visit the new blog: Nullus Extra Cruem

Forgetting all I’m lacking
Completely incomplete
I’ll take your invitation
You take all of me now…    

…I’m living for the only thing I know
I’m running and not quite sure where to go
And I don’t know what I’m diving into
Just hanging by a moment here with you    

There’s nothing else to lose
There’s nothing else to find
There’s nothing in the world
That can change my mind…    

~from “Hanging By A Moment”, Lifehouse

Thoughts?

Note: I owe Pastor Matt Chandler in Dallas, Texas (who is currently recovering from brain surgery to remove a tumor) in part for sparking the following idea taken from a message he shared this past summer

For those of us who have been awakened to the gospel narrative, it all makes more than good and perfect sense.  But consider how it must sound to someone who’s eyes haven’t been opened to the truth found only in the gospel… it’s what Paul was sort of getting at when he wrote ”The message of the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction! But we who are being saved know it is the very power of God (1 Cor. 1:18, NLT).”   

Imagine for a moment that you don’t know the saving grace of our Lord Jesus and ask a friend to explain the gospel and he says “Well, it starts with a virgin named Mary.  She was visited by an angel and told she would conceive a child by the Holy Spirit and to name him Jesus.  He’s then born in a stable with barn animals and laid in a feeding trough (a “manger” you might call it) instead of a crib for what was a pretty humble inaugural welcome to earth for the infant prophesied to be the Messiah.  He’s raised in a wood shop, the son of a carpenter named Joseph (but not biologically his father because his mom was a virgin).  At about 30 years of age Jesus is baptized in a river by his crazy cousin John (who eats locusts and honey and lives in the wild), signaling the beginning of his life work which would culminate about three short years later.  He then set out to recruit what we call his twelve disciples.  They end up traveling from village to hillside to everywhere in between listening to Jesus preach and also witness him doing all sorts of miracles from healing a woman who’d been hemorrhaging blood for twelve years and had seen every physician in town (after she merely touched the hem of his garment), feeding 5000 with some little boys lunch, and then there’s the ladies who pled with Jesus to come and heal their brother but he’s a couple days too late so instead he raises the stiff corpse from the dead. 

…Eventually, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day get so agitated with Jesus (who they saw as a trouble maker, they thought of themselves as pretty righteous guys) that they devised a plan to trap him and subsequently have him crucified on a cross as a hardcore criminal beside two others even though he was anything but a law breaker (he lived the only sinless and righteous life in all of history).  I believe all of this and I also put my hope in the reality that Jesus laid his life down voluntarily for rebel sinners like me because it was necessary and he loved us enough to suffer and be shamed like that in our place. In addition, after they buried Jesus, he rose from the dead a couple days later and re-appeared to his disciples and many others before he up and ascended into heaven forty days later.  Oh yeah, and he’s coming back on a white horse to get us one day.  What do you think dude, does any of that make sense?” 

If I didn’t know any better I’d say it’s foolishness myself.    

The next time you share the gospel, remember that unless God in his mercy opens the eyes of and grants a repentant heart to the sinner you are speaking with, the gospel is sure as the sun came up this morning to be seen as folly.

Thoughts?

Whether or not anything is on those tapes that Tiger would wish was erased I have no clue.  Given all the public scrutiny and people’s desire to dissect the lives of those they worship, I doubt the tapes will be tampered with, let alone destroyed.  Sooner or later we will get to hear what was said when a neighbor called 911 after learning Tiger had crashed into a fire hydrant and then veered off into a neighbors tree.  Troopers have already concluded that alcohol wasn’t involved.  Tiger has stated that his wife Elin immediately ran out of their home and came to his rescue smashing out the back windows of his Cadillac SUV, ironically with golf clubs in hand.  It has also been reported that Tiger has skipped meeting with officers a few times now—listening to ESPN the last couple days one could almost get the feeling that Tiger committed armed robbery (it should be noted that he isn’t required to give a statement to the police—supposedly Florida law states you must merely provide your license, registration and proof of insurance when in an accident).   

What Tiger was doing out at that time of night really shouldn’t be my concern and if you ask me it shouldn’t be yours either.  If a guy wants to make a middle of the night run on the convenience store to get some milk for his Cheerios in the morning it’s his business.  If he was up to something else, well, that’s between he and his wife.  America is a country in which you can come and go from your house as you please (for now anyways, we don’t live in communist China last I heard).   

I grew up hearing sermons about a video screen the size of Texas that gave me nightmares as a little twirp.  You might know what I’m talking about, the video screen in the sky that will replay every last sin I ever committed (so much for any highlight reel I was hoping would get air time).  If you are a football fan maybe you’ve seen the HD screen the Dallas Cowboys have in their new home.  Well, the screen I’m talking about makes that look like a hand-held.  The problem with the video screen is that God doesn’t motivate his people the way we motivate people, we can’t find any biblical support for such a notion.  Whoever came up with such an idiotic notion should be put in the corner with a dunce cap on his noggin and a sign on his back that says “Kick me!”  

