Discernment

Two Halves of the Whole Gospel

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Goin' nowhere fastDo you sometimes feel like we’re not hearing the whole Gospel? Hang around the Godblogosphere long enough and you get the eerie feeling that no one truly knows what the whole Gospel entails.

And it’s not just the Godblogosphere. I suspect that many of our churches can’t articulate the entirety of the Gospel.

As I see it, we’ve made this mistake of viewing the whole Gospel as two halves. The mistake—one of typical human nature— is to wrap the entirety of our brains around the one half that resonates with us the most, then act as if the other half doesn’t exist.

If we must delineate the error of the two halves, it’s best to look at the one passage of Scripture that defines those halves. We find both in Ephesians 2:8-10.

Half A:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
—Ephesians 2:8-9

Half B:

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
—Ephesians 2:10

Those who cling to Half A are the folks I’ll call the Elect. They obsess about doctrine, detest even a whiff of works righteousness, and are enormously concerned with getting people saved. They got their marching orders at the Reformation and consider it the high point in modern history. And heaven help anyone who’s not in total agreement with them.

Those who adhere to Half B are the folks I’ll call the Fieldworkers. They obsess about  helping those in need, detest the hypocrisy of not walking the talk, and are enormously concerned with bettering the lives of everyone around them. They can’t point to any one point in time for their marching orders,  but earnestly believe that we need a new Reformation. And heaven help anyone who’s not in total agreement with them.

The problem with the Elect and the Fieldworkers is that they are so focused on their half of the whole Gospel, they simply can’t bring themselves to understand the other half. The blinders are on so tight that neither group  can even acknowledge the other side’s main propositions are just as Scriptural as theirs.

The Elect easily trash the loose theology of the Fieldworkers. The Fieldworkers quickly note the clean, uncalloused hands of the Elect. To the Elect, the Fieldworkers are false teachers and heretics. To the Fieldworkers, the Elect are uncaring, self-absorbed Pharisees. Both sides point to the other and claim, “You’re not living the Gospel. I doubt you’re truly saved!”

And you know what? On that claim, both sides may actually be right!

Worrying about how you come to Christ is great, but Elect, what are you supposed to do with the sixty or so years of discipleship you have staring you in the face afterwards? Worrying about the needy is great, but Fieldworkers, how do you receive the heart of God to do so if you can’t articulate how to know God at all?

The whole Gospel contains both the power to raise the dead in spirit to spiritual life in the name of Jesus AND the power to tenderize the human heart toward the service of others in the name of Jesus.

What baffles me is why this is so hard to understand.

Why do we slice the Gospel in half then whine about the half we don’t like? Why the venom between the Elect and the Fieldworkers? Why?

The whole Gospel is the whole Gospel. If we’re not concerned with seeing people saved through hearing the message of salvation, maintaining the integrity of our doctrine, and preaching that we can’t earn our way to heaven, then we’re blowing it. If we’re not concerned about taking care of those in need, living out the love of Christ in practical ways, and fighting for the betterment of everyone we meet, then we’re blowing it.

Please Church, it’s time to believe and live the whole Gospel!

The Spirit Has Left the Building—More Thoughts

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So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.
—John 5:19

Last Friday’s post, “The Spirit Has Left the Building,” needed more analysis, so I hope to provide that today. I noted in that post that much of the problem we have with the twin church killers of entertainment-based worship and dull routine is largely due to a lack of the Holy Spirit working in those churches. They either try to make up for the missing Spirit by substituting dog-and-pony shows, or they just make do with emptiness (and call it the norm).

I believe one of the greatest mistakes we make in our churches is to assume. In this case, too many churches fall under the assumption of “Here’s our church program for this Sunday, Lord, now bless it!” That’s highly presumptive on our part. Worse, it tells God that whether He blesses our service or not, we’re going to do it with or without Him. What a sad reflection on our churches that we feel we can get along just as well whether God is there or not!

The fix to this is to structure our church meetings along the lines of “Lord, we are not blessed unless we hear what you wish to do this morning.” That humble, godly openness to receiving what God intends differs greatly from the presumptive, “arm of flesh”-based format so many churches adhere to.

This is not to say that a meeting can’t be planned, only that the plans should never stand in the way of what God ultimately desires to do in and through us on any given Sunday. It instead offers an environment of reception, where the church as a whole anticipates what God will do in and through them.

This is the church that makes a difference in the world. It mirrors Jesus’ understanding that the only work worth doing is the work God is preparing for us to do. We do what the Father is doing. As we all know, God is a spirit, so He blows where He will. And that will may not conform to our own. This requires that we be discerning, able to draw near to the face of God to know what He is doing.

Are we daring to draw near? Not always. We Christians talk a good game, but whenever I’ve pressed people in the past, the truth comes out. We’re really not all that interested in seeing what the Lord is desiring to do. It takes time to draw near, and who has that kind of time anymore?

So we should not be surprised when we fail to discern the Lord’s leading, to be deaf to His voice. For all our talk of prayer, I would dare say that few of us pray more than an hour a day. In fact, I suppose that we spend less than ten minutes a day pressing into God to see what He is doing.

