Over the past few weeks I spent a good deal of time studying the life of General Stonewall Jackson. He is one of the more complex individuals I’ve studied—a man who had a strong sense of God’s sovereignty yet was something of a hypochondriac, a man who exhibited a great deal of Christian character who nevertheless also owned slaves. The tension between these things is what makes him so interesting to me. He was by no means a perfect man and this makes him all the more fascinating.

As I was reading about Jackson I also read a new book by John Stott—one I reviewed yesterday. In this book Stott points out eight areas in which he thinks Christians need to rediscover obedience if they are to be radical disciples of Jesus Christ. In Jackson I was looking to the past through twenty-first century lenses and in Stott’s book I was looking forward through those same lenses. One book showed what Christians have been, the other book suggests what one man says they ought to become.

Between these two books I have been given a lot to think about. One thing I found myself pondering is the areas in which Christians of the future will judge the Christians of today. You and I look to the southern Christians of the mid-1800’s and marvel that they could somehow believe that slavery was anything less than abhorrent. We look even to those who disliked slavery and wonder how they could have been so complacent, so passive in the face of such evil. “I am against slavery but feel we should let it die a natural death” does not impress us. But only outright arrogance could lead us to believe that we have no blind spots, no areas in which future generations of Christians will shake their heads and marvel that we could have been so blind.

So I spent some time thinking about those things, wondering where our blind spots may lie. And here are three possibilities, three suggestions.

Abortion

Christians hate abortion. We believe that God is the creator of life and believe that life begins at the very moment of conception. We believe that each life is a gift, whether it is a life that is wanted or unwanted by the mother, whether it is a life that will be “normal” or one that will be marked by profound disability. All humans are created in the image of God and, therefore, all life has intrinsic value. And if all of this is true, then of course we despise abortion and long to see it abolished. We hate it so much that we do…well…what do we do? If we are honest with ourselves we have to admit that most of us do not do much of anything.

What have you done in the past week, the past month, the past year to actively combat abortion? If you are like me, you’ve done very little. You may have prayed that God will change hearts and change the laws of the land. And this is good, of course. If there is to be any change, prayer will be instrumental. You may have spoken to some friends or neighbors or family members, trying to convince them of the value of life. But very few of us have done anything substantial, anything that could possibly one day appear in a history text. Few of us move beyond the “I hate it” stage into some form of active combat.

If we imagine Christians a century in the future, or perhaps two centuries, how will this kind of action, or inaction, appear to them? What will the verdict of history be? How will we be able to explain our complacency? They will read our words, all perfectly preserved in digital media, and they will know that we wrote and spoke about our hatred for abortion and our desire to see it abolished. But will they see actions to go along with all of those words? Maybe we are just waiting for it to die a natural death.

Creation Care

I am no environmentalist. I have stated on this blog that I am very skeptical when it comes to man-made climate change or what used to be known as global warming. I believe the science used to “prove” that humans are causing the earth’s climate to change in any noticeable way is largely bunk. I do not think we are facing issues of immediate over-population and have never once chained myself to a tree or, like a celebrity once did, demanded that my children use only one square of toilet paper per wipe.

Having said all of that, there is little doubt that humans are having a very noticeable and often detrimental effect on the earth. Massive amounts of land are being deforested and areas of the earth are becoming uninhabitable. We produce vast amounts of waste and live in ways that are entirely unsustainable over the long-run. The average North American throws out something like 1,500 pounds of garbage per year. It all has to go somewhere! I was recently in a town in the US where they’ve had to institute twice-weekly trash pickup. That boggles my mind.

And while I will again insist that I am no environmentalist and do not buy into the doom and gloom prognostications of that guy who wanted to be President, I do wonder how future generations will judge Christians today. As we live as God’s envoys in God’s world, as we seek to carry out God’s Creation Mandate, are we caring for this earth and expressing dominion over it for God’s glory? Or are we damaging it through sheer greed, sheer exploitation? As Christians, those who have the best understanding of our purpose in this world and of our relationship to the earth, we should be the ones leading the way in caring for God’s creation, in modeling care for it. And yet Christians are followers more than leaders. We consume just as much and we consume the very same stuff. We are remarkably complacent. And I wonder how that will look to those who follow in our footsteps a century or two from today.

Slavery

We look to the Robert E Lee’s, the Stonewall Jackson’s, the R.L. Dabney’s of days past and wonder how they could have been complicit in the enslavement of a race. We wonder how they could have lived in and among a race of human beings and still regard them as property. Sure they disliked slavery, but that almost seems to make it worse. If they disliked it and felt it was morally reprehensible, why didn’t they do more to combat it?

Yet our culture is one in which the need to consume has led us to demand ever more and ever cheaper. The products we demand in such quantity are largely produced in the third world by labor that is somewhere between cheap and slave. Now I will grant that this is a difficult issue and one that is multifaceted. We know that in some cases the clothes we wear, the electronics we buy, are manufactured by mere children. And yet we know that these jobs are life-giving and that if the children were not doing this, they might well be doing something far worse. We know that the wage we pay a grown man for doing a full day’s labor in a foreign factory is about the same as we tip the girl at Starbucks. And yet even that is a better wage than he might receive elsewhere. And any job is better than no job. The issues are complicated, easy to caricature, but difficult to reconcile.

