Beat the System

I recently was inspired to listen to my Christian 80's rock again. I always come back to Petra and Stryper as bands that not only had great music, but they had theology that not a lot of today's music seem to be able find.  This is not another blog about Christian music though it is about some of the theology that that music has brought back to mind.

The song Beat the System from the Album Beat the System by Petra 1985. I know that for today this phrase has more along the lines to mean "question authority, and fight the man, resist authority, find a way to circumvent the establishment." But at the time it was more along the lines of fighting the world system of sin.

Not that battling sin is the purpose but doing things as Christ commanded as opposed to simply following after the world. It was that idea of being counter cultural. It was about actively subverting the flow. It acknowledges that to follow Christ is most likely not going to look like what the world is doing. This is the very definition that fills in what Jesus told his disciples they would have to do.

Jesus said that the disciples that follow him will have to bear their own crosses. Disciples who follow understand that he is more than savior, he is Lord.

I don't know about you but the picture I get of carrying a cross is scary and it is not just the death part. See the death part makes sense, Jesus was put to death. Of his disciples James the brother of the beloved John was put to death before the close of the New Testament, he was beheaded. Another disciple that was brought up under the apostles teaching Stephen was put to death, stoned to death. John the baptist was also put beheaded for obeying the commands of God. Herod stretched out his hand and tried to Put Peter to death as well, he escaped. The apostle Paul was stones and persecuted and even appears to have died and rose again in the midst of his mission. Fox's book of Martyrs tells the story of pretty much every other disciple being martyred as well.

In other words taking the call to follow Jesus seriously has consequences. 

When Joe Banks was faced with his own mortality and asked what his interests were he said:  "Courage, courage interests me." Joe versus the Volcano (1990). 

But does courage interest us as Christians, for the sake of the gospel?

It interests me truly, but I find also a lot of fear in my heart. I wonder if for many of us the bigger problem is not the death, that has almost a victorious sound to it. To be able to be counted worthy to die in such a way would be an honor for any Christian, not that I want to minimize the sacrifice at all. But I feel that it is the taking up and carrying the cross part that is difficult for most of us. Are we able to walk through the streets of our own neighborhoods and communities with a sign of death on our backs? Not just that but being ridiculed and mocked and accosted while we do?

If walking down the death march was easy I suppose many of us would do it. The problem is we don't know the time frame from when we start walking to when our death sentence is carried out. Can I live in a world that hates me for standing on truth for a lifetime? Can I live as a pariah in my own community? Now I don't relish at the thought of persecution nor should anybody, but do I live in such a way as to ever invite it?

Do we dare to beat the system or would we rather work as a shadow operatives? Please understand this in not an indictment but a real question that even I have to wrestle with. As the storms are gathering I ask myself am I willing to share my faith, and what that means for a dying and decaying country that wants to throw off all restraint? Am I willing to do this without sitting behind a computer screen? In case you aren't one to read the headlines much, persecution for Christians in this country has begun. It is still only in its infancy, it has to figure out how legally it can do it, but if you are paying attention the wheels are already moving to shut up the voices of dissent that we the Christians have become.

It is ironic because the world system of sin that we are to counter is becoming one with our own system of government. One that wasn't always that way. We are becoming a new Rome. Will we cry out that Christ is Lord and not Caesar? Or will we stay happy behind our closed church doors until the government comes to remove them?

I am not talking about revolution. I already wrote about that, I am talking about what Paul calls not being ashamed of the Gospel from Romans 1.

14. I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. 15So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.16For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith."

So ask yourself, ask and pray. Does courage interest you?

thanks

Sermon: Trusting me, Trusting you?

This is a sermon I gave June 28th about struggling through my life long challenge and journey with Proverbs 3:5-6. Sometimes it is easy to trust. Sometimes it is difficult to trust. Sometimes we don't even understand what it even means to trust. With a little help from C.S. Lewis, I am working on it.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
Do not lean on your own understanding
In all your ways acknowledge him
and he will make your path straight.

Easy, right?

https://archive.org/details/TrustingMeTrustingYou 

thanks

A re-New Hope

Writing straight theology is easy for me, but returning to my personal walk is a challenge. Sometimes I get overwhelmed, sometimes I have to be honest about where I am. These words from the Cure's song Maybe Someday sometimes haunt me.

No I won't do it again, I don't want to pretend
If it can't be like before, I've got to let it end
I don't want what I want, I've had a change of head

I got to let it go and leave it gone,
just walk away, stop it going on
Get to scared to jump if I want too long

Being hopeless is not a place that a Christian should be, but I have to admit sometimes I feel this temptation. I have been tired of being without hope for awhile. So I have to come back and ask God where is the hope? I read 1 Corinthians 2 where it says:

 

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the heart of man imagined,

what God has prepared for those who love him”

I read this and I say "well my eye has certainly not seen nor has my ear heard."  But Paul reminds the Corinthians that he came to them and he decided to know nothing among them except Christ and him crucified. I can write good theology but it means nothing if I can't stop resting my faith in the wisdom of men and instead find solace in the power of God. The power of God. What power of God? 

