How to be a Christian

Every Christian I know has at some point wondered whether they were doing it right.

We wonder whether we are doing the right things, praying enough, giving enough, committed enough, sinning too frequently, going to church too infrequently, going to the right church or the wrong church with the right doctrine or wrong doctrine, whether we loved their neighbor too little, and on and on.

It's sad that so many of us live under that pained confusion, not ever really embracing joy, actually feeling quite burdened about all we believe, but it's not surprising. 

We're the first Christians to ever have lived in the 21st century. We can read all that we want about the people who came before us, but they didn't live in our context. Some things will be the same. Much won't be.

We're also the first Christians to have unlimited access to everyone else's thoughts, all the time. We're exposed to hundreds of voices declaring that they've finally figured out exactly what Jesus would think, all the time. We're reminded over and over that even when we think we're doing pretty good in our faith journey, someone thinks we've got the whole thing screwed up.

I had a conversation with a friend recently who mentioned that he was preaching through a particularly difficult Old Testament passage, and before preaching it he knew that he was going to have a handful of young fundamentalists who were going to tell him that he didn't preach enough about the law and God's holiness and how God should slay us all in our path. It's no wonder that we feel conflicted, like we're messing up. What if those young fundamentalists are right? What if our primary way of approaching God should be in fear, as if we're one wrong move away from getting the lightning bolt? One misstep away from his wrath?

That fear–the fear that God is just waiting to catch us screwing up–is not just the fear that keeps the religious-types devoted, but it's also the fear that keeps the wayward from coming close. For every believer who comes to church with a scowl because they are pretty sure that's what God wants from them–unadulterated, pure, religious dedication–is another believer who avoids it because they just feel like they don't measure up.

Both the Pharisee and the Tax Collector are invited into the family of God because of the Gospel.

This is why the Gospel is about freedom. The Pharisee needs to be freed from the massive burden of self-righteousness, and no little amount of self-doubt, that comes along with believing we have to earn our credibility before God. The tax collector needs to be freed from the burden of knowing that he can't measure up, or is somehow kept at an arms length from the true kingdom. The Gospel doesn't agree or disagree; it actually provides a whole new framework. It's no longer about you. It's about Jesus.

The more we can embrace that freeing thought, the more we'll simply be Christians. No heavy burdens. Just resting in what Jesus has done.

Why the Resurrection Matters

Another Easter Sunday has come and gone and with it, the temptation to let the "Resurrection" fade into the background much the same as Christmas fades into the past and we are left paying off our credit cards from over-celebration. We don't celebrate in the same fashion for Easter. Despite the attempts to commercialize it with the Easter Bunny, new outfits, and candy, it still remains primarily a religious holiday that isn't recognized by people other than those who identify with Christianity. Yet the temptation to move on with our lives and compartmentalize the truths of the resurrection is just as much of a temptation as it is to throw out the wrapping paper and mentally move on to the next big event.

Easter is fundamentally different than Christmas, however. While the events of Christmas are incredibly important and contain a great deal of doctrinal truth, they don't stand on the same level as the events of Easter. In fact, the events of Christmas have no value whatsoever apart from Easter, since the death and resurrection of Jesus are the culmination of everything that he came to accomplish. If they never occurred, then his birth, life, and whatever else occurred would still have been interesting, miraculous, potentially life-altering even if we chose to use Christ's life as an example, but not near as important as they are because of the events of Easter weekend. I'm not sure if the importance of the resurrection can be overstated: if it doesn't happen, there is no hope, there is no ultimate salvation, and practically there is no foundation for the church. The first two points are theological in nature and I won't address them here. It is that last point–the practical necessity of the resurrection for the church–that I want to address.

As we examine the broader culture (at least of America) it's easy to notice that there are some very sharp disagreements regarding how we view various cultural issues. Pick any issue you'd like, and chances are you can find not just diverse views on the subject, but polarizing views. Our tendency is to believe that these disagreements are themselves the problem, but they aren't. They are a symptom of the problem. The real problem, as it turns out, is that we are standing on fundamentally different foundations.

