Month: January 2007

Words, and How Not to Use Them

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I'm going to wash your vulgar mouth out with soap!

“Heh, heh, heh, heh, Beavis, John Piper said, ‘ass.'”

On the heels of my post yesterday about confronting the F-word comes my response to the hubbub about Pastor John Piper’s comment at a conference that sometimes “God kicks our ass.” Wayne Grudem felt led to jump into the fray concerning Pastor John’s potty mouth. And, of course, half the Godblogs in my sidebar links could not resist the compulsion to comment.

I guess I can’t, either. My reaction: yawn.

This is the kind of Evangelical rathole that makes Christians the laughingstock of the world. We’re not seen as a joke because we follow a risen Christ, but because we’re so obsessed with filtering out gnats while gorging on camels. When the lost can see it and we can’t, does that honor God at all?

The Bible says this:

And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.
–James 3:6-9 ESV

Reread that italicized portion. Therein lies all you need to know about “those words.”

You see, real profanity is not contained in a word found in a dictionary. Words only have power when they possess intent and direction. The very fact that many Evangelicals equate cursing with saying a naughty word shows how we’ve lost all wisdom. A true curse has the intent of damaging another person. It’s a wish the sayer hopes to see come to fruition. In a way, it’s a kind of magical incantation designed to wound.

That we’ve so fully jettisoned that understanding is why people get upset about Piper’s comment.

Let me make myself clear. Piper saying that sometimes “God kicks our ass” isn’t profanity, by any means. On the contrary, if I need to hear that God’s going to kick my ass, then please tell me and use the strongest words possible! The word ass here doesn’t matter one way or another. What matters is whether we are cursing our brother. And Piper clearly was not doing so.

This is why many of the very people who get all flustered over a word like ass are the same people who are likely to say, “You’re a wicked heretic, and God is going to punish you.” No “bad words” uttered, but the direction and intent of the words are meant to attack another human being. If those words are true and inspired by the Holy Spirit who can see into the hearts of all men, then no foul. But if they are not, they bring destruction upon a person made in the likeness of God. They are a curse.

We Evangelicals simply do not grasp this. Any casual glance around the Godblogosphere every day shows one Christian cursing another. Comment sections in Godblogs are filled to the brim with accusations of heresy, cutting remarks, and snide assertions about other commenters’ eternal destination. In the vast majority of cases, those words are curses against a fellow brother or sister in Christ. Yet not one of George Carlin’s infamous “Word You Can’t Say on the Radio” is ever uttered.

The unbridled tongue that God hates isn’t the one that says, “God kicks our asses.” It’s the one that says, “The guy in the cubicle next to mine at work is a real ass.” There’s no cursing in saying, “I will die.” On the other hand, “I hope you die!” is a curse before God when said against another human being.

All this hoopla comes off as just another case of Evangelicals missing the point in their rush to appear holy. Do we think that 80 years of never uttering a “dirty word” is going to look good in heaven when every day we tear down another person with our supposedly clean words?

God forgive us for missing the point!

The F-World

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As a musician (I'm a drummer and guitarist), I've got an ear for challenging or snappy music. As a writer, I've got an appreciation for witty or deep lyrics. It should be no surprise then that most contemporary music bores me to tears. It lacks charm, and most of it suffers from a dearth of both musicality and lyrical excellence. Doesn't matter what the genre is.

If I have any musical weakness, I'm overly fond of jangly, "sunshine" pop with monster hooks that'll have you singing along all day.  That Rickenbacker 12-string sound brings a smile to my face. Think bands like The Association, The Zombies, The Byrds, and—of course—The Monkees. Think AM radio's golden age. That style of music largely passed into lore. No one writes music like that anymore. Worse, no recent band has the cleverness to pull it off consistently.

I don't buy a whole lot of music like I once did. The last CD I purchased was Derek Webb's She Must and Shall Go Free, which has a sort of folk and roots rock feel. Good music, stunning lyrics.

The other day, I followed a link looking for some trivial fact and it led to a site that played a random selection of "baroque pop," contemporary sunshine pop music that has the feel of the real thing. The song was by Belle & Sebastian, a band I'd not heard before. Not only was the song "Another Sunny Day" absolutely right on sound-wise, but the lyrics abounded in perfect touches.

So I did something I've rarely done: I downloaded the song from iTunes. Played it over and over at full volume. For about a half hour I was immensely pleased by the find.

Only one problem…

When you get to be my age, lyrics run past you and you don't get them with the same precision you did as a teenager. I caught that first stanza, but a couple jumbled ones followed. The British accents didn't help. So being the kind of person who cannot gain full satisfaction from something without knowing every trivial detail about it, I summoned the lyrics from one of a bazillion lyrics sites.

Awesome lyrics, clever and witty. And I'm reading and…oh.

