Fractured Saints - never beyond mending - a christian blog for the broken ones

In Matthew 19:16-22, there is a great, yet pretty terrifying interaction between Christ and a rich, young man.  In it, the young man asks God what he must do to be saved.  Jesus lists several portions of the law, including ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’  The young ruler boldly says that he has kept these, which Jesus doesn’t challenge (wow!).  Beyond that, Jesus calls the rich young man to sell all his possessions and give to the poor.  And with that the rich young man walked away dejected.

I have been thinking about this a lot the last couple weeks.  I think that materialism is one of the chief challenges to the church in the US.  Given that, I have really been struggling through how I would respond if Jesus showed up at my work today and asked for the same thing from me.  Sadly, I would fail the love your neighbor as yourself test (thanks to God for grace), but I think an honest assessment of how easily I would give up my house, emergency fund and 401k, speaks volumes about how opened handed we are to God.  I think that God put this story in the Bible not to be allegorical or symbolic, but rather to put reality on the concept of how much we have turned over to God.

Sadly, I feel I would act much like the rich young man.  I rest in the grace found in Christ, but I think that those of us who are given much should certainly repent regularly of our / my desire to make earth our home.

The past couple weeks, God has really been showing me how privileged I am and how much of it has so little to do with my performance and so much to do with his immeasurable grace.  It has led me to confession and even a bit of weeping.  Here are the points that hit home -

• The movie Precious –  Wow I only made it through about 20 minutes of this movie.  The movie gives a view into the life of a young, overweight African American teenage girl that is truly horrific.  To describe the depth of despair, her mother let her father rape her so that the teenager could keep giving birth to children so that the mother can get more welfare money.  The fact that I was born to 2 white middle class parents who loved me thoroughly has way more to do with my current life than my hard work.  Mark against my pride of status / success in my life.
• A conversation with a good friend – A friend and I went to a movie a couple weeks ago and conversation veered to kids.  His sister came up in the conversation, and I was sad to hear that her firstborn is still experiencing real problems.  It appears that the young child has bi-polar and is still quite violent and down-right threatening sometimes.  Both my friend’s sister and husband are faithful, smart, excellent parents who are struggling day in, day out with their child.  This really shook me up as well as I act as if my children’s relatively good behavior is largely a result of my “good” parenting.  Another heavy mark against my pride of the “job I have done” in parenting my kids.
• The movie The Road – This was another movie that shouldn’t be watched after a hard day.  Basically it consists of a post-apocalyptic world where there is no food / animals left.  The story is about a man who is just trying to keep him and his son alive on the road.  It is incredibly bleak, but it again it just showed me how much I have come to expect out of life.  Safety, regular food production, clean water.  These things are insignificant until we start to think about what we would do if they were yanked away.  Of course, my sinful heart would think, well that couldn’t happen in America, but I see no place in the Bible where I am promised that.  Huge mark against my pride which lead me to expect all of the things of my life to continue uninterrupted.

All of this has caused me to pray more humbly, to thank God deeply for simple things (air, food, family) and to generally distrust my natural state of evil pride.  I still forget regularly about my need to do these things (chief sin of Israelites who forgot God), but I have been clearly shown my sin.  God, please be merciful to me and help me to further confess and turn from my sin.

James 4:7-10 (English Standard Version)

⁷Submit yourselves therefore to God Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. ⁸ Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. ⁹ Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. ¹⁰ Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

This past Sunday, I heard a great sermon on James 4:7-10.  In the sermon, the pastor spoke extensively about drawing near to God, and what that would take given the passage.  The introduction to the sermon was around a Christian in the 1700s who kept a diary over 30ish years where he consistently notes that he tries to get up early in the morning.  Again and again, he resolves to be up early for prayer and time in the word, but it is clear he consistently fails to do so according to his entries.  He is depressed by this and even questions why he continues to resolve to do something that he clearly coming up short on.  All of this was to point to our deep need to admit our weakness, weep / mourn over it and thus be able to more fully experience the grace and exaltation that comes through Christ.

I imagine that I have heard all of this in sermons before, but it struck me at a deep level on Sunday.  The presumptive attitude that allows me to approach God, thinking that I am doing pretty well is probably my chief barrier to a rich relationship with him.  Cleansing hands and purifying hearts is not a experience where I really get to maintain my dignity on my terms.  This scares me to be honest, and while I was convicted, I have had a hard time actually doing it in this week.  So today, I am going to resolve to confess not my lack of spending time with God regularly, but rather the errant attitudes of my heart of complacency, idleness and presumptiveness.  Yikes, that sin list grew fast and ugly.

