Psalm 24

“The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof,
the world and those who dwell therein,
for he has founded it upon the seas
and established it upon the rivers.”

— Psalm 24:1-2

There are moments when we are reminded of the grandeur of the created world.

I was skiing with a group of friends in Colorado, enjoying the beauty of the Rocky Mountains. From where I stood, I could not see the top of the mountain we were on. Already, I was out of breath. The lodge where we were staying was almost 10,000 feet above sea level, and still the summit was out of view. We joked that we would “conquer the mountain”, but that was just a saying. The best we could hope for was to enjoy ourselves and not get injured!

When David looked up the mountain and saw Jerusalem at it’s peak, he had a similar reminder of the greatness and grandeur of the created world. We simply dwell within the world; we are part of the created order. We can enjoy it, experience it, marvel at it, have dominion over it, but we do not own it. Only the one who created the world can truly be it’s owner; only the creator can truly “conquer” it.

The earth and all that it contains are the LORD’s, said David. Why does he have that right? Because he alone has founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the rivers. David’s attention turns from the created world to the one who created it. It is as if he wants us to remember, “If you are amazed at the things that are created, imagine how much more amazing the creator must be!”

Do we marvel at the beauty and the magnitude of the created order? Do we take pause when we stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon or the base of a mountain or the edge of the ocean? We should! And when we do, we should be reminded that all of it, (including ourselves), belongs to God.

The Overlooked "C"

“I plan to be the number two in this in six weeks. How? Name repetition, personality mirroring and never breaking off a handshake.”

— Andy Bernard on The Office

An Executive Pastor I used to work with (or for, at the time) sat me down and told me about the "four C's" that they were looking for in their staff members. If I remember correctly, he had gotten the four C's from a book by Bill Hybels, the founding pastor of Willow Creek, a large and influential church in Illinois.

The four C's were Calling, Character, Competency, and finally, Chemistry. Calling is your internal motivation to do the particular job you are being hired to do (there is much more to calling than this but let's leave it there for now.) Character is who you are; it is your integrity, your work ethic, your attitude, etc. Competency was your ability to do the job: do you have the ability to do the job well? Finally, Chemistry, which was how well you fit in with the rest of the team. It was this fourth one, he said, that was most often overlooked.

I heard Phil Jackson say the same thing recently when he was asked about taking over the reigns of the New York Knicks. He was asked how he planned to think about the roster of the team in the coming year to two years. Who did he plan to try and keep? The answer wasn't, "the best players" or "the people that would fit under the salary cap" it was, "the players who fit together correctly to make a team." 

"Chemistry" is the overlooked "C". It's also the most difficult to evaluate when you're looking for someone to join your team, particularly if the new person is a new hire. Ideally, you'd be able to spend time with a person, work with them on some projects, or see how they interact with everyone on the team during a meeting. Most of the time, you're not given that opportunity. Furthermore, even if you had the opportunity to do that, it's a difficult conversation to have with someone if you find out that they don't fit. Barring some objective and documented criteria you could use to evaluate chemistry, the result will almost always be subjective. "You just don't seem to fit."

(Calling is also somewhat subjective; hopefully if a person doesn't feel called they'd rule themselves out. Character and competency are the easiest to evaluate objectively, in my opinion.)

The trouble with trying to evaluate chemistry before inviting someone to join our team is that past results are not necessarily an indicator of current or future success. We've all had teams we meshed well with, and others we haven't. There have been positions that we're well suited for, and positions we weren't suited for. Making it even more complicated is the reality that some people give a great first impression; they are great interviewers. (Andy Bernard on The Office prides himself in being a great interviewer. He's a doofus of an employee, though.)

Chemistry may be hard to evaluate but it's invaluable in terms of having an effective team. Next time you are tempted to be swayed by someone's character, competency, or calling, don't forget to ask: but do they fit? It'll save you a mountain of frustration later!

Misleading Questions and the Vision for Your Life

I admit that when I started writing this morning, I began by rhetorically asking the wrong question.