Yet the issues are very real. Our culture of consumption, our sheer greed seems to fly in the face of God’s commands that we live free from the captivity of possessions. How will history judge us when they see the homes of North American Christians bursting at the seams with stuff—with clothes and electronics and furniture—manufactured by impoverished brothers and sisters a continent or two away?

Conclusion

I don’t know that history will necessarily judge us by any of these standards. Perhaps as Christians we really are doing all we can to combat abortion; perhaps we are caring for the world and the problems are overblown; perhaps we really are doing a service in buying these items that feed and clothe people in impoverished nations on the other side of the world. But I suspect we’re not and I suspect Christians in a generation or two or three will marvel at our complacency and judge us by what I hope is a better standard.

I’d love to hear from you. What are the issues for which you think history may judge the Christians of the twenty-first century?

Sponsor:

 

Continue Reading »

Today’s guest blogger is Frank Turk, he of Pyromaniancs fame. He shares what was meant to be a recorded conference message but has instead been relegated (reduced?) to a blog post.

*****

Some of the massive throng of readers for this blog may know that I was nominated to speak at “theNines” this year — which is an on-line event where the speakers record 9 minutes of advice for people in ministry, and the event itself is free of change. Turns out that I have also been selected. Only the rules changed this year: instead of 9 minutes, we only get 6, and the topic has itself also changed significantly. Until there’s a public announcement about that, I’ll leave that to the chaps at Leadership Network and Catalyst to disambiguate the situation.

BUT: the changes leave me with a 9-minute talk that I drafted and now cannot use — until Tim e-mailed me yesterday and asked for a submission to help him keep his blog running for a couple of days while he’s away from his desk. So for all of you, here’s what I would have said if nothing else had changed:

First of all, to sort of throw a rock at my normal constituents, I want to strongly recommend Rick Warren’s video from last year about what the purpose of the local church is. That’s a great nine minutes on what the local church ought to be, and you should go back to the archives to watch that one again and again because he’s right.

There’s another side to what Pastor Warren said in that video, and I wanted to make that the focus of my brief time here: it’s the topic of “bigness”. See: a subtext of Pastor Warren’s talk is that a ministry is not really fruitful unless it’s big – because really: only a big church with big resources can do what Saddleback does on paper and in fact in the real world. You can’t send thousands of missionaries and planters unless you have tens of thousands supporting them – or at least as a base from which to draw all those people.

And I think we have to ask: is that exactly what we’re supposed to be doing? Should we be trying to be as big as possible so we can turn out people in droves to missions and church planting?

Now: here’s the wrong answer. The wrong answer is, “house church is NT church, and everything bigger than a couple dozen is a bloated American drive-thru theology that is both unbiblical and unsavory.” That’s just simply wrong. The first church in the NT had 3000 members after the first day. The churches Paul planted usually met with trouble because they were large enough in ancient Mediterranean cities to cause economic and social changes by changing the way they lived. Big is clearly not bad, or unbiblical.

But in the context of North America, we have a problem the ancient church did not: we are experts at business process, and we are lean thinkers from the top down. We believe that mass production is a brilliant organizational and systematic approach, and we think that we should be able to do more with less – so for example, we think that one guy should be able to run an organization which takes in $5 million a year with relative ease, he should be highly compensated, and he should have an executive staff who runs things for him so he can be the vision guy. We can even cite the book of Acts where the Apostles say they refuse to wait tables for the sake of being the messengers of God’s word — to sanctify our own belief that some kind of executive pyramid is best for the church, and we can achieve more with less, and we can move from good to great – with absolutely no offense or criticism meant by me toward Jim Collins.

The problem is this: we are not marketing a product. We are not making widgets. Seriously: we are not really asking people to make some kind of commercial transaction where they give something and the church or God gives them something back. What we have is a situation in which everyone we want to tell about this Jesus who was crucified thinks they have much to give God – including advice about how to run and fix the world – when in fact we ought to point to the fact that they have nothing to give God, and that is their main problem. What we are here to put in the marketplace, as Paul did in Athens, is a declaration that for all our wealth and culture and religion, we are all now being told by God through Jesus Christ that we have no excuse of ignorance, and that when God comes to judge it will not be enough to say that we offered sacrifices and very solemn and earnest reflection to an unknown god.

We are not marketing a product with benefits which people can buy and therefore use as they please.

If we are the church, and we are concerned about the Gospel, we are telling people that the only hope they have is in disgrace. See: the only thing we have is a man who came and chastised the religious people – the liberals and the conservatives – for thinking they were safe, and for making God someone who owes them something. He said they were leading people not to the gates of heaven but to programs, and activities, and things they called discipleship – but he said this made those people twice as much a child of hell, and they have the gates of Heaven shut in their faces.