The effenheimer. The F-bomb. Right there. Third stanza. And not in any grammatical usage that I've ever encountered before.

Ugh.

How I'd missed it the first hundred times I played the song, I can't say. After seeing it there in the lyrics, it was if the singer now shouted the word right in my ears, helped along by the background chorus who repeats it with the same emphasis.

Dang. The Monkees wouldn't have talked like that. And where was the "Explicit Lyrics" tag at iTunes? Nowhere to be found. I guess in the bizarre context used in the song, someone deemed it "Non-explicit."

That's what Apple gets for cozying up to Bono. What's an F-word between friends, right?

Because I write for a living, I'm attuned to the issue of censorship. I think I can also make a case that the F-word has legitimate uses. Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-Prize-winning photoI just don't want to hear it in my sunshine pop.

In fact, I don't want to live in a fallen world. I don't want to hear the "old familiar suggestion" coming out of the mouth of a twelve-year old girl. I don't want to hear about fathers decapitating their toddlers. I want to close my ears and scream at the top of my lungs to drown out the news telling me that the sex slave trade is alive and well  in the world, mostly populated by teenagers and tweens.

But we live in a fallen world—the F-World, for want of a more clever ID. Everything around us reeks of sin, as if some quark-sized evil implanted itself in every atom in existence.

Yet consider how easily we Christians believe two lies:

  1. We can play with that evil and not have it consume us from within.
  2. We can keep that evil at bay and never have to confront it. 

I see far too many Christians making excuses for the sins they justify in their own lives. We might even come up with clever renderings of particular Scriptures to cover our shame, but in the end, it's only amplified.

Or we'll scoff at some contemporary leader we don't like who goes down in flames, while we pat our man on the back. Then we're shocked—SHOCKED—when our man's feet prove to be clay.

So many of us navigate the F-World poorly. We mindlessly jump from church to church, forever running from whatever it is that we despise in its operation, unable to come to grips with the truth that the Church must live in the F-World until Christ returns. Or we do the opposite and embrace every piece of garbage the F-World throws at us as if its manna from heaven. Both are foolish. Both come to ruination.

I hear Christians talking all the time about the F-World. Why then do we seem to be more at the mercy of the F-World than at the mercy seat of Christ? For all our theology on a fallen world, we lurch from extreme to extreme in the ways we deal with it. One day we're burning all our hard rock albums because they're evil, and the next day we're buying them all back off eBay because to the pure all things are pure. 

It's bad enough that our incoherent message on how to deal with the F-World confuses the lost, but it confuses Christians even more. I've been a Christian for thirty years and I can honestly say that I don't think I've met another Christian who understands the tension of living in the F-World to the point that he or she deals with it as Christ did. Finding that narrow path must be far more difficult than we believe.

Bunkers or Excess. In the F-World, neither one makes sense. 

{Image: Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-Prize-winning photo of a vulture stalking a starving Sudanese child. Shortly after winning the prize, Carter committed suicide.} 

The World’s Best Bible-Reading Program

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Last year, I decided to try a one-year Bible-reading plan because I’m one of those people who lives in cycles of near-coma transitioning into frenzy and back again. (Don’t ask me to do ANYTHING before noon.) The Book of Durrow's Gospel of MarkThat served me well until about age forty, but now I can’t seem to handle the mania like I once did.

So rather than the feast or famine approach I took to Bible reading in 2005 (not my normal pattern, either), I decided to try something highly structured and methodical. As someone who loves Scottish preachers, I threw my allegiance to the Robert Murray M’Cheyne Bible-reading plan.

That lasted four months before I threw in the towel.

Plenty of Bible-reading systems exist, with M’Cheyne’s one of the most popular. No doubt M’Cheyne and I will not cross paths in heaven given that he’ll be next to the throne of God, while I’ll be resigned to a distant spot on the outer edge of things, but this doesn’t change the fact that his Bible-reading program’s not all that good.

What’s Wrong with One Year Bible-Reading Plans?

The problem, as I see it, is that all such programs miss the point. While reading through the Bible in a year is a worthy endeavor, it’s an artificial one. God’s not so much interested in us making it through all 66 books in 365.25 days. What He desires of us is that we understand what we read in His word, ruminate on it, and then do something with what we’ve read. With some of the plans out there, I could spend an entire year reading the Bible and not remember one whit of it, nor put into practice even one of its commands.

Sadly, that seems to be what a lot of Christians do. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the state of the world, and especially the biblical ignorance rampant in the Church in America.

Beyond the artifice behind them, most Bible-reading plans suffer from an imposed superficiality and disjointedness. This latter problem drove me off the M’Cheyne plan. It included an OT reading, a Psalm, a Gospel, and an Epistle all in one day. The next day, move up a chapter in each. Is it any wonder that the unity of the Scriptures begins to fall apart when read that way? Yes, I’m reading the Bible! But I’m not putting it all together into a whole that transforms my life.

