Faith, the Opposite of Control

If you were to ask me what one lesson stands out in my life in this last decade, I would point to control.

Fact is, you and I don’t have any. Control is an illusion created by our culture. We in America idolize the self-made bootstrapper, yet if we can’t control whether or not we take our next breath, then ultimately, we are not in control of our lives.

Most people in America, most Christians even, have their minds fogged by the illusion of control. And the illusion is easy to believe because we surround ourselves with gadgets and services that perpetuate it. We read books, especially self-help tomes, that reinforce that we can be masters of our personal kingdoms. We are told that getting ahead is all about our own efforts. Our society holds out a roadmap that shows that if we just work hard enough, we can walk from the mall entrance to Neiman Marcus.

But if you’ve lived long enough, you begin to see what we have been fed about controlling our lives is a lie. Sometimes, no matter how hard we work toward a goal, it never arrives. Sickness intrudes. Randomness strikes. A butterfly in China flaps its wings and a tornado destroys a palatial estate accrued through decades of sweat. In the great mall of life, we end up in Spencer Gifts staring at black light posters instead of negotiating down the price of a Botero at Neiman.

The Great Recession, as this economic downturn has been called, is proving to be a factor in waking some Americans out of the control delusion. People who did everything right, who followed the mall map to a T, still saw their shopping trip of life go awry. Now they sit in the food court sucking down an Orange Julius and not the complimentary Roederer Cristal handed out by the luxury retailers.

I suspect that the next couple years will be an enormous wake-up call to Americans, for many will find themselves progressively sliding down the class ranks. And the resulting anguish will be like nothing our generation has ever seen.

But then, basing our lives on our own ability to control them can have no other outcomes except grief. The expectations run too high.

A few years ago, I read The Black Swan, a fascinating book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The author posits that too few people account for the unexpected and that most success is illusory, the product of chance happenings that are all that separate the board room from the mail room. Taleb states that those business celebrities who write books about how they achieved their success might as well have saved all their scribblings and just written, Hey, I got here by dumb luck. When even the secular crowd wakes up to the lack of control we have over our destinies, maybe hope for positive change within our country remains.

What the Bible says:

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.
—Ecclesiastes 9:11-12

I have known too many cases where hard work failed to win the day. I have known too many people who did everything right, but they still got steamrolled by events they could not foresee. I know people who made decisions praised as wise by the wisest of the wise, but who still saw that wise choice end in bitter fruit.

We are not in control of our lives. We deceive ourselves when we insist we are.

For the Christian, the answer to the delusion of control is here:

You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.
—1 Corinthians 6:19b-20a
Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
—Colossians 3:2-3
For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
—2 Corinthians 4:17-18

As I look at the American Church of 2010, I see people struggling to maintain control. We consider ourselves to be our own, masters of imagined destinies that line up more with the American Dream than with having a mind set on the eternal unseen. To such people, the following verse is the strangest in the Bible and is prayed with the least conviction:

Give us this day our daily bread….
—Matthew 6:11

When we have surrendered control of our lives entirely to Jesus, we can pray Matthew 6:11 with joy.

But for too many people, praying such a prayer becomes an issue of abandoning too much control. It asks too much. It asks us to rely on something foreign to us: faith.

You see, faith is the opposite of control. Faith says, “I do not know what tomorrow will hold. I cannot even control today. Instead, I will live by the Spirit. Jesus leads I will live with the uncertainty of the world and instead exercise the muscle of faith that I have let atrophy for too long. Christ is in me; therefore, I have hope.”

The times we live in now will tax many people. All the old refuges will fail. The Church must revise the way it thinks about life, putting Christ first and its own finaglings last. We will have to experience what it means to depend on Jesus alone for physical healing because we can no longer control our health care because we can no longer afford doctors and hospitals. It will mean praying for food and expecting to receive it, even when the grocery store shelves are bare. It will mean learning to be thankful for even the smallest blessing we receive in faith from God. It will finally mean learning to move beyond just talking about faith and actually living it.

How to Fix the American Christian – Unifying Faith and Praxis

A current theme erupting throughout the Godblogosphere concerns taking the Church back to the Gospel. I think that’s a noble effort.

As a flawed human among flawed humans, though, I worry that even such an essential “recovery” runs the risk of leading people into a form of sub-Christianity that in the end fails to reflect the entirety of the Kingdom of God and the reason Jesus came.

I was not planning to write on this issue in this “How to Fix the American Christian” series, but when a reader objected to the series due his belief that such a series merely supplants the Gospel with “behavior modification,” I felt compelled by God to write this. In fact, I believe God provided me an apt illustration that is already deepening how I think about this issue.

