Dying to Self

God’s Beauty Plan

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Edgar Degas - 'The Star'We’ve talked about issues in discipleship in the last ten days (though, honestly, this whole blog is about discipleship), but I wanted to say one more word.

Let’s step into Dan’s Magic Imagination Machine and consider what follows.

Scenario A: A proud father knows his daughter will be beautiful. He takes care of the child and allows her to develop slowly over years. Childhood is encouraged, outside play is cherished, friendships with other children are promoted, and time for rest and recuperation are given. When Dad realizes his daughter is mature enough, he enrolls her in charm school. When ready, the girl is given ballet lessons. Her father also oversees her education, adding one lesson at a time as the girl is ready to receive new knowledge. At eighteen, that young woman is revealed to the world. What a stunning beauty! A woman whose elegance, sophistication, and loveliness capture the hearts of all who meet her.

Scenario B: A proud father knows his daughter will be beautiful. To hasten that day, he has the girl pumped full of growth hormones, with bone stretching rods inserted into her limbs to make certain the girl grows tall. At five, the girl is subjected to calculus and physics classes, plus courses in three languages. The girl is only allowed five hours of sleep each night because her schedule is packed. And because Dad was never allowed to waste time in outdoor play, neither is his daughter. When the daughter doesn’t score well on her tests, Dad berates her, telling her how badly she’s failed and how she’ll never be the beauty queen she’s supposed to be. Then how will her Dad be perceived by the world? And on and on…

I’m sure that everyone reading this will agree that the Dad in Scenario B sounds like a psychopath. What normal person would treat a child that way?

Why is it, then, that Scenario B (the irrational one) is the way portions of the American Church try to make disciples?

And now for the NtBV, the “Not the Bible Version”:

He has made everything beautiful in our time…
— Not Ecclesiastes 3:11a

One word: Unlikely.

As we know, the real verse reads this way:

He has made everything beautiful in His time…
—Ecclesiastes 3:11a

As I’ve gotten older in the Lord, He’s taught a me an inescapable truth: if we try to make disciples in our time (or any other way that is ours and not His), we’ll only break them and make them less than useful to Him.

I see now that we must view disciplemaking with the following understandings:

1. The Lord builds the house. We do not build the house.

2. The Lord builds disciples on His timetable, not ours.

3. The Lord does not break reeds and quench smoldering wicks. We, however, do so with reckless, clumsy abandon.

4. The Lord has expectations. We do, too. Ours, however, do not matter.

5. The Lord sees the final, perfect end-product of discipleship and fully comprehends all the stages along the path of growth. We look in a temporal mirror and wonder why the end-product does not look exactly like we did at every stage of our own personal development.

6. The Lord disciples with love. We disciple with impatience.

7. The Lord disciples perfectly. (You can probably guess by now how we disciple.)

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a “discipler”—typically loaded down with one agenda after another—run roughshod over a “disciplee.” I’ve lost track of how many people have walked away from the faith or turned irrevocably bitter because a discipler didn’t take the time to ask, “What is God doing in this person’s life?” Asking that question rather than stating, “And now, this is what I will be doing in this person’s life,” would have made a world of difference.

Some disciplers pump their disciplees with more knowledge than they’re fit to handle. Others get upset that the process of growth goes more slowly than they would like, so they ramrod truth down immature throats. Some disciplers are unwilling to be at peace when their disciplees occasionally feel discouraged because the disciplers believe “a true disciple always lives in victory.” Or—and this is one of the trickier ones—the disciplees are actually further along in an area of discipleship than the disciplers and the disciplers are unwittingly asking them to take a step backwards.

You can probably come up with you own “discipleship gone bad” stories. Sadly, those stories should be rare to non-existent.

