Leadership

When the Devil Seems to Win

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A little country church tucked just off Main Street, Trinity Fellowship had served the community for years and did it well. They had experienced growth over the last year—eight new families—but they had also experienced something less encouraging.

Rebecca Simms worried that her youngest daughter would end up in jail. She did.

Mike Travers heard about the layoffs a month ago. The pink slip came yesterday, his third in three years.

Emma Andersen, two semesters away from graduating from college (the first in her family), got that fated letter saying her full-ride scholarship money had dried up due to tough economic times.

Bryan and Lydia Preston found out two weeks ago they were expecting their first child. This morning, they learned something was wrong with the baby.

Between the six people on the leadership team at Trinity, they suffered a miscarriage, cancer, a bankruptcy, the suicide of a child, crippling depression, and an affair that led to divorce. Three are no longer in ministry and may never return.

Last Sunday, Daryl Wells, the worship leader, led a song that contained a lyric out of Isaiah 54:17: “No weapon formed against you shall prevail.” More than one person singing that morning wondered if the words were true.

Sometimes, the Devil seems to win.

Trinity Fellowship and the people who comprise it are the product of this writer’s imagination. But they might as well be real, because their stories are. Every Sunday in America, someone, somewhere, is sitting in church wondering how it all went wrong. For some, it’s a question asked many times.

It’s not enough to say we live in a fallen world. That brings no comfort at all. Nor does it make sense of the mountain of Scriptures that say that God rescues His people from calamity. Let’s be honest here: More than once, you’ve wondered why the Scriptures don’t line up with your experience of life.

I’m not wise. I make a lot of mistakes wise people wouldn’t make. But several decades of observation take me back to the same answer for this issue.

The Devil seems to win for one major reason: We don’t pray.

I think we’ve all learned that when someone says he will pray for us, he probably won’t. It’s not a malicious promise, though. The intent is there, but we all know how life intrudes and the best of intentions remains nothing but intentions. Angelic warfareIt seems to be the human condition.

Succumbing to the human condition is not what the Church is supposed to be about, though. Our God is not a god of settling.

I used to think that my condition was largely due to my own prayers—or the lack of them. I don’t believe that anymore.

Sure, what we pray for ourselves matters. But God means the Church to be a Body, a collective, a community that lives and dies by what the whole does. If I’m not praying for you and you’re not praying for me, then the Devil wins.

Several years ago, I attended a Christian Camping International conference, with Leighton Ford as the keynote speaker. He told us about a flight where he sat next to a man who prayed the entire flight. Ford assumed the man feared flying, so he broke in at one point to offer some comfort. Only then did he notice the sheet of paper the man clutched. On it were the names of many prominent Christian leaders. When Ford questioned him about this, the man confessed that he had been praying for the downfall of the people on the list.

Ford informed us that, with the passage of time, all but one of those leaders had seen their ministry—and their personal lives—destroyed.

I don’t think Evangelicals take the Devil seriously. We don’t see life as a battle. We blithely float here and there, mostly prayerlessly, and let the river carry us wherever it may. Then when we wash up on the rocks, we wonder what happened.

It’s not enough that we pray for ourselves. We need others to watch our backs for us, because many times we are too close to our own lives to see where we may be exposed to enemy fire.

People in ministry positions are the prime targets of the Enemy. Take down a pastor and an entire church can go down with him. I recently heard that a thriving, well-known church my wife and I visited a few years back blew up entirely after the pastor screwed up. And don’t think that doesn’t wreck a lot of bystanders, because it does. Maybe not at first, but that kind of disaster eats at people’s spiritual guts, fosters corrosive cynicism, and does enormous damage.

Really, how hard is it to pray for others in our churches, especially for those in prominent roles? Isn’t it much harder to fix the craters and wounds from shrapnel when a life blows up due to the lack of a prayer covering?

Kind of a Pentecostal term there, prayer covering. Regardless of whether or not it’s Christianese, it’s reality. When bad things happen to people, be they lost or saved, the holes in their prayer covering—if they even have a prayer covering at all—may explain everything.

I’m to the point in my life where I honestly believe that almost all of the hardship we see in life is due to a lack of prayer. Those Scriptures that don’t align with life don’t because we’re just not taking prayer as seriously as the Scriptures do.

God Speaks Through Dreams

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“‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy. And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.'”
—Acts 2:17-21

At my church’s VBS last week, the theme revolved around Joseph, the one who by God’s revelation saved all of the known biblical world. The dream of JosephGod spoke that plan of salvation to Joseph through dreams.

Evangelicals don’t do well with dreams. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the average church who would claim to have the gift of interpreting dreams. In most churches, the mere mention of the role of dreams in directing the church, planning for the future, or meeting the needs of people too afraid to share their needs publicly will get you an initial blank stare that morphs into that “I smell a heretic” scowl.

