Dying to Self

You Love the Lord, But…

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…do you trust Him?

At first glance, such a question appears ludicrous. How can one love God and not trust Him?

Well, you love your kids, but would you trust them with a gun? Uh, probably not. I taught riflery at camp once. Emphasis on the once. Having a spacy teen girl carelessly point a loaded .22 at your head (despite fifteen minutes of admonition not to do so) tends to bleach your complexion, if you know what I mean. Didn’t make me love her any less, though.

Each of us may have good reason to love but not trust. How about a dad you love, but who’s in the habit of making life miserable for you and your family because he drinks—and he’s not a fun drunk. Or a single mom who brings home “Uncle” after “Uncle,” a relentless series of men who drift in and out of your life. Or your brooding teen nephew with the death metal and the Hustlers stashed under his mattress—your own son wants to man shotgun in the young nihilist’s new Lancer Evo.

You love your mom, but she’s not acting like an adult should. Dad, either. The nephew? Barely tolerable, but you love him ’cause he’s your beloved sister’s kid. Plus, you sat by the young punk’s bedside when he got pneumonia at eighteen months and you prayed your guts out that he’d live.

I think plenty of people who tear up in church during worship, the ones with their hands held highest, may very well love God with a fervor that outdoes everyone else in the pews, but all the while they’re scared to death to trust Him with their lives. They’re scared because they’ve been burned by a father who was an ugly drunk, or a mother who couldn’t keep a decent man in her life, or {fill in the trust issue here}.

No greater area of struggle affects me like this one. I love God very much and have served Him for many years, but I don’t always trust Him. Yes, I’m fine when I’m trusting the Lord for other people’s faith needs, but when it comes to my own I don’t do so well. I’m sure my Dad’s problems didn’t help me in trusting, but I don’t remember being leery of God’s direction and leading in my life until I started getting dropped.

Dropped?

Have you ever taken that leap of faith, the one so certain that it could not fail because “God was all over it”? Wile E. Coyote splatEnded up as a squish spot at the bottom of some canyon just like Wile E. Coyote, didn’t you? Hurt, right?

It wasn’t just the pain of meeting the ground at a terminal velocity as much as the fact that the angels didn’t bear you up. That God—the one who orchestrated that leap of faith—seemed to vanish in a puff of smoke just when you needed Him the most. Years later, you’re still nursing the wounds, still asking why.

And still not getting any answers.

For me, no verse in the Bible stares me in the face and dares me to blink more than this one:

Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him…
—Job 13:15a KJV

For some of us, though, dying would be fine. But what of living, yet bearing a brutal wound? Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him may actually be easy. It’s the Though I’m left paralyzed in the bottom of a crater, yet will I trust in Him that needs our attention. I know a pastor who, on his way to a church meeting, accidentally backed the car over his toddler son and killed him. I can’t imagine. I simply can’t. I get choked up even thinking about something like that.

…yet will I trust in Him…

I’m not sure we do trust Him, at least to the extent we say we do. Though we all want to trust God to be more coherent and reliable than a drunken father, irresponsible mother, or suspect punk nephew, I suspect we all have our limits where trust begins to corrode. For some, that level’s pretty low. I believe that more than a few of us in America would blanch in the face of finding our favorite TV show canceled, our usual breakfast cereal discontinued, or the NFL home team packing up to move to LA.

Even if most of us can get past those mundane “disasters,” other more serious ones loom. We don’t want to deal with diminishing physical prowess. We don’t want to see the new kid promoted over us because it means we’ve maxed out our career and it’s all downhill from here on. We don’t want to go on weeping over adult children who have abandoned the Faith. We don’t want to consider what happens when the dream dies.

Even Christian books dance around this issue. I’m two-thirds of the way through Dan Allender’s Leading with a Limp. As an illustration of the power of honesty, he tells the story of a high-powered lawyer who confronted her company with a mirror and showed them how ugly they’d become. The company realized their errors and turned things around. The lady lawyer came off as a hero for her boldness.

