Behind the Facade

Last week I had the opportunity to visit with a friend who is in the hospital recovering from a serious accident. As I was visiting with his in-laws, they were talking about the conversations that had taken place while he was under the influence of anesthesia, or pain medication, or whatever.  They mentioned that you really get to see the character of a person in these situations.  The effects of the medication removes our filters, and "the real you" comes out.  In this case, it was simply more proof of what an amazing man my friend is.

This story had me thinking about how open and honest we are with each other.  In this age of photoshopped pictures and manicured social media profiles, how exposed do we allow ourselves to be?  It has been said that character is who you are when no one is looking.  Would people truly recognize the real you from your "public persona"?  

Several years ago I had to confront my own dichotomy between who I was and who I presenting myself to be.  I took a chance and opened myself up.  I found friends who embraced me and loved me in all of my vulnerable sincerity.  I found a new freedom to live my life with honesty and genuineness.  I trusted the love I received because I knew it wasn't based on false pretenses.  

Regardless of how we present ourselves to others, God knows us. He sees the things we hide, and he is not fooled by our facades.  And yet he loves us - more than we can ever understand.  When I recognized this fact and truly embraced openness and honesty with both God and those around me, I experienced love and freedom like never before. 

Chad Hess

Weeds & Waiting

He told another story.  “God’s kingdom is like a farmer who planted good seed in his field. That night, while his hired men were asleep, his enemy sowed thistles all through the wheat and slipped away before dawn.  When the first green shoots appeared and the grain began to form, the thistles showed up too.”

The farmhands came to the farmer and said, ‘Master, that was clean seed you planted, wasn’t it?  Where did these thistles come from?’

“He answered, ‘Some enemy did this.’

The farmhands asked, ‘Should we weed out the thistles?’

“He said, ‘No, if you weed the thistles, you’ll pull up the wheat too.  Let them grow together until harvest time.  

Matthew 13:24-30 (The Message)

When I think back over my years of pastoring, the most frequent question that people, ask is, “Why doesn’t God do something

• Tragedies happen.
• Horrific accidents devastate lives and families on a DAILY basis.
• Tyrants and bullies force their own plans on people and crush opposition, and they seem to get away with it.  (This happens in church systems as well.)

And again, sensitive souls ask, WHY is God apparently silent?  Why doesn’t he step in and stop it?

Let me be clear, there is probably no direct answer that can be given in this life that will satisfy most people, even believers.  But parables like the one above do show that God’s sovereign rule over the world isn’t quite as straightforward as people sometimes imagine.  

Consider:

• Would we really like it if God were to rule the world directly and immediately, so that our every thought and action were weighed, instantly judged and, if necessary, punished in the scales of his absolute holiness? 
• If the price of God stepping in and stopping a campaign of genocide were that he would also have to rebuke and restrain every other evil impulse, would we be prepared to pay that price?
• If we ask God to act on special occasions, do we really suppose that he could do that simply when we want him to, and then back off again for the rest of the time?

The farmer waits for the harvest time, watching in frustration as the weeds grow alongside the wheat.  Not only the farmer, but also the birds wait for the tiny mustard seed to grow into a large shrub.  And that’s what God’s Kingdom is like.

Jesus’ followers, like us today, didn’t want to wait.  If the kingdom was really present where Jesus was, then they wanted the whole thing at once.  They weren’t interested in God’s timetable.  They had one of their own and expected God to confirm to it.  (Does this sound familiar?)

Notice in particular what the servants say about the weeds.  They want to go out immediately into the field and root out the weeds.  The farmer restrains them, because life is NEVER that simple. In their enthusiasm to eradicate the field of weeds, they are very likely to pull up some wheat as well.

Do you think Jesus had an eye on the revolutionary groups of his day, all too ready to step into God’s field and pull up what they considered to be “weeds”?  There were many groups, including some of the Pharisees, who were far too eager to fight against “pagans” on the one hand and against compromised Jews on the other. The servants may have intended to do God’s will.  They were longing for God to act and were prepared to help him by acting themselves.  But part of Jesus’ whole campaign was to say that the TRUE Kingdom of God does NOT come like that, because God is not like that!

For me, the heart of the story of the weeds and the wheat is PATIENCE—not just the patience of the ‘servants’ who have to wait and watch, but also the patience of God himself.

I do not believe God enjoys the sight of a wheat field with weeds all over the place.  But nor does He relish the thought of declaring “harvest-time” too soon, and eliminating wheat along with weeds.  This is an incredible insight into the heart of the Father. COMPASSION is at the heart of God’s delaying.  We must never forget that.  Delaying his judgment so more people could be saved at the end. 