Yet any pass through the Bible reveals dreams to be a common means of God speaking to and guiding individuals, groups, and nations.

Which is why the enormous pushback by some Christians against dreams is a big problem.

That passage in Acts that starts this post…a few questions:

1. Is the Bible the authority for how we should conduct our lives?

2. Are we still in the Last Days?

3. Is the Holy Spirit still being poured out?

If you answer yes to all three questions (and you should), then guess what? You affirm that God speaks to people today through dreams.

See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? 😉

Fact is, there’s no biblical argument that can be formed against dreams as a contemporary, God-ordained means of revelation. None.

Despite that truth, we Western Christians get upset at the idea of using dreams as a way to order our lives and the life of the Church. Why? Because dreams are messy and sometimes weird. And man, do we Westerners hate anything messy and weird in our churches! Still, that says more about our own foibles than it does about the veracity of dreams as a form of approved divine revelation.

I strongly believe, though, that our automatic rejection of any kind of God-ordained revelation that occurs outside the Bible’s chapters and verses is a major flaw in the contemporary Church. As much as I love the Bible and affirm it as the final arbiter of truth, the Bible may not speak to specific situations that are not explicitly stated in its pages. Yet the need for specific answers remains.

A case in point: For a church looking for a new pastor, the Bible does not say which of five great candidates would be the best choice. How then do we choose if all five meet the Bible’s exacting criteria for the role of pastor? By drawing straws? By hoping that the other four will get calls from other churches and leave us with only one candidate? By relying on our intellects to scry out the right man?

When the early Church had a similar issue, this is how it was resolved:

Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.
—Acts 13:1-3

Plenty of good candidates, but the Spirit did not select Simeon, Lucius, and Manaen for the work, did He?

This is how the Church is to function in those specific, individual situations to which the Bible does not directly speak:  by listening to the Holy Spirit’s extra-biblical voice.

I know that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I’m sorry. Man up, because this is what the Scriptures say in response:

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good.
—1 Thessalonians 5:19-21

So rather than tossing out all extra-biblical revelations—dreams included—we are to test them. We then retain and act on those that pass the tests.

We’re doing that, right? No? You say we’re just throwing them all out instead?

*Sigh.*

Should we be surprised then when our churches seem adrift and lacking in direction? Or when our rational church decisions produce irrational results? And what about when bad things happen to good people because no one bothered to address what may have been an unrevealed, yet fixable, problem before it got out of hand?

What would have happened to the biblical world if Joseph had despised his dreams and the dreams of others? Would we even have a Bible?

A city surrounded by enemies decides that maintaining a city army is messy, demanding, and costly. So despite what the city charter says, the city leaders decide to disband the army. When the barbarians storm the gates, won’t there be regrets for what was ignored?

Yet this happens all the time in our churches because we simply do not want to deal with dreams (and other types of supernatural revelation) as a means of legitimately hearing from God.

When I was about 18, I had a dream that a friend drove onto some train tracks and his car stalled just as a train was coming. The dream was so frightening and vivid that I awoke and started praying for my friend.

Just a few hours later, that friend told me how he’d been out in the wee hours of the morning when his car stalled on railroad tracks just as a train was coming. He couldn’t start the car and worried that he would have to leave it on the tracks, only to find his door refusing to open. But one last twist of the key got the car started, and he drove off the tracks just moments before the train came hurtling through.

What if I had ignored that dream and not prayed for my friend right then? Do you think the outcome would have been different? I do.

Someone else was blessed because I took action regarding the content of a dream.

For several years, a terrifying recurring nightmare troubled me in my 20s. The dream was always the same. I’d awake thrashing and in a sweat, my heart pounding.

I was fortunate that the University of Cincinnati is known for sleep research, so there are a greater than average number of folks in the area who deal with sleep and dreams.  I was able to find a Christian man who helped people understand their dreams. He and I spent several months working on my recurring nightmare, plus other dreams.

In the end, God gave us an answer to what the nightmare meant. Once I understood, I was able to take specific actions that resolved the issue behind it. The nightmare then ceased.

I was blessed because I took action regarding the content of a dream.

More recently, I had a recurring dream that troubled me. Going back about six years, I’d have this one dream about once a year. Then 18 months ago or so, I started having the dream about once or twice a month. I was stymied by what to do about the dream because it didn’t fit real life situations as I knew them. Nothing in the dream conformed, so I excused myself from taking action because I rationalized away the need to do anything.

Just a few days ago, I found out that this recurring dream had sadly come true. The dream proved more real than the shadowed appearance of “reality.”

