It’s the Simple Things

Just as we can do “no great things, only small things with great love,” so is it also with evil. The temptation to murder is not what causes a man to murder, it is the temptation to annoyance, to a quick comment of disdain, to a thought of anger, that brings a man to kill. We do not enter into tyranny because of the tyrant, but because of the disrespectful child.

As the evil one has been defeated, he can no longer wage war upon us—but like a scattered force living in a jungle, small ambushes and guerilla tactics are continuously at hand for those of us walking through a world in which we know Heaven is above, but are only able to catch glimpses of it through the thick canopy. It is not great evil that we are afflicted with, but small evil: that which finds its way into the cracks of our character, growing hardly noticeable thread-like roots beneath a slab of concrete, and over years and years causing the sidewalk to split and crumble and be overrun with vegetation. Now it is hardly noticeable as a sidewalk. It appears to the passer-by that by some strange occurrence, chunks of cement have been left among a bed of weeds; it seems that it is the cement that is out of place.

Jesus speaks of a seed that is sown among different types of soil. There is perhaps another sower, another type of seed, that tries to take root in the soil yielding harvest. Trees do not come from above and mash themselves into the ground, they grow from small beginnings beneath the soil and become something huge and immovable. So it is with temptation: it is not the great and terrible things we see causing mass ruin that we should concern ourselves with, it is the small things. “Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick,” as C.S. Lewis explains in The Screwtape Letters.

Though some may say that we do not need to concern ourselves with the small things in our life, if only the big things seem aligned—how much it is the opposite! For we see small and big with the world’s eyes: our actions, possessions, and experiences. But the eyes of heaven see only one’s heart, one’s motive, one’s true thoughts and desires. How can a thirty-story building stand if the first floor’s beams are weak? In the same way, we must be on the watch for the beginnings of temptation, the smallest deterrence from the Way, if we want to avoid great calamity. As Shane Claiborne says, “the tempter’s best lie is 99% true,” and it is this that we must be most on guard for.

Inside Out

Perhaps Christians should be less concerned with living out their faith, and instead be more intent on living in their faith.  To live in faith—from within my faith—so that as I go I make disciples; not by worrying myself with how much I do, or how many things I am doing “right” versus how many things I am doing “wrong,” or how many results I see, but rather by being intimately connected to and in love with an impossible God.

Our commands from Jesus are to love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Too often I attempt to love God by loving my neighbor, while Jesus explicitly states them as two separate things.  I can never try to find God first in people.  I can never be satisfied with God only when I am attempting to love my neighbor.  I cannot let myself mistake the feeling of loving someone else or seeing just one facet of God’s work for God’s true fullness and being.  I must first be satisfied with God alone, in silence and solitude, before I attempt to love my neighbor, for if I try to love my neighbor first not only will I fail but I will become addicted to God’s work rather than God Himself.

When I am fully satisfied with my Father—with only His being, and my being near His—then I will inevitably love my neighbor as well.  A love for God creates a love for others.  And when I love others, I will fall more in love with Jesus.  It is a never-ending cycle that feeds itself.  But I won’t ever be able to love my neighbor more by attempting to create love for them myself.  I can never cultivate love by action.  Unless I love with the Holy Spirit’s love that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 13, I will certainly fail.  I will never learn to love others more unless I first find the Holy Spirit within myself, and am satisfied with God’s presence alone.  I must live in my faith if I want to see my faith grow out.

When Means Become Ends

Christians should always be pursuing social justice, but never for the sake of social justice.  Social justice is one of many different stepping stones towards seeing the Good News come alive, but without following the other stepping stones[1] all to the end of our Father’s glory—without the Holy Spirit as our motivation, our purpose, our passion, our guide, and our sustenance—all of our efforts for social justice are in vain.  Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:3 that “if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.”  If we are running the race, then we are running the race to win—to the finish line, not to anything that we pass by on the way.  Social justice will be passed through on the way to the finish line but it is never the finish line itself.

