A Flawed Love Letter?
July 28, 2004
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 4 comments
There’s an odd new move in some of today’s cutting-edge churches. It is a move to recover the love relationship we are intended to have with Jesus— an admirable and holy desire. However, this strange new company of Jesus lovers has a peculiar view of the one they love, a view so at odds with the truth that it calls into question the very nature of love itself.
There is no doubt that Jesus is the Lover of our souls. His is a boundless love, deeper than space itself. Into this love relationship He calls us like a young hero beckoning his future bride. His love for the Church is so unfathomable that it transcends the pleasure of our sexual unions, a pale copy of the joy that is to come when we who call Him our Lover are joined to Him for all time and sit down beside Him at our marriage supper.
What kind of love letter would such a lover write to his beloved? Would it misspeak his true intentions? Would it contain exaggerations of his accomplishments? Would it leave out the truth and leave in lies? What lover would speak to his beloved this way?
Certainly not Jesus.
And yet these same folks who are calling us to simply love Jesus more and let Him love us in return are saying that His love letters to us, The Holy Scriptures, are flawed, filled with errors, mistaken and incomplete. No inerrancy in Jesus’ love letters to us is possible. Only fools, not lovers, believe the Bible to be inerrant. To believe the words of Jesus are perfect is to love them more than Him.
Readers, you will hear more and more in days to come about returning to a pure love of Jesus, but with a cloaked caveat that the Scriptures cannot be wholly trusted. Wariness and wisdom are called for. As the wrong kind of yeast ruins what is intended to be a fine wine, so the introduction of doubt into the veracity of the Scriptures will sour many a soul.
No one should ever doubt the Lord; His love for us is transcendent. How then can we think of Him as speaking to us anything but the perfect and immutable words of His eternal, loving heart?
Psalm 119:7-11 ESVThe law of the LORD is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the LORD is sure,
making wise the simple;the precepts of the LORD are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the LORD is pure,
enlightening the eyes;the fear of the LORD is clean,
enduring forever;
the rules of the LORD are true,
and righteous altogether.More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
in keeping them there is great reward.
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An Encouraging Word
July 23, 2004
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 3 comments
We all need a dose of encouragement. The world weighs heavy on many. Today, all I have to say is this:
God loves you with an everlasting love that no trial, no pain, no despair can overcome. The weight we feel is life, and while we cannot always avoid the pitfalls of life, we have a sure hope, a God who meets us in our time of need:
7 �In my distress I called upon the Lord;
to my God I called.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry came to his ears.8 �Then the earth reeled and rocked;
the foundations of the heavens trembled
and quaked, because he was angry.
9 Smoke went up from his nostrils,
and devouring fire from his mouth;
glowing coals flamed forth from him.
10 He bowed the heavens and came down;
thick darkness was under his feet.
11 He rode on a cherub and flew;
he was seen on the wings of the wind.
12 He made darkness around him his canopy,
thick clouds, a gathering of water.
13 Out of the brightness before him
coals of fire flamed forth.
14 The Lord thundered from heaven,
and the Most High uttered his voice.
15 And he sent out arrows and scattered them;
lightning, and routed them.
16 Then the channels of the sea were seen;
the foundations of the world were laid bare,
at the rebuke of the Lord,
at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.17 �He sent from on high, he took me;
he drew me out of many waters.
18 He rescued me from my strong enemy,
from those who hated me,
for they were too mighty for me.
19 They confronted me in the day of my calamity,
but the Lord was my support.
20 He brought me out into a broad place;
he rescued me, because he delighted in me.21 �The Lord dealt with me according to my righteousness;
according to the cleanness of my hands he rewarded me.
22 For I have kept the ways of the Lord
and have not wickedly departed from my God.
23 For all his rules were before me,
and from his statutes I did not turn aside.
24 I was blameless before him,
and I kept myself from guilt.
25 And the Lord has rewarded me according to my righteousness,
according to my cleanness in his sight.26 �With the merciful you show yourself merciful;
with the blameless man you show yourself blameless;
27 with the purified you deal purely,
and with the crooked you make yourself seem tortuous.
28 You save a humble people,
but your eyes are on the haughty to bring them down.
