Month: November 2004

Keith Green: the Prophet Still Speaks

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I will readily admit that I do not do a good enough job of promoting other Christian blogs. I have a few links at the right, but Cerulean Sanctum has pretty much just been my views.

Hoping to make this blog a better portal to excellent Christian material (while also—hopefully—keeping my own discourse here sharp), I want to direct people to one of the best blogs I know of, Paradoxology, run by Chris Monroe, better known as Desert Pastor. The topics he posts are routinely hot potatoes within the Christian world and in need of good analysis. The dialog that results is almost always thought-provoking and all over the map of belief. I always come away from Paradoxology better than I went in.

Today, the topic is the nature of prophetic ministries, specifically taking a look at Keith Green’s: Paradoxology: Prophetic Aftershocks, part 1 (will pop a new window.)

Keith Green has had a huge impact on my life even though I was unimpressed with him before his death. Only after that fateful plane crash twenty-two years ago did Green’s ministry start to hit me between the eyes. I know it’s odd, but his death completely changed my perspective on his life and music. I now wish I had had the opportunity to see him in concert before he was taken away from us.

Here’s my comments on Green over at Paradoxology:

…and still no one today is making the kind of music Keith Green was blessing us with 25 years ago.

Keith GreenI am the Christian I am today largely because of Keith Green and the band of people he ran with. He was Emergent before there was such a thing. He was an ordained Vineyard pastor back in the early days of that influential movement, but he kept one foot rooted in the great preachers of the faded past. Green introduced me to Leonard Ravenhill’s writings and preachings, and Ravenhill pointed me to A.W. Tozer and the history and wealth of the Welsh Revival.

Green has always been a “love him or leave him” figure in the Church. While his voice is definitely prophetic, if you read his biography you realize that much of Green’s prophetic ire was directed back at himself. He never lashed out at the complacency of the sleeping church without a keen sense that he was just as asleep as everyone else. Call him a prophet with feet of clay, but his stern call to something better than what we were/are experiencing in the life of the Church in America is unmitigated, nonetheless. We would do well to wake up, just as he said.

Green brought streams of Christianity together, too. He incorporated the holiness movement, the charismatic movement, the Jesus People movement, the missionary movement, the worship movement, and old-fashioned tent revivalism into one foundation. I can’t think of anyone in recent memory who was able to pull off this feat so well. That we lost him at so young an age, and eventually watched the ministry he founded go adrift, is a loss that has not been overcome yet.

Lastly, and this is almost a minor aside, but Green wrote music for adults. He and Rich Mullins, also tragically lost too young, wrote music for people who wrestled with life and faith, not for popsters and teenyboppers. I heard “Asleep in the Light” played on the local Christian radio station at 3AM a couple days ago, 3AM being the only time they could get away with playing it without offending anyone. What a sad comment on where Christianity is today. Oh that our music was more offensive and less pancreas-destroying!

Thanks for noticing how important Green still is. Hopefully this generation will look up his works and take them to heart.

Desert Pastor’s singling out of Green as the start of a series on modern-day prophets is a good beginning. I hope you will all surf over to Paradoxology and not only check out this new series of posts but the rest of the conversation, too.

Sweet Surrender

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I think this is one of the most neglected passages in today’s churches:

Truly, truly, I say to you, Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone; but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit. He who loves his life shall lose it. And he who hates his life in this world shall keep it to life eternal.
—John 12:24-25 MKJV

No issue facing the Church in America is more pressing than this.

There is something in the American consciousness that plays into the idea that we can have it all ways. You cannot only be rich, but also good-looking. You cannot only be a true family man (or woman), but also a corporate ladder-climber. You can be a Christian and also be in love with the World.

We don’t hear too many messages about dying to self anymore. Too many churches today preach a message that says that we can have it all—serve ourselves and serve God at the same time. That this is a message spawned in Hell does not seem to bother most Christians, though. We have somehow found a way to make this verse moot:

No servant can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
—Luke 16:13 MKJV

We have found that Caesar and Christ need not be a choice we have to make. There is no need to surrender to one or the other. We can hold fire to our breasts and not be burned. The lust, the flesh, the eyes and the pride of life are not such bad things once you learn how to manage them correctly.

Surrender is foreign to us. We do not embrace it willingly, even if we embrace it at all. Should we wonder then at our fruitless churches, our Spirit-less assemblies, our rote and routine existences dying for a fragment of Heaven, just a crust from the Master’s table?

Yet there is no other path that leads to life than one of surrender. The cross means death and its definition has not changed in two thousand years. We are not our own, we have been bought with a most precious price, yet we live like masters of our realm, dictators of not only what we suspect we own, but dictators to God of how He should treat us because of our own self-importance.

