Faith

Faith, the Opposite of Control

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If you were to ask me what one lesson stands out in my life in this last decade, I would point to control.

Fact is, you and I don’t have any. Control is an illusion created by our culture. We in America idolize the self-made bootstrapper, yet if we can’t control whether or not we take our next breath, then ultimately, we are not in control of our lives.

Most people in America, most Christians even, have their minds fogged by the illusion of control. And the illusion is easy to believe because we surround ourselves with gadgets and services that perpetuate it. We read books, especially self-help tomes, that reinforce that we can be masters of our personal kingdoms. We are told that getting ahead is all about our own efforts. Our society holds out a roadmap that shows that if we just work hard enough, we can walk from the mall entrance to Neiman Marcus.

But if you’ve lived long enough, you begin to see what we have been fed about controlling our lives is a lie. Sometimes, no matter how hard we work toward a goal, it never arrives. Sickness intrudes. Randomness strikes. A butterfly in China flaps its wings and a tornado destroys a palatial estate accrued through decades of sweat. In the great mall of life, we end up in Spencer Gifts staring at black light posters instead of negotiating down the price of a Botero at Neiman.

The Great Recession, as this economic downturn has been called, is proving to be a factor in waking some Americans out of the control delusion. People who did everything right, who followed the mall map to a T, still saw their shopping trip of life go awry. Now they sit in the food court sucking down an Orange Julius and not the complimentary Roederer Cristal handed out by the luxury retailers.

I suspect that the next couple years will be an enormous wake-up call to Americans, for many will find themselves progressively sliding down the class ranks. And the resulting anguish will be like nothing our generation has ever seen.

But then, basing our lives on our own ability to control them can have no other outcomes except grief. The expectations run too high.

A few years ago, I read The Black Swan, a fascinating book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The author posits that too few people account for the unexpected and that most success is illusory, the product of chance happenings that are all that separate the board room from the mail room. Taleb states that those business celebrities who write books about how they achieved their success might as well have saved all their scribblings and just written, Hey, I got here by dumb luck. When even the secular crowd wakes up to the lack of control we have over our destinies, maybe hope for positive change within our country remains.

What the Bible says:

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. 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 9:11-12

I have known too many cases where hard work failed to win the day. I have known too many people who did everything right, but they still got steamrolled by events they could not foresee. I know people who made decisions praised as wise by the wisest of the wise, but who still saw that wise choice end in bitter fruit.

We are not in control of our lives. We deceive ourselves when we insist we are.

For the Christian, the answer to the delusion of control is here:

You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.
—1 Corinthians 6:19b-20a

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
—Colossians 3:2-3

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
—2 Corinthians 4:17-18

As I look at the American Church of 2010, I see people struggling to maintain control. We consider ourselves to be our own, masters of imagined destinies that line up more with the American Dream than with having a mind set on the eternal unseen. To such people, the following verse is the strangest in the Bible and is prayed with the least conviction:

Give us this day our daily bread….
—Matthew 6:11

When we have surrendered control of our lives entirely to Jesus, we can pray Matthew 6:11 with joy.

But for too many people, praying such a prayer becomes an issue of abandoning too much control. It asks too much. It asks us to rely on something foreign to us: faith.

You see, faith is the opposite of control. Faith says, “I do not know what tomorrow will hold. I cannot even control today. Instead, I will live by the Spirit. Jesus leadsI will live with the uncertainty of the world and instead exercise the muscle of faith that I have let atrophy for too long. Christ is in me; therefore, I have hope.”

The times we live in now will tax many people. All the old refuges will fail. The Church must revise the way it thinks about life, putting Christ first and its own finaglings last. We will have to experience what it means to depend on Jesus alone for physical healing because we can no longer control our health care because we can no longer afford doctors and hospitals. It will mean praying for food and expecting to receive it, even when the grocery store shelves are bare. It will mean learning to be thankful for even the smallest blessing we receive in faith from God. It will finally mean learning to move beyond just talking about faith and actually living it.