In the rush to strongly delineate the Law from the Gospel, I believe we have a tendency to fall into the error of lumping the Law with the natural outworking of the Gospel. In other words, because both involve doing, we fail to make a distinction between the Law and Gospel-based praxis.

One of the beauties of the Gospel is that being finds a central place among doing. Man cannot justify himself by the doing of the Law. Instead, he rests in the finished work of Jesus, abiding in Christ. What we Christians are by that abiding now defines our being.

But like so many aspects of the faith, mistaken notions lurk on the outskirts of that beauty. We are, after all, in the process of being made to be like Jesus; we are not complete yet.

The error of equating the Law with the natural outworkings of the Gospel are addressed by James in this well-known passage:

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe–and shudder!
—James 2:14-19

What separates the Christian from the demon is not belief in Christ. It is faith expressed through Gospel praxis. It is doing those actions that naturally extend from having been confronted with the truth of the Gospel. It is not just saying, “I believe the Gospel and no longer attempt to justify myself by the Law.” No, it means that the entire way you and I live can and must be altered by that statement. And since that involves how we live life, it must necessarily involve what we do.

Herein lies the problem with the contemporary American Church: Our praxis does not reflect what we claim to believe—and the world knows it. Tree with fruit

The illustration that best reflects this issue mirrors the agricultural focus Jesus often took in His parables.

Imagine three trees.

The first “tree” is hardly recognizable as a tree at all because its entirety remains below ground. It is all roots. That tree believes itself to be the prefect reflection of a life in Christ. It is always talking about the Gospel, defending it and affirming the five solas of the Reformation with an undying allegiance. It cannot help but sink its roots deep in the nourishment that is God Himself, praying and reading the Scriptures with enviable devotion.

But in truth, such a tree is abnormal. Because it is all below the surface, it cannot provide shade, wood, or fruit to others. It exists solely for itself. It takes from the soil and water, yet gives nothing back to the world above ground. From time to time, it may send a meager shoot up through the soil, but rarely does this act provide anything meaningful to others. Such a tree may even proudly declare how it is impervious to the wind that would knock down other trees, but it fails to see how useless it actually is, a perversion of the kind of tree that God intends.

I have three such trees in my yard, all Bradford Pears. They started out looking beautiful, but their trunks and branches were not strong, despite being deeply rooted. They cracked and split, so I had to cut them down. The stumps remain and the roots still show some signs of life, occasionally sending up sprouts. But that won’t be the case forever. For all intents and purposes, those trees are dead, their roots slowly rotting in the life-giving soil.

I’ve met plenty of Christians like the all-root trees. They didn’t start off that way, but that is how they finished. They have an apologetic that would make Ravi Zacharias seem like Joel Osteen, but theirs is an insular world beneath the soil, one the outside world never sees. They tend to live in fortress-like churches and are always talking about defending the faith. Yet for all their talk of the Gospel, the world around them goes on as if they are not there at all.

Another tree has a trunk, branches, and green leaves. By all appearances, it seems like a normal tree. It does interact with the world, doing useful things for others like providing shelter from the sun and bearing fruit for eating. Such a tree prides itself on giving back to the world by what it does as a tree. It believes itself to be the perfect reflection of a life in Christ.

But below the surface of this tree one finds a curious lack: It has no roots. It didn’t start that way, but over time the tree became so concerned about appearing to be a tree by being doing what a tree is supposed to do that whatever focus it needed to give to its rootings withered away. Over time, such a tree tends to burn out and dry up. And all the things it once provided shrivel.

I’ve met plenty of Christians who spend all their time trying to maintain an appearance of being a Christian, but they have no Gospel roots. Such people are all about what they do and how they act. They have no means of simply being or dwelling, no rootedness to the source of nourishment and grounding.

A few years back, we hosted the big family Christmas and got a tree from our neighbor. We cut the tree fresh from their plantings, struck by its shape and beauty. The scent from that fresh evergreen filled our house. If it dropped any needles in our living room, I couldn’t find them. We enjoyed everything about that tree, but when it had served its purpose, I dumped it on our burn pile in mid-January.

The amazing thing about that rootless, cutoff tree is that it remained green until August. Finally, a typical August drought proved too much and it finally succumbed to brown.

I said that there are three trees, right?

The only tree that genuinely serves the purposes of God is the one with deep roots in the freedom and nourishment of the Gospel and a trunk and crown that provide a full expression to the world of that rootedness by providing beauty, shelter, comfort, and food to others. Such a tree fully expresses what it means to be a unified, living thing. The roots support the tree, anchor it, and provide nourishment to the trunk and crown. The trunk and crown not only make the tree useful to others, but they deliver life and growth back to the roots. In fact, without the trunk and crown, the tree dies a slow, lingering death.

