How to Fix the American Christian – Lightening the Load

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At a time of the year when Americans lose their collective minds and buy throwaway gifts for senseless reasons, the Scriptures say this:

And behold, a man came up to him, saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” And he said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” He said to him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The young man said to him, “All these I have kept. What do I still lack?” Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. And Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly, I say to you, only with difficulty will a rich person enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”
—Matthew 19:16-24

At the risk of being accused of blasphemy, I’m going to say that the above passage is a nonstarter for most Christians, especially in America. The closet of American excessWe’ve heard it so often that it simply drains out of ears before it reaches our souls. We don’t think we’re rich, nor do we believe that our possessions own us. And we certainly don’t ponder for one moment that Jesus is speaking to us in his address to the rich, young ruler.

Despite the fact that there’s probably not a person reading this post who is not among the world’s top 5 percent in wealth, most of us don’t consider ourselves rich. The inequitable percentage of the world’s goods that Americans consume compared to the size of our population is just another example of damnable statistics. We read Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, and though it tugs at our heartstrings, we feel it would best challenge someone richer than you or I.

Fine. I realize this issue is a nonstarter.

But the Bible says this, too:

And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. “So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let the one who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house, and let the one who is in the field not turn back to take his cloak….”
—Matthew 24:14-18

Any warning from Jesus is worth heeding. His words are truth and life.

Now I’m sure the preterists out there will take issue with any contemporary usage I attempt to draw from this passage, but I’m ignoring them. When I read this passage out of Matthew I see an underlying truth: Jesus wants us to live lightly. In other words, you and I need to be nimble.

But when I look at most Christians today, we are anything but nimble. We’re the slowpokes in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, dragging out of Egypt an oxless oxcart cart bulging with every last good we own, even as the Red Sea threatens to collapse on Pharaoh’s army nipping at our heels.

The average Christian household today is a massive burden. And it is so because we bury ourselves under stuff. We live in too-big houses filled to the rafters with ten of everything. (Even as I type, a basket near my desk overflows with a dozen highlighters. Don’t ask me why.)

And it’s not just simple stuff like highlighters, but racks and racks of clothing and shoes. We buy bookcase after bookcase to store books we no longer read or reference. Stuff accumulates to the point that we can’t find room to live amidst it all. We created the storage industry so that even in a tiny town like mine, they keep building more and more places to store people’s stuff. {Insert classic George Carlin standup routine here.}

That tendency to keep our overflow stored in larger and larger spaces was addressed by Jesus:

And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”
—Luke 12:15-21

If the state of the American Church is any indicator, we are rich in stuff and not rich toward God. Yes, God was the one who gave that rich man all that bounty. It’s what the man did with it that condemned him. We must never forget this.

For this series, I started with this issue rather than saying we must seek Jesus first because sometimes you have to clear the room of the giant pink-polka-dotted elephant before one can see anything else. And our excess in America is one honkin’ big pachyderm. I heard on NPR this weekend that sales of goods to WalMart alone accounts for 15 percent of China’s entire GNP. Whether that figure is true or not, it’s scary because we all know that it may very well be true.

This year has been a time of God telling me that we have got to lighten the load. In truth, you and I are beholden to what we own. We cannot live in the nimble way demanded by the Gospel. We are not prepared to get up and go when God tells us to. Because we live in America, our hearts are divided between the Lord and our possessions, no matter how much we protest.

If we want to fix Christianity in America, we Christians MUST lighten our loads.

A baker’s dozen practical actions to consider:

1. Stop buying more stuff. Just stop. You and I don’t need more stuff, period. Especially electronic gizmos. I am constantly amazed at the Christians online who have gone through multiple generations of cellphones, iPods, and laptops. Why? The number of Christian blogs where the blogger comments, “I just replaced my old _______ with the latest one,” is staggering. What’s more staggering is that the thing replaced is often only a couple years old. And nine times out of ten, the thing replaced is not something anyone needs to live. Yet somehow that thing just had to be replaced. Our parents got by without cellphones, so why do our kids each need one? You grew up okay, right? Let the Bible dictate how we live, not a Verizon commercial.