Fuzzy Church

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The times we live in are growing increasingly difficult for people to navigate. It’s hard to  ignore the cultural and societal breakdown. The wicked seem to flourish, and the righteous increasingly find it tougher to cope in a world where truth is called a lie and love is considered hate.

The anger in this country runs at a fever pitch, and as Christians, who claim to have citizenship in a different world, the tendency to want to fight back becomes overwhelming. Don’t we have rights? Don’t we have a mandate to right wrongs? Are we not Americans, too?

With so many conflicting voices out there, sorting through the noise takes concentration. It demands focus, a singleminded devotion to what is core—especially core to Christianity.

For that reason, I want to state the obvious, because with all the shrill voices we hear daily, what is obvious is proving harder to remember.

So here is the obvious:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

And to that I must add this one truth that we must also never forget:

Any other mission is a distraction.

Do we understand this? I don’t think we do. When I look at the American Church today, it looks fuzzy around the edges, out of focus, blurred. Our goals are nebulous. We’re pulled in a million directions, with each of us dedicated to some pet ministry project that doesn’t intersect any other ministry project. In addition, we daily add some other front to the culture war. We’re already fighting this agenda and that, yet each day another agenda from some godless group crops up and we have to open a new war front.

Countless Christians fight the cultural, political, and societal wars. It used to be that just raising awareness of some new sinful agenda was enough, but when that didn’t work, counterattacks had to be devised. People were encouraged to join the cause. Church gone fuzzyFires were stoked in the faithful. Write and email our congressman; demand he or she take action. Protest. Get on the picket lines. Let the world see our faithfulness by how hard we fight godless agendas. And when that fails to work, let’s get angry. Our foes are angry, so why not show them we can be even nastier. If they fight with a lit torch, then we counter with a flamethrower! They get their lawyers, but we get twice as many! Sue! File lawsuits!  Shout, yell, scream! And when that doesn’t work, just do it longer and louder! Keep raising the stakes! If they want martyrs, then martyrs they shall have! Let the blood run in the streets if it has to, but the cause of Christ must be established in America, come hell or high water! And if it takes bashing a few heads to get there, then let the bashing commence!

Somewhere, amid all that seething Christian anger and frustration, buried by using the mechanisms of the world to fight the world, two vital truths at the core of everything we are to be about as Christians get lost:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

It seems to me that we Christians don’t seem to be learning that it’s not by might nor by power but by God’s Spirit. (I think God said that, so it must be trustworthy.)

The Church in America has gone off message. Fuzziness becomes inevitable. We’re not effective at stemming the tides of all these social, political, and cultural dysfunctions we want to see corrected because we’re trying to fix them apart from the core of what we are about:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

Many Christians talk about taking dominion, but the only way that dominion comes about is by meeting the enemy’s footsoldiers and converting them into Christians. If the opposing army is now on your side, you’ve won the war.

It’s so simple.

But instead of focusing on Jesus while we lead people to Him and disciple them into maturity, we Christians go all fuzzy. We dilute our efforts and our focus by going after agendas, many of them longtime agendas against which we have made little progress despite millions of hours devoted to fighting them.

What would happen if we took all the effort devoted to fighting all these fronts and devoted it to active evangelism instead? What would be gained by millions of hours of dedicated evangelism and training up new believers into Christian maturity?

I ask those questions because our country has never experienced less evangelism and discipling to maturity than in these times. Statistics show that fewer Americans attend church and have never been less interested in the Christian message than today. Not only have we lost the culture wars because we focused on them to the detriment of our core calling, but by jumping on so many bandwagons that are NOT core, the pews in our churches emptied faster than in any time in our country’s history.

Want to end abortion?

Want to stop the homosexual agenda?

Want to restore ethics to business?

Want to fight indecency all around us?

Want to restore the principles that made America a great nation?

Want to see the Church grow and lift Jesus up?

There is only one answer:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

Business, America, and the Courage to Do What Is Right

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One major lesson learned from the economic meltdown is that far too many people in American business today are morally bankrupt. And it seems the higher up you go in the corporate org chart, the more malfeasance one finds. The post-Enron push made by companies to hire more ethical workers has been shown for the farce it is. We continue to hire and promote foxes for hen-house guard duty.

