Obedient Compassion

At the time of this writing, our church is getting ready for our “Compassion Weekend” where we’ll be going into the surrounding community to minister to those around us through cleaning up parks, ministering to the homeless, etc. We have a desire to be the hands and feet of Christ in our city and to be a light without expecting anything in return.

The toughest part in all of this, in my opinion, is having the right motivation and heart attitude while doing ministry. It is against our human nature to minister to others without expecting something out of it for us. At the very least, whether we admit it or not, we expect to feel good about what we’re doing or for the people we serve to be grateful for what we’re doing. But our ministry needs to be motivated by something and Someone much greater than that. Is our desire to serve able to withstand receiving nothing out of it?

A few days ago Jenn and I went on our weekly grocery store run. When we pulled into the parking lot we saw a man standing on the median holding a cardboard sign that said, “Homeless. Anything will help.” We decided that we would bring the man a sports drink after we went shopping. As we exited the parking lot we pulled up and handed him the drink. He said thank you, the light turned green, and we drove off.

As we pulled onto the highway to head back to our apartment, I felt a tugging on my heart to do more for the man so I asked Jenn if I could drop her off at the apartment and head back to take the man out for pizza. After bringing Jenn home, I turned around and headed back to the store where I found the man, still standing there with his sign. I walked up to him and asked what his name was and where he was staying. He told me that his name was Dave and that he and his girlfriend were living in a tent in the woods behind the store. I then asked if I could take him to get a pizza. He said he didn’t want to leave his girlfriend who was sleeping in the tent because he didn’t have a cell phone. I then offered to go grab one for him and asked if he needed anything else. He said that he wasn’t picky and that he didn’t need anything else.

I called in the order to Pizza Hut and then headed over. On my way I stopped and bought Dave and his girlfriend some basic necessities like deodorant, water, etc. I then went to Pizza Hut, picked up the pizza, and returned to the grocery store. But when I arrived, Dave was not on the median where I left him. I went behind the store to see if I could see his tent but I couldn’t. I then went inside to look for him but he wasn’t there. After driving around the parking lot a couple more times, I decided to leave.

Thoroughly discouraged and frustrated, I got back on the highway and headed home with many questions running through my head. Why did God allow me to go through all that trouble just to have the man leave without receiving what I was going to give him? Weren’t my intentions pure enough for God to honor them? What was the point of God giving me a desire to help someone if the person wasn’t going to be there when I returned?

As I continued to reflect on the situation, I realized how truly self-focused my questions were. God can provide for Dave’s needs without any of my help and He wasn’t surprised that Dave wasn’t there when I returned. In this moment, God was teaching me that He calls His people to obedience, not good feelings or even success. God, through His Scripture, tells us to be obedient to His command to care for those in need. He doesn’t promise that we’ll feel good about what we’re doing or even that what we’re doing will be effective. He just calls us to obey, to honor His commands because we love Him. Pleasing Him should be our only desire. We can’t do this on our own but He has given us the Holy Spirit to mold us and change us so that we are more like Christ in His compassion.

Do we have faith to fail? Does our motivation to serve others come from a desire to be obedient to God’s calling or to get something out of it for ourselves like being able to pat ourselves on the back for helping someone else? Do we measure success by effectiveness or by faithfulness to His call regardless of the outcome? May we be a people that are marked by a desire to be obedient to God’s call, who have a heart for the down and out and the needy, and who have a faith that is completely Christ-aware instead of self-aware.

Repentance

We in the Church love a good testimony. You know, the kind where someone was trapped in a life of addiction, gave their life to Christ, and was pulled out of it and now everything is great. But what about the person that gives their life to Christ then slips back into that sin? What of the Christian who confesses and agonizes over their sin only to return to it the very same day? Have they not truly repented? Are they not sufficiently contrite?

Repentance is often put forth (whether purposely or not) as an event, rather than a process. In some circumstances it truly is a one-time event in someone's life where they cease a certain sin immediately. But more often, it is not. We are sometimes told that if we do not stop falling into a certain sin then we are not repenting. This leads to overwhelming guilt and shame, even in a loving Christian community.

