FOUR REASONS
By Steve Brown
Frankly, it’s hard to admit. How can the followers of One so loving be so unloving? How can the followers of One so gracious be so ungracious? How can the followers of One who brought such good news turn it into such bad news? How can those of us who follow such a gracious Master be…well…such pains?
I’m not just preaching at you. I have to face my own sin…the people I have offended, the harsh things I’ve said, the improper judgments I’ve rendered and the times when I’ve caused a loving God to blush. So why are we such pains? There are four reasons. In coming to know God, we
think we have to be God.
The Bible says, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?’ ‘Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?’ For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever” (Romans 11:33-36).
It’s easy to forget that sometimes. We don’t have to defend, protect or stand up for a God who is the essence of sovereignty, power and love. God was doing
quite well before we came along and will do fine long after we’re gone. The truth is, protecting God is sort of like protecting a lion. I’m a teacher. The problem with being a teacher is that one has the proclivity to (try to) fix every problem, to (try to) straighten out every opinion and to (try to) correct every mistake. I don’t and we don’t. Not only that. We don’t have to be right and we’re, in fact, often wrong.
We think we have to lower the standard in order to admit that we don’t live up to it.
The Bible says, “None is righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). John, one of Jesus’ disciples, said, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). It’s quite easy (and human) to be proud of one’s goodness and, if the goodness isn’t real, to fake it. That sort of thing goes on all the time with those who say one thing and live in a way quite different. It’s even worse with us. We know the rules and can fake it better than people who don’t know the rules.
Then when you add the fact that there’s something about religion that encourages faking obedience, we Christians have a serious problem. We thought, quite wrongly, that we had to be good to get one to listen to what we had to say. We thought, quite wrongly, that if we admitted how often we were wrong and how often we were sinful, we would cause one to think less of Christ. We thought, quite wrongly, that “witnessing” required we witness
to our goodness as well as to his. The truth is that we, as Christians, are simply beggars
When we get a little truth, it’s easy to think that we have all truth.
telling other beggars where we found bread…and not former beggars either. If we pretend to obey all the rules, those who don’t know us will think that Christianity is only for good people. And for those who know us, they will call us hypocrites. Not being good enough is, in fact, the essence of the Christian faith. The church is the only organization in the world where the only qualification for joining is being unqualified. The church is also the only organization in the world where being unqualified is the only qualification for remaining a part of it. Nobody is good. If we aren’t good people all the time, it doesn’t make us hypocrites; it makes us illustrations of what the Bible and our faith teach. We are people who know we aren’t good and have discovered the One who will forgive us and sometimes even make us better.
When we get a little truth, it's easy to think we have all truth. It was about another issue but the principle is the same. Paul said to one of the churches where there was a lot of judgment about others’ practices, “Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own
master that he stands or falls” (Romans 14:4).
Christians believe they are right about some very important and eternal truths. The problem comes in when we assume that, because we are right about God, we are also right about politics, the social order, and how people should dress, think and talk.
I have a very deep voice and, frankly, it makes me sound like I know what I’m talking about… when the truth is that sometimes I’m very confused. At Key Life, we get a ton of questions from people who want to know what I think about politics, movies, books, culture and, of course, God. Frankly, I don’t know any more about most things than most people. I do know Jesus and, when I tell you about him, you should, at least, pay a modicum of attention. When I drift off into other areas, however, even when I may sound authoritative, let me now give you permission to ignore what I say. Credibility and knowledge in one area of expertise don’t automatically transfer into other areas.
Religion can make us weird.
One of the interesting things about Jesus’ anger is that it was always, without exception, directed not at the people who did bad stuff but at the most religious people in his culture. If you want to read some words that will “singe your hair,” read what Jesus said about the very religious folks in his acquaintance (for example, Matthew 15:1-9 and Matthew 23).
I have to be careful here, but can we talk? Religion can be like
a disease. Well, better, like an inoculation of some disease, making one immune to the real thing. Religion can become an “excuse” for all sorts of things that have nothing to do with real religion. For instance, if you are a narrow, mean-spirited twit and you join a religious organization, you will probably still be a narrow, meanspirited twit with one addition: you will be a narrow, mean-spirited twit in the name of God.
While Christianity is a relationship, Christianity is also a religion with religious institutions, religious ritual, religious symbols, religious confessions and religious training. Christians have to be so careful with our religion because, if we aren’t careful, it’s easy to become nothing but the institution, the ritual, the symbols, the confessions and the training. Do you know the difference between institutions and institutionalism ? The first is the necessary organization for getting anything accomplished or for passing something on. On the other hand, institutionalism is the hardening of institutional arteries. We can sometimes become so involved in our religious stuff that we don’t take the time to check and see if Jesus has left the building. The truth is that a lot of religious institutions would function quite well even if Jesus did leave. So we need, on occasion, to stop all our religion and just be quiet to see if Jesus is still at the center of what we’re doing. If he’s not, then we’re in serious trouble.