The question I had planned on considering in this post was: "what would you do if you could do just one thing?" This was the question I was asked over and over and over again in an attempt to help me understand what I ought to do with my life. I suppose I was asked a similar question to this one in High School on one of those tests that was supposed to help me figure out my future. As I got older, the question was framed differently: "what would you do if you never got paid?" Or, on the flip side, "what would you do if you had a million dollars?" (Most of my life, it seemed to me that the only person to ever have answered that question truthfully was Peter Gibbons: "Nothing. I'd do absolutely nothing.") Unfortunately, it's the wrong question, and a misleading one at that.

First, it's the wrong question because God has already given us a "one thing to do". If the "doing just one thing" question has any value, it is supposed to guide every other choice that you make. If you can figure out the one big thing, the "vision for your life", then you can figure out everything else that you need to do to get there.

I remember reflecting on this several years ago when I was thinking about my career choice. I had been in ministry for several years and I was frustrated at where I was. For some reason it occurred to me that if I wanted to switch careers, I would need to figure out what I wanted to do and then if I could figure that out, it would guide my choices for today. When my time finally came to enter this new career, maybe several years from now, I would be ready because I would have been targeting it the whole time. I decided the same thing had to happen for me in ministry. At the time, I may not have had a particular assignment, but if I really felt the call to be in ministry, it was imperative that I continue to prepare myself. That way, when my number got called, I was ready to go.

The Bible gives every Christian a "one thing to do" that ought to give us guidance and vision for everything else that we do. To be a Christian means that we have put our total confidence in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ to reconcile us to God. This reconciliation was necessary because we were on a path of destruction; we were living our own way, chasing our own dreams, ignoring God's will and reign. We were in bondage; now we have been set free.

What follows from that freedom is a new mission: to bring glory to God because of the work of Jesus Christ. Everything you do now will be to that end. It is the primary calling on your life; the thing that guides every choice you make. The Christian declares, "My goal is to advance the Kingdom of God and to ensure that His will is done in this domain, the earth, as it is in the domain of Heaven."

This is the lead calling in the life of the Christian, that,  when you have understood it, will profoundly influence how you answer the question above about the "one thing you would do". It answers the question and unseats whatever answer was there before. All of us, no matter our daily occupations, are kingdom builders. That is "the one thing that we must do."

In my experience most people are unable to articulate this as their chief end or their purpose. They believe that Christianity is about being good, or doing the right things, or about being moral or ethical or Republican or Democrat or accepting or loving or tolerant. Jesus has moved from being "savior who calls us into a new kingdom" to "good example who teaches us how to live". They were never told in advance that following Christ means a radical alteration of how we view the world and our purpose within it. The broad implications of this are that the church isn't making much headway advancing the actual kingdom of God. A kingdom that reflects us? Sure. But not a kingdom that reflects God's will and his ideals.

It is imperative that we understand this primary goal and chief calling. Without it, our life will reflect only our desires and our passions and our will and will never be guided by the desires, passions, and will of God. And they might be vastly different things. 

Second, because God's "one thing" adds purpose and redeems our real life. Is it just me, or does the "one thing" question lead you to a point where you start to feel like unless you do something massive and extraordinary, you are sort of a waste of space?

I was reading the story of William Wilberforce this morning, the man who is credited with leading England to abolish the slave trade in the 18th century. We read a story like his and then we ask, "so what is God calling ou to do?" And the result is that we feel obligated to come up with something huge and world-changing: I'm going to abolish sex-trafficking or hunger or malaria or become the pastor of a mega-church or write a best-seller on the Gospel or whatever. Or, on the other side, we just get depressed. Depressed because we realize that most of those things seem hopelessly unrealistic.

Here's the thing about Wilberforce: when he became a Christian, he was already a member of Parliament. He was already influential. He was young. His buddy was the Prime Minister. He was wealthy. He had a bunch of tools in place and didn't really know what to do with them; up until he became a Christian, he had basically squandered all of it and used it to his own gain. Then Jesus showed up. Far from sitting him down in a room and saying, "now William, what is the one thing you would do?", Jesus instead gave William's work real and lasting value. Now, William knew, my goal is to glorify God. How has God set me up to do that?

