When Being “Discerning” Isn’t, Part 1

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One of the things that bothers me most about living in a culture mired in spotlights is the sheer number of forums and opportunities available to say or do something foolish in public. Within that subset of bother, nothing makes me slap my forehead faster than shining the spotlight on Christians who haven’t thought through all the ramifications of their theologies or who make the most appalling statements when a mic is shoved under their nose.

I fully admit that I am one of those people whose mouth runs faster than his brain. Let me talk long enough and the chance that I’ll inadvertently say something that grossly offends someone runs to about 1:1 odds. People who know me only through the blog probably consider me some deep, intellectual introvert with a bit of Old Testament prophet mixed in. In other words, kind of scary. Fact is, I’m a big, motormouth chucklehead who spends most of his time laughing—and sticking my foot in his mouth at some point in the conversation because I don’t know enough to shut up.

That said, I am a much more reflective person than I used to be. I’m not nearly as hard on other people or myself than my former persona of “angry young man destined to change the world singlehandedly.” Which is why the whole issue of discernment in the real world is one that never leaves my thoughts.

We just can’t seem to get discernment right. And if we can’t get discernment right, then nothing else in life will function as it should.

A couple weeks ago, a conversation in the comments of Tim Challies’s blog brought this home. Tim had posted a link to a blog post on another blogger’s site. That blogger argued that Christians should not friend ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends on Facebook. Here’s the reasoning:

I believe that all relationships in my life either support or detract from my marriage, however tacitly, and they stay or go based on that criterion. I believe spouses should have access to each others’ phones and e-mails and should approve of each others’ Facebook friends. I believe privacy with exes, even and perhaps particularly virtual privacy, is dangerous. I’m on the road I chose, and no good will come from revisiting roads not taken.

C.S. Lewis said this:

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.

Lewis’s rationale can be extrapolated to mean that we can think that there will never be a demon lurking around the next corner or we will think that one will always be awaiting us.

I believe the wisdom of Lewis’s statement applies to all aspects of the Christian life. We may find it easy to believe that money is neither intrinsically good nor evil, but we often find it impossible to think that some other aspects of life also fall into that same gray or neutral area. We want our good and our evil clearly delineated.

Yet life is not always black and white. When Christians automatically flee to those poles, we’ve abandoned discernment for a knee-jerk reaction.

In the case of the anti-ex blogger, her error is found in the automatic dichotomy imposed on human relationships. She believes that every relationship is either helping or hurting her marriage.

Perhaps I’m a serious backslider here, but who frames life that way? Isn’t that automatically assuming that evil lurks behind every corner? Isn’t that falling into a trap of unhealthy concern about everything that might possibly go wrong? Is it impossible for anything, even friending a former flame on Facebook, to be neutral?

My son’s bus driver warned him that he could not read on the bus anymore because some girl was reading, got jostled, and the corner of the book flew up and bruised her eye. So now on the school bus (emphasis on school) it’s a crime to read a book.

That’s where this kind of “anything might go wrong” discernment always leads.

Folks who advocate to live that way always call on the same verses:

Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.
—1 Corinthians 6:18

But as for you, O man of God, flee these things.
—1 Timothy 6:11a

Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.
—1 Corinthians 10:14

That’s a lot of fleeing. And when applied rightly in the right situations, it’s a proper response.

However, the problem is that fleeing is but one option, the most drastic one. It’s not the sole option for dealing with life that works for most cases. For a good example of when it’s appropriate to flee, consider this:

Now Joseph was handsome in form and appearance. And after a time his master’s wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, “Lie with me.” But he refused and said to his master’s wife, “Behold, because of me my master has no concern about anything in the house, and he has put everything that he has in my charge. He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself, because you are his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” And as she spoke to Joseph day after day, he would not listen to her, to lie beside her or to be with her. But one day, when he went into the house to do his work and none of the men of the house was there in the house, she caught him by his garment, saying, “Lie with me.” But he left his garment in her hand and fled and got out of the house. And as soon as she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and had fled out of the house…
—Genesis 39:6b-13

Given what a lot of Christians endorse concerning relationships, it was a bad idea for Joseph to even set foot in Potiphar’s house in the first place, given that he was single man in the home of a married woman. But Joseph didn’t flee that situation right away, did he? Somehow, he resisted, as it notes, “day after day.”

