Banking on God: Crisis, Part 4

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Pure goldLast week, in the third part of the “Banking on God: Crisis” subsection of this series, I asked some pointed question concerning the lack of preparation our churches have made to weather bad times. Today, I’d like to begin to offer solutions.

In talking over today’s post with the Lord, one word came back to me again and again. It’s a word that’s fallen out of favor in far too many churches. We have young people in churches all over this country who have never been taught what this word means. We’ve got people leading our churches who have no concept of how this word applies to any part of American civil existence, yet it’s a word that defines God more than any other word:

Holy

For our churches to be prepared for down times they must be holy.

Now I’m all for grace. The Lord’s grace covers each of us and makes us perfect in His eyes. But think about when the Lord led His people out of Egypt. What did they leave behind? Egypt. And all its trappings. All its idols. All the things that would hinder. Because when we go on a journey—and prevailing through dark times is a journey—traveling light is its own reward.

For the Christian, traveling light means leaving behind the things of life that rise up and ensnare us. Frankly, we’re so ensnared in our American Dream, in our so-called “rights,” and in our sense of personal well-being that holiness has taken a backseat to cultured appearance, doing things our way, and entitlement. But none of those common things will see us through tough times.

One passage God revealed to me comes from the rock apostle:

For it stands in Scripture: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” and “A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.
-1 Peter 2:6-12

The other meshes with it, but in a more urgent way. Jesus says this of dark times and preparation:

Let the one who is on the housetop not go down to take what is in his house, and let the one who is in the field not turn back to take his cloak.
—Matthew 24:17-18

People who live in the shadow of tribulation need to understand that holiness and the journey before them are intertwined. We need to abstain from those things that will make us stragglers, easy pickings for robbers, and in danger of falling behind the rest of the band.

So we start our list with this critical need.

1. We must be holy

    This means dropping everything that makes us “common.” Christians are to be a peculiar people, an aroma of heaven amid the scent of death. And the only way we can be that aroma is if we are holy.

If we’re surfing “those” sites on the Web—stop. If we’re listening to trashy music—stop. If we’re watching trashy movies—stop. If we feel compelled to buy this throwaway thing or that—stop.Stop living a common life. Start living a holy one.

We must watch our mouths, attitudes, and thoughts. If we’re not happy with the way we deal with any of those things, then we must get before God and make sure we’ve mastered them before we take another step on the journey.

A holy nation doesn’t need unholy stragglers. It doesn’t need common, ordinary people, but uncommon, extraordinary ones, people who think right and not left, people who can’t be conned to leave the path of holiness.

If your doctor said, “If you drink another diet cola, you’re going to die,” do you think you would drink another diet cola? No. You’d make a decision then and there to stop drinking the darned things.

If your house were on fire, would now be a great time to watch March Madness? No.

Stop sinning. Just stop it. Stop being common. Be holy.

Look, the things we do every day either move us closer to the Lord or draw us away. It’s high time we start purging all the distractions. Our very lives may depend on that, because God works through people who are serious about holiness. If we’re going to need miracles, we better darned well have nothing we’re doing in a common way that will hinder those miracles.

2. We must live simple lives

Just as we can’t have anything in our spiritual lives that might weigh us down, we can’t be weighed down by material things. The American Dream is not God’s Dream. Please read that again. God is not interested in the American Dream but in a Church that does what He says.

If your American Dream and mine are hindering God’s purpose in our lives, then it’s time to dump that American Dream. You know what is hindering you. If not, then find out by drawing near to God. He will tell you what you need to purge.

For most of us, we own too many perishable things. It’s time for us to give them up. Some of us will need to give those things away to others who might need them. Others will need to hold on very lightly so that if God says, “Hold for now,” we can easily let go when He eventually says so.

The first thing we can do is to stop the frenetic consumption. Stop buying more junk. That stuff will only hold you down. You don’t need an iPod. You don’t need a big screen TV. You don’t need most of the things you own. I suspect that the average family could give away 75 percent of what they own and still live responsible, meaningful lives.

How many pairs of shoes do you really need? And do you need to buy $200 running shoes? Why the new car or computer every couple years? Why the multiple gaming systems? For those of us who are compulsive book buyers, do we really need to stock our Christian library with yet another how-to tome that we’re not putting into practice? Seriously.

If the Hebrews in their flight out of Egypt had as much accumulated junk as we have, there never would have been an Exodus. They’d still be packing to this day.

Our preparation must include a purging of those things that will hinder us.

3. We must be generous to others

Here’s the best word I can give to any of us who self-label as “mature” Christians: It’s not about us. The days when it was about you and me were over the day we bowed our knees at the cross. We died. It’s not about us.

It is, however, about others. The Christian is a servant whose heart inclines toward others, toward God and toward other people.