For all us Christians to be healthy, we must not only have the Gospel, but we must also have Gospel praxis. That Gospel praxis reinforces our faith as much as anything. Doing the Gospel truly does lead to a reinforcement of the Gospel in our hearts. That natural outworking enlarges us as much as a tree’s leaves provide the photosynthesis to make it grow. I can only speak for myself, but I know the profound reality of how the outworkings of the Gospel through genuine practice serve to reinforce the Gospel in me. The doing strengthens the being.

When we Christians declare that we are no longer beholden to the Law, we must NEVER confuse the doing of the Law with the doing of the Gospel. Far too many Christians are making that mistake, though, because of their well-meaning intentions to distance the Church from works righteousness. However, in the course of such avoidance, Gospel praxis suffers. This all too often leads to insular churches that are smug in their preservation of the truth of the Gospel, while at the same time they give nothing of that Gospel truth back to a dying world. And so they inevitable harden and die along with the world they are so loathe to serve for fear of betraying sola fide and sola gratia.

Why Christianity Is Failing in America – Further Thoughts

I almost always post on Monday. I didn’t yesterday because I was thinking more about my post from Friday, “Why Christianity Is Failing in America.” A couple readers asked the question I knew would come—””So how do we fix the problem?”—which led me into all sorts of introspective thought.

I don’t like raising problems without at least some stab at a solution. There are a million Christian blogs out there moaning about this problem and that, and I don’t want Cerulean Sanctum to simply add to the collective complaint. I’m looking for answers.

The question of how to overcome the kind of half-baked, slacker mentality that permeates American Christendom needs better brains and souls than mine to find lasting answers. I struggle with this morass we find ourselves in as much as anyone. I’m not sure how to extricate myself, much less provide life-changing answers to anyone else.

Still, a few core concepts might lead to resolution:

1. We Christians must stop worrying about what others think. For all our talk in America of being individuals, for all our love of the iconoclast who does it his way, for all our national pride at stepping up to the plate when no other country will, we Americans are stunningly conformist. And we are that way largely because we are scared to death of suffering eternal damnation because someone in the fast lane might think we’re not good enough.

For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.
—Galatians 1:10

The Church of Jesus Christ in these here United States will keep on preserving the status quo as long as we fear men. And truly, we are shaking in our boots at what others think of us. Such a group will never be martyred. But it’s going to take some level of personal sacrifice to break the self-conscious chains that tie us to conformity to the world.

2. We have got to take time apart from the world and reconnect with the brains God gave us. We Christians in America are some of the least introspective people in the universe. Talk of the “examined life” goes right over our heads.

If I could wish one thing for American Christians right now it would be to jettison whatever it is that keeps us distracted 24/7/365 (even church-related stuff), and get before God in silence to pray.

But more than prayer, I think that modern Christians must take back time from wordly living to do something even more necessary in light of the times we live in: We must think and meditate.

I am continuously startled by how pragmatism is rapidly undermining the base that Christianity was built upon. We’ve become people who fail to consider the consequences of each “new thing” we promote, even when those things seem on the surface to be great for the Church. Fact is, most aren’t. “Because we can, we should” is practically the mantra of contemporary Christianity in the West. And it is that way because we live unexamined lives. We bought the world’s marketing and we’re remaking the Church in a pragmatist image.

The way we are headed, perhaps we should just jettison the pretense and go for it. I hear about the lack of men in churches today. So why toss another chunk of change at yet another doomed-to-fail men’s program purchasable from whatever the hottest new church is? Just put up the stripper poles and hire a few hot things in skimpy outfits to dance before the service. It would work. You could probably find a Bible verse taken way out of context to support it, too.

Too extreme? Well, that’s what happens when Christians don’t take time to think about the consequences of everything we do. We’ve trapped ourselves in this race to the bottom because we turned off our brains during our rush to consume and be stylin’, with-it individuals like everyone else.

3. We have got to question the way we do EVERYTHING. We can go on and on about how Jesus turned the world on its head when He walked the earth, yet we go out from our Sunday meetings to live conformist lives that never question the status quo.

In concert with the call to sit in silence before God while asking Him to respark our burned-out minds, we Christians must begin anew to ask the question WHY. This is not an exercise with re-evaluating our doctrine. Too many churches fry their theology in the crucible of why. Instead, we need to place every aspect of our praxis as believers in America under the white hot stage lights of why.