As I get older, I realize that the path that leads to destruction is wider than I once thought, and the narrow road of life is virtually untrod, even by those who call themselves “Christians.” Since only the Lord knows the way of the narrow path, why do we insist that we know it better than He does? The unsurrendered life can never follow that tiny trail, though, since it is too busy insisting on its own way, even if that way leads to death.

A word to those who think they have surrendered:

The truly surrendered person…

…will never be well-known.
…will never live in the nice house, drive the appropriate car, or wear the most fashion-forward clothes.
…will never be wealthy and may never be “set” financially.
…will make a career of loving God and others, even if this means his/her professional career suffers for it.
…will be overlooked (or even mocked) by the “important people.”
…will be seen as a fool by almost everyone—even by those in the church.
…will never labeled a success by anyone but Christ.
…understands that to buy the Pearl of Great Price will take everything.
…thinks first what is the mind of the Lord.
…says, “Not my will, but Thine be done.”

Apart from surrender, there can be no life in Christ. I used to think that it was possible to be a Christian and yet live just like those around me, but I now know that this is a lie. We tend to believe that lie, however, here in America. So we go on stumbling in the dark for a light that can be ours only if we, like that grain of wheat, fall into the ground and die to the rest of the world around us. Only then can we be fruitful, the aroma of God amid the stench of a dying world.

All to Jesus I surrender;
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In His presence daily live.

Refrain:
I surrender all,
I surrender all;
All to Thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.

All to Jesus I surrender;
Humbly at His feet I bow,
Worldly pleasures all forsaken;
Take me, Jesus, take me now.

All to Jesus I surrender;
Make me, Savior, wholly Thine;
Let me feel the Holy Spirit,
Truly know that Thou art mine.

All to Jesus I surrender;
Lord, I give myself to Thee;
Fill me with Thy love and power;
Let Thy blessing fall on me.

All to Jesus I surrender;
Now I feel the sacred flame.
Oh, the joy of full salvation!
Glory, glory, to His Name!

The Fall of Heroes

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But when a righteous person turns away from his righteousness and does injustice and does the same abominations that the wicked person does, shall he live? None of the righteous deeds that he has done shall be remembered; for the treachery of which he is guilty and the sin he has committed, for them he shall die.
—Ezekiel 18:24

Today’s post is not a treatise on the permanence (or impermanence, as some believe) of grace. Rather it is about the decline of heroes.

When I was growing up, my father regaled me with stories of his semi-crazed neighbor, a little kid named Pete Rose. With the Edelen house right next to the Rose home (and the only two houses on the street) my dad had few playmates his age and often had encounters with the much younger Rose boy next door. At one point, Rose shot my dad in the foot over a bet about steel-toed workboots. My dad lost that bet—painfully.

In spite of this, I grew up in Cincinnati as a huge fan of the Reds. Fortunate enough to be baseball crazy right as the Big Red Machine—which I will argue is the greatest collection of ballplayers ever assembled—was winning back-to-back World Series in the mid-Seventies. And of all the players on that team, none was more of a hero to me than Pete Rose, the scrappy, tough, never-say-die local who went to the top of the sport.

We all know how that turned out, though.

I have a young son and can only hope that there will still be men worth emulating as he grows older, but I have my doubts. A disease is running rampant through our society that has as one of its worst symptoms a perplexing pedes problem: feet are turning to clay.

I’m not sure if it is a function of growing older, but I simply do not meet people of deep character anymore. The strong man or woman out there seems to always have a fatal flaw that keeps them from greatness or shatters the illusion of greatness they have erected for themselves.

The decline of heroes has a chilling effect on our society. It makes us more cynical, less hopeful, and less willing to believe the good rather than the bad in people. It may be true that all men are sinners from birth, but we once aspired to more than our birthright. Now we just assume it with a shrug.

The football coach is a pederast. The Sunday School teacher cheats on her taxes. The police officer beats his wife. The ballet teacher engages in one illicit affair after another. The baseball hero gambles his life away.

I know people of deep character, but so many are in the twilight of life and I wonder where their generational legacy is. We say we look to the Church, but are we truly people of character or are we faking it?

I’m weary of hearing the stories relayed and tired of seeing the bubbles burst. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve sat with other men and heard one story after another of porn addiction or infidelity. Newsweek recently ran an article on the huge boom in married women who are having affairs. Kids are cheating in school in numbers that are staggering. A college prof noted recently that almost all the papers he’s getting he’s read before or seen posted on the Internet.

We’ve lost our ability to be heroes when we decide that being as low as the next guy is okay. Truth is, the standard for being low is, well…getting lower by the day. More accountability groups exist within churches than ever before and yet we are more morally slack than any generation I recall.

Does anyone want to be a hero? Who still thinks that character counts for something? I may be forty-two here in a couple days, but I don’t want to believe there are no more heroes. Wisdom may say that all have sinned, but to believe that none overcome is more than anyone should bear.