But what if she hadn’t? What if they gutted and filleted her, then tossed her still-warm professional corpse on the dust heap, taking extra special care to ensure she never worked in a law firm within the borders of the good ol’ U.S. of A. again?

Doesn’t that happen? Doesn’t the leap of faith sometimes result in a big splat? Also, don’t we all know people who never recover? I do.

Last December, I wrote a blog post called “We Need a Gospel That Speaks to Failure.”I think we also need a means to help people crawl up out of the crater left behind when all the faith in the world didn’t work—for whatever reason. That’s where Christianity should shine, in moments like those.

Because I think that life is not going to be easy for most of us. At some point we’re going that face the reality of the ground rushing up to meet us and no net coming out of the sky. We have to be able to make sense of the crater we leave behind if we’re to trust God in the future.

We talk about God never leaving us and make up little poems (“Footprints in the Sand,” anyone?), but then the Bible also says this:

But, in regard to the ambassadors of the rulers of Babylon who sent to [Hezekiah] to ask about the wonder that was done in the land, God left him in order to try him, to know all that was in his heart.
—2 Chronicles 32:31

What is God going to find in our hearts when we’re in the crater after the leap of faith? What is it going to take from His Church to help those in the crater summon up the trust He is looking for?

A Letter to Rich, the Young Ruler

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Dear Rich,

What a pleasant surprise to receive a letter from you! Your previous letter said you’d been working 60 hours a week to get the promotion you wanted, and now I read that you’ve received it. Looks like your hard work has paid off. You certainly are living the American Dream!

Congratulations, too, on your new five-bedroom home and your new Porsche Cayenne. I’m sure your wife and kids are deliriously happy with both. Thanks also for the pictures from your recent vacation to St. Kitts. My, the twins sure have grown.

I read the printout you enclosed of the blog article written by the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. You agree with his contention that there’s no compelling reason to buy an Apple iPhone. That’s probably a wise decision.

In reading that article, though, I find his reasons for not buying an iPhone intriguing. Most of the reasons he cited were technological. I, for one, think a far better reason to avoid it exists.

In our previous correspondence, we’ve gone back and forth on Jesus and what it means to be a Christian. I know you are quite a spiritual person, a “seeker” as you say, but I believe being spiritual and religious doesn’t go far enough.

So, Rich, I’d like to consider a word you don’t hear much today: profligate. That’s a word I would have liked to have seen mentioned in the article from the Thomas Nelson CEO, but even companies that deal with words shy away from some of the less popular ones. Profligate is one of those words.

Here’s how the dictionary defines the term:

Profligate

†“adjective
1. utterly and shamelessly immoral or dissipated; thoroughly dissolute.
2. recklessly prodigal or extravagant.

†“noun
3. a profligate person.

I can’t help but think, Rich, that since perfectly good cell phones can be had for $50, the desire for one that costs ten times that much seems…well, profligate. No doubt, the iPhone reeks of style and trendiness, and no doubt, many people who claim to follow Jesus will buy one. I’m not sure, though, that those buyers understand the word profligate.

Let me tell you about some people I know. I know a couple who bought a small home in one of the worst neighborhoods in our city. He has a good job and could afford a much larger home, but he and his wife elected to use their extra money to meet the desperate needs of their poorer neighbors. I know a man who forgos the expensive medication he needs to feel better so he can help a woman who has no health insurance pay for the even more expensive cancer medication she needs. I know a family who sent $1000 of their hard-earned money to help an unemployed couple they had never met in person make a house payment so they could keep their home. I know a man who gave every cent he owned in the world to fund a missionary couple who would have been recalled. Those missionaries were in the middle of their translation of the Bible into a new language. They would’ve had to come home unless they raised enough money to complete the translation.

Funny thing is, those people I just mentioned don’t know the common, negative understanding of the word profligate either—but for a far different reason. They live a different way: the way of Christ. If they have any profligacy in their lives, it’s profligacy in giving, not taking.

