So it's been a while, huh?

I understand the phalanx of frustration that is felt by all of my adoring readers and that you feel lost and alone without my guidance, wit and foolishness as witnessed in this blog. So for all of you who read this (both of you would be my guess), if you read it, call me or email me just so I know. If I don't get an email or a call from you referencing this number 235664 then I will realize that I am speaking only to myself in this blog and it will cease to exist.

I question and I wonder about a lot of things. I have serious doubts about the whole purpose of things outside the work of God. Now, by "the work of God" I am including his work in the world and our participation in that work. I hope that all who read this recognize that I put extremely great value on these two things. In fact, they rank right up there with Laura Johnson, my three kids, Mountain Dew, and the Kentucky Wildcat basketball team (damn their scrawny hides allowing North Carolina to beat them!). But don't you just question the value of a lot of the other things that go on in the world? I mean, really, who needs a 46" plasma tv or even a 52" (or I just heard advertised today a projector that will give you the equivalent of a 92" picture)? How close do I really need to be to enjoy what little there is to enjoy in television and movies today? I wouldn't be able to actually taste the Mountain Dew on screen even if it was seven feel tall! And while there are players on the Wildcats that really are seven feet tall, I don't need them running back and forth across my wall. But I digress.

There are only a few things that really matter: love for and by God, love of family and the fulfillment that comes from following God's lead. I want to be more and more like Christ, more and more willing to live a life of sacrifice and suffering in honor of his life and sacrifice. But when God allows those things to come my way, the first thing I do is panic or get mad or get afraid. I refuse to get afraid or mad or panic anymore. I have the things that matter, the rest will just have to forget it.

Is it possible to exist outside of grace?

Truly I wonder. I try so hard to be all that I should be, all that I am supposed to be, all that I have been created to be. Instead, I miserably fail. Those who count on me the most find me to be the most unreliable and those who know me not, consider themselves among the elite. So I wander and I wither and I excuse myself and I chastise myself. If only you were like this one, or like that one. If only you would...

Then God speaks...

I would not have you be anything other than totally and undeniably dependant on Me, My son. All the rest is shadow and feathers. Clouds bursting into showers of dust...the dust from which you were created and the dust to which you aspire. Nothing more and nothing less. Aside from Me. Yet with Me (I tire of all the capitals, my son, let's let it rest, shall we?), there are incomparable extensions of superiority and usefulness you will find.

By the matchless grace of God, I have had an impact on this world and in accordance with whatever grace he should continue to bless me, I will endeavor to impact some more. On this Memorial Day, I seek to honor those who have gone before and who have sacrificed for my behalf and on the behalf of my family. But, wouldn't it be better if there were no war? If men (and now women) didn't have to die in order for nations to get along?

I believe that God would prefer that we not have war. He is the one who said that life is precious and valuable and that he is watching if even so much as a sparrow falls. Mustn't he grieve for all of his children (Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, etc.) who fall in battle? Since God surely isn't for it, then it is only reasonable to assume that war is a creation of our own and as such, is subject to our setting of the boundaries and the rules and limits. If that is true, couldn't we just choose to settle our differences by, I don't know, having someone chosen out of the respective legislative bodies of the particular nations race wheelbarrows full of chilled gelatin up a mountain. First one to the top and back wins? I mean, we're getting to choose, right? Why not guerrilla gelatin battles as opposed to smart bombs and dirty bombs, WMDs and MAD?

And I would appoint the roaming gnome as referee.

Could it really be true?

Could it really be true that God loves me so much that he is willing to forgive all the things that I have done? I am rereading Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning and I am reminded of the grace that is mine through Christ Jesus my Lord. Can we stretch the limits of the grace that God offers?

Let's look at a classic example: Jonah and his battle to prevent the redemption of the evil people of Nineveh. We always talk about the midafternoon snack that Jonah became and allow our minds and imaginations to go all over the place as we seek to prove or disprove that there could be a fish (or whale) large enough to swallow a man and then allow him to survive in there for three days before regurgitating him back onto shore. We think that this is a fantastic yarn that stretches our abilities to accept by faith what is written in the Bible. Our arguments and discussions take tremendous twists and turns as we debate the improbability of such a thing while routinely failing to see that which should boggle us all the more.