We can do extreme things, but we can never become extremists.  We should never tie our hands with an excess of words[2].  And we should never become sold out to an ideal or a movement instead of the Great I AM.  We should never seek to do extreme things, we can only seek the way of Jesus and leave it up to the world to determine whether or not what we do is radical or extreme.  As Shane Claiborne says, “The only reason God’s cultural refugees seem so peculiar is because of how far the world has moved from God’s dream for it.”  It doesn’t appear that Jesus sought to be extreme or radical, He simply lived out the will of His Father in heaven, and it was seen as radical by the world.  We are not rebels, we are simply alien residents.

Our purpose is not to fight against the world but to bless the world.  Much of what we do might clash with the world’s ways, but this is never our sole intent.  The Gospel is good news to all people, and anything that is not good news is not the Gospel.  This is not to say that it will all be easy…but it certainly will all be freeing and hopeful.

Let us live lives set apart from the ways of the world, and let those set apart ways never drive the world into further darkness but rather draw it up toward the everlasting light of Jesus Christ.

1. Sharing the Gospel, prayer, personal and intimate relationships with Jesus, fellowship, sharing of possessions, breaking bread together, etc.
2. As Thomas Merton says, “If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, we will never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.”  And as one of my friends has said, “We must do with our hands what our mouths are itching to say.”

Splinters

Distractions—things which are usually felt to be pleasurable yet take our mind off of seeing heaven—quickly become habits, in which the distractions become much more desirable but much less pleasurable.  Habits are the beginnings of idols.  We must protect ourselves from distraction then, for Satan is most successful when taking things from us rather than when giving us more.  We must seek poverty (which is more than simply the “things” we may or may not possess) so that he has nothing which he is able to take from us, and we must be on guard of the small things, for it is the small things that find their way into the deepest areas of our hearts of our hearts and then do the most damage as they grow without our knowledge.  We must be careful to defend against what C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters says is the most dangerous way of temptation:

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Quotes

Hopefully at least one of these will inspire you as they did me until I can write something of my own that is worth reading.  Still not sure who determines what’s worth reading and what’s not, and even I don’t know how or where I get that information, but here’s some quotes nonetheless.

“Aim for heaven and you get earth thrown in, aim for earth and you get neither.” -C.S. Lewis

“If someone asks if we are Christ-followers, can we say ‘Tell me what you see?’” -Shane Claiborne

“After the game, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.” -Unknown

“The solution to life is life itself.  Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis, but first of all by living.  For until we have begun to live our prudence has no material to work on.  And until we have begun to fail we have no way of working out our success.” -Thomas Merton

“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.” -Screwtape the demon (C.S. Lewis)

“The only reason God’s cultural refugees seem so peculiar is because of how far the world has moved from God’s dream for it.  We should live in ways that don’t make sense without God.” -Shane Claiborne

Too Young to Understand

I have been praying that the church would be under divine protection from the distorted holiday season we’ve entered into; so much of what America celebrates conflicts with what I read in the Bible.  It seems that we have come to celebrate exactly what Jesus came to free us from…

I am told more and more frequently that my ideas on materialism, giving, the poor, Americanism, the modern church, and what the gospel is meant to be are impractical, misinterpreted, unrealistic, and other such discouragements. Yet I am convinced that I still do not have near the innocent, childlike faith that God’s people should have. I have prayed, I have searched scripture, and I do not find any instance in which the people who are completely in love with God lived practical, realistic lives. Very little of the gospel makes sense to me (by sense I mean by the world’s standards: what I have been taught by other people, “common sense” and the regular workings of modern American society and such) but the more I devote myself to following the way of Christ and the less I cling to everything the world says is wise, the more I discover a cfonunsig, SURPRISING, and unnaturally Exquisite joy about everything I do. If someone cannot believe in this God they cannot see, they should try living as He commands, and they will undoubtedly begin to see Him – not with their eyes, but with something else. There is another way of “seeing” inside us all, but it is so often unrecognized because we fail to open our “eyes.” I do not have clear and explicit explanations and descriptions of this, but I do not need to; all I need to do is live so that people actually believe I am “seeing” something they are not, and in doing so make this “sight” something irresistible.

