To rise again…

Sometimes, when you least expect it, you hear the voice of the Spirit. From the poetry of Emily Dickinson:

Each life converges to some centre
Expressed or still;
Exists in every human nature
A goal,

Admitted scarcely to itself, it may be,
Too fair
For credibility’s temerity
To dare.

Adored with caution, as a brittle heaven,
To reach
Were hopeless as the rainbow’s raiment
To touch, 

Yet persevered toward, surer for the distance;
How high
Unto the saints’ slow diligence
The sky! 

Ungained, it may be, by a life’s low venture,
But then,
Eternity enables the endeavoring
Again.

There is in every life a goal, a purpose. I have lost mine. Once, long ago, in the quiet of a summer’s night, I thought I heard a call from God—that my life, my vocation, and my future were to be bound up with Him and His people. Overwhelmed by a surfeit of anxieties and cares and destroyed by a relentless tide of rejection and failure, I now quail under the conviction that I either failed or was wrong. There seems no evidence to support my claim to calling; surely, I must have “heard” wrong.

Suffering from pneumonia these last ten days, I endured the double anguish of considering what’s become of my life. I feel an orphan in foreign land, a refugee doing what’s necessary rather than what I desire. The exclusion from ministry office is like a sentence of death. While I know my lot is not worthy to be compared with the genuine sufferings of others, for me life has become hell. As I worsened toward the week’s end, I wondered if perhaps my prayers requesting release from this hell were being answered. But then I heard Him speak—in Emily Dickinson, no less! Apparently He is not yet done with me.

I dare not articulate what I have only begun to understand. But I think I heard an echo of Paul: “The gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (Rom. 11:29, KJV). My pursuit is not over; my call not removed. I turned my face to the wall and prayed, and in the night, this word came: “My son, I say unto thee, ‘Arise!’” (Lk. 7:14).

These last few days have been blurry—yet I am making a turn for the better. With the strength that is manifesting, I choose to arise…. I arise with the only venue currently open to me…. I’m coming back.

An Alternative Shack review…

I realize my review makes for an awfully long read on-line. I sort-of apologize…! I just didn’t want to cut it.

Anyway, some have asked for a version they could download and read off-line. Here are two versions: a Word document, and a PDF. Just give credit where credit is due!

Shack Review—Word doc

Shack Review—PDF

A walk of faith…

It has been a tumultuous couple of months for our family here in Virginia Beach. During the precipitous market crash of the Fall, 2008, our savings disappeared without so much as a “see you later!” We were entirely too leveraged and should have pulled the plug earlier, but my unfounded optimism and tendency to avoid unpleasant realities clouded my judgment. I had hoped for an escape, but unlike previous downturns, we would not weather this storm.

Losing one’s financial security yields an odd mixture of outright panic, deep remorse and remarkable peace. My wife consoled me by saying, “At least we don’t have to worry about what the market is doing anymore!” Yet it brought other worries, including my on-going struggle to find ministry employment. As long as we had some kind of safety net, the process of sending out endless résumés to churches was merely a frustration; without any means of support, it became a luxury we could no longer afford.

So after twenty-two years of teaching and ministry, I began a search for secular employment. And God is so good: He opened a door for me with an electrical contractor in Yorktown. The committed Christian who owns the company learned of my need and thought that we might help each other for as long as the Lord allows. So I am now learning the language and processes of purchasing electrical equipment and materials. I confess there are moments when I am entirely baffled by my circumstances, yet I quickly remember how miraculous it is that I—a middle-aged preacher, ignorant of almost everything other than some theological tidbits—have found a job at a time when the economy is (supposedly) going down the tubes.

Needless to say, my life has been dramatically rearranged. The job only asks for 40 hours a week, but the commute adds another 10–15 hours each week. My days begin well before the birds awake and seem to end shortly after dinner! For those of you who know me well, you would be genuinely surprised by how early I’m “up and at’em!”

The change has necessitated a reexamination of my ministry activity. For some time I had wrestled against what I believed was the prompting of the Lord to start some kind of fellowship. Still being somewhat scarred from my earlier ministry experience in charismatic, word-faith circles, I was reluctant to go out on my “own,” and so sought a position in an existing church. While I had the means to wait for the right position to open, I eagerly volunteered my teaching gift to local churches. It is not as noble as it sounds, though; I admit that I hoped that one of those churches might have recognized the gift and been moved to take me on staff as a teaching minister, but it never happened. Why buy the cow when the milk is free, right? Heh!