We don't always experience the power of God the way the disciples did. I know that God gives different gifts to different people. I don't have to worry about not having the gift of healing or of the prophetic. This is not about answering the why's of those questions but instead reflecting on the power that is readily available to us. There is power in simply knowing God. As much as we may want Jesus to be present with us, he said that it was to our benefit for him to go away. He said this because he would send the comforter, the counselor, the companion, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit seems to impart the power for our gifts, but for this discussion he grants access to the very person of God. Jesus was the human God with us, and the Spirit is God with us now. Until we stand in his presence physically again.

The power that is readily available to us is in his resurrection. The other is the power of prayer. He rose from the dead. That means his words are true. Two powers available to me. He is near and he listens. He has risen and my sins are forgiven, not just forgiven but the power of sin that used to enslave my soul has been broken. My soul is free from the bondage that made sin not only my master but my only option. I was an enemy of God condemned to live apart from him. My life was on a track with a one way ticket to hell where I would experience some form of wrath from a Holy God.

The power of God however broke those chains and now I can draw near to him. I am a new creature. I am a new person. I need to learn how to live as this new being, with plenty of old baggage to still sift through. But he has broken my shackles. Because I am no longer a slave to the sin, I am now a son of God. The writer of Hebrews reminds us:

Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

Because Jesus came as a man and experienced temptations and yet remained without sin he is able to sympathize with us even in our weakness. He understands...

Dear God I need your mercy and grace, help me in my time of need. I am failing in my challenge of belief.

I think of the song from the Cure and how often my thoughts are similar and then I think of a bit of Psalm 42.

 I say to God, my rock:

“Why have you forgotten me?

Why do I go mourning

because of the oppression of the enemy?”

10  As with a deadly wound in my bones,

my adversaries taunt me,

while they say to me all the day long,

“Where is your God?”

11  Why are you cast down, O my soul,

and why are you in turmoil within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

my salvation and my God.

There is real power in God, but then I realize where my eyes have been looking.

And then I remember another Cure song, Trust, and I can hear God's voice echo.

Still the hardest part for you, to put your trust in me

I love you more than I can say, why won't you just believe?

I know that I no longer want to just say that maybe someday it will be different. I know that it won't happen if I leave my hope to my feelings. I have to renew it.

thanks  

The Eagles Come at the End

I recently watched the third part of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.

At the end of the movie the Eagles show up and decimate the Uruk forces.  In the same way the Eagles show up at the end of the Lord of Rings to save the day.

I have always thought "Why didn't they just show up earlier and save everyone a lot of pain and suffering?" Or "Why didn't Frodo and Sam just ride them to Mount Doom in the first place?" 

Aside from trying to find plot holes in movies, we tend to have this type of thinking in our own lives.  Why doesn't God make this a little easier?

In similar thinking, after the last supper in the garden of Gethsemane, the disciples understandably try to save Jesus from the trouble of being captured and arrested.  Who wouldn't try to rescue Jesus from pain and torture?  Jesus responds to them with more understanding of the situation.
Mathew 26
⁵³ Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? ⁵⁴ But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?” ⁵⁵ "

This verse always makes my the hair on the back of my neck stand up. In this statement is such a display of restrained power.

Jesus is saying look guys I am God, I can easily get out of this situation, but this situation is important to the biblical narrative. This is a pivotal moment in history that cannot simply be circumvented.  Jesus came not to simply show us a way out of problems but for us to encounter God himself.  This is a process, a journey.  Encountering God is not something that can be rushed.  It is not something that can simply be added to what we are doing at the moment.  It is a process.  

Developing a relationship with God takes time. This is one reason why we are all not immediately carried away to be with God the moment of conversion.  This is also why deliverance doesn't always immediately arrive. Of course God could do something in this situation but he must have another plan in mind. Yielding to and waiting for his plan and not our own is one of the hardest parts of faith in God.

The solution may seem obvious to us but we do not have all the information. We think we can see the end result and we wonder why we can't just go over to it now.  It is like a solider trying to win a war by acting unilaterally. Soldiers are trained for battle and they act at the commands of officers. The commanding officers have the information and tell the soldiers where to go and what to accomplish next. The soldiers do not always see the big picture but have to deal with what is commanded of them.

With human nature we would naturally want to take the path of least resistance. We want the reward as quickly as possible.  We want the pain ended as soon as possible.  But stories are not told in this way or else there would be little to read.  Without a little adversity characters would not develop and grow. There would be no inspiration for the reader. No story to retell down through the ages. There wouldn't be anything to teach with the story or learn from the narrative or even reason to retell the experience.  People do not remember the routine and mundane.

God may have a relationship in mind that he is developing with me. God may have a journey planned that I need taking. The problem is it may not look like what we would like, or may take longer than we were hoping it would take.  

Isaiah 40:31
But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.
Maybe Tolkien had this verse in mind when writing about the eagles. Waiting on the Lord happens while we are on the path. It is as we walk, that the help comes so we won't grow faint. It is after we are already running that the strength is given to not become weary. Waiting is not idling. The eagles are a reward for our faithfulness it seems, not a way to get around problems.

So...plot hole, or plot device? 