The church is here to bless a world with Christ’s love that does not deserve it, and to show that the way of Jesus truly is most desirable. We are not after results (though we rejoice when there are), we are after a love that transcends all wisdom and knowledge. We are after a world of peace, a world that reflects heaven. We are not here to preach and prove and explain where and how and why the lost are wrong. We are the church of the living God, and we are here as models – small, not-quite-built-to-scale examples made out of scraps and broken bits and pieces – of the immeasurable love (and grace and mercy and forgiveness and joy and so on) of the resurrected Jesus Christ, who taught things so very backwards from the ways of the world that it seems like total nonsense. It sometimes is even offensive, how foolish the cross is. But to see things we have never seen, we must do things we have never done. And seeing as how Jesus’ life is the only life that has ever truly been different from ours, being without sin, I can find no other way to approach my Savior than to live a life that will be called impractical, misinterpreted, unrealistic, and other such encouragements.

Oh, what the scandalous grace of God can do to a man...

Don’t Vote for Jesus…

While you will have already voted (or let the election pass you by) by the time you read this, I still feel that it is important that I share.

The American church is convinced that they are to vote for whatever political party or presidential candidate most supports their morals and the teachings of scripture.  But it seems to me that the separation of church and state must exist, not because I want to live in a country that is full of people who don’t know Jesus, but because the power of God is far beyond the power of government, and I would hate to see Christianity diminished to nothing more than legal issues that are enforced by mere men.  I prefer Christianity as it IS presented in scripture: a complete salvation of humanity’s depravity—not enforced on people who desire something else, but praised by people who desire nothing less.

Voting for a political party because they will make your morality into legality is simply agreeing to raise up a country of pharisees. This does not at all negate our morality (which is from Christ alone)—for we must protect our relationship with Jesus at all costs—it is simply going about it in a terribly wrong way.  The pharisees brought guilt and condemnation to those who did not follow the strict laws put in place by the twisting of scripture, and were concerned only with whether or not the laws were being followed.  This is no different from Christians being so eager to turn their moral beliefs into government-enforced legalities.  The change of president should never affect how we live out the gospel.  If we are hoping for a change in government so that we might finally be able to live how we are called to live, we will only become more disguised in our initial failure to live as Christians, because if this is the case we have not been living as Christians to begin with.

The dissatisfaction with the way moral issues are dealt with has nothing to do with the government.  Yes, making abortion or homosexual marriages illegal will decrease their occurrences.  But Jesus is far less concerned with the frequency of sin, and far more concerned with being in an intimate relationship with his people.

Discipline does not make people righteous.  Laws do not change people’s hearts.  Jesus taught this over and over again.  It is only the power of the Holy Spirit in each individual person’s life that can ever defeat the tools of Satan.  And if we are relying on the power of government to impress our heart condition on others, we are setting ourselves up for a very great fall, and we are putting very little faith in the power of God.  Instead, the church must begin to live the gospel of Jesus Christ.  If there is such a problem with abortion, love those who have had them and who are planning on having them.  If there is such a problem with homosexual marriages, love a homosexual.  If there is such a problem with war, live a life that overflows with joy from peace.  I, for one, am sick and tired of Christians talking about all the things they hate, and preaching to each other every Sunday about how wrong certain things are, and then driving in their six-figure vehicles back to their cozy houses with guest bedrooms and big-screen televisions, where they remain safe from the afflictions of the world.

The church must show the world that there is a better way to live.  Do not ever think that we can substitute legality for living the gospel in our own lives.  Do not ever let government replace the call of Christ.  We must bring Jesus to the dark places of the world if we want to get rid of those dark places.  It is on us, not the government, to make life with God irresistible.  If we live for Him, so much more will be accomplished than obedience to scripture.  Christianity is about so much more than sin management.  The power of God is so much greater than anything we can imagine…

Don’t vote for Jesus if you refuse to live for Him.

Control is something out of my control

To say that God is in control is to preach a reassuring truth.  Responding to that by doing nothing is completely contradictory to that truth.  Usually when it is said that God is in control, what is meant is that He will take care of things.  The first problem with this idea is that it subjects His control to the way we think things ought to be taken care of.  The other problem is not with the phrase itself, but how it is most commonly used—the tendency is to say that God is in control so that we won’t have to take care of things ourselves.