At any rate, my wife and I prayed and concluded that the time of waiting for recognition had come to an end; it was now time to do what we knew to do. So we resurrected Household of Faith Ministries, the tax-exempt ministry organization we formed ten years ago, and began holding services in our home on Sundays at 4 pm. While these are still early days, we are cheered by the attendance and the fellowship. I decided to step down from the other volunteer positions; they consumed a lot of time. It is important to be a blessing, but when one is drowning its not the time to volunteer. I chose to spend my ‘free’ time with my family and in pursuit of my writing.

As you might imagine then, the last seven weeks have been a blur. I am emotionally and physically exhausted. It may be only another opportunity to walk by faith and purge my reliance on things of this earth, but it has been an arduous education. It has taught me a lot, about God, others, and myself. You really do learn who your friends are when times get hard! But thankfully, there is Jesus! Now that I’ve completed the last of my volunteer responsibilities, I should have another eight to ten hours to use for other projects. But, for this week at least, I’ll probably just sleep!

Believe it or not, I do have a couple of entries to post here. I have been working on a new website for Household of Faith which will include recordings of my teaching. I have not decided if I will migrate this blog to the website, but for now I will continue to post the occasional musing here. There is so much to say…! Until then, please—get into the Word! And may God have mercy on us all.

A final thought…

 

May God have mercy on us… 

Our Number One Need…

No sooner had I posted my first reflection on what a church should be than I received a comment that powerfully reveals our need for systematic and faithful teaching of Scripture. Somewhere out there is a soul possessed of a hundred questions, who apparently thinks that s/he knows Christ. And yet they appear clueless about the reasons for His coming and the purpose of His life on earth. From the sound of it, s/he might be a refugee from the contemporary church; at the least they harbor a great deal of cynicism towards it.

The possibility that this possessor of questions might well have been in regular attendance at a church is a powerful indictment against contemporary protestantism. The fact that someone could think that they know Christ and yet be so pointedly ignorant of the reasons for redemption demonstrates that the church has abdicated her responsibilities to teach the Word. This commentator apparently envisions Christ as a Robert Heinlein character, some powerful, mystical embodiment of human divinity, calling out the goodness lying dormant within human consciousness. No doubt s/he believes that humanity suffers under an accretion of layers of toxic sediment disgorged by the machinery of western, capitalistic culture, which has buried the divinity within our hearts. For this possessor of questions, humanity is in a state of unconscious ignorance, imprisoned to materialistic desires and awaiting a cryptic key to release our hidden potential.

Make no mistake: in the beginning Almighty God created humanity good and declared him very good indeed (Gen 1:31). Humanity at the first walked in fellowship with God (Gen 3:8). Now imagine that for a moment: what kind of being must Adam have been before the fall, that he had the faculties to fellowship with the Creator of the Universe? I love my children, and there was nothing like coming home when they were young and walking with them in the late afternoon light. They might tell me a story or share a dream, but more often than not, their attention would wander after a bug or a rock or a swing set. It was a joyous connection for me, but it was not fellowship. For fellowship, I needed someone who could converse with me with a measure of comprehension, understanding and empathy. Think of it… what kind of man was man before the Fall?

But Adam sinned: he rejected God by disobeying His commands. The devil said that God didn’t want Adam and Eve to be “like God” (Gen. 3:5), but that was a lie, because they already were like God! God had invested them with the authority to rule over all the works of His hands (Gen. 1:28; Ps. 8:5–7). All Adam needed to do in order to exercise that lordship was to submit himself to God, and allow God to rule through him. But Adam—like the devil himself—rejected this place of submission and dependency. He wanted to be like God on his own, without having to bow his knee to God. And so he fell. And great was the fall of human kind.

Humanity repeats this fall again and again, and those today who seek to fan the flames of some so-called divine spark inside of us, who see in Christ Jesus a mystical purveyor of esoteric knowledge that will enable humanity to reach its full potential, fall in the same fashion as Adam again. Man is not God and never can be nor will be God. But my question is, how could someone hold such beliefs in a church? That could only be because the church has abandoned the teaching of the Word.

