Discernment

The Stone-Cold Sober Church

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This past Friday, I had a long chat with my son about alcohol.

I talked with him about how alcohol lowers inhibitions and what a lack of inhibitions looks like when someone’s drunk. We talked about how drunks and druggies can be talked by themselves or others into doing or believing all manner of stupidity they would not ordinarily do or believe when not drunk or drugged up. How bright people can no longer discern right from wrong when they’re high or bombed. The drunk/druggie thinks his slurred commentary is genius, but all ability to follow the wisdom of a subtle rebuke goes out the window. Drowsiness sets in. All self-control is lost. A fool is born.

Sitting in church on Sunday, that conversation came back to me. I realized that by that explanation, our entire society is wasted.

The Bible says this:

So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober.
—1 Thessalonians 5:6 ESV

The problem that most struck me while I pondered this was how a substance abuser can be talked into believing almost anything. All the filters of discernment fail.

You hear some people talking about being drunk in the spirit. I wonder if they mean the spirit of the age. If anything, when we talk about the Holy Spirit, I wonder if the state of genuine union with the Lord should instead make us sober in the Spirit.

That’s what I want to be: sober in the Spirit.

This is what being sober in the Spirit yields:

But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”—these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
—1 Corinthians 2:9-16 ESV

There’s a distinct lack of spiritual understanding today. In the American Church, we go for just about anything that seems right to us. We make assumptions about what is good, rely on our intellects, and then conform everything to that perceived good—yet  we may not have been sober in the Spirit when we finagled that outcome.

It’s easy to pick apart a drunk’s argument, but what happens when the Church is not as sober as it should be?

Sure, some of us will take a look at the culture wars and wring our hands because we have lost and some of that junk is seeping into the Church, poisoning the well. But because we may be tipsy, subtler issues creep in, too, born out of listening to good-sounding ideas that were not subjected to spiritual sobriety. Sometimes, that’s how the bigger errors get through.

The following is NOT something Jesus said in the Bible:

“Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of worship for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”
—NOT Mark 11:17b

No, actually it’s not written that way. The correct wording is house of prayer, not worship.

Yet if your Sunday church meeting is like most big evangelical churches today, you’ll spend 20-30 minutes “worshiping” and about two minutes praying.

Sure, the temple was razed, but don’t we understand the priority from that passage? And that’s just one small aspect of Christian practice and living.

Sober, alert watchmanIf we are drunk, then we lack the sobriety in the Spirit to know the difference between the good and the best. Have we asked soberly if spending 10-15 times as much time singing on a Sunday turns prayer into an afterthought? Should we then scratch our heads when nothing changes for the better? Should we then blame God for the fruit of our corporate prayerlessness?

Many issues as simple as that one perplex American Christians. But then we tell ourselves nothing is wrong, and it’s the other guy who needs to get his act together.

You can convince a drunk of anything.

Church, it’s time to get stone-cold sober in the Spirit.

The Lie Remains the Same

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Due to an overwhelming number of tasks on the old to-do list at year’s end, I called a halt to interacting on Facebook, that great time suck. I said goodbye to birthday congrats for people I hadn’t seen in 30 years, bid adieu to keeping up with other people’s holiday plans, and articulated a hearty aloha to commenting on someone’s else post that got my goat. And there were plenty of goat-getting updates to note.

Too many.

Now returned from exile, it seems to me that Facebook is awash with the kind of commentary guaranteed not only to get one’s goat, but raise hackles, rub the wrong way, get dander up,  make to see red, and stand hair on end. Everyone seems angry on the Internet, especially on Facebook.

But it’s the way people respond to the things that make them angry that should alarm a thinking person. Everyone and his brother must add their two cents, and it might as well be counterfeit coinage.

In nearly every conversation regarding culture, societal shifts, current events, politics, or religion, you see the following:

Does the Bible really say…?

People should be free to do what they want, so….

Over and over and over. And in almost every case, those two are used to justify something antithetical to orthodox Christian theology or to godly, righteous living.

I wonder if the people who resort to using that question and that statement recognize their source:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
—Genesis 3:1-5 ESV

That supposedly clever line of reasoning some guy used to justify his immorality or someone else’s is old, old stuff. Back to the beginning kinds of justification and argument—just with contemporary wording to fit the spirit of the age.

