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

So many times I see Churches trying to “reinvent the wheel” so to speak.  There’s a new program, a new series, a new song, a new building, a new (fill in the blank) that is going to attract attention, regain interest, see souls saved, build momentum, and secure growth to better spread the Gospel.

I understand it.  There are things in life I get bored with, and even church can get boring at times.  (Yes, heathen that I am, I admit I also get bored with church once in a while!)  How often have we heard of teenagers who grow up into young adults that leave church, sometimes for a time only to return, and sometimes never to return except on special days, and all because church is boring, or they have heard it all before.  How often have new families joined only to disappear into the background a few years later while we scratch our heads wondering where “so-and-so family” went?

I see and hear all this, and I see and understand the perspective – “I guess they got bored, ’cause I heard they’re going somewhere else now.  We need a new ___________!”  Yet in my heart I have always felt that while the programs, and other things have their place, this is NOT what is going to make a lasting difference.  “Church is people, not programs!” I would hear myself say, and then find myself trying to find some new twist to add to my Sunday School lessons to make the lesson more interesting, or some activity that would basically do on a small scale what I thought was unnecessary on a larger scale.

Then I read this quote from a book: “We are constantly on a stretch, if not on a strain, to devise new methods, new plans, new organizations to advance the Church and secure enlargement and efficiency for the gospel.
This trend of the day has a tendency to lose sight of the man or sink the man in the plan or organization.
God’s plan is to make much of the man, far more of him, than anything else. Men are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men. … This vital, urgent truth is one that this age of machinery is apt to forget.
The forgetting of it is as baneful on the work of God as would be the striking of the sun from his sphere. Darkness and confusion, and death would ensue.
What the Church needs to-day is not more machinery or better, not new organizations or more and novel methods, but men whom the Holy Ghost can use – men of prayer, men mighty in prayer. The Holy Ghost does not flow through methods, but through men. He does not come on machinery, but on men. He does not anoint plans, but men – men of prayer.”

From E.M. Bounds, Power Through Prayer [Baker Book House, n.d.], pp. 5-7

2Chronicles 7:14 “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

God’s method has always been and will always be using His people – not a new program, not a new series, not a new song, not a new (fill in the blank) – but His people.  We are the method of God, and while we may use the new programs, and new series’, and new songs, we must never forget that the responsibility is a personal one, the directive specific to every saved individual “Go ye . . . ”

I must admit that a certain degree of delegation of my responsibility has been unfairly, and even unwisely placed in other things, other people, and this simply will result in the failure of realizing my own purpose in life – to be the witness God wants ME to be.

What are some ways you have delegated your responsibility, or trusted in other things to do your work of witnessing for you?  How can you make a difference to change it?

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things. – Philippians 4:8

So, um … this is really hard, is it not? I’ve spent some time this week reflecting on this verse and holding my thoughts up to it. I’ve discovered a couple of things:

* Sometimes following this advice makes me feel very boring. There, I admit it. Nobody likes a Pollyanna. Except God, of course, whose opinion ought the be the only one that matters …

* Most things I can think of comprise both lovely and unlovely aspects, and yet my mind jumps first to the unlovely, then (perhaps) to the lovely. When I do think of the lovely in things, it’s nearly always tempered by an underlying focus on the unlovely.

* My Web habits do not help. It’s not like I spend my days surfing porn or anything, but if I really get down to it, isn’t Failbooking just another way to make fun of people? Don’t I read the Huffington Post because I know somebody’s done something that will make me mad?

* It’s a lot easier to think on the right things if I don’t get off track in the first place. I found myself earlier this week standing at my sink doing dishes, running and re-running a scene through my head that involved a certain person picking a fight with me and what I would say in response. I left the kitchen mad at that person, even though none of it had happened in reality. But the next time we saw one another, I found myself hard-pressed to be friendly. Wonder how different it would have been if I had been thinking about this person’s good attributes while I did dishes.

I knew I had a tendency to think negative, but I didn’t realize what a big problem it is for me. I also had no idea how hard it is to get out of the rut of that kind of thinking.

I have been thinking of a lot of things lately.  Mostly I have been sitting silently, contemplating the goings on of people around me, and wondering how the different events in the lives of other people may have an influence in my own life.  It has been a personal thought experiment on the butterfly effect on my own life.  How will I act, or react, when the time comes for a decision?  What will be my motivation when I decide?  Will I be given a choice to act or a choice to accept whatever comes?

Then this verse pops into my head.  Romans 12:1 “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.”

Then a question or two comes:  What does God want from me now?  How will God get the glory in my life?  Am I willing to surrender everything to Him, to make any sacrifice no matter what is asked of me?

Tough questions to be sure, and not questions I am taking lightly.  I am struggling to lay down my desires, my self, my wants and perceived needs, and trying to let go of it all to allow God to ask of me whatever He will, and I am struggling to cultivate a willingness to accept whatever that may be, and make a purpose driven decision to let God have His will in my life.