Some of us are just lazy. We’ve told ourselves that God doesn’t speak like that anymore, so we toss off a few prayers and go blithely on our way. Although I suspect that if most of us read a book on prayer by E.M. Bounds, we’d get a far different picture of what it means to travail in prayer.

Others only seek their answers in the Scriptures, but—as controversial as it might be to say this—we’re not necessarily going to find a specific word from God in the Scriptures to the need at hand. Jesus knew the Scriptures better than anyone, but he withdrew for prayer for hours at a time in order to receive power for ministry and for seeing what the Lord was doing in the situation at hand. Yes, we will see the face of God in Scripture, but we must also seek His face in prayer.

Here’s one reason why we need to diligently seek God for our raison d’être as a church:

Now in these days prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. And one of them named Agabus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world (this took place in the days of Claudius). So the disciples determined, everyone according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea. And they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul.
—Acts 11:27-30

The church that actively seeks the working of the Spirit is the church that receives revelation for service. Again, that openness for hearing God direct us toward specific works in the here and now is critical to the functioning of the church. Otherwise, what we are left with is what God has done, not what God is doing. And we need to know what He is doing now.

The church of entertainment and the church of solemn contentment go stale because the Spirit is not there to guide them. In fact, I suspect they don’t really wish to hear from the Spirit because He might ask something difficult of the people gathered there. He might very well tell the people in a wealthy church to sell all they have and give to the poor. Or He may not. But how will we know if we’ve closed off the Spirit?

The church God uses is the one that lives in a state of openness to the leading of the Spirit, no matter the cost. But when we support churches that don’t want any of “that stuff” or are too busy buying disco balls, then we’ve shut down the very conduit of Christian life.

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Nowhere Men

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We visited the in-laws this last weekend. One of my father-in-law’s rituals is to play hymns on the piano before we head off for church. When I came downstairs after getting dressed, I heard the following hymn:

I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice,
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.

I’d stay in the garden with Him
Though the night around me be falling,
But He bids me go; through the voice of woe
His voice to me is calling.
— “In the Garden” by C. Austin Miles, 1913

I admit that I always liked that hymn, but as I sat there last Sunday morning, it bothered me. A lot.

Forty-five minutes later we were singing “Fairest Lord Jesus” in my in-law’s church. And then we sang a modern worship song speaking of how beautiful Jesus is.

In the last couple months, I’ve had conversations with guys who confessed that God seems to answer the prayers of their wives more than He does their own. One went so far as to tell me that whenever he received a positive answer to prayer, it disappointed him to find out his wife had been praying for the same thing. He attributed the success in receiving that answer to prayer more to his wife’s prayer life than his own. In those times when his prayers didn’t line up with his wife’s, nothing seemed to happen.

It makes me wonder if Christian men today feel like second-class citizens of heaven.

Consider the image of Jesus we proffer in our churches today. He becomes a sort of benevolent, winsome character who is handsome (in a glossy, Western sort of way), considerate of others, good with children, intelligent, deeply spiritual, and a hard worker. In our churches, we sing about how much we love Him, talk about His beauty, go on about how we want to be near Him, and so on. In short, He sounds like the perfect husband.

I suppose that a few men out there are crushed by that notion, especially since nearly everything in our culture points out that men are stupid boors who think with their genitalia, love sports mindlessly, and mess up everything they touch. Then there’s Jesus who is none of those things. Is it any reason that the little woman loves Jesus? Or that it’s hard for men to identify with the Lord?

I think this is why I’m hearing that men feel their wives have got it all over them when it comes to being spiritual. I think it explains the disconnect that some Christian men experience when it comes to having a meaningful relationship with Christ. They look around and see that what they are told they must experience seems a bit off. They can see how their wives can go on and on about how beautiful Jesus is, Thinkin' about it...but to men, the contemporary image of Christ they are told they must assent to, and the way they are to live out their faith feels at times, well…gay.

There, I said it.

One of the problems of our age is that none of this is truly news. The modern Christian men’s movement has been trying desperately for a couple decades to counteract what they see as the emasculation of the Church, and I believe they have a legitimate cause there. However, I think that books like Wild at Heart by John Eldridge, the “Bible” of the Christian men’s movement, blows the solution to the problem by encouraging men to find answers by hunting bear with a pointy stick. That attempts to counteract the image of a weepy-eyed Jesus by telling men they need to be testosterone-laden, elk-choking scalliwags. We simply trade one graven image for another.

I don’t believe that the problem is with us men as much as it is with the image of Jesus we project today in our churches. Attempting to pump ourselves up will yield no change unless we re-examine who Jesus is.

In light of what I was thinking about that morning before church as my father-in-law played piano, the sermon proved fortuitous. The pastor preached on Jesus’ question, “Who do men say that I am?” I think that question sums it up for most men. Who is Jesus? And are we exalting a graven image of Him that drives men away from the Church?

What do you think? If you agree that we’ve distorted the image of Christ to make Him overly appealing to women at the expense of men, how would you rescue that image?

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