Benevolence

Beating Down the Newbies

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The following made mistakes in their ministry and held erroneous views of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, and basic Christian doctrine:

  • C.H. Spurgeon
  • Billy Graham
  • A.W. Tozer
  • John MacArthur
  • Jack Hayford
  • Apollos
  • Amy Carmichael
  • Jonathan Edwards
  • Martin Luther
  • George Whitefield
  • John Wesley
  • Gladys Alward
  • David Brainerd
  • C.S. Lewis
  • Leonard Ravenhill
  • D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
  • Peter
  • George Mueller
  • Watchman Nee
  • Elisabeth Elliot
  • John Calvin
  • Dallas Willard
  • John Wimber
  • Hudson Taylor

And you can add to that illustrious list the name of every born-again believer who has ever lived, including you and me.

The funny thing about growing in Christ is that you don’t start from a blank slate; you start from erroneously held beliefs about the way it all works. And erroneously held beliefs don’t vanish the second someone says, “Jesus, I put my faith in you alone.”

Growing in Christ is an experiment in reaching your hand into the fire and finally realizing that fire is slightly warm. While the Holy Spirit gives believers a new set of senses that turn us on to another world, for the newest of us we are like the blind man who responded to the first portion of Jesus’ healing with “I see men, but they are like trees walking.”

The great saints listed above at some point in their Christian ministry changed their view from more worldly to more godly. None of them (or us) sprang fully formed from the head of God. If we think otherwise, then we’ve confused God with Zeus and us with Athena. Greek myths, folks. Greek myths.

Which is why I am utterly perplexed at the beat down so many young Christians receive from supposedly mature believers. A boot to the neckWe can claim all sorts of spiritual adventures and trips to the fourth heaven that even Paul didn’t get to, but if we can’t treat with kid gloves the young believer who has a mistaken notion about some spiritual thing, then we don’t know what discipleship is all about. And rather than looking like the Lord we claim to know so well because of our eight-hour a day quiet times, we bear more than a passing resemblance to a giant, round piece of bronze beaten with a large mallet held by a guy who should lay off the Twinkies.

I don’t read as many Christian blogs as I used to because I got tired of the smackdowns. No one gets any theo-points from God for flaming some newbie Christian who mistakenly confused justification with sanctification. As far as the guy spewing the napalm goes, for all all he knows, he could be setting back the cause of Christ by beating down a young Christian who would otherwise go onto greater and greater ministry sooner and sooner had that newbie not incurred the wrath of a Protector of the Faith™.

And it’s not just online.

The way many new and not-yet-mature Christians are treated in our assemblies, it’s a miracle of God the gates of hell have NOT prevailed against the Church. Supposedly mature believers say all sorts of soul-crushing things to young Christians. And trust me, it sets people back. The kind of self-righteous, loveless rebuke some inexperienced believers receive is like a focused magnifying glass on a sunny day to an ant.

As a counter to that, consider one of my favorite passages of Scripture:

Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord. And being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue, but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him and explained to him the way of God more accurately. And when he wished to cross to Achaia, the brothers encouraged him and wrote to the disciples to welcome him. When he arrived, he greatly helped those who through grace had believed, for he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, showing by the Scriptures that the Christ was Jesus.
—Acts 18:24-28

Apollos was good—but he wasn’t quite good enough. He didn’t see the whole picture. He didn’t have the full empowering of the Spirit. He was too raw.

But rather than verbally lashing Apollos for the inadequacies in his mostly decent theology, rather than crushing the life out of him because he had not “arrived,” Priscilla and Aquila took him aside and worked with him. Other brothers in Christ actively encouraged him and treated him as they themselves would wish to be treated.

And the result was worth waiting for. Folks would not have been saying, “I am of Apollos” (1 Cor. 1:12), if Apollos had not finally come into his own as he grew in favor with God and walked that journey from good to great.

Our transitions from sinners to saints is not a clean, clear-cut process. If you’ve been a Christian long enough, the one reality that comes out is that discipleship is messy. Your walk is a mess and so is mine.

But we can’t look at our own mess and excuse it, especially if we are looking at someone else’s and shrieking, “Man, what a disaster you are!”

Log and speck, right?

So what is the deal with beating down the newbies?

Here are a few suggestions I pray we can all consider or practice with believers who don’t have their Christian walk together yet:

Always lead with love. Always.

Consider that Jesus uttered The Golden Rule for a reason.

Start with encouraging a young Christian in what he or she is doing right.

Keep praying that God would take that young Christian from one degree of glory to the next.

When considering confronting a raw, young Christian, pray that God would do an inner confrontation in that youngster by His Holy Spirit first. Later, if the Spirit should reveal a need to partner with Him in offering gentle removal of specks, do so only after removing one’s own logs.

NEVER correct unless willing to work alongside the young Christian to help him or her reach maturity. If unwilling to partner with that immature believer, then find others who will and leave the correction to them.

Remember that if a young Christian is truly walking with the Lord, then God will not fail to complete His work, no matter how rough things appear at the moment.

And remember: You and I started out rough, too.

Did I mention to always lead with love?

The world is full of beat downs of people who don’t quite have it right. We live in merciless times among smug people who think they know it all.