The question that has to be asked is, what is God in control of, and how is His control manifested?  While the technical or theological answer is that He is in control of everything, the point I am trying to get at is that He is in conrtol of us, and He uses us to do His work.  If it is true that the Holy Spirit resides within us, then it is nonsense to do nothing in response to saying that God is in control, for by doing so we are actually limiting what God has control of in ourselves, and misinterpreting inaction for faith.  But as Fireflight says, “faith is moving without knowing,” and as 1 Corinthians 5:7 says, “we walk by faith and not by sight.”  We cannot have faith while sitting still.  If God is truly in control we must realize that He is within us, and that it is us He has control over, and that we must live the life He has for us by faith, rather than watch it pass us by without.

Call to Arms

The church is not a building, it is a family.
The church is not a stage, it is a hospital.
The church is not a weekly commitment, it is a way of life.
The church is not a clique, it is an army.
The church is not a game, it is sustenance.
The church is not for conscience, it is for God.
The church is not for the pretty, but for the broken.
The church is not to look good, but to be saved.

We are the church.  Brothers and sisters, helping each other back into health, laying our lives down for one another, fighting a spiritual war side by side, depending on one another, praising our source of life the ever-merciful God our Lord, boasting in our weaknesses and inadequacies that He has made strong and complete, and sharing in the eternal gift of true life, given freely and abundantly, and constantly renewed by the Spirit of Life that is within us.  Let us be something that demons fear and angels praise, something that Satan hates and God loves, something that demands the evil one’s attacks and requires the supernatural, miraculous protection of our heavenly Father through Jesus Christ.

Play by the RULES!

School has a tendency to surprise me.  Perhaps I am not alone in this.  The transition from nothing to everything is quite overwhelming, and things one does on a regular basis (such as watching movies, writing blogs, playing video games…and quite unfortunately, sometimes things of greater importance) are forgotten and replaced with the new-found chaos that educational institutions love to offer.

Simply put, I haven’t written anything in a very long time because I have been trying to adapt to a new schedule.

That being said, I’m going to cut right to the chase and share what God has spoken to my heart lately.  I feel like I can say with confidence that a great number of Christians try to live their life by the rules that are set in the Bible.  It is the only thing we have to go by, after all, isn’t it?

The problem with this idea is that there are no rules in the Bible.

Now let me explain myself, because I have a feeling that I will receive a lot of flak for that statement.  God obviously says in Scripture that one must do this or that, so how can there be no rules in the Bible?  But I am a firm believer in the idea that Jesus meant what he said in Matthew 11:28-30, and having to abide by an exorbitant amount of rules that I don’t necessarily understand does not exactly compute with that verse.  And it seems to me that if salvation is an eternal thing that cannot ever be lost (as explained here), there is no real reason or motivation to follow those rules, because there is no punishment.

And this is what God has put on my heart of late: God does not have rules for us, God has hopes for us. He has this life that is made available to us through Jesus Christ, this life of love and joy and hope and peace, something BIGGER and BETTER than any life we could choose to live on our own.  And sin is settling for less than what God has to offer.

If you were to go through every single law put in place in the Old Testament law and really dig into it, you would discover that each and every one was put in place because it was in the best interest of the people during that time.  Jesus’ fulfillment of OT prophecy and institution of the New Covenant aside, OT law doesn’t apply to us because we have technology and medicine and research that protects us from many of said laws.  (Note: This is not at all a rejection of the Old Testament—I am a witness to the fact that God still uses the Old Testament all the time, and in an infinite number of ways—simply a further explanation as to why OT law was put in place to begin with.)  Everything about Jesus points to the idea that every single law in the Bible was not spoken by God to cause behavior modification, but to protect the people’s relationship with God.  Because God is jealous for us.  He wants nothing to get in the way of a relationship with Him.  And scripture proves that; because the Bible is not a rulebook, it is a love letter.  And abiding by the “rules” in it do not make us better people or any more secure in our salvation—our salvation is eternally secure in Christ Jesus—they simply show us how to be more in love with our Savior.

That is a light burden.