Category Archives: Discipleship

Accepted on a journey

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Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
She said, “No one, Lord.”
And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”

—John 8:10-11 (ESV)

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”
And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

To another he said, “Follow me.”
But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.”
And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.”
Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

—Luke 9:57-62 (ESV)

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.

—Luke 18:22-23 (ESV)

People like to talk about Christ accepting everybody and forget that the acceptance of Christ is not a thing that says to us, “I’m fine with you just the way you are; you just keep doing what you’re doing.” The acceptance of Christ, rather, says to us, “Go and sin no more.”

He says to us, “I love you just the way you are—but too much to let you stay that way.”

He says to us, “You’re all messed up, but I love you anyway; that’s why I’m going to change you from the inside out.”

He says to us, “Give up your life—give up your plans, your desires, your ideas of how things should be—and I’ll give you something better.”

Jesus doesn’t call us to stay where and what we are because he’s not much of one for staying in one place; he calls us to follow. He calls us to a journey, and a relationship, and like any journey and any meaningful relationship, that means change. It means leaving things behind, and getting new things in return.

And yes, that includes the things of which we say, “God couldn’t possibly want me to give that up; he can’t possibly mean that I’m not allowed to do that.” In fact, it especially includes those things, because those—whether sinful in and of themselves or not—are the things in our lives that most interfere with his lordship: they are our idols. They are the things which which we must give over to him if we’re to follow him; clinging to them is nothing less than idolatry.

And yes, that includes our sexuality—and that means for all of us. He may give it back to us in pretty much the same form, or he may not; he’s been calling people to celibacy for a very long time, after all, for a great many reasons. But whether straight or gay, married or single, our sexuality absolutely must be surrendered to his lordship in our lives if we’re to follow Jesus faithfully; and that may very well mean accepting that we cannot do that which we most want to do, and which we’re most accustomed to doing.

And yes, that includes our money, and our careers, and our other family relationships, and our gifts and talents and aspirations, and all the other things that matter to us. He calls us to surrender to him everything of significance in our lives, to do with as he will. This is not the price of his acceptance, but its consequence; it’s what it means to be accepted by Jesus, because to be accepted by him is to be invited to go with him, to go where he’s going and do what he’s doing, instead of going where we want to go and doing what we want to do.

 

Character is who you are when you’re not thinking about it

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Remember, as you think about this photo, that Barack Obama considers Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. a friend, and is comfortable enough with him to call him “Skip.”It speaks well for Sgt. Jim Crowley that he’s solicitous of Professor Gates, helping him down the steps; I think it also speaks well of Dr. Gates, that he seems completely comfortable accepting Sgt. Crowley’s help. It seems clear that they’ve made their peace, and that’s good. It does not speak well of the president that he strides on ahead, oblivious.By way of comparison, here’s Barack Obama’s predecessor with Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), who was neither a close personal friend nor a political ally:

I believe the contrast between these two pictures captures something real and significant about the contrast between these two men.

HT: Thomas Lifson, via Whitney Zahnd

Christianity: a change of orientation

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To restate the typical presentation of the gospel slightly, each of us on this earth is born with a global orientation toward sin, which manifests itself in various specific orientations toward particular sins—some stronger than others, some wider-ranging than others, some more fundamental than others, but all of them representative of our general inborn orientation toward rebellion and wrongdoing.

Jesus Christ was God become human. He lived a fully human life, but without that orientation toward sin; he was perfect, oriented totally toward God and his goodness and holiness. As such, he was innocent of any rebellion and wrongdoing. He died on our behalf to take on himself and pay in his own body the penalty for all of our sin; he then rose again from the dead to break the power of sin and death over us; he returned to the throne room of heaven to be our advocate with God the Father; and when he had done so, he sent us the Holy Spirit to live within all those who follow him, so that we might always be connected to his presence and power.

As such, Christ is at work in his people by the will of God the Father and the power of his Holy Spirit to reorient us away from sin and toward God. The work of sanctification is nothing less than a total change of orientation, replacing the sinward orientation with which we are born, to which we are accustomed, within which our mental, emotional and spiritual habits have been formed, with the Godward orientation that is the way of Christ, which is the way of the cross.