2. Use items till they wear out. The shoes I’m wearing are eight years old. My best dress shoes are 22 years old. My favorite pair of slacks was 15 years old before the vacuum cleaner accidentally ate them. I’d say the average age of items in my closet is 11 years old. And in my garage sits the soon-to-be 17-year-old truck. Meanwhile, I’m writing this on an 8-year-old computer—yeah, ancient.

Christians are called to be frugal and wise, not the leaders in fashion. We’re not supposed to listen to the world’s siren call. If our stuff is old, that’s fine. If that means people don’t like us because we’re not hip, that’s their problem. (And no crying about having to be hip to evangelize people, either. The Holy Spirit is the same yesterday, today, and forever, so He doesn’t need your Prada bag to reach your girlfriends.) God looks on the heart, not the label of your brand new Armani jacket.

3. Reevaluate what items we truly need to live. Start asking why we need this or that “essential” item. Instead of always plotting what we might gain from purchasing an item, let’s consider what we might lose instead. Honestly, with all too many “essentials” today, the loss is greater than the gain. We end up working longer and harder to afford the essentials billed to us “timesavers.” How stupid! And often, the item we think of as essential interferes with building community between ourselves and other people. In the end, the item we can’t do without may very well drag us down

4. Find other ways to access desirable items without buying them and holding on to them. For instance, must we buy the latest Christian book? Or can we order any book we want to read from our local libraries through interlibrary loans? I know that my little rural library has pulled books for me to read from seminaries and Bible colleges all over the country. I read them, absorb what I can, and then I put into practice what I can. If I can’t put into practice what I read right after I read it, why would I think that having it on my bookshelf (a bookshelf I had to buy, mind you) would make any difference?

Can a highly desirable item be shared with others outside our immediate family? It bothers me that so few Christians entertain that thought—or reject it as “socialism” or an impediment to their right to consume whatever they wish whenever they wish it. If we did learn how to share better, all of us would be beholden to a lot less stuff. We could work less (since we wouldn’t need to make as much money), devote more time to the Lord’s work, learn lessons in Christian community, and enjoy simpler lives.

5. Say no to redundancy. We own duplicates of so many things. It’s as if we’re always in Plan B mode, afraid that God won’t provide for us should our only set or lone item go on the fritz. I know one Christian blog that discusses Bibles, where readers often show off their massive stacks of leather Bibles, each costing $50 or more. I don’t understand why, especially when believers around the world are crying for Bibles yet cannot afford to own one. (I know this is especially true in China.) I know that we own four different sets of plates. Some of those were inherited, but it still does not make much sense to own that many. When some people have none, why do we have multiples?

Our tendency toward redundancy also means that we are more likely to buy a number of cheap items that will not last rather than one of an expensive item that will. We need to reward quality, even it means owning less of a quality item. (See also #7.)

6. Learn generosity. The generous person cannot be owned by things. Period.

7. When we divest, give to the genuinely poor in a way that builds the Kingdom. Jesus asked the rich young ruler to divest himself of most everything he owned and give the money to the poor. If we sold just our excess alone, I think it would go a long way. That’s how rich we are.

When we choose to sell our excess or to donate items, we should find ways to invest it in the Kingdom. Rather than simply dump items at the Goodwill or the Salvation Army stores, I believe it would be more Kingdom-minded if we were to find on our own a family in need that we could support, and in more ways than just handing over money or our excess goods. We should instead befriend the folks in that family and work to help them get out of the poverty trap. We should make certain they know about Jesus, and not just by sharing the Gospel in words. Growing up, I remember that many churches adopted Vietnamese refugee families, but today we do little of that same work for the poor among us. That needs to improve.

8. When we must buy, choose high-quality items from local craftsmen. I am wholly convinced that living simply is not just living with less but owning items that are better built and crafted. So little of what we own today will ever be classified as antiques because it won’t survive. It’s artless, cheap junk. I purchased what I thought were quality oak chairs a few years ago to replace the broken chairs at our kitchen table, only later to realize the new chairs came from China. Ten years later, none survive intact. Contrast this with the Ethan Allen chair I’m sitting on as I write this. My parents bought it for me when I was 11.

While I am certain everyone reading this will provide an exception, I believe that local craftsmen are more likely to produce goods that last than the garbage coming out of China that we so readily consider “a deal.” In addition, buying locally made goods supports the local community and allows us the blessing of knowing the very people who make the goods we own, building relationships. It keeps money local, too, and resists the multinationals, who drive consumption, greed, fear, and envy.

