Church Issues

Frauds

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By the time I’d counted my tenth radar-wielding cop in only twenty miles, I could only shake my head. I’m no speed demon, don’t get me wrong. Still, I knew our ride back home from visiting the in-laws over Memorial Day would be more snail-like than usual. People get cowed by all the law enforcement and they take on a herd mentality that makes good driving impossible.

When a mobile cop car pulled onto the highway, I knew we were done for. Every lead-footed, Top-Gear-watching, Michael Schumacher wannabe suddenly spazzed and downshifted into second. Think “trailing the pace car” kind of gridlock here as about forty vehicles all jammed together behind the cop car, each driver petrified of passing him. Three lanes of gear jockeys cursing their dumb luck scrunched onto I-71 heading south through Amish country. Oh, joy.

What did I think? What a bunch of frauds.

And they were frauds twice over, too. If they truly were crazed speed enthusiasts, you’d think one would have the guts to pass the cop (who was doing about 55 in a 65 zone). On the other hand, they all acted like law-abiding little old ladies out for a Sunday drive in their pristine K-cars—another lie.

Frauds.

I think most of us are frauds, each in his or her own way. Our society doesn’t reward honesty. Doesn’t give out medals to people who keep it real. We may think Jeff Bridges’ iconic character from The Big Lebowski, The Dude, epitomizes a guy just being, but he’s a fictional character in a movie mouthing fictional statements written by someone else. The whole thing smacks of fraud when you distill it down to its essence.

I think most people in this country would die a thousand times over if other people knew what they were truly like, could know their thoughts, could feel their insecurities. I think most spouses have never scratched the surface of what the other looks like deep in his or her heart of hearts.

I’m convinced that far too many Christians in churches around this country live a fraudulent life filled with keeping up an aura of spiritual perfection. They go through life as someone they’re not. FraudsA few live in such self-deception they don’t even know they’re doing it. Still, most do know—and they hate themselves for it.

In the very early days of this blog, I’d get e-mails from folks castigating me for being holier than thou simply because I pointed out a few things I thought we all could do better. Me, holy? No, I’m just as fraudulent as the next guy. I think as time went by, people saw through whatever mask they thought I was holding up. But what they didn’t see was the more subtle one I wear all the time. It looks like me, only better, stronger, sharper, and swifter—but most of all, more spiritual.

When we age, the first thing that goes is pretense. Suddenly, the young punk down the street we used to dust in pickup basketball is creaming us every Saturday. We reek of wintergreen the day after, too. In the silence of our homes, we hear the knees creaking.

It happens the same way in the soul of the Christian attuned to the Lord. (At least it should.) We wake up and see that same masked face in the mirror. And when we pray, the Holy Spirit shows us that same lingering shadow of the Old Nature. He tries to get us to admit we’re frauds, but it doesn’t come easy. People talk. People have opinions. People, people, people—that same old fear of men. A snare, the Bible says.

The Bible also says this:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
—2 Corinthians 5:17-21

We are ambassadors of Christ, and as such we represent the government of a new Kingdom with reconciliation as its message. And ambassadors don’t get to be ambassadors by clinging to fraudulent identities. No, they endure a character trial that proves their mettle. In other words, No Frauds Allowed.

All of creation awaits our coming into our ambassadorship. It’s groaning, in fact, that we come into our own, that “own” Christ established before the foundation of the world.

If only we’d put down the fraudulent lives, the fears, the secrets, and step into the Light.

And Now a Word from Our Sponsor…

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I read another blogger’s comment that she received some words prayed over her this last weekend. Now comes the mulling of whether or not those words constitute a clear leading of God.

I can sympathize with that conundrum. I use the word conundrum because we receive a lot of “words” in today’s Church, but all too few of them turn into anything at all, making receiving such a word a dicey proposition.

It shouldn’t be that way.

Though I count myself a charismatic and thus have been exposed to hundreds of words prayed over me in my lifetime, I can count on two hands the number that truly reflected the intervention of God. That’s a darned poor track record for “words.”