I did nothing about a dream. A sad outcome resulted. Now I can’t do much about that outcome.

I believe that the outcome would have been different if I had prayed fervently about the dream, despite the seeming nonsense of it. Instead, I disbanded the army and let the barbarians storm the gates.

Four steps we can take to restore the value of dreams in our lives and in the life of the Church:

1. Believe that God wants us to listen to our dreams — He IS speaking to us, so we need to heed what He is saying.

2. Respect recurring dreams — If a dream (or dream theme) recurs, it may be God’s way of demanding our attention because the dream is important. (Genesis 41:32 — “And the doubling of Pharaoh’s dream means that the thing is fixed by God, and God will shortly bring it about.”)

3. Pray — Ask God for the following:

a. Discernment — We need to know which dreams are genuinely from Him (and not from the triple-meat pizza we ate before bedtime) and require us to take notice and action.

b. Interpretation — We must always ask for an interpretation of dreams, either by the Holy Spirit’s illumination within us or by the wise words of those blessed with a gift of interpreting dreams.

c. Direction — We must take action on God-ordained dreams once interpreted.

4. Share our dreams with other believers— A dream may not mean much alone, but when similar dreams are shared by others, a pattern may emerge; so if a dream seems vivid, don’t be afraid to talk it out with wise believers and other Christian dreamers.

Someone’s going to say it, though: “But Dan, can’t dreams be misinterpreted or mistaken?”

Yes, they can. But that’s OUR fault. Consider this:

And Pharaoh said to Joseph, “I have had a dream, and there is no one who can interpret it. I have heard it said of you that when you hear a dream you can interpret it.” Joseph answered Pharaoh, “It is not in me; God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer.”
—Genesis 41:15-16

Joseph understood the source of interpretation. If we genuinely operate in the Spirit with regard to dreams and their interpretations, God is faithful to provide answers; He is the interpreter. Like Joseph, we must be tapped into God if we are to handle dreams correctly.

Here is the starting point for handling all dreams correctly: We establish the Bible alone as the arbiter of the meaning behind a dream and its interpretation.

If I have a dream in which I leave my wife and kid and become a meth dealer, the meaning of that dream is most certainly NOT that I should leave my wife and kid and become a meth dealer. No dream interpretation or subsequent action on that interpretation should violate Scripture—ever. Scripture stands as the authority over all dreams, interpretations, and actions taken.

This is not to say that the dream itself can’t be awful or that events in the dreams can’t stand contrary to Scripture. Just as people in the Bible sometimes act contrary to the will of God, the events of dreams may portray sin. It may be that God is trying to root out sin in our lives or in the lives of someone we know.  Proceed cautiously, though.

If you or I have a dream, will God be angry with us if we take the simple baby step of praying about it? Will we be chastened by Him for taking everything—including our dreams—to Him in prayer?

If we take dreams seriously and always pray about them, I think God will bless us in mind-boggling ways. Yes, some dreams will prove to be nothing more than too much TV before bedtime, but God’s not going to be angry if we take even that dream to Him in prayer. It will just peter off into nothing of any consequence—except that we spent a little more precious time before the God who loves us.

The ramifications of ignoring dreams are huge, though. In the face of an approaching famine, the words of God that come to us in dreams may be all that stand between life and death.

So, what’s the problem with us and dreams?

What Being a Church Family Means, Part 1

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Since my last post, I’ve been struggling. No, not with some metaphysical angst like you’ve come to expect. Instead, I’ve been trying to manage the sheer amount of need I continue to encounter in the lives of others.

Regular readers know that my family’s health insurance company pulled out of the market after the Health Reform Bill passed. They simply terminated our policy and told us Obamacare would take care of us…four years from now. Circumstances make a 1:1 replacement impossible. While we may have found a solution (praise the Lord!), it’s still more tenuous than I would like. The wrong kind of diagnosis or procedure could find the chink in the insurance armor and wipe us out financially.

Reports keep rolling in from all over of other people who face enormous medical bills or can no longer afford or qualify for health insurance. A relative recently got a $4,000 bill for a simple MRI. That’s one big chunk o’ change most people don’t have lying around. Given the median household income in America, that bill for one test comes close to 7 percent of the entire household income for the year. Adding that the savings rate is negative, with people spending more than they earn, where’s the rainy day fund to pay for that MRI?

What made my relative’s situation all the more aggravating is that the MRI was inconclusive. A $4,000 swing-and-a-miss.

The fear that I hear in people’s voices when they talk about being unable to pay for essential medical procedures or being forced to roll the “may have to skip this one” dice when a diagnosis could go either way—it just breaks my heart. The number of people dropping their health insurance and gambling with the future because insurers are jacking rates in advance of the Obamacare mandatory insurance fiasco is skyrocketing.