One of the posts I featured in my “The Best of Cerulean Sanctum 2006” is entitled “Chapter, Verse, Blog” (it’s a good read; make certain to follow the link to the Viola piece). The main idea in that post concerns the artificial chapter and verse system we’ve imposed on God’s word. It may come as a shock to some people, but the chaptering system we’re so familiar with did not exist until eleven centuries after the New Testament came to be. The verse system came three hundred years after that. In other words, when the greatest saints of the Church read the Scriptures, they thought of them solely as uniform books. Today, we think of them more as chapters and verses. Most reading plans slavishly obey chapter delineation for no good reason other than convenience. But God never intended His word to be “convenient.”

How to Read the Bible for Life, Not Just a Year

The World’s Best Bible-Reading Program, as I see it, moves beyond this piecemeal approach to reading the Scriptures. It has nothing to do with the proud announcement that “I read through the entire Bible this year!” Instead, it has everything to do with knowing the word of God and putting it into practice. It’s not a one-year reading program, but a “rest of your life until they bury you in a pine box” program. The first way of thinking is marketing; the other is transforming.

Here’s how The World’s Best Bible-Reading Program works:

    1. Find a quiet, undisturbed place to read. Start in the New Testament since the New Covenant is necessary for perspective on the Old Testament. Might as well begin with Matthew. 

    2. Read through one entire book in a single sitting. Obviously, the first five books of the NT are going to require some time. But do it. (You’re eternal. Live like it!) These books are whole units and are meant to be read as such. We need to experience their coherence. Trust me; the Holy Spirit will bring the entirety of the book to your mind in the future in a way you’ve never experienced before.

    3. When you’ve read the book once, don’t move on! Read through it again. For the first five books, if you must break them into chunks, go with five or six chapters—whatever maintains the arc of the narrative.

    4. Re-read that one book. Note the way the narrative and themes flow. Commit those stories and themes to memory. Note where they exist in the book.

    5. Re-read that one book. Pay special attention to the way the Lord is portrayed.

    6. Re-read that one book. Examine the relational aspects of the book, God to Man, Man to Man, Man to God.

    7. Re-read that one book. Note the Lord’s redeeming and salvific acts within the greater arc of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration.  (This first pass through the NT assumes you have a modicum of OT understanding. After reading the OT through, the second pass through the NT will clarify things further.)

    8. Re-read that one book. This time around, note all the Lord’s commands and how we’re told to practice them. Consider how they might work practically in your daily activities.

    (By this point, you’ve read the same book seven times. Depending on the length of the book, it may have taken seven days or seven weeks. It doesn’t matter. This is about changing your life and relationship with Christ. This is about sixty years of discipleship. It’s not about getting through the Bible in a certain length of time.)

    Now comes the hard (and controversial) part…

    9. Take everything you’ve learned in this book and put it into practice. Take a month (*see comments below) to do nothing but concertedly meditate on what you’ve just read by making it real in your own life. It might mean that the only Bible you read this month are the parts of this one book that you still aren’t getting and must re-read. Doesn’t matter—do it. (If you absolutely have to read something every day that isn’t part of this program, consider a few Psalms or a cycle of Proverbs. They’re the most suited to broken-up reading patterns since they are collections of wisdom and less unified than a book like Romans.)

    10. After your month, take stock of all that you’ve learned by reading and practice. Make a mental assessment of the themes of the book and how they apply to your discipleship. If you’re confident you’ve read and practiced this book, move on to the next one. Once the NT is finished, move onto the OT. (I realize some of the OT books are daunting in length for a single read-through. Make a concerted effort to read them in one sitting. Failing this, some of the OT books are narrative, which allows for breaks in the story. Psalms and Proverbs are easily segmented, as noted above. All prophets must be read in one sitting the first time through. A book as enormous as Isaiah is hard to partition, so consider reading it on a weekend day.)

Repeat these ten steps for the rest of your life.

George Barna’s dire poll warnings about Biblical ignorance today in Evangelical churches largely reflect the piecemeal approach we take to reading the Scriptures. Too much of our reading and teaching are topical, destroying the uniformity of the revelation. That so few churches preach through the entirety of the Scriptures in the way outlined in this reading programs explains our ignorance, too. Bible reading programs that reduce the Bible to tatters only compound the problem. So does the lack of digesting what we read.

I can’t guarantee many of the things I write here at Cerulean Sanctum, but I guarantee this: If you make The World’s Best Bible-Reading Program your lifetime plan for reading the Scriptures, you’ll be transformed.

And you can take that with you to eternity.

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A final note: If you are looking to find out more about Christianity and its core beliefs, please visit this link: “How to Become a Christian.”