Discernment

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.

Sadness, Depression, and the Christian

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He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
—Isaiah 53:3-4 ESV

It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
—Ecclesiastes 7:2-4 KJV

We live in an age when sadness is under assault.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a fellow Christian. At one point, I brought up some of the sadness I felt over the state of the world 2010 and some genuine losses in my life and the lives of family members. In the course of the discussion, he mentioned antidepressants.

Back in the dark ages of 40 years ago, depression was considered a debilitating mental illness. To be diagnosed with depression, one had to be nearly nonfunctional, unable to perform even simple tasks, such as getting out of bed in the morning. I had a college professor who talked about losing three entire years to crippling depression. He said he couldn’t think and could barely lift himself out of his favorite chair. Depression had rendered him completely inert.

I like to listen to Science Friday on NPR. Recently, they did a program on depression. During the interview, the two experts discussed the explosion of cases of depression diagnosed today and the reality that antidepressants are the most common drug prescribed, with one person out of every 15 in America taking them. And those numbers are growing.

Those experts noted disconcertingly that pharmaceutical company marketing departments helped manufacture much of the need, dramatically reducing the threshold for what is considered depression. Doctors bought into that marketing. Now, we have created an atmosphere of  “Sad? Well, there’s a pill for that.”

In effect, in many cases, we are using drugs to eliminate ordinary sadness.

A friend who works with mentally ill children attended a recent symposium. He later wrote that an expert on depression divulged that for most people, if left to a natural grief-resolution process that omits drugs, feelings of sadness equated to “depression” typically fade away on their own in about nine months. Intriguingly, that expert works for a drug company that sells antidepressants.

Something is terribly wrong in our society when we are unable to separate normal sadness from debilitating depression.

March 29 is turning out to be a sad date on the calendar for me. My mom, a woman greatly loved by everyone who knew her, died on that date nine years ago. In one of those terrible synchronicities of life, I got the news that the man who led me to Christ, the most Spirit-filled person I ever met, and the one whose life still serves as my example of what it means to be a Christian, died yesterday. He mentored me in what it means to live by the Spirit and to listen to what God is saying. He loved people unconditionally. God spoke to him and used him to always give a word in season. Fred Gliem was 90.

Even though Fred lived a full life and impacted many for the Kingdom, his death makes me sad.

Some Christians out there don’t like sadness. Like the society around them, they want to replace sadness with a sort of Pollyanna-ish happiness that never abates lest one discredit the joy of having Christ dwell in one richly. I hear about Christians who want to turn every funeral into a cause for celebration. Honestly, I wonder what those folks are smoking.

Here’s what the Bible says is the reaction of Spirit-filled people to the death of one of their own:

Devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him.
—Acts 8:2

Those devout men knew their friend was in the arms of Jesus. Still, they wept and wailed over his tragic loss.

I think one of the reasons why so few people know how to deal with sadness, why some want to toss medications at those who are sad, is because our worldviews allow no place for anything less than individual fulfillment and happiness. Sadness and grief are rendered deviant emotions.

Sadness also demands a response from others. While many emotions can go without comment, sadness can’t. Sadness asks for comfort. And comfort means availability.

Do we make time for the sad and grieving? Or do we prefer they pop a few happy pills and stop bothering us?

Job’s friends are almost universally reviled because God chastised them for speaking while ignorant of the facts. But one thing God did not do was criticize Job’s friends for their dedication to their stricken friend:

Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that had come upon him, they came each from his own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They made an appointment together to come to show him sympathy and comfort him. And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him. And they raised their voices and wept, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads toward heaven. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.
—Job 2:11-13

Seven days and nights Job’s friends stayed with him—before they even said a word. They mirrored Job’s grief, tearing their robes and weeping as they took on the dust of his despair.

When was the last time you or I heard of anyone showing such devotion to a friend in his or her time of sadness? Isn’t our tendency instead to quote Romans 8:28 and casually discount another’s abyss? Man of SorrowsHaven’t we become people who blithely say, “You know, they have a pill for that,” so we can go on with our lives, make our next business meeting on time, and not be bothered by the natural outcome of living in a sin-soaked world?

If one of Christ’s titles were not “The Man of Sorrows,” how could we ever claim that He was fully human? No, we know Jesus was well acquainted with sadness. He did not run from that emotion. How then can we?

The Scriptures say that the fool’s heart is always in the house of mirth. The fool learns nothing of the breadth of life’s truths, including the truth that sadness serves a purpose. From its depths come a kind of wisdom that can’t be gained from always thinking happy thoughts. Indeed, a sad face is good for the heart. It grounds us in real meaning and makes us better people.

