Who Cares Who Is Right?

I found two interesting quotes tonight.

I don’t see any place in the Bible where Jesus says to be right. And I see a lot in the Bible where He tells us to learn about love.

- Lord, Save Us From Your Followers movie

And the other is, 

If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.

- Paul of Tarsus, 1 Corinthians 13:2 (Msg)

So often, ideas thrown around on the internet and discussed and prodded and poked and foisted upon people and packaged and presented and overmade and remade that a high emphasis is made of being "right." I'm less concerned today with being right than I am concerned with mirroring and becoming God's love to those around me.

Kylie, my 16 year-old just told me,

Being right inflates our pride, while love requires being humble. It's easier to focus on ideas. With writing, there is so much to learn about it. If you focus so much on the how, the rules, the technique, you can actually stop writing. What makes you a writer is writing. If we focus on theology all the time, there's little time to actually practice our Christian faith by putting the love we learn about into action.

Well said, baby girl.

The One Thing That Changes Everything Else

I have a friend who is struggling with the doctrine and work of the Jehovah's Witnesses. I have another dear sister who is struggling--quite literally--for her life, against alcoholism. They have one common characteristic that is at the core of their respective problems.

Both have a malformed image of their Creator.

That's My King

I love this speech by S.M. Lockridge and the visuals back it up well. On Easter Sunday or any other Monday, that's my King!



And I hope I get to see this painting someday...

Haitian Orphans Come Home to Colorado

They're home! They're home! They're home!

Letters from the Field: Obamavilles And The Fruits Of Repentance

Dear Friends,

How are you? How was your Christmas? Mine was incredible! A family stepped forward and offered to help with our Christmas gifts this year, buying nearly everything we wanted and everything we needed. They are a family that dearly wants to hear God's voice in their lives and it excites me to see it.

Have you heard about Obamaville?

The name of the town reminds me of a classic Jimmy Buffet tune, a favorite of my cousin's. This is a real sign of America's Second Great Depression. Iconic pictures of the 1930s tent cities, in some cases called "Hoovervilles," dot the news. Like the early years of the last depression, economic measures designed to slow or even reverse the decline may not be all that helpful and in some cases may actually hurt the economy.

I am no expert, but having a blog means having a point of view. My great friend, Andrew, shares similar circumstances as my own, unable to work because of his physical condition. He told me on New Year's Eve what I had instinctively known and remembered from high school economics. The numerous bailouts the government has engaged in is against the fundamental rule of capitalism. If AIG, et. al, truly failed financially, the government should have let it fail and go into bankruptcy. That's the reason for bankruptcy courts. Procedures exist for failures like that, procedures that might have better served the American people. Instead, the executives are bailed out by the one entity that should have put them in court to defend their actions. This is corruption, plain and simple.

In times like these, it is not enough for us to simply pray that God help the needy and suffering. Nor is it enough to fast, to humble ourselves before God and expect Him to hear us. It requires a fundamental heart change. It requires individual and corporate repentance. It requires what God lays out in Isaiah 58.

Isaiah 58:1-8

(the Message paraphrase)

Tell my people what's wrong with their lives,
     face my family Jacob with their sins!
They're busy, busy, busy at worship,
      and love studying all about me.
To all appearances they're a nation of right-living people—
     law-abiding, God-honoring.
They ask me, 'What's the right thing to do?'
     and love having me on their side.
But they also complain,
     'Why do we fast and you don't look our way?
     Why do we humble ourselves and you don't even notice?'

"Well, here's why:
"The bottom line on your 'fast days' is profit.
You drive your employees much too hard.
You fast, but at the same time you bicker and fight.
You fast, but you swing a mean fist.
The kind of fasting you do
     won't get your prayers off the ground.
Do you think this is the kind of fast day I'm after:
     a day to show off humility?
To put on a pious long face
     and parade around solemnly in black?
Do you call that fasting,
     a fast day that I, God, would like?

"This is the kind of fast day I'm after:

• to break the chains of injustice,
• get rid of exploitation in the workplace,
• free the oppressed,
• cancel debts.

What I'm interested in seeing you do is:

• sharing your food with the hungry,
• inviting the homeless poor into your homes,
• putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad,
• being available to your own families.