But that can never be the Church of Jesus Christ. If anything, our love and mercy should always go out to the tenderest among us.

My Island, No Trespassing

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I like to watch people. The backstage of an event is often more interesting to me than the event itself. What happens when no one is looking (except for me) I find fascinating.

Recently, I’ve been watching what may be an interesting cultural trend.

My son is part of a weekend program that offers many challenging classes for gifted students. We love it. The two classes he takes have about 30 kids in one class and 15 in the other. Because some families have more than one kids in a class at a time, parents are not always fully represented, so some kids are in class by themselves, while others are there with one or both parents.

Both classes involve a lot of construction. The kids may build complex items, such as a soldered circuit board. Pretty ambitious stuff. Again, challenging for the kids.

I’ve been there for both classes. What has struck me is the dynamic of helping others.

When presented with a task, the majority of parents focus solely on helping their own child, despite the fact that other children have no parent present to help. Also, while plenty of opportunities to assist the teacher of class exist, not many people jump at the chance.

A few parents assist those children who have no parents present. A few generally help the teacher with whatever needs to be done to make the class work. A few. But most parents turn all their attention to their own child.

I’ve written many times about the island mentality in America 2010. I  see a country where people increasingly focus on their own family unit to the exclusion of others. Some believe this is the aftermath of cocooning wrought by 9/11. PangeaI contend that cocooning has transformed into islanding.

Some scientists say that the continents began as one land mass called Pangaea. Time and tectonics eventually tore Pangaea into smaller chunks that became the recognizable individual continents and islands.

In many ways, our communities and sense of common national identity are being torn asunder by the tectonic shifts of societal change. The entire idea of  community increasingly suffers when people turn their community into a sea filled with tiny islands with a common sea between them, but no real contact between the islands. The sea, rather than being a means of travel and connection, becomes a moat that keeps others out.

What is particularly sad is that these human islands “evolve” their own ecoculture that, in time, cannot abide the ecocultures of the other islands. Anyone who follows the travails of Australia in that country/island’s fight against cane toads and rabbits knows that being too different in one’s ecoculture wreaks havoc when an outsider comes in.

So, some islands work very hard to keep the outsiders out. And the fracture lines keep widening.

This should not surprise us, though. Darwinism, one of the core philosophies of contemporary society, wormed its way into the minds of too many people. We made peace with the “selfish gene” and incorporated “survival of the fittest” into our worldview. We see others as competition. “Only the strong survive.” We must protect our own, even if it comes at the expense of others individually and our communities as a whole. Or so it is said.

A couple months ago, I mentioned that the youth pastor at my church lamented his inability to get youth groups from other churches together to do combined community projects. Too many other churches feared their youth would be poached by a “competing” church. Island thinking exist in Christianity, too.

God didn’t make us to live as islands, though. Our families are not intended to be so sacrosanct that no one else is allowed in,  or that others exist only to get in the family’s way.

This is especially true of the Church. Jesus repeatedly said that the family of God is not an island, that ANY who do the will of God are invited in. There are no strangers, only those who have not yet come into the fold. And on the cross, Jesus shattered the idea of boundaries of biological family by entrusting His mother to the care of His youngest follower, and vice versa.

If we are to be a true reflection of the Church that God intends, we have to get rid of the moat. We can’t be an island, other than to be a place of refuge amongst cultural and societal insanity. Because the model we have from the Bible is not an island. Nor does the Bible preach the nuclear family to the detriment of those whose biological family does not look like our own.  The Church should NEVER be afraid of the outsider, because such was each one of us before Christ restored us.

Is it that hard to put down “our thing”—whatever it may be—to help another?

Do we not have some sense that we are diminished ourselves when others go wanting?

Why must we work so hard to protect our own that we have nothing else left over to give to those not our own?

Must we live by the survival of the fittest?

And lastly, why are we so proud of our personal island when God has no place for islands in His Kingdom?

The Times and Our Response

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Munch's 'The Scream'

I can’t remember a time in my life when more people are on edge. Short fuses and strong emotions don’t mix. Everywhere I look, people are either ready to pop a vein in their heads or to bury those same heads in their hands out of fear or sorrow.

In the last few days, I have had numerous encounters with people who appear to be losing it. What’s even stranger is that I spent most of last week at home sick. That makes the percentage of tense encounters even higher.

While I’m not one for end times speculations, it sure seems to me that the time before the Lord returns is running out. Reading the biblical descriptions of what people will be like in those days reads like America 2010.

Which is why,  more than ever, the Church needs to be at its most humble, winsome, and loving. We cannot be the angry, fearful, hateful people. Because we are called to be like the Lord, and the Lord is a rock and sure foundation, we need to look like Him in the eyes of desperate, angry, fearful people. We must be solid, but humbly so. We must turn the other cheek more than ever before and refuse to dish back what is dished out to us. We must be willing to accept being called wrong even when we are right. We simply cannot afford to repay anger with anger and fear with fear.

How do we get the American Church to that point? The only answer is to die to self.

Fact is, dying to self is pretty much the answer to 90 percent of the questions and issues that face Christians living in these times. If we only live to preserve our material goods, our status, and our positions on negotiable issues, if we live only to ensure that we always look good in the world’s eyes, then we will fail to stake out the higher ground and only descend into the madness around us.