This is hard. The grace of God is not about leaving us as we are, or making us comfortable, or protecting us from pain; this is one reason why we resist true grace and prefer a counterfeit of our own making. This is why, as Flannery O’Connor said, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” But as painful as it may be to allow God to change our orientation, it is necessary, because the orientation with which we’re born points us, in the end, to nothing but darkness and death. It’s only if our souls are turned, if God reorients us to himself, that we can find light and life in his presence.

Thought on the true nature and purpose of the conscience

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As I’ve noted before, “conscience” is a problematic word in our culture—not because it’s a hard concept to understand, but because we find it a hard one to accept. We don’t want our conscience to be something that pokes at us and makes us face the fact when we’re doing something wrong; we tend to want to do what we want to do, and we want to believe that if we can convince ourselves we feel good about doing what we want to do, then it must be OK.

As such, what a lot of folks in this world end up doing is essentially turning their conscience off—refusing to pay attention to its promptings, finding ways to dismiss it, teaching themselves to feel good (at least on the surface) about doing what they want to do, and then calling that good feeling their conscience. That way, they can tell themselves (and whoever else might happen to come around) that their conscience is clear about their actions.

Unfortunately, if we really want to, it’s not all that hard to get ourselves to the point where we’re standing proudly defiant of the will of God in the absolute (if self-generated) conviction that we’re obeying his will; and to the casual observer, it can be difficult to distinguish such stands from true acts of conscience. After all, Martin Luther launched the Reformation, in part, with an appeal to conscience, refusing to bow to the power of the Roman church because “to go against conscience is neither right nor safe”; these days, there are a lot of folks running around who want to be little Luthers, condemning the church for its teachings and declaring, “Here I stand.” Some are very convincing.

What too many people lack, though, is the central point of Luther’s statement: “My conscience is captive to the word of God”; this is the foundation for everything else. If your conscience is captive to the word of God, if your focus is on obeying God even when it’s the last thing you want to do, if you’ve been training and strengthening your conscience in faithful study of the Scriptures and in prayer—as Luther had—then yes, to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. If not, then you may very well be going against conscience and not even know it.

The key point is that conscience is not self-generated, because we aren’t the arbiters of reality—no, not even of “our own” reality, because there’s no such thing; whether we like it or not, our reality is the same as everyone else’s. The purpose of conscience isn’t to give us the perception of moral reality that suits our preferences, but rather to help us perceive moral reality as it is—to tell us what truly is right and wrong, not to confirm us in our own ideas and wishes on the subject.

This isn’t something we always want (which is why any person who truly functions as the conscience of an organization is going to be intensely unpopular at times), but it’s something we need, and badly, because we aren’t pure; we’re sullied by sin in all its various forms, and that distorts and occludes our judgment. As much as we may want to be the highest authority in our lives, we just aren’t qualified for the job—and it’s not so much what we don’t know that gets us into trouble (significant though that often is) as what we do know that ain’t so; it’s especially those things that we convince ourselves we know, not because of the available evidence, but because we desperately want to believe them. Those are the areas where we most need correction—and the areas in which we’re least willing to accept it; the role of conscience is precisely to convict and correct us at the points where we least want it, to inflict discomfort in order to prevent greater pain.

 

(Derived from “God’s Grace, Our Counterfeit”)

“Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable”

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“and lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.” I’ve always loved this song; it strikes me as deeply confused in its conclusion but insightful in its observations, and I’m a sucker for a great folk-rock hook.  I hadn’t thought of it in I don’t know how long until it popped into my head this morning, and I’ve watched the video several times today already.

