Dying to Self

On Disappointment

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I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the LORD
In the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD;
Be strong and let your heart take courage;
Yes, wait for the LORD.
—Psalms 27:13-14 NASB

Disappointed
— 36,600,000 occurrences on Google

Disappointment is always lurking. Due to astonishing similarities to an existing series of books by a bestselling novelist (who was a complete unknown to me just a few weeks ago), my novel and the series that I hoped would spring from it may be dead. At the advice of another author who was familiar with that other novelist's recently published trilogy, FaceplantI read those books. Having finished them this last Sunday, I sit here now and wonder how it is possible.

It wasn't too long ago that I landed my dream job at Apple Computer bashing Windows and the PCs that ran it. Newly married, I was on top of the world. We moved cross-country, thrilling to the hope held out before us. However, less than six months later my department was disbanded and we were stuck in Silicon Valley, a place where "it's all about who you know," without knowing anyone.

My mother was a "mom's Mom" in every sense of the word. And though she worked with young children every day, she had no grandchildren. How excited we were to learn of our pregnancy just days before we flew back to Cincinnati to stay with my folks for Christmas. There was even talk of moving back to be near the soon-to-be grandparents. Two months later, Mom was diagnosed with brain cancer. We moved back to Cincinnati, and I was fortunate to find a great job. My Dad died a couple weeks before the Christmas that followed the joyous one just a year before; Mom followed just over three months later. My exciting new company started having money trouble in the wake of the looming Internet bust and the layoffs came. My wife kept her good job, but we had a new baby and Dad's estate was troubling, so I stayed home to try to solve all the issues of losing both parents in rapid succession. We moved into our first home just a few months later—and then my wife was laid off, too. New house, new child, no parents, no income.

And so it goes.

In the last ten years I've stared in the face of more disappointments than I can remember. After a while you take a look at your list of goals in life and ask, "What was I thinking?" And while that's not the commonly accepted Christian response to goal-setting—at least from what all the bestsellers on the Christian bookstore shelves say—it may be closer to the truth than some wish to admit.

When the Tower of Siloam fell on eighteen hapless residents of long-ago Palestine, Jesus wasn't trapped by the question of the source for their rotten sense of timing and luck, He simply said, "…unless you repent, you will all likewise perish." He had a much different perspective, didn't He?

For centuries people have made the Bible into a talisman for good fortune. Entire theologies are woven around what God is mandated to give us if we apply the right alchemy of verses to our woeful situations. Yet who claims to force the hand of the Almighty? Who is that prideful? Well, Lucifer comes to mind….

What no one asks is if it's okay to pray what David prayed in Psalm 27. He said, "Lord, without the assurance of goodness provided to me in the here and now, I'm ruined!" God never intended for us to go through life without goodness evident this side of Heaven.

Now this is not prosperity thinking. You won't see any links to Rod Parsley on Cerulean Sanctum. But isn't the status quo, either.

I believe that we as a Church need a readjustment. Our idea of goodness is possessing every glossy item featured in the latest Neiman-Marcus catalog, plus a few from Family Christian Stores. We've let America infest our idea of what is good. In many ways, we've traded in a few of our "worldly" trinkets for "approved and redeemed Christian" versions. (A step down if you ask me.)

When we die in real life, what do we take with us? Nothing. But what about when we die at the foot of the cross? The answer's the same. Yet the problem with so many of us American Christians is we aren't fully ready to leave it all at the foot of the cross. And since we aren't, we never fully appreciate what the Father gives us in exchange for all the junk we lug around.

And what does the Father give us at the cross? Jesus.

Folks, do we want Him? Or will we cling to what is ephemeral, what is gone with one pink slip, heart attack, fire, or theft.

The goodness David waited upon, the anchor to goodness that held him, was the Lord Himself. There is no disappointment in the Father for in His right hand are pleasures forever (Psalm 16:11.) And we know who sits in that strong right hand.

When we know Jesus Christ and are known by Him, how can we be disappointed?

