Author Archives: Jeff

Integrated.

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Do you feel like Jesus is a part of your life, and not the center of your life? You’re not alone. What does it mean to “live for Jesus” even when we have all these other responsibilities clamoring for our attention? Does your time with God compete with everything else you must do?

Consider a different approach:

“The prevailing view of life today is that of an individual standing on his or her own, heroically ‘juggling’ various responsibilities: family, friendships, career, leisure, chores, decisions and money. We could also add social responsibilities like political activity, campaigning organizations, residents’ groups and school associations.

 

From time to time the pressures overwhelm us and we drop one or more of the balls. All too often church becomes one of the balls. We juggle our responsibilities for church (measured predominantly by attendance at meetings) just as we juggle our responsibilities for work or leisure.

 

 

An alternative model is to view our various activities as responsibilities as spokes of a wheel. At the center of hub of life is not me as an individual, but us as members of the Christian community. Church is not another ball for me to juggle, but that which defines who I am and gives Christlike shape to my life.”

—Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community, pages 42-43

 

-ISMS: Idealism.

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“Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.” —George Carlin

Do you call yourself a realist? And do others call you a pessimist? Was there perhaps a time when you were a romantic idealist, envisioning things that could be if only we believed and persevered towards them?

I struggle with cynicism on a daily basis, which is not a surprise confession among those who know me well. Recently I’ve begun to own up to my cynicism, which is really nothing more than pride packaged together with a know-it-all perspective and delivered by way of humor. I like to think of myself as smarter than others, and able to laugh about how things actually work as opposed to the common view of how things should work. Cynicism and its cousin sarcasm are insufferable to live with.

It’s actually not ignorant to be an idealist, as long as one’s ideals are true. Of course, being true to one’s ideals is the next step. We are as much what we do as what we say.

In continuing these intermittent series on “-ISMS,” I thought it helpful to label another one that gets both bad and good press. Ideals set before us as something to aspire toward and attain can be a great motivator, but we get into trouble when we foist our ideals on others, expecting them to measure up. Consider the ideal of community, as described by Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it has sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.”

Continuing on to the end of the next paragraph:

“Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”

“… The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly.”

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, pages 26-27; translated with an introduction by John W. Doberstein.

In the Gospel the real is better than the ideal. Let God shatter your ideals of community, for that is His grace to you to bring you something far richer, more beautiful, and more nourishing for your soul.

 

Love is a thread.

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In the garment of justice, your love is an irreplaceable thread.

The Justice Conference
February 24+25 in Portland, Oregon
thejusticeconference.com

A mark of a maturing believer and follower of Jesus is a growing awareness of the true needs in the world, and a love for those people with a passion to help meet those needs and build bridges for the Gospel message. We see the inequity in the world and are not content to wait on governments to move solely for the sake of the marginalized, needy, poor, and destitute. We give up personal comforts so others can have the basic necessities for health and life.

Justice is about reconciliation, which is rooted in love. We who have been reconciled with God, get to see His reconciling work spread to every area of our lives and all of creation. What began as a personal relationship with God adds a public dimension that becomes a transformational relationship with the world. One day the universe will be set right (final justice), though we don’t have to wait until then to meet the needs that are within our control today. The love of Christ compels us.

 

Relationally generous.

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Ever felt too empty to give more to those who ask or need, or forgive one more time that person who doesn’t really deserve it?

Consider the limitations of your own soul, and then move from that tiresome place to consider the infinite grace of God found in Jesus — the One who gave far more than He received, and continues to give to us who don’t deserve one ounce of His compassion.

“Generosity is not contingent on what you receive, but on what you are willing to give… If we only give what we have received, we are nothing more than relational and emotional barterers.”

—Erwin Raphael McManus, Uprising: A Revolution of the Soul, 136.

“In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He Himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”

——Paul speaking to the Ephesian Elders, applying the words of Jesus, Acts 20:35

In a world stocked full of self-style self-help gurus and manuals, the whole “God helps those who help themselves” mottoes fall far short. God helps those who plead on His Mercy. And He gives them more grace than they can manage to give away.