Jonah was a prophet. Evidently a fairly well respected prophet and a guy who heard God when he spoke to him. God called out to Jonah to take the good news (not to be confused with the Good News) to Nineveh that God was going to forgive them of their sin. This may have been good news for the Ninevites, but it wasn't for Jonah. Jonah was a Jew and the Jews were no friends of the Ninevites. You see, the Ninevites were evil people, known for cutting their enemies in half lengthwise. I don't know why that always sticks out as important to me, their cutting lengthwise, but it does and it's how I tell the story. Knowing how God works, Jonah refused to go to Nineveh, he did not desire for them to be saved. So Jonah ran from God and from the mission he had been assigned. You know the story from the boat and how eventually Jonah is willing to sacrifice himself on behalf of those on the boat with him. Yet he wouldn't even go talk to the Ninevites. Jonah hated the Ninevites, but God was calling to him to evangelize them (again the wrong use of the word but you get the picture). Then comes the encounter with the whale and Jonah relents (notice I did not say that Jonah was convinced) and goes to Nineveh. There the people repented, turned from the wickedness and accepted the God of the Jews as their God. Though he should have celebrated, Jonah was discouraged, desolate and depressed. It had worked out just like he knew that he would, God had done just as Jonah knew God would and now the great enemies of Israel were serving their God. We should take from this the realization that Jonah had his priorities all mixed up. He was interested in putting limits on God so that God was in Jonah's image instead of the other way around.

Fast forward to today. Look at us in the church. Knowing how God works we choose to work some other way. We choose programs so that we can be like Willow Creek or Saddleback. We seek charismatic preachers and expansive sanctuaries. We desire pipe organs and large choirs or rock & roll bands with praise teams. We know how God works. It is not in the magnificent and the mighty that we will always find God. Often it is in the still small voice. It is not always in the whirlwind, it is often in the silence. "What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8" Let us choose to accept the incomprehensible grace of God and to put off the binding and oppression that our past may have taught us. We are not slaves to the past, nor are we slave to our teachers. We have but one Lord and He is God.

Ask yourself this question

Ask yourself this question: is it better to be alone knowing that you are being true to yourself or is it better to be surrounded by friends while knowing you are living a lie? Seems like a simple enough question, but let it slosh around inside your brain for a while and see how it stacks up.

Alone, but true to self If you choose this option, then your credibility is to be admired. You do not want to be untrue to who you are and who God made you to be. That is commendable. But loneliness is not what God created you to be. Speaking in reference to the man He had just created, God said, "It is not good for him to be alone." Now in this particular account, God was referring to giving Adam a partner, a life mate, in other words, Eve. But I believe that it is consistent with what we learn about God through Jesus Christ to say that it is not good for anyone to be alone (at least not all the time). Jesus spent time alone, sure. He would go off by himself in order to pray and to be silent with God. But he surrounded himself with people most of the time. They were all important to him, but their priority was figured in concentric circles (think of your typical bullseye type target). The crowds that followed him are the outside ring of the target. These include people that he loves, but people that don't always love him or have his best interest at heart. Some of them are just interested in what he's doing, but they don't want to follow. Others just came for the free food. (There are always some who are only hanging around to see what they can get out of it or you). And, some are there to collect intelligence in order to justify killing him. The next ring includes a large group of what would be called disciples, or followers. This group would include his apostles but also other people who were in his camp. They would be dedicated to his well-being and would realize that he was devoted to them. They would support what he desired to do, but were willing to question him when they didn't fully understand his actions or his reasoning. At the center of this relationship bulls-eye would be James, John, and Peter, the Big Three. They are the ones that Jesus knew he could count on and the ones that he intended to spearhead the movement after he returned to be with the Father. So, see, Jesus had friends and acquaintanes and he knew how to manage all of the relationships. You will note, however, that Jesus remained consistent in how he felt about the whole group: he loved them all. His interactions with them depended on their acceptance of him.

Life of the party, living a lie There's just something about this whole concept that speaks to frequent and endless torment. If you chose this option, there is no doubt that there will be plenty of opportunities to have fun and to laugh and carry on. The problem is that after the party, you still have to live with yourself. And your intrinsic understanding of self will not allow you to accept the lies you share with everyone else. So, you will be miserable. Jesus was stopped by a young man one day. This young man was wealthy and was a follower of the Mosaic Law. He asked Jesus, "Master, what must I do to gain eternal life?" and Jesus said, "Love God and love others as yourself (basically)." The young man replied, "Master, I have kept all the Law since I was a child." So Jesus said, "Then, sell all you have and follow me." Scripture tells us that the young man went away sad. Why was he sad? He had great wealth. He could do anything he wanted. Except that one thing that meant the most to him: he couldn't keep his wealth AND enter the kingdom for eternity. He lied to himself by thinking he had kept all the commandments, because he broke the first one most of all. "I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me."

My advice? Be true to yourself and love the Lord. All the rest will be given to you. Jesus said so.