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by Matthew Porter
Ever gather around a bonfire –great warmth, great vibe – and think, “This is an amazing fire. Wonder what brand of logs these are…”?
What about a refreshing cold drink on a hot day? As you slake that savage thirst, do you say to yourself, “Wow, these must be designer ice cubes”?
Obviously, the answer to these completely absurd questions is “no.”
But equally absurd is my own unyielding insistence in making my name and my work and my personal sacrifices known. I matter and by whatever means necessary, I must get people to understand that.
Quick story about an embarrassing personal failure…
A film I wrote and directed was going to be shown at a film festival. I attended because I was told it had won an award and all the winning films were shown – except mine (looking back, this detail was probably mentioned somewhere in an email). I was there, my work was being honored, and yet I was furious. I’m talking CAT 5.
Unhinged livid. Why? You’ll love this: because I had been robbed – robbed of the chance to tell the people congratulating me afterwards, “Thanks, but it’s not about me. We were blessed with a really great team, blah, blah, blah…” I was SO ready to be gracious and humble and self-deprecating –utter bull you-know-what. Truth was, down in the deepest reaches of my heart, I could not have BEEN more proud and preening. If I had been outwardly boastful in a really gross, off-putting way, at least I would have been honest with myself. This unexpected event laid absolutely bare my true motivation – and it wasn’t good.
Often it seems like our biggest struggle is to make a living through our job — and God knows that is tough. But if you think about it, far more exhausting and soul-draining is the day-in, day-out fight to achieve a feeling of significance. There are no days off with that gig and it is a merciless taskmaster. Looking back, that’s what I was looking for that night at the film festival — not just the surface level of praise, but that soul-satisfying, bone-deep feeling of importance. Significance. Like a junkie, my mouth had been watering in anticipation of a fix and when it didn’t appear, I was mightily pissed. This burden of making ourselves
great and important and significant in the eyes of others is a terrible weight to carry – a Sisyphean task if there ever was one. And here’s the saddest part: we were never meant to carry that burden.
My dear friend and Key Life legend, Erik Guzman, is an MBA and he put it this way: in economics, nothing has value in and of itself. Value is simply what someone is willing to pay for something. Well, we know what was paid for us to be reconciled to God and it was a stomach-churning and scandalously high price. Put another way, God’s grace has already set the market value on our lives. So why then would we waste our days fighting to gain what we’ve already been freely given?
That burning log and that melting ice cube… the more they progress toward fulfilling their purpose, the more they diminish, eventually becoming nothing. Same with us. It’s not that we shouldn’t strive to do great things, but true greatness is already ours because of Jesus — ‘great’ not because of who we are, but whose we are. Now, that onerous and unbearable burden of achievement and significance… it’s not ours to carry anymore. And understanding that gives new understanding to the idea of God increasing and us decreasing. We seem to struggle with that, thinking it’s God taking
something away. The truth is, He is taking something away, but that ‘something’ isn’t like a kid losing his favorite toy – it’s like a slave ‘losing’ his chains. It’s a ‘something’ that would have eventually ground us down and stolen our joy had we kept it. He takes away – if we allow it – something that slowly kills us and in return we get freedom. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.
You’ve heard that phrase, “Preach the Gospel. Die. Be Forgotten.” It’s attributed to Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf, an Austrian noble born in 1700. Obviously (and ironically), Count Nick somehow blew it because we do remember his name. But what truth there, right? We have to – [sigh] – I have to stop trying to sacrifice to gain significance. Someone already sacrificed more than we can imagine to make us more significant than we could ever dream.
Listen, everything done for God’s kingdom is noticed (Matthew 6:1-6). It is. But let’s embrace the quiet Christ-like beauty of service and sacrifice done without anyone’s acclaim or even anyone else’s awareness. This desperate, scrambling, clawing quest at building our own legends, our so-called legacies — screw it. May we burn up like that log. Melt away like that ice cube. Leave nothing behind. Give every last ounce for His glory, NOT in an arduous slog toward achieving significance, but with joyful creativity and a lightness of spirit knowing that, because of Jesus’s finished work, we already are significant.
by BARRY SMITH
Ipassed into the stairwell at the end of the first-floor hallway and headed to the door that would take me outside to where the busses were parked with their engines idling, waiting for their afternoon passengers.
As I entered the stairwell, I noticed someone under the stairs, almost like he was hiding. I remember thinking that that was strange.
Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the person jump out of the shadows and swing what looked like a stick. I felt something, not a pain, more like intense pressure on the back of my head. I tried to turn in the direction of the fellow who had hit me, but as I did, my vision blurred, and then, nothing.