Interestingly, William almost derailed what was eventually God's plan for his life by trying to answer the "one thing" question on his own terms. If you asked him after he became a Christian, "what is the one thing you would do if you could only do one thing" William would have said, "be a member of the clergy." Thank goodness he never did that. The right answer was, "glorify God". He didn't need to be a member of the clergy to do that.

God's purpose for your life gives your life direction and purpose that is already higher and more important than whatever you could come up with yourself. The Christian person raising kids in suburban New Jersey and the Christian person trying to solve world hunger have both been given the same purpose, the same "one thing": to glory God and bring his kingdom and will in the world. Some of us do that by raising Christian children who will run Christian businesses and operate with proper ethics and do their job well and earn money so they can give it away. Others of us will do that by moving to a remote village somewhere in the world and explaining the Gospel to it's inhabitants. What gives any of our work meaning is this: it is for the glory of God.

A much better question for the Christian, then, ought to be this. How am I advancing the kingdom of God and his will in the life that I already live? And then, how can I invite others along with me on the journey?

You are a kingdom builder already; what you are doing is already extraordinary. It is supernatural. You are bringing God's kingdom here as it is there. That's your task, no matter what you are doing today.

And that's the reality that ought to shape our choices today, and our vision for our future.

Living in the Tension

There is no shortage of people who claim to have God or the Christian life figured out. Generally, this means that their perspective is the correct one and everyone else is a dummy. We treat theology like a game of dodgeball and if you don't see things my way I'll blast you in the face with a rubber ball.

I read two articles today that demonstrated this perfectly. I won't link to either of them because ultimately I'm not responding to the issues they were addressing and I don't want to get distracted. I'm responding to the off-handed, rubber-ball-to-the-face way that they addressed those issues. The formula is simple:

1. Make your point with very little biblical evidence. "I believe x because that's what Jesus would do."
2. Set up straw man. "Fear-based Christians disagree with me."
3. Hit straw man with red ball. "Anyone who disagrees with me is living in fear."

The problem is that most of the things that we take "sides" on in Scripture were never meant to be "sides" issues. They are "tension" issues. Issues that require both sides of the story to really understand. You're not really supposed to be able to figure them out, at least, not completely. You are called to live in the tension.

For example, an issue like God's sovereignty. Too far one direction and you are a deist: God only steps in when he absolutely has to. Too far the other direction and you are a fatalist: you have no responsibility and are basically an automaton. The Bible endorses neither of those perspectives; we live in the tension of embracing our own responsibility so that we are unable to make excuses for our behavior, while at the same time recognizes that nothing happens that God doesn't either cause or allow. Calling it a "tension" doesn't make for a very fun game of dodgeball, though.

We do the same thing with God's love vs. God's disdain for sin. Or with baptism. Or worship. 

Basically any Christian issue comes down to taking sides and blasting away.

Except it doesn't. What it comes down to is a long journey of discovery; of trying to figure out how God calls us to live. It is about discovering the richness of living in the tension between two things that are difficult to reconcile and yet realizing that we follow the great reconciler. 

The key is not to base our theology or doctrine on our own opinion or how we feel but on what the Bible teaches. If the Bible addresses something simply, simply embrace it. If the situation is complex, don't reduce what God has decided to leave unclear. Live in the tension of faith and have confidence that in that tension there is much grace.

You Are Responsible for Your Story

“Child, I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.”

— Aslan in The Horse and His Boy

It's amazing how much information you can find out nowadays. You hear about some allegations being leveled against someone as unknown as a pastor (let's face it: even some of the most well-known pastors are only well-known because most Christians live in a bubble), and a couple of Google searches and Facebook posts later you've learned all that you need to know. Or at least, all that you can know by looking on the internet. Suddenly your mind is filled with information that you almost certainly don't need, and you are left to your own devices to sort it all out.

Let's call them "non-relational reflections". Or something of the sort. It's the type of thing you think about when you don't really know a person and all you have in front of you is data. At least, you think it's data. It may be gossip. Or it may be true. It's hard to say.

It got me thinking a little bit about responsibility, and what I'm supposed to do with all this "truth" I discovered online. And then it got me thinking about my own story; the one that I'm living right now. The one that I actually am responsible for.