Eventually, though, Potiphar’s wife trapped Joseph in a no-win situation, grabbing ahold of his clothing, and offering him the classic proposition again. So he fled.

In other words, the situation was so bad that fleeing finally became the only option.

How Joseph reacted throughout the entirety of his dealings with his master’s wife is how we must rationally apply the “flee model” of dealing with temptation.

In my conversation in the comments over at Tim Challies’s blog, a commenter who advocated the flee model for even the least issue eventually got to the point where he questioned whether youth groups of mixed sexes were a good idea because they don’t allow a good option for fleeing.

If that’s where we are in the Christian Church today, then we’ve lost the battle. We might as well barricade ourselves in our rooms alone. When our first instinct is to flee at the slightest temptation, then we are no longer practicing discernment. Instead, we have become slaves of finding a demon lurking around every corner.

Here’s the verse that mature Christians apply in most cases of temptation:

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
—James 4:7

And this:

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.
—Ephesians 6:11

Real Christians in a real world must navigate through gray. It’s why the Holy Spirit was put inside us. He’s our guide to dealing with issues that are unclear or those that have yet to descend to flight. He’s also the one who gave Joseph the will to say no day after day until it got so bad that fleeing became the only option.

In the case of friending ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends on Facebook, no blanket “helping my marriage or harming it” dichotomy exists in the real world.

Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well

Single man + "married" woman = flee?

Both you and the Holy Spirit know which exes it would be okay to friend and which it wouldn’t. Listen to what the Lord shows you about your own weakness and be mature about it.

And let’s also be mature and acknowledge that in a world of two sexes attracted to each other, we’re going to have to employ some other method than resorting to fleeing at the least attraction.

As an older married man, I want to speak honestly to younger men and those who have never been married but anticipate it some day: There will be times when you are attracted to women who are not your wife. Those women may even be the wives of your friends. You may attend a party with a lot of other couples, and before you walked into that party, you and your wife had some major fight about something stupid. When that other woman at the party lends you an ear, there might be a spark of attraction in that moment.

Discernment acknowledges forthrightly that such situations will arise. Discernment also acknowledges that flight is not always an option unless you want to be a complete idiot with no friends who makes his wife constantly suspicious of his seemingly unbridled lust.

The wise person must employ some other means of dealing with these kinds of situations. That’s real discernment. And it’s real Christian maturity too.

In my next post, I’ll talk about another discernment issue that even the most learned Christians fumble.

Spiritual Lust and Infatuation

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A couple weeks back, I posted that one of the Enemy’s tricks is to stoke the fires of wanting more (“Tangleknot on Leading the Opponent’s Subjects Astray“). In that desire for more, Christians may even make the mistake of overdesiring to grow deeper in the Faith.

“But, Dan,” you say, “how can that ever be a bad thing?”

Well, it’s a bad thing when it leads to spiritual lust.

Lust happens when all the boundaries that normally hold good gifts in check fall away, leaving a naked core of desire that knows no limitations. It’s playing the piano—by dropping bricks on the strings. Performing that way may make a sound, but it’s noise, not beautiful music. It’s a misguided approach. Should one want to play the piano correctly, one should play it as its design demands it be played. And as any skilled pianist can attest, one does not go from “Chopsticks” to Carnegie Hall overnight.

Spiritual lust occurs when Christians in their desire to know God violate the design He created by which we can know Him, grow in Him, and develop intimacy with Him. In the desire to know God, people inflamed by spiritual lust can instead find themselves drawn away from God because they violated His means of approaching Him. They become moths drawn to a flame, plunging down the pathway toward strange fire.

