Benevolence

The ChristCon Con

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Each week in North America, thousands of Christians gather together in hundreds of different Christian conferences scattered across the continent. In the course of a year, millions will attend thousands of these Asleep in the Light ID Tagconferences to hear celebrity preachers preach, learn from massively credentialed Christian teachers, and enjoy fellowship with likeminded believers.

Yet we have no revival.

Pastors, worship leaders, and Sunday School teachers will attend conferences for pastors, worship leaders, and Sunday School teachers. Men, women, couples, singles, seniors, and youth all have conferences geared to their unique needs. We have countless denominations conferencing to handle policy and chart the future of their group.

Yet we have no revival.

We sponsor conferences on theology, ecclesiology, purity, pastoral care, eschatology, hermeneutics, biblical archeology, and any topic within Christendom we can imagine. We even have conferences on evangelism.

Yet we have no revival.

We drop millions of dollars on airfare, trainfare, boatfare, and gasoline to get to conferences. We line the pockets of innumerable conference speakers, teachers, facilitators, and facility owners. We have the monetary equivalent of the GDP of a small African nation to spend on lodging, dining, and even sightseeing within conference host cities.

Yet we have no revival.

On the other hand, in China, where the flames of revival burn white-hot, the Communist Chinese police hope against hope that the Chinese house churches will start arranging conferences. What better way to round up renegade Christian leaders by the conference-full, bind them in shackles, and toss them into some prison hell-hole—some never to be heard from again.

But born-again Chinese Christians know better, so they don’t hold conferences.

Consider:

Chinese Church: No Christian conferences. No one attending conferences. No money spent attending conferences. Yet revival gloriously blazes on.

North American Church: Thousands of Christian conferences yearly. Millions of people attending conferences. Untold millions of dollars spent attending conferences. Yet we have no revival.

Concerning the status of the North American Church and its love for conferences, the Bible supplies us an apt phrase: Chasing after wind.

I make no pretense toward the prophetic, but I have a word for us all:

One day, you and I will stand before the Lord at His Judgment Seat and He will ask us if we told the lost about Him, discipled others to spiritual maturity, fed the poor, clothed the naked, attended the sick, and visited the prisoner.

But He won’t be asking how many Christian conferences we attended.

Some will object to this post. I simply ask this: Are our churches so weak that we can’t disciple anyone to any reasonable level of maturity, so we have to send everyone running off to a plethora of conferences to take up the slack? If so, we should instead be staying home and fixing our churches with prayer, fasting, and faces-in-the-dust repentance. But do we do this? No. We pack people off to conferences. And as we’ve seen, we have thousands of conferences and yet we have no revival.

Do we understand how seriously we’re squandering the Lord’s resources? If we did, we’d get serious about this Faith we supposedly hold dear and stop treating it like a hobby (with fancy conferences that make us feel good about ourselves—yet accomplish next to nothing eternal).

What if each of us took the money we had allocated to yet another conference on our calendars and instead used that money to pay for medical care for the uninsured single mother with four kids who lives down the street? What if we took the weekend we would have spent with our posteriors planted in some padded theater seat soaking up a message we already know from yet another “gifted” speaker we’ve heard a bazillion times already and instead spent that time fixing up the house of one of the elderly in our congregation? What if we actually took all the things we’ve already learned about Jesus and put them to use telling others about Him and doing good works in His name so that when we have to stand before Him we look like sheep, not goats?

Perhaps if we raised the bar for those who get to attend conferences. Perhaps if we set a standard so that before we’re allowed to attend another conference we must help lead five people to Christ and disciple them to some semblance of Christian maturity.

Funny thing is, if we did that, I suspect that many of us would be asking what the point of conferences is anyway. Maybe then, our love for Christian conferences would be replaced by a love for the lost and for the brethren.

And then we would have revival.

Speaking the Truth…in LOVE!

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Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ…
—Ephesians 4:15 ESV

It’s one thing to speak truth. Any dimestore prophet standing on a streetcorner in an urban jungle can speak truth. That deranged guy shoving his poetry—only $2.00—in your face as you walk down the sidewalk can spout truth. Speaking the truth in loveA club-tie-wearing teacher commanding the front of a pasty-white classroom in an exclusive private school in Chevy Chase, Maryland, can instill truth. That young Hispanic lieutenant who saw the military as his way out of the barrio can yell truth at his soldiers.