If we live simple lives that are not focused on self, then we are freed to live for others. That makes us uniquely generous.

Living generously for others means that your privacy and mine are a thing of the past. The dead have no privacy. The dead can’t be inconvenienced by others. Dead people can’t complain about the living. If we have to live in dark days in situations that would have violated our privacy in lighter times, tough. Time to grow a thicker skin.

Because we are no longer so concerned about our own cocoon, God will use our newly available selves to move in generosity like we haven’t in the past. We may even quit jobs that consume all our time and energy and take lesser jobs that may once have been beneath us, so that we might better serve and have time to be generous.

And being generous means giving out of what we personally have received. It’s too easy to recommend that someone else be generous. Each of us needs to give out of his or her own rich blessing of God.

4. We must be guided by the Holy Spirit

Agabus, a prophet, stood and announced to the early Church that a famine would hit the whole world. The early Church immediately set about to address that word. This is God speaking to His people to ready them for the next step. This is how we must live.

If we are not attuned to the Spirit of God, if we despise either the written word or the prophetic word, we will not hear the next step. No more serious condition exists for a people journeying through dark times than to fail to discern the direction we need to take. And if we want to hear God, we need to get back to that first condition above: holiness.

Holiness and hearing God go hand in hand. The trappings of the world will dull our hearing. So will a lack of faith to hear.

I said earlier this year that 2008 was the year that the Church must start getting serious about listening to the Holy Spirit. Today, I think that is even more true.

5. We must think outside the box

When Adam fell, his mind fell as well. Though some Christians actually believe that we are getting stupider with each passing generation, I don’t believe this is true. Christ promises to renew our minds, which is not a vain promise. He will do it.

For those situations where we need to find radical solutions to intractable problems, we must be prepared to think along lines that we may have neglected in the past. Or we must pursue revolutionary, new ideas. Either way, we must use our renewed minds to the betterment of our situation and those of others around us.

Leonard Ravenhill tells the story of meeting a church janitor, a meek woman with an elementary school education. After he preached that Christ renews our minds, that little woman, who was only in the church to do her cleaning, overhead the message and came up to Ravenhill afterwards. She asked if God can really renew a person’s mind, including the mind of a person whom many would consider dull and stupid. Ravenhill assured her that this is how God works.

That woman took the Lord at His word. She promptly enrolled in Bible college and learned everything she could of the Scriptures. She renewed her mind. She then went on to university, learned several languages, taught the Scriptures, and became a noted missionary. All because she believed that God could take the mind of someone who knew nothing and use it for His glory.

A mind renewed by God thinks counterculturally. It will always be coming up with ideas that run counter to prevailing wisdom. This is how God works. This is how we should think.

6. We must have faith for miracles

The shoes of the people of Israel did not wear out. The widow’s oil never ran dry. The centurion said to Jesus, “You say the word and my servant will be healed.”

This is the faith we must have in times of crisis.

Note that this is not a faith that settles for anything less than the miraculous. Sadly, very few people in the United States have that kind of faith. We have a rationalized faith that sees the mountain as a mountain that cannot be moved because…well, it’s a mountain. We make peace with our faithlessness and call it enlightenment. But Jesus does not honor that kind of faith for it is not faith at all.

If we’re to do great works before the darkness rolls in, then we must be people who have taken up the shield of faith, the armor of choice in tough times.

7. We must be prepared to die

In times of crisis, we must be people who love not our lives unto death. Some of us may not make it. That’s the risk of going faithfully into difficulty.

That’s not a message you will hear in too many Christian circles today, but it was an attitude that pervaded the early Church. We need to rediscover that truth.

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce of a heaven far more substantial than this earth we’ve called home. Is that true in your life and mine? Then why do we cling so rigidly to this world and not the one that is more real and more worthy of our attention?

If we do these seven things, I believe we will be on the path to preparedness.

In my next post, I will offer practical solutions for battening the hatches of our churches as we prepare to weather crisis. Stay tuned.

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Banking On God: Series Compendium

My Hope & Prayer for 2008

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I have a hope and prayer for 2008 that I wish to share. It started off from a series of negative experiences, but I want to make it positive because I believe the positive word comes from the heart of God.

I’m late to the show on the book Simple Church by Rainer and Geiger. Judging from Amazon’s rankings of the book as #1, #2, and #3 in various evangelical categories, it’s still hot long after its release in 2006. I’m also amazed at the number of strongly approving reviews. Amazed. In fact, if I could sum up my review, I would describe the book in one portmanteau word: Craptacular.