The other day, I was in an odd position in a group of Christians when each of us was asked to share one area in which we might be disappointed with God. After no one said anything for a while, I volunteered a disappointment, hoping my vulnerability would encourage others to share on a deeper level. I related a tough situation that launched a series of tangential events that I still deal with today. Immediately, several others felt it necessary to tell me why I shouldn’t feel disappointed. (Talk about walking into a baited theological trap!) Needless to say, I was surprised that others felt my disappointment was somehow invalid. Oddly enough, only one other person volunteered to share and that sharing came with trepidations and qualifications to keep the others from repeating their disapproval.

That type of story happens too often in Christian circles today. I know I can handle that kind of response, but what about a more fragile person?

Anymore, I feel that my role in discipling consists of one thing: to be available for other people. Just to be there. When they struggle with an area of life, rather than me telling them, “Oh, you shouldn’t be struggling,” or “You should be doing this, this, this and this,” instead I’ll be asking , “How can I be there for you to help you become more like Jesus?”

Because when it all comes down to it, God makes disciples. And He makes them by His means, in His time, under His conditions. What He asks of me is that I be available for His use as a tool in other people’s lives. “Here am I, send me” is not just a call to the mission field, but the call of one person to walk alongside another.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t teach people the things they need to know. It doesn’t mean that we don’t reprove. Only that we do it in a way forged through that incalculably valuable question, “How can I be there for you to help you become more like Jesus?” I’ve got to believe that such a perspective on discipleship, that availability, that desire to love others no matter their issues, makes all the difference when it comes to making disciples.

Because when God makes all things beautiful, they are filled with a loveliness beyond our comprehension. And that’s how it should be.

The Terrible Trio

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I don’t know why, but I love trios. I look at my favorite rock bands and a large percentage of them are trios. Rush, The Police, Cream, and The Jimi Hendrix Experience occupy a big chunk of my secular music collection (of which there is not much, let me tell you). On the Christian side, I think the best live performance I ever saw was the Charlie Peacock Trio. So trios capture my imagination.

Even bad trios.

The last few weeks have found me thinking about the state of the Church on a more visceral level. Not the high-level stuff about how to better small groups or preach more effectively, but real A hellish triomeat issues that penetrate us to the core of who we are as individual Christians.

In the end, I see three paralyzing factors that stop us dead:

  • Fear
  • Shame
  • Guilt

I have an idea that this terrible trio robs more people of effectiveness, joy, and growth in Christ than nearly anything else. Start searching the roots of the modern American Church’s problems and almost all of them can be traced to this trio.

Take any issue facing the Church today and you can filter each issue through that trio and it will make sense as to why we’re not reaching our potential in Christ.

Let’s consider evangelism. On the surface, what’s hard about evangelism? A Christian tells a non-Christian about Jesus. Simple, right?

Now add the terrible trio and see what happens to our evangelistic zeal!

  • Fear – we are inadequate for the task.
  • Shame – we may not know the Scriptures well enough to answer an inquirer’s questions adequately.
  • Guilt – we don’t share Christ often enough—or at all.

Or how about being a single Christian?

  • Fear – we will always be single and will never find lasting love in this life.
  • Shame – we keep making one relational mistake after another while others enjoy happy marriages.
  • Guilt – we’ve failed to remain sexually pure.

Or how about accepting a call to the pastorate?

  • Fear – our new congregation will wither and die while we’re on watch.
  • Shame – others have been established for years in the pastorate, so why did it take us so long?
  • Guilt – no one knows that we’re just as messed up as the average guy in the pews.

See, the terrible trio of fear, shame, and guilt can be applied to nearly any situation/event/idea that rises up in the Church. You can postulate outcomes, discern motivations, and uncover hidden belief systems all by filtering reality through the lens of the terrible trio.

This may be more personal than some folks can handle, but do you recall your wedding night? The first time you and your spouse stood naked before each other? Was that a shame-filled moment? It wasn’t for me, nor was it for my wife. In fact, what struck me in that moment more than just about anything was the utter lack of shame. Not one fleck of shame intruded into our time together. I understood then what it meant to be back in the Garden, to be as God created us. Even as a sinner, I tasted what it meant to be free from shame.

