Sin, pride and what really matters.

As I said, I've been reading and studying the Book of Job. Last week I came across this passage in chapter 35.

6 If you sin, how does that affect (God)?
If your sins are many, what does that do to him?
7 If you are righteous, what do you give to him,
or what does he receive from your hand?
8 Your wickedness affects only a man like yourself,
and your righteousness only the sons of men.

That's kind of weird, don't you think? So many Christians are concerned over offending God with their personal and national actions, yet in this series of sentences it states that God is not really concerned about out sins. Or our righteousness

Pride is the core of all sin. I'm not alone in that observation. When you think you know better than your creator, you have an issue with pride. Most people do the wrong thing when they believe they are too smart to get caught or because they really don;t believe that what they are going to do is wrong, even when everyone else says it is. But even if you are doing the right thing, you can still be dealing with pride.

In the church, there is a real pride issue in the belief that it is possible to thwart the plan of God in the world through our actions. Many in the church justify that position by calling certain actions as "compromising the Gospel." In other words, you do something that goes counter to the culture of your church (e.g. going to see a particular movie or reading a certain book) and you will be told you are free to do that, but if others see you do it, you could cause them to stumble and "compromise the gospel."

Number one, that is a very weird definition of "gospel." Gospel means "good news" and that news is that Jesus Christ died for everyone's sin since the beginning of time, for now and into the future. It means that there is nothing we can do to make us any closer or send us farther away from God. Everything we have done wrong has been taken care of.

Second, if that is true, there is nothing we can do to make God love us even more.

What we do affects only us and those we connect with. That makes all our actions very personal in nature.

You get what you are obsessed with

I've been spending several week studying Job, because when life sucks (as it does for most of us) it helps to get perspective from a guy whose suckitude quotient is higher than most people on earth will ever experience.

For those not familiar with Job, it's the book just before Psalms in the Old Testament and tells the story of a wealthy but really great guy (feeds the poor, helps sick people does everything right) who gets attacked for no good reason, his family killed his wealth taken and his body start falling apart, all at the same time.  The he is surrounded by a bunch of friends who tell him he must have some "secret sin" in his life and God is out to get him for good reason.  Even his wife tells him to just give up and die.  I recommend reading it, because it at least has a happy ending.

But what I wanted to talk about is something from the last third of the book, where one of the friends -- the youngest who goes by the name of Elihu -- starts laying down some good advice.  As I was reading it this week, it hit me right between the eyes because it explains a lot of what is going on in the church.  The passage is in Chapter 36, starting in verse 16.  Elihu says:

¹⁶ “God is leading you away from danger, Job,
      to a place free from distress.
      He is setting your table with the best food.
 ¹⁷ But you are obsessed with whether the godless will be judged.
      Don’t worry, judgment and justice will be upheld.

That's a great description of where the church is today.  The opportunity for significant advances are right there, but rather than concentrate on reaching people for Christ, they are screaming about injustice and unrighteousness.  The result is a world who no longer believes the church represents God.

There's the real problem in religious life right now.  I know a lot of atheists and agnostics.  In my discussions with them it becomes clear, early on, that the issue is not that they don't believe in God, or that they don't really know if God exists.  What they say is that they don't believe in the God, ore even the Jesus, that the church demonstrates today.  I can't say I blame them.  I don't even believe in the God that is demonstrated by the church today.  I know a completely different God; one that is concerned with the cause of "sin" rather than the sin itself.

And that's a completely different discussion.

Like comedy, grace is hard

As I watch and participate in what goes on in life, I realize why so many people prefer to live in judgement than walk in grace.  Judgement can be quick and painless.  Grace requires a systemic view of life.  Trying to decide what's evil or good under grace causes migraines and aneurisms if it is at all possible.  Judgement, on the other hand, is is clear cut... even if you are wrong.  Hey, at least you took a position, right?

While a judgmental lifestyle is not limited to the religious crowd (just talk to someone from Greenpeace, PETA or anyone in either major political party) it is easier for a religious person to be judgmental.  If you see or hear of something that offends you you can rationalize that the offensive thing is "an affront to God" and therefore be justified in your position.  Without a "Higher Authority" justification, all you have is the position that whoever disagrees with you is just stupid.  Telling someone they are going to hell for their position is not quite as offensive as telling them they are stupid.  The latter will get you punched in the nose.  The former just gets you laughed at.

From a Christian perspective, however, (as opposed to a religious perspective) a judgmental lifestyle is counterproductive.  Christians have been given the responsibility of "preaching the Good News" to all the world, the news being that God has already forgiven them for everything they have ever done or ever will do that can be considered a sin ... by anyone ... including God.  But putting conditions on what constitutes "Christian behavior" has been part of the church condition since, oh, say the establishment of the church in Galatia in the first century.