Somehow I get the feeling that Jesus wanted His followers (and us) to live with the tension of believing that the Kingdom was, indeed, arriving in and through His own work, and that this Kingdom would come, would fully arrive, not all in a bang but through a “process” like the slow growth of a plant.

Saying that God is delaying His final judgment can look, outwardly, like saying that God is inactive or uncaring.  But when we look at Jesus’ own public career, it is impossible to say that God didn’t care.  We who live post- Calvary and Resurrection know that God did indeed act suddenly and dramatically for the whole universe at that moment!  

When today we long for God to act, to put the world to rights, we must remind ourselves that He has already done so, and that what we are now awaiting is the full outworking of those events.  We wait with patience, not like people in a dark room wondering if anyone will ever come and turn the light on, but like people in the early morning who know that the sun has risen and are now waiting for the full brightness of midday. 

Bill Crofton

Earning Heaven

“Will God keep me out of heaven because I don’t take better care of my mother?”  It was an unexpected question that came from a soul that had been tortured for more than fifty years.  The question was followed by a litany of explanations for her behavior and decisions regarding her mother. It seemed important that she be able to justify her behavior and convince me, or perhaps God, that she was a good person despite the way she has treated her mother for the last 50 years.  

Truth be told, after listening to her torment of the last fifty years, I had a hard time finding fault and was not at all sure that I would have done any better.  But the thing that was most concerning was not her behavior or decisions. It was her deep need to justify her actions.

Will God keep me out of Heaven because . . . ?  It’s not such an unusual question.  I’ll bet you’ve asked it yourself, if only silently.  Will God keep me out of heaven because . . .

• I’m divorced
• I can’t stop drinking
• I’m gay
• I abandoned my kids
• I wear jewelry
• I don’t give enough money to church
• I can’t stop looking at porn
• I belong to the wrong denomination
• Of my business practices
• Church people disgust me
• I smoke
• I was born in the wrong country
• My father abused me
• I’m a bad person
• I haven't been baptized
• I quit going to church

Maybe you see a question here that resonates. Maybe yours simply hovers in your conscience.  I expect that, as you look over this list, you may see some things that cause you to say, “Why would anyone even think that’s a problem?” and others for which you might banish people, were you God.

There is much talk inside and outside Christian circles today about “sin”, and we all seem to be trying to nail down exactly what it is and what it is not. We want a good definition, a list, a standard to which we can measure ourselves (or more likely each other) to see if we’re sinners . . . if God finds us acceptable. If we can’t gain sufficient comfort in a list of rules, then we search for reasons why we’re not responsible. “I abuse my kids because my father abused me,” “You have to be shrewd in business to survive,” “The people at church are money grubbers and hypocrites.”

I’ve become tired of the conversations around determining what is and what isn’t sin and how our environment or genetics are the truly responsible agents. I’m tired because these arguments are framed to miss the point.

We have become a society, and all too often a church, that advances two ways in which we can be justified. We convince ourselves that either: there is nothing wrong with what we’re doing, or It’s not our fault.  Either of these conclusions cuts us off from the redemption we find in Jesus.

The truth is that we are all hopeless and helpless sinners mired in our own depravity with no capacity whatsoever to rise above our own sin, AND there is nothing on the above list or any other that can separate us from the love of God through Jesus. We will never develop a list that will keep us from being sinners, and we can never use our human condition to mitigate our responsibility.

To be human is to have shadows on our conscience. What makes all the difference is what we do with them.  We are sinners. Jesus is our friend, our Savior, and our only hope.  When we truly embrace these core truths, perhaps then we can explore all those questions of secondary importance without the need to either condemn or justify ourselves or our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Ultimately, I passed along to this tormented soul one of the few truths of which I’m certain and on which hang all my hopes. “There is absolutely nothing that we can do to get us into heaven and nothing we can do that will keep us out, and that is good news indeed for me.”

John Monday

We Are All Contemporary Worshippers

It’s a little sad how we turn words into villains. Some aspect of a word seems to be “against us,” so we become needless enemies of the whole of the word.  In church circles, one of those words is “contemporary.”

con·tem·po·rar·y  [kuhn-tem-puh-rer-ee]  adjective

1. of same time: existing at or dating from the same time period as something or somebody else.

2. existing: in existence now. 

3. modern in style.

4. of the same age: of the same or approximately the same age as somebody else.

Lots of church-going people hear it as a threat to tradition and even to theology. I think it is the third definition above that causes the uneasiness: modern in style.  The reality is, when you take the whole of the word, it is really a great descriptive word from which we can’t easily escape. And it is a word that describes us! Like it or not, we are (as every preceding generation has been) “contemporary” people.  There aren’t a plethora of options; we are contemporary, or we are dead! 

