You never let the Gospel inconvenience your lifestyle.
Dying to Self
Throwing Stones in Glass Houses of Worship
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Some arguments that crop up in the Godblogosphere just kill me. If I were a non-Christian, I’d have all the ammo I’d need from blogs alone to make a compelling argument to look somewhere other than Jesus for my salvation.
Can I reiterate the old aphorism that the biggest argument against Christianity are Christians? Hackneyed, yes, but sadly true.
Last week, the old divisive question of cessationism vs. charismata raised its perpetually ugly head for the umpteenth time over at Pyromaniacs. It seems that we simply can’t let this issue die, as if one more post on it’s going to force one side or the other to capitulate.
Whenever the supporters of a cessationist view want to make their point that all charismatics are “shambalahonda”-babbling, heretical nutjobs, they go to the same well again and again: TBN. The same tired arguments are trotted out. “Look at Benny Hinn! Will you get a load of that screwloose?” Or “What’s with Paul and Jan Crouch? I mean, seriously!”
And thus all charismatics—myself included—are painted with the same exceedingly broad brush. The blanket of condemnation falls on anyone who spoke in tongues after the Apostle John died, and we’re all Benny Hinns, W.V. Grants, and purveyors of error worthy of an extra bucket of red-hot embers when we finally croak and wind up in hell.
But is that the truth?
I’d like readers to bear with me through the next few paragraphs. Don’t even read them unless you’re willing to read to the end. Just stop reading now if you aren’t going to finish this post. I’ll even highlight the questionable words in blue so you know which ones I mean.
Pyromaniacs is a Reformed site. They support 5-point TULIP Calvinism. In truth, we agree on most things, though I understand that my Lutheran theology (though Reformation-inspired) coupled with a belief that the charismata are still working today would not endear me to my brothers there. Certainly, I would not be branded Reformed by their definition.
So while Phil Johnson of Pyromaniacs talks of bad experiences with charismaniacs, I’d like to share my experiences in the Reformed church, since I was a part of a few Reformed churches over the years and have friends who have attended Reformed Calvinist churches.
One Bible study I attended consisted solely of men from a respected, wealthy Reformed church. Before the Bible studies started, these men would sit around and belittle the poor, talking about “those people” and how they were lazy and ignorant. (That they laughed while they tore down “the least of these” made it all the more excruciating for me to even be in the same room with those “Christians.”)
Or let’s consider the Calvinist church that split because some people in that church wanted to evangelize the nearby Hispanic community. Objections swirled that the church would be ruined should “those people” (there it is again!) come in and disrupt things by bringing their culture and customs with them.
Or how about greeters at a Reformed church “greeting” visitors by immediately asking if they were Calvinists, then walking away when the visitors said they did not know?
What can be said of the Reformed church that belittles congregants who can’t afford to send their kids to an exclusive, private Christian school (founded in part by the church)?
Or how about the couple who wanted to start an evangelistic outreach in their Reformed church, but encountered constant apathy on the part of the congregation because “those who were predestined were already in the church”?
In short, which is worse—the babbling, emotional, theology-challenged, snake-handling charismaniac OR the self-righteous, xenophobic, status-seeking, materialistic Reformed/Calvinist?
It’s a pointless question, isn’t it?
If we Christians want to speak words of death in the Church, then by all means let’s resort to naming the worst possible examples of living the Christian life that we might possibly find in some other denomination or sect. Then let’s write as if those worst possible examples were the norm.
I didn’t want to write this post. That this post even needs to be written saddens me. Writing those examples of how some perverse subset of Reformed/Calvinist brothers and sisters ignored the very heart of the Gospel gave me no pleasure at all. Why? Because I know that thousands more Reformed Calvinist brothers and sisters in Christ are NOT like that. In the same way, thoughtful, theologically-sound charismatics who don’t like TBN or the excesses displayed within some charismatic churches exist in large numbers.
Because some Reformed and Calvinist believers are jerks doesn’t negate the Reformed/Calvinist message anymore than wacky charismatics negate theirs. The truth here is that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Before we disparage others from some other flavor of Christianity, we should ask if our own flavor has its house in order. Railing on “those other guys” comes easy to us because few of us wish to acknowledge the problems in our own house. (If Team Pyro wants to correct those Reformed churches I mentioned above, I’ve got the phone numbers for a couple of them. They can drop me an e-mail. I’ve already corrected charismania many times here.)
If Reformed/Calvinists with a keen eye for discernment would work to clean up their house, and Baptists worked to clean up their house, and Nazarenes worked to clean up their house, and charismatics worked to clean up their house, I have an idea that God would bless each house in a profound way. Perhaps then, even our differences wouldn’t seem so large.
But if the Nazarenes decide to point fingers at the mess in the Baptist’s house, and the Reformed/Calvinists decide to ridicule the excesses in the charismatic house, then the world they all live in will go on spinning and the Church of Jesus Christ will smother itself with a blanket of words that kill.
Because I can always find a problem with my neighbor. It’s my own problems I’m not so keen to fix.
You Love the Lord, But…
Standard…do you trust Him?