Why do we sink enormous amounts of money into church buildings? Why do we slave in jobs outside the home? Why do we put our kids in private Christian schools? Why do we read only Christian novels? Why do we follow a church service order of worship, announcements, offering, sermon, go home? Why do we have a youth ministry? Why are there so few Christian leaders on the national stage who are making a difference? Why do we buy items made in the country of China that actively persecutes our fellow Christians? Why do we depend on others to feed us? Why are we letting Muslims outreproduce us? Why are there still orphanages? Why are we not making disciples? Why do so many of us wonder if we’re truly saved?

Why?

People looking to replace their “old” iPod they’ve had for two whole years don’t ask the question why. They don’t question anything except why they didn’t get their new gizmo in the mail the next day despite paying for overnight shipping.

People in the Church in America, on the whole, are not asking why. And worse, we’re not following up the why with the answer that the Gospel will give us. And that’s largely the reason why we keep doing things the world’s way and not the Lord’s.

4. Genuine community has never before been so needed. When Christians start sitting in silence before God, begin holding up their practices to God to be examined under the question of why and the Gospel’s reply, the next step is for the Christian community to join together to take what has been gained and change the world.

What Christian community?

Oh. Yeah. Hmm.

I no longer support the long-cherished belief that it takes one person to change the world. Fact is, with 6.5 billion people on this planet, nothing happens outside of groups. I can radically change my behavior and little around me will change. By its sheer enormity our culture tamps out whatever fires I may start as an individual.

Any godly change that will make a difference in the world today will not come through a scattered set of individuals but a like-minded group of hundreds—such as your typical church. That so few churches are able to spark that kind of change in their localities…well, you get the point.

The problems we face as a Church in America cannot be addressed by individual martyrs. And it’s going to take martyrs to buck the massive systems we’ve erected that blind us to the Lord’s way. You can crush an individual. It’s more complicated to crush several hundred people. The pressure is more equalized among all involved, with fewer individuals likely to crack entirely. (That’s the Body of Christ working as a genuine body, with each organ supporting the others.)

If I jump off the bridge, I make a small splash. But if several hundred jump with me, look out for the wave…

5. “Seek first the Kingdom” cannot be relegated to a platitude. Every Christian in the United States will raise his or her hand to the question of “How many here are seeking first the Kingdom?” But the biggest lie we Christians tell on a day to to day basis concerns how much we’re truly committed to that truth.

If you are a Christian, seeking the Kingdom first must necessarily change the entire way you live. It has to. That it’s not for so many of us only proves our failure to seek. We instead seek personal glory and comfort at the cost of discipleship. It’s as if we don’t believe in a life to come, only the vaporous reality of this physical world.

In America, pastors have the reins for leading people to Kingdom-mindedness, whether we (or they) like it or not. In truth, every one of us is charged to spur on our brothers and sisters to growth in Christ for His Kingdom. But sadly, until the Church here gets some momentum, pastors are it.

And so I ask pastors, why (there’s that question) do so few of your charges get what it means to seek the Kingdom first? Why is it that your people seek houses, promotions, vacations, and comfort above the Kingdom? Worse, why is it that you preach sermons that only fuel people’s desire to fill their lives with that which sets itself up against the Kingdom of God?

A simple example: I’ve heard a bazillion messages on how we Christians can prosper in our own lives, but I can’t ever remember hearing a sermon explaining why Christians should seek economic justice for the poor, even if it means they must become poor themselves to do so.

Genuine Christian education is in a freefall in this country. Our curriculum is a shambles of wordliness. Our sermons only prop up fallen kingdoms. Our people never see genuine Christian practice.

And it’s all because we’ve made the Kingdom of God a concept rather than a reality.

The Church in America will reverse its tragic trajectory when fearless groups of Christians who have meditated on the tough issues of our day, who ask the question why, band together and put the Kingdom first again.

That’s highly conceptual. I know that. But it’s going to be slightly different depending on where one lives and the strength (or weakness) of the local churches in that area. (Maybe I’ll provide some general practical advice in days to come.)

This is a genuine tar pit we’re in, folks, and we’re up to our necks in the world’s black goo. I will even go so far as to say that revival alone is not the cure-all. The Lord can light the fire, but we have got to be more serious about what we do when He does. And that will take many of us thinking while we challenge the status quo. Perhaps it will even take us rising up before the best of the fire falls.

I think that talk is not cheap in this case. I think talk can stir up the dissatisfaction that many of us feel. Perhaps that will build the momentum for a new American Church Revolution.

We can hang together or we can hang separately. God is giving us the choice.