Imagine that the two of us were standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and we began to describe to one another what we see. To a certain extent, our descriptions may seem similar. We might describe a deep gorge, the relative color of the dirt and clay, the vastness of what we are viewing. As we go further in our descriptions, however, they inevitably begin to diverge. One of us argues that the canyon is a thousand feet deep, the other says it is only a couple of hundred feet. Perhaps we argue about the vegetation, or what it is that makes it so beautiful, or how the sun sets–or rises–on the opposite end of the canyon. Soon we would find that our disagreement is so sharp, that it is impossible for us to figure one another out. We end up completely polarized, convinced that the other person is a lunatic.

Of course you may have already figured out the problem. We are viewing the same canyon, but from two different vantage points. Where we are standing makes all the difference in recognizing why it is that we disagree on our perspective. Once we understand that we are not even fundamentally seeing the same things, we can come to terms with the fact that we disagree.

This is why the real issues of culture have nothing to do with our perspectives on the issues, and have everything to do with the foundation on which we are standing. Christians in particular have taken for granted that for the vast majority of the history of the United States, most of the population stood on a similar foundation. Call it "Judeo-Christian values" or whatever you wish, but really it was just the foundation that there was a God and that we could find out more about him in the Bible. I don't assume that the entirety of the country was Christian, let alone religious, but at very least the foundation was roughly similar. Thus, if there were disagreements on certain subjects, they weren't extreme. We might be arguing about the color of the clay in the canyon, but at least we are looking at the same clay.

Unfortunately that foundation has shifted and the vast majority of culture is no longer standing on the same foundation. This is the effect of post-modernity that claims that there are no universal truths. One of the impacts of this was the supposed destruction of the meta-narrative, which is by it's nature a comprehensive truth claim. Of course the theory falls on it's head. Even saying that there is no universal truth is a comprehensive truth claim about how the world works, it simply shifts the responsibility for decision making to the individual, rather than the universal. Again, claiming that every decision is up to the individual is a universal claim. Thus the meta-narrative was not done away with, but simply changed, and as a result, we find that when we are describing what appear to be similar issues, they are not the same at all. Those of us who are Christians are standing on an entirely different foundation than those who are not-Christians, and vice versa.

This in itself is not a bad thing, it is just something that simply "is". If anything, it provides an opportunity for Christians to have more clarity about what it is that they actually believe. I also think that it should provide Christians more opportunity to have grace with skeptics, since we ought to understand that the issues is not a disagreement, per se, it is a foundational issue. We are not standing on the same footing. We aren't looking at the canyon from the same angle. I can't expect my skeptic friend to see the world from the same perspective that I do, unless we first understand where it is that we are standing.

All of this brings me back to the church, and my original point about the practical need to remember the resurrection. Over the past decade, at least, and perhaps longer than that, post-modernity has come into the church in a variety of ways. The easiest entry way has been to offer differing perspectives on traditional Christian perspectives. Some of those perspectives have been healthy and offered appropriate correctives in the church. Like all institutions (and individuals, I might add), when you have held onto a particular belief long enough, you typically end up abusing it in it's application. For example, the longer you believe you are a safe driver, the less likely you are to use your seat belt. The better you are at a particular activity–skiing, for example–the more likely you are to push the limits verging into the unsafe, even for an expert. The same goes for churches. What might begin as a helpful doctrine or tradition can end up being abused in the long run, in desperate need of correction and a reminder of where the application should begin and end. Other perspectives, however, have not been corrective in nature, but downright incorrect. As a seminary professor said, "the only corrective to bad theology is better theology." Unfortunately many of the critiques in the last decade have not been better theology, but just more bad theology from a different perspective. The pendulum might swing to embrace it, but it doesn't mean that we are any better off. Change for changes sake is not necessarily a good thing. So how do we combat these perspectives? The answer is the resurrection.