29 For you are my lamp, O Lord,
and my God lightens my darkness.
30 For by you I can run against a troop,
and by my God I can leap over a wall.
31 This God�his way is perfect;
the word of the Lord proves true;
he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.32 �For who is God, but the Lord?
And who is a rock, except our God?
33 This God is my strong refuge
and has made my way blameless.
34 He made my feet like the feet of a deer
and set me secure on the heights.
35 He trains my hands for war,
so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.
36 You have given me the shield of your salvation,
and your gentleness made me great.
— 2 Samuel 22:7-36 ESV
He rescues us because He delights in us. His gentleness has made us great. From His temple He hears our cries and He shakes heaven and earth to come to our aid.
This is the God we serve, the Lord we love, who loves us immeasurably and without ceasing.
If you feel low, or are buffeted by trials, remember who our God is. He will reward you for your faithfulness.
A prayer:
Lord, we thank you, praise, and bless you for your faithfulness. Your promise is that you will meet all our needs according to your riches in glory in Christ Jesus. No good thing do you withhold from those whose walk is blameless.We come to you today as your children seeking your great mercy. Father, be our deliverance today, be our salvation in our time of need, even as you have promised to from the beginning of all time. All good comes from you, every blessing is yours, infinite and rich.
You know we are like dust and that we cannot save ourselves. Unless you build the house, we labor in vain. Shake heaven and earth to stoop low to our defense, Lord, that we may know your mercy and rejoice in your gentleness toward us. Come make our enemies flee and turn our trials to gold, not for us alone, but for your namesake.
This we pray in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
May the Lord richly bless you today!
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Calvin Declines
July 21, 2004
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 1 comment so far
Excerpted from The Houston Chronicle - 7/21/04:
“As early as this year and certainly, if the projections hold, within the next two years, the majority of American adults will not be Protestants for the first time since the founding of colonial Jamestown,” said Tom W. Smith, director of the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey.
“We were always at least a majority Protestant country, and that is about to change.”
The survey, which was released Tuesday, has studied various aspects of American life, including its religious dimension, for 32 years.
From 1972 to 1993, it found that Protestants constituted 63 percent of the national population. But the total declined to 52 percent in 2002.
The study mirrors results from a recent Harris County survey. Protestants decreased from 56 percent in 1994 to 34 percent in 2004, according to the Houston Area Survey directed by Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociology professor.
One reason for the national decline, Smith said, is a failure to keep youths and young adults within the Protestant fold.
From the ’70s through the early ’90s, Protestant churches retained 90 percent of young people, but that dropped to 83 percent after 1993, he said.
Another reason: Once-nominal Protestants are more open to stating that they are no longer affiliated with any denomination, he said. In the survey, the number of people saying they had no religion grew from 9 percent in 1993 to 14 percent in 2002.
And, some people who once identified themselves as Protestant now call themselves “Christian,” which would put them in the survey’s growing “other” category. Latter-day Saints, Muslims and Eastern religions are also in the “other” category, which grew from 3 percent in 1993 to 7 percent in 2002.
I guess you can say that the Reformation is essentially dead.
Folks are unpacking these numbers various ways. Non-Protestant immigrants are thinning the ranks as the United States struggles to maintain its borders. More Christians are failing to self-identify as “Protestant,” choosing a more generic title of “Christian” (a category that grew slightly.)
But with the rise of Islam in America, as well as the unabated hemorrhage of people who are weighing the Church in the scale and finding it wanting (the “no religion” crowd), there are serious problems the Church in America must face.
The first is obvious: We simply are not leading people to Christ. I believe that if every self-confessed “Protestant” led one person to Christ every five years, we would see those numbers dramatically shift. Just about a dozen people pointed to Jesus in a person’s lifetime. I have to wonder how hard that is to do. The numbers do not lie, though—every measure of Christian life out there shows declining or stagnant numbers. We simply are not leading people to Christ.
Nor are we reproducing. God’s people have been encourage by the Lord Himself to be fruitful, yet our birthrates in the Christian community are hovering in the low single digits, at best. We are barely replacing ourselves. Meanwhile, Muslim families are experiencing birthrates more than twice what ours are. Most futurists are speculating that Islam will overtake Christianity as the primary world religion sometime between 2025 and 2035. And much of that is simply through birth rates.