Spiritual lust is a kind of addictive behavior because it will drink whatever it can find to feed the thirst.  A little or a lot, it doesn’t matter. Nor does the quality of the spiritual experience or its rightness in the eyes of God. Spiritual lust makes demands that must be filled, no matter the expense.

Adoring fans...That addiction often leads Christians into pointless searches for truth in places where no truth (or precious little) can be found. A prospector looking for gold nuggets would not likely find them examining the contents of a septic tank. Yet this is what some Christians do when they go on quests to find the truth of God in other religions. Or it’s what too many charismatics do when they hop a jet bound for the far side of the world to bask in some new “revival” rather than finding God right where He has always been. Some Christians will tolerate all manner of skubalon in hopes of finding some tiny morsel to feed their spiritual rapaciousness.

The sad truth is no path to deeper intimacy with God exists than the old-fashioned ways found through the classic spiritual disciplines of the faith. We can’t help but grow in the Lord if we pray, study, meditate, fast, embrace solitude, practice submission, live simply, serve others, worship, confess our sins, seek guidance from the Lord, and celebrate.

Too many Christians want faster methods than those. Or they want whatever’s “new.” But both of those are simply spiritual lust. And God will never be honored through lust of any kind.

Spiritual infatuation tangentially connects with spiritual lust, but in a different way. It’s what happens to Christians who begin to veer into spiritual lust, but who sidetrack quickly because they find what they believe to be the perfect object of their theological affection.

Just as we old fogies get a whimsically nostalgic smile on our faces when we see a young teen utterly smitten with another, so it is that we recognize the signs when a young Christian has discovered a truth for the first time. How many times have we seen others find a tiny nugget of truth they then use as the sole basis for constructing elaborate theologies? How often do we run into other Christians, even older ones who should know better, who are infatuated with one truth to the point that all other godly truths become irrelevant?

I have many friends who are involved in the International House of Prayer (IHOP). IHOP has built much of its teaching foundation around Mike Bickle’s concept of Bridal Theology, connecting the Song of Solomon to Revelation’s depiction of the Bride of Christ.

Though I have grave concerns regarding Bickle and the Kansas City Prophets movement he came out of, I think that the Bible does show that God has a profound love for us akin to that of a groom for his bride. We Christians can be encouraged by this understanding.

But a problem swiftly rises: Building an entire theology off bridal imagery leaves out a big chunk of the rest of the Bible. Doing so avoids other perfectly legitimate explanations of the Gospel. It also forces proponents to keep expanding the morsel, blowing it out of proportion to its basic reality. Think how easily infatuated kids gush about their objects of affection, inevitably magnifying the character of that person to superhuman—and clearly mistaken—levels. After awhile, the voice of reason no longer penetrates the gauzy dreams erected by the infatuated. The infatuated filter their entire experience of reality through their infatuation. And we all know where that leads.

But before some of you high-five each other and yell, “Dude, Edelen totally dissed IHOP,” let me offer a different subject: atonement. A gnarly subject, yes?

Many reading this will defend a penal substitutionary view of atonement to the death. I, myself, believe in a penal substitutionary atonement. That said, I will also claim that some of the other views on the atonement (such as the ransom, governmental, Christus Victor, and satisfaction views ) all have some very good points going for them. In fact, it may even be possible—at least as I see it—that all those views work together in synergy much the same way that the four Gospels reinforce each other and give us a more complete understanding of Jesus.

Yeah, I know, heresy.

When you get to the heart of this problem, though, too often the pitchfork and torches crowd are the ones suffering from a spiritual infatuation. Remember, if Martin Luther hadn’t called the Roman Catholic Church on its spiritual infatuations….

Spiritual lust and spiritual infatuation lead to one unavoidable reality: a defective understanding of the revealed truths of God. And that defective understanding leads to all sorts of blindness and error when taken to extremes.

Trust me, too many of us take them to their extremes.

All of us suffer from some amount of spiritual lust and spiritual infatuation; it’s part of the human condition. That said, we don’t have to be complacent about this tendency. True growth in Christ comes when we seek Him rightly, discern truth from error, and allow Him to show us how our infatuations may be keeping us from knowing Him by His design and in His time.