I've been reading The Horse and His Boy with my boys, Michael & Anthony. Does that make me the horse? If it does, then I am a wild stallion. Or perhaps one of those Budweiser horses. But I digress.

As Aslan explains to the boy, Shasta, why things happened for him the way that they have, Shasta eventually begins asking questions about his traveling companion, Aravis. What was the meaning of her story? Aslan's response stuck with me: "Child, I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own." Later, Aravis receives the same reprimand from the Lion when she asks about Shasta.

It stuck with me because of the regularity with which I can and do find out about what is going on in someone else's life; someone else's story. It starts with curiosity. Then I form opinions. Eventually I act as if what is happening in someone else's story–a person I don't know and have never met–is somehow my responsibility. Either my responsibility to call out their bad behavior; my responsibility to reprimand them or warn others about them; or my responsibility to simply know. Then it's my responsibility to let everyone else know what I think. Judging by all the information and opinions I found on the internet, I'm not the only one who has a problem.

The trouble is that it can lead to at least two really dangerous paths. The first path is that we start wishing that we had someone else's story. The second path is when we start criticizing someone for how they are living their story.

The first path–wishing we had someone else's story–is human nature. We already know that we're prone to coveting what someone else has. More often than I care to admit I find myself wanting what someone else has; I wish that what happened to them would happen to me: they get a new house, new car, new clothes, their church grows faster than the one I'm at, etc. 

The second path, however, is much more subtle: criticizing others for how they are living their story. The reason it's more subtle–and I think, more dangerous–is because we can couch it in a whole lot of nice sounding things like "brotherly concern", or treat it as if we're just trying to "protect the sheep from wolves", or "hold them accountable!" or whatever other spiritual jargon we want to throw at it.

No one says, "for your own good and the glory of God I think you should give me your house." There's no way to be spiritual about your covetousness. But it's easy to be spiritual about your criticism.

Here's the thing. Well, the two things. First of all, we're all going to have different stories and Jesus makes pretty clear that when he's talking to Peter at the end of the book of John that it's a really good idea for us to worry about the story God has for us and not the one he has for someone else. And secondly, and I think, as a result of the first, we need to be really careful about these "non-relational reflections" into or about other people's lives. 

Yes, we should hold people accountable–but it's supposed to happen in relationships. The proximity of our relationship has a major impact on the responsibility of our relationship. If you don't have a relationship with someone, no matter how much information you can Google about them, no matter how many blogs you read about them, it's almost always going to be best to keep the criticism to yourself. Better yet, stop reading it altogether. What good does it do? If you have no responsibility to correct this person in the midst of their story, and you aren't going to do anything with the information but sit there thinking about how screwed up that persons story is or how stupid they are, then just leave it be. Most of the time, the people we are quick to criticize are people that we don't know and therefore have no responsibility for.

So I'm left with the data in front of me and I have to sort it out and then I conclude with this: it doesn't matter. It's almost impossible to figure out what's true and what's not true, and at the end of the day, it's almost never even information that I need. I'm responsible for me, my family, how I live my life, the choices that I make, and how I lead the people that God has told me to lead. I hope to live my story well, and I hope you live yours well.

I guess at the end of the day I hope that the pastors I read about on the internet live their story well, too. I'm just going to stop worrying about it so much. I have enough responsibility already.

“When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!””

— John 21:21-22

Stop Being a Superstar

We live in the age of superstars. We love celebrity status. And it's killing us.

To be fair, we have a heart-level problem. Christians call it a "worship" problem. Worship, simply put, is what we do when we ascribe ultimate value to something. The thing that we most ultimately value will be the thing to which we devote our attention, our resources, our energy, and even our full selves. We do it all the time, without even thinking. We'll give ourselves over to the thing that we most highly value. The problem is that we ascribe ultimate value to cheap substitutes rather than to an eternal and complete God, and end up feeling used, broken and frustrated. The Bible calls that misguided worship "idolatry". Idolatry is worshiping something other than God, displacing Him from his rightful position of having ultimate value.

The reason I provide that as an up-front caveat is because time and time again we find that the thing we consider to be ultimate is usually ourselves. In fact, we have been bombarded by the message (at least in my lifetime) that we need to look out for ourselves; that we are the most important person in our universe, and that we should be okay with that reality. We want to, and nearly succeed in, worshipping ourselves.