It’s hard to count on one hand how many times I hear as a pastor each week, “I just need to learn how to love and forgive myself more.” That’s an incomplete load of nonsense. (It’s partly true, as are all lies.) Find your dignity and worth in Christ, who has become your identity in all the ways He impressed the Father for you, and quit focusing all your energies on loving yourself — that’s code here in the West for normalizing our innate self-centeredness.

Why is it more blessed to give than to receive? Because that’s what God is like. He’s a Giver, not a Taker. Be like Him and quite taking so much and start giving yourself away. I’ll be seeking the same.

 

Survival.

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The challenge we face, as people and churches, in our fight to survive:

“The ‘ultimate concern’ of most church members is not the worship and service of Christ in evangelistic mission and social compassion, but rather survival and success in their secular vocation. The church is a spoke on the wheel of life connected to the secular hub. It is a departmental sub-concern, not the organizing center of all other concerns. Church members who have been conditioned all their lives to devote themselves to building their own kingdom and whose flesh naturally gravitates in that direction anyway find it hard to invest much energy in the kingdom of God.

They go to church once or twice a week and punch the clock, so to speak, fulfilling their ‘church obligation’ by sitting passively and listening critically or approvingly to the pastor’s teaching. Sometimes with great effort they can be maneuvered into some active role in the church’s program, like a trained seal in a circus act, but their hearts are not fully in it. They may repeat the catchwords of the theology of grace, but many have little deep awareness they and other Christians are ‘accepted in the beloved.’ Since their understanding of justification is marginal or unreal – anchored not to Christ but to some conversion experience in the past or to an imagined present state of goodness in their lives – they know little of the dynamic of justification.

Their understanding of sin focuses upon behavioral externals which they can eliminate from their lives by a little will power and ignores the great submerged continents of pride, covetousness and hostility beneath the surface. Thus their pharisaism defends them both against full involvement in the church’s mission and against full subjection of their inner lives to the authority of Christ.”
—Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Renewal, page 204-05.

Questions » How do you see this in your own heart? In your community?

 

Weight Words: Just do it! This changes everything.

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Every command (imperative) in Scripture is rooted in God’s prior work (indicative) and especially in His identity and ours. Such as Ephesians 5:1-2:

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

It’s doing what we are becoming and being.

We’re God’s children, so we can behave like it.

Consider the implications of the verses that follow:

3 But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. 4 Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving. 5 For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. 6 Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.
—Ephesians 5:3-6

That former life does not describe us any longer, for “at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light” (v. 8). We can leave behind lives of greed and pride, and no longer live as idolaters. Idolaters try to please themselves, and worship themselves or others. How freeing to instead energies towards trying to “discern what is pleasing to the Lord.” (v. 10)

Sometimes I hear skeptical people say “The Bible is just full of do’s and don’ts, a bunch a rules I don’t need.” That simply is not true, and let’s remember that every time God commands something He does it with our best in mind (for our good) and because it is in His nature and shall be in ours.

 

Everything good.

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20 Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, 21 equip you with everything good that you may do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.
—Hebrews 13:20-21

If Jesus had not given up His soul to die for our sins, and rose again from the dead, He would have zero claim over our lives. But since He has done all of that and more — by the blood of the eternal covenant — He has ultimate authority over us, His flock. As the “great shepherd of the sheep” He protects, cultivates, and leads His sheep.

Notice how what Jesus did for us, now becomes what He does in us. He works “in us that which is pleasing in His sight.” And through us: equipping us to do everything good, so we may do His will. God’s fame is the goal.

Everything good happens this way. [for » in » through]

Everything good is enacted and enabled by grace.

 

Unreached.

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Lost from AsiaLink HistoryMaker on Vimeo.

“The missionary question is not ‘Where are their unbelievers?’ And then send a missionary there. There are unbelievers everywhere!

The missionary question is, ‘Where are there peoples who do not have any Christians in them?’ Or don’t have a church strong enough to do the neighbor evangelism that we can do if we just want to do it. That’s the missionary question. That’s the question of peoples and nations. How many are there? How many are unreached?”

Over one billion people worldwide have no opportunity to hear the gospel.

—
Unapproachable, inaccessible in location or situation, untouched, untouchable, disconnected, unable to be met or out of touch. These are all words and descriptions given for yet another word: Unreached.

[HT: Brick in the Valley]