Did God actually say…? Well, yes, He actually did. And your argument that He meant it in some other way that no one in 2000 years of Christian history has ever proffered as true should tell you something about the wrongness of your interpretation.

But then…

…And you will be like God…. You will be self-determining. You will be free to decide what is right and wrong. You will do whatever the heck you want to do, and no one will tell you otherwise because you told God to take a hike and enthroned yourself on His plush chair. You.

Red-eyed snakeEngaging the conversation in 2014 means a near-constant return to the Garden. Any time some postmodern Socrates chips away at traditional morality or invokes an alternate interpretation of truth, you can hear hissing between the words.

The part that no one who resorts to the old lies ever thinks through is this:

You will not surely die.

Actually, you will. And you’ll start that dying long before you get to the genuine finale. And then you’ll get a nasty, nasty surprise.

At least it will be a surprise to you. To some who weren’t spouting lies, it’s no surprise at all. They know that people who argue Satan’s way get to meet the originator in person.

Meanwhile, people who know better than to quote evil keep seeing the same old lies everywhere they turn.

If it weren’t so sad, it would be boring.

Telling the Time

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Grandmother clockWhen I came downstairs to eat breakfast before going to church, I saw that the wall clock had stopped.

It’s a “grandmother” clock my father received as a gift for 20 years of service with the company he worked for. He wouldn’t make it to 30. That company downsized him nine months before he was to receive his full retirement package. Nine months.

Still, it’s a nice clock, and it was given under a different company ownership, when people still cared, before the relentless string of mergers and ownership swaps.

Because it’s a grandmother clock, it chimes every 15 minutes. And because it chimes every 15 minutes, it has three keyholes where you stick in a key and wind it. I wind it pretty religiously, but life is filled with distractions, especially this time of year, and I forgot that regular task.

The hands read 1:59. Sometime in the a.m., it had stopped right before it was due to chime.

Having had the clock all these years, I take the chiming for granted. I think any owner of such a clock does. After a while, you don’t notice the chiming as much. When it fails to chime, you don’t realize it. You have to note the lack of pendulum movement, and then you know.

Something about a stopped clock makes me a little sad. That clock is wondrously alive so long as all its springs remain tightly wound, and the slow tick-tock fills the foyer. It’s a comforting sound, one that recalls a different, slower time. A time of artisans working deftly on such things as grandmother clocks, of great-grandfathers smoking a pipe while reading the newspaper, of sepia-toned memories and a sense that what is to come is a marvelous thing where people are somehow better than they are now.

I wonder what Christian people in the age of grandmother—and grandfather—clocks thought the present age might be like. What can a clock tell us?

My clock stopped a minute before it was due to chime twice. Slack springs couldn’t do the job of alerting us to the hour. People in the household forgot their duty, so the clock tick-tocked until it ran out of stored energy. It had been running on its last winding for too long and had no power left. Without that power, no alert sounded. It took a long time for anyone to notice the clock had stopped.

The silence of a stopped clock doesn’t register immediately. One must know to listen for it. If no one listens, and no one considers what was once present is no longer, the clock persists in its mute deadness.

A stopped clock is still right twice a day—so goes the old joke. Still, a stopped clock is far more wrong than right. It becomes less than helpful, because if you don’t see or hear it actively working, it gives mistaken information that can lead astray. What was once critical to one’s proper functioning is now detrimental. A stopped clock becomes an excuse for lateness and for failing to attend to important matters.

A long time ago, a stopped clock was a major problem. How can it be reset unless another, working timepiece is present in the household? If the stopped clock was the sole teller of time locally, one had to go elsewhere to discover the correct time. In some communities, the church belltower might have a clock. Or the village square. Today, centralized timepieces are mostly lost to the past. Oddly, time signals fly continuously through the air now—but beyond perception without special gadgets to snag them. The proper time is always with us, but we can’t sense it without help. Those special clocks that intercept hidden signals require something more than just the simple human intervention of a winding. The average person might understand how a wound clock works, but the new kind are inscrutable to all but the most technically adept.

Some would argue that the new technology behind clocks renders the old act of winding a clock moot. Everything has a clock in it nowadays. Funny, though, that so few can truly tell us the time.