moving to a new blog

I will stop publishing to this blog as of today. I started writing this blog shortly after leaving the Elder Board in 2007. For a couple of years, posts focused on dealing with residual issues related to church, church attendance, church doctrine, and the whole purpose of church life. What I wrote was an honest expression of my struggles with leaving institutional Christianity in search of the God of heaven. Since my writing frequently referenced local personalities and organizations, I maintained anonymous authorship and a tight circle of readers.

Over the last year or so, I have noted a slow transition in the focus of my writing. I have moved from criticism and cynicism (sometimes rather severe) toward subjects related to my interior life and what God is doing to remake me into one of His. More Christians are likely to track with me now than when I was writing about “all that was wrong with Christendom.” Since the nature of my compositions is shifting, it seemed appropriate to move to another blog, one that will not be anonymous, but open to a larger audience (my small group, for example.)

So that interested parties might know “where I’m coming from,” I have copied about 20 posts from this blog to the new one. These are posts that I consider to be the most important and formative in my journey, posts that remain highly prominent in my thinking to this day.

Finally, for those of you who have been following me throughout, thank you for your support and your comments. And I hope that you will continue to pray for me (us, really!), that  our “love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help [us] to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ [we] may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.”

Click here to go to the new blog:
http://hebendsdown.wordpress.com

   

only what’s done for Christ

Congregations in many evangelical churches sing a hymn composed by C.T. Studd titled, “Only One Life.” The chorus includes this line:

Only one life,’ twill soon be past,
Only what’s done for Christ will last.

This hymn is typically sung at the end of a sermon on personal evangelism. The text for the sermon is usually I Cor 3:11-13:

For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work.

The sermon’s message is clear: personal witnessing is the most important activity of your life and everything else you do pales in comparison. Therefore, if you don’t want to waste your life, start witnessing and getting as many people as you can into the Kingdom. That is what will make your life worthwhile.

A pastor who engages in evangelism and discipling can immediately justify the eternal worth of his life’s work (it’s usually a “his”). The Biblical principle that is presumably invoked is that those engaged in ministry are doing God’s work. How common is it that a young person says, “I don’t want to waste my life. I’ll go to seminary to train for a job that will allow me to do God’s work full time”? But, what about the rest of us, who have “worldly” jobs that consume eight or more hours of our day engaged in activities that have nothing obvious to do with the Kingdom of God? Are we truly wasting our lives? An answer in the affirmative lurks like a demon below the surface.  Even if we share the gospel with people on a routine basis while on the job (something that is rare, indeed!), the vast majority of our time is consumed doing something other than God’s work. The typical congregant, listening to an “only what’s done for Christ will last” sermon is bound to accept a large amount of guilt, but is not likely to change his or her life.

As if psychologically stifling guilt were not enough, there are other serious problems stemming from the “only what’s done for Christ” approach to life as we generally understand it. Many Christians deal with the guilt by giving money to those who are engaged in God’s work, and the more money we earn, the better! But let’s tell the truth: does high income actually translate into a high level of support for Christian workers? Surveys indicate that more than 50% of Christians donate little or nothing to their church’s ministries and, on average, Christian giving hovers around 3% of income, falling rather far short of the proverbial tithe of 10%. Not only does our work lack intrinsic worth, we are largely unsuccessful at rescuing it’s worth by sacrificial giving for the sake of the Kingdom.

There is yet another consequence of the “only what’s done for Christ” sermon that is rather serious, partly because it is so subtle. We think that, if we’re not engaged in God’s work, our jobs are worthless in an eternal sense. “It won’t last” means that whatever we accomplish in our jobs will be burned up in the end, so from an eternal standpoint, our jobs make no real or permanent difference. Being fully convinced of this perspective precludes any attempt at discerning whether or not our jobs might actually be God’s work. We are robbed, thereby, of the possibility that God is actually interested in what we do from day to day, with consequences that are far reaching. Those Christians inclined to pray at all find it easy to justify supporting a pastor’s sermon preparation in prayer, but praying for a mom who must grocery-shop for the family at the same frequency that a pastor delivers a sermon seems like a waste. Surely, God is far more interested in this week’s sermon that the food that mom picks up at the store.

Swirling around this whole problem is the sacred-secular dualism. We have cleverly, and to our near destruction, partitioned life into the sacred and secular, when God makes no such division. Consequently, we see God’s work as being distinct from all other work: only what’s done for Christ will last, and the rest is an utter waste of time.¹ Since most of us are not missionaries or pastors, engaged full time in God’s work, then, by definition, most of us are wasting our lives as we trudge off to work every day to jobs that don’t hold a lot of meaning for ourselves, God, or the future. If this is true, then millions upon millions of Christians need to quit their jobs and becoming full-time Christian workers.

There is an alternative, though. We could decide that the whole construct is wrong-headed and contrary to Scripture, and then figure out a truly Biblical understanding of God’s work.

Any thoughts?

¹ If you have any lingering doubts about the fact that we divide work into God’s work and other work, then consider this. Who has the more important job? Is it the man who lives in a foreign country whose sole mission in life is to plant churches amongst a people who would otherwise have no hope of hearing the gospel? Or is it a school teacher in the United States? The knee jerk response would be, of course, the former. Let’s put the problem in stronger relief. A young person comes to you and says, “I really want to do God’s work.” Would not the general recommendation be that this person check into seminaries or do an internship in a church ministry? Who amongst us would suggest that, if he really wants to do God’s work, he should become a garbage collector?

whether we live or die

Do you ever read a Bible verse and think, “Yea, right.” Here’s one:

The LORD performs righteous deeds
And judgments for all who are oppressed.
(Ps 103:6)

God executes judgment for all the oppressed, but how can this be? Neither history nor personal experience seem to corroborate this assertion. In fact, God’s own people, generation after generation, spent 430 years in slavery under the oppressive hand of the Egyptians. No doubt, even fifty years into this 430-year period of slavery, the Jews were wondering about the claim that God is on the side of the oppressed.