Is Legalism the Unforgiveable Sin?

I'll bet that title got your attention, didn't it?

A couple of teens and I were having a discussion concerning the statement by Jesus that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was the unforgiveable sin. Matthew 12:31 says, "And so I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. (NIV)" So we began to discuss what this meant. I told them that essentially it meant that to claim that the work of the Holy Spirit was the work of anything else when we knew that it was the work of the Holy Spirit would be blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Granted, that is a simplified answer, but I think it works. But this discussion got me thinking.

The work of the Holy Spirit is to comfort and to guide the believer into all truth, right? Another work of his is to convict the unrepentant of their need for repentance. Is it fair to add to that and to say that for his work to be considered his work, we need to realize that there is grace involved? Here's why I say that: If someone were to be convicted by the Spirit that they were in need of repentance and grace were not involved, I believe that would likely cause the one being convicted to want to blow their brains out. Imagine! You've come to the realization that your sins and the sin of humanity has severed your relationship with a loving, holy and wrathful God. Yet, without grace being known, you have no idea of the way that you could restore that relationship. You would only see the interminable darkness that invades your soul and would see no way out.

You could say that the newly convicted and as yet unrepentant person is like a little child. They know that there is a problem but they are not sophisticated enough to understand the solution, to even take advantage of the solution. In our faith, we believe that God provides something called prevenient grace to children and those who might be mentally incapacitated to the degree that they could not make a decision for Christ. Prevenient (that is, going before) grace is granted to them as salvation and redemption. I think this prevenient grace is also provided by the Holy Spirit to our unrepentant friend as well. As such, he then is able to, not be saved, but not be held accountable until he is informed enough to make a decision. (Now if that person were to find out what they needed to do to be saved, and then decided to resist the wooing of the Spirit, prevenience no longer applies because they have the knowledge to make the right decision and consciously choose not to.) This grace is a provision of the Holy Spirit.

God's grace administered through His Holy Spirit by virtue of the sacrificial death of Jesus, God the Son, on the cross, makes it possible for the one who does not meet the church's idea of salvation material to still be saved. In other words, God doesn't expect us to change in order to be saved, He saves us in order to change us.

The practice of legalism, whether we're talking about the Pharisees of days gone by or the saints of today, says that you must fit into our rules, our methods, our standards or else you may not enter this church or, by expansion, the kingdom of heaven. Yet it is obvious that the calling of the Holy Spirit on the unrepentant life and the work of the Holy Spirit in the newly converted life are acts of divine grace. As such, I would be comfortable in saying that the application and availability of grace are acts of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it would follow, would it not, that to claim that because someone smokes or drinks or gambles or dresses inappropriately or curses or whatever is unfit for salvation and unworthy to participate in the activities of the church (as legalism usually does) is to deny the work of the Holy Spirit, to commit blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, as it were. If that is true (and I think that it is, but I will welcome conversation about it), then legalism is an unforgiveable sin.

The Page I'm On

I'm in the middle of reading this book. It's one of your typical show-and-tell type of biographies. In it, the character, a famous man whose identity I will not divulge, looks back over his life and examines the places where shifts occurred, where the slightest little difference could have (or did!) affect his entire life. I think what he's trying to get at is that we need to recognize these shifts, these slight, seemingly inconsequential moments in time, in order to fully realize the depths of the lives we live. Should I choose to turn right at the intersection of Water and Main? Should I take my girlfriend to Cracker Barrel or Chucky Cheese? Events that seem to be of little value or importance, attitudes and stances we choose to employ, can be deal-breakers. They can send us down the road to ruin, or they can be guideposts on the highway to heaven. Words and attitudes do matter; choices of allegiance are important; sometimes life (at least as we know it) really does hang in the balance.

God has understood this about us all along. He tried to make it clear to Adam & Eve in the Garden, showing them that relationship with him was of utmost importance. Proving that even a slight deviation could have monumental consequences. Finally (after destroying all of his creation except Noah & company and after allowing his children to be taken into captivity and then redeeming and rescuing them), God gave his people ten simple little rules that were designed to help them get along in the world. (If you read the book of Genesis, you will see that there were seldom capable of accomplishing this on their own.) These ten simple little rules have a really dramatic sounding title: The Ten Commandments, or, to use the theological terminology, the Decalogue. These weren't all that difficult. Four of them deal with relationships with God and the other six deal with relationship with one another.

Let's understand this one point, it shouldn't be too hard for us to see the import of: Love God, Don't Kill, Don't steal, don't have sex with somebody you're not married to, don't seek to take something you don't have, but belongs to someone else. All of them are about relationship. Maybe it would be a good idea for us to see that and seek to keep relationships in our lives healthy.