So here goes a random assortment of thoughts from the last couple days that I thought that I would share.

1.  I have been reading through Leviticus the last couple days, and I am amazed at how hard it would have been to live with any sort of faithfulness in Old Testament Israel.  On top of that, one person’s blase attitude about their need to properly deal with sin could cause the entire nation to pay.  All of the sudden, I am far more appreciative of what Christ did for us and yet I wonder if I am way to careless with how I act.

2.  My wife is having our 3rd child tomorrow morning (praise God for His blessings large and small).  My son helped me wonder again at God’s creation as I told him that his little sister has been eating mommy’s food for the past 9 months through her belly button.  He couldn’t believe it.  Wow, God sure made some amazing things that we treat as every day occurrences.

3.  This post from First Importance was too good to pass up -

Parenting for me has always been a daunting task.  I think that my generation (people in their 30s now) has generally been the “show me” generation of kids.  Our parents did a decent job of telling us that they loved us, but many a time, the words fell short of accompanying actions.  Ironically, this has now kind of boomerang’ed a bit on me as I find my parenting not living up to the standards that I expected from my mom and dad.

Inadequacy in parenting is always at a high when finishing parenting books.  I just got finished with a great book (which I highly recommend) called Handbook to Joy-Filled Parenting by Barbara Moon.  In it, she talks about connecting to your children at a young age, by looking into their eyes and “synchronizing” with them.  It’s a neat concept that I am now really trying to implement with my kids.

My kids resist it though, which can be really frustrating.  See even though they love me, they often would rather keep doing what they are doing (playing, watching pbs, etc) than to sync up with me.  This is really hard as a parent, and yet I know that is regularly my posture to God.  The king of the universe wants to connect with me and I say….”I am busy”.  That really sucks, but not quite enough to generally get me out of doing it.

May God give me the strength to model good connecting with God by regularly “looking into His eyes”.

James 1:5-8

5 If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. 6 But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7 That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; 8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.

This past Sunday, the minister spoke on the first part of James 1, primarily talking through suffering.  I am really familiar with the book of James as my parents paid me at some point to memorize the entire book.  As a side note, I am not sure if that move of my parents was either really bad or incredibly smart.  Maybe somewhere in between, but I digress.

What struck me was the text around the doubting man.  I had always read this in direct application to the man who asks something from God, specifically wisdom.  Therefore, whenever I needed wisdom on some decision, I would try extra hard not to doubt my desire for wisdom.  However, upon re-reading the verse this week, I think God wanted to speak to my life on a deeper level.

In the past 10 years of my faith, I have certainly gone through several seasons of doubt with God.  Most notably was struggling through the concept of God’s sovereignty and supreme goodness.  By the grace of God, I do not doubt in these areas as I did previously, but at the same time, I think I may have wallowed in that time longer than I should have.  This isn’t to say that I should have just swept the doubt under a rug, but rather, if we have doubts about God or His plans, we should try to quickly address them to be able to leave the state of being a doubtful man.  If we do not, then James says that we shouldn’t expect to receive anything from God and that we are unstable in all that we do.

As it is somewhat in vogue to be doubtful these days (David Bazan?), do we risk seriously limiting our spiritual lives?

My grandmother died last night and again, I’m faced with tragedy.  I am not generally good at sorrow / grief, and I typically respond in somewhat cold, logical manner.  Though my grandmother was a Christian and I fully rejoice that she is in the presence of our Savior (Come quickly Jesus!), part of identifying with grief is really seeing death for what it is.  Very similar to what I said in my last post,  death really is a stark reminder of the consequences of sin.  It is a victory for the devil in a lot of ways.  I am reminded of the scene in the Passion of the Christ where the Devil figure is walking through the crowd as Jesus is being killed.  There is a certain level of triumph in his face, yet he is apprehensive.  The death of Christ was the devil’s greatest victory and at the same time was his greatest and most final defeat.

