On Millstones and Disconnects, Part 1

Yesterday's post was a sad one. Today's is angry. (I'm trying to run the table on emotions here this week.) So if you're not ready to read a rant today, there are some fine blogs on the right sidebar that might be less incendiary.

Here's the key passage:

For whoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in My name, because you belong to Christ, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward. And whoever shall offend one of these little ones who believe in Me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck and he were cast into the sea. —Mark 9:41-42 MKJV

We have a classic biblical parallelism here:

It's outrageously simple.

Cerulean Sanctum is a blog about the Church in America. I try to write about issues that affect us Christians (and our churches) here in this country. Because I love the Church, I want more than anything for us to be all we can be, not only as a corporate body of believers but as individuals within that body.

This is why I'm distraught over the sheer number of disconnects between what the Church preaches and how we are to live in society. If we have Ultimate Truth in the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, then we should not shrink from any challenge. The world should be able to look to the Church and have us point to the answers for problems that plague us all. Our apologetic is not contained in mere words, but in a practical outliving of Truth that applies to all realms of life: work, play, family, life, death, and so on.

But that costs something. It's not easy. It can't always be summed up in a Bible verse or a "read this Christian book and you'll be better." Here's a for instance:

A man receives a call at work that his pregnant wife and unborn child have died after a sudden onset of preeclampsia. They'd been married twelve years and had struggled to conceive. They were ecstatic to find out she was pregnant. This would have been their first child. They've been coming to your church for less than six months.

You want to minister to this man later that day, so you:

B. Drive over to his house, sit down with him and let him weep. Listen to his stories about his wife. After your initial visit, bring him food from time to time. Pray with him after Sunday services. Let him know that he can call you any time, night or day. Send him handwritten notes encouraging him. Invite him to get-togethers with other people at your home. Ask him to sit with you in church. Make sure other people in the church know who he is and what happened to him so they can be an encouragement, too. Ask him what other ways you can help him through this time.

One of those options costs something. And it's not "A". The sad thing is that "A" is what many people get. I'm not here to say the Bible has no place in this man's recovery, just that the way it was mishandled in this case was deserving of a millstone placed around the deliverer's neck—especially since nothing else was offered.

I've lost my patience with "Christian" organizations that tell people how they should live, but offer no help in achieving that goal. They think they're providing a cup of water, but they're deluding themselves. The people who say these things are only offending Christ's little ones. Unplugged/Disconnected They deserve a millstone hung around their necks and a permanent dunking in the waters above the Marianas Trench. It's a disconnect of biblical proportions.

The largest disconnects are those that call on the Gospel to intersect culture. I hear American Church leaders preaching that God's way trumps the world's, but then the Christian who hears that message goes out into the real world and runs smack into the disconnect.

A few examples:

2. The family-oriented parachurch ministry says that the only biblical household is the one where the husband is the primary breadwinner, while mom stays home with the kids. But dad just lost his twenty-year job to offshoring, his field's dried up locally, and because mom didn't keep her work skills fresh after the kids came, they're burning through all their savings while dad spends sixty hours a week job hunting.

3. Your church teaches a class on parenthood and says that the proof of God's blessing on your life is the number of children you have. But you've had three miscarriages and the last one caused so many problems you had to have a hysterectomy.

The message the Church is speaking attempts to intersect reality and the result is a complete disconnect. And a painful one at that.

The retort to all this is to say, "This is all sour grapes, Dan. You're trying to blame this on God or to say the Scriptures aren't true."

And that would be completely off-base.

What's at fault here is not God or His word. The problem is that God's given the Church a responsibility to go beyond easy answers, but we've chosen the easy answers instead.

None of the beginning statements above are wrong. Instead, the Church has failed to implement godly solutions to worldly issues, giving those statements an appearance of error. We as a Church have forgotten how to make culture fit a biblical lifestyle. We're still trying to make a biblical lifestyle fit culture—and that doesn't work. Ever.

The world looks at our Christian square pegs and says, "Oh yeah? Well, try to jam that through our round hole!" Instead, Christians should be making the world's finest square holes that will perfectly fit the square pegs. But we're not doing that anymore.

We once did. In this country, Christian ideology once drove culture; now it's the other way around. And sadly, the modern Church is abetting that disaster.

Are we satisfying the thirsty children? Or are we offending them?

Leonard Ravenhill

Matt Self over at The Gad(d)about, besides having the common sense to pick drums over all other musical instruments, also has the brains to quote Leonard Ravenhill. Good for Matt. The American Church needs to hear more Ravenhill.