But the repentance that we see Jesus call for is not characterized by an immediate, perfect cessation of sin but of a hate of our sin and a process of change, called sanctification, by the Holy Spirit. Paul, in Romans 4, declares that we are made righteous before God because of the blood of Christ shed for us on the cross. The moment we receive salvation, we are justified before God. This is a one-time, once for all moment. Sanctification, on the other hand, is loving, molding process that the Holy Spirit undertakes to make us more like Christ. When we are justified, we do not stop sinning. However, our lives are no longer characterized by sin. Repentance finds sanctification as its context. The Holy Spirit works in our lives to make us more like Christ but it is a lifelong process. We are not made perfectly holy the moment we receive salvation.

Jesus was notorious among the Pharisees for spending time with "sinners." One of his most poignant and revealing statements to them (and us) comes in Mark 2:17 when He says, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." Thus, the Church is intended to be a hospital for the sick. It is a group of people who don't have it all together. A group of people who consistently fall into the same sin over and over again but who hate their sin and genuinely want to move past it for the glory of God.

(As a side note, the analogy of the Church as a hospital for the sick also entails diagnosing sin in all its forms and calling it what it is according to Scripture. Christ did not gloss over people's sins or say they were not that big of a deal. He had to die for them. Our sin is serious. Hospitals do not amass a large amount of sick people and have them just fester in their illnesses. The goal of a hospital, and the Church by the power of the Holy Spirit, is to treat these diseases with the aim of the sick getting better.)

If you've ever been involved in an accountability group with other believers, you know it is a very frustrating thing to be involved in. The same struggles and sins continue to pop up. A follower of Christ may do really well with something they are wrestling with one week only to fall back into it the next. I've seen discouragement and have been very discouraged myself. When we view repentance as a one time deal and any relapse as a mighty failure, discouragement and crushing guilt are often the result. But this is not how Christ intended it. Repentance is the acknowledgement, confession, and renouncing of sin and the determination to turn from it with the help of the Holy Spirit. It is a process and a journey, one that takes time but yields change if we yield to Christ and do not rely on our own strength.

Loving God For Who He Is, Not What He Gives

A paraphrase of an illustration by Tim Keller:
Imagine that you have some family money and someone comes along and asks you to marry him or her. But after the wedding and some time into the marriage, that person comes to realize that he or she can't get his or her hands on that family money and they leave you. How do you feel? Violated? Used? Just a means to an end? An object? Do you feel like you weren't loved for who you were in yourself? Do you realize that almost all of us relate to God like that? How do you think He feels? We've all met people who have said something like, "Oh I used to believe in God and I used to go to church and try to serve God but He didn't come through for me. I asked Him for things and He let me down and my life didn't go the way I thought it would. In other words, God has this incredible blessing bank account somewhere and I know it's there but He would never let me get my hands on it and I didn't actually want God, I just wanted His blessings. And when I didn't get the blessings, I was out of there." Do you see? You married God for His money. 

What are we basing our faith and love of God on? Do we trust and love God because our circumstances are going according to plan and our lives are the way we would have them be? If so, at the first sign of turmoil, tribulation, and confusion, our first response will be to accuse God or worse, abandon our belief in Him.


Do we trust and love God because we have positive experiences when we worship and we love the emotional high that sometimes comes from being close to Him? If so, the inevitable dry times in our walk with Him when we do not hear from Him may cause us to believe that He has abandoned us or even that He does not exist.

Do we trust God because we have solid intellectual reasons for His existence and involvement in our lives? If so, a carefully constructed attack that seems to contradict those reasons might leave us feeling helpless and shaken.

Do we trust and love God because He gives us what we ask for and blesses us with peace and joy? If so, when those blessings are taken from us, we may blame God and walk away from Him.

There is a very real temptation to build our faith in God on the blessings that He gives. This faith is weak and easily accosted. How it must pain God when our love for Him is a response to the things we get from Him, rather than loving Him for Who He is.  It is easy to love the gifts rather than the Giver. But a mature and unshakable faith is built on the solid rock, Who is Jesus Christ Himself. Our love for Him is the simple, humble response to His unfathomable, self-giving love for us. True faith is not built on blessings and circumstances but on the immovable foundation of Jesus Christ. May we love Him for Who He Is, not what He gives us.

In Truth and In Love

It seems that when most people outside of the church hear the word "Christian," they associate it with people who are judgmental, rigid, condescending, and exclusive. To be fair, this notion does not come from nowhere. It is not simply made up and plastered onto people they already don't like. Those in the Church do not have the best track record when it comes to loving those they disagree with.