Everywhere I turn, people are getting gouged. I talked with someone whose mechanic replaced the transmission of his car, without prior approval, as part of an approved engine overhaul. Now the shop is holding the car hostage, waiting for the owner to cough up an additional $2,500+. While that’s an extreme case, it’s not unusual to buy an affordable item only to find that it costs twice as much to repair. (Ask me about our washing machine.)

It’s a litany of woe out there. And I think it’s going to get worse.

It’s ironic that I planned to reference an old post of mine and the date on it is exactly six years ago. Not much has changed in six years, sadly, especially on this issue.

I wrote in “The Anti-Church” about how churches and the people who comprise them go awry when it comes to meeting internal needs. We take  a simple request for help and bury it under Jesus’ words about the poor always being with us. We find myriad ways to excuse not meeting the need of a brother or sister in Christ who could use a hand. And we look the other way when it all goes wrong for those requesters.

One of the defining episodes in my life was in 2001. I was sitting in the seats of the huge, suburban church I used to attend. The man sitting to the left of me told me about the massive, multi-thousand-dollar plasma TV he’d just bought and how he was going to spend the whole weekend watching sports. On my right, a man who looked like he didn’t have a friend in the world sat dejectedly. When I asked him what was wrong, he said that he’d been out of work for more than a year and had just received his first foreclosure notice from his bank. (Remember, this was 2001, though it sounds like both are ripped from today’s current headlines.)

Two men. One church. Big disconnect.

If you were to ask me what we need more of than anything else in our churches right now, it’s to let those who have a need stand up during the service and make their request before the congregation. Why this doesn’t happen in our churches is beyond me. Seriously, what is the Church for if not to bear the burdens of our brothers and sisters in Christ? And what can be a bigger burden than facing foreclosure or a a five-digit medical bill that can’t be paid?

Yet I continue to talk with people who suffer in silence. And I continue to hear church people tell me there’s no place for that kind of request in the Sunday worship service.

Bull.

Maybe if we got off our high horses such a time to share practical needs would wake us up to the reality that people in the pew right next to ours are suffering and that we Christians need each other. Maybe it would shatter our illusions of control. Maybe it would break the stranglehold of consumerism around the necks of too many of us. And maybe it would make us all more humble and drive us to be nearer to God.

Maybe? No, actually it totally would.

So why are we reluctant to do this?

I suspect that church leaders regularly hear needs confessed to them in private. In all too many cases, though, the need never gets past the pastor’s office door—and it never gets met.

It’s vacation time. Millions are hitting the skies or the road. Why not consider scaling back the expectations of vacation or curtail it entirely so as to meet the needs of people who are genuinely hurting, even people in our own churches? Do we have to go to Disneyworld? Or is a local amusement park a better value? Do we have to go out of town every year? Or can we stay in town this year and use the money to help others? Do we even have to have a formal vacation at all this year?

Does this kind of thinking mark today’s Christian? Or is the response always kneejerk and self-serving ? Do we have any idea what it means to go without a want to meet another’s need?

Lost people aren’t blind. They’re watching what we do. And when they see us living the same self-serving life that they do, they don’t see any need for this Christ we talk about every once in a while.

Julie at Lone Prairie is one of the bloggers in my Kingdom Links blogroll at right. She’s an artist and a compelling writer. She also bakes a fine cupcake, from what I read. Last week, she posted how a recent health insurance rate increase due to the Health Reform Bill was proving difficult to meet.

Want to help? Buy some of Julie’s art, T-shirts, and so on. How hard is that?

In closing, I want to share one more defining episode in my life.

Both my wife and I endured a lot of job layoffs. We always had great performance reviews, but when a company eliminates an entire department, all the great reviews ain’t gonna save you if it’s your department. Helping handsWe went through eight combined layoffs in the first 11 years of our marriage. (Trust me, that’s devastating.)

During one of those extended times of unemployment, when we were most concerned about our finances, a gentleman at an online Christian forum, someone I’d never met and barely knew online, sent us some money. It was quite generous, and I cried after I opened the envelope. I had no idea how he’d tracked us down or where he’d developed such a heart to reach out to strangers as he did.

In the end, that gift wasn’t as much about changing our finances as it was about changing my heart. That generosity altered the way I think about other people and their needs. The action of giving proved more valuable than the amount on the check.

Seriously, how hard is meeting any need, no matter the size, when we band together as the Body of Christ? Most people’s needs are not insurmountable when we work together as the Lord said we should.

Because that’s what a real family does. And when we live that way, we are changed to be more like Jesus, who gave His very life for us. How then can we not pay His gift forward?

Other posts in this series:
What Being a Church Family Means, Part 2
What Being a Church Family Means, Part 3