Dying to Self

The Humble Warrior

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I [Paul] therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
—Ephesians 4:1-3 ESV

Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.
—Philippians 2:3 ESV

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.
—Colossians 3:12-15 ESV

He must increase, but I must decrease.
—John 3:30 ESV

There is much talk about manhood today, but I don’t see much of it in practice. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not about hunting bear with a pointy stick and never has been.

Many bestselling Christian writers talk about being warriors. They sell truckloads of books and inspire the creation of thousands of men’s groups in countless churches. Men go on “advances” (don’t EVER call it a “retreat”—too girlie) to learn how to develop their inner warrior, or if the group has more of a business focus, their inner leader.

Despite the millions of books sold, speaking engagements across the world, and a guaranteed bestselling sequel when the sales of the latest warrior tome peak, one arrow is routinely left out of the warrior author’s quiver: humility.

By nature, humility and war are a hard marriage. The examples don’t come as readily as the images we get of tough, swaggering men in bullet-shredded uniforms, each with a cigar firmly clenched between his teeth, mowing down one wave after another of Nazis, flamethrower in one hand, tank gun ripped off a flaming Sherman in the other. Such men ascend through the ranks and become twelve-star generals, husbands to nubile movie starlets, and CEOs of multinationals that consume lesser companies no matter how many poison pills are consumed. That’s the role model of manliness we Americans hallow. (In the American Christian world, the model’s pretty much the same, though the cigar is suspect.)

I’ve thought long and hard about some examples of humility and warrior spirit, the best example I can toss out there (besides the obvious ones) is that of the man after whom the city near where I live is named, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus.

The story is told that Cincinnatus, a farmer well-liked by his neighbors, was called to serve in 458 BC during a time of great threat: enemies were advancing against Rome. Despite the fact that his family might starve as a result of his decision, Cincinnatus accepted a call to lead the armies of that great city. He was declared dictator, swiftly defeated the invaders in just sixteen days, and immediately resigned as dictator, going back to his farm. Nineteen years later, he was called out of retirement to meet a new threat to Rome. And again, he fought the fight and promptly gave up the throne to go back to rural life.

That’s not the kind of example we are given too often today.

Less often than that do we have examples of men who never picked up a sword or gun, who never spilled blood, but spent most of their time on their knees. Prayer WarriorGeorge Mueller was such a man. A lot of the testosterone-laden out there wouldn’t think much of Mueller; he was concerned for orphans. Sounds kind of womanly compared with the examples we see held up in bestselling men’s books. But Mueller prayed. That man sweated out big prayers that met big needs and overcame ferocious principalities and powers that sought to destroy little boys and girls, demonic forces that wanted nothing more than to grind up children in the hardscrabble streets of England. And the one thing that people said about Mueller besides the fact that he was a praying man? That he was humble.

As much as the bestseller shelves are loaded with books jam-packed with bone-chewing examples of manliness, the dearth of books featuring meek and humble men speaks volumes. Simply possessing a penis and knowing every great line from Spartacus, The Green Berets and the king of all warrior movies, Braveheart, doesn’t qualify you for warriorhood. Making prideful, snarky assertions about someone’s eternal security on the God-blog flavor of the week doesn’t make you God’s man, either. It takes a humble man to walk into his prayer closet (where, it should be noted, there are no ticker-tape parades), kneel in humility before the Lord, and start assaulting the powers of darkness through prayer. Your average street dog can easily sink his teeth into a flesh and blood foe, but only a meek man devoted to prayer can tear down demonic strongholds in spiritual places!

The problem with Christian manhood today is not that there aren’t enough villages to plunder, it’s that humble, stooped grandmothers are out there on their knees fighting the battles that “real” men are too proud (or lazy or weak) to fight. Too many men in our churches moan that someone stole their warrior badge. Meanwhile, Satan is plundering OUR village. And he’s doing it not in the obvious places, but in the spiritual realms, the very place that prayer alone works.

John the Baptist prayed (you didn’t realize it was a prayer, did you?), “He must increase, and I must decrease.” Men, that’s meekness and humility right there. That prayer is the true warrior’s marching order. Likewise, our call to honor is found in Ephesians 4:1-3. If the Savior emptied Himself and became a servant, dying in the utmost humility, meekly refusing to justify Himself before men, how can we be any different? Only after Christ fully humbled Himself was He exalted and given The Name Above All Names.

Do we get it? Or are we going to keep on blathering about our warrior birthrights while we pick off the “weak” through our clever arguments, our mocking haughtiness, and our brutal gracelessness?

True Christian warriors are men of humility and grace. They understand that only when they are weak are they strong.

Which kind of warrior are you?