You mentioned in your last letter that I sounded out of step with the rest of the world. Indeed, I fear I am. You see, for me, it’s not so much about accumulating the hip trinkets of this life, things that break, become obsolete, and ultimately do not satisfy the longings of the heart. That’s because I believe in a world far more real than this one, a world where hip trinkets pale in the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Yes, as you said, it’s a risky belief. It means not keeping up with the social standing of the rest of the world. I would probably never be voted into the wonderful country club you and Mrs. Ruler just got accepted to. But that’s okay, Rich. It really is.

Some Christians believe this world is not their home. They won’t be understood by the rest of the world, nor by some other people who say they believe in Jesus. They’ve said no to many of the things the world offers and that’s an exceedingly hard thing to do.

You see, Rich, it’s one thing to say you believe something. It’s another thing altogether to believe something so much that your life looks radically different from the rest of the crowd. The crowd says so many things and believes so many things, doesn’t it? But who is willing to die to the voice of majority and give what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose? In a way then, the true profligate may be the one who appears to have every thing deemed good by the world’s standard, but will one day wind up losing it all in tears and flames. He has gained the world, but lost his soul.

I know my letter may not make sense to you. I’ll keep praying, though, that for all your seeking, God in His grace will make Himself known to you.

But I must caution you, Rich. If He does, and you take that revelation seriously, it may mean an end to one dream and the beginning of another. That new dream won’t look much like the old one, though. It may mean not only forgoing an iPhone, but giving up cell phones altogether. You may end up thinking it better to share those extra bedrooms in your new home with orphans or widows even if it means you could no longer afford that home theater system you said you might be purchasing. Don’t expect to be popular for electing not to keep up with the Joneses so you can minister life to others. The folks you run with probably won’t approve of your new dream. You may lose your standing at the country club. You may even be kicked out because you’re no longer one of the right kind of people.

But then again, that new dream’s the only dream that counts, the only one that ends in the Eternal Golden City. I pray I see you there.

For the Kingdom,

B. A. Disciple

Yet Another Good Question…

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I’m in a questioning mode. Consistent readers of Cerulean Sanctum will probably ask when I’m not in a questioning mode, but that’s beside the point. 😉

This time, I’m not the one asking the hard question, Anthony Bradley is. His is one of those stunners that can’t be avoided, a sort of “now that you have heard, you have no excuse” truth.

Here’s the opening lines of “Orphans vs. American Dream“:

Why Does America Have Orphans If It Has Christian Churches?

America has nearly 115,000 orphaned kids in foster care waiting to be adopted. Some wonder how this is possible in a country with Christian families. Surely, there are 115,000 missional families in America, right? Missional families, for example, embrace the redemptive mission of God and practice “true religion” in their local communities (James 1:27). Missional Christians in America could eliminate the foster care system tomorrow if we would stop “shootin’ up” with the American Dream (heroin) in order to get high on a lame life lived for the sake of comfort and ease.

Word.

As with anything deep, read the whole thing.

We’ve thought about going this route ourselves. We’ve asked the same question.

But saying yes isn’t easy. The bureaucratic, politically-correct adoption system creates nightmarish roadblocks for anyone seeking to adopt. Someone to watch over me...We know because we watched friends go through the emotionally devastating process of being rejected time and again in their attempts to adopt. Then they got involved in the foster care system, itself a bad dream, and received a child quickly, a child they later adopted.

Yes, we’ve made the system maddeningly hard to navigate, but when were Christians excused from bearing up under duress? Our Lord went to the cross. We just have to fill out countless forms, answer some sensitive questions, jump through political hoops, and pray big prayers before we can make a foster care orphan our own.

Christianity can’t become mere talk. Most of the world already views us as folks who talk big but can’t back up our message through our actions.

I think Anthony Bradley nails this one. Now what are we going to do about it?