Are pastors filling their souls with the great things of Christ, good theologians, the fathers and mothers of the faith, or pro sports coaches and CEOs?

The Christian, The Church, The Culture

Part 1

Some further thoughts on how the combination of cultural and spiritual influences work inside the Christian's heart.

There are no cultural institutions or rhythms in our world that encourage church attendance.

It used to be that weekends were different. Businesses closed. People didn’t travel as easily. More families were raised with a sense of Sabbath. Kid’s extra-curricular activities were not scheduled on the weekends. And so forth. Instead of a weekly rhythm that at the least encouraged rest on the weekend and at most made space for church attendance, we are now immersed in a hurried 24-7 whirlwind of activity. Nothing closes…ever. And if we find a store closed in the evenings and on weekends, we are shocked and dismayed. Nothing can be scheduled in the middle of the week anymore, so more and more of our activities happen on the weekend. Making it worse, because we are so booked throughout the week and most weekends, we are tempted to take as many Sundays off as possible. For people living in the beautiful state of Colorado, that means – get outdoors and stay there!

As a result, the normal rhythms of our lives make it hard to stop and do something a little out of the ordinary – sit in one room and engage in worship for a couple of hours. (Forget attending 3 times a week.) As a result, the decision to attend a church service is exactly that – a decision. It doesn’t just “fit” into our normal schedules. And it isn’t something that “just happens.” If church life is to become a regular and healthy part of our lives, it has to become a scheduling priority.

Do you put church in our smart phone calendar like you do your lunch appointments? It may sound crass to do that, but when was the last time you missed a lunch appointment? Because the patterns of the weekly lives we lead don’t make church a priority, we need to do that. We need to put it into our rhythms and activities. And without paying attention to a detail like what we do with ourselves and church once a week (more than that?), we will succumb to the secularized patters of life.

If the patterns of life we are subject to are radically secularized, we are responsible to put the sacred back in its rightful place.

That includes the daily spiritual disciplines, our spiritual friendships and deepening our moment-by-moment walk with God, and it certainly includes the family of God.

The Christian, The Church, The Culture

I have been thinking lately about the combination of church and culture in the hearts of American Christians. Actually, as a pastor, you might say this issue is ingrained in what I do on a weekly basis, but nonetheless, it has been on the surface in recent days. Where does church fit into our priorities and schedules? How are we acculturated to view our spiritual selves? How much of that do we bring into our weekly church habits? Is church (as we know it) really all that important in the long run? So, as any decent blogger, I thought I would think out loud about a few things.

There are no major, publicly accepted institutions that enforce the importance of the spiritual.

The biblical view, which I believe is the accurate anthropological view, is that everything is spiritual (with apologies to Rob Bell). Though we are accustomed to a view in which our normal, day-to-day lives are lived in a non-spiritual and wholly “secular” world, it is more accurate to say that there is nothing that is not God-soaked.

Three of the primary influences in our culture create and reinforce the compartmentalization of our spiritual awareness: politics, journalism, and the university. In the world of politics, religion and spirituality play a unique, if not corrosive role. It is not uncommon, even among the least personally spiritual politicians, for candidates to invoke God or religion in some way. But even if they call it a “personal matter” or utter phrases like, “God bless America,” it is understood that their personal religious beliefs will remain private. They claim it in the public sphere, but they claim it to be only subjectively meaningful. And that is why I call it a corrosive role. We end up learning that the only right role for religion is subjective – religion does not belong in the public square. But because many of our public leaders claim some kind of religious conviction, we are lulled into the sense that a completely private spirituality is all we need. Our political sensibilities simply do not help us understand the proper role of Christian spirituality in our lives.

Journalism is even worse. An industry that is dedicated to up-to-the-second information with little to no context leaves us little to no room for rumination and reflection. If you wanted to, you could find a way to be inundated with “facts” and information 24/7. You would be, in one sense of the term, “informed” but you would have little to know actual understanding about anything you now have rolling around in your head. Headlines are poor substitutes for thought. Come to think of it, a lifestyle of headlines becomes a roadblock to sustained thought.

Add to that the growing reality that most of what passes for mainstream journalism is heavily influenced by a point of view, and you have a recipe for group-think.

For centuries Christians have been known as “people of the book,” meaning not only that they are guided by Scripture, but that they ought to be comfortable with the kind of intellectual and spiritual work that is done through the Book. We are not headline people who jump to quick and dirty conclusions. We are people who soak in the wisdom of the ages through each and every season of life. The wise Christian is a different creature than the well-informed news-junkie.

And then there is the ubiquitous influence of the western university. More and more these institutions have become degree factories in which students pursue a technical degree aiming at getting a high-paying job on the other end. Along the way, some of them are forced to take a required number of “humanities” credits, which in my experience, is not always a welcome experience for them. “Will this help me find a job?” seems to be the guiding principle for both the school and the student.

“Will this help me be a better human being?” is a question neither knows how to answer. But it is ultimately the question for all of us to answer. The Christian’s primary concern here is about the spiritual formation of the human person under God and not how much money they will make in their lives or how much technical skill they possess. If a person becomes wealthy is neither here nor there. Wealth is a tool that can be used virtuously by the well-formed soul, or viciously by the malformed soul. But this is not how we are trained in the world around us, and these concerns are left unanswered and un-addresses by our typical university system.

So then, who will teach us what the spiritual life under Christ looks like? And maybe it is more a matter of modeling/living out the importance of the spiritual than teaching it (in the sense of instructing it).

Funerals Are A Pain

Funerals are a pain. And I don’t mean that in the sense that they are an annoying inconvenience – they are pain. They mark the passing of family or friend, and they stand as that public moment when we all grieve, love on each other, and make steps toward a new normal without the one we loved. As a pastor I sometimes get to watch as families deal with their loss while the pain is very fresh and sometimes the members of families are all at very different places at the same time. One thing I have never appreciated about some is their immediate tendency to try and brush aside the grief with something like, “at least they are in a better place.” Though that is true for those who die with Christ, and though that truth is part of the healing process, we ought not to short-circuit the process of death and grief so quickly.

A recent article in CT deals with the new book, The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come, by Rob Moll. In the article we are encouraged to think more about funerals as an act of spiritual formation and even community formation under Christ. We are, after all, people of a crucified and risen savior living in inevitable physical decay. We ought to therefore embody a community of resurrection – and remember that resurrection implies death. Rob Moll notes:

We live in a culture that has forgotten how to help people measure their days. Through medicine and science, we know more about death and how to forestall it than ever before. Yet we know little about how to prepare people for the inevitable. The church is a community that teaches people how to live well by teaching them how to measure their days. Put another way, when the church incarnates a culture of resurrection—one that recognizes the inevitability of death but not its triumph—it teaches people how to die well.

Have we become so obsessed with living well or living comfortably that we have lost sight of dying well as part of the spiritual act of the believer? If we have neglected this, does it betray a lack of confidence in the providential guidance of God in all seasons of life?

The article is very thoughtful, and I heartily recommend it.