Godly Character

The Only Difference

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…my friends, the only difference between the sheep and the goats, according to the Scripture, is what they did and didn’t do.
—Keith Green from the song “The Sheep and the Goats” (riffing on Matthew 25: 31-46)

I believe one of the most obfuscated verses in the Bible is 2 Timothy 3:16-17:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

Notice my emphasis there. What is the whole point of knowing the Scriptures? It’s to be equipped for good works. Christ and the cityThose good works include such things as evangelizing the lost, training the young, feeding the hungry, fighting injustice, stewarding the Earth, and befriending the friendless.

Some might think that knowing the Scriptures just to do those things seems like a waste of good biblical knowledge. But it’s not about knowledge. It’s about loving others.

Who gave one of the most impassioned defenses of Christ in the Scriptures? Stephen, the man who waited tables, who fed the widows and orphans. Read Acts chapters 6-7. This was a servant, folks. And he knew the Scriptures.

In the days ahead, I’ll be writing more on this intersection of social responsibility and the Gospel.

Stay tuned.

This Thing in My Hand

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We had to eat lunch out today because of a hurried schedule. Just my son and I, little doubt existed where we’d wind up eating: some fast food joint that stuffs a toy into their kids meal.

My problem comes from knowing how those toys come to be.

At one time, middle-class Americans made those toys. Now they’re made by very young adults (and in most cases, children, as some estimates say up to 250 million children between five and fourteen-years-old slave away) in factories in countries many Americans can’t find on a map. The factory owners house them in barracks where they sleep head to toe. They work twelve to sixteen hour days, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and even on their limited breaks are typically not allowed to venture off the factory property without supervision. In truth, they have nowhere else to go. Worst of all, if we found the kind of coinage lying on the street that those workers make as their hourly rate, we’d think it not worth the risk to bend over.

While some may say that a few cents on the dollar goes a long way in one of those countries, Click image to read more...most of those factory workers have to pay for their food and lodging in the factory barracks. That rent may equal their pay.

They are 21st century indentured servants.

Some of these workers drop dead from overwork. They live in constant fear they may get ill, won’t be able to keep up, and will be replaced. We in the West may talk about failure not being an option, but these poor unfortunates live it.

They have no voice.

They have nowhere to turn.

They have no future.

They have no hope.

I’ve talked to missionaries who say that this kind of factory work may be the one thing that will stymie the revival going on in many of those lands.

Think about that for a second. So my kid and yours can have a toy in their kids meal. A toy they play with for fifteen minutes before it’s buried under a sea of other forgotten toys in an overflowing chest.

And it’s not just kids’ toys. It’s grownups’ “toys,” too.

Anyone out there heard a sermon on this lately? Anyone? Bueller?

I’m not a stupid person. I can do a reasonably good job positioning Ivory Coast, Togo, Sierra Leone, Gambia and the rest of eastern sub-Saharan Africa in their proper positions along the coastline. Singapore and Sri Lanka? Easy.

But I was stumped when I noticed a pair of pants I wore to church said “Made in Macau.” Yeah, I’d heard of it, and could guess it was probably in the Pacific somewhere, but that’s as close as I got.

If I don’t know where Macau is, do I really care to know that some fifteen-year-old girl in a 95 degree sweathouse making fourteen cents an hour during her thirteen-hour day stitched the pants I wore to church to worship God?

You see, our excess costs something. We may never see where the thing in our hands was made or the semi-slave who made it, but God does.

It’s devilishly hard to say no to one more bauble, isn’t it? Large multinational corporations (who play shell games with their headquarters’ addresses to avoid having to answer for the way they treat that 15-year-old Macau girl) pride themselves on the fact that you and I don’t really care where it came from or how, just so long as we can get it cheap. And get it in neverending quantities.

I don’t sleep well at night much anymore. These things trouble me. I think they should trouble all of us. But they don’t. Not really. Out of sight, out of mind.

I won’t go into how all this damages the United States economically in the long run. That’s another post. But I do want us to think about our Christian responsibility to stand for justice. If our rampant materialism creates injustice, then we Christians should be on the forefront of speaking against it.

I look around at all I have and anymore it just sickens me to know that most of it got into my hands in a circuitous route that should have me weeping at who did what to whom and how. I’m going to have to answer for that some day.

This is why I’m trying to live with less. I won’t buy something unless I’m replacing what wore out. And even then, some items I simply won’t replace. I’m going to try to buy American if possible, to keep jobs in a country that still has some labor laws to protect people. If I need to buy two pairs of shoes, I’ll forgo one pair if it means spending a bit more to keep my neighbor from losing his job. Maybe that will send a message to those corporations paying slave wages in some country I can’t place on the map.