The resurrection provides Christians with the foundation on which unity can be built as a church, for at least two reasons. The first reason encompasses both Jesus death, and resurrection, which puts all Christians on the same plane. If Jesus death and resurrection are real, historical events that happened and on which Christianity is based, so that faith and confidence in those events is essential to being a Christian, then the very nature of them mean that all of us arrive into this new kingdom of God on the same train. No one gets in on their own power. No one is more righteous than another. In fact, we all have the same righteousness from the same savior and get in on the same ticket.

The second reason that the resurrection is necessary is that it proves that Jesus is the king of this new kingdom, and thus, he gets to set the expectations. I believe that one of the chief reasons that some of the sharp disagreements that the church has experienced with the culture have become sharp disagreements within the church itself is that many within the church have unwittingly shifted their foundation. This was more evident than ever in the week leading up to Easter when a variety of articles were published claiming to come from Christian sources, but as I examined them, I noticed that they weren't Christian at all. They claimed to have a similar value structure, but they so minimized the death and resurrection of Jesus that those two events were no longer the foundation on which they based the rest of their so-called "truth". Realizing that meant that I could accept their conclusions at face value–as the author's opinion–but also realize that they weren't Christian perspectives, even though they claimed to be. It has become increasingly easy for people in the 21st century church to disagree with Jesus, or try to change his words to fit our meaning, and the reason that we can do it is because we, essentially, deny the power of the resurrection or take it to mean something it doesn't mean. The resurrection is not hope just for hope's sake; it is hope because it revealed that Jesus really was who he said he was. Jesus really was God incarnate who had the ability to defeat death on our behalf. The power of the resurrection wasn't limited just to him; it's a power that all who put their faith in Christ have access to. Far from being just some nebulous, ill-defined hope, it is a hope that very clearly identifies Jesus as God of very God, and King of every King. In other words, if we believe the resurrection is true, we don't get to disagree with Jesus.

As believers, then, the starting point for our unity must be the resurrection of Jesus. This is what gives him His claim to authority, as well as clarifying for us why we don't get to be authoritative in our own right. The Resurrection is the foundation on which the Christian views the rest of the world. When we stand on the power of the Resurrection, then we may still discuss and dialogue about what, exactly, Christ believed, but we don't get to disagree with Jesus or the rest of the Bible, or interpret it to fit our cultural milieu or cultural understanding at the time. Rather we stand on the authority of Christ himself.

If there are sharp disagreements in the church, I am much less interested in knowing what you think about the disagreement, and much more interested in knowing what you think about Jesus. Is he the risen Lord, or not? If he is, then you and I can both submit our opinions to his. If he isn't, then we're not on the same foundation to begin with, and I don't care much that you disagree with me. We'll never agree on what the canyon looks like so long as we are standing on different lookouts.

This is why we can't put Easter in the past. Easter Sunday, and what it represents, are not just a day in the life of the church calendar, but the foundation on which every day must be built. To the extent that we remember that, we'll have a united church. To the extend that we forget it, we'll be divided. It might really be as simple as that.

Saturday Night

I signed in to the blog to write a new post about something that's been on my mind since this morning, but decided against it for the time being. (It was going to be about an article I read on a proposed legislative change in Maine that would require non-profit organizations to pay property taxes, but I'll save that for another day. It's probably not as disinteresting as you might imagine, and it has potentially much more profound effects than you may realize...) In any event, I decided to write a brief note on what I do on Saturday nights. 

Saturday nights are about brain rested and engaged, all at the same time. If it's been a good week, and I'm well-prepared, then I've just gotten done with my two-day weekend, starting on Friday morning and going through the day on Saturday. Sunday, my week starts up again, and it starts up with a bang. It's my busiest day, and it requires by far the most mental energy, for at least two reasons. I'll preface this by saying that this isn't intended to be a "woe is me" story. It is just how things are.