Today, we have the same problem as then.  We like to say that we need to avoid involvement in certain practices if we want to be "really Christian," and we have all kinds of different flavors of that attitude, ranging from not wearing makeup for women, to not going to certain movies or reading certain books, all the way to political positions - on both sides of the political fence.  The reasoning for this is that you have to be careful what you put into your mind and body because bad stuff might spill out.  Jesus had a bit of a different position on that:

"It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man." New American Standard Bible (©1995)

We also tend to take it to the place of who we associate with, saying we shouldn't be around certain people because their lifestyles could pollute us.  Jesus had something to say about that too:

"The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, 'Look! He's a glutton and a drunk, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'" International Standard Version (©2008)

So you can see that the judgmental lifestyle, while much easier doesn't really hold much water in an eternal perspective.  Grace, on the other hand, is just a real pain in the ... neck.

I have a friend whom I love dearly who I led to Christ many years ago.  She had somethign of a wild lifestyle but was very unhappy.  I remember sitting with her late at night aside a hotel pool during the convention we met at and walking her through a prayer of forgiveness.  It was beautiful.  

She got pregnant shortly after that and had an abortion.  I stayed with her and told her she had already been forgiven.  Happened again a few years later.  I stayed with her and told her she had already been forgiven.  She moved away, got a new boyfriend and got pregnant again.  This time she kept it, but was a single mother for a long time.  I kept telling her about Gods forgiveness.  She finally found a good man.  Got married.  Has a great marriage.  Just had another baby.

Here's the thing.  If I had been normal through this relationship, she would never have felt she could come to me about anything.  I'm not a fan of abortion, or sex outside of marriage, but that's my opinion and my life.  How God deals with me is completely different from how he deals with anyone else.  I can only be concerned with God's grace for me and when I am in a relationship, I can only be concerned with how I exhibit that grace.  That means I am in it for the long, very messy haul.

Sometimes I wish I didn't really get the whole grace thing.  I don't really.  But I get enough that I can't be comfortable with the judgement thing.  My life would be a lot easier.  I would get to hang with people who have really simple, seemingly black-and-white lifestyles.  But I have to admit, hanging with "tax collectors and sinners" is a whole lot more entertaining.

Legislating morality

Sorry it's been a while since I last wrote, but January and February were extremely busy. finally got a couple of days off to think about things other than work and I have a notebook full of ideas, but today I wanted to take up the issue of legislating morality.

I don't believe it can be done, but there are many who think otherwise and point to laws against murder as proof. But my point is that while you can pass laws against or for anything, it doesn't change the moral climate of a society. Murder is still a prevalent crime throughout our society in spite of laws and punishments against it. The US founding fathers put the restrictions on government interference in religion for a reason and this is one of them.

(Note I did not say the separation of church and state, which is a misunderstood concept. The premise was not to keep the influence of religion out of government, but to limit government endorsement control of religion. Interpretation in the past 100 years has reversed the intent of the concept.)

A good example of what I am talking about is the attitude regarding abortion in the US. Both sides of this highly polarized issue are pushing for government intervention in what is ultimately a moral decision. When life begins is not the issue, but when life attains a right to life is. And that decision is based on one's theology, not politics. Therefore the decision rests in the individual. There are any number of laws and legislation that are meant to control access and availability of abortion but none of them have had any affect on how many abortions are performed in the US.

Some might point to the Roe v. Wade decision as the legalization of abortion, but that isn't the case. What happened in that decision was the government actually started taking notice. Statistics on abortion were not really reliable until 1970 because many abortion were done in private and reporting was not required, and they continued to climbe after Roe- v Wade in 1973. After 1979, however the the number of abortions flattened out and started a steading decline beginning in 1990. After some thorough checking, there really wasn't any major change in US legislation against abortion in 1990 and beyond, nor were there any major legal precedent changes. So what was it that caused abortion to flatten out and then decline?

A little more checking and I found that in 1974 a movement promoted by the evangelical community, Crisis Pregnancy Centers, became a real force by the early 1980s and went into ascension in 1990 as it attained the same government support levels as Planned Parenthood. The centers have changed names a couple of times since then but the work is still pretty much the same: offer an alternative to Planned Parenthood's abortion bias. Some people on the pro-choice side claim the CPC dogma is deceptive, but pro-lifers say the same about Planned Parenthood, so I think the rhetoric balances out.

Here's my point: The morality of abortion was not legislated. The state just said, leave us out of it. It's up to people to make moral choices like this and the church is better equipped for that job. Abortion and teen pregnancy are steadily declining all over the country not because of legislation, but because people of faith decided to start doing their job and provide a second moral option. What's more, they did it in a loving, non-judgmental manner. (you might have had a different experience with the CPC people, but the one's I know provided information on abortion services to anyone who really wanted them and did it without making the client feel guilty.)