Young Timothy wrote, “for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control (2 Timothy 1:7).”  And Paul his mentor wrote, ”For Christ’s love compels us… (2 Corinthians 5:14a).”  Don’t you think Paul would have included the video screen in at least one of his letters if it was a part of compelling us to live for Christ?  Seriously, what kind of merciful God who has said he forgives us of every last sin stores an archive full of the memory of them to later embarrass us with?  You and I might be that twisted, but God isn’t like us.  What kind of glory could God possibly get by doing such a thing?  Don’t the heathen get to see enough of our sins as it is?  And I don’t know how you feel about a movie marathon featuring my darkest secrets, but I have no interest in viewing the lowest and most humiliating moments of your life.  

We can mark it down on our calendars, God’s going to ruthlessly and severely judge the unrepentant (Romans 2:5).  It will be dreadful.  A day is coming in which all the wrongs will be made right and Christ will deal ruthlessly and severely with his enemies (Hebrews 10:12-14).  Those who haven’t feared God in this life surely have much to fear.  But for those of us who are in Christ, where do we get the harebrained idea that God is going to air our dirty laundry out for every soul that’s ever lived to view? 

The book of Isaiah records,

“I—yes, I alone—will blot out your sins for my own sake
      and will never think of them again.”  ~43:25, NLT

If God is God and we are his and he doesn’t think of our sins again—we can rest assured—our 911 tapes have already been erased.   

Now if  I’d just remember that.

Thoughts?

Thoughts?

Much of what I encounter in the “Christian” blogosphere seems to suggest that we can almost argue, reason, or push people into the Kingdom with a barrage of the most impressive explanations and the right combination of the slickest words and terms in the English language.  It’s as if the particular kind of bloggers I have in mind assume that in our interacting and conversing with unbelievers—if our theological acumen and scientific knowledge is only weighty and persuasive enough—we will render the unbeliever/skeptic speechless and bring him to his intellectual knees (and subsequently, to the place of genuine faith).    

Well, I beg to differ.

Some are quick to point to Paul conversing with the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in Acts 17.  But even there “Paul’s evangelism again follows the pattern of ‘reasoning’ about Jesus and the resurrection (IVP New Testament Commentaries).”  When Peter writes “…always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you”, I get the feeling that he isn’t saying anything close to “Be ready to list 15 irrefutable reasons you believe in intelligent design”, ”Be ready to shoot down Darwinism without a minute’s notice”, or, “Be ready to fire off 10 points that prove the superiority of your ‘Judeo-Christian’ political views.”  No, that’s not what the apostle says.  We are to be “prepared to make a defense for a reason for the hope…” and the most uneducated among us can do that.  In other words, the gospel is good news not only among the poor but also among the ill-educated (I’d further point out that the poor and ill-educated aren’t always one in the same.  Ill-educated folks aren’t always poor and all poor folks aren’t always ill-educated). 

The late Malcom Muggeridge had the following to say in 1969 and I think the issue he raises applies today.

I have also received a very large number of letters, many of them of quite overwhelming sweetness and charity. I venture to quote from one which I opened as I was writing these words. The writer is a monk who had done me the high honour of reading some words of mine, which, he was kind enough to say in his letter, ‘the gentle Saviour used to give me a better understanding and appreciation of our Christian heritage, and a more fervent determination to stand loyal come what may.’ He goes on:

‘Every morning at 5 a.m. before I go to offer the Holy Sacrifice, as a small token of my gratitude to you, I ask our beloved Saviour to be good to you and to those dear to you. I will continue to do that for whatever short time remains before I meet Him face to face.’

No one human being could possibly do another a more precious favour than this; such gestures flood the whole universe with light. I have put all these letters some thousands of them in a large metal box in the hope that after I am dead someone may go through them. They reveal, I think more fully than any public opinion poll or other so-called scientific investigation, the extraordinary spiritual hunger which prevails today among all classes and conditions of people, from the most illiterate to the most educated, from the most lowly to the most eminent. The various moral and theological and sociological disputes of the day, however progressively resolved with ecclesiastical connivance, have nothing to say to this spiritual hunger, which is not assuaged by legalized abortion and homosexuality, solaced by contraception, or relieved by majority rule. Nor will it take comfort in the thought that God is dead, or that mankind has come of age, or even in ecumenical negotiations for writing off Papal Infallibility against the validity of Anglican Orders. The only means of satisfying it remains that bread of life which Jesus offered, with the promise that those who are of it should never hunger again. The promise stands. ~Malcolm Muggeridge, “Jesus Rediscovered” (from the forward).

I propose that we: 1). Focus our energies on ever exposing and addressing man’s grim spiritual condition and crisis (i.e., broken fellowship with his Creator due to his own rebellion)…  2). Appeal to those who just may be hungry, and share the “bread of life” with them…  and 3). Lay off our countless efforts and near addiction to “winning” the arguments. 

Thoughts?

Thoughts?