Do this and the lights will turn on,
     and your lives will turn around at once.
Your righteousness will pave your way.
The God of glory will secure your passage.
Then when you pray, God will answer.
You'll call out for help and I'll say, 'Here I am.'

If you want to see a change you can believe in, if you want to see God answer prayers, don't just fast and hope that He blesses you. Don't just hunger after God. Model your heart and actions after Him! Engage those around you and work to ease their suffering. If you see injustice, work to end it! If you see your employees hard pressed, stop work until they catch their breath. God does not saddle you with a heavy burden, does he? He does not bicker and fight with you, does he? Can you honestly say you follow Him when you live in ignorance of His most fundamental motives? We may claim to love the Lord God with all our passion and prayer and intelligence and energy, but until we love others as well as we love ourselves, we cannot honestly claim the title Christian, literally "Christ follower."

This is heavy stuff, but God does not pull any punches when we've missed something this elementary. Christians in business cannot place profit above and beyond the humanity and charity God commands from us all. As Marley lamented in A Christmas Carol, "Business! Mankind [should have been] my businesss!" Indeed, Scrooge himself walked in repentance by placing a very human interest in his employee Bob Cratchit and his family. The complaints that socialism and fascism brought against capitalism were very similar to the complaints that the three spirits of Christmas brought to Scrooge, that men in capitalism only enrich themselves by exploiting the working poor. The very reason America was successful in the first place was that men lived by the morality of their faith, putting into practice the charity and kindness that their faith professed. Alexis DeToqueville, in Democracy in America, put it this way,

Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?

If we profess freedom, and we do, then we must live by God's morality. Instead of seeking what we can get out of our employees, our "human resources," should we not treat them as good or better than ourselves? This change must start in our hearts, work into our minds, and out through our hands. Obamaville may be a ghost town in years to come, but only if we get the message.

A brother from a different mother,

Steve

Never Abandoned In The Floodlands

In a former life that I now dimly remember, I occasionally got free music as a sales associate for The Ark Bookstore in Denver. Normally, the samples were of new, relatively unknown groups that their label was trying to push. There was the rare exception, however, and those were moments that made the low wages and long hours almost worth it. Chief among those moments was when our Sparrow representative stopped by with a pre-release copy of Steve Taylor's 1993 album, Squint. It was the last—so far—studio album that Taylor would release, capping a decade-long career in the Christian music industry. Most folks don't know who Steve Taylor is. However, most Christians have likely heard the Newsboys' song, Shine, which Steve produced and wrote the lyrics to. In fact, Steve's partnership with the Newsboys is what most credit them for their success.

Steve's music has had a huge impact on my life. Songs like Hero, Meltdown, On The Fritz and so many others fed my spirit when I faced religious hypocrisy and pretentious spirituality at a young age where I needed truth and solidarity. Truth confronts, but it also comforts. One of the best examples is in the song, "Curses," where the chorus (echoing Psalm 37:25) repeats,

Never have I seen the righteous forsaken
Never abandoned in the floodlands
Never have I seen their children out begging
Never have I seen them slip through your hands

This simple refrain would echo in my mind every time I faced worries about making mortgage or buying groceries. It remains a reminder that not only is God faithful, but that I am not the first of his children to encounter financial difficulty.

There is something else about the chorus. In this modern,"lower-middle class" lifestyle, I tend to forget the meaning of floodlands. Today, modern civilization has flood control. Rivers that used to rage and ravage towns and cities are now harnessed and regulated by dams and reservoirs. The floodlands were areas that were normally dry but prone to extensive inundation. As a result, no one who could afford to build would build in such an area. They tended to be vast areas with thick undergrowth crisscrossed by a myriad of foot trails. The only inhabitants were the poorest of the poor, vagrants living a nomadic lifestyle and eating hand-to-mouth. If a river were to flood, they would be among the first victims, sometimes the only victims. Being abandoned in the floodlands would never be by choice. It would be the last stop before dying.

God is always mindful of our situation. He never lets us slip through His hands. We make mistakes, but He never does. Also, notice what it doesn't say. It doesn't say that we would never see the floodlands, or walk through them. He may have us pass through the floodlands for any number of reasons, not the least of which would be to reach out to those are also in desperate need. Yet here is the one thing that brings me such comfort: we will never be abandoned! We have a God who carries us through the fiercest storms and the highest waves. Most importantly, when it's all over, we get to go home with Him. That's worth any trek we might face here on earth.