Scarier still: all the ones I can verify as legit came from the same two men, one an oldster in the Faith and the other a young man old in soul.

Two men in thirty years of my Christian life. Two.

You’ve got to wonder at the damage all those phony messages from God cause. The prophet is in!If I hear another person mention they’re going to a prophecy conference I’m going to lose it. Those folks follow these so-called prophets around like groupies and it’s sad. Considering the accuracy of today’s modern prophets, you’ve got to wonder how many of those conference attendees have had hundreds of words prayed over them, none of them amounting to more than so much air. Yet the addiction’s there, so they go, always seeking, but never finding.

Don’t get me wrong here. I believe in modern day prophecy and gifts of wisdom and knowledge. I’ve given out a few of those in my life, emphasis on few. I’m hearkening back through time and I can count perhaps three—at the most. Why so few? I don’t speak unless I’m absolutely sure of my source.

It bugs me that for all these prophetic words, almost none of them resemble Jesus’ warning to the man at the pool of Bethesda: stop what you’re doing or something bad is going to happen to you. Usually the word consists of some vague reference to how God loves the person receiving the word so much and has grandiose plans for him or her. Every once in a while, you do get someone calling out a “Jezebel spirit” just to keep from seeming too positive. (All I can say is that this Jezebel spirit’s getting a workout in some charismatic circles. Must be exhausted by now.)

It’s all too easy to make up some high-falutin’ spiritual language talking about great nations, lampstands, and watchmen. Curiously enough, none of those handful of accurate words prayed over me ever contained such language. Most were just plain talk. But at least they were right.

On the bogus side, I once received a word from someone telling me I would be a great nation. I’m not truly sure what that’s supposed to mean, although I’m convinced my wife wouldn’t go along with it. Our pastor came from a household with fourteen kids and I can tell you that the Mrs. shudders at the thought. Another time, two very earnest women insisted I’d be getting back into camping ministry “in the next few months,” but my phone’s not rung for that idled career in fifteen years. That’s a whole lot of months.

Pity the poor person who has those mistaken words turned against them, too. When some minor prophet makes a pronouncement and it doesn’t come to pass, it’s never the prophet who’s wrong. It’s the poor unfortunate who received the bad word who gets his or her mustard seed of faith questioned. I don’t know about the prophet, but when I read the Scriptures it says that God’s words don’t return void.

I wish I didn’t have to write this post. Yet with all these “words from the Lord” being bandied about, someone needs to speak up.

About ten years ago, I remember a church meeting where a man stood up and relayed a highly specific word. (Note: the details have been changed for privacy concerns.) This man had a word of knowledge about a woman whose teenage daughter Josie had run away from home, traveled south, and was now deeply immersed in the drug culture of Miami. She’d been gone for three years now, effectively missing, though the mother had heard from her once in that time. The man went on to say that the mother needed to contact her daughter at that last known phone number, even though the daughter had not been at that number for more than a year. The man then said the daughter was afraid to call her mother, but if the mother called her first, God would do a great healing in both their lives and they would be restored to each other. But the mother needed to make that call to the only phone number she had.

My wife turned to me and noted that we didn’t know anyone in the church who fit those details and she suspected the word was wrong. Our small church met in a rented facility, and what no one knew was that a woman had come in to prepare the building for another activity later that day. She was in a back room and heard that word over the building’s sound system. Amazed, she wandered up front to the man who gave the word and told how astonished she was that anyone knew her situation. She prayed with some folks, then went home and called her daughter at that phone number. And yes, everything the man said came to be.

Now THAT’S a word folks. It’s specific. It contains information that can only be spiritually discerned. It intersects with known realities. It meets a need. It makes something happen because of the faith of the hearer who trusts it. And, most of all, it comes to pass.