Now what if we lived out our lives in such a way that we took that lack of shame with us everywhere we went? What would happen to us as Christian if we lived without fear, without guilt?

Don’t you know that’s EXACTLY how we should be living?

So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?”
—Hebrews 13:6

For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.”
—Romans 10:11

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
—Romans 8:1-2

The terrible trio are bondage, pure and simple. As Children of the Heavenly Father, we’ve been released from those chains! Are we then living as a free people? Or do we reshackle ourselves and others?

What would a Church look like that was free of fear, a stranger to shame, and unbound from shackles of guilt?

Lord Jesus, make us a people who are devoid of fear, shame, and guilt. By Your grace, extend to us that freedom so that we might live as You intended from the beginning of time. You have bought us that right. By your Holy Spirit make that freedom real in the lives of your children. In Jesus name, amen!

That Saved a “Wreck” Like Me

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My post last week on “Two Halves of the Whole Gospel” has generated some interesting conversations. I was originally intending to do a week of posts about my work, the reason this blog exists, and some tidbits about me. However, I feel the Lord tapping me on the shoulder about expanding the “Two Halves” post.

One of my concerns for the American Church is that we’re carving the Gospel up into disparate chunks, then loving our favorite chunk to the exclusion of the rest. I believe that terrible misunderstandings and errors grow like pernicious weeds because we do this. We end up missing the Lord’s best for us.

I want to begin my point here by having you all imagine a giant junkyard filled with one wrecked/junked vehicle after another for as far as the eye can see. Rusting heaps, useless, and destined for destruction.

One day, a master mechanic pulls into the junkyard behind the wheel of his rescue vehicle.Totaled for all eternity? He hauls some vehicles away to his garage, works on their engines, then fills them with his special fuel. A couple pumps of the accelerator and that once dead engine sputters to life.

In time, the master mechanic details each vehicle. Any portion of that vehicle that doesn’t work, he repairs. He removes all the rust, patches the holes, and primes, paints and buffs the results. The vehicles begin to look as they should. In fact, they begin to look a lot like the mechanic’s own rescue vehicle.

But the master mechanic is even more wise. He knows that each one of his vehicles exists for a reason. So he equips each with specialized parts that run off his unique fuel. To some, he gives wings to fly so they can journey to distant parts of the junkyard as his representatives. To others, he gives crane arms to lift other vehicles out of ditches should they run off the road. Each vehicle receives what it needs to serve. He makes each vehicle into exactly what he desires of it for his good purpose. Some are fast, some durable, some multi-functioned, some exceptionally good at a specific task, and many even help the master mechanic retrieve more wrecks from the junkyard. In the end, those once worthless vehicles become what the master mechanic intended for them to be in the first place. They fly, roll, and sail in tune because of the master mechanic, his rescue vehicle, and his special fuel.

Perhaps it’s too simple an illustration on some levels, but I believe that’s a decent explanation of the Gospel at work.

Sadly, too many of us live as if the Gospel stops once the master mechanic retrieves a few vehicles from the junkyard, tunes them up, and fills them with his fuel. If they do they little else than sit around the master mechanic’s lot, that’s fine.

But that’s a terrible error.

Those vehicles have a purpose and that purpose is as much a part of the Gospel as anything. If we fail to understand the truth that those vehicles have a destiny as tools for the use of the master craftsman, then we’ve missed Gospel truth. The equipping for service is part of the Gospel, too, for what was once useless now lives up to the reason for which it was made! That’s the Good News as much as not resting forever in a junkyard is.

What’s frightening is what happens when the vehicles on the master mechanic’s lot do nothing but hang around the lot all day. In time, the lot begins to resemble the junkyard: plenty of parked vehicles failing to do what they were created for. Eventually, those retrieved vehicles begin to sputter for they would rather hang out in the lot then go to the garage where the master mechanic can fuel and equip them for the purpose for which they exist.

It’s not enough to no longer be a wreck. If that’s what we think, then we don’t understand the whole Gospel.