In war, when a soldier surrenders, he gives up every right to self-determination after that.  His weapon, his personal effects, what he eats, where he sleeps, even his very life are given over into the hands of whomever he has surrendered to.  Not an easy thought to be sure, but if that person were God, shouldn’t it be easier?  Surrender.  Sacrifice.  Not so easy after all it seems.

I guess the start of it all is the questions themselves.  If I have surrendered to God, then shouldn’t the questions be something more like “What does God want to see done in this and every situation?  How will I act to be sure God gets the glory from this life that now belongs to Him?  How could I possibly say no to whatever sacrifice is called for?”

This week I began revisiting a study that my husband and I did several years ago with friends at our church in Orlando. It’s called Experiencing God, and I highly recommend it to anybody who, like me, has a hard time “hearing God’s voice” or seeing His will.

One of the most valuable things this first week has (re)taught me is that I look at the world backwards. If I want to know God’s will, I, like many people, ask what His will is for me or what His plans for my life are. But throughout the Bible, God works His will through His people by asking them to obey Him in faith. He’s probably not going to give me a life roadmap or tell me exactly what the results will be down the road; instead, he asks me to obey, and as I do that each day He’ll take me forward in His will one step at a time.

Another point I needed to be reminded of: God is always at work around me. I need to look around to see what He’s already doing, and then respond to His invitation to become involved in that. I think I get so hung up on what I should be doing, where I feel I’m needed, that I ignore the fact that He’s already got a plan and He’s working it out; he is just gracious enough to let me be part of it if I’m willing.

As you may have heard by now, Anne Rice recently announced on her Facebook that she is finished with Christianity. Here’s what she has to say about it:

She still, however, says she remains “committed to Christ.” Rice is just done with the religion of Christianity. And I can certainly understand where she’s coming from.

When I read the words of Christ, my heart overflows with hope. Here’s Jesus, God as man, going to the broken, downtrodden, outcast people and saying that the Kingdom of God is for them. Here’s Jesus preaching a way of living that’s a complete 180 from the ways of the world. Here’s Jesus laying down His very life so that the broken can be healed, and the outcast can enter God’s Kingdom. Jesus makes me want to leave everything behind, and follow Him.

Now, when I compare all that with the way Christians act sometimes, I can’t help but wonder what went wrong. How did we go from “He lives by the sword dies by the sword” to “Let’s take out Hugo Chavez?” Why is the Prosperity Gospel still popular even though the Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil? Why do some Christians spend so much energy preventing gay couples from marrying, yet turn a blind eye towards poverty?

A few weeks ago I had a faith crisis. I didn’t know what I believed in anymore. I still loved Jesus, but I became fed up with religion. So I had to sort of forget about anything anyone had ever taught me about God, and read the Bible for myself. And the funny thing is my faith suddenly grew! Jesus became real to me again. So maybe we all need to leave religion behind in order to find true faith.

I have a personal rule that if I feel the need to make air quotes whenever I say a certain word, it means I need to start rethinking how I express the concept I’m trying to get across. Lately I realized the word “saved” is one of those words I need to rethink.

The reason I air quote “saved” is because if I don’t, this is what I believe people hear when I say it: that when I was in elementary school I recited a prayer written or led by someone else, either because I knew someone expected me to do it or because someone had told me I was going to live forever in a lake of fire if I didn’t, and this experience means now I can go around saying I’m “saved” even though you can’t tell I’m any different from anybody else.

I don’t want “salvation” to mean that for me or for anyone else. Since I’m a word person, I’ve come to think that for me, part of it is a simple semantic problem. “Am I saved?” puts the focus on me. Even “Has Jesus come into my life to save me?” still keeps the focus on me (and it’s way vague on top of that). I accept that “I am saved” speaks of the grace of God in saving me from death, but that phrase still doesn’t directly attribute God with that grace. It says, “Whew, I got out of that one, didn’t I?” That’s not what it’s supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be about Christ.

But here’s where I run into trouble. The best way I can think to say “I am saved” without saying “I am saved” is to say “I follow Christ.” That should do it, right? It’s clearer, it’s more concise, it points to Christ, and it reflects what I really want to say. And it doesn’t stop at the first half of the equation; rather than just “I am saved,” it covers the whole circuit: Christ saved me; now I follow Christ. It’s basically the same as saying “I’m a Christian,” but since that’s another word that’s got a lot of bad associations, I like “I follow Christ” better.

Problem is, do I? If I began to say “I follow Christ” instead of “I am saved,” would I have to then put air quotes around “follow?” Unfortunately, I think I would. I imagine “I follow Christ” would come out of my lips with unholy pride. It would also come back to haunt me when I’m impatient with my family, when I’m driving like an @$$hole, when I’m passing judgment on my Christian fellows, and when I’m sitting silently in a doctor’s office reading a book while the obviously anxious person next to me who seems to want someone to talk to just twiddles her thumbs – when I could be building a relationship with her, opening up a door to Christ with her, seeing how I can help her.

I would rather say “I follow Christ.” But I’d better be ready to actually do it.

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.

1 Thessalonians 5:13b-15:

“Live in peace with each other. ¹⁴And we urge you, brothers, warn those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone. ¹⁵Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else.”