You, me, our children—any of us can spew, whisper, and scream truth.

But only Christians speak truth in love. Because we know Love.

Which is why there’s no excuse for Christians to speak unlovingly to anyone. We do not speak fear, because in love, there is no fear.

God ordains that love be the envelope that holds His treasured words when we speak truth to others. When we preach, our message is love and our delivery is, too.

And when we confront error, it is not in anger, but in love. We rebuke lovingly, humbly, and gently:

Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.
—Galatians 6:1 ESV

Lest you too be tempted. Because we are dust.

The mature understand this. The immature rail and accuse, showing no love, no humility. No image of Christ, into whom we are to grow.

Paul again:

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.
—Galatians 5:13-15 ESV

How easily we fall into biting and devouring. Even now ministries composed of misguided people gnash and consume in an attempt to one-up each other in their mastery of what they believe to be truth. And it brings disgrace upon the name of Christ. Because there is no love in it at all. One side may very well be correct in their understanding, while the other succumbs to mistaken notions. However, everyone is at fault when love gets trampled underfoot, because love is the ultimate expression of what it means to walk in Christian maturity:

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
—2 Peter 1:3-8 ESV

The culmination of a God-pleasing lifestyle? Love. All those other godly traits serve as the bedrock upon which love rests.

I knew a man unlike any I’ve met. Gifts of the Spirit flowed out of him like water. But more than the power by which he ministered in Christ’s name, he loved. No person he encountered proved unworthy of his love. He gave love to everyone, no matter how small or important. And because his love flowed so readily into other people’s love-starved lives, when he spoke truth, people listened. He’d earned the right to be heard because he led with love. Even when he corrected others, they listened and obeyed because he’d already won their respect and admiration because he loved before all else.

When someone speaks hard-to-bear truth to you, would you rather they lead with love or lead with accusations?

I believe one of the most under-lived truths of the Scriptures today comes from an all too familiar Scripture:

And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.
—Luke 6:31 ESV

When we must hear truth, how do we wish it delivered? If we say, “With love,” do we speak truth to others the same way? Or do we bludgeon sinners and opponents, only to expect they use kid gloves with us?

It feels miserable to be on the receiving end of a tirade, doesn’t it? Tongue-lashings hurt, but they’re simple to yell, aren’t they? Any loudmouth can shout truth in our faces.

But to deliver a message in love isn’t easy. It demands we actually care in tangible ways for the people we speak truth to. It costs us something. It asks for genuine relationship. It means reaching out as one human to another.

And the greater truth of speaking the truth in love is the only person fully qualified to speak truth to another person is the one who fulfills this Scripture:

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends.
—John 15:13 ESV

If we’re not prepared to die for the people we speak truth to, then we should let others less infatuated with their own lives speak it instead.

Humbling. Speaking the truth comes with a price. When we fail to love before we speak truth, we come under the condemnation of the Golden Rule. We have not loved, therefore we should not expect love in return:

For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.
—Matthew 7:2 ESV

Angry accusations beget angry replies. Biting. Devouring. And our anger burns hotter.

Here is truth:

We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
—1 John 4:19-21 ESV

Nothing we do in the name of Christ comes apart from Him. Without Him we can do nothing. So when we minister out of any spirit other than love, we minister out of the flesh. The words we then speak scorch like strange fire, not the sweet, life-giving warmth of the Spirit. We Christians cannot say we love God if we do not love our brothers and sisters. Loving them means speaking truth. And the only way to speak truth is in love.

It’s costly. It’s demanding. It takes work. It asks the Spirit to blast away our easy, fleshly responses. Yet it speaks life, the very Spirit of our Lord.

The Wrong Toy in Your Happy Meal

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My son suffered the ultimate indignity last week—at least from the perspective of a six-year-old boy.

Because our Wednesdays are crazy, we take that day to eat out. I usually bring it home rather than pay for expensive containers of artificially colored and flavored, H2O-diluted high fructose corn syrup. We’ll drink water from our tap, thank you. (I’ve got a bottle of Karo handy if I need a late-night fix.)