One of the reasons for this is the lack of love when engaging with those who do not hold the same beliefs. We are quick to point out where those who disagree with us are wrong without understanding the full ramifications of doing this. Speaking the truth without love gets us nowhere. I have never heard of someone who didn't believe the Gospel suddenly turning their life around because someone else gave them a rock solid proof for something they believed. In the name of "defending the faith," much damage is done to those who do not believe. Scroll through the comments on almost any YouTube video and you'll eventually find an argument about Christianity with Christians throwing verses and proofs at those who don't believe in a very unloving manner. This is fruitless and counterproductive. These Christians are probably well-meaning but in the end, it turns people off. Even as a fellow Christian, I am embarrassed to read some of the things that are being said. I almost want to apologize for them.

This is why Paul emphasizes in Ephesians 4 that it is not enough to speak the truth. It must be said in love or you are better off not saying it at all. Love does not engage in conversation simply to win an argument or to justify its own beliefs but it puts the other person ahead of itself, keeping in mind that the person you are conversing with may have been through much pain because of "religion" and therefore wants nothing to do with it.

People were not drawn to Jesus because He gave bullet proof arguments for everything He was teaching. They were drawn to Him because of His love and humility. It is easy to get caught up in the apologetics side of faith and to believe that it is up to us to bring people to Christ. If that were the case, we would be weighed down with an incredible burden and responsibility. We do not bring people to Christ. The Holy Spirit draws people to Himself and often uses us as the tool. But to believe that we are responsible for other people's salvation can lead to unloving arguments in an attempt to win people over.

Christian faith as Jesus taught it does not make us arrogant because we have the truth and everyone else needs to figure it out too. Quite the opposite. One of the greatest signs of a change in our hearts because of Christ is the replacement of pride with humility. This leads us not to be exclusive but to love those who desperately need Christ because we know that we have done nothing to deserve Him. Christianity in its truest form should lead to tolerance and acceptance, but not in the "do whatever feels right for you/believe whatever you want" sense. It is tolerance that stands for truth and does not compromise but that lives in the midst of and loves those who do not yet know the truth.

Finally, it should be noted that this post is not at all advocating spotty doctrinal stances or being sketchy on important truths of the Christian faith. Speaking the truth in love does not mean apologizing for what Scripture says or compromising on various points just to avoid conflict. While I have been highlighting the importance of loving discourse, it is not at all loving to not speak the truth to those who need to hear it. We must be loving but we must also not be afraid of speaking the truth. The problem is not whether or not to speak the truth, it is how to speak it. When the rich man went away sad because of what Jesus told Him in Matthew 19, Jesus didn't chase him down or apologize for being too harsh. Jesus never apologized for the truth (He characterized Himself AS the Truth). However, He also never spoke it in an arrogant or judgmental way either.

May we learn to not fear speaking the truth or apologize for it but do so in a humble, loving, nonjudgmental way, extending the love of Christ to others knowing that we did nothing to deserve it.

Grace

"I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God's grace given me through the working of His power. Although I am less than the least of all God's people, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God, Who created all things." -Ephesians 3:7-9

How we view God's grace plays a monumental role in what our churches look like and how they function. Whether we realize it or not, we have an ingrained idea of what grace means for us and what its purpose is. Most of us would agree that grace is an undeserved gift from God that we receive because of the blood of Christ and our faith in Him. From there, the paths diverge greatly and they impact how we see the church.

The first way of viewing grace is seeing it simply as a gift of God that we receive and hold onto. When we confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead, we receive salvation (Romans 10:9). This is all good and true but the first view of grace ends there. When we see grace as something we receive, it becomes about us. We see ourselves as the recipient of a fantastic gift, which we hang onto. Church is then a place to hang out with other people who received the gift where we praise God that we're going to heaven someday and it ends there. Grace and God's gifts are simply for us to enjoy and feel good about.

The second way of viewing grace is, as Paul says, something we receive and then pass onto others. Paul says that God's grace was given to Him but it doesn't end there. The grace he received is for someone else. It comes with direction and purpose. Why did Paul receive grace from God? To preach to the Gentiles and to make known the mysteries of God which are revealed in Christ. The astonishing truth is that God's grace was not just for Paul, it was for Paul to pass along to those he was ministering to. The grace of God cannot be contained because it comes from the overflow of Who God is. God's grace is so wide and deep and long that we could never use it up or ask too much of Him (Ephesians 3:20) It is not meant to be hoarded. Grace is given to us so that we might give it to others.