Just in case one thinks I'm blowing smoke, I'll offer a subjective proof, one of many small miracles God has done for me and my family. Two weeks ago, my mind turned to Christmas. It dawned on me that we might not make mortgage, let alone have the ability to purchase gifts this year for my children. Rather than fret, I told God about it and asked Him to please provide Christmas gifts for my kids. Later that week, I got a call from our church saying that a family wanted to bless a family in need with Christmas presents and asked if I would be interested. "Are you kidding? I was just praying about that this week!" I told them. Needless to say, everyone was blessed at how God worked the whole thing. He usually isn't so blatant and obvious. God uses subtle and practical ways for us most of the time. But once in awhile he offers us unmistakable signs that He's there. With God, we are never abandoned.

Burning Questions

A friend of mine asked me what I thought of this. I thought, I hope they don't try to cook the chicken over all the glue, cardboard, simulated leather, and the myriad of chemicals likely to be in the books they're collecting.

Seriously, these folks have lost the point. If it were simply a matter of their faith being unable to accept anything but the KJV Bible, I wouldn't say anything because that's their issue that they need to work out with God. Something else is the matter.

They can burn all the books in the world except for their precious KJV and still never come to this critical realization: The problem is not in the books out there in the world; the problem is in our hearts. It's easier to burn someone's books than it is to examine our own thoughts and actions. It is true that they burned books and paraphernalia back in Biblical times, specifically Acts 19. Nonetheless, it was an outward demonstration of what had already happened in their hearts. Specifically, it was to make a clean break with the past lives they'd lived, burning the bridge behind them that lead back to the old ways. They knew that, if things got rough, their hearts might lead them back into the sorcery and divination they had been practicing. They could have sold all of their junk and received the equivalent of $35,000. That money went up in smoke because they didn't want to pass on the practices that they had abandoned.

This church's book burning is a case where the practice out-lives the meaning. It serves no real purpose, except to state their reading preferences and belief in the King James-only doctrine. Given that that statement could be made any number of ways, having a book burning is a foolish choice. It gives the appearance that small-town, North Carolina residents are intellectually backward. It plays to the stereotype that small-town southerners are narrow-minded, hyper-religious zealots. It invites comparison to the Nazis and other evil regimes, both real and imagined, that used book burning in their quest for an ideological purity. It is, in my mind, the worst thing they could possibly do to demonstrate their faith. This is exactly what the enemy would want them to do.

So what are we to do for people who operate like this? Should we correct them? Should we disown them? Neither; in fact we should pray for them, that the Holy Spirit would correct them, that he would stop them from continuing this practice. I pray that they come to a better understanding of God's love, and, in turn, move to a better expression of his love for others.

JellyTelly Launch

Hmm. JellyTelly. Interesting.

The Most Popular Video On Easter

Here's YouTube's most popular video on Easter. It isn't outtakes from The Passion of the Christ. It's...

What Kind Of God Does This?

You give and take away
You give and take away
My heart will choose to say
Lord, blessed be your name

We sang this song at a memorial service for a 6 year-old girl two years ago. She was playing one day and in less than 24 hours, she was dead. She died of an invisible defect no one could have guessed with the symptoms she presented. There was no one at fault; she simply died.

We were angry, confused, and deeply grieved. Yet God was still God and the same One that loved us so desperately that he let His Son be tortured and then crucified also chose to allow our hearts to be wounded and He took that little girl away from two loving parents and a community of friends. We worshiped that God. We still do.

There are some situations in life where you are forced to believe that God has some greater purpose in mind, some greater good that He chooses when he allows His children to be killed. If this planet is all there is, then the death of good people and the death of innocents makes no sense whatsoever. On the other hand, if this planet is merely an opening movement to a larger piece of music, then the silencing of a note here and there has meaning.

As I think back on the shootings a week ago, I remember that this time last week, we still had four notes with us that are now gone from the page. The loss and the grieving of those around them are still fresh and extremely painful. Yet most of them have chosen to continue to praise the same God that allowed their loved ones to be taken from them. Not everyone can do this, but the strength and beauty of those who do is overwhelming.

God is there.