If you haven’t been around Cerulean Sanctum very long, you’ll get to know Ravenhill soon enough. He and A.W. Tozer are the “patron saints” of this blog. No one in the last century wrote blistering words like Tozer and no one preached with more fire than Ravenhill. That they were friends in real life is the icing on the cake.

I don’t do a lot of imploring on this blog, but if you’ve never heard Ravenhill preach, I implore you to go to SermonIndex.net and check out the Ravenhill section at this link (with videos at this link).

Ravenhill was more than a preacher, though; he may have been the last true English-speaking revivalist with roots that went back to the Welsh Revival. He passed away in 1994, and one of the greatest losses in my own life is that I mismarked a calendar and missed him preaching at a local church. He passed away not too long afterward.

Yet he lives on in his teaching tapes, and most of them are incendiary. Not only did Ravenhill handle the Scriptures in a way unmatched today, but he could draw parallels and bring two disparate Biblical concepts together like no other preacher I’ve ever heard. He not only knew the ins and outs of the Bible, but hundreds of hymns, too. Best of all, he had a solid understanding of how the charismata work today. He was the total package. Listening to him is so convicting I find it hard not to keep from rending my clothes and pouring ashes on myself. If you want to know that “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” may have sounded like to Jonathan Edwards’ listeners, check out few of the highest-rated Ravenhill sermons on SermonIndex.net, especially those before he was slowed by a stroke in the mid-1980s.

God knows that we need another like him to rouse the Church in 2006.

And though it’s a shame to limit the breadth of Leonard Ravenhill’s wisdom to a few zingers, I’ll end with some of his more pithy statements:

The only time you can really say that ‘Christ is all I need’ is when Christ is all you have.
If Jesus had preached the same message that ministers preach today, He would never have been crucified.
A popular evangelist reaches your emotions. A true prophet reaches your conscience.
The last words of Jesus to the church (in Revelation) were ‘Repent!’
A true shepherd leads the way. He does not merely point the way.
Your doctrine can be as straight as a gun barrel…and just as empty!
John the Baptist never performed any miracles; yet, he was greater than any of the Old Testament prophets.
I doubt that more than two percent of professing Christians in the United States are truly born again.
Our God is a consuming fire. He consumes pride, lust, materialism, and other sin.
There are only two kinds of persons: those dead in sin and those dead to sin.
[Concerning the darkness that has enveloped most of Christendom:] When you’re sitting in a dark room, you can either sit and curse the darkness, or you can light a candle.
Children can tell you what Channel 7 says, but not what Matthew 7 says.
Some women will spend 30 minutes to an hour preparing for church externally (putting on special clothes and makeup, etc.). What would happen if we all spent the same amount of time preparing internally for church, with prayer and meditation?
Maturity comes from obedience, not necessarily from age.
What good does it do to speak in tongues on Sunday if you have been using your tongue during the week to curse and gossip?
The Bible is either absolute or it’s obsolete.
Why do we expect to be better treated in this world than Jesus was?
Today’s church wants to be raptured from responsibility.
Testimonies are wonderful. But so often our lives don’t fit our testimonies.
[Concerning one of the new movements in the church that was causing a stir among Christians:] There’s also a stir when the circus comes to town.
My main ambition in life is to be on the Devil’s most wanted list.
You can’t develop character by reading books. You develop it from conflict.
When there’s something in the Bible that churches don’t like, they call it ‘legalism.’
We can’t serve God by proxy.
We must do what we can do for God before He will give us the power to do what we can’t do.
There’s a difference between changing your opinion and changing your lifestyle.
Our seminaries today are turning out dead men.
How can you pull down strongholds of Satan if you don’t even have the strength to turn off your TV?
Everyone recognizes that Stephen was Spirit-filled when he was performing wonders. Yet, he was just as Spirit-filled when he was being stoned to death.
If a Christian is not having tribulation in the world, there’s something wrong!
[Concerning the fixation that today’s church has with numbers, with growth at any price:] The church has paid a terrible price for statistics!
Any method of evangelism will work if God is in it.
Church unity comes from corporate humility.
You can have all of your doctrines right, yet still not have the presence of God.
Many pastors criticize me for taking the Gospel so seriously. But do they really think that on Judgment Day Christ will chastise me, saying, ‘Leonard, you took Me too seriously’?
You can know a lot about the atonement and yet receive no benefit from it.
If the whole church goes off into deception, that will in no way excuse us for not following Christ.
You never have to advertise a fire. Everyone comes running when there’s a fire. Likewise, if your church is on fire, you will not have to advertise it. The community will already know it.