Sadly, what my commentator accurately divines is that the church too often is about the inappropriate exercise of power. Much of the contemporary church is nothing more than a business enterprise marketing compassion and religion. Their focus is on their income statement; they keep score by the square footage of their “campuses” and the numbers of their outreaches. They design ministry in response to consumer surveys in the hope that they will increase their market share and proportionately raise their income. However, where my commentator misses the mark is in accusing those who accurately teach the Scripture of an abuse of power. Those who hold to Scripture are not building an enterprise based on guilt or fear, but instead are leading people to God by teaching them the Truth.

If anyone wishes to see religious abuse, to witness church malpractice, they need only look to the seeker-sensitive, purpose-driven, or emergent church paradigms. Leaders in those ecclesiologies gather disciples after themselves; they abandon Scripture and preach whatever their people want to hear. These are the ultimate abusers, for they willingly allow people to slip into an eternal destiny in hell, all so that they may build a bigger church, elevate their personal profile, and obtain a seat at the place of power in the community. They choose to dispense comfort for the here and now, rather than point to our need of redemption, holiness and sacrifice. They reject Scripture as the source of authority for all things concerning life and faith and instead turn to human wisdom and the literature of human potential and pop-psychology. They corrupt the worship of God in spirit and truth with a panoply of neo-pagan emotional, inarticulate, and irrational rituals.

If humanity is ever to achieve its design as capable of fellowship with God; if we are ever to regain the good, divine aspects of our original being, it will only be as we fully and completely surrender ourselves to God in absolute dependence upon Him and His teaching. His ways of redemption are articulated by Christ in the Word. Therefore we must commit to immerse ourselves in the Word, and to allow His Word and Spirit to completely inhabit, indwell, and impel us. If there is, or ever was, a divine aspect to humanity, it was the presence of God within us. There is nothing divine in us alone. Once, long ago, human beings bore the imago dei—the image of God—without measure. But that was lost and marred through the fall. Jesus Christ came to restore that image. And when we receive the Word and are born again from above; when the Holy Spirit comes to indwell our hearts anew, then God begins the process of restoring His unblemished image in us. It is through the Word and the Spirit that humanity can be transformed and conformed to the image of our Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus.

Let us therefore be a church that elevates the teaching of the Word and the doctrines of the faith. Let us so love the world that we refuse to allow them to live with fatal misconceptions of God, Christ and humanity, and instead be willing to proclaim the Truth, even if it makes us unpopular. Let us be passionately hungry for God’s Word, esteeming the words of His mouth more than our necessary food. And let us cry out to God to be a church—and for all our churches to be—a place where the Word is faithfully proclaimed and taught. May God have mercy on us all.

Vacation is over…

As you may have noticed, I took a short break from writing over the last two weeks. Sometimes you need to clear your mind and think of things of less import and consequence. I read a horrible novel (a critique of which will be forthcoming!), lazed at the beach, and watched hours of re-runs of the television program Monk. None of which contributed to the development of my reasoning faculties…! But they all helped me restore a sense of peace and quiet to my mind.

But September has dawned, which for me is always the start of a new year. I love the autumn, and while it hardly feels like fall here in Virginia Beach, there are ever so many subtle hints that it is coming soon. As temperatures drop with the leaves, my mind accelerates. I’m sure I’ll have lots to say soon.

Thanks for your patience, and for visiting the sight even when I hadn’t posted in a while. All is well. So let us begin….

Summer Daze…

My apologies for my light blogging these last few weeks. Life never remains constant in our house, but recently our schedules have changed so dramatically that we may soon have to resort to evening planner synchronizations! At any rate, it is the end of summer and I find it hard to focus. However school is starting, and my biological clock will soon notify my brain to return to full function. Yet, even as I took a break from my usual thoughts, I did observe something that provoked a reflection.

