COMMUNITY

A good friend of mine asked, “How has the Western lens of evangelism in the last 50 years that promoted the idea of a "personal salvation" affected authentic Christian community?”

I believe emphasis on personal salvation (almost to the exclusion of consideration of God’s purpose to renew all creation) programs a person to believe that the essence of spirituality is to be saved from the judgment that is coming upon this earth. I am now in the waiting area waiting for my escape from this doomed planet. God has provided some goodies and entertainment to keep me from being bored. The enemy also has provided some goodies and entertainment. My assignment while waiting is to eat God’s goodies and avoid the enemy’s goodies so that people will want to accept the same escape route as I have. In this view of salvation, Christian community is defined as those who share the waiting room with me. And though most are pretty good company, after awhile some of them get on my nerves.

“When is that rescue ship going to arrive?!!”

WHAT IS GOD'S LOVE LANGUAGE?

I was talking to a couple about their marriage last night. We centered in on the topic of love languages. It is based on the idea that each of us “hears” love in a certain way. Some of us recognize touch as an expression of love. Others feel loved when they receive gifts. Another group hears, “I love you,” when they are on the receiving end of acts of service. There are those who do not hear, “I love you,” unless you spend meaningful time with them. And finally, some people hear love, when they hear, “I love you,” or other words of affirmation spoken to them.

At the end of our discussion last night, the husband asked a very significant question—“What is God’s love language?” What a question! If the greatest commandment is to love the Lord, our God, with all our heart, soul, and mind (and it is), how do you love God?

The very short and biblical answer is obedience. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” But I believe we often hear obedience as merely keeping the rules. The Bible tells us the rules and we show God how much we love Him by the way we keep those rules.

I submit that the obedience that says, “I love you” to God is more about imitation than compliance. In the same context where Jesus said, “If you love me you will keep my commandment,” he also said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

When we are so secure and satisfied with God’s care for us and His control of the world that we no longer feel a need to take care of ourselves, but feel free to abandon ourselves to His plan and purpose and devote ourselves to the pursuit of the benefit of others with the same intensity that we have pursued our own, then we are speaking God’s love language.

PREACHING TO THE CHOIR

I used to call it a “religious battle of the bands.”

It’s our town’s Community Thanksgiving Service. Choirs from most of the churches present a musical selection, interspersed with various pastors praying, reading Scripture, and or preaching. When I first got here the crowd was very large, usually over 500. Last night, you could say that the speaker literally “preached to the choir”. Remove the choirs and preachers and you may have had about 30 to 40 people.

Why keep it up? No one is coming anymore. A few years ago I would have said bury it. Very few people seem to be enjoying it.

But then, whom is this event designed to please? Doesn’t He deserve any and all gratitude that we can give, no matter how off-key or antiquated a few of those expression might be? It’s hard to keep from putting myself at the focal point of worship, as if God likes what I like?

There is also the issue of unity. No matter how feeble the attempts, I believe something powerful takes place in multiple dimensions when followers of Christ try to worship together. It’s sort of an “in-your-face” to the entities, both spiritual and political, who gain their power from the fragmentation of the body of Christ.

I like the way N. T. Wright puts it—“Then in chapter 3 [Ephesians] it emerges once again that the creation of this united worshiping community is a sign to the principalities and powers of the world that their time is up, that God is God and that they are not (3:10).” N. T. Wright, Freedom and Framework, Spirit and Truth: Recovering Biblical Worship, www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Biblical_Worship.htm

MAY I HELP YOU?


In a Home Depot store, how do you distinguish employees from customers?

In a multi-cultural society, how do you distinguish followers of Christ from the rest of the crowd?

The apostle Peter wrote, “…Clothe (egkombōsasthe) yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another…” (1 Peter 5:5 ESV). The Greek word in the parenthesis is only found here in the New Testament. It refers to tying on an article of clothing. Peter may have been alluding to the apron-like garments that Roman slaves wore to distinguish themselves from Roman citizens. The image of Jesus tying on a towel to wash the feet of his disciples comes to mind.

Could it be that the distinguishing mark of a disciple of Jesus Christ is not so much morality as it is humility? I have heard a lot of “biblical” preaching and teaching. Have done quite a bit of it myself. I’m sorry to say that I have not seen humility pushed as hard as conformity to certain practices and beliefs. And what’s worse, I have seen humility walked even less than it has been talked.