But the situation is even more complex. When you ascribe ultimate value to something–when you are worshipping it–it is rarely if ever just a personal thing. The natural outcome of your worship is that you will want others to worship the thing you ultimately value as well. It's impossible not to! The 21st century result is that all of us are vying for the attention of others; holding out the thing that we consider to be of the most value–ourselves–and hoping that others will join us in our idolatry.

While self-worship may have always been the agenda of the human heart, it has been propelled by advanced communications in the 20th century, and exacerbated further by social media in the 21st century. Give someone your smartphone and tell them to take a picture of the most interesting thing they can think of, and nine times out of ten they'll take a selfie. But that's just a symptom. Advances in communication and social media gave us at least three opportunities to promote our self-worship that most people throughout history didn't have.

First, it expanded our influence. Prior to the extreme advances in communication in the 20th century, the number of people whose influence extended beyond their town, city, and especially their state was few and far between. Most people's influence extended to their family, at best. Now, you can have instant access to literally billions of people. Drop the right tweet, post the right status, and you might find that suddenly you have real influence. The truth is that even people with a modest number of followers on Twitter or Facebook have a significantly higher amount of influence than someone would even dream about 100 years ago, simply because we are more connected.

Second, social media allows us to craft an alternate identity, or at least, highlight only the good parts of our real selves. The advances in technology mean that we can craft our little self-worship idol in a way that we know people are going to value it. Celebrities are created not because of who they are, but because of who we perceive them to be. We value the false identity they've created; not the real deal.

Alternatively, the best way to make sure that no one ever worships you is to let them get to know you. Then they find out the whole package and realize it's not that great. That's why your family doesn't think you're a superstar, even if everyone else does. In fact, no matter how great you are, your family never thinks you're that great. I'm pretty sure Barack Obama doesn't have his kids call him Mr. President at the dinner table, and I'm doubly sure that they talk back to him just like my kids talk back to me. I doubt LeBron James' mom and family cater to his every need at Thanksgiving dinner because he's arguably the best basketball player in the world. (Not to mention that if either of them actually expected that type of behavior from family, we'd think they were arrogant turds anyway, not worthy of our respect.)

Social media allows us to skip past having to let people in on the real deal and only show them what we want them to see. And we're okay with it, because the vast majority of them are never, ever going to know the real story. It's not just that what they are consuming is a limited version of ourselves; it's that all they will ever know is a limited version of ourselves. We can carefully craft the idol.

Third, and perhaps the thing that destroys us the most, is that our celebrity is quantifiable. How many followers do you have? How many friends? How many likes did you get on that last status update? Who commented? Who is talking about you if you google your name? You might not have had even a percentage of that information before the advances in technology. "How famous am I?" would have been a much more difficult question to answer with any accuracy.

These three opportunities exist for every single person in the 21st century to allow them to promote their own ultimate value. All of us have access to the tools that will give us influence. All of us can create a false identity to be worshiped. And all of us can quantify, every second of every day, exactly how well we're accomplishing our agenda. And it's killing us.

Every day we measure our self-worth (intentionally or unintentionally) by comparing ourselves to other people's false identity, and then turning around and seeing how many people are "liking" ours. Admit it: you would feel better about yourself if 50 more people liked your last status update; no one posts that selfie and feels good when they get zero comments or likes. Chances are, they'd be devastated.

This is why today, more than ever, we need to be pointing people's hearts and affections back towards Jesus. Only once we begin to see Jesus as having ultimate worth do we begin to release our agenda for our own glory. Jesus, through his Holy Spirit, promises to change us on that heart-level. Jesus gives us the confidence that we measure up and that he loves us, regardless of how many likes or comments we get. He's the only one who is going to love you perfectly, and not the fake you that you've crafted for outsiders. The real you that's sitting on your side of the computer.

My advice? Stop chasing celebrity or superstar status and start embracing Jesus. Instead of killing yourself trying to chase down the love of others, enjoy life with a God who chases you down because he already loves you.