As Christians, we need to be more vocal about justice in work. I’ve posted quite a bit about unjust work situations in this country, but it’s even worse overseas. Our materialism makes it worse. For this reason, we can’t keep silent.

Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.
—Proverbs 21:13

Choosing Your Canaan

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We’re thinking about putting our son in public school this August.

We homeschooled him via a public e-school this year and personally experienced the Achilles heel of homeschooling: lack of socialization. As an only child in an area where almost all the children go to public school, our son suffered from piecemeal contact with other kids and it showed. Yes, we have him in activities with other kids. It simply hasn’t been enough.

In addition, because he’s an only child, he needs to be in an environment where he’s not the center of attention all the time. Homeschooling works totally against that idea. Nearly every growth area he needs to improve in can best be met by hanging out with a large group of kids for long periods of time.

But when I mentioned this reality to a friend the other day, I received a rather pointed response:

“You’re handing him over to the Canaanites.”

Hmm.

What followed was the usual explanation of how anything but education in an exclusive private Christian school will permanently warp our son. We’ll be totally unable to counteract the brainwashing he’ll receive in public school. Welcome to Canaan!For our decision, we’ll end up with a child who grows up to be one part Bertrand Russell, one part Aleister Crowley, and one part Ted Bundy.

Thank you, NEA.

Or actually, thank you Baptists.

You see, two Baptist megachurches in our rural town control much of the public school district. Folks from their congregations make up a big chunk of the superintendents, principals, and teachers. Considering that these two churches try to outdo each in moral rectitude, I highly doubt first graders will be forced to read Heather Has Two Mommies.

But all this is beside the point.

No, some think the private Christian school education must be superior because it has better people in it. Along the road I live on, many families live in trailers, sectionals, and double-wides. They tend not to send their kids to private Christian schools for no other reason than they can’t pay the tuition.

Truth is, most people making a household income less than $100,000 a year can’t pay to send their children to private Christian schools.

Which leads to the heart of this post:

And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, I am the LORD your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. You shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them. I am the LORD your God.
—Leviticus 18:1-4

No matter what we do in the United States of America, we’re forced to choose our Canaan because we aren’t a theocracy like Israel was. As much as the Lord wants us to follow Him exclusively, we Christians aren’t called to bunker ourselves against the rest of the world. We’re called to shine our light amid the darkness. And where is the darkness? Everywhere we look.

And sometimes, it’s oh so disarmingly subtle.

Whatever my child may face in public school, I can assure you that none of it is subtle. On the other hand, the pernicious nature of the subconscious message of the exclusive private Christian school is the the message of upper-middle-class suburban Evangelicalism: materialism.

Fourth-graders putting condoms on bananas OR materialism. Which one damages the soul more? Which is harder to root out? When the Lexus SUVs pull up to drop the kids off at the private Christian school, are the kids aware of their privilege? When they’re all equipped with the latest iPod, the swankest TI graphing calculator, and the non-stop message that it’s all about them, how can they NOT be?

Worse still, how can they possibly see through that gray fog when their own parents can’t?

I’m no master of discernment, but I think I’m fairly capable of dealing with whatever the public school Canaanites can throw at me. The kids I truly worry about are those in the private Christian school who may very well be materialists at the core, yet surrounded by a highly polished veneer of Christianity or—in keeping with an age when truth is now truthiness— what I like to call Christ-iness.

We can’t drop out of Canaan because it’s all around us. We have to choose which Canaan we’ll dwell in. Some do so consciously, while other get sucked in by osmosis.

One of the reasons we moved to the country was to get away from the overt materialism we saw pummeling the suburbs. We want our son to see that not everyone garners merit by what they own. We want him to escape the dependence on others to provide for his every need. We don’t want him in the Canaan that’s so intractable that hardly anyone sees it.

The private Christian school parents forced to send their kid to public school may sit down with him or her and say, “Now be on your guard if they try to tell you that homosexuality and abortion are okay.” Meanwhile, the public school parents sending their child to the private Christian school may say, “Now be on your guard because many people there will define themselves by what they own or what they can buy.”

Choose your Canaan. We all must. No one gets a free pass. Every day each of us must fight evil.

But evil itself is not uniform. It bends the rules. Sometimes it comes as an angel of light and sometimes as a blackened beast from the pit of hell.

It’s the angel of light that troubles me.