Listen to “Sad Face” by The Choir:

There’s a crystal in the window
Throwing rainbows around
There’s a girl by the mirror
And her feet won’t touch the ground
‘Cause she never saw the sky so bright
Isn’t that like a cloud, to come by night
Nevermind the sky
There’s a tear in her eye

A sad face is good for the heart
Go on cry, does it seem a cruel world?
A sad face is good for the heart of a girl
A sad face

There’s a woman in my kitchen
With a rainbow on her cheek
Well isn’t that a promise?
Still I never felt so weak
There’s a tiny spirit in a world above
Cradled so sweetly in our Father’s love
So you don’t have to cry
No there’s something in my eye

A sad face is good for the heart
Maybe just now I don’t understand
A sad face is good for the heart of a man
A sad face

A sad face is good for the heart
It’s alright you don’t have to smile
A sad face is good for the heart of a child
For the heart of a child
For the heart of a child
For the heart of a child
A sad face A sad face…

The Christian Singles Mess

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The man-childTim Challies posted on Facebook this quote from a book by Richard Phillips:

“One of the biggest problems in the church today is the failure of young adult men to value and pursue marriage.”

That quote really bothered me, honestly. It seems like the typical male-bashing that is so prevalent today: If something is wrong, blame men.

It takes two to tango, though, so I can’t see why the blame must always fall on men for the state of dating today.

I’ve been married since 1996, so I can’t say that I am totally up on every aspect of the Christian single scene circa 2010, but still, I can’t believe it has changed THAT much since my single days. So when I read quotes like the one from Phillips, I just have to wonder if people see the same mess I did.

When I was single…

It was almost always the woman who broke things off in a relationship. I knew a lot of single Christian guys, and they were typically the dumpee, not the dumper. These were good guys, too. They WANTED to get married. It’s just that their girlfriends didn’t—at least not to them. So just who is putting off marriage here?

While both sexes have “lists,” the lists of desirable qualities in a mate that women kept seemed to be more unrealistic than the lists of men. What made this more glaring was that as single women aged, their lists got shorter, while men’s lists tended to stay the same. So which sex is making dating harder?

I dated about a half-dozen women before I met my wife. Twice, women I dated gave me the “you’re too nice” break-up speech—only to have those two later date men who hit them. Worse, they couldn’t bring themselves to break it off with their abusers. I pray that a third of women out there are not dumping nice guys in favor of bad boys, but my experience says otherwise. What kind of message is that sending to men who are “nice”?

A man’s income is a bigger factor than single Christian women care to admit. Plenty of good, caring, honest men don’t make six figures. I’ve seen too many cases of women dropping the “poor” nice guy in favor of the loaded playboy. The outcome is self-fulfilling. So which sex is succumbing to questionable motives?

This is not a post to bash single women. Still, all the culpability for the mess out there can’t be dumped solely at the feet of men.

It’s true that we seem awash in Man-Child Syndrome, with men acting like teenagers into their 30s. But at the same time, thanks to the inevitable outcomes of radical feminism, we’ve also developed this almost predatory female who wants to compete as a man in those elements of life we’ve always associated with manhood. Can anyone claim that THAT’S an improvement for women?

Here’s the even worse problem: quotes like those from Richard Phillips. Why? Because the fixes are not those most Christians are willing to examine. We can complain all we want about the state of male-female relationships today, but the fixes do not amount to telling one sex or the other to get their collective acts together. The problems run deeper.

Here’s an example:

Today, young men must compete for jobs against young women. But the playing field is not level. Every study I have seen in the last few years shows that companies prefer to hire women. Men are also cowed by the threat of sexual harassment lawsuits. Having been in several workplaces where a male coworker was sued for sexual harassment, I can tell you that the effect is chilling, even on those men who would never consider saying or doing anything deemed harassment. I remember commenting to a woman I worked with that I thought she had a great fashion sense and was a smart dresser; she responded, “And just what do you mean by that?” Her response taught me that it was better to not talk to her at all.

This adds up in the lives of men. It amplifies the so-called Battle of the Sexes, a battle that didn’t exist prior to the 1960s and the rise of radical feminism. As men are most often the loser in this battle, this contributes to the Man-Child Syndrome.

I also believe that the way we prepare young people for the work world today exacerbates the problems. Beyond men and women competing for the same jobs, we use college as an excuse for job prep. We throw young people into a largely unsupervised college environment, expect them to put off marriage for four years, expect them them put off marriage for more years after graduation while they “establish their careers” (and justify the massive costs of a college education), and then we wonder why dating and mating is a giant mess.

Yet what Christian leader out there today is willing to question the way we work, earn money, and get an education? Instead, we find a convenient whipping boy, the man-child, and tell him to act like a man—when our entire system is geared for preventing him from doing so.

As I see it, the problems are systemic and difficult, which is why it’s easier for Christians to simply ignore them as we pursue our careers and gather for ourselves the only thing that seems to matter in life:  money. Telling men to act like men doesn’t get us anywhere unless we’re prepared to make the changes necessary to mold them into our professed ideal. And those changes may mean revising every aspect of our society and culture.

I wrote about my suggestions for how we Christians can address the issue of singleness in the Church in Singleness: Radical Answers for a Harsh Reality. I also talked about how we Christians are not seeing the bigger picture in dating and mating in The Truth About Women (and Men).

I wish more Christians were willing to look hard at masculinity and femininity breakdowns in our society today and pose genuine solutions that challenge the way we live. If we don’t, how can we expect different outcomes?