Teasing & Grace

Our kids know that they aren't supposed to tease each other. They understand that if they do it, they are being disobedient. Nevertheless, the regularity with which they tease one another must border on legendary. Twin boys, age 6. A younger sister, also age 6. Three kids ten months apart, all of them in their teasing prime.

So there they are. Knowing that "obedience" and "behaving" is a positive quality that we would like to help them learn. And yet, battling daily with their internal desire to tease. On the way to school each day, it is nearly inevitable, except on those rare days when God is gracious to us, that at least two of the children will begin to tease one another. The third will be silent. We will remind. We may scold. Finally, we may yell. And when we are close to silencing the teasers, so that three children are once again in line with our expectations, the third will finally speak: "Daddy, I'm the only one behaving." He may as well add a "nanny nanny boo boo" for effect.

And thus, all three children descend into rebellion.

Someone said that God gives us children so that we will understand what it is like to create someone in our own image who denies our very existence. It isn't that they pretend we're not there; they just completely ignore our "sovereignty" over the situation as parents. They know the rules, they just have a really hard time keeping them. The internal push to do the wrong thing is too strong. It's almost worse than pretending we weren't there. They look us in the face and do exactly the opposite of what we asked them to do, and what they know they should do.

Of course it really is just a microcosm of our own rebellion. It's the reason that religion doesn't work. The internal push to do the wrong thing is too strong; the rules only highlight our desire and make it worse, like someone telling us "not to look" at something. Our first reaction, without even thinking, is to look. Had no one ever told us not to look, we may have never looked, or at very least, we wouldn't have known it was wrong to look. It's when we hear the law of not looking that our desire becomes evident and we do the one thing we aren't supposed to; we look. But the problem is deeper.

Even if we don't look, and we don't descend into obvious rebellion, we still end up in the wrong spot. We say, "See, I didn't look." But our heart (and our tone!) reveals what we really mean: "see, I knew I was better than all those lookers; all those rebels." It's a much more subtle form of rebellion; an implicit rebellion; a rebellion couched in righteousness. A rebellion that elevates our selves and denigrates others because, after all, we really are better than them.

Religion creates rule breakers and rule keepers and neither of them are righteous.

The only one righteous is the one who not only kept all of the law, but loved keeping it, not because anyone would notice, but simply because he delighted in God and delighted in keeping his ideals. There was no self-interest involved; only God-interest. He fulfilled the law not because he was a law-lover, but because he was a God-lover. He loved God fully, so he loved others fully. So love is the fulfillment of the law.

What does that mean for three kids who tease each other incessantly? I don't really know. But what I do know is that they need grace more than they need law, and I need grace more than I need another parenting manual. That doesn't mean I don't help them to behave, it doesn't mean I don't give them rules, and it doesn't mean that they don't have consequences. It just means that the first thing they get when they get to school is a hug and an "I love you", and that's the first thing they return to every day. And they get it regardless of whether or not they teased each other in the car.

The Trouble with Religion

“But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.”

— The Horse & His Boy, C.S. Lewis

Religion is a wicked taskmaster. It is a tyrant that tells you how you can be "good", how you can be "better", that your ultimate righteousness is just one step further ahead–and at the same time, your destruction only a step behind.

The worst part about religion, at least in the sense that the New Testament most often describes it, is that it teaches you how to be good and do good things. The religious leaders in Jesus day and the plethora of other religious teachers throughout early church history had a similar theme to their message: Yes, God loves you...but only if you obey. Consequently the adherents of the religious teaching would look good, do good things, help others, and serve God, but it was always out of fear. Fear that others would find them out, fear that they may not be as good as they had hoped, and ultimately, fear that God would stop loving them. The truth is that religion is a never-ending ladder that you just can't climb.

The Gospel frees us from the tyrant of the law, and it's taskmaster, religion. It turns the old teaching in it's head: God does not love us because we obey. We obey, because God already and always loves us. The Gospel story is the story of God's one-way love towards us, even when we didn't deserve it, couldn't obey, were running in the opposite direction, trying to displace God with our own "gods"...God loves us anyway. When we begin to really understand that reality, our obedience has nothing to do with fear that God might somehow stop loving us–why would he stop loving us now? He has always known who we really are–but rather is driven by the fact that he will never stop loving us! God loves us. The more we understand that love, the more we will obey.