As much as we may want it, if in the beginning the Eagles always showed up to make life easier, we would learn very little. It wood also make a crap movie.

thanks

A Return to Innocence

A new year. Time for a. C.S. Lewis quote.

“Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods ... That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off,’ you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist.”

Things my reason has once accepted. In spite of changing moods.  This is so fantastic, who doesn't have changing moods? Sometimes I get distracted by my moods. Sometimes that distraction can temporarily make me forget my previously accepted reasons.

However somtimes my moods may be informing me that my held reasonsings may need adjusting. For example, perhaps I struggle with bad moods caused from my always needing to be right. This becomes overwhelming and causes my relationships to suffer. Maybe I need to alter my reasoning.

This is how we grow. 

But, as C.S.Lewis points out this does not carry over to faith in God or even in struggles with the Word. There are certain certainties that need to be established. You don't tamper with anchors or cornerstones. Certain weights are meant to weigh us down and that is a good thing.

Now having these weights are great, but Lewis also reminds us that moods need to be trained. We need to train ourselves to come back from changing moods, to not dwell on them, especially on matters of faith.

This is what renewing our minds is about, I have to renew my mind when it falls out of faith. Romans 12:2
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Giving into my changing moods based on my rocky experiences is what the world does.  Training our minds to respond to God's truth is what a disciple does, it is what a Christian does.

With a New Year here many of us are taking resolutions looking for fresh starts or hitting reset.  This year I want to reset my thinking.  I have been bogged down with what wasn't and what failed to come to pass. 
I have to remember that:
“In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.”  Proverbs 16:9

I need to reset and return to a time when my thinking was more innocent. A time when my thinking wasn't overwhelmed with the many ways one can feel disappointment in a year. I say overwhelmed and not informed because I would not want to lose the actual experiences. If I did then I would not be where I am today and I would not have grown.  This is how we change.    

It is very easy to stay where we are but I want to move forward into 2015 with new vision and new hope. A new vision of Christ draws us after him.  So I want to remember this:

“Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”  Philippians 3:13-14

As God determines our steps let's renew our minds and return to the innocence of trusting him. This should always take us back to our accepted reasons and if reasonable those things should hold in the face of our shifting emotions.  So this year read your bible, find your anchors (It's Christ), and hold on for the storms that may come. 

thanks

Proverbs 3 five and six

This was my life verse for awhile and then I realized I really was really poor at doing it.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart. I used to think I knew what this meant. I've taught it to students confident it had to do with salvation.  It sounds very easy, at least theologically speaking. I do trust in the Lord with all my heart because I trust him with my soul, right? I used to think it was that easy. I have prayed the sinner's prayer and therefore I do trust him for the securing of my heart and the very safety of my soul. But this I've found fails to help at all with not actually leaning on my own understanding, as the next phrase of the verse reads. Doesn't trusting God for my eternal life mean I am not leaning on my own understanding?

Well a bit. I am not leaning on my own understanding as far as salvation goes, but what about the rest of life? I believe I have a bit of understanding about life. This is the rub. I think that at this point in my life I do have some understanding, but more often than not it probably flies against what is God's understanding.  This is what this verse seems to be getting at.  If I was trusting in the Lord with all my heart, I shouldn't be leaning on my own understanding because my understanding is limited to my experience.  Worse than this limiting is that my experience is skewed by my own ideas of right and wrong and where I place value and how I judge pleasure and pain.  So my understanding is limited and my preferences are selfish and thus my understanding is not a useful barometer for the way things actually are.  But thinking not in my own understanding is really difficult.

This is why the verse calls us away from our own understanding.  So I may think that I am trusting and leaning but I actually keep getting caught up by what I feel about my experiences. This is why I have the problem of why my path seems not so straight or not so directed, depending on the translation.  My path seems crooked, which does line up with my experiences, which makes my trusting in the Lord difficult.
It is silly, but I only just realized that I was poor at trusting, really trusting.

I wasn't paying attention to the fact that I find it very difficult to not lean on my own understanding. Leaning only or leaning mostly on my own understanding is another way of saying that I am piss poor at faith.  Not faith in God strictly speaking. I think of the verse where faith requires not simply that I believe that he is, which is fairly easy to do as a Christian, but the second part which says that we must believe that he is also a rewarder of those whose diligently seek him (Hebrews 11:6).

This is difficult because I haven't seen much reward. I feel that I have been diligently seeking him my whole life, but this may be more of that my understanding thing again.  And while I do not think of the reward as cash and prizes, I still do feel more reward should have arrived by now. I have heard it taught that the reward is simply more of God himself, which I can appreciate, but this would lead me to believe that if I did have more of him I would be better at leaning on his understanding rather than my own.

This is mostly to say that I realize that I have probably been affecting my enjoyment of God because my skewed perspective of my circumstances. Good theology cannot speak to the trials in life if I am only looking at myself, or at least barely staring above myself.

So in the end maybe I have just revealed my poor faith when it comes to looking above my understanding of my circumstances to trust in God. But I am aware of the problem and I can only continue walking before him as humbly as possible as I attempt to get more of him and alter or have my perspective altered.

thanks