He's with the tears of the victims' families. He's with the grief-stricken sobs of the murderer's parents. He's there through all the heartache and brokenness. He cries with those who mourn. He sits in stony silence with those who can't cry another tear. He is there. He alone knows the depth of a person's loss. He alone feels the heartache with each parent, every sibling and every friend. He sits in the ashes with those who say, "You give and take away. Blessed be your name." We praise that God.

Letting God Work

Here's an encouraging follow-up to this week's shootings in Colorado. Click.

Church Shootings Update

Still no word on whether the first shooting is related to the second shooting, but the fact that the police haven't said they are ruling that out, combined with a search warrant being executed in Arapahoe (SE Denver area) County, leads me to believe they are working on establishing such a link.

One of the families involved at New Life lost both teenage daughters and the father is still in the hospital. What do you say to a man who saw his two "young flowers" cut down in a hail of bullets? If I were in his shoes, I would be wondering if I did all I could to protect them. I'd be asking God "Why was it my two girls?" I'd mostly be a basketcase, inconsolable and overwhelmed with grief. It's one thing to read a news article, quite another to live through one. My prayers as a dad and husband are for David Works and his family. There is no good answer for why he and his family were struck this way. May God comfort and protect him during this traumatic time.

One positive note is that an armed security volunteer saved lives yesterday. A person who trained and practiced ended up saving lives today and possibly sparing my state a continued killing spree. God bless her for her quick action and bravery.

Church Shootings In Arvada and Colorado Springs

Let's see what we know right now.

At 12:30 AM this morning, a person asked for lodging at the YWAM (Youth With A Mission) base in Arvada. This is the same base that my friends went to when I was in high school. This person opened fire on four YWAMers and killed two. One of these two had helped George Morrison of Faith Bible Chapel hang Christmas lights last week. He was obviously up all night with police.

Now, someone has opened fire on people at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, just 60 miles south of Arvada only 12 hours later. Between 3 to 5 people were taken to hospitals there, although they are not sure how many victims were injured.

Are these two shootings related? Exactly 12 hours later, a gunman attacks another Christian group. I don't know, but until they're sure they have all the suspects in custody, I don't feel all that safe right now. I feel like I did on 9-11 and on 4-20-99 (Columbine). I am alert and concerned. Terrorism is aimed at destroying people's sense of security. It works.

I'm going to church next weekend, if only to show these jokers that Christians aren't driven by intimidation or fear.

Halo 3 and Youth Group - A Toxic Mix?

When I was growing up, video games were more or less a novelty. Pac-Man, at right, made a lot of money in the arcades, mostly in quarters (remember cash?), but no one really considered a home gaming market, mostly because the technology didn't exist. Today, a wildly popular game such as Halo 3 grosses $170,000,000 in the first week of sales, out-pacing the figures for Harry Potter books and film releases. It is cultural currency of the highest order. It's also rated M for mature by ESRB, and with good reason. According to the experts, it's a violent, gory first-person shooter.

This game is a boon to anyone looking to train skilled commandos willing to dispatch their targets with extreme prejudice. It's not so helpful for parents who are trying to raise normal, healthy human beings. What's even more troubling is the fact that some churches are incorporating this game into their youth activities. I realize that some times that youth leaders are using some unusual tactics to build community with the kids, but some ideas are not worth pursuing, like bobbing for goldfish (wasn't that an old frat trick?). I have to wonder at the wisdom of incorporating WWJBA? into any program (What Would Jesus Blow Away?). Whose decision is it to expose any child to the violent imagry in this game?

If the questions thrown at youth ministry seem unfair, you should probably know that I was a youth leader for a few long years, meeting success and failure week in, week out. What I didn't realize until long after my work with youth was over was that Sunday School and youth programs started off not to minister to the youth of the church, but as an outreach effort to bring in new believers at young ages. It was an overt, deliberate attempt to bring about child evangelism. No wonder it's doing a poor job raising our children! When I was serving as a youth leader, I had a dramatic insight as to why youth ministry is so tough today. Parents, nominal pillars of the church community, would foist their kids on me and directly or indirectly say, "Here you go. Teach them about God." How is any youth group leader going to undo in 2 hours what the teen has been up to the other 164 hours that week? Parents are the rank and file defenders of their children, something most parents seem to have forgotten or summarily abandoned. Any youth or children's pastor needs to focus on child evangelism and parents need to lead their children into the deeeper waters of biblical Christianity, not abandoning them to a youth leader.

