Maturity

A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

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I actually had my testimony heckled at an Assemblies of God church.

At issue was the fact that my testimony goes something like this:

I was a good kid who did everything his parents asked of him, and a straight-A student who was reading Irving Wallace by the time I was in fourth grade. Cub Scouts, Webelos, Boy Scouts. Never smoked, cussed, drank, did drugs, or anything classified by most people as “wrong.” I was in church every Sunday and Sunday school before the service.

Then, at age 14, I put my faith in Christ.

Some lady thought that wasn’t dramatic enough and let me know it.

Plenty of Christians out there believe there’s a scale for measuring human depravity, with -10 being the nadir of human existence and +10 being eligible for your own Elijah-inspired, one-way ride in a fiery chariot straight into the arms of God—no lines, no waiting. I think my heckler believes I started at +8 and had nowhere to go. Shame on me; I never made it to my heroin-addled, white-slave-ring-leading, patricidal, hell-raiser stage like I was supposed to.

Thank you, Jesus; thank you that I was spared a dissolute life.

You talk to any solid Evangelical about justification and you’ll usually get a decent answer that would satisfy most people asking about it. Sanctification is another issue.

The Bible says this:

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
—2 Corinthians 3:17-18 ESV

Sanctification is a process; we “are being transformed,” not we “are transformed immediately.” The light of the Holy Spirit flicks on in that place of our formerly dead spirit and we are justified, but that soul of ours is still in need of a heap o’ work. Years of it, in fact.

I swore I wasn’t going to talk anymore about what I’m reading on the Christian blogosphere, but this topic is too important to pass up: It is a grave error and a massive conceit to attempt to usurp the role of God in another person’s sanctification process, telling God, “As far as I’m concerned, you’re not working fast enough.”

But what are we to expect when someone starts at -9? Is +7 a week after meeting Jesus possible? A month? A year? A decade? If we can’t distinguish the difference in the sun’s arc across the sky from one minute to the next, how confident are we that we see with the eyes of God that one minute difference in the arc of a person’s sanctification process? To go back to the 2 Corinthians 3 passage and its note on “degrees of glory,” there are 180 degrees in a U-turn. A long obedience in the same directionThat’s a lot of tiny steps to take. Being made to look like Jesus is not a blink-of-an-eye affair, but one of a lifetime of minute, resolute steps. As Eugene Peterson’s classic book on discipleship is titled, it’s “a long obedience in the same direction.”

There’s not a person reading this now who doesn’t know at least one Christian out there who’s taking a long time to break out of the negative numbers on the depravity scale and into those higher, positive sanctification digits. Yet what does it say about us when we screw up our faces and rail that the ex-biker who spent ten years smoking crack isn’t where he should be after meeting Jesus two years ago because he smokes cigarettes now instead of crack? Sure, he’s down to just a pack a day from five a year ago, but still. And just why is it that he takes so long locating the Book of Habakkuk?

I’m listening to the first CD I’ve purchased in two years, Derek Webb’s She Must and Shall Go Free, and the tune playing right now has these lyrics:

My life looks good I do confess
You can ask anyone
Just don’t ask my real good friends
‘Cause they will lie to you
Or worse they’ll tell you the truth
‘Cause there are things you would not believe
That travel into my mind
I swear I try and capture them
But always set ’em free
Seems bad things comfort me

Good Lord I am crooked deep down
Everyone is crooked deep down
Good Lord I am crooked deep down
Everyone is crooked deep down
Everyone is crooked deep down
—”Crooked Deep Down”

Good Lord, we are so crooked deep down. How long it takes to make the crooked as straight as the Lord Jesus! No matter how smart or holy we looked before we were saved, we were all miserable sinners. God doesn’t believe in scales of depravity. If He did, we’d all be coming from a place close to negative infinity. That’s a big hole to work out of for anyone. Much grace is needed—more than we can imagine this side of eternity.

Look, if we’re not happy with how fast someone is moving along that narrow road, then maybe that’s God telling us in our own sanctification process to draw alongside that slow person and give them the benefit of what we’ve come to learn from our own place farther on down the way. Otherwise, perhaps it’s better that we let God do on His own what needs to be done in the life of another—without our smug color commentary.

Because, in the end, He makes all things beautiful in His time, not ours.

The Little Things: The Zodiac Blogger

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God's been bringing these Little Things to my mind more and more. These posts were supposed to be occasional, but I can't stop noticing them of late. This post is about one little thing that makes my heart sink when I see it.

I'm sometimes clumsy when I confront people, so I hope that I'm not accusatory in this post. Think of this as a challenge to purity of conviction then. We've become inured to the whole issue, and anything we're inured to is for all intentions invisible. Magnifying glassThe diabolical part about this particular Little Thing is that it's astonishingly prevalent. I want to believe it's just because it's so ingrained in American culture that we don't think about it at all.

It's being a Zodiac Blogger.