If the Bible communicates truth about God and the universe in which we live, then Ps 103:6 must be entirely compatible, not just with the Jewish slavery in Egypt, but with similarly difficult situations in our own lives. But, harmonizing Biblical doctrine with real life can be downright difficult. When hard times come, and they invariably do, we are told to cheer up, because “God causes all things to work together for good for those who love Him.” Tell that to someone who, 400 years before Moses showed up on the scene, died without hope that the Jews’ lot in life would ever change. Better yet, quote Romans 8:28 to a Jew whose grandparents died in a German concentration camp during WWII. Platitudes, especially  Biblical ones, fall on deaf ears. It is too easy to cite the Exodus as evidence of the truth of passages like Ps 103 and Romans 8 because we know the end of the story. And as the saying goes, all’s well that ends well. If it were not for the Exodus, there would not have been a Moses, a Torah, a temple, the prophets, the Christ. When it comes to post-biblical events, though, we do not have the luxury of hindsight, so we are left on our own to decipher their meaning and significance. Frequently, we draw devastatingly wrong conclusions. I have a Jewish friend who told me, “I don’t believe in God for one reason: the Holocaust.”

*   *   *   *   *

“I don’t believe in God because…” What follows the ellipsis varies from person to person, but at bottom, the issue is a refusal to acknowledge the presence and the rule of God. That “things happen,” like the Exodus or the Holocaust, does not make belief in God harder. The shoe is on the wrong foot. Lack of belief in God makes it impossible to come to terms with the Exodus and the Holocaust. Every one of us has faced challenges and adversities, though they may pale in comparison to the Holocaust. How we think about our “everyday” adversities will inform us about our views of the Holocaust and other horrendous events in human history, which are practically without number.

In the midst of adversity, my natural tendency is to focus on my own fear and pain, which makes me a slave to adversity, unable to live free inside of it. Rather, I need to practice living in a place where God is central and I need to do this when life is reasonably good so that when hard times come, and they will, I will be ready. What does “God is central” mean? It means that His plans are the important ones. His ends need to be my ends. He tends to me because He wants me, not because He wants to coddle me and meet my every whim. He loves me, which is to say that He wants me for Himself and for His glory, not so that I will be a success as defined in my own corrupt eyes. He loves me for me; I must love Him, for Him, which is an arrangement that sounds a lot like marriage.

Let’s take two people who, presumably in love, are seeking the unity of marriage. While it is incredible to the rest of us, invariably, a newly-minted married couple believes that life together will be bliss. At the wedding, hope abounds, and the vow that each repeats to the other seems to them nothing more than a formality, really: “for better or worse…” Soon, though, life happens and half the couples bail on the vow and each other. Drawing from Ephesians 5 (not to mention many Old Testament passages), marriage is like the relationship that we have with our God. In the context of a commitment to unity with God, the serious disciple makes the same vow as a married couple: “for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.” But, sooner or later, everyone comes face to face a frustratingly difficult question: if God is all-powerful, then how does the worse, the poorer, and the sickness every happen, never mind the Exodus and the Holocaust?

Sin has wrecked our world. Unless we accept this basic tenet of the Scriptures, we cannot make sense out of the Holocaust. And, frankly, we cannot make sense out of anything else, either. An uncountable number of horrors, large and small, have resulted from sin, and the bombardment is relentless. Day after day, month after month, decade after decade, millennia after millennia, sin penetrates and devastates our lives and our world. There are the obvious consequences of sin: dictators; drug dealers; muggings and murder; wars and other disputes between countries and groups. Sin also has consequences that I might not think about:  the polluted air that I breathe every day; food that clogs my arteries; unequal (unfair) distribution of food, electricity, vaccines, education, the Internet, washing machines and flush toilets; being forced to pay (by taxes) for weapon systems that will kill thousands, if not millions, of people; advertising that very effectively convinces me that having some created thing is better than having the Creator, Himself; sensual pleasures that supplant spiritual joy and consolation; lies that attack our very faith in God every day. Do you own a cell phone? Think about this…

There is virtually no end to the list of the price we have paid for sin in our lives and our world.

After the Romans arrogantly nailed God to a cross, just to get rid of Him, can we imagine that there is any  boundary or limit to sin? Should I even be surprised at my own sin? If I am surprised at anything, it is that God did not immediately effect a permanent and severe penalty for my very first sin, as He did for Satan and his angels.  Imagine this for a moment: the Roman soldiers, after nailing God’s only Son to the wooden beams, stand the cross up in a hole in the ground. With a thud, the vertical beam strikes the bottom of the hole and Jesus feels the jolt through every joint in his body; the crude nails rip at his flesh and splinters dig into his back. The Father, watching all this from heaven, is getting more and more furious that the Romans are treating His thoroughly holy and innocent Son unjustly, and with scorn and contempt. The Father sent the Son to love people and then those same people are treating him horribly. In a flash of anger, the Father destroys the entire Roman Empire in one second. Gone is the mighty Roman Empire, its people, government, and institutions. Nicodemus and Joseph take Christ down off the cross. Together with Mary, they tend to his wounds.

If you can tell me why God did not stop the crucifixion of His precious Son in whom He was well pleased, I will tell you why He does not stop sin from wrecking our world and our lives. In the meantime, in submission to the wisdom of God, who is able to turn evil into good, for there is no one more powerful than He, my prayer must be… therefore, whether I live or die, I am the Lord’s.