In this light, the death of the Christian is re-enactment of Christ’s death.  There is sorrow and it is a victory in a way for the devil.  But in this minor victory, the devil has to face the fact that it his last victory that he will ever have in that believer’s life.  They are home and will never suffer under temptation, sorrow or the whisperings of the evil one ever again.

With these two realities in mind, I am going to try to weep for sorrow at the victory of sin in my grandmother’s physical death and weep for joy at the victory of Christ in her eternal life.

I hope this makes sense.  Today’s been a cocktail of emotion.

So as I have blogged quite a bit about in the past, I am big on the idea of heaven.  With having come through the joy of Easter, I was able to really re-focus my mind on the hope of re-birth.  In light of all of this, there was news yesterday that Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk, passed away.  While I hadn’t read a lot of the guy’s stuff, he clearly loved Christ and is RIGHT NOW experiencing the joy of heaven.  But with that said, there was a real moment of deep sadness for his family and friends who lost, though temporarily, a loved one.  There is something violently wrong with death, and this is felt when we are quiet and able to reflect on our mortality (albeit earthly).  I believe that Christ mourned over this very thing when He wept at knowing his friend Lazarus died.  It seems to be the most fundamental twisting of God’s good creation.

So my thoughts today, are not to push past the grief to reflect on the truth that Michael is with His savior and the joys of heaven, but rather to dwell in grief at the state of our broken world.  In this grief, I hope to pursue those around me and tell them about the only Hope which can provide an eternal solution to the brokenness.

Hebrews 3:12 – 14

(12) See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. (13) But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. (14)We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.

This past Sunday, we had a sermon on the verse above and were challenged to take up the task of “encouraging” one another daily.  While this is very much what I think that we need, I am often at a loss in what encouragement even means.  In relationships that are established and healthy, encouragement seems to fit and really serve an end, but if there is no real relationship undergirding the encouragement, it seems almost trite to me.  With the verse in mind above, I am asking God that I am not being hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.

How has encouragement worked for any of you?  I want to encourage my brothers and sisters in Christ, but I want to do so authentically rather than just a “hey I think you are swell” kind of fashion.  Is the person you are encouraging a big factor in how you pursue them?  Should you pursue friendship first before really trying to provide generic affirmations?

God has a high calling for His church and it is clear that the enemy would like nothing more than for us to remain disconnected and hardened.  I am praying through it and appreciative of any hints from your experiences?

So I have always enjoyed the TV show LOST which has serious themes of good vs evil, redemption, guilt and the consequences of our choices, but this season has helped me to understand God a little better.  Let’s see how fast this community can tear this up.

Last week, Slice of Infinity ran a great article on Plan B (http://www.rzim.org/usa/usfv/tabid/436/articleid/10511/cbmoduleid/1133/default.aspx ) which presented a great way of looking at God’s plan for our lives.  I remember as a teenager in the youth group community / college community and frequently the question of “What is God’s plan in my life?” came up.  The article addresses this question in the following unique way.

A wise friend of mine once wondered if following God was not something like following the directions on a GPS system. At the beginning of the journey, the plan for arriving at the desired destination is set before you. But when you accidentally turn left or are forced to take an unforeseen detour, the computer doesn’t scold you. It doesn’t force you to start over or announce that you can no longer make it to your final destination because you have ruined the route. In fact, it doesn’t even make you feel guilty. The end still in mind, it simply adjusts the plan from that point onward, as if the “wrong” turn was a part of the journey all along. The destination has not changed. Plan A may have switched to Plan B, but the outcome will be the same.

With this in mind, LOST got me thinking about alternate realities.  My Old Testament professor in college always said that reality, especially in terms of sinners coming to faith in Christ, is “100% man’s free will + 100% God’s sovereignty”.  While this understanding lines up with Scripture, it is hard to wrap your head around.  Using the GPS analogy and LOST’s alternate realities from this season, this is how I am thinking about the conflict now.

So my changed understanding is this.  God is not constrained by time and therefore can see / is sovereign over all possible alternate realities of our lives.  This could be seen in the book of Jonah where God says He was going to destroy Nineveh, yet does not when the people repent.  Being that God is unchangeable, this posed an issue for me.  Now, the way I think about it is that God saw 2 alternate realities, was completely in control of both, and responded as He had planned in that reality.

The post is long, but what is people’s thoughts on this?  Helpful or not?  May God be glorified as we search for Him and His nature.