9. Leave the Joneses to the Joneses. Keeping up with them will only keep us away from the Kingdom of God. They’re building their own worldly kingdoms that will perish. Our aim as Christians is to build an imperishable one. So don’t just give that ideal lip service; live it. If people think less of us for failing to keep up, that’s their problem. If we are still trying to please men, then we should not be servants of Christ. Because in the end, Christ’s view of us is all that matters.

10. Don’t judge other people by their possessions. Those who attempt to live simply err when we  judge others for what they own. This traps so many Christians. But we must remember that simplicity takes many forms, and just because someone drives a BMW tells you nothing about how they acquired it or how long they expect to drive it. If a $50,000 car lasts for 25 years while a $25,000 car lasts for only 10, then the pricier car may be worth it. My own closet is filled with clothing from L.L. Bean, not a cheap retailer, but I acquired it mostly through gift certificates gained through promotional programs, meaning I paid about $75 for what amounts to $1,000+ of clothing. The designer dress the fashion plate at church wears may have been purchased from a consignment shop or from the racks of Goodwill. We just don’t know.

As Christians, we are to mind our own households and let others mind theirs. So rather than peeking over the fence at the next guy’s fancy stuff, let us ensure that we are doing all we can to live simply ourselves. God will certainly deal with the other guy in His own way and time.

11. Consider downsizing the house. Our houses are too big. Because nature abhors a vacuum, and so do we, we proceed to fill those homes with all manner of stuff we don’t really need. Stuff that costs money to repair and maintain. Stuff that ultimately drains us and imprisons us.

Some are learning in this economy that they overbought their house. That’s a hard lesson that no one wants to learn. Truth is, we all may. I suspect that most of us live in houses that are more than we can afford or maintain. We must remember that choosing to be being downwardly mobile is not a negative, especially if it makes us more like Jesus.

12. Get in the prayer closet and get real with God about this issue. Ask God for insights by the Spirit as to what is won or lost by the possessions we own or intend to buy. Ask God for a discerning mind that will not cave to Madison Avenue. Ask to be made poorer in goods so that we may be richer in spirit. Ask for an attitude of gratitude. Ask for humility. Ask for a heart that is undivided. Ask to be made more like Jesus.

Most of all, we must pray for our children. They are the ones most easily enslaved by the world’s idea of wealth. Any plan of simplicity we undertake as families will be least understood by our children, as it means they will have less than their peers. I guarantee, even if they are born again, children will not grasp the benefits of simplicity if it means they must do without the latest hot item that their peers, even their church peers, own. We must also prepare for the incidentals of simplicity with our children. Case in point, a child without a cellphone will suffer socially if his or her peers all own one. The ramifications of simplicity and its impact on our children is one of the greatest battles we will fight to keep from being owned by the world’s systems. The promise is that a child raised in the way of simplicity will better cope with loss (and gain), will more greatly appreciate Christian community, and will find the narrow path that avoids the world’s highway to destruction.

13. Be grateful to God and rely on His provision alone. The bedrock underlying consumerism in the United States consists of greed, fear, and envy. See any positives in those three?

As Christians, those three sins must become increasingly foreign to us. Yet we work so hard to ensure that the very spiritual transformation God desires of us when it comes to those sins is thwarted by our confidence in our own selves to provide.

If anything, this economic collapse must teach us that none of us is that innately powerful to keep the entire world at bay by creating our own home fortress. Even the most controlling people suffer loss. Better that we learn gratefulness for even the smallest thing. Better that we learn to pray “give us this day our daily bread.” Grateful people who lean on God for His provision can never truly suffer loss.

More than ever, the call to Christians everywhere is to learn to live with less, to be more generous to the poor, to consider how living with less builds community with other believers, and to rely on God alone for our provision.

May we do more than listen.

Banking on God: Crisis, Part 4

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Pure goldLast week, in the third part of the “Banking on God: Crisis” subsection of this series, I asked some pointed question concerning the lack of preparation our churches have made to weather bad times. Today, I’d like to begin to offer solutions.