A hymn says it all:

I'd rather have Jesus than silver or gold;
I'd rather be His than have riches untold;
I'd rather have Jesus than houses or lands;
I'd rather be led by His nail-pierced hand

    Than to be the king of a vast domain,
    Or be held in sin's dread sway;
    I'd rather have Jesus than anything This world affords today.

I'd rather have Jesus than men's applause;
I'd rather be faithful to His dear cause;
I'd rather have Jesus than worldwide fame;
I'd rather be true to His holy name

He's fairer than lilies of rarest bloom;
He's sweeter than honey from out the comb;
He's all that my hungering spirit needs;
I'd rather have Jesus and let Him lead

Beloved, never be disapponted that Jesus is all you ultimately have.

His Winnowing Fork Is in His Hand

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Wheat field

I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.
—Matthew 3:11-12 ESV

Last week I was shopping for groceries in my local Kroger when I was overcome by a staggering feeling. Turning into an aisle with two rows of cooler cases, I felt like I was displaced from the rest of the crowd in the store, pulled away, destined to persecution at the hands of those around me. It was a sobering, yet eerie, sensation. When I finally took it to prayer, I was reminded of John the Baptist’s comment on the work of Christ, the Savior’s winnowing fork in hand, ready to thresh the nations.

Many times on this blog I have commented that we are not ready. A passage that comes to mind so frequently is

For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.
—Ecclesiastes 9:12 ESV

Will the world soon be “caught in an unguarded moment?” Is an evil time coming more swiftly than we realize? I cannot say with prophetic certainty, but something is happening. I don’t want to blame this on two hurricanes, either. It’s more than that. It feels, to quote C.S. Lewis, as if “Aslan is on the move.”

I thought about all those people around me in the store. Chaff? I also felt like hard times were coming for us believers in Jesus, the wheat, and that we will have underestimated its ferocity when it arrives. I heard recently that Chinese Christians are praying for persecution for American Christians so that the sleeping American Church would finally get serious. Will that prayer soon come to pass?

Anyone else get this same impression recently?

The Little Things: Excuses

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One of the societal trends I have noticed in the last ten years is that people increasingly make excuses. Everyone has an excuse as to why the work I’m paying them to do hasn’t been done, why they can’t fix my car right in four tries, Magnifying Glasswhy the pictures came out fuzzy, why they burned my meal at the restaurant, and on and on and on.

What baffles me about this trend is that the reason for that failure to execute never is “I made a mistake.” It’s always something more along the lines of “My distributor can’t…,” “My manager won’t…,” “The service center we use isn’t…,” and the ubiquitous “It’s their fault, not mine.” I’m convinced that the next time I actually hear a person say, “I messed up,” I’m going to hand him $20 and say, “Thank you for taking responsibility for the problem.”

Honestly, it’s that bad.

What makes it worse is that there is no greater source for excuses than in our churches. Nowhere else summons up the patter of random deflections than in the group we meet with on Sundays.

The curious thing about this, though, is that it is usually not the church entity itself that is making excuses for itself, but individual Christians within those churches. It is the nature of any volunteer organization, which a church primarily is, to have somewhat more slack rules of operation, but what makes us Christians so unwilling to take the blame when something goes wrong?

“We were supposed to have a prayer meeting on Wednesday, but Steve couldn’t…,” “Someone was going to visit our elderly shut-ins this week, but…,” “It’s not my fault that no one put together the youth group program until the last second and…”—well, it just gets tiring.

The grace of God is cheapened when we use it as an excuse for not doing what we say we will do. Jesus didn’t take too kindly to us making excuses:

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
—Matthew 25:41-46 ESV

The Church in America needs to dump excuses. We’re using them to excuse ourselves from taking responsibility for our actions (or inactions, as the case usually is.) We need to own up when we make mistakes. We need to stop acting like grace is there to excuse us from doing what we need to do.

Excuses may seem like little things, but they break the heart of God when He sees His Church so ready to spout them and so unwilling to own up to our responsibilities as ambassadors for Christ. For every witness we bear, our anti-witness through excuses only undoes that work.

It’s time to be more responsible. Or as the word of God says:

One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much….
—Luke 16:10a ESV

If we wonder why the Church in our country seems so lackluster, perhaps this is the place to start.