The next thing I was aware of was being in a bed with silver rails on
either side. My head hurt, and I had to squint because of a bright fluorescent light. Something was beeping. I realized that there was a blood pressure cuff on my arm.
Then I heard someone talking.
I looked up and saw a doctor talking to my parents. I heard him say that I was lucky that I was alive.
“That kind of a beating could have killed him.”
I had been hit in the back of the head with a pipe and went down to the floor, unconscious. Then, three boys kicked me repeatedly in the face and torso. I had a concussion, a broken nose, broken ribs, and was blind in one eye.
The boys, it turned out, had been expelled from the school the week before and had decided to return and express their displeasure by attacking someone. I happened
"Christ is our king. We can trust him to rule us and to protect us from all of his and our enemies."
to come along at just the right (or wrong) time.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks the question, “How does Christ execute the office of king?”
The answer is that he “executes the office of king in subduing us to himself, in ruling and defending us, and in restraining and conquering all his and our enemies.”
Isaiah 33:22 says, “…the LORD is our king and it is he who will save us.”
Psalm 34:7 says, “The angel of the LORD encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them.”
Jesus is not only a Savior who rescues us from sin and gives us eternal life. He is also a King who watches over us and protects us.
That does not mean that we will never have trouble or hurt. But it does mean that those who would seek to harm us can never go any further than God allows.
There was a man who was “blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil.” He loved the Lord and served him. He was known as “the greatest man among all the peoples of the East.” His name was Job (Job 1:1-3).
Satan could prove that the “greatest man in the East” did not really love God for himself but only loved him for what he could get from God, then that would show that no one really loved God.
“Take away all the things you’ve given him,” Satan said to God, “and he’ll curse you.” But God knew otherwise. He knew that Job’s love for him was real. So, he let Satan conduct his test, knowing that it was Satan who would fail.
But Satan could do nothing against Job without God’s permission.
First, God said, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger” (Job 1:12).
Satan took Job’s children from him, and he took all of his wealth, but Job continued to love the Lord.
Satan came back to God and said, “Strike his flesh and his bones, then he will curse you to your face” (Job 2:5).
“Very well,” said God, “he is in your hands, but you must spare his life” (Job 2:6).
As much as he may have wanted to, Satan could not kill Job. He could only go as far as God allowed him. Even in the midst of such terrible trials, God protected Job.
In the end, Job did not turn away from God. He did question and 10
Satan wanted to prove that Job did not really love God. He wanted to show that the only reason that Job served the Lord was because of the things God gave him. If
Did you know? You have been touched, taught, guided, comforted, empowered, affirmed, and loved by the Holy Spirit.
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complain about what he was going through. But his questions and complaints were always directed to God. He did not turn away and complain about God to others. He remained connected to God throughout his ordeal. It was Satan who failed. He could not induce Job to turn away from the God he loved and served. And when the trial was over, God restored to Job double everything he’d lost.
Christ is our king. We can trust him to rule us and to protect us from all of his and our enemies. Even when our enemies seek to harm us, they can never go any further than God allows.
The three boys who attacked me were identified and arrested. When
they went to trial for their assault on me, only two of my assailants were there. My father asked the assistant state’s attorney why the third attacker was absent. He was the one who had hit me with the pipe.
While he was out on bail awaiting trial for his assault on me, he had hit someone else in the head with a pipe. That person had been killed. He was in the county jail awaiting a trial for murder.
When the three had attacked me, was it their intent to kill me? I don’t know. What I do know without any doubt is that even if they had attacked me with murderous intent, they could not take my life from me. My life was in God’s hands.
Something is terribly wrong when we behave more like we're the elite than the elect.
Let me back up.
For those who are new to Christianity, new to the Christian faith, new to church community, new to the powerful transformation the gospel brings to us as individuals, words like “elite” and “elect” probably don’t translate well in slightly unfamiliar territory. So that we begin with the same view on the same side of the hill, here’s a primitive definition: Elite means the same inside the church as it does outside: roughly, “a group of persons exercising the major share of authority or influence within a larger group.”1 I’d add that this group likely knows or innately understands that they hold this influence and power. Elect, however, takes on a wholly Biblical meaning here, taken from the original Greek ekletos, meaning “chosen,” and illuminated in such passages as Romans 8:30-33, 2 John 1, and Colossians 3:12. There are others, but for the sake of this discussion, I’ll point you to those and let you dig for the rest if you are so inclined.
The apostle Paul wrote quite a lot on the subject of being “elect,” so much so that those who hold to a Reformed view of Scripture and a theology that declares that our salvation rests solely on God’s choosing us rather than our own free will use his letters to the churches in Rome and Galatians (and all the others, really) to prove their stance on soteriology, or how God saves man.