In talking over today’s post with the Lord, one word came back to me again and again. It’s a word that’s fallen out of favor in far too many churches. We have young people in churches all over this country who have never been taught what this word means. We’ve got people leading our churches who have no concept of how this word applies to any part of American civil existence, yet it’s a word that defines God more than any other word:

Holy

For our churches to be prepared for down times they must be holy.

Now I’m all for grace. The Lord’s grace covers each of us and makes us perfect in His eyes. But think about when the Lord led His people out of Egypt. What did they leave behind? Egypt. And all its trappings. All its idols. All the things that would hinder. Because when we go on a journey—and prevailing through dark times is a journey—traveling light is its own reward.

For the Christian, traveling light means leaving behind the things of life that rise up and ensnare us. Frankly, we’re so ensnared in our American Dream, in our so-called “rights,” and in our sense of personal well-being that holiness has taken a backseat to cultured appearance, doing things our way, and entitlement. But none of those common things will see us through tough times.

One passage God revealed to me comes from the rock apostle:

For it stands in Scripture: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” and “A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
-1 Peter 2:6-12

The other meshes with it, but in a more urgent way. Jesus says this of dark times and preparation:

Let the one who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house, and let the one who is in the field not turn back to take his cloak.
—Matthew 24:17-18

People who live in the shadow of tribulation need to understand that holiness and the journey before them are intertwined. We need to abstain from those things that will make us stragglers, easy pickings for robbers, and in danger of falling behind the rest of the band.

So we start our list with this critical need.

1. We must be holy

    This means dropping everything that makes us “common.” Christians are to be a peculiar people, an aroma of heaven amid the scent of death. And the only way we can be that aroma is if we are holy.

If we’re surfing “those” sites on the Web—stop. If we’re listening to trashy music—stop. If we’re watching trashy movies—stop. If we feel compelled to buy this throwaway thing or that—stop.Stop living a common life. Start living a holy one.

We must watch our mouths, attitudes, and thoughts. If we’re not happy with the way we deal with any of those things, then we must get before God and make sure we’ve mastered them before we take another step on the journey.

A holy nation doesn’t need unholy stragglers. It doesn’t need common, ordinary people, but uncommon, extraordinary ones, people who think right and not left, people who can’t be conned to leave the path of holiness.

If your doctor said, “If you drink another diet cola, you’re going to die,” do you think you would drink another diet cola? No. You’d make a decision then and there to stop drinking the darned things.

If your house were on fire, would now be a great time to watch March Madness? No.

Stop sinning. Just stop it. Stop being common. Be holy.

Look, the things we do every day either move us closer to the Lord or draw us away. It’s high time we start purging all the distractions. Our very lives may depend on that, because God works through people who are serious about holiness. If we’re going to need miracles, we better darned well have nothing we’re doing in a common way that will hinder those miracles.

2. We must live simple lives

Just as we can’t have anything in our spiritual lives that might weigh us down, we can’t be weighed down by material things. The American Dream is not God’s Dream. Please read that again. God is not interested in the American Dream but in a Church that does what He says.

If your American Dream and mine are hindering God’s purpose in our lives, then it’s time to dump that American Dream. You know what is hindering you. If not, then find out by drawing near to God. He will tell you what you need to purge.

For most of us, we own too many perishable things. It’s time for us to give them up. Some of us will need to give those things away to others who might need them. Others will need to hold on very lightly so that if God says, “Hold for now,” we can easily let go when He eventually says so.

The first thing we can do is to stop the frenetic consumption. Stop buying more junk. That stuff will only hold you down. You don’t need an iPod. You don’t need a big screen TV. You don’t need most of the things you own. I suspect that the average family could give away 75 percent of what they own and still live responsible, meaningful lives.

How many pairs of shoes do you really need? And do you need to buy $200 running shoes? Why the new car or computer every couple years? Why the multiple gaming systems? For those of us who are compulsive book buyers, do we really need to stock our Christian library with yet another how-to tome that we’re not putting into practice? Seriously.

If the Hebrews in their flight out of Egypt had as much accumulated junk as we have, there never would have been an Exodus. They’d still be packing to this day.

Our preparation must include a purging of those things that will hinder us.