We went to my first-born’s new school for a ‘new family orientation dinner’ last week. Call me old fashioned, but I donned a jacket and tie and forced the boys into khakis and collared shirts. It was a dinner after all, not a cookout or a picnic. Boy, were we overdressed! My sons weren’t that overdressed; most of the children were dressed appropriately for school. But the parents were another issue. Only one other man was dressed in a jacket and tie; that he was quite a few years older than me was a bitter consolation! Needless to say, we shed the jackets quickly to avoid discomfort. Some men were dressed in business casual, yet by far the majority of the parents looked like they had just left the beach.

Which prompted me to ask myself: what’s happened to adults in our culture? Are there any left? When I looked around that full dining hall the other night, I swear there weren’t many adults in attendance! It may be a failing, but I confess that I judge people by the way they’re dressed. It’s not about the clothing per se, its more an issue of the suitably of the outfit for the occasion. And I couldn’t help but wonder, isn’t there supposed to be a difference between the way kids dress and adults dress?

I have teenagers, and there are times when we surrender and let them out of the house looking like… well… like teenagers! However, a time should come when kids mature into adults able to navigate the social responsibilities of life on their own. I always thought that that time came sometime after college, but at the latest it must come by the time of professional employment and/or marriage. By then, shouldn’t guys have learned to tuck shirts in, abandon the flip-flops and put on a decent shirt? Shouldn’t a mom have put away the midriff-exposing shirts? Or am I being just too old-fashioned?

I can’t help but wonder if there is a correlation between these relaxed dress standards and our declining standards in academics and public and private morality. We seem possessed of an anything goes mentality, where rules of personal responsibility and appropriate behavior no longer apply. We’ve even reached the point where individuals and institutions need suffer no consequence to their gluttonous accumulation of debt. How long can we continue as a people when we’ve removed all standards of civil behavior? The nation is beginning to stagger under the cost of this moral amnesia.

Where are the adults in our society? Where are the ones ready to make hard decisions, to put off gratification for the benefit of the future? Where are those who will bear the burdens of life and teach the next generation that while life is unfair, sacrifice, discipline and honor can assure success? When I see a room full of parents—parents of middle and high school aged students—looking like monied refugees from Spring Break, well, I wonder: have we so delayed the onset of adulthood that these folks are still waiting for the call? What standards are being instilled in the next generation? Perhaps this next generation’s adolescent rebellion will take the form of dressing appropriately and adopting manners. But what is the real chance of that happening?

For now I count it all of a piece with the overall decline and fall of the West. It is certainly provides evidence that I am no longer as young as I feel! Selah!

An additional thought on being a fundamentalist…

After reading my previous post, a friend forwarded the following from John Piper’s blog, Desiring God:

20 Reasons I Don’t Take Potshots at Fundamentalists

1. They are humble and respectful and courteous and even funny (the ones I’ve met).

2. They believe in truth.

3. They believe that truth really matters.

4. They believe that the Bible is true, all of it.

5. They know that the Bible calls for some kind of separation from the world.

6. They have backbone and are not prone to compromise principle.

7. They put obedience to Jesus above the approval of man (even though they fall short, like others).

8. They believe in hell and are loving enough to warn people about it.

9. They believe in heaven and sing about how good it will be to go there.

10. Their “social action” is helping the person next door (like Jesus), which doesn’t usually get written up in the newspaper.

11. They tend to raise law-abiding, chaste children, in spite of the fact that Barna says evangelical kids in general don’t have any better track record than non-Christians.

12. They resist trendiness.

13. They don’t think too much is gained by sounding hip.

14. They may not be hip, but they don’t go so far as to drive buggies or insist on typewriters.

15. They still sing hymns.

16. They are not breathless about being accepted in the scholarly guild.

17. They give some contemporary plausibility to New Testament claim that the church is the “pillar and bulwark of the truth.”

18. They are good for the rest of evangelicals because of all this.

19. My dad was one.

20. Everybody to my left thinks I am one. And there are a lot of people to my left.

——————

It sounds good to me. Amen? (Thanks, “d”!)