When we see grace as simply a gift for us, we become self-focused. We gladly receive God's grace, then are unwilling to extend it to others. This causes us to become resentful, judgmental, unaccepting, and secluded. We start seeing forgiveness as simply accepting an apology while continuing to harbor bitterness and anger in our hearts. We see other people as not deserving grace because of how much they've wronged us. We become the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18 who is unwilling to forgive the debt of a man who owed him a day's wages when he was forgiven a debt of 18 year's wages by his master. When we freely receive but don't freely give, the poor and needy become unimportant and this life is seen simply as a holding pattern before heaven.

But God calls us to something far bigger than ourselves. Salvation in Christ is just the starting point of receiving God's grace. He gives us His grace so that we will then share it with others. Grace means reaching out to those in need, accepting without judgment into the church those who are lost and seeking, truly forgiving without fear of being wronged again because we are eternally forgiven by God. The pouring out of grace allows us to act as a pipeline through which God achieves His purposes and blesses the world. It allows us to constantly be full of God's grace and goodness while passing it on to others.

How we view grace radically shapes our churches. Will we hoard it and turn Sunday mornings into an hour of feeling good about what we received from God while doing nothing for others? Or will we freely give it to all, gathering as a missional community of broken people who deserve nothing, yet have everything in Christ?

One Body

"Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit-just as you were called to one hope when you were called-one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all." -Ephesians 4:2-6

"The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body-whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free-and we were all given the one Spirit to drink." -1 Corinthians 12:12-13

Before I go any further with this blog, it's important to acknowledge that it is incredibly easy to criticize and critique our brothers and sisters in the Church. The line between encouragement/exhortation and judgment/criticism is very easily blurred, especially with the ease with which modern technology allows us to share ideas and opinions. What starts as a genuine desire to correct easily turns into an attack to prove one's correctness. Now, I am not at all saying that we should not correct each other or hold each other accountable. These are very good, essential qualities of a healthy Church. What I am saying is that it is becoming more and more common to see brothers and sisters in Christ taking shots at each other. Instead of confronting false doctrine or incorrect actions in love and gentleness, we often demonize the other person or group. This can also lead to a widespread denunciation of the Christian Church as a whole for some perceived error. In my experience, it has been incredibly rare to hear someone talk about how they love the Church and are thankful to be a part of it. The closest it usually gets is someone saying they love the particular church they attend.

Let me reiterate that I think that one of the Church's main functions is to help those who are a part of it to grow. This often means correction, confrontation, and accountability. These very good functions, however, are often twisted to become attacking, gossip, and bitterness. How does this happen?

Throughout the book of Ephesians, Paul's language is heavily Trinitarian. He emphasizes the vital role of the  Holy Spirit in causing unity among believers in Christ. We are not made to be at odds with each other. In fact, when we receive the Spirit through the "one faith," we are bound together by the "bond of peace." Paul explains earlier in Ephesians 2 that Christ Himself is our peace. In some mysterious, unfathomable way, God becomes our peace and our unity because of Christ through His Spirit. We are made into one body and share in common the Spirit of the Most High God. This body is the Church, of which Christ is the head. He loves His church and gave Himself up for her. How then could there ever be a lack of unity in a body which Christ Himself holds together?

Because of our sinful nature, we are sometimes taken over by our desire to have our way and to be correct. This led the apostle Paul to exhort his readers to be humble and gentle, to correct those in error but to bear with them in love. This takes effort and is difficult but is important if we are to honor Christ as His body. The body is a unit. We are each an individual part of the body but we contribute to the whole. When we criticize, judge, lack grace, and demean each other, we are hurting ourselves.

Of course there are and always will be exceptions to all of these (and I am limited to an American perspective) but it is worth encouraging one another:

I love the Church for caring about sound doctrine and being committed to seeking and learning God's perfect Truth and how we ought to live to glorify Him.
I love the Church for caring for the orphan and the widow and those in need.
I love the Church for acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God.
I love the Church in parts of the world that are hostile to them for their patient suffering and example of hope in the midst of extreme trials.
I love the Church for being missional and taking the hope of Christ to the lost and broken.
I love the Church for being able to admit its flaws and mistakes and for its willingness to grow in love and unity.