It may seem like a little thing, but my informal poll of people who listed "Christianity" or "Jesus" as a topic of interest in their Blogger profile shows that two-thirds of them have their zodiac sign listed.

God says this:

And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.
—Deuteronomy 4:19 ESV

And also this:

…but test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.
—1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 ESV

Horoscopes and astrology fail the test of the above passages. The Father desires that we have no other gods before Him.

This look at Little Things is about just that: the little things that keep us from walking in fullness of life. They may not seem like much, but they still speak to our allegiances. I don't want to show the world I have any allegiances to worldviews that are against the worldview of Jesus Christ. Honestly, I wish I had no idea what my astrological sign was. But this I do know: I definitely won't be putting it out there for others to see. I don't want anything to disqualify my witness for Christ, so I just avoid anything astrological altogether.

If you have a Blogger profile that includes your zodiac sign, consider removing that sign. It may not seem like all that much, but I think God would be pleased if we eliminated those things that might hold us back or divide our hearts.

Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.
—Philippians 3:13-16 ESV

Update: I've been told—I assume the sources to be good here—that Blogger automatically puts up your zodiac sign if you fill in your birthdate in your Blogger profile. I did not know this. Still, it's a product of the times that these things are assumed as being desirable to know. If I were in the position of displaying that sign, I'd still consider removing my birthdate if all it's doing is generating a zodiac sign.

Some of the commenters here have said that this may be too little a thing to be part of this series, but I don't feel that way. I'm a big advocate of grace and grace will cover these things if we are ignorant of them. But I believe we still need to think about them because too many things like this add up to us being held back by the world.

I've long been convicted of the narrative in Joshua 7 that found the army of Israel being routed in their battles against the Amorites. When Joshua fell on his face before God and asked why, God told him that someone in the camp had taken as plunder of war items that were dedicated to the Canaanite gods, items that God had said must be destroyed (after a previous military victory.) That man, Achan, had hidden these in his tent. Joshua took Achan, his entire family, and all his animals, and stoned them to death. Then he burned everything that had been associated with Achan.

God takes these things seriously. Thankfully, we don't have to suffer stoning for what we've done. I know that I'd be under a pile of stones for the things I've done in my life. But it doesn't mean we should tolerate those things, either, especially when we consider their source.

This last year the Lord has been showing me what I need to purge from my life, more things than ever before. I think what has changed is that I no longer desire anything that will hold me back from being all that He can make me, so now He can get down to work. I'm sharing some of those issues in this series and Cerulean Sanctum, in general. I'm simply hoping my comments on this will help others out there. Whether people can accept these things or not, I understand.

Have a blessed day, all of you.

The Little Things: Unkept Prayer Promises

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It is one of the small scourges of American Christendom, but it occurs thousands of times a week across the country. This is how it usually plays out:

    Greg: "I just found out today that I'll be losing my job in a month. My company's outsourcing my entire department to Malaysia. I really need prayer."Steve: "That's terrible. I'll pray for that, Greg."

    Greg: "Hey, thanks! That means a lot to me."

    Steve: "Well, see ya later!"

And we all know what happens: Steve goes home and promptly forgets to pray for Greg—ever.

Magnifying GlassI used to be like Steve. After about the thousandth time of having a promise to pray for someone vanish into the ether that is my mind, I decided that I was dishonoring God and all the people who requested prayer from me. What's worse, there were times that my promise to pray was the equivalent of saying, "Fine!" whenever anyone asked me how I was doing. It was something to say, even if I didn't truly mean it.

There is a silver lining to the cloud, at least for me. I changed. I stopped telling people I would pray for them after the fact.

"But, Dan," you say, "what kind of barbaric response is that? What a heathen you are!"

Say what you will. I just told people that I knew myself too well and that I had a better idea: I'd drop everything I was doing and pray with them right then and there.

So that's what I do now.

See, there's one thing people who need help and request prayer want to know in their heart of hearts, and that's the reassurance that you actually did pray for them. By dropping everything I'm doing in the moment to pray with someone, I accomplish three things:

  • They see, and therefore know, that they have been prayed for.
  • Both of us enjoy the face-to-face relational aspect that prayer builds in both the one receiving prayer and the one praying.
  • God is honored in that faithfulness to pray and hears that prayer.

For me, I know that I have never failed to forget to pray for someone who asked me to pray for them—because I did it right then. Do I remember to pray a second time or more after that initial prayer? Sure. But even if I do fail to remember to continue to pray, I know that I did at least once, and so does the person I prayed for. That makes them more likely to come to me for prayer in the future, as well.

I don't claim to do everything right, but this one I learned the hard way.

This is such a little thing, but it makes all the difference. If we honestly believe God moves through prayer, then it is my prayer that we all consider keeping prayer promises to people by just sitting down with them and praying right off. Anything that happens later is a bonus.

Now if I could just remember to get back with people I prayed for to see what the results of that prayer were! (That's just as important, but I'll have to leave that little thing for a later post.)

Have a great week.