That encapsulates almost all the hottest books on “How to Do Church” that I’ve read in the last few years. The same hot churches are held up for mimicking. The same church problems are cited (correctly, I might add—the one nod I’ll give these books). But the solutions are always wrong. Always. Nearly all are just business principles given a good shellacking of Christianity to make them look smooth and shiny. Honestly, if Google and The Gap are the models for effective churches, all is lost. (That author Tom Rainer is the head of Lifeway Christian Stores should not surprise anyone.)

What is my biggest problem with all of these modern “How to Do Church” books? Every last one of them offers solutions that can be instituted without the Lord. The fixes are universally man-made. This, universally, makes them the arm of flesh. And the arm of flesh will always fail. Always.

But one fix never fails.

That fix is not a thing, but a person. We know Him as the Holy Spirit. He will lead us gently if we allow HimHe’s perfect. Unlike one craptacular, modern, “How to Do Church” book after the other, the Holy Spirit guides into all truth. Not some truth, but all truth. He’s the ultimate source for making the Church all She can be.

Here’s how I can save you hours of reading lame books on how to fix your church and turn it into the church God desires. You only need to listen to the Holy Spirit.

I suspect that’s not a very satisfying answer for some people. You can’t make money selling curricula, church models, and seminars by telling church leaders they need to dump all their craptacular books and start listening to the Holy Spirit. But that’s what church leaders need to do.

A church is made up of too many diverse people for a “How to Do Church” book to succeed. If you read the Bible closely enough, you’ll realize that it doesn’t even attempt to provide all the solutions to how a church should operate. Yes, some general ideas exist, but when it comes down to the specifics, that’s where the Holy Spirit comes in.

Take this passage:

Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.
—Acts 13:1-3

No “How to Do Church” book is going to give you that. They’ll tell you a process by which you have to funnel everyone, but they won’t get down to this level of leadership.

Why not send Lucius? Or Manaen? Why send that guy who used to persecute the Church, that Saul character?

I would suspect that at the board meeting of your typical church, simple, complex, traditional, emerging, or whatever, the process would dictate who got chosen and for what purpose. What God thinks and the ones He would choose would probably be far down the list. Too dicey to depend on the Holy Spirit; just let the established process make the decision instead. We send the ones WE think are best, the ones who best fit our idea of who should go for the given job. And aren’t we the ones deciding what that job is anyway?

Give me a thousand copies of the bestselling Christian leadership books out there and I’d burn them all than trust one over what the Holy Spirit thinks. Why then, do our church leaders trust books so much and God so little?

The Holy Spirit provides perfect answers to intractable problems. He also provides specific answers for dealing with specific people in specific situations. He alone makes a church what it should be. He alone makes genuine disciples out of wrecked people.

We need to stop this craziness and get back to the Lord. If our churches are not run by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, then they are not churches. We must also keep the Scriptures ever before us, but with the understanding that people—sadly—can use the Bible to justify all manner of leadership styles that rely not one iota on the Holy Spirit. These “How to Do Church” books quote a million Scriptures, but they use the Scriptures to support their foregone premises, rather than seeing what it actually says. And what it actually says is that we’re blowing it if we’re not dependent on the Spirit for guidance.

My hope and prayer for the Church for 2008 is that we find a way to get back to depending on the Holy Spirit to guide our churches. And not just lip service, but genuine dependence so that we don’t do a thing unless the Spirit confirms that thing one way or another.

How do we get there?

1. Know the Scriptures—We’ve got to really know them,our leaders especially. The Holy Spirit calls to mind the Word of God, but if the reserves aren’t there, we won’t hear.

2. Holiness—It’s time to get serious about holiness. That means dropping out of the world’s game. That means being a people separated unto the Lord. You want to hear from the Holy Spirit? You want your church to prosper? Then tear down the altars and purify the temple. That never fails.

3. Waiting—The Holy Spirit answers on His time, not ours. Just because our society is enslaved to busyness doesn’t mean our churches must be. We must stop trying to force things to happen that aren’t in God’s playbook.

4. Humility & Repentance—We must repent and humbly admit that we’ve attempted to take the world’s ways and make them the Church’s. But what fellowship have Christ and Belial? None. We cannot continue to swallow fleshly business practices within our churches. Those ways end in ashes.

5. We must desire the leading of the Holy Spirit—The Holy Spirit leads where Christ is hungered and thirsted for. He is faithful to those who desire to hear from Him. The Lord does not leave His people adrift. He never has and never will. However, we did not believe this, so we gave up on His leadership and instituted the world’s. It’s time to get back to the Lord and desire Him above all.

I wrote this several days before it posted because I cannot escape the message. The Church that is not led by the Holy Spirit is utterly directionless, not matter how smoothly it may operate. God has a better way. My hope and prayer is that we rediscover that leadership by the Holy Spirit in 2008.

May you find the Lord in 2008, and know his guidance, when you seek Him with all your heart.