The first reason that Sunday requires a lot of mental energy (if you care about the people in your church) is that most people are coming in on Sunday and they are burned out from the week. They are tired, they are in need of encouragement, they want to hear what God has to say, they want to be built up, challenged, equipped, and then sent on their way, and the expectation is that it's my job to do that for them, or at least, to do my best. Because I care about the people in my church, I want that for them. I want to take the Bible and explain it to them in a way that matters for the real, everyday life. I honestly believe that if "Christianity" is just something you do on Sundays, then it's worthless. It has to have traction in the rest of your life; it has to have as much meaning when you show up at work on Monday as it did to you on Sunday. In other words, I don't think that Christianity is something that you do to make you feel good. I don't think it's something that "works for some people" but doesn't work for others, as if religion really is just a pick-one-that-makes-you-feel-good affair. I think that Christianity either has to offer a meaningful and rationale explanation for why things are the way that they are, so that it actually offers real answers that matter or it's really nothing. To say it another way, what we believe has to ultimately touch every square inch of our lives in some fashion; hence, there is no square inch of life that cannot be explored, examined, and considered.

The second reason that it requires so much mental energy is that to actually offer that meaningful insight into life in a way that matters means that physically speaking, you are going to engage a significant percentage of your brain. There was a Mythbusters episode that sought to prove (or disprove) the myth that humans only use about 10% of your brainpower. As they tested, they noticed that there were ways that would engage a significantly greater percentage of brainpower, as in when you were doing multiple things at the same time. For example, if you were walking around, reading, speaking, and recalling a story all at the same time. Anyone who has every done any public speaking already knew that experientially, but it's actually backed up by science. If you've ever wondered why you are so exhausted after speaking to a group of people (even if you enjoy it!), this is the reason. It requires far more coordination of various brain functions than most people realize.

This is the reason that a Saturday night is both simultaneously about resting and engaging all at the same time. It's like stretching. Or mental yoga. Yoga, because I try to focus on what it is that I'm going to say on Sunday. Stretching, because I'm trying to warm up my brain just enough so that it's ready to go, but not so much that it's already tired.

At the end of the day, though, the reason I try to engage/rest on Saturday goes back to that idea that tomorrow, I feel a burden for the truth of God and for the people of our church. I want to make the connection between those two things: here is what is true, here is what that means for us when we get out of here. I have enough confidence in God's power, and enough trust in our church, that even if I totally blow it and whiff (or, as I've thought in the past, if I Charlie Brown it) I know that they are going to be okay and they are going to come back next weekend. There's more than enough grace to go around!

On the other hand, I know that I've got 30 minutes. And then for most of us it's back to the grind. Back to real life. Back to figuring out what God and Jesus and the Bible actually have to do with my bills, my family, my work, my co-workers, my neighbors, and everything else that sucks the life out of me during the week. Here's to hoping that 30 minutes is time well spent.

Freedom from Condemnation & Drivenness

This is part one of a four part series on freedom from condemnation. The four parts ended up being Freedom from Condemnation, Repentance, Parenting, and Drivenness.

Probably the first topic that came to mind when thinking about how our freedom from condemnation actually interacts with the reality of our lives was the topic of drivenness, but for a variety of reasons, it's the last one I'm going to mention. The reason for the delay is largely because this topic applies to me in a very real sense, and anything I write is either going to be personally convicting or hypocritical if I haven't actually applied the truths to my own life. I know that I need to apply the truth of my freedom from condemnation to my own drivenness; knowing how to do that is another matter altogether.

Drivenness comes in many different forms, but at it's base, I think it comes from a desire to meet a certain set of standards. Those standards can either be external (I want to live up to my parent's dreams for me) or they can be internal (I want to be the best that I can personally be.) They can stem from a positive experience, like having supportive parents, or they can stem from a negative experience, like being bullied in High School. Regardless of where the standards generated, the driven person wants to achieve them and meet them at all cost. The standards become more than just healthy goals; they become the expectation. Anything less is unacceptable.

