Church Issues

Discerning Opposition from Correction

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Razor wireIf you’ve been a reader of this blog long enough, you’re familiar with one of the issues I believe we Christians today need to strengthen: discernment. As the world around us decays and the Western churches look increasingly like the world, never before has discernment been so needed—and yet so lacking.

Knowing how to pray is important. When people come to us for prayer, the Holy Spirit is there to pray for us, especially when we don’t know what to pray. However, the influence of the churches we grew up in and our lack of the scriptural knowledge may overpower our faith in praying. We may very well not be praying what we ought.

Discernment carries over into prayer when we discern how to pray correctly for people who are undergoing trials.

Everyone reading this, I’m sure, believes that God is sovereign. On that we rest assured. However, knowing whether the trials of someone’s life are due to opposition from Satan or the loving correction of God is difficult. For our purposes here, let’s understand that correction is the refining of a path that a believer is on, even if it means a 180 degree turn. Opposition is the figurative “hitting the wall,” when nothing at all can get through and everything appears fruitless. At issue is that, from our limited perspective, the two might seem interchangeable.

I think most people believe one of the following ideas about correction in a person’s life:

    1. God corrects by utilizing His own direct agency.
    2. God uses his ultimate sovereignty over Satan to permit the Enemy to serve as a tool of correction.
    3. Time and chance happen to all; this includes “correction.”
    4. We are not being corrected by anything or anyone outside of ourselves.

Most people would also tend to believe that opposition occurs in one of these ways:

    A. God opposes those who are out of His will by utilizing His own direct agency.
    B. God uses His sovereignty over Satan to permit the Enemy to oppose the wayward.
    C. The thief comes to steal and destroy; Satan is the opposer, not God.
    D. Because of the Fall, everything is tainted. What some view as “opposition” is only the practical result of a fallen world.
    E. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Nothing outside of ourselves is opposing us.

Some will argue that people may operate out of more than one of those concepts listed, but should they happen to have multiple views operating, one will usually be primary.

Let’s see how this applies in reality…

A godly man named George, who ran a grocery store for years, believes that God is guiding Him to sell his very profitable grocery in order to start a ministry. Having seen the difficulty that some ministries endure in getting emergency food, water, and medical supplies to stricken areas, he starts a logistics company to streamline this process. George sells off the grocery and puts his life’s savings into his new company, the ministry he feels called to serve through.

At first the new company does very well, but a large secular multinational notes the success of George’s smaller company and moves into its marketspace. George’s company immediately begins to suffer. He prays every day that his ministry will stay afloat. However, his ministry/company is losing money rapidly, only being kept afloat by George’s dwindling personal savings.

One Sunday, George winds up in your church asking you for prayer about his problem. Which of the principles of correction or opposition listed above guides the way that you pray for George? Is he being corrected or opposed? And in what way?

Or consider your next-door neighbor Nancy, whose nineteen-year-old stepdaughter Meredith has been mistreating her own child. Nancy, a strong Christian, has been attempting to intercede on behalf of her grandchild, knowing that the state is close to removing custody of the child from Meredith. Ultimately, the state places the child in a foster home and Nancy is still locked in an increasingly futile fight for custody.

When Nancy is sharing her story with you and asks for prayer, along what lines of reasoning above does your prayer follow?

So how do you view and pray for George’s and Nancy’s situations? Did George hear God’s guidance, or is God correcting George’s waywardness. Or is this simply a case of Satan’s opposition to godly initiatives? And what about Nancy’s fight? How do you see her battle? How would you pray?

Your answers and comments are very much appreciated!

Random Thoughts on a Friday Morning

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Wanted to type something profound today and just don't have it in me, so I thought I'd pass along some others who are speaking better than I.

Doug Groothuis over at Culture Watch: Thoughts of a Constructive Curmudgeon writes one awesome post after another. His most recent on suffering ties in well with some of the themes I've explored this last week in The Practice of the Practical Gospel and The Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome.

A Slice of Infinity asks why there are so few worship songs written today that seek to find God in the midst of suffering. Very good question and perhaps a reflection of the American Church's revulsion for anything but party time.

Popping the balloon of complacent discipleship, Dallas Willard ponders the fire insurance religion we've made out of the Gospel and wonders if that insurance even exists. Again, nice tie-in to my previous posts this week.