3. We must be generous to others

Here’s the best word I can give to any of us who self-label as “mature” Christians: It’s not about us. The days when it was about you and me were over the day we bowed our knees at the cross. We died. It’s not about us.

It is, however, about others. The Christian is a servant whose heart inclines toward others, toward God and toward other people.

If we live simple lives that are not focused on self, then we are freed to live for others. That makes us uniquely generous.

Living generously for others means that your privacy and mine are a thing of the past. The dead have no privacy. The dead can’t be inconvenienced by others. Dead people can’t complain about the living. If we have to live in dark days in situations that would have violated our privacy in lighter times, tough. Time to grow a thicker skin.

Because we are no longer so concerned about our own cocoon, God will use our newly available selves to move in generosity like we haven’t in the past. We may even quit jobs that consume all our time and energy and take lesser jobs that may once have been beneath us, so that we might better serve and have time to be generous.

And being generous means giving out of what we personally have received. It’s too easy to recommend that someone else be generous. Each of us needs to give out of his or her own rich blessing of God.

4. We must be guided by the Holy Spirit

Agabus, a prophet, stood and announced to the early Church that a famine would hit the whole world. The early Church immediately set about to address that word. This is God speaking to His people to ready them for the next step. This is how we must live.

If we are not attuned to the Spirit of God, if we despise either the written word or the prophetic word, we will not hear the next step. No more serious condition exists for a people journeying through dark times than to fail to discern the direction we need to take. And if we want to hear God, we need to get back to that first condition above: holiness.

Holiness and hearing God go hand in hand. The trappings of the world will dull our hearing. So will a lack of faith to hear.

I said earlier this year that 2008 was the year that the Church must start getting serious about listening to the Holy Spirit. Today, I think that is even more true.

5. We must think outside the box

When Adam fell, his mind fell as well. Though some Christians actually believe that we are getting stupider with each passing generation, I don’t believe this is true. Christ promises to renew our minds, which is not a vain promise. He will do it.

For those situations where we need to find radical solutions to intractable problems, we must be prepared to think along lines that we may have neglected in the past. Or we must pursue revolutionary, new ideas. Either way, we must use our renewed minds to the betterment of our situation and those of others around us.

Leonard Ravenhill tells the story of meeting a church janitor, a meek woman with an elementary school education. After he preached that Christ renews our minds, that little woman, who was only in the church to do her cleaning, overhead the message and came up to Ravenhill afterwards. She asked if God can really renew a person’s mind, including the mind of a person whom many would consider dull and stupid. Ravenhill assured her that this is how God works.

That woman took the Lord at His word. She promptly enrolled in Bible college and learned everything she could of the Scriptures. She renewed her mind. She then went on to university, learned several languages, taught the Scriptures, and became a noted missionary. All because she believed that God could take the mind of someone who knew nothing and use it for His glory.

A mind renewed by God thinks counterculturally. It will always be coming up with ideas that run counter to prevailing wisdom. This is how God works. This is how we should think.

6. We must have faith for miracles

The shoes of the people of Israel did not wear out. The widow’s oil never ran dry. The centurion said to Jesus, “You say the word and my servant will be healed.”

This is the faith we must have in times of crisis.

Note that this is not a faith that settles for anything less than the miraculous. Sadly, very few people in the United States have that kind of faith. We have a rationalized faith that sees the mountain as a mountain that cannot be moved because…well, it’s a mountain. We make peace with our faithlessness and call it enlightenment. But Jesus does not honor that kind of faith for it is not faith at all.

If we’re to do great works before the darkness rolls in, then we must be people who have taken up the shield of faith, the armor of choice in tough times.

7. We must be prepared to die

In times of crisis, we must be people who love not our lives unto death. Some of us may not make it. That’s the risk of going faithfully into difficulty.

That’s not a message you will hear in too many Christian circles today, but it was an attitude that pervaded the early Church. We need to rediscover that truth.

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce of a heaven far more substantial than this earth we’ve called home. Is that true in your life and mine? Then why do we cling so rigidly to this world and not the one that is more real and more worthy of our attention?

If we do these seven things, I believe we will be on the path to preparedness.

In my next post, I will offer practical solutions for battening the hatches of our churches as we prepare to weather crisis. Stay tuned.

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Banking On God: Series Compendium