And this man chastised his believers for following him around, wanting him to feed and clothe them, and give them a high place in his revolutionary kingdom. And this man was put to death for his trouble, condemned, and disgraced.

The ones who condemned him had big churches, and they wanted a God who liked and in fact wanted big churches. And this guy – the guy we have to offer the world – told them that their big churches were useless, and that in fact he would leave them desolate - empty.

So there’s a tension in Scripture you ought to think about: God has called many people, and is glorified when people are saved by Him in large numbers. But maybe it’s a burden on those of us who want to lead God’s people, and to lead them well, to think about whether God has called us to move from Good to Great and market a product which will draw a crowd, or whether God has in fact called us to declare something which is the opposite of success, and the opposite of human excellence, for the sake of making people glad to be named the scum of the earth for the sake of Christ.

When the 3000 believed and were baptized on that first day of the church, they didn’t then form a mission statement, and then create an org chart, and then set up ministry zones or whatever: They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. They were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need, And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

That’s the definition of “big church”, y’all. Somehow we should have the teachings of the Apostles in the first place, and it should cause us to be people who want to be in the fellowship of others whom God has saved. It should make us generous, and selfless, as if we were people with nothing to lose – we should be convinced that neither death nor life, not angels or devils, not things present or things to come, not politics or criminals, not any height or depth, nor anything else in all creation, including the things we make for ourselves, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Think about your ministry. Does it lift Christ up so that people want to give up something rather than gain something? We cannot build big churches when they are composed of people with small, unsaved hearts. Is being bigger and greater going to cause your church to be more like the church in Acts 2 – or more like something you can buy from an infomercial that comes with 6 DVDs and a workbook?

Think about that – because the last thing you want when you see Jesus is for him to tell your house is desolate. Who wants their life’s work to look like a cathedral on the outside, but in the end it gets burned up like a house made of straw and sticks?

Let me challenge you, folks, to make churches that are big churches – but not big as the world measures it, as if Jesus came to die so you could be a life coach, or have a famous podcast. Make your church big on Jesus’ death for sin, and big on mortifying our human accomplishments, and big on giving this message and everything else it takes in order that many people will be saved, and many people will hear Jesus say to them, “well done, you good and faithful servant”.

Be that big. Pray about that, and be in the Lord’s house with the Lord’s people on the Lord’s day. Grace and peace to you. Amen.

*****

Frank Turk is a guy with a blog who has really amazing friends. He blogs with Phil Johnson and Dan Phillips (and Pecadillo) at teampyro.blogspot.com, and with the army of multi-spectrum evangelicals at firstthings.com’s Evangel, and at his own personal blog which you can find at iturk.com.

Frank works full time in the renewable energy sector, has a wife and kids, and loves his local church.

Sponsor:

 

Continue Reading »

Here is a prayer for the sick or for the spiritually-distressed. It is drawn from the Canadian and American Reformed Church web site. This is a prayer that comes from the perspective of the one so-afflicted and I don’t think it is necessarily meant as a pastoral prayer. It is worth changing the first person plural (we) to the first person singular (I) since in that way it seems to be a little bit more pointed, a little more personal. What I particularly like about it is that it allows the possibility (though it does not demand it) that suffering is a form of chastisement from God. It celebrates God’s sovereignty and his goodness even through suffering.

Merciful God and Father, You give eternal hope and salvation to the living and eternal life to the dying. You alone have life and death in Your hands, and Christ alone has the keys of death and of the grave. All things are in Your power so that neither health nor sickness, good nor evil, life nor death can happen to us without Your will. We also know that by Your power and direction all things must serve our salvation. Gracious Father, we implore You to grant us the grace of Your Holy Spirit, that He may teach us truly to know our misery and to bear patiently with Your chastisements. If You, O Lord, kept a record of our sins these chastisements should have been ten thousand times more severe. We believe that they are not evidence of Your wrath but of Your fatherly love towards us, that we might not be condemned with the world.

Lord, strengthen our faith by Your Holy Spirit, so that we become more and more united with Christ our Head, since it is Your good pleasure to unite us to Him in both suffering and glory. Enable us to bear what is brought upon us by Your fatherly wisdom. We submit ourselves entirely to Your will, whether You leave us on earth or whether You take us home unto Yourself. We trust that with body and soul, both in life and in death, we belong to Christ, whose resurrection is the guarantee of our blessed resurrection.

Grant that we may experience the comfort of the forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ. May His innocent blood wash away the dirt of our sins and may His righteousness cover our unrighteousness in Your sight. Arm us with faith and hope, so that we may overcome the assaults of Satan and not be put to shame by any fear of death. When our eyes grow dim, let Your eyes be open toward us. When You take away from us the ability to speak will You then hear the sighing of our hearts. When our hands have lost their strength, continue to support and carry us on Your everlasting arms.

Father, we commit our spirit into Your hands. Deal with us according to Your promise. Never forsake us, but always be with us, even in the hour of death.

Hear and answer us for the sake of Christ, our dear Saviour. Amen.

Sponsor:

  

Continue Reading »