I pray that everyone who reads this will take the opportunity this weekend to draw alongside someone who stumbled or who is torn by suffering. Take them out to lunch or dinner and pay for their meal. Just listen to them and let them talk. More than ever, we need each other now and in the days to come. Be the Church.

The Practice of the Practical Gospel

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Weeping angel sculptureTim Challies had a convicting analysis earlier this week concerning the shallowness of Evangelicalism. I think that more and more of us are fed up with the state of the American Church in general, and Tim puts a fine point on our flailing around:

The shallowness of evangelicalism leaves it largely inequipped to deal with the difficult issues. If we are to be a people that brings hope to the hopeless, purpose to the purposeless and joy to those who know only sorrow, we must be prepared to give answers that are biblically-based and Scripturally-satisfying. To do this we must wrestle with the difficult doctrines of sin, love, sorrow and suffering. We must be prepared not only to give an answer for the hope that lives within us, but for the suffering that causes us to draw upon that hope and to take our refuge in Christ Jesus, the One whose death gives us hope for now and for eternity.

Amen to that.

Yet I think that for the Church in America to really live out the Gospel it has to go one step further. While I agree that the Church must do a better job with our answers, I believe even more strongly that we must radically improve our praxis, the very practical living out of the faith that lies behind those answers.

While I may get dinged by some for suggesting this, if it were merely an issue of biblical answers, I could type up an appropriate set of Bible verses, add in a dash of exposition by a famous Christian of yesteryear, and simply hand out the right pages that would address the specific problem of this person or that. In this way, no one could ever claim that they didn't get answers to their pain.

However, if you'd just had your world ripped apart, is a package of answers wrapped neatly in a bow going to assuage your anguish or make you feel loved? Not likely.

If Christianity were just about answers, then it's reached its pinnacle because you can Google for answers and get a gazillion and a half Web sites—including this one—ready to dispense Christian truth at a moment's notice.

But we're not the Blog of Christ. We're the Body. That Body wasn't created to go into the hellholes of Earth and hand out a tract, but to be the very arms of Jesus around a broken person who needs a shoulder to cry on more than she needs someone armed with a relentless set of answers.

This isn't to say that Tim's wrong. No, he's absolutely right. The problem arises in that answers must be accompanied by someone who cares enough to go the second mile. Postmodern people expect that everyone will claim to have answers, but they're more willing to listen to those bearers of truth who demonstrate compassion first and answers second—and for good reason: the rightness of what we believe was never intended by God to exist in a vacuum barren of human interaction. We're the Body of Christ (and not merely the Answers of Christ) by His wisdom, and we gut the Gospel if we think we can casually drop an answer bomb on hurting people and walk away. Yet how many thousands of times a day, especially on Sunday, does that happen in our churches, workplaces, and homes?

No one supports apologetics more than I do. The Bible clearly states that each one of us should know that of which we speak. Still, the fact remains: one of the primary reasons the Western world doesn't take the Church seriously (and even the Western Church doesn't take itself seriously) is we thought we could trade godly, compassionate relationships for easily dispensed solutions.

Any regular reader of Cerulean Sanctum must get tired of me preaching this, but the whole truth is that the Gospel transforms fully only in vital community. Ignore community long enough and the power of the Gospel to change lives is diminished. Not because the Gospel failed, but because our practical expression of it in community failed. This is wholly our problem and not anything that's wrong with the Gospel.

How so? If we're not willing to sit for hours on end with the grieving congregant who just buried his fiancée days before their wedding, what then should we expect of him when it is our turn to mourn? Our lesson to him is that it is easier to quote a few appropriate passages of Scripture than it is to give the one thing we value more than anything else today: ourselves. Over time, people learn that only short, well-rehearsed scripts can be expected and not a knock on a door that reveals an empathetic face ready to listen rather than dispense answers. Pass enough of this anti-Christian interpersonal neglect around within a worshiping community and I can guarantee we can make Sunday (and the rest of the week for that matter) as empty of God's compassion as the darkest portions of hell.

Answers matter. But in the end those answers have a proscribed destination: people. Why then are we so willing to ignore people or give them only a minute of our time on our way to whatever we deem in the moment to be more important than they are?

We will never have a greater mission than to be Christ to the people we encounter daily. If we can't make room for them, then no matter how much of the Bible we memorize, nor how many answers we're equipped to provide, our ministry will bear no fruit.