I believe that it was Jesus’ humility that made him so attractive to the “spiritually incompetent” of his society. Jesus’ humility had nothing to do with feigned inferiority or any other form of self-deprecation. It was more about priorities. Father God’s way before his own way. The needs of the world before his own needs. For Jesus, humility was essentially a life of complete submission and total service, coming from an absolute confidence that his Father had the world completely under control and had him totally taken care of.

What would happen to the world’s view of Jesus Christ, if his followers moved humility from the periphery to the center of their teaching and practice? What would my world begin to look like if I wore humility like a bright orange apron?

IS GOD CONCEITED?

Assumption: God is the possessor of every known virtue to the infinite degree. There is no one greater or equal to Him. There is no one or nothing of greater or equal value to Him. This is no brag, just fact.

For Him to place greater value on something other than Himself would be inconsistent with truth. To attribute greater value to anything other Himself would be to make that thing God. So when God values His glory above everything else, He is not being conceited, He is being consistent. It would be the epitome of conceit if any creature tried to do the same.

The Hebrew word for “glory” is kabod, which literally means “heavy”. So when the seraphim in Isaiah 6 say, “…the whole earth is full of His glory…” They are saying that creation is heavy with God. All of the things that we admire most in creation—beauty, wisdom, justice, mercy, strength, truth, love, etc.—are reflections of the One who created it. The way that I get a grasp of this is to think about a chocolate brownie. I really like chocolate brownies. And when I pick up a heavy brownie, I really get excited because I am expecting that thing to be particularly rich and chocolaty. If you pick up a precious metal, the value is gauged by its purity and weightiness. This is the Old Testament idea of God’s glory.

Through Creation and also through Redemption, God is sharing the intense pleasure that He gets from being God and acting like God. Creating us in His image, God programmed us to enjoy Him, the way that He enjoys Himself. Now, I know this sort of rubs our sensibilities the wrong way. And it should, if we are talking about a mere creature. However, there is nothing wrong with God wanting to be treated as the center of the universe. HE IS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE! But when you or I live our lives as though we are the center of the universe, it is obnoxious at best and blasphemous at worst.

God does not do anything out of a desire to meet His own need. He has no needs. By definition, He is self-sufficient. Creation is not God’s attempt fill some kind of void in His being. It is really quite the opposite. God’s love compelled Him to share that which is of supreme value, His glory (the substance of all that He is) with something other than Himself. So he created angels and ants, constellations and cockroaches, and He said, “It’s all good.” Then He did something very special. He took some dirt and breathed into it some parts of His being that He did not put into any other of His creatures. And he called them humans. Then He said, “It is all very good.

He designed humans to enjoy the experience of being like God and acting like God and to live their life in awe and gratitude toward the One who would so graciously allow them this privilege and responsibility.

The serpent tempted Adam and Eve by offering them a way to enjoy the experience of being like God and acting like God without having to be dependent upon God or obedient to God. He offered them a way to actually become God. He convinced them to distrust God and disobey God. As a result, they not only lost their ability to enjoy being like God and acting like God, but they lived under the delusion that they had the right to decide who was God and who was not.

Living for the glory of God is all about restoration. Through Jesus, God restored our ability to enjoy the experience of being like God and acting like God. To put it another way, He restored our ability to reflect God. Jesus is the perfect example of what humans were meant to be—a flawless reflection of all that God is. Total trust and obedience allowed Jesus to experience maximum enjoyment of being like and acting like God. (And yes, Jesus is totally God and equal to God, but what He accomplished in restoration was done as one who was totally human. The divine powers that He demonstrated while on earth were by means of the Holy Spirit energized by trust and obedience.) When we look at Jesus, we see why God is so thrilled with Himself and wants to share that with others. We see demonstrations of the power that put the earth and seas in their places and we see demonstrations of compassion and pity that make us wonder why God would give such attention to insignificant creatures like us.

The most precious human relationships are those where people open up and share themselves with one another. That’s what God’s glory is all about. God has opened up and shared Himself with us, knowing that if we will receive what He is sharing, our joy will be full. Glorifying God is not about making Him look good by my good deeds. Glorifying God is about showing how attractive He really is by seeking my satisfaction totally in Him. Trust and obedience is the means by which I enjoy that satisfaction.