Unfortunately, when people are set free from the driving whips of religion, they often find that they do not exactly know how to have the discipline of obedience. Their obedience in the past was driven so hard by external forces and people and perceptions and law that it never really took root in their heart of hearts; they never really learned how to obey. They just learned how to avoid getting the whip–and these are different things.

For some it happens when they go to college and find that once the taskmaster is no longer around, they no longer have to obey. This is not because of the Gospel; it is simply evidence of what we already know to be true: if our obedience was only the result of a fear of a negative consequence, then once the fear is removed, so is the obedience. 

But for others, the same phenomena is seen when they finally discover the Gospel. Sometimes, the freedom they begin to experience as they hear the truth leads them not to more obedience, but for a time, to what appears to be less obedience. Perhaps this is why the apostle Paul had to remind the early church not to take license with Grace. Just because you are saved totally, freely, and forever, does not mean that you go on sinning. Actually it will lead to the opposite. But for many people freed from the shackles of religion, there is a time when they realize that they don't actually know how to obey. They have to relearn, because they have to be retrained. Obedience is no longer the result of the whip; it's the result of a heart softened by love.

Religion is a wicked taskmaster because the law can never produce what it promises. In fact, it always results in the opposite. Press a person with religion, and for a time, they will appear to have improved. Stop pressing, and you'll find that they haven't gotten better, they've gotten worse. As soon as there is no one to force them to do something, they find they don't have the power to force themselves.

Only the Gospel ultimately leads to obedience, because the Gospel starts with the heart and transforms our very desires. We can't force ourselves to be better, but when our heart changes, we find that we don't have to force ourselves at all. It starts slow, eventually seems to come naturally, and one day, it will come perfectly.

Potentially the Most Important book of 2014

Replant: How a Dying Church Can Grow Again

By Darrin Patrick, Mark DeVine

Buy on Amazon

Still two months out and I already pre-ordered my copy.

I'm convinced that churches don't have to "die". Not if that means putting a for sale sign out in front of the building, anyway. But then it depends on your vision of "life".

If the life of your church is something you create, or something you "had back in the golden years", then yeah, maybe your church needs to die. The hard truth is that if the "life" of your church doesn't stem from Jesus, then you're not a biblical church anyway.

But if your vision of what "life" is in your church has to do with the life that's given by the Holy Spirit because of Jesus, then the truth is your church was never even dying to begin with. Maybe in need of a refocus, but still very much alive. You just have to recapture what that life means and looks like. Probably it means you have to return to your first love and identify your idols.

That refocus is going to require repentance, a willingness to move forward, some intense leadership hurdles, and a whole lot of the Holy Spirit. But it can happen.

I hate seeing for-sale signs on church lawns, and the unfortunate reality is that barring some changes, that's the future for most of the churches I know. I'm hoping this book helps stem that tide.

How to be Successful

I was listening to an interview with Warren Buffet this morning on Sports Radio. Despite it being a sports program he was asked the question he's probably always asked: what made you successful?

Three things that he mentioned. First, he found something that he loved from an early age. second, he had the right temperament to do what it is that he does. Third, he had great teachers along the way.

I'd sum it up this way: Passion. Gifts. Education.

Your passion is what gets you up in the morning and gives you the energy to push through, even when things are tough. We think of the word "passion" to mean a sort of ecstasy or deep seeded emotion. The word actually derives from the Latin for "suffer". In other words, what is it that makes you suffer in your soul? Is there anything that bothers you about how things are? Is there something that you can't help but do, because not doing it would cause greater pain than doing it?

Passion is what makes a man like Nelson Mandela endure years in prison because the cause of abolishing apartheid was too important to ignore. It would have been more painful for him to be free, and ignore the problem, than it was to be in prison, but continue fighting. That's passion.

Your gifts are what enable you to do something about your passion. Not everyone has the same gifts. Gifting can look like temperament, as in Buffet's case. He doesn't get rattled when people disagree with his decisions or when the stock market appears to be tanking in the short term. He has tough skin and can take the long view. Gifting can look like skills. Some people can motivate others with words; some people can motivate others with money. Some people can do; others can teach. Your gifting is going to help you fulfill your passion.