We have been asleep on our watch. We need to be telling people about Christ and raising Christian children. It is God’s desire that everyone be saved and that none perish. But we have to do something about it.
I understand the family issue is huge one and that not everyone can have a half dozen kids. But there is no reason why we cannot adopt or foster children, raising them in the fear of the Lord.
No reason at all exists, though, to justify why we are not out there bringing people to Christ.
Turn the TV off. Throw out the XBox. Unplug the iPod. Then let’s all get out there and work to bring in the harvest. The laborers already are few; let’s not let them become nonexistent.
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Building Castles with Air
July 20, 2004
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Uncategorized Feedback : 1 comment so far
In talking with folks all over, I have been struck by one inescapable reality: We Christians in America have become a prayerless people ignorant of the Bible.
Reasons for this I have outlined in previous entries. We are filling our time with everything but prayer and study. True, our lives are hectic—far too hectic—but if we think we are going to build the Kingdom of God and see ourselves transformed into men and women who would die for Jesus, we cannot do it on ten minutes of prayer dashed off daily as we hustle from place to place. We cannot do it with a lone verse taped to a dashboard. We cannot do it with empty souls.
I do not know why we fail to understand this. But even more, I do not understand why we don’t feel the impoverishment in every part of our lives. It is one thing to be a child of God, but quite another to be filled with the Spirit in such a way that everything we do has a holy sheen to it that others notice instinctively. That we know that this is where we should be, but still we do not care to get there, is a kind of sickness. We have become so used to the illness itself that we have learned to live in this sickly state and to make excuses for feeling rotten.
But this is not what the Lord desires. He wants all of us, not a tossed off token prayer, not a hope that one day we’ll get around to studying and knowing the Scriptures.
We can only get there if we want it. If we are sick and tired of being sick and tired in our souls, then maybe we can work to find ways to make it possible for us to spend the time before the Lord that we need to reach that place where He can truly use us to change the world.
But we have to want it. Do you?
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The Anti-Church
July 7, 2004
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Benevolence, Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Dying to Self, Godly Character, Relevance, Simplicity Feedback : 8 comments
This last weekend I was talking with folks concerning some of the issues I've raised in my posts on the Church and work when someone mentioned an issue that had come up in his former church, a good-sized, Midwest congregation.
It seems two families got hit particularly hard by downsizing, putting their incomes in such dire straits that they were threatened with the loss of their homes. When they approached the church for help, they were told nothing could be done. The kicker was the church was in the process of buying an $80,000 sound system. The kicker for those families was that they eventually did lose their homes.
Yet, nothing could be done.
Let me say this: When you love a 64-track digital mixing board more than your brothers and sisters in Christ, you are not the Church. When folks in the congregation spend more time debating whether or not they'll sign up for the ten channel package of satellite HDTV rather than the twenty channels of programming when all the while your sister in Christ is going to lose her home, you are not the Church.
I am absolutely sick of hearing these kinds of stories. There is never any reason for them to exist. I don't want to hear about our concern for the lost if we have no concern for them once they are no longer lost. The Church does not stop being the Church once a person gets baptized. We talk and talk and talk about community and love and all sorts of warm fuzzy concepts, but if I see my brother in need and do not do what I can to help, then I am no longer the Church, but a rugged individualist who believes that God helps those who help themselves and can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. If you can point to the chapter and verse that supports that kind of thinking, then I'll recant, but you simply won't because it is not the Gospel.
How many of you are sick and tired of playing "church"� Frankly, I've had it. Meanwhile, the thief who comes to steal and destroy robs one family after another, families who thought they were surrounded by love, but were in fact only surrounded by theories and nice ideas.
This is only going to get worse, folks. If you are like me, I would challenge the leadership of your church on these kinds of issues. And while we can think globally and worry about someone on the other side of the planet, if we can't deliver on helping the people we meet together with every Sunday, how can we ever hope to make a difference to the world? We can't let the Church become some glib, but pale, imitation of itself or else we have become the Anti-Church.
God forgive us for letting it get this far!
Tags: Benevolence, Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Dying to Self, Godly Character, Relevance, Simplicity
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