In the case of Halo 3, I find myself agreeing strongly with Paul Asay of Plugged In Online. I have a hard time convincing myself that it's a valid tool. There's a reason M ratings are handed out and parents of teens, Christian or secular, would find their parental rights undermined by the church leaders in such a tactical blunder. Sorry, but Halo 3 should be dropped like a sack of potatos for use in Christian youth evangelism or any youth program.

Using the Wrong Compass

Would you let your kids visit a site that offers them their own personal familiar spirit based on a creature of nature and they called it a "daemon?" What if they made a movie about it? What if in the end of the stories it told that the children killed God and did as they chose?

The stories I'm talking about are part of a series called His Dark Materials and the movie is called The Golden Compass. The author, Phillip Pullman set out to literally invert Milton's Paradise Lost by becoming one of those on the side of darkness. He creates a strawman of God by making him a feeble old angel and his church to be the real center of evil power needing to be overthrown.

Although Pullman has taken exception to it, his trilogy is compared as the antithesis to The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Pullman levels charges at Lewis, finding him contemptible. Pullman also lumps God with all religions, an error committed by most atheists, and judges the church a corrupt and repressive regime.

New Line Cinema is producing the film, the same that produced The Lord of the Rings trilogy. My admiration for producing such a work based on Tolkien's books is now turned to revulsion for producing Pullman's gnostic daemons. Don't expect me to buy any of New Line's work for a while unless they drop the film.

Pullman's strawman Authority (by any other name) is no match for my very real God Who created the heavens and the earth. The same God who created us gave us brains for seeing through strawmen and for grasping the laws--natural and spiritual--that He created. While Pullman would say that God's laws are repressive and harmful, I have found the opposite to be true. God's laws, like those of any good parent, are to help us avoid injury and stay in fellowship with him and with each other. Anything else is simply fantasy.

Pullman is one of the people that Peter wrote to us about, warning that their claims of special knowledge and real truth are empty and self-destructive. Why have anything to do with them? Know the truth: God made you and He loves you as His child. There is nothing better than to accept His offer of a redeemed, full relationship with Him and eternal life, enjoying that relationship and his creative beauty forever. The Bible is the true golden Compass. It is not any special interpretation of the truth by one man, but a letter written through many hands by the same God. It will be a great day (hopefully not the last day) when Pullman wakes up to that reality.

Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about ‘His glory’s dimunition’? A man can no more diminish God’s glory be refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him…and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God — though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to ‘put on Christ’, to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.

- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Tia from HomeschoolBlogger.com wrote about this a few days ago. The comments alone are worth your time.

Motives And Strings

In going through my hard drive, I found an old e-mail from 10 years ago last month. I had written it to my daughter, who was then only a year old. It speaks to me more today than it ever did then.

Date: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 12:53:50 -0600
Subject: Motives

Dear Daughter,

There are things you realize when you "come of age." You'll realize, that adults don't have it all together, at least not all the time.

I'm finding out that you can do the right things even with the right spirit but still have the wrong motives most of the time. Sarah, most christians can battle desperately with sin and no one will have a clue until they reach some sort of crisis.

Back in the late 80s, the american press thrived on scandal. So when a prominent Christian leader named Jimmy Swaggart admitted to having a fling with a prostitute and repented before his congregation, they pounced on it. The scene of a man in authority blubbering and sobbing behind the pulpit for 30 seconds fascinated America or at least it's press. He had reached a crisis. He knew that a person in his position doing what he did was going to hurt someone eventually. And when he knew it couldn't go any farther, he came out and was judged. That coupled with a few more scandals crippled the church from making a very important statement on morality at a very crucial time.

So I, along with every other Christian including you, struggle with sin. Sometimes some struggle more intensely than others. We must always approach others with mercy and grace when we see them struggling. What are we doing anyway without the love of God in our hearts and on our lips?

What I am struggling with now is a bit more fundamental. It's a crisis of motives. As I have taken a sabatical from the ministry, I'm finding I am less resistant to sin. I don't put up as much of a fight as I used to. I was avoiding sin and doing the right things because I was in authority and leading others. The Swaggart scandal scarred my mind and heart. I didn't want the same scandal to affect the ministry God was doing through me. It was a good motive but not the best.