Jesus came along and, since it is only through Him that we can truly know what God is all about, gave us the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon is essentially the Decalogue all over again, only with some distinct refinements: for example, not only is murder condemned, so is anger. Not only is adultery condemned, so is lust. You see the point, don't you? Jesus was telling us that we couldn't be the people God desires us to be by just grabbing the big 10, pointing at them and saying, "Hey! I've never broken a single one of these!" and expect that to be enough to keep the vital relationships in our lives healthy. Doing that will, in the end, only serve to sever our relationship with God and with people. It takes more. But you may say: "I'm just a man (or woman), I can't possibly live up to what Christ is expecting of me." And I would tell you, "You're right!!"

You can't do it. At least, you can't do it without the wonderful grace of Jesus. He tells us that he will be with us, that he will forgive us, that he will love us and that there is nothing we can do to stop him from doing those things. No matter how hard we try, we cannot stop the love. In showing this grace, in witnessing to this boon to mankind, in making this kind of sacrifice; Jesus is showing us what God is like. Jesus is showing us that God, while transcendent and wrathful and vengeful and jealous, is also immanent and forgiving and redeeming and understanding. God is love!

He is the penultimate example of a father's love. But so often, we take advantage of that love, we punish that love, we deny it and we betray it and we belittle it and we ignore it. We take exception with that love and we cajol and ridicule and demean and shake our fists in the air and declare: "I am a man! I will not give in to the Father. I will not share in his grace, I do not accept his love, I choose another over him." And how his heart must break! The aching and the sorrow must be overwhelming. Were God not God, it would be enough to cause him to just give up. Fortunately he is God and not man. So, he hangs in there and he waits and he loves and he forgives and he loves. He doesn't count against us the many times he has bailed us out, the times that when everyone else failed us, he came through. He remains silent. He gently loves and remains forever open to reconciliation.

Oh, bring back the God of the Old Testament!! With his theolphanies of thunder and lightning, he would show his power as well as his grief, his love as well as his disappointment. Maybe then we would listen. But He is a God of grace. The page I'm on is this: I will always try to be like him.

It's Only A Name

We have to be so careful these days with the labels we use. We are so quick to say, "It's wrong to be a Democrat," or "It's wrong to be a Republican." If we are going to use labels, shouldn't we be convinced of the label that we ourselves carry first? Labels are like names, they are used to identify us or someone else. And they carry great weight. Imagine carrying around a name like mine all your life! Yes, I've heard all the jokes, but if you think you have a new one, feel free to utilize the comments section to send it my way.

People who are anti-Jewish are more correctly called anti-Semite. That's because the Jews are a Semitic people. That label or name, Semite, comes from the Hebrew, shem. For you Bible scholars out there, that name should mean something to you.

Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.

Shem literally means name. So, Semites are people of a name. It is through the lineage of Shem that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were born (you can find this in the 11th chapter of Genesis). You will recall, I trust, that Jacob had his name changed by God: Jacob became known as Israel. Hence the nation of the same name. I could go into a long drawn out process about this (in fact I did just last Sunday in church), but I leave the rest as an exercise for the class, except to point out that Jesus the Christ came from this same lineage.

We carry the name, Christian. It literally means, "one who follows Christ." We are proud of that name, we celebrate it, we lift it high, we proclaim it. But do we live it? Living the Name of Christ means that we will look at the world and and all the stuff that happens in it and ask ourselves, "How would Jesus respond to (fill-in-the-blank)? And then we should go do that. It is imperative that we understand that Jesus left us, the Body of Christ, as the place where the world could meet God. Yet, how often do we prevent that very thing from happening?

If a pregnant teen comes into our church, do we welcome her with the love of Christ or do we whisper and stare? Or, God forbid, do we do both--->attempting to appear righteous, do we love falsely and then gossip? Or, if we see injustice in our communities or our schools or our government or our world, do we decide that these are things that others are supposed to handle or do we stand up and allow ourselves to be counted, regardless of the cost? That's what Jesus did, you know.

There is a dire world out there far beyond our personal worries and fears, far beyond our self righteous crap and our pontificating on the virtues of our other labels, that deserves our attention, our prayer and our action. Particularly I want to draw your attention to Darfur, Sudan in Africa. 1.2 million people have been displaced by Arab militia illegally supported by the Sudanese government. There are estimates of somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand who are dead, along with numerous beatings, rapes and starvation. Do you hear anyone talking about it? No, sadly, no.

We carry the Name. Will we carry the cross, too? It all goes together.

But, what the hell, It's Only A Name.