 


Living Lighter, Living Larger

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Nope. No room for God here...I spent most of this week discarding.

Most of what got tossed went to the recycling center. Other items will be sold off. I don’t like to see my excess wind up in a landfill just because I couldn’t control how much I consume. Driving past the county dump this afternoon, it seemed to me to be a hundred feet higher. Though I do my best not to contribute to the altitude, I can’t escape that at least a few of those towering inches are indeed mine.

The number of bags of shredded files totaled five. I can probably shred another ten bagfuls. My parents’ lives comprised much of those confetti strips of paper. They’ve been gone nearly seven years now. Old mortgage papers, phone numbers for people who have moved on, medical receipts. Two lives in paper.

Our house resembles a bomb blast as we make room. Items that once held precious memories today prove that magic drains out in time. The present asserts itself, while the future bears down with the weight of uncertainty.

The Lord’s been speaking to my heart this week. He says I need to live lighter. With each discarded item, each memory that tumbles from my hand, each dream I let go, I know I’m one step closer to heaven.

I don’t think that word’s just for me, though.

I’ve lost nearly 30 pounds on the low-glycemic diet I’ve been following. It could have been more, but 30 was enough. I added a few off-limits items and my weight has stabilized. Of all the effects of this weight loss, none compares with the energy I’ve rediscovered.

There’s a lesson for us in that.

Whenever I consider the American Church’s state, I can’t help but think that much of our problem stems, not from the weight of glory, but from the burden of worldliness. Our inability to resist the weight of the world has rendered us fat and lazy, shackled to things, and far from the heart of God.

A simple gut check here: we don’t do the things Christ asks of us because if we did, we’d have to lose our lives. We’d have to step away from the TV, turn off the iPod, stop planning the vacation in Cancun, and get serious about the work of the Lord. We’d have to stop wondering how to insure all the debris we lay claim to and start investing in the Kingdom.

But you see, we can’t, can we? All that stuff means too much to us.

I hear so many people talking about seeking after God for a vision for their lives. To most of those people, I would say, “Give up now.”

Why? Because not a square inch exists in their souls for whatever vision God would wish to give them. All the empty places reserved for the Lord are filled with the world’s accumulated trappings. That stops 99 percent of Christians in the West dead, right there. They’ll never be effective for the Kingdom because they can’t give it all up and live lighter.

When God sent manna, He warned the people not to store it because He wants His people to live lighter.

When the days grow dim, Jesus warns us not to go back for our coat when it is time to move because He wants us to live lighter.

The desire to hold onto the world’s symbols of success destroys Christians. Destroys. The number of people who put their hands to the plow and look back must be in the millions. And each one of those millions grieves the heart of God. When I think of all those hopeful servants who never achieved God’s best for them because, like the monkey who grabbed the coconut in the trap, they couldn’t let go of their stuff and subsequently saw their ministry potential nullified…well, it breaks my heart.

At one point in my life, nearly everything I owned fit into my Honda Civic hatchback. But time, a little success, marriage, and children all contribute to this upward parabolic curve of accumulation that inevitably leads to divided loyalties. And most people fail to question that division. They’ll call their wealth “God’s blessing,” yet for most people that “blessing” only leads to a soul loaded down with perishables. Instead of storing up treasure for heaven, we’re hoarding the wealth of the flesh and watching our potential for the Kingdom wither and die.

The American Dream undoes most of us. On paper, it reads great. But the reality only leads to bloat and uselessness. And if we think God’s going to use us mightily for the Kingdom when we’re stuffed to the gills with the world’s excess, then we’re the most deceived people on the face of the planet.

If we want our lives to reflect the transformation from self-centered louts into the glorious image of Christ, then we have a choice don’t we? And the amazing thing about that choice is that even if we chose wrong a long time ago, the Lord will give us another chance to choose right. He wants us to lose the world’s flab, even if we gorged ourselves on it once.

Right now, it’s not too late. One day, it will be.

To live larger, we’ve got to live lighter.

What do you have to lose?