At first glance, such a question appears ludicrous. How can one love God and not trust Him?
Well, you love your kids, but would you trust them with a gun? Uh, probably not. I taught riflery at camp once. Emphasis on the once. Having a spacy teen girl carelessly point a loaded .22 at your head (despite fifteen minutes of admonition not to do so) tends to bleach your complexion, if you know what I mean. Didn’t make me love her any less, though.
Each of us may have good reason to love but not trust. How about a dad you love, but who’s in the habit of making life miserable for you and your family because he drinks—and he’s not a fun drunk. Or a single mom who brings home “Uncle” after “Uncle,” a relentless series of men who drift in and out of your life. Or your brooding teen nephew with the death metal and the Hustlers stashed under his mattress—your own son wants to man shotgun in the young nihilist’s new Lancer Evo.
You love your mom, but she’s not acting like an adult should. Dad, either. The nephew? Barely tolerable, but you love him ’cause he’s your beloved sister’s kid. Plus, you sat by the young punk’s bedside when he got pneumonia at eighteen months and you prayed your guts out that he’d live.
I think plenty of people who tear up in church during worship, the ones with their hands held highest, may very well love God with a fervor that outdoes everyone else in the pews, but all the while they’re scared to death to trust Him with their lives. They’re scared because they’ve been burned by a father who was an ugly drunk, or a mother who couldn’t keep a decent man in her life, or {fill in the trust issue here}.
No greater area of struggle affects me like this one. I love God very much and have served Him for many years, but I don’t always trust Him. Yes, I’m fine when I’m trusting the Lord for other people’s faith needs, but when it comes to my own I don’t do so well. I’m sure my Dad’s problems didn’t help me in trusting, but I don’t remember being leery of God’s direction and leading in my life until I started getting dropped.
Dropped?
Have you ever taken that leap of faith, the one so certain that it could not fail because “God was all over it”? 
Ended up as a squish spot at the bottom of some canyon just like Wile E. Coyote, didn’t you? Hurt, right?
It wasn’t just the pain of meeting the ground at a terminal velocity as much as the fact that the angels didn’t bear you up. That God—the one who orchestrated that leap of faith—seemed to vanish in a puff of smoke just when you needed Him the most. Years later, you’re still nursing the wounds, still asking why.
And still not getting any answers.
For me, no verse in the Bible stares me in the face and dares me to blink more than this one:
Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him…
—Job 13:15a KJV
For some of us, though, dying would be fine. But what of living, yet bearing a brutal wound? Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him may actually be easy. It’s the Though I’m left paralyzed in the bottom of a crater, yet will I trust in Him that needs our attention. I know a pastor who, on his way to a church meeting, accidentally backed the car over his toddler son and killed him. I can’t imagine. I simply can’t. I get choked up even thinking about something like that.
…yet will I trust in Him…
I’m not sure we do trust Him, at least to the extent we say we do. Though we all want to trust God to be more coherent and reliable than a drunken father, irresponsible mother, or suspect punk nephew, I suspect we all have our limits where trust begins to corrode. For some, that level’s pretty low. I believe that more than a few of us in America would blanch in the face of finding our favorite TV show canceled, our usual breakfast cereal discontinued, or the NFL home team packing up to move to LA.
Even if most of us can get past those mundane “disasters,” other more serious ones loom. We don’t want to deal with diminishing physical prowess. We don’t want to see the new kid promoted over us because it means we’ve maxed out our career and it’s all downhill from here on. We don’t want to go on weeping over adult children who have abandoned the Faith. We don’t want to consider what happens when the dream dies.
Even Christian books dance around this issue. I’m two-thirds of the way through Dan Allender’s Leading with a Limp. As an illustration of the power of honesty, he tells the story of a high-powered lawyer who confronted her company with a mirror and showed them how ugly they’d become. The company realized their errors and turned things around. The lady lawyer came off as a hero for her boldness.
But what if she hadn’t? What if they gutted and filleted her, then tossed her still-warm professional corpse on the dust heap, taking extra special care to ensure she never worked in a law firm within the borders of the good ol’ U.S. of A. again?
Doesn’t that happen? Doesn’t the leap of faith sometimes result in a big splat? Also, don’t we all know people who never recover? I do.
Last December, I wrote a blog post called “We Need a Gospel That Speaks to Failure.”I think we also need a means to help people crawl up out of the crater left behind when all the faith in the world didn’t work—for whatever reason. That’s where Christianity should shine, in moments like those.
Because I think that life is not going to be easy for most of us. At some point we’re going that face the reality of the ground rushing up to meet us and no net coming out of the sky. We have to be able to make sense of the crater we leave behind if we’re to trust God in the future.
We talk about God never leaving us and make up little poems (“Footprints in the Sand,” anyone?), but then the Bible also says this:
But, in regard to the ambassadors of the rulers of Babylon who sent to [Hezekiah] to ask about the wonder that was done in the land, God left him in order to try him, to know all that was in his heart.
—2 Chronicles 32:31
What is God going to find in our hearts when we’re in the crater after the leap of faith? What is it going to take from His Church to help those in the crater summon up the trust He is looking for?