1.              We all exist here, right now, at the same period of time as one another, so we are Contemporary Worshippers!

2.              Even if some would prefer to go back in time and others forward, the reality is we exist in the NOW, so we are Contemporary Worshippers!

3.              We drive ourselves to worship, wear clothes of our modern current existence, email one another, talk on our cell phones, use our computers and tablets, and make donations at kiosks in the lobby because the vast majority of us don’t write checks and certainly don’t carry much cash.

4.              In our worship, we speak in a modern style, we like air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter, and we use sound systems and lighting so, regardless of the “worship element,” we are Contemporary Worshippers!

5.              We are all of the same age range as some other persons in our worship.  We are Contemporary Worshippers!

Because we are contemporary people, we are contemporary worshippers:

·      Whether we are singing a brand new praise song or a hymn from the 1640’s

·      Whether we are reading a parable of Jesus or dramatically acting out a story

·      Whether we are accompanied in our singing by organ or sitar or banjo

·      Whether we are responsively reading scripture or a quote from today’s newspaper

·      Whether we are placing an envelope in the offering plate or giving on our cell phone

·      Whether we are seeing a pastoral scene or a movie clip on the big screen

·      Whether we are engaging with those gathered or taking a moment for God and us alone

IF we have come to worship God, then that is what we are doing, and corporately we are CONTEMPORARY WORSHIPPERS!

We can’t not be.  We can do worship re-enactments like those who re-enact the Civil War, and we can pretend to be in heaven surrounding the throne of God and act out what we believe that worship might be like some day.  But for us to worship, we only have the opportunity to be contemporary worshippers.  Adam and Eve were contemporary worshippers, Abraham, Daniel, Jesus, the Disciples, the Reformers—EVERYONE who has worshipped had only one option—to be a Contemporary Worshipper, there aren’t other options!

Now, as a Contemporary Worshipper, I might sometimes really connect if the music is a certain style, and even within a genre, a certain song might really move me into connection with God.  This same song might have no positive effect on the person seated next to me.  The reading of a text might move my seatmate to tears, and I might just not get it.  As a Contemporary Worshipper I am not mandated to use any and every most contemporary expression, nor am I locked into using only what has been used before. 

I seek to connect with God, and all the accouterments of a worship service are there to assist me in my connecting with God and giving him praise, adoration, worship.  Just as I appreciate people allowing me to sing and pray and worship in English, and I should allow others to worship in the language most meaningful to them, so with the elements of worship, music styles, use of the arts—just think of them as different languages that enable people to connect with God and worship him.

Hopefully, as a group of contemporary worshippers who are seeking God and who value one another, we will continually seek a wide variety of styles in worship. Of course, the greatest determiner of whether our contemporary corporate worship service will be a meaningful experience for each of us and for the God we worship is how contemporary our private worship was throughout the week in preparation for our corporate experience. May we be contemporary worshippers who worship the Father in Spirit and in Truth.

Andy McDonald

Freedom

The Fourth of July is a day to celebrate freedom.  Freedom from tyranny; freedom from oppression; freedom from persecution.  Those of us who have the privilege to live in this country understand that these freedoms come at a very high cost.  The men and women who gave their lives saw a greater good – anticipating a future where their sacrifice – rather than an act of defeat and a reason to grieve – would inspire others move forward, reach greater heights, and fight for freedom around the world.

Recently, our church staff used a YouVersion reading plan on the Gospels as the basis for our weekly staff worship time.  We were at the end of the plan and discussing the moment when the disciples deserted Jesus and Peter’s denial.  One of the pastors pointed out something I had never noticed before.  (Isn’t it amazing how there’s always something new to find in Scripture?)  It’s Luke 22:32:

“But I have pleaded in prayer for you, Simon, that your faith should not fail. So when you have repented and turned to me again, strengthen your brothers.”

Before Peter (Simon) even failed his Savior and denied him, Christ had already forgiven him.  Not only had he forgiven him, he was affirming his value by tasking him to “strengthen your brothers.” 

“Peter, you’re going to do a really bad thing, and you’ll feel horrible about it, but I love you and I forgive you, so don’t let that mistake define you.  Leave it in the past, and I know you will do great things.”

And Peter did do great things, and to this day we are strengthened by his words.

Peter understood the great cost of his freedom.  He knew that the sacrifice made on his behalf secured his salvation and a renewed relationship with his Creator. 

We all experience failure.  Sometimes on a daily basis we realize how far short we fall.  But our failures, our shortcomings, do not define us.  Jesus defines us.  And we live in the freedom He provides to repent, turn to Him again, and strengthen others.

Tami Cinquemani