On Consigning Enemies of Christ to Hell

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It's one of those blast furnace kind of days here today, 95 degrees with 95% humidity. To the amusement of little boys everywhere, the sun is so hot right now that ants burst into flame on the sidewalk without need for a magnifying glass. As I type, my son is sipping hot peppermint tea—of all things—somehow oblivious to the heat pump outside laboring to rid our house of thermal build-up. InfernoThe dryer is working with the weather to scorch our clothes dry, and just to add insult to injury, I need to take a flamethrower to some weeds outside tonight.

Why not talk about hell, then?

The Christian blogosphere talks about hell far more than you'll hear from any pulpit. I've read just about every take on hell you can imagine in just the last few weeks. But every one of those theological treatises has ignored one kind of hell, the hell that most people experience: hell on earth.

It doesn't take much for us Christians to castigate anyone we deem to be unworthy sinners. You don't have to look very far to find such horrid heathens. The Christian blogosphere is brimming over with posts that name names and point fingers. The names of the enemies change, but the general collection of them remains the same. You're likely to find homosexuals, evolutionists, atheists, and the ACLU in that category. Karl Rove seems to occupy that spot for Sojourners types, while the hardcore conservatives still get mileage out of Bill Clinton. And then there's whatever preacher or teacher we love to hate. Benny Hinn, Rick Warren, Joyce Meyer, Ken Copeland—maybe even your own pastor will show up on that list, who knows. The important thing here is that hell needs to be invoked whenever we think about them.

More and more I believe that we truly want to see some people burn in hell. It used to be the Hitlers, Pol Pots, and Stalins of the world, but increasingly it's the people we disagree with—you know, The Enemies of Christ. And from the dialog I see occurring on an increasing number of Christian Web sites, I believe that there are a few too many Christians who would get no more glee than to have a front row seat in Abraham's bosom so they can stare out over the chasm that separates heaven from hell and lob a few jeers at the prisoners of hell. Because we all know that nothing hurts worse than to be in hell and have to suffer the receiving end of cat-calls from The People Who Got It Right.

But waiting for the eventual demise of the Enemies of Christ is not enough for some of the most vocal critics out there. They'd love nothing more than to see people in hell right now, here on earth. Such an idea almost warms the cockles of their hearts (that is if stone can have cockles.)

Now it would seem a hard thing to make hell on earth for people, but I now know how it comes about easily.

You see, most people on earth are already in hell because they have no prayer covering. Most of those destined for fire have never once had anyone pray for them. At no time has a Christian stood up in public or stolen away to his or her prayer closet to pray for these souls just waiting for damnation. Not once. More often than not there hasn't been a real Christian within ten feet of those Enemies at any time in all their years on earth. No one to pick them up when they fall. No one to hear their hurts. No one to take their confession. At least no one who we would consider Spirit-filled.

It is a far easier thing to call someone an Enemy of Christ than it is to pray for them. It takes no effort on our part to just keep doing what we already do when confronted with people with whom we disagree. How simple it is to label someone "godless" or "heretical" or "deceived" than it is to get down on our knees and say to God Our Father, "And so I once was. May your truth be made known to them through me, Lord Jesus, by any means possible."

Because you see, someone may have been praying for you long before you surrendered up your Enemy of Christ label and became a Child of God. Someone loved you and me enough to have labored in prayer over our souls for years and yet we can't spare those we consider Enemies of Christ one second of our day to cover them in prayer for what may be the first time in their lives. No, it's easier to blog about their sin, to throw up our hands in disgust, and to leap to our feet in protest than it is to fold those hands and bow those knees.

So this is what I ask of anyone who comes to Cerulean Sanctum. Before you blog about this Enemy of Christ or that heretic, spend one month in prayer for them. Pray every single day. Pray that God would put Spirit-filled Christians into their lives who will speak life and truth into them, sharing the Gospel not only in words but also deeds. If you are close enough to actually be that supportive person, then consider taking the job because obviously no one else has. If after the end of that month of prayer (and service) your righteous indignation still burns hot, then do as you are lead of the Spirit.

Some people are already in hell, folks. Not having a prayer covering is the very definition of being in hell on earth. Not having the fellowship of committed Christians willing to draw up alongside you and help you through your hell on earth only makes it worse. Perhaps we need to remember how fortunate we are to have had that covering and that presence of devout believers in our own lives. And perhaps we need to stand in the gap for all we perceive to be Enemies of Christ before we get online and bitch and moan about them.

Isolationism, Materialism, and the Evils of Our Age

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Just a monkey in a cageIt doesn’t take a genius to see that something is drastically wrong at the very heart of our daily living. After reading Brad over at The Broken Messenger blogging about the American Dream and how it is destroying us through our materialism and outright stinginess toward tithing, I have to wonder if the cure we Christians are offering is just a Band-Aid pasted over something gangrenous.

