Discernment

Battling Beelzebul

Standard

"Lucifer" by Franz von StuckFor we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
—Ephesians 6:12 ESV

Want a surefire indicator that the Holy Spirit is moving in a church?

1. The lowest floor of the church building floods during a rainstorm—and the church is near the top of a hill

2. Cars are vandalized in the church parking lot—and the church is located near the edge of a quiet rural area

3. Someone makes arson threats against the church—and the church is located near the edge of a quiet rural area

Our church meeting last Sunday was powerful. The Holy Spirit was moving in the midst of His people. He’s been moving this way for a while now. In the last few months, we’ve seen amazing healings (including a man with terminal heart disease whose body was so bloated with fluids he could barely move, but he was dancing in church just two days later, cured of his disease and fifty pounds lighter), people are being convicted of sin, the word of God is going out mightily, new people are coming in, we have baptisms about every other week, and on and on.

So, of course, the Enemy takes notice because the last thing he wants is for any of that kind of thing to occur. If you haven’t guessed already, the three assaults listed above happened at my church in the wake of the powerful move of the Lord last week.

Last year, I wrote a widely disseminated post called “The Chthonic Unmentionable” in which I wondered why Evangelicals cringed at the “Devil” part of of the triumvirate of “the world, the flesh, and the Devil.” I’ve been around long enough to know that most Evangelicals will mentally assent to the existence of Satan, but to ascribe to him much more than existence is too much to ask. Better to say nothing and maybe the demons will go away.

Despite Martin Luther’s inkwell and his penchant for aromatic responses when assaulted by Satan, I didn’t hear much more about the demonic growing up until I got involved in an Assemblies of God church. At that point, I wondered why no one had told me anything about this important fact of life. After a personal encounter with a demon-possessed person (mentioned in the link above), I suddenly realized that all those Gospel “stories” about Jesus casting out demons weren’t something that merely happened in Palestine circa 30 AD.

Like C.S. Lewis, I believe there are two mistaken notions about the demonic:

1. We focus on them.

2. We ignore them altogether.

To the first point, I once visited a church that considered Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness akin to The Bible: The Sequel. I saw a guy casting a “demon” out of his chair before he sat down for the meeting. Must’ve had a bad run-in with tack at some earlier point in life and didn’t want to take any chances sitting on anything possibly more evil. What else could explain that kind of fruitcake behavior?

On the other hand, we’ve got folks in the American Church who would take a look at the three negative things that hit my church and its folks this week and sum it up with a shoulder shrug. “Just a string of bad luck,” they would say, or “Horrible coincidence.”

Let me simply say this: The Enemy HATES you. Lucifer and his legions would gleefully destroy your body, your home, your marriage, your children, your church…anything and everything is fair game to them, save for God’s grace on your life. Many Christians do suffer from those attacks; justification does not end our encounters with the demonic! When a marriage goes south in the Christian community, Satan orchestrated that destruction from the first “I do” to the last “This marriage is over! I’m out!”

We’re fools if we don’t take this war seriously—and it is a war. Jesus confessed this to Peter:

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” Peter said to him, “Lord, I am ready to go with you both to prison and to death.” Jesus said, “I tell you, Peter, the rooster will not crow this day, until you deny three times that you know me.”
—Luke 22:31-34 ESV

Satan wants to sift us. Jesus countered that demand with prayer. All our resolve will not help us one lick unless we put on our blood-bought spiritual armor and walk as warriors against the infernal.

Ephesians 5:18 ends Paul’s admonition concerning defense against the demonic with this command:

…praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me….
—Ephesians 6:18-19a ESV, emphasis added

Are we praying in the Spirit that the Lord would destroy the works of the Enemy in our lives and in the lives of Christians around the world? Are we putting a priority on the kind of travailing prayer that Pauls speaks of? Because the chthonic is actively plotting ways to make each and every Christian rue the day he or she confessed Christ. Believe it. They don’t toss up their hands and go, “Oh well, onto the next one.” No, they never stop their assault.

We would do well to remember that the unsaved have no protection at all against the wiles of the Enemy. They are fair game 24/7/365. For this reason, we Christians should never deal smugly with the lost because not only are they under a powerful delusion inspired by Satan, but they live lives perpetually assaulted and have no clue that such a battle rages. I dare any Christian reading this to turn their noses up at the lost in light of this. It’s not just the afterlife that will be a living hell for the lost; it’s a living hell right now. Our response to their plight and to God’s plucking us out of a similar fate should be the same: humility.

We must never take the demonic lightly. Great times of encountering God in power are countered in every way possible by an Enemy who seeks to kill, maim, and destroy. Take that as a corollary.

{Image: Lucifer by Franz von Stuck, 1894}

Chapter, Verse, Blog

Standard

No, that’s not a new law firm. We need more legal eagles like we need more “spiritainment.”