Warring Evangelicals Make Iron Eyes Cody Cry

I’ve blogged on green topics before (for instance, see this post), so perhaps I’m excluded from commenting on the recent environmental brouhaha as Evangelicals once again savage each other over an issue that neither side understands completely.

Several well-known Christians have signed an initiative asking for greater sensitivity to the issue of global warming. Iron Eyes Cody—The Crying Indian A wide variety of Christian leaders from Jack Hayford and Duane Litfin to Brian McLaren and Robert Yarbrough signed on the dotted line of the Evangelical Climate Coalition (ECC.)

Meanwhile, Chuck Colson, Ted Haggard, and James Dobson have said they don’t share that same feeling. And yet again, another highly vocal group of Christians has been brutally critical of the ECC, basically calling any Christian interest in environmental issues a concession to Gaia worship.

Like so many of these stupid battles—and they are stupid—the brutal misunderstanding, tortured Scriptural citations, and outright mean-spiritedness dishonors the Lord.

Here’s what I don’t get:

1. The harshest critics pull out the Great Commission factor. They act as if it’s impossible to walk and chew gum at the same time. Why is it so impossible to think that Christians can be good stewards of God’s creation AND evangelize at the same time? Why the bogus either/or argument? Whether we’re going door-to-door or just sharing Christ wherever and whenever, we still consume food, gasoline, and other resources. Can’t we think a little bit more about how we do it? Will that somehow negate Matthew 28:19-20? People arguing that we can’t do both are only doing so because they are short-sighted and simply wish to justify their own personal selfishness. And Jesus doesn’t think much of people who think of themselves first.

2. Even if you disagree with the global warming clarion call (and I’m certainly not convinced either way), what is the absolute worst that can come out of Christian leaders asking us to be more sensitive to the issue? We burn through fewer non-renewable resources? We’re more aware of our own personal wastefulness? We live more simply? Are any of those bad aspirations? Do any run counter to God’s word?

3. I don’t understand why some folks ignore the whole of Scripture when it comes to stewardship. The very first charge God gives Man in Genesis is to care for creation, yet some believers act as if that command has been rescinded. If they can point to chapter and verse that negate that charge, I’ll fully concede the point. Simply put: they can’t. Again, our entire lifestyle can be one of stewardship and simple living and those detract not one iota from our greatest purpose.

4. If it’s a matter of witness, what witness do wastrel Christians give the world when they toss trash out the windows of their ICHTHUS-labeled Chevy? Every week I see self-labeled Christians littering. Every week. Without exception. Why? What does that accomplish except to drive people away from the Lord?

5. Unfortunately, we’d rather fight than switch. If it’s all about showing the proper witness, then why not join the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society, befriend unbelievers in those organizations and lead them to Christ? We can witness anywhere, so why not right in the belly of the beast, so to speak? Salt and light—no matter where we are. And I’m not talking about joining environmental organizations just to convert people, but doing so because it’s the right thing to do.

6. Is there a truckload of weird New Age garbage wrapped up in environmentalism? Absolutely! You’d had to have sleepwalked through the last forty years to have missed that one. But as we all know, the Enemy tries to counterfeit or corrupt everything that God values. So why the shock on our faces that the Enemy’s got a grip on a lot of folks in the environmental movement? What are we afraid of?

7. Too many Christians have short (or selective) memories. I remember 1971 and the debut of the iconic Ad Council campaign simply called “The Crying Indian.” Remember Iron Eyes Cody standing on side of the road by a pile of trash with a lone tear streaming down his face? It’s considered one of the greatest commercials of all time. And what did it accomplish? By the end of that campaign’s run in 1983, litter in this country had been reduced by 88%.

I live not far from the Little Miami River, a historic waterway. A few years ago, that river was so filthy that canoeing companies that made their livelihood off the river were facing extinction. The water was so bacteria-laden from pollution run-off that anyone who fell in while canoeing faced a horrid gastrointestinal nightmare days later. Yet people who were saddened by what had happened to that beautiful river didn’t give in. Thousands worked to clean it up.

Today that river is pristine, with nearly all the driven-off wildlife having returned. Some folks cared enough to clean up that river. More cared to clean the air. Others focused on litter. People who were not satisfied with breathing smog and walking through empty pop cans did something about it. Who benefited? We all did. We live cleaner today because some people cared enough to make a difference. We can live even cleaner still.

Christians today have that same opportunity. Why should the children of the world show greater care of the Lord’s creation than we do?

Even if the whole global warming thing is a boondoggle, there’s no reason why we can’t all be less wasteful, live more simply, and show greater care of what God has given us. If the ECC accomplishes that tangentially, then we’re all better for their effort.

Now say it with me: UNLESS.