And finally, education or knowledge. You need people around you that will help shape and form who you are so that you can be the most focused in the pursuit of your passion. You also need to have the right information so that you can pursue your passion most effectively. Education can be helping you understand more about who you are; oftentimes, we think we're good at something that maybe we're not (case in point: most of the people auditioning for television Talent Shows). Learning you stink at something is a form of education. It's an important knowledge to have–almost equally important, actually, as knowing what you are good at. 

We also need to know something about how the world actually is. If you want to fix the poverty problem in a little known African country, you need to know hy things are the way that they are in that African country. One of the reasons that most oversees charity is so ineffective is because we project our culture on to theirs; we project a certain way of thinking and doing things onto a group of people who have their own way of thinking and doing things. The most successful people will be the ones who have the right information about themselves, and about the problem they are trying to tackle.

Passion. Gifts. Education.

You probably won't ever become the world's wealthiest person, but that's not how success is measured. At the end of your life you'll measure success based on how closely you came to aligning yourself with your truest passion. The closer you were aligned, the more you were able to accomplish, the more successful you will be. The further you were, the less successful you will be. Everything else will be icing on the cake; even 50 billion dollars.

The Gospel Vaccine

The best way to make sure that someone never understands the Gospel is to make them good.

I think this is what Jesus means when he tells the Pharisees that they go across sea and land to make a single convert and then make him "twice the son of hell" as they themselves are. There was a certain zeal to their activity; perhaps they were driven by a passion for their message. They may have appeared enthusiastic. Yet, they functionally shut the door to the kingdom of heaven in people's face. Why?

Because they taught people how to be saved without Jesus. They made people good. They told them how they could behave better, have a better life, be more religious, and please God on their own. Once they believed that they could please God with their own efforts, they were in double trouble. It's one thing to be ignorant of the fact that you have a problem (in this case, God's displeasure towards your best efforts); it's another thing entirely to believe that you've solved the problem on your own.

It's bad to have cancer and not know it. It's worse to have cancer but convince yourself everything is okay. In the case of the former, you might be open to the real remedy once the problem is revealed. In the case of the latter, you don't even think you need a remedy.

The way we do this in the world of American Christianity is giving people just enough Jesus that they don't ever bother to look for the real thing. We give them a vaccine. They are inoculated. And we do it by making them good.

Growing up, we were made good through religious activity. We had solid theology and doctrine, we just didn't have much of Jesus. We assumed Jesus. We could quote answer #1 from the catechism (at least the first part), we just didn't know how to actually get the comfort that we said we had (the second part of the answer). (Side note: question #2, which no one memorizes, also directs us towards the answer...)

Nowadays the pendulum has swung in the other direction. We no longer address doctrine, theology, or that sort of deep, boring, and confusing stuff. We just "follow Jesus". We're not entirely sure which Jesus, or what Jesus believed, or what he taught, or any of that confusing stuff. We do know how to be better parents, better lovers, and better employees, though, so it can't be all bad. Anything other than that we can just sort of make up as we go.

The end result is the same in both categories. It's either something we do or something we know that makes us okay with God. Either we know a lot about him, or we follow him. Unfortunately, neither is ultimately sufficient.

The heart of Christianity is putting our total confidence in Christ's work rather than our own; it's understanding God's absolute and one-way love towards sinners like us. It means admitting that my best isn't good enough. I can't earn God's acceptance–but I don't have to, because Jesus already has. God gives it to me, free of charge. That's grace. And it's the only way in to the kingdom of heaven.

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.”

— Matthew 23:13-15

“Q. What is your only comfort
in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own,
but belong—
body and soul,
in life and in death—
to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,
and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.
He also watches over me in such a way
that not a hair can fall from my head
without the will of my Father in heaven;
in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.
Because I belong to him,
Christ, by his Holy Spirit,
assures me of eternal life
and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready
from now on to live for him.”

— Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 1

“Q. What must you know to
live and die in the joy of this comfort?

A. Three things:
first, how great my sin and misery are;
second, how I am set free from all my sins and misery;
third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.”

— Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 2