May we, as the Church, be marked by the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace, Who is Christ Himself and bear with one another in love and grace. 

The Holiness of God

 Just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: "Be holy, because I am holy." -1 Peter 1:15-16

Holy is the way God is. To be holy he does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. Because he is holy, all his attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy. -A.W. Tozer

When examined at their deepest level, every doctrine comes back to the holiness of God. It is vitally important to grasping justification, sanctification, redemption, grace, etc. Without a robust and thorough understanding of the holiness of God, little of who He is, what He does, and what He requires makes sense. God is separate, set apart, and distinct from everything in His creation. This also involves His perfectly pure moral standard. He is good because He is holy. He is perfectly just because He is holy. All of these things come back to His holiness. When Isaiah is faced with God's holiness and glory in chapter 6, he is forced to measure himself against that perfect standard and realizes that he is filthy. He even thinks he will be ruined because of his imperfection in the presence of a holy God.

Christians often see the redemption and salvation through the death and resurrection of Christ as the most important and essential doctrine of our faith. However, God's redemption and salvation don't make sense apart from the context of God's holiness. There is something that we had to be saved from, namely our own sin. There was a desperate need to be redeemed by the blood of Christ because the result of our sin is the wrath of God.

Something that is common to hear from skeptics is, "How could a good God be also full of wrath? That doesn't sound loving or good to me." Without knowledge of God's holiness, this question is certainly reasonable. However, keeping in mind that God is holy and perfect, how could He NOT punish sin? If God did not abhor sin and did not desire to banish it from His presence, He would not be good. God's wrath is the manifestation of His holiness. He cannot look on sin and accept it. Otherwise, He would not be good and just. Imagine that a judge presided over a case where there was overwhelming evidence to convict the suspect of a murder that had been committed. We would be outraged if the judge let the man go free without punishment. We would not say he was a good and just judge. God's justice and wrath is evidence of His perfect goodness and holiness. He cannot allow sin. He would not be holy if He did.

Now, the truly unfathomable mystery of God's holiness is that it led Him to engineer a plan that would be the greatest injustice in the history of His creation. He came to Earth as a perfect man, retaining all of His holiness, and bore the wrath that was meant for our sin. He was perfectly innocent, deserving none of the penalty. Yet, He took it because He loved us and wanted to take away that sin so that He might make us holy through the blood of Christ. He was tempted in every way, just as we are, yet did not sin. Even so, He was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. Without an appreciation for the holiness of God, the cross doesn't make sense. God's holiness keeps Him from tolerating sin but it also is the source of His unconquerable love which conquered the grave for us, if we accept the blood of Christ to cover our sins. 

From a sinful human perspective, God's command to be holy as He is holy is impossible. In our natural, sinful state, we can only exclaim that we are men of unclean lips and deserve ruin. But through the holiness afforded to us by Christ through His perfect, holy sacrifice, we can be holy as He is holy. No wonder the Gospel is called Good News.

Abiding in Christ

"Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." -Jesus in John 15:4-5. 

We sometimes begin our church services, prayer meetings, and worship events asking God to make us feel His presence in the midst of us. Often what we mean by this is that we want God to provide us with a positive emotional experience that will give us concrete evidence that He has been with us and that He has blessed us. We love the warm, fuzzy "mountain top" experiences we sometimes feel during worship and continue to pray for them to occur. It is easy to feel that God has not shown up or has not blessed us if we feel no emotional or easily perceivable change in us. Discouragement sets in and we feel that we have wasted our time. "Why hasn't God spoken to me after all this praying and seeking?" we ask. We pray for peace and receive none. We pray for direction in a specific area and receive none. We conclude that God has not spoken and He has not met with us.

But abiding in the presence and glory of Christ is far more than a positive emotional experience. It is more than receiving peace or clear direction when we pray. It is more than a perceived satisfaction that we have been in the presence of God. None of these things are wrong in and of themselves but they can become idols if we seek them above God Himself. They are not indicators of abiding in Christ.

Paul commands us in 1 Thessalonians 5 to pray without ceasing. At first glance, this is an absurd suggestion. We have thousands of thoughts every day that are completely unrelated to God. But what