We typically call driven people "ambitious" but that doesn't tell the full story. Lots of people have ambition, but they can give themselves grace when they fall short. Driven people can't. It's the standard or nothing. They push forward relentlessly. At night, they fall asleep thinking about all that they didn't accomplish. A voice in their head whispers, "you're just a big phony; you can never measure up." The next morning, the driven person wakes up to attack the voice, the standard, to achieve. 

To some of you that description will sound somewhat crazy. I'm not saying that all driven people hear voices in their heads or go to sleep depressed, but I bet it happens more than we know and more than driven people themselves would want to admit, particularly if they claim to be a Christian. They know it's not right, they know that their identity should be found in Christ, they know that they are not defined by their failures. Nevertheless they also can't seem to let go of the drivenness that motivates them to keep going.

Let me say this first, then. I'm pro-drivenness. Driven people get stuff done. The other day I was going into a board meeting after running around between two or three different after-school events and the president of the board commented that the old saying was, "if you want to get something done, ask someone who is busy." It sounds counter-intuitive on it's face, but the point is that if you find someone who is busy, chances are, you have found someone who likes getting stuff done. You've probably found someone who is pretty driven.

The problem with drivenness, and the reason that we are in constant need to be reminded of our freedom from condemnation, is that our drivenness is almost solely based on our ability to meet the law. In other words, it's legalism. We find our self-worth and our joy from being able to accomplish the standard; when we achieve whatever standard it was, we feel justified, and when we don't, we feel condemned. The drive to fulfill the law may therefore be joy, if we can succeed, but it is also, and maybe even moreso, fear of condemnation if we fail. It is not too fine a point to make to say that if you could strip away the layers of the driven person's heart, what you would find is a person who just doesn't want to fail. Fear of failure is fear of condemnation.

This is why it is condemnation that must be done away with. Law, without Christ, always leads to condemnation. There is no other way. The reminder the driven person needs is that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The challenge is remembering this truth when we inevitably fail!

Drivenness, ambition, or whatever you want to call it is not inherently wrong. I think it's a good thing. But as good as it is, it can kill your soul. It kills your soul by making you feel like your justification, your goodness, your self-worth is found only when you meet the law. And when you fail, it's on you.

The good news of Jesus is that we are free to be driven, and yet we are also free from the fear of failure and condemnation. Driven people need grace and can live in the reality of Grace, in success and in failure. We continue to have joy when we succeed; because of Jesus, we also have joy when we fail. Our joy is not dependent on our efforts. Our joy is dependent on Christ's efforts, for our freedom.

Loving Others

A notification flashed across my iPhone this morning from a pastor's group I am a part of. The question that had been posed and was now sitting on my screen was how to address a "seeking" couple that was visiting the church but had questions about a particularly difficult cultural situation. In this case, the situation was "homosexuality", but it could have been anything. The pastor wanted to know what he should say and how he should address it.

A few thoughts went through my head as I considered what I would say to him if I responded. The first was, "what do you actually believe about the subject?" My guess is that my pastor friend already knew what he believed, or at least thought he knew what he believed, but when the question is actually posed by a real actual human rather than as a theoretical concept, stuff gets real.

I want to interject and interrupt myself for a moment, because I want to say that I did not read any further than the question, and I did not get an explanation or backstory or any details about what this particular pastor knew or didn't know or thought or didn't think. That said, there was something about the wording that made me think that this person perhaps hadn't through through what he actually believed when the rubber actually met the road; when his theology met his humanity. The word that struck me was the description of the inquisitors as "seekers".