Paul wrote these things to explain specifically how members of the body of Christ should behave toward one another. We in church are all supposed to be living Christ’s Way, so these directions should be easy to follow. But there’s a reason why many non-Christian and/or non-churched people look at church as a den of hypocrites. It’s often full of unkind words (most often said behind backs), impatience, idleness in God’s work (ironically), and an unwillingness to address these very problems.

I can’t write these things off as the diseases of “organized religion” as I would have 10 years ago. These are my diseases. The church is us. Its problems stem from our unwillingness to follow the teachings of Christ even in His house of worship. We are responsible for the body of Christ — every single one of us.

Every time I am impatient and unkind, I am the problem. Every time I fail to address the gossiping that’s going on around me, I am the problem. Every time I begin to think I have a right to criticize another person, I am the problem.

If I do not love the Lord my God enough to love His children and His church through its faults, as He loves me, I have a big problem, and that problem is me.

As I look at myself, the church, and our culture, I wonder, Where’s the love? Not just for others, but for God?

Loving God is a recurring theme in my thoughts and prayer life, so maybe I’ve posted about this before. But it just nags me. Do we even “get” love?

I keep thinking back to a time when my husband and I were engaged, when we were walking down the street in DC after seeing a spectacular art exhibit together, holding hands. We weren’t talking. We weren’t really even looking at each other. But a lady walking towards us on the street grinned from ear to ear when she saw us coming, and I’m convinced it’s because our joy in love was radiating so powerfully it could have knocked her off the sidewalk.

A lot of people would say, Well, that’s just that googly-eyed phase of love. That doesn’t last. Love’s more than a feeling. They write it off as a youthful phenomenon.

Well, sure, love is more than a feeling. The love I had for my fiancee then and for my husband now has always been more than a feeling, thanks. That’s why it has helped keep me happily and joyfully married for nine years. Instead of denigrating it, why not look at that youthful phenomenon of googly-eyed love as a model? The love we have for a mate can be overpowering, making us look ridiculous to others, a life-changing love, good or bad. Why should our love for God be less than that?

I don’t think it’s irreverent to talk about love for God in that intimate a sense. The psalmists wrote of an overpowering love (Ps. 40:5; Ps. 59:16; Ps. 31:16; Ps. 63.3, and on, and on …) in the kind of passionate poetry that some people only expect from smitten high schoolers. And let’s not even get into the Song of Songs, if we go for the interpretation that it’s an allegory of God’s love.

Love can be reverent and overpowering. Love can make you give up things at a word from your loved one. Love can be worshipful and awed. Shouldn’t we love God that way? What’s so wrong with that?

For father’s day, my wife bought me the book Crazy Love by Francis Chan.  I am not though with it yet, but wow is it a convicting book.  He is in essence critiquing the American church and our “American” approach to Christianity.  I just got through reading the chapter entitled “Profile of the Lukewarm.”  He begins the chapter by retelling the parable of the sower (in which the seed lands on path, the rocks, the thorns or the good soil.)   When I hear that passage, I of course know that I am the good soil.  Don’t we all?  Chan points out that we shouldn’t assume that we are the good soil.  He writes:

“I think that most American churchgoers are the soil that chokes the seed because of all the thorns.  Thorns are anything that distracts us from God.  When we want God and a bunch of other stuff, then that means we have thorns in our soil.  A relationship with God simply cannot grow when money, sins, activities, favorite sports teams, addictions or commitments are piled on top of it. … I will say it again: Do not assume you are good soil.”

He then goes on to list a lot of ways in which lukewarm people live.  What I like best is that in the book, he follows each with a passage of scripture, not just a citation, but an actual passage.  I found a place that has a .pdf of the full list (with just the citations)  here: http://www.dublinvcc.org/Portals/0/Crazy%20Love.pdf

Probably the most convicting one of the list was this:

“Lukewarm people do not live by faith; their lives are structured so they never have to.  They don’t have to trust God if something unexpected happens—they have their savings account.  They don’t need God to help them—they have their retirement plan in place.  They don’t genuinely seek out what life God would have them live—they have life figured and mapped out.  They don’t depend on God on a daily basis—their refrigerators are full and, for the most part, they are in good health.  The truth is, their lives wouldn’t look much different if they suddenly stopped believing in God.”

This is followed by Luke 12:16-21, the parable of the man who tore down his barns to store more of his goods, only to have his life demanded of him that very night.

When we look at this list, read the scripture and really examine ourselves, which of us can say that we burn for Christ?  Who of us is salt and light for our Lord?  Are we truly answering the call to love the Lord our God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind?  I measure myself against what I am called to do by Christ and I find myself falling short.  Not because of a lack of trying but a lack of love and obedience.  Personally, I know that I hold too much back.  Like so many other lukewarm people I want to make Jesus a part of my life instead giving Him all of my life.  I have heard more than one preacher say that it is ok to have nice things.  I think we need to reevaluate and learn that it is ok to have enough and no more.  We need to accept the love of our Father and give all of our lives to Him and not just part.  If we hold back from Him, then we are told that any of our righteousness is as filthy rags.  I pray that I can be transformed by the love of Christ into the kind of servant that He desires.