Though I want to charge ahead in this post, let’s first consider Brad’s lament:

We blend the definitions between “need” and “desire” such that they are indistinguishable so that we can justify not giving to the Body of Christ our time and or money; yet somehow we find the means to set aside regular portions of our wages and time in our lives for our dreams – all with the expectation that once the allotted time has passed, we will reap the rewards for our patience and self sacrifices. But in the same manner that we pursue our earthly dreams, Jesus has asks us to abandon them along with everything else. He asks that we sacrifice all for a little while, for inconceivable and imperishable riches later.

With all respect to Brad, there is a far deeper problem here. Not only do we suffer from the very things Brad so rightly accuses, but we cannot NOT suffer from them because of the way we’ve setup our societal structures.

I’ve blogged about this many times before, most recently in part in my business series, but it bears repeating. I own a large farm tractor. I bought it when we moved to our property with the idea of having a small farm. All my neighbors own farm tractors, too, in various sizes, capabilities, and vintages. There are five families that live on about sixty acres of land. We all have need for a tractor, but do each of us have to have one that is strictly ours?

With our island mentality of existence, each man must have his own self-sufficient world supplied with things that keep him isolated. A man must have his own tractor because he rarely interacts with his neighbor at all, so it makes borrowing an issue.

It goes beyond sharing commonly used items, too. If fifty acres of wheat need harvesting, he, his wife, and his 2.1 children can’t do it by themselves if they try to do it by inexpensive hand labor—they need the machinery that will enable them to work alone. The machinery costs money—a lot of money. Now they’ve got to work even harder to make more money to afford the expensive machines, the fuel to power them, and their upkeep. Maybe the wife takes an outside job now. And the kids wind up latchkey kids because he’s moonlighting at night and there’s that overlap when both he and his wife are gone. It’s all too common and the reason is that there is no community left that will come to his side to eliminate his need for the expensive equipment in the first place.

What if instead of going bankrupt trying to buy a $75,000 combine, all his neighbors came over and helped harvest the wheat using little more than a horse-drawn scythe or two? Inexpensive and communal, too. The labor is divided. Repeat that pattern over a number of families and many hands make for easier work.

Sure, that may work for organic farm communities, hardcore Amish-types, and the like, but what about the VP of Operations at the soap making company? Well, what about him? What are we Christians failing to work through when it comes to problems like this?

Brad’s issue over the American Dream and how it afflicts us Christians will NEVER go away no matter how hard we try unless we jettison our self-sufficiency. If you aren’t part of a community that strategically works to see that no one gets left behind in the grinding wheel of modern life, then each one of us has to have a complete set of stuff to be self-sufficient enough to live. Even Saint Francis could not have been Saint Francis unless some person out there included him in the life of a community. Yes, a few people can drop out altogether and live like hermits, but all of us can’t do that. The only answer is for Christians to start abandoning the pie-in-the-sky idea that we will somehow stop with the self-sufficiency and the requisite materialism that naturally attends it without covering each other’s backs!

Initially we put our parents into nursing homes when they were aged not because we have hard hearts, but because no one would be there to support us in our support of them. Pull the right stick out of the Kerplunk game and all the marbles will fall. Name a problem in our society and I bet you can trace it back to our misguided belief in self-sufficiency.

Ever wonder why there are a hundred different types of breakfast cereal in the grocery store? Self-sufficiency breeds self-centeredness. Self-centeredness naturally evolves into the concept that I am the master of my own kingdom. As a king, I need something that sets me apart from the commoner. They may eat cornflakes, but I need the organic muesli with non-GMO, freeze-dried ollaliberries added. The common becomes despised because I require something better. Whining for “better” promotes greed. Need I say more?

Folks, being more holy won’t fix this. We’ve tried that route and failed miserably. Nor will attempting to live a simpler life get us out from under the burden that reinforces the very complexity we try to avoid. The brick wall awaits and we’re going ninety even with the brakes on. The system is broken at a fundamental level: We lack real, connected community and our need to overcome that lack results in our becoming self-sufficient. If I don’t need you, I need everything that is not you that might replace you. And soon enough, the thing that replaces you is viewed as more essential than you are. Is it any surprise then that we live in such an angry society? If I don’t need you, then all you are doing is competing against me. There’s that Darwinian ethic again—seems to crop up everywhere.

Our self-imposed isolation is destroying us on the inside and driving us to lengths that dishonor God. But a Christian community founded upon the ideals that no one is ignored and that your problem is my problem will not succumb to isolation, self-sufficiency, and materialism. It will naturally avoid living out a disconnected, stingy, ungrateful life before God.

Trying to undo entrenched societal structures that diminish our potential for the Lord takes brave men and women. Any of them still out there?