Instead, that title exists because of a common criticism I see in the comments of other blogs. A Godblogger posts on some topic and, inevitably, a reader comments that the posts was essentially nullified by a lack of Scriptural citations. Never mind that the entire post speaks from the whole revelation of Scripture. Too few Bible verses plucked from Haggai or Philemon and the whole thing topples like an Enlightenment house of cards.

I saw such a criticism on another blog that linked to my post from last week, “Leer and Foaming in Las Wendy’s.”  The commenter at that other blog didn’t like that I failed to quote the same verses on modesty that we’ve all heard a million times. Never mind that part of my point was that we know what to do, we just don’t do it; because I cited no Scripture, I had no real Christian admonishment worth reading.

I’m not bothered by that comment. I’ve no verse citation quota to live up to. I’ve included enormous numbers of verses in many of my posts to underline points—enough to get the imprimatur of whatever Evangelical pope exists.

What bothers me is we’re potentially abusing the Bible by always rendering up select verses to make our points; we slice and dice the word of God to make it fit our particular theory. Like cluster bombs, our choice verses descend on our enemies in awesome, domain-name-shaking explosions that threaten to destroy the very foundational IP addresses that undergird the Internet. We quote passage after passage, highlighting them with whatever our blog theme summons for a blockquote. And before blogs—remember life before blogging?—Rock, Paper, Scissorswe filled our books, and sermons, and tracts, and on and on with this verse and that, carefully woven together to form a bulletproof “defense of the Gospel.”

But something’s missing. We’ve overlooked the best for the good. The result is a perpetual game of Rock, Paper, Scissors in which your passage from 1st Corinthians beats her chapter from Leviticus, which annihilates his verse from Revelation.

And yet I imagine that many Christians today are sitting back and thinking what all that verse-slinging has gotten us. I mean, are we truly happy with the state of the Christian Church in the West today?

Late last year, I read an excerpt from a book by Frank Viola, a house church proponent. The excerpt had little to do with house churches and everything to do with the way Christians today handle the Word of God. And unlike most things I read, eight months have gone by and I still can’t get Viola’s excerpt, “The Bible Is Not a Jigsaw Puzzle,” out of my head. I’ve exhausted more mental time thinking about the ramifications of Viola’s argument than nearly anything I’ve considered in the last year.

I’m not even going to attempt to excerpt his excerpt. Read the whole thing. I promise it’s worth it.

Most of us have seen the fallout from our overemphasis on chapter and verse. People can quote verse after verse of Scripture, but their micro-understanding of God’s Word suffers in comparison to His macro-revelation. It’s a little like being given the key to an Aston Martin Vanquish, only to rejoice in the key and not the whole car. If you never drive the thing because you don’t know a steering wheel from a ferris wheel, then what’s the point?

Too many Christians fail to grasp the overarching testimony of the Scriptures. We may talk about a Christian worldview, yet hardly anyone correctly handles the entirety of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration. Can’t I make a case for God’s enduring love for us humans, His ultimate creation, without citing John 3:16? If I don’t mention Romans 12:1, can I still talk about worship? If I cite no Scriptures at all, but appeal to their truth in their entirety, have I somehow slighted the Lord?

I think we’ve reduced the Scriptures to a potpourri of pithy sayings. I know that when I sit down and read an entire book of the Bible in one sitting it speaks in a way that no piecemeal reading will ever match. No rending of each verse to wring every ounce of meaning out of it, but just sitting down and reading a book all the way through. And while I admit that some books like Psalms or Proverbs are collections, Paul’s epistles were never intended to be read as a New Testament version of Proverbs. Nor were the Gospels. They have an arc in their writing that carries its own meaning, and when we neglect to read them in the form they were designed to be read, we miss more power and wisdom than we realize.

Moving away from piecemeal study into a more holistic handling of each book will carry over into a greater understanding of the entire testimony of Scripture. Our quiet times won’t be the same. Meditation on the Scriptures won’t be on just this verse of that, but on entire books, and possibly the whole of God’s revelation to Man.

An old book was entitled Your God Is Too Small. Well, I think our Bible reading is too small, too. Instead of chapter and verse, we need a more macro approach to the Scriptures that imparts a holistic view of the entirety of God’s speaking to Mankind.

Or we can keep on playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with the words of the Lord.

What the American Church Is Doing Right, Part 1

Standard

Thumbs Up!The last couple weeks here have seen some heavy posts discussing problems in the American Church. Cerulean Sanctum exists to discuss these issues and find thoughtful solutions. Because of the founding idea behind the blog, the tendency is toward a non-stop stream of what the Church here is doing wrong. And though my hope is to find practical ways to improve on problems or to raise issues that perpetually fly under everyone’s radar so they can receive attention, my intention is not to be a critic for criticism’s sake. I am, first of all, a Christian. My hope is that we can always do better.

At the start of this week, I’d like to take a couple posts to highlight what the Church in North America is doing right. As always, readers, feel free to comment because I would like to know what you think about this, too.