With allegations of fraud dogging Goldman Sachs, and with further indictments and allegations (thankfully) coming to others behind this debacle, the question is: Are we going to learn anything about the bankruptcy of the American soul from this?

I want to pass along a story on CNN written by Bob Greene. It details a transaction that goes on many thousands of times in this country each day, though this transaction has a slight, but important, twist. Greene tells of his encounter with Mark Dalton, the owner of a mom-and-pop bookstore, after purchasing a used book online:

In 2008, I found a book I was looking for on that Amazon marketplace, and submitted an order. The price was more than reasonable: $6.95 for the used hardcover. Used books are not shipped by Amazon itself, but by the local booksellers.

A week or so after I placed the order, the package arrived, from High View Books in Smithfield, Rhode Island. The book seemed to be in good shape. I was pleased.

But with it was a personal letter to me. It said:

“Thank your for your recent book order. I have enclosed a check to you for $2.95. The reason for this is that this book is only in ‘Very Good’ condition, while I mistakenly described it as being in ‘Near Fine’ condition in my listing. Please accept my apologies for the error. (Also, please note, the soiling that you see on the dust jacket is actually on the Mylar and not the dust jacket itself.)”

[Dalton] wrote that he hoped his apology and the refund were satisfactory. Sure enough, tucked into the book was a check made out to me, for $2.95.

Greene goes on to mention that the condition issue was beyond his ability to discern. Instead, he was surprised that anyone would go to the lengths Dalton did to ensure that the sale was completely up and up, especially for an item with such a small price tag.

As they say, read the whole thing (“A $2.95 Lesson for Wall Street“).

One of these days the business world is going to wake up to the reality of genuine customer service. But beyond that, I hope they finally discover whatever moral compass the owner of High View Books possesses.

The allure of money in our society, that “get rich quick by any means necessary” mentality that permeates our culture, may be only one of our many vices, but it certainly is the root of great evil. My brother had a CAT scan done recently and got a $4,000 bill for the procedure. That’s insanity for what amounts to a glorified x-ray, but I’m sure it reflects a “gotta get my cut” reality from a dozen different sources who stand to profit from that scan.

I don’t know about you, but I find that kind of pile-on mentality wicked. Yet it’s the norm anymore in America. It’s why an airplane ticket is more fees and taxes than payment for time spent in the plane traveling. It’s why gas prices are so high, why it costs so much to educate our kids in public schools, and why the answer to everything governmental seems to be a tax hike. It’s the Great Gouge. We’ve reached an era when sick people avoid the doctor not because of the fear of a cancer diagnosis but of bankruptcy!

But in a bookstore in Rhode Island, a man realized a $6.95 used book may not have been in the condition he described, so he refunded the purchaser $2.95.

In contrast, on Wall Street we have morally bereft con men who knowingly sold worthless securities because they could get rich, even if their jackpot ruined other people.

I say all this because The Wall Street Journal once featured an article that exposed the religious backgrounds of all the major players in the Enron,  WorldCom, and other business scandals of the early 2000s. They found that almost all the people with the dirtiest hands were pillars of their churches.

I don’t know anything about the religious beliefs of the owner of the bookstore in Greene’s story. But I know that he had far more Christian character than church elder Ken Lay of Enron infamy.

The little things matter folks. There’s courage in sending back $2.95. God not only looks at our weights and measures, but He knows what we do in secret.

As Christians, do we conduct our daily business with God in mind? When there’s money to be made, do we join the pile-on, even if it ends up hurting people? Would we have sent back $2.95 because the book we sold was a fraction less perfect than we had described?

Honestly, if America wants to get back to greatness, a good first step would be for American businesses to fire the morally bankrupt (no matter how high up the org chart) and hire godly men and women who realize that the God they serve is always watching.

In ending, I want to help reward the courage to send a $2.95 refund. While I could not find an online link to them directly, I did find contact info and a means to order books directly from High View Books through Biblio. So the next time you want to buy a book, consider supporting High View Books. And let’s send a message that character still counts.