If there are issues of morality that you are concerned about, don't look to the government to fix it. That job belongs to the church and it's about time we started doing our job. We already know it works.

Effective faith

One of my friend's father died last night after a really long bout with cancer. My friend didn't have the best relationship with his dad because he treated my friend's wife -- one of the sweetest people in the entire world -- like crap. But near the end, the wife and the father reconciled. He apologized and the wife, who is full of grace, just showed him love and forgiveness. the father has been in a coma for the last few days and she was by his side for much of it. He came our of it a few hours before he died and she was right there, telling him about heaven and the love God has for him. She walked him through the process of reconciling with God for the simple reason that her children, his grandchildren, loved him and wanted him to be in heaven. And so the old man made his peace with God with the woman he had verbally abused for many years, leading him literally by the hand into eternity.

Sweet story.

Here's the thing.

Lynda and I have been in relationship with this family for a long time. We love them to death. Sometimes they come to church, but because of their work schedules, about the only day they get to have together is Sunday, so the don't come to church very often. He's not really into church stuff, anyway. And she is really new-agey and into crystals and auras. You know, the kind of stuff that gives regular evangelicals the heebee-geebies. She also reads the Bible and teacher her kids what she learns. She totally has the love of God thing down. In fact, she has it down better than most of the regular evangelicals I know, primarily because she doesn't go to church very often and doesn't get exposed to all the extra stuff that comes from being washed in the modern rules of church.

She is a very effective Christian and lives out the great commission every day of her life better than most every other Christian I've ever known.

So my friend, who rarely goes to church, this week led a man, who has hated her for a decade, to salvation and eternal life with God. What did you do this week?

Another inconvenient Christian

I have a friend named Debbie Pope who I met before my wife and had a minor crush on because no only was she cute and had a southern accent, but she was also an incredible writer. That kind of thing turns my head. Debbie went on to become a popular professor is small colleges on the West Coast and is currently trying to find her next thing to do. She was always looking for the next thing. What has never changed is that she is still an incredible writer and I like to say she is the greatest writer you have never read. She wrote an essay on her Facebook today an I just had to share it with you, because it fits. And her writing still turns my head. Here's the Link

Forgiveness: What it is and isn't

There was a political columnist talking about whether George Bush really wasn't as bad as he has been made out to be. His upshot was that kind of thinking leads to forgiveness and he just wasn't going to forgive President Bush.

That's so sad for him, not the President. And it shows a basic understanding of forgiveness that is horribly wrong.

Most people consider forgiveness to be a moment to be the "bigger person." To show the offender that, gee, what you did is not so bad and let's just forget about it. Sometimes that is what needs to be done. Sometimes what we take as a horrible personal offense is nothing more than bad manner, an oversight or a complete accident. But that is not forgiveness. That is a matter of perspective.

Very specifically: Forgiveness is not for the person being forgiven. It is for the person doing the forgiveness. Let's look at this.

If you go through life harboring a slight, a grudge, or an offense, you carry that issue with you for the rest of your life. It affects the relationships you have with everyone else. Everything you do is colored by it. It can keep you from having the relationships or achieving the things you really want in life. But forgiving that issue means it doesn't control your life; that person does not control your life. Forgiving means taking back your life and moving on with it.

Forgiving does not mean saying what was done was OK. It is not absolution. Sometimes it means a severe restructuring of a relationship. Sometimes it means starting the relationship again, from scratch. But that stage is reconciliation, not forgiveness.

My pastor likes to say that forgiving someone doesn't mean trusting them. I can agree with that. To trust someone, you have to know them. If you don't know them, you don't know their capabilities or standards so you don't know what to expect. When you forgive someone, you essentially say that you really didn't expect that of them so you really don't know them. You can decide at that point whether to have a relationship with them. Sometimes you need than knowledge to begin reconciliation and establish a relationship. That way they can't offend you because you know what's coming.

But sometimes you know the person very well. You know that the offense was a lapse in judgement, a lack of knowledge or moral weakness. You aren't saying what they did was right, but you still want to move forward with the relationship. So forgiving the peerson allows you to get what you want, which is a relationship with the offender.

And that is exactly why God forgives us; why Jesus did what he did on the cross. He wants a relationship with us. He wants to be with us for eternity. Moreover, he wants us to be in relationship with each other. So he paid the price for every offense we did to him, and to each other, so we don't have to hold grudges and curtail our lives because of those offenses. In the end, God's decision to forgive us has a selfish motive. He just wants to love us and he wants us to love each other.