 

Uncomfortable Truths…

None of us likes to offend people. Of all people, it may be Christians who like being offensive the least, since we are under command from the Lord to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us and to suffer wrong contentedly. Nevertheless, we also have been commanded to go into the world and preach the gospel. To do that faithfully, we must tell people the truth—the truth about their condition as fallen humanity and the truth about their need of salvation.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…. —Rom. 3:23

 However, we are so intellectually and emotionally immature, so hypersensitive, and so deceived in our understanding of love that we shy away from telling people the truth. Especially sinners. We don’t even want to call them sinners! We invent new euphemisms instead: seekers and those distant from God are currently popular. The New Testament is less polite:

 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. —Eph. 2:1–3

 There is a reason we preach the gospel. Yet it looks as though we have forgotten it. Perhaps because somewhere we decided to minister out of our feelings rather than speak from God’s Word. The Word tells us that there is a standard from which humanity has fallen and all of our best efforts cannot help us:

 For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. —James 2:10

 When we break God’s law, we sin. We don’t like that word, so we try to call it other things—problems, challenges, even personal issues. But sin is sin, and it produces death:

 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. —Rom. 6:23

 There is judgment coming to the sinner. God’s wrath will be poured out on the last day:

 But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. —Rom. 2:5

 God’s wrath has been levied against fallen humanity. Unless sinners repent and turn to Jesus in faith, God’s wrath towards them is unavoidable:

 Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. —John 3:36

 Sadly, in today’s church evangelism has been made about increasing church attendance—not convicting sinners of their sin and their need of Christ. When will we recover a proper understanding of our need to proclaim the gospel to the lost?

 And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. —Rev. 20:15

 I shudder to think of the final destiny of sinners. But I also shudder when I think of the displeasure we might face if we persist in rejecting God’s Word and magnifying our thoughts and feelings over that Word. No matter how we might want to sanitize it, the gospel is an offense to fallen humanity. It contains uncomfortable truths. We must get over ourselves, trust God and preach the Truth.

 

The Truth Project…

Last October, the USA Today newspaper reported on the results of a Gallup poll that questioned people about their beliefs concerning the origins of humanity. The paper noted that 66% of those questioned agreed that the statement “the idea that God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years” was either definitely or probably true. Yet in the same poll, 53% of those questioned indicated that they believed that “the idea that humans evolved from less-advanced life forms over millions of years” was also either probably or definitely true! Houston—we have a problem! It sounds like America is profoundly confused!

 A recent survey conducted by the Pew Forum found that over 75% of the United States identifies itself as Christian. Yet as this USA Today/Gallup survey indicates, there is an obvious disconnect between what people believe in church and what they believe in society. As one fellow put it, people today have “Christian hearts and pagan heads.” No wonder our society is in the state it is; we seem unable to allow biblical truth to affect our view of the world.

 A variety of ministries are awakening to this issue; recently there has been an explosion of academic and popular treatments on Christian worldview education. One of the most substantial and solid treatments has been produced by Focus on the Family, entitled The Truth Project. This is an excellent discussion of biblical truth and how it relates to life in society.

 The Truth Project is designed for small groups. It would be a tremendous contribution to our churches, schools and neighborhoods, if we could encourage one another to allow the truths that we believe to actually govern the way we think about things in our culture and society. Imagine how our faith would come alive if we genuinely discovered how relevant and applicable Christian beliefs are to the life we live in this earth! We could strengthen our churches immeasurably, and perhaps bring some sanity back to our civil society.

 Focus on the Family is conducting a nationwide training seminar by satellite on September 27, 2008. Registration fees include the day’s instruction plus the complete 12-lesson Truth Project Curriculum on DVD. You will also receive access to Focus’s learning and support site to help you in any area of your presentation of the series.

 I am honored to serve on a committee overseeing the presentation of this seminar in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. If you are interested in helping us administer and execute our seminar, email our director Robert Wallace. For additional information, and to attend the seminar, both in Hampton Roads or elsewhere in America, visit the Truth Project web site and register for the meeting in your locale.

God has laid a burden on my heart for a return to committed discipleship within the Church. He has charged me with teaching not only the theology necessary, but also the practical life habits involved in becoming disciples. One of the greatest needs we have, however, is basic, common sense instruction in how what we believe should affect every area of our life—political, social, financial, and cultural. It does us no good to learn the disciplines of prayer and meditation, and come to understand the theology of redemption and the Christian life, if we persist in living life as practical pagans. Christianity is not about church attendance but about the Kingdom of God in this world. I encourage you to investigate this project and pursue its instruction. May our efforts bring glory and honor to the Almighty!