I knew what he meant. "Seeker" is church lingo for someone who is seeking God in some fashion. They are typically "spiritual" but not "religious". They may have been raised in the church, see value in Christianity, but aren't entirely sure how to mesh what they think they believe with what they think the church believes. Often times a seeker has a particular question in mind; something that is their litmus test. For one man who visited our church, his question was predestination. He wanted to believe in God, but couldn't believe in a God who predestined people to Hell. He asked me what I thought on the way out of church, and I had to answer an incredibly complex question in just a couple of minutes with very little understanding of what was behind the question or where he was coming from. When you are talking to a "seeker", the tendency is to frame your response in a way that softens or mutes the difficult edges of your answer. We convince ourselves that the person isn't ready to hear the truth, or that the truth might offend them, and we wouldn't want that! We don't want to be the person who shoves them from "seeker" status back into "lost" territory. We better make sure that our answer is true, but not so true that it is offensive.

Oftentimes our responses in those scenarios end up being so ambiguous that they leave the person on the other end feeling like they got an answer, but not being totally sure what it was. I was watching an episode of Parks & Recreation the other day where the always-positive Chris played by Rob Lowe had recently broken up with Anne, one of the main characters. The problem was that the break-up was spun in such a positive way that Anne didn't realize that he had dumped her. I wonder how often my answers to these difficult questions so ambiguous or spun so positively that the person on the other end walks away thinking that I may have said something entirely different than what I intended.

What my pastor friend was really asking was, "How do I tell these people what God really believes about homosexuality without offending them and turning them away?" I think that's a legitimate question, but I don't think it matters whether or not the people are seekers, or whether they have been followers of Jesus their entire lives and are only just now having to figure out what God really thinks about this as it becomes a more common cultural question. Instead, I think that the real question that we have to ask ourselves is this: do you really love these people?

It strikes me that Jesus doesn't turn away from difficult questions, and he doesn't soften the blow of the truth that is in his response. Sometimes, people turned away because of it. Other times, they stuck with him. Here is the key: it was never their status (lost, seeker, found, whatever), and it was never their response (turning away or sticking) that guided his answer. It was always truth embedded and presented in love. When Jesus answered a question truthfully, he knew full well that he loved the person he was talking to. That's why he answered with such poignant truth. It was because he loved them.

I had to have a difficult conversation with someone once related to this topic. The first thing I did was ask the question: what does the Bible actually say? What do I actually believe? What does God actually think? This is what it means to love God, at least in part. It means that I actually care about what He thinks, and not just what I feel. But then, ultimately, the rubber meets the road and the theology of what God says meets the humanity and the emotion and the spirit of the person sitting right in front of you who has asked, "what does God think about this?" My pastor friend knew the right answer, but he wasn't sure that he knew the right response. My question would be, "do you really love them?"

When we really love the person we are responding to, to whatever degree our love can be totally genuine, that love will shine through in our response. I'm not telling you what God thinks about an issue to prove that I'm smart, or to prove that I can one-up you, or to belittle you or make you feel bad about yourself. I'm telling you what God thinks because I love you and He loves you and because He loves you and I love you I believe that there will be more joy in the truth of what God says than there will be if I just tell you what you want to hear, or if I couch my answer in such fluff that you leave without being entirely sure what God actually thinks. Love doesn't mean we always agree. Love doesn't mean that we always give the easy answer. Love means that we can give the honest answer, even when it hurts.

I said this to the Elders of our church a while back when we had one of these difficult questions come up and we had to respond, even though we knew that the reason the person was asking is because they were putting out their little litmus test to see if we believed in a God that they could believe in. I said, "if it is not difficult for us to respond, then we are not being Elders." Responses to difficult questions are not filled with pride; they are filled with love. It ought to matter to us when we give an answer to someone that we know might cause them to leave the church or leave the fold of God. Yet we know that it would hurt more, and be more harmful, to neglect what God said, or to answer ambiguously, just for the sake of harmony; just so that we don't rock the boat.

So yes, the question is, "what do you actually believe about the subject?" But then, before we respond, we need to ask ourselves, "do I really love this person like Jesus loves them?" If so, then we respond in truth, embedded and presented in love, not ambiguity.