The choices in my tiny ‘burg of 2,000 are actually pretty extensive since the Chinese place came to town, but I let my son choose this time. And we parents all know what that means: We’re goin’ to McDonalds.

My son has a McToy fetish bar none. He might play with said Happy Meal treasure for what amounts to nanoseconds, but he’s perpetually itching to see what the Golden Arches is dishing. Surprisingly, he still plays with a little Spyro the Dragon LCD-game he got at McDonalds two years ago, so sometimes Ronald gets it right.

But this time…nope, not this time.

I prolong the agony because I don’t want him rifling through dinner. So we took the plethora of hot bags home, and he pounced on the Happy Meal the second we walked through the door to see what bonanza lay inside.

Wait two seconds…

“Dad, we gotta go back!” he yelled, eyes rimmed with tears.

I fed him my practiced nonplussed expression.

He moaned louder. “But they gave me the girl toy!”

The girl toy. The dread fear of all sub-tween males. The %^$#* GIRL toy.

A man meets the woman of his dreams, marries her, and settles down to bliss. Soon, she’s pregnant. But an unusual illness turns out to be pancreatic cancer. She dies within two months, taking the baby with her.

A couple who’s struggled with infertility adopts an infant boy. Their delight turns to endless days of agony as the boy later manifests an incurable genetic disease so rare that no one tests for it. He’ll progressively become an invalid and die in his teen years. Meanwhile, their health insurance won’t cover the costly therapy needed to prolong his life by five or more years.

A young man starts a company with his best friend. They prosper. But the friend develops a gambling problem that knows no bottom. The man soon learns his friend has embezzled millions to cover his debts. Bankrupt, the company goes under and takes the young man and his family down with it.

Almost two decades ago, I sat on the front porch of a cabin at a Christian camp listening to a boy cry. I didn’t know him. He wasn’t one of the kids that called me “counselor.” But he was hurting, so I hunkered down next to him and listened.

I’d heard anecdotes of warring parents who dropped their kid at camp so they could spend that week shredding their marriage license, but this was the first one I’d encountered in the flesh. He’d received the “Mommy doesn’t love Daddy anymore” phone call just minutes before.

My parents stayed together, so I didn’t possess any firsthand broken home experience. I prayed silently (on the outside, while inside I cried out for wisdom) and listened as this poor kid bawled.

In the end, I told him that I couldn’t identify with what he was going through. I could tell him all sorts of things that might make him feel better for a minute, but I didn’t know what it was like to have parents split up. That was a horrible hurt no one should have to endure.

I charged him with this: One day, he’d be a camp counselor and he’d come across a boy whose parents said to hell with family, and he’d know exactly what to say because he’d experienced that torture, too.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that we need a Gospel that speaks to failure. Everywhere we turn today, we’re treated to a message that screams about seizing our best life now. But no one envisions a best life that includes suffering—now.

Among all the questions why, few of us take the time to ask if our pain is someone else’s gain. Even some stranger’s gain. Man of SorrowsWe consider the horror dumped on our laps and automatically assume that God’s forsaken us, or we’ve somehow forsaken Him. Yet we rarely wonder if the torment we’re enduring is meant to bless someone else.

Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to Asia, buried a wife and several children in Chinese soil, then went back to England a different man. Joel Osteen was recently voted the most important Evangelical in America. If Taylor were still alive today, and you had your choice between receiving counseling from either Osteen or him after a drunk driver plowed into your family’s car and killed your wife and kids, whom would you choose?

The Bible says this of Jesus:

He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
—Isaiah 53:3 ESV

Jesus’ contemporaries didn’t think He had anything to give them, did they? We know better. We go to Him with our hurt precisely because He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And His people, who likewise know sorrow and grief, can be the flesh-and-blood shoulder we need to cry on as we cry out to the heavenly Man of Sorrows.

Your tragedy carries meaning for someone else. God never intends for us to squander pain. Be wise in knowing how to use yours to the benefit of another grieving soul.

My son? On his own he decided the best way to deal with the wrong toy in his Happy Meal was to give it to a girl who might appreciate it. He told me that this would ease the disappointment.

Out of the mouths of babes.