As it happened, after I watched it the first time, I flipped over to my Facebook account to find Sarah Palin’s official statement on the murder of George Tiller, about which I’ve blogged here and here.  I think the conjunction was appropriate.  I don’t know what Saliers was focusing on when she wrote those lines, and I’m reasonably sure that neither she nor Amy Ray share my position on abortion (or much of anything else, except maybe folk music), but I couldn’t help thinking about them as I reflected on the case of Scott Roeder, the man who shot Tiller.  If this is who the authorities think he is, he’s been involved in anti-government activities and anti-abortion protests for a couple decades now; it sounds like he started out motivated by a real desire to do something about some of the evil and injustice in the world, and along the way, got twisted into fighting evil with evil.

That happens all too easily, if we’re not careful.  It’s all too easy to start accommodating evil, just a little, on the theory that the end justifies the means; but each act of accommodation makes the next just a little bit easier, and makes it seem just a little bit more necessary—and over time, the pace of accommodation increases, until finally it isn’t really even accommodation anymore, because we’re being transformed into the very thing we once despised.  It happens all too easily, because it’s always easier to roll down the slope than to climb up it, always easier to destroy than to create, always easier to justify our actions than to repent of them . . . except by the Spirit of God, this is the immutable truth about our souls:

Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable, and lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.

Left to our own devices, we lose the call, wander off the path, and are ultimately devoured by the darkness.  We may not all do so as dramatically as Scott Roeder—or, for that matter, George Tiller—but there but for the grace of God go we all.

Love without truth is dead (and vice versa)

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And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

—Ephesians 4:11-16 (ESV)

Philip over at The Thinklings has an excellent post up from yesterday entitled “Love Without Truth Isn’t Love At All”; I agree with him wholeheartedly and commend it to your attention.  I believe his point is a critically important one, and one which has been largely lost not only in our culture but in much of the church in this country, in large part because we’ve lost sight of Paul’s definition of spiritual maturity—and perhaps, in many cases, of any concept of spiritual maturity at all, or at least of any sense that it’s something to be greatly desired.

That’s our loss, because Paul is right (and so is Philip):  love cannot exist without truth—and of equal importance, neither can truth exist without love, and we’ve largely lost sight of that, too.  When Paul characterizes spiritual maturity as a matter of “speaking the truth in love,” he gives us what seems to me to be one of the most luminous statements in Scripture, capturing the way Christ calls us to live in one single, balanced phrase.  We are called to speak the truth in love as a way of life, compromising neither, setting neither above the other, and for good reason: neither can exist in its pure state without the other.

Love without truth decays, because true love seeks only what is best for the beloved; when truth is taken out, whether because the truth seems too hard, too painful, too inconvenient, too much work, too risky, too unpleasant, or what have you, the heart of love is gone, for it is seeking, in one way or another, its own perceived benefit. It may believe that it’s trying to spare the other person unnecessary pain, or something of that sort, but in reality it’s trying to spare itself; and that way leads the decline of love into the mere sentimentality which declares, “Love is blind.” No, love has its eyes wide open, because love is founded on truth. It’s precisely the fact that Jesus knew exactly what he was doing and exactly whom he was doing it for, with no illusions as to our worthiness or anything else, that made his death on the cross an act of love. Had he been blind to all that, it would have been worthless.

At the same time, truth without love also decays. It’s not just the words we say that make our statements true or false, it’s how we say them, and in what spirit; which is why it’s possible for us to combine true statements in such a way that those who hear us will draw a false conclusion. Without love, truth hardens, growing cold and brittle, like a coal removed from the fire; to say that God hates sin is to speak truth, but to say it without love is to give the very distinct impression that he hates sinners, too, which is most decidedly not true. Indeed, to grasp the truth that God hates sin without also understanding that he is love and that he loves all whom he has made is very likely to come to believe that God hates sinners.

The reason for this is that God is truth, and God is love, and neither truth nor love has any meaning or reality apart from him; and thus to sever one from the other is to sever both from their source. What’s left is something very much akin to cut flowers: they may retain their beauty, and they can be kept alive for a little while, but they’re dying. To have either truth or love, we must have both.

What do love and grace have in common?

