Thursday, February 28, 2008

The Point of Church

Everything revolves around love in the kingdom of God. Those things that are most important to God issue from love. Case(s) in point:

1) Obedience [of faith] to Christ arises out of love. We cannot force ourselves to obey Christ out of sheer will or intellect. It takes love. If one loves Christ, obedience follows naturally. It is that one who loves Christ and obeys him for whom the love of God will be efficacious in turn.

2) Moving in the Spirit with great faith and as an astonishing witness has point and purpose only when arising out of love. Seemingly spiritual giants are just dogs in the street without love. Those things that are here for a season, but are bound to pass away cannot carry any weight at the threshold of eternity.

3)
A personal friendship with God arises out of love. Since God is love, to get along with him one must adopt love too. Not like a mask, but as a transforming reality of the heart. When we start where we are and "go with the flow" of love (God) living in us, his love is brought to fullness within us. Certainly, one can never get along with God and not be loving like him.

So where is the place of doctrine in all this? Well, at the end of time, it will not matter, nor will anyone care whether or not one was Arminian or Calvinist; dispensational or covenantal; pre-, post- or a- millennial; charismatic or cessationist. What will matter is not the practice of doctrine, but the practice of love. Don't get me wrong, doctrine is important, it's just not more important than practicing love.

Church, ultimately, is not about religious duty, nor religious teaching but about relationships between brothers and sisters, and love, not doctrine, defines that. If one goes through life attending church, committed to the group but never connecting to people, one errs and misses the matter of utmost importance. If one studies the Bible and knows church doctrine, but does not know his brethren he has missed the most significant doctrinal point.

Church is the place (and the period) where we learn to love one another and add others to the circle of love. The central reality of any church should be love and the way it connects people to people. If we strive for all else and miss that, we will have missed everything. If we lay anything on the line, if we sacrifice anything near and dear, let it be to further the love we have one for the other. That is the point, after all, of church.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Rock Gardens & Weed Beds

Most folk think there is something solid about being middle of the road and something bad about being extreme. I can see where in many situations that is wise, but it's anything but when it comes to Christianity. The milquetoast middle is nothing but a muddle. Offered for your consideration: the parable of the sower. The extremes were clear in their result whether for good or bad, whereas the mucky middle had the look, even the promise of fruitfulness, but alas, not the substance. Why? Only by selling out can we achieve what was intended by scattering the gospel seed in the first place. Only a single-minded vision of submitting to what "Christ in us" is attempting to grow can make our lives fruitful in God.

In God, fruitfulness is what counts. For the seed of the Word, for the seed which is the Word, to get anything done in us that he came to do, there has to be singularity in the soil of our hearts. Our soil must be set apart, exclusively, for the growth and fruitfulness of that one seed. It must yield no room nor nutrient for anything else to grow. If our soil is a mixed bag, chunky with rocks, or infested with other kinds of seed, our appearance may seem fine for a time, but over time, our fruitfulness (or fruitlessness) will reveal the unfortunate truth.

Like any farmer planting his fields, when God plants Christ in us, he expects Christ out of us (CICO). For that to happen, nothing can compete with the seed that he's scattered on the soil of our lives. When rocks and weeds compete for the soil with that seed, the seed's growth is stunted and its fruit is nonexistent. God wants an abundant harvest, how can we offer him rock gardens and weed beds?

Thursday, February 14, 2008

The Message In Wrath

We don't hear much about the wrath of God anymore. I wonder if we're missing something important in ignoring and/or undercutting its message. There is certainly no absence of "discussion" about the subject in the Bible: do we need to be "discussing" it more?

Romans 1 tells us the wrath of God is in the process of being revealed from heaven. Obviously, the subject is important enough for God to include it in his self-revelation in nature. In other words, this is something we should know about him, he wants us to understand this. Life as we know it screams at us in no uncertain terms that God is upset, and he wants us to get the message. The repercussions of it echo incessantly rattling everything this time and plane.

Prophets, one after the other, tried to establish God's wrath as a stimulant to reasonable thinking on our part. Not that we live in fear of punishment, that is the Devil's ploy, but we should live in sober judgment discerning the nature of "how things work." When sky walking on a steel girder stories above the security of earth, that sinking feeling that discerns gravity is a boon to clear thinking and careful stepping. Surely wisdom owes a debt of gratitude to the wrath of God!

The death and burial of Jesus Christ reveal the true extent of God's wrath. The witness of life (see Romans 1 above), and the deadness of our souls invoke a certain trembling in us, perchance even the whisper of God's voice reaches us.
We hide, trembling in the bushes, knowing we are sinners and children of wrath by nature. We fear the face of him who sits on the throne. Nothing could coax us out of our hiding places but the sure knowledge that our sins were fully expiated through Christ's sacrifice and we were thereby reconciled to God. The outrageousness and brutality of Christ's passion impeccably scribe the fearful breadth of God's wrath against sin.

Do we even have a real purpose for ministry and evangelism without paying due deference to the wrath of God? Ours is a
ministry of reconciliation. The quality and depth of God' grace and forgiveness cannot be seen in proper relief apart from the backdrop of his animus against sin. He who is perfect in grace is also perfect in wrath. Have we truly delivered any message at all if we haven't revealed the message in his wrath?

Monday, February 4, 2008

The Essence of True Repentance


It's the first word of the gospel message. It is simultaneously commanded by God and granted by him. John baptized unto it, and commanded fruit in keeping with it, but what is it? The simple definition is a change of mind or heart, but often we have a change of mind or heart (or at least we think we have), only to find ourselves back in the same place far sooner than we ever thought possible.

Is repentance meant to be a yo-yo experience, the penitent returning to the same place of regret over and over? Not ultimately, but I think we sometimes get stuck there. We need more than godly sorrow, guilt has its place, but I think it's more stagnating than instigating. If such is to be any more than wasted emotion, we need to get up and climb over that hill to see a new horizon. Repentance is about transit-- it moves us from where we were to someplace new.

Truth is: regret is not the same as repentance, even though it is a stop on the way. It is possible for one to reach the conclusion that God considers a thing wrong, and even to regret that it’s been done, but still not see the thing the same way that God does. That point of agreement is where the journey toward repentance crests the final hill to see the quest's goal. For the one who sees what God says, but does not see as God sees, only Romans 7 can be his or her lot-- overcoming certainly will not be!

Regret can never be the source of victorious, overcoming behavior in the future. Even if determined action is taken against regretted behavior, that will only end up attaching a collar and leash to a wild leopard. It does not and cannot change the nature of the beast. The imposition of an alien viewpoint cleanses the soul no better than sweeping rubbish under a carpet cleans the house. For repentance to produce fruit, a sincere realization that God was right and we were wrong needs to arise in the soul and overwhelm heart and mind.

We can beat ourselves up endlessly for the stupid things we do, say and think, but that won't translate into victory unless that "aha moment" distills in our souls and we see it God's way. Not just see it, though, we have to actually agree with God. That's not something you can do by checking a box at the end of a user agreement and move on, it's something birthed in the soul and wakened in brokenness. Only then can we truly relinquish our will to his, come into agreement with him and achieve change.

Only then can we walk together with God. The prophet asked, "Can two walk together except they be agreed?" The answer to rhetorical questions is always obvious, but sometimes the applications are anything but. The answer to effective repentance is out there waiting for us to connect the dots. From the intersection of Godly Sorrow and the Need of Change the sign post points toward the next stop called AgreementOn the other side of that ash heap we're trying to climb over is the junction where we and God meet and travel on together. 

It's the essence of true repentance.