Today, I start with my first three:

1. Rediscovering the sacred

Earlier this year, I blogged on Unshackling the American Church, and one of the posts in that series featured a call to re-explore sacramental living. I firmly believe that many voices in the Church are beginning to understand that Consumerism has replaced Christianity as the national religion of the United States. The poverty of Consumerism is its devaluing of all things sacred in an attempt to displace the sacramental with temporal pleasures.

But God did not make Man to always be wanting more of the material, but more of Him and what He values. If anything positive comes out of postmodernism, it’s an awareness that  we’ve gone too far in our pursuit of the perishable. Modernism, especially as it intersected industrialization, set us up for an abolishing of the transcendent. Science explains it all, industrialization can manufacture it all, and technology becomes the acolyte that descends from those twin towers with the answer to our every problem—now on sale at WalMart for only $299.95.

Man is not so simpleminded, nor so spiritually bankrupt. I believe that many Christians, who through their own  ignorance bought the lie, are coming back around to the greater truth: Consumerism cannot answer the deeper cravings of the heart. Structures within American Christianity that in the past catered to consumerist tendencies will find it harder to maintain their grasp on people who are fed up with trendiness, trinkets, and milk. Already, I see a backlash against megachurchianity as more Christians realize there is no “there” there.

I witnessed this implosion firsthand at the church I attended for many years. Interestingly, if the list of 50 Most Influential Churches is to be believed, the numerical freefall of that church in the list in just one year says most of what one needs to know. And I predict that any of the churches in that list are fair game. As more people wake up to the shallow messages preached in many of those churches, realizing that they’ve strayed away from the sacred and into tawdry dog and pony shows, we’ll see change.

One of the changes I’ve seen already is an explosion of burned-out Evangelicals who are leaving megachurches and non-denominational churches for more traditional churches better rooted in a history of appreciation for the sacred. Everywhere I turn in the last year, I’m seeing signs that the Orthodox Church is gathering in these disaffected believers. Why? Because they never gave the boot to the otherness of God and the wholesomeness of simple living. For those not going the Orthodox route, new monastic communities that are wholly Protestant are springing up everywhere, attracting the children of Baby Boomers, kids raised in consumerist church environments who longed for what those churches could not provide: a sense of the sacramental nature of life serving a transcendent God who values the lasting.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I have a built-in suspicion of reactive movements. The pendulum that is the Church in this country flirts with one extreme or the other as it seeks truth in the middle. I don’t believe that monasticism or a flight to Orthodoxy are the answers, but they’re the evidence of a need to go back to that sacred middle.

I think it’s good that more people are questioning the lack of sacredness in American Church life. Baby Boomers embraced a consumerist vision for church and their children are rejecting it. Sometimes the children ARE smarter than their parents.

2. Catching the green wave

A greater appreciation for the Creation signals another healthy trend in American Christianity. For too long a “it’s all gonna burn” mentality dominated Evangelical thought, in dire opposition to God’s original call to steward what He gave us. But the backlash has begun.

This is a good thing in every way. Readers here know that I fully support more responsible use of natural resources and a return to agrarian ideals. The expediency of thinking we’re going to be raptured out of here any day, so who cares if we ransack the world God gave us, is a devilish product that caters to greed more than proper stewardship.

Christians should be the ones leading the environmental cause. But even the recent past has given us scares from some Christian sources who insist that a green mentality is at odds with Christianity and will result in us spending more time planning for Arbor Day than Easter Sunday.

Christians are now seeing through that false dichotomy. Many understand that dropping out of Consumerism, favoring simpler lifestyles less dependent on things (and the waste they generate), and carefully tending the world God gave us proves the Gospel rather than detracts from it

3. Courageously facing the truth about the itself

Just in the last six months I’ve witnessed some real soul-searching by Christian leaders. More legitimate voices are questioning some of the entrapments of modernism that have crept into the Church. Godbloggers are writing more posts saying that perhaps the Gospel really is about loving God and loving our neighbor. More Christians are willing to say they were wrong in the past about some issues.

I believe this soul-searching by the American Church is a good start. I’m not a proponent of Emergent, but the flaws in our system that Emergent pointed out are getting some attention, instead of the usual arrogant brush-off. Churches are starting to wise-up to past sins. They’re questioning if some programming is more culturally-rooted than Christ-rooted. They’re pondering deep issues:

  • Maybe we aren’t as outward-focused as we say we are.
  • Maybe our community life isn’t all that fulfilling.
  • Maybe we have become self-centered.
  • Maybe we have acted like Americans first and followers of Christ second.
  • Maybe the megachurch model is deeply flawed.
  • Maybe we really are just shuffling around our congregants.
  • Maybe our discipleship programs are trite.
  • Maybe we have made Christianity too rational and need to recover an emotional connection to God.
  • Maybe the American Church is the new Laodicea and the Third World Churches are right.

All these are steps in the right direction. By acknowledging our own concessions to something less than the full Gospel, we’re willing to jettison the cultural entrapments we’ve falsely held up as Christian. I believe more people are dissatisfied with what we’ve built into the institution of the Church that never should have been incorporated.

Those are the first three. I’ll have three more things the American Church is doing right in my next post.