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They’re both a lot harder than we think.  I’ve been arguing for a while now that grace is painfully difficult to accept, because free is a higher price than we want to pay; yesterday, Jared Wilson put up a superb post pointing out that love doesn’t really make things easier, either.  It’s short and I’d love to copy the whole thing, but then you wouldn’t have any incentive to go over and read it there, so I’ll excerpt it instead.

Why do we think it’s easier to love people than it is to just be religious?I’m not sure people who think and speak that way really even know what love is.Maybe the reason we don’t all, in the spirit of unity and rainbows, just set aside our differences and love each other is because it’s really freaking hard to do that. . . .It’s a lot easier to follow some rules everyone can see me keep than it is to truly, actually love people.Anybody can be on their best behavior. But to love someone who hates you? That takes Jesus and his cross.

Go read the whole thing.

The importance of theory

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“Most modern people have a curious contradiction; they abound in theories, yet they never see the part that theories play in practical life.  They are always talking about temperament and circumstances and accident; but most men are what their theories
make them; most men go in for murder or marriage, or mere lounging because of some
theory of life, asserted or assumed.”—Gabriel Gale, in “The Shadow of the Shark.” The Poet and the Lunatics. G. K. Chesterton

7 quick takes, 2/13/09

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7 Quick Takes Friday is hosted by Jen F. over at Conversion Diary; I haven’t participated to this point, but it seemed like a good day for it.

>1<

I love being a pastor, but there are many days I couldn’t rationally tell you why.  Today would be one of those days . . . in fact, this week would be one of those weeks.  Our poor congregation is dealing with multiple major health issues (most of them in key people or families), on top of the economic issues that are hitting everyone, on top of some other issues in particular people’s lives, at the same time as we’re trying to develop a plan to revitalize the congregation and its ministry.  Suffice it to say, things are a bit overwhelming around here just at the moment.

>2<

My hope is that we’re dealing with all these stresses because we’re moving forward in our efforts to revitalize the church—that we’re under deliberate spiritual attack to keep those efforts from bearing fruit.  We want to be faithful to do what Christ calls us to do, and we’re praying that he will work through us to draw people into his kingdom, and to raise up mature, godly followers of Christ; if we’re truly beginning to make progress in that direction, one would expect the enemy to try to nip it in the bud.  So, from an optimistic point of view, this might be evidence that we’re doing things that will ultimately bring new life to our congregation.

>3<

Of course, it isn’t really our effort that will make that happen, if it does.  You’ve no doubt heard it said that “God doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called”; that is, I think, truer in pastoral ministry than in most places, because there’s simply no such thing as being qualified for this job.  As David Hansen put it in his book The Art of Pastoring: Ministry Without All the Answers, being a pastor is impossible—except by the grace of God.  If we’re trying to do this in our own strength, we will fail.  True, there are those who will appear to succeed, because those who have the gifts to build great businesses can do that just as well in the church as on Wall Street; but they won’t be pastors.

>4<

The corollary to that is that we can only pastor well when God’s the one making everything happen.  I sometimes think that pastoral ministry is like the plot of The Phantom Menace.  The remarkable thing about that movie—I don’t say good, just remarkable—is that everything that happens on screen (aside from the emergence of young Anakin Skywalker) is diversion and subplot; the real plot, Palpatine’s deep-laid scheme to seize power, all takes place off screen.  It’s somewhat the same way being a pastor; we put all this effort into sermons, meeting with people, administration, planning, and the like, and all our work is just scaffolding for the Holy Spirit to do his work—and it’s his work that builds the church.

>5<

I respect my friends who are ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ within the Catholic church, and I understand the logic behind a celibate clergy; but I don’t see how they do it.  Leaving the whole issue of sex all the way aside, I couldn’t survive in pastoral ministry without my wife.  I don’t say that she always gives me exactly the help that I need, and still less that she gives me everything I need; she’s not up to that standard any more than any other human being is.  But she’s an incredible source of strength and support and wisdom and love, and I really couldn’t live this life without her.