I guess I’m tired of the burden of proof falling on the one receiving these supposed words from God from someone else. I don’t want to seem glib, put I think “put up or shut up”—a most earthy sort of spiritual testing— applies. If all these folks delivering words have a track record that resembles a 500:1 shot bound for the glue factory, then they need to sit down and stop hurting others with their “gift.”

And yeah, I get a little steamed thinking about it. I wish more of us did.

Goodbye, Jerry

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Jerry FalwellThough I normally don’t comment on the deaths of well-known people, I need to write about the loss of Jerry Falwell.

Al Mohler posted some thoughts on Falwell and the resulting comment firestorm caught me by surprise for its sheer mean-spiritedness on both sides. Even in death, Falwell proves a most polarizing figure.

I didn’t know Rev. Falwell at all. Never met him. I watched him preach a few times on TV, but honestly, I was more interested in following his ASL interpreter. (I was learning ASL at the time.) Falwell’s preaching didn’t do much for me.

I wish Falwell had not become the face of Evangelicalism. I cringed every time the press went to him or to Pat Robertson for comments on current events. But Falwell was a product of the South, and he spoke like a true Southerner: unashamed of his opinions and happy to let you know them. If you understood that, you understood the man.

So as much as I wasn’t a fan, I wish to comment on two important truths, one he reinforced and one he later said.

No matter what any Christian thinks of Jerry Falwell, he decisively answered a most important question that all Christians must consider: Does a sacred/secular divide exist?

For most of Christian history, the answer has been yes. Jerry Falwell said no. And I believe he was right.

We can’t underestimate the profundity of pulling down the curtain between the sacred and the secular. Many of us today fail to realize how much we’ve gained by understanding that all of life is sacred, and it loses none of its sacredness when it intersects with everyday living. Eliminating that divide better frames the Kingdom of God in its proper context. The Kingdom penetrates everything it touches when Christians advance.

Jerry Falwell believed that Christians should not be ashamed to enter secular realms with the Gospel. Before he came on the scene, too many of us lived a double life. He didn’t found the idea, but he made it popular for Christians to go into the highways and byways of the world confident in Christ.

We forget what it was like before Falwell, don’t we?

Sadly, while the idea reflects God’s heart, the execution of that mandate doomed itself by going too far. Instead of letting the light of Christ speak, we decided to make something happen. Like Moses striking the rock, we overstepped our bounds and made a laughingstock of Evangelicalism. We equated expanding the Kingdom into secular realms with attempting to rule it with a not-so-subtle iron fist. In effect, the mishandling of the elimination of the sacred/secular divide led to power grabs from overly smug Evangelicals, rather than a humble glowing of light from within the traditionally dark areas of life long ago abandoned by believers.

Such promise….

As for what Falwell said, this comment post-9/11 got a lot of press:

“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.'”

Despite the fact that Falwell later apologized for the remark, I believe he was right—though not just in regard to the sins of those easy whipping boys.

For decades, America’s been gradually slouching toward Gomorrah. Some will claim the blame goes to the groups Falwell targeted in his comment. Others will say our lack of compassion for the poor, justice for the disenfranchised, and love for the least of these surpasses the sins of those other groups. Yet more will say that our materialism and pillaging of the planet at the the expense of other peoples and nations are the cause. Whatever the case, Falwell looked at 9/11 as a wake up call for the soul of our country.

Unfortunately, few of us seem to have answered that call. We just go on our merry way, humming a tune only we know, oblivious to signs of impending judgment.

So it’s hard not to see Jerry Falwell for what could have been. We Christians in America got Falwell for a spokesperson rather than a more Francis Schaeffer-like mouthpiece. Never one for subtlety, Falwell pushed everything fast, hard, and far. Excess toppled it all in the end.

Still, as much as some Christians are ashamed of Falwell for that excess, I can still thank him for making more of us aware of the truth that the Kingdom of God is not hemmed in. Christians do have a mandate to be salt and light in the most tasteless and dark places. If that’s ultimately his legacy, it’s a fine one to leave us.