What did Paul say about being chosen, or elect? Basically, that those who are called to follow Christ were chosen to do so by God Himself. Unlike the Jews, who were set apart as God’s chosen people, Christians under the saving grace of Jesus Christ and His redeeming work on the cross are not saved simply because we were born of Jewish, or of Hebrew lineage. Paul himself was born a Jew, but he makes a distinction here that is important because it speaks to the level playing field, so to speak, of all who can and will be called to follow God and find their salvation through Jesus Christ. Not just the Israelites, but all of humanity for all time. Those whom He calls, He saves (Romans 8:30).
When we remember that it is God who does the choosing, that we have really nothing to do with how He saves us (regardless of whether we believe as the Reformers did or assert that we have a hand in deciding to follow Jesus), when we recognize that Jesus paid it all, when we step away from our own attempts at saving ourselves and acknowledge that we have a difficult time even motivating ourselves out of bed in the morning, let alone saving ourselves to eternal life, how in the world can elitism puncture and penetrate our lowly, dependent selves? And where does our ugly spiritual elitism spring out of in the first place? Likely the same starting point as all our other ugly elitism: pride. Doesn’t it feel gratifying to have others acknowledge our intelligence and theological acumen? Don’t we want to be identified with the other smarty pants in the room?
Back when the “seeker sensitive” church movement began to pick up steam in California in the ’90’s, my husband and I were parenting three little boys in our midtwenties. We both had expensive university educations, and when we began to become uneasy as we increasingly heard verbiage that embraced a departure from exegetical preaching, we left our mega church on a quest to take the time to understand exactly where we stood theologically.
We found ourselves jumping straight into the Reformed camp, which lined up with our more orthodox views on Scripture. How the Reformers couched their words and parsed passages was largely in agreement with how we viewed the Bible, too. This was good stuff!
For the first time in my life, I began to understand that what I knew to be true of God’s Word actually had a theological “camp,” and I was happy to put a label on the systematic theology I had grown up hearing from the pulpit.
One day a man visiting our home began to talk theology with me. As we sat in our living room, kids playing outside and spouses serving up iced tea and conversation, he declared, “I’ve come to believe that those who hold to Reformed Theology are really the upper echelon. I mean, we’re just really onto a higher understanding of God, aren’t we?”
Well. My ears were tickled and my heart probably skipped a beat, too. Me? Upper echelon? I mean, I knew I was smart. I was labeled “gifted” in kindergarten. Yes, yes, certainly I was onto some higher understanding, and my poor fellow believers left behind in our seeker sensitive and basic evangelical churches just don’t get it. Poor them.
It was about this time that we also jumped into homeschooling, although our reasons at the time had far more to do with a preco-
cious four-year-old than anything religious. But as I began to read the articles that zealous Christian homeschoolers would write, when I listened to the speakers at conventions proclaim that we homeschooling parents were in the business of creating worldchangers and the best of the best, guess what happened in my heart, there, too?
Soon I began to define myself by the choices we had made. We weren’t Christians, we were Reformed Christians. We weren’t Christian parents, we were Christian homeschooling parents. That meant something: We were serious Christian parents, determined to be faithful and do everything right and deliver our children to the mark.
We. Us.
It wasn’t until all of our definitions and misplaced identity failed us, until God allowed rolling waves of blinding whitewater to batter us about and we emerged on the sizzling sand sputtering and coughing and gasping for breath, that we began to see that we were behaving more like the elite than the elect. It took the cracking of our ice-cold theology and pride to allow the warm, refreshing abundant life-water of Jesus Christ to bring us to our knees and acknowledge our daily need for him. We needed to learn to live in the truth of the gospel from here on out. The elite define themselves by their status and accomplishments.
They talk in a language meant at once to impress and exclude. Ironically, as the Reformed elite we had forgotten the doctrines of grace and the five Solas of the Reformation.2 We were, quite simply, what the Apostle Paul warned the church at Corinth: puffed up and arrogant.3
The elect, on the other hand, define themselves by Jesus Christ’s status as God’s son and our Redeemer and His accomplishments on the cross at Calvary. They endeavor to build purposeful relationship inside and outside the church so that they can speak the gospel into each other’s lives. They humbly acknowledge the fact that they must daily return to the knowledge of the role of grace in their salvation and understand that the grace poured out upon them is an indicator of how loved they are by God, not because of any special knowledge they possess or spiritual performance, but simply because of God’s unrelenting love for them.
Something is terribly wrong when we behave more like we’re the elite than the elect, but living as the elect changes everything. Where do we start if we recognize that our pride has cornered us into the status of “elite”? Live as loved.
Live as if the God of the universe looked down the corridor of time, saw what a wretched sinner you are, plucked you out of that slough of despond, and set you high upon a rock. Because He did. 16 1 dictionary.com
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