>6<

One thing about being a pastor is that it’s taught me a certain new respect for politicians.  That might seem strange, but it goes like this.  I have long been of the school of thought that I wouldn’t trust anyone to be president who actually wanted the office.  Then one day it occurred to me that I could really say the same thing about pastors—I wouldn’t trust anyone to be a pastor who wants the job.  By that I don’t mean that you should only seek to be a pastor if you really don’t want to do it; but someone who’s just doing it because they like the idea and find it appealing either will be fried by it, or will like it for all the wrong reasons and probably be all the wrong kind of success.  The only intelligible reason to be a pastor is because God is calling you to this ministry and you can do no other; it’s the only thing that can make it worthwhile to be a real pastor.

And then it hit me:  our nation needs political leaders, and especially a president, the same way that the church needs pastors; and therefore, it logically follows that God calls people to political life, and ultimately to the presidency.  And if God calls you to run for president, then by cracky, you’d better run—and that can make it worthwhile, when nothing else I can possibly imagine could.

>7<

Which is why, in the end, though I often couldn’t rationally tell you why, I love being a pastor.  The price is high, some days, and some days the return for your efforts seems pretty low; some days, you have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place, and the hurrier you go, the behinder you get, and that’s just how it is.  But we have this assurance, that this is God’s church, and as solid and forbidding as the gates of Hell often look, they will not prevail against it—and that God has called us to play a particular part in their defeat; and if our part often looks improbable, well, we worship a God who specializes in improbable victories.

Looking back: blogging as a spiritual discipline?

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A year ago today, I put up a post asking whether blogging can be a spiritual discipline (and if so, how), and came to the conclusion that it can.  I tried to start a meme and get others asking that question, but mostly that didn’t happen; my question did prompt a little discussion, but then it fizzled.  Unexpectedly, the main effect of the question I posed was on my own posting habits.  That was my second post of 2008, and the 97th post on this blog; in 2007, I had 65 posts.  By contrast, a year later, this is now my 668th post since that one; it’s fair, I think, to say the change was significant.  Clearly, blogging has become a discipline for me.  The question is, has it been a spiritual discipline?The most obvious answer is, not always.  There have been a lot of posts over this past year for which I couldn’t make that claim, for one reason or another.  That doesn’t necessarily make them bad posts, though some of them might have been; it just means that posting, say, Jonathan Coulton’s mock ’80s sitcom title sequence probably didn’t make me a holier person (though it did make me smile, which is a good thing, too).To some extent, though, I think it has.  I wrote last year that “blogging can help me see the gaps between what I live and what I believe,” and that has proven true, though not exactly in the way I thought.  I do try to “apply my beliefs and their implications not only to the lives of others out there in the culture, but also to myself and my own life”—to ask the question, “If I say x, and that means someone else ought to change and to live differently, how does it mean that I need to change and live differently?”—but I know there are times I manage that and times I don’t; but here’s where the public aspect of blogging comes in handy, because in those times when I don’t, or when I’m careless about doing so, there’s usually someone out there to post a comment and point it out.  As such, one aspect of blogging as a spiritual discipline is that it exposes one to the correction of others.  (Bearing always in mind that no commenter is any more infallible than I am, or than anyone else is, so there is some need to sift and weigh the comments one receives; nevertheless, the conversation is valuable.)As well, I think the simple discipline of writing has helped.  I don’t know that it’s made me a better preacher, but it’s made me a better writer, and has made the process of writing smoother and less wearying for me; as such, it has at least made me better at producing sermons.  That in and of itself, again, might not be a spiritual discipline, except that I think better, and learn better, in conversation than solo; writing might not be quite as good as a good talk with the right person, but writing about God and Scripture and the church can still be quite valuable for my spiritual growth.  I’ve never been very good at the stereotypical “quiet time”; silence is a good discipline for me primarily because it’s a very hard one, and I can’t sit still to save my life—unless I have something to focus me, like writing.  Writing becomes my devotional time, if I’m writing about things which serve that purpose; writing about God sets my mind and my heart on him, and writing about his people shapes and forms me as a pastor.