It wasn't the best motive because when the ministry ended or paused, the reason to keep from sinning also was lessend or reduced. I have motives for avoiding sin now, but not nearly as strong as before. It's because I didn't invest in the right motives while I was leading that has brought me to this crisis. So what are the right motives and how do I recover?

Right motives have certain qualities about them. They are pure, unmixed and serve a larger purpose. The best ones are also timeless. It can't be fixed to something in this life because life changes. The certainty in life is that it will change. Therefore, if my motives are fixed to something as limited as a position or season in my life, the motive, although good, will still crumble and fall when the reason for it being there ends. So the best motive is timeless. It is tied to the eternal. What is eternal? God is obviously eternal and His characteristics are eternal, such as holiness and love. So if we do right things out of love for God, out of desire for His holiness in our lives, we have the best motive. It will not crumble and fall.

It's like the man who built his house on the sand. When the wind and rain came and removed the sand, the house fell down flat, putting the builder in a crisis. But if you anchor your house to bedrock, something that's not going anywhere for a long time, chances are your house will not go anywhere either.

My dear daughter, invest yourself in what is eternal on a daily basis. Let your motives be tied to God and His love for you and all of us. That will keep you motivated, because everytime you pray, everytime you sing a praise song to him, the source of your motivation becomes clear and strong.

Have you tried guitar yet? I have yet to learn it, although I want to. When you see a guitar string, you see that it is tied at both ends to something. When you touch that string, it reverberates into the very heart of the guitar. When something touches your motives, it should reverberate into the very heart of God.

I love you very much.

Your Daddy.

PS. Right now you are finding noses and eyes and learning who everyone is and what the difference between daddy's nose and your nose is. I'll ask you where's daddy's eyes and then I'd better watch out because I've got a poke in the eye coming. I can't wait until I ask you where Jesus is and you point to your heart. Uh-oh (one of your favorite words right now). You're waking up from your nap...

Recently, we hosted a wonderful guest named Rosie Boom, who blessed us with a private concert at home. God used her to minister greatly to us. There is something wonderful about having an instrument in your home that can't be duplicated or recorded. It reverberates with us and connects with us. She let God use her ministry on just a single family. It was nearly too rich a gift to receive. I'll close with a lyric she sang us,

Don't you fret now, child
Don't you worry
The rain's to help you grow
So don't you hurry the storm along
The hard times make you strong.

Celebrate Who?

There are two forms of spirituality in the world. A true and a false version, and often they find themselves at odds about the basic truths in life. Such was the case today when I was running an errand. As I passed the local community church's marquee, I had to do a double-take.

(recreated for your viewing pleasure)

I couldn't believe it. Now, I'm assuming that the pastor (or whoever put it up) merely wants to encourage people, but I'm convinced it sends the wrong message, which is that human beings are basically good. I guess it's a form of sacred humanism (as opposed to the more popular secular humanism), and it runs contrary to true spirituality.

Jesus was once addressed by a man who addressed him as "Good Teacher." It was a small pleasantry, but Jesus took issue with the salutation because he discerned the man's heart. "Why do you call me good?" Jesus said, "No one is good except God alone." He was essentially repeating the assertion in Psalm 14:1-3, "There is no one righteous, no not one." While God is doing a good work in us, it's important we recognize that apart from Him, we don't have any good thing, including our selves. Indeed, we have all sinned and fallen short of His Glory. We should mourn the loss of our glory, not celebrate who we are. If anything is worth celebrating, it is God and His grace that reclaims us. We should celebrate God working in us and making us a new creation in Christ. That I will celebrate both in this life and the life to come! I am not worthy of His redemption, but I am deeply grateful for it.

Any Volunteers?

As a teen, I found out that you could get to do cool things if you volunteered. My second time volunteering for a Christian concert promoter, I was in the "DMZ" between the stage and the standing-room-only crowd at a Petra concert. It was a blast! Over time, I became a volunteer supervisor with the promoter and recruited my own crews, something I personally viewed as my ministry, enabling people to hear the message of Christ in a relevant way. Later, it was one of the items on my resume when I applied for a job with a national ministry to recruit volunteers for the conferences they were going to do, and I'm certain it opened a door for me.

I was interested when I found this recent article from FoxNews, Study: Midwest Tops Coasts for Volunteerism. An author of the report on the study, Robert Grimm said "Volunteering is not something that's just nice to do, it's necessary to solve important community problems." I couldn't agree more. Without volunteers, some ministries could not function. My sister-in-law is a nurse and she works as a counselor for at-risk youth. Could they afford a nurse's salary? Not without cutting back somewhere else. I edit a church newsletter that wouldn't see the light of day without volunteers. Recently, my wife's surgery required that she stay off her feet for nearly a month. Because of my disability, we would have been unable to cook, clean or do simple housekeeping without a volunteer coming in and helping us. How much of our community is made better by volunteers? Probably more than we will ever realize.

As a homeschooling parent, I want to help my kids find the joy in volunteerism. They participate in fundraising for the local pregnancy center. They help lead home group for the kids. As they get older, they'll gather experience in other opportunities, experience that will open doors for them like it did for me. More importantly, however, is that they learn to tithe with their time as well as with their money. God will bless them for it, just like He's blessed me.

Falwell and Christianity

So, Jerry Falwell is dead. God alone is his judge, but I wonder what kind of reception he will have when he arrives in heaven. I will say this about the man. He went to his dying day doing what he believed was right. Anyone who’s done that for a period of time will find that he has fewer friends than enemies. He wanted to fight moral decay in America. Perhaps his greatest legacy is the thousands of young minds that pass through the doors of Liberty University. I know at least one classmate who graduated from there. Still, I have always been put off by his particular brand of Christianity. Perhaps I never gave it a close enough look, but I think I understand why God did not let me follow in the footsteps of Falwell.

It may be a strange coincidence, but I found a quotation of Rich Mullins taken from a concert only a short time before his death in 1999. For those who don’t know, Rich has been a formative influence on my faith and my worldview. He was on a wonderful journey, and it was something I wanted for myself.

Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you’ve done it to me. And this is what I’ve come to think. That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.

I didn’t go searching for this quotation. Believe what you want, but I believe God caused me to come across this. It’s starting to bring a lot of my last few years into focus. Depending on what God has called them to, people who commit to following him will voluntarily place themselves in positions where they love the poor, and they love the broken. Some who would not choose this for themselves—people like me—have it thrust upon them. I do not believe that God would take away all of our possessions. Yet, what has God called us to? He has called us most importantly to love him and to love each other as we love ourselves. It’s difficult to profess to love someone without identifying with them.

In 1987, I spent another week of summer vacation at a small Christian camp outside of Denver. I had just come out of a school where I was not exactly the most popular. I had come with the desire to make a fresh start and enjoy my time there. You wouldn’t believe it, but it happened. I had a great time. People were looking to me as one of the more popular kids. It was intoxicating, really. It was actually my first test of power, so to speak. I was being myself and I was having a great time. Friday morning rolled around and before we all went off to activities, I was cornered by three girls. They asked me if I knew Audrey from their cabin. When I wasn’t sure, they said that she was the one with the artificial arm. Instantly, I knew her. She was one I noticed often in the cafeteria. I had contemplated how much harder everything would be at camp if I had the same handicap. I wondered how often she got teased. When I nodded, they told me quite bluntly that she liked me and wanted to go with me to the Friday night formal, but she was too afraid I’d reject her.

I knew how things worked, that my popularity could be ruined by being seen with her at the formal. The shoe was now on the other foot. Would I return the cruelty I had learned from so many years of living on the outside? I couldn’t do that to her. I knew her experiences in form, if not the specifics. I told them I would think about it, but I already knew my decision. That evening, while we walked under the stars, I put my arm around her, knowing that I had done some good by giving her an evening with a simple wish fulfilled. If anything, I knew that she would have one experience that wouldn’t pull her into the dark hole of rejection that I had known for years. I can’t claim that I romantically loved her, but I took some steps in her world and sacrificed whatever prestige I had to let her know that she was just as worthwhile as I was.

What I did was love her enough to care about her heart. God raised me from inferiority to superiority for that week just to let me bless His beautiful, worthy daughter. It wasn’t me, though. Jesus was walking with her under the stars. He’s the one that changed me enough to have compassion with those who have been cast aside and left alone. If I had never felt rejection, my heart would likely have been indifferent to her. Jesus loved the poor and the broken because he knew people’s hearts and the pain they felt at each rejection. He had compassion. Through His working in my heart and through His loving me, I was able to love her in the way we’re supposed to love each other. It shouldn’t be unusual for people to do this, but it is.

“Love one another as I have loved you.”

What Religion Can't Do, Something Else Can

Michelle Malkin interviews Daveed Gartenstein-Ross regarding his year inside radical Islam. What sticks out most to me is the fact that Gartenstien-Ross moved from a seeker to an unquestioning automaton. His parents were, in his words "new-age hippie Jews." They had a syncretistic religion in their home where Jesus was in the living room and Buddha was out on the back lawn. They saw truth in multiple faiths and so they validated those faiths, even though those faiths were exclusive one to the other.

Because Gartenstein-Ross's parents didn't stand for anything in particular, they opened up their son to a radical, corrosive religion that actually stood for something. He was attracted to the hard boundaries that Islam offers. I'm reminded of a "hippie" study where it was proposed that a school playground have it's fence removed because children should have the freedom to explore and not have to run into barriers. What happened when the fence was taken down? The children didn't wander off or explore beyond the fence. They actually didn't want to use the playground equipment but stayed near the door. Instead of feeling free to explore, the children felt threatened by not knowing they were safe.

There is something oddly comforting in a set of rules. It grants the power to know things for certain, even if the rules are self-imposed. This is the underlying appeal of fundamentalism, whether it be Christian, Judaic, Islamic, or even vegan. People long to know what the boundaries are because they intuitively reason that there are rules to life. I did "X" and I got hurt, therefore I won't do "X" anymore. They struggle for peace and they find it in the oddest places, like when Gartenstein-Ross found Islam.

My own journey through fundamentalism led me to study a number of different religions in the effort to understand their difficiencies. "We" are right, and "they" are wrong. I was searching out the truth to validate my adopted religion. While I learned much of the truth, I learned that my religion had its little idiosyncracies and, while they didn't invalidate it, it helped me understand that no person can fully understand all of life and the God who created it. No one person or movement has all the answers to everything.

As a side note, the pastor of another church that shared our facility lost his son at a Vacation Bible School session when the tree he was playing in was struck by a bolt of lightning. There was no explanation for it. Why him? Why then? It didn't make sense to me and any answer as to the real reason behind his horrible death was completely unsatisfying. I've had similar experiences since then and the only conclusion I have is that the created order has been broken and the result is that "good" people meet "bad" situations and God works in these situations for our ultimate good. It doesn't take away the pain of the broken system, but it's one that offers hope and a future better than what we face today.

I realize, though, that the God of the Bible has fewer rules than the Christian fundamentalists ascribe to him and far fewer than those who choose to live under the law of Moses in Judaism or under the law of Mohammed in Islam. Jesus said the two greatest commandments were to love God wholeheartedly and to love others more than ourselves. Everything else in the law hangs on either or both of these prima lexi, if I can co-opt the Latin in my own words. Those are the posts and rails by which all of life should be governed. Legalism and fundamentalism may find that these rules are not enough to live by, that much more must be defined to please God and love each other. Strangely enough, Jesus confronted the legalists and fundamentalists often in his ministry. They were called pharisees and saducees. They found that by defining the law down to the minutae, they often could find the loopholes that allowed them to honor the law but dishonor the spirit of the law. This is the poison found in any religion in the world.

The law is unable to change the heart of man. It simply puts up the boundaries for people to know where they stand. More and more people flock to religion only to find that it still doesn't satisfy or change their hearts. So what does?

In nearly everyone's life, they form relationships with others, if only on the surface. Relationships are the most dynamic agents of change. They are catalysts for growth or death, refreshment or draining. What most people never seem to realize is that they can have a relationship with their Creator. It's that relationship that serves as an agent for change in the Christian life. Pushing deeper in that relationship brings more and more growth and refreshment, even if they encounter harder times.

It's this relationship that I believe Gartenstien-Ross was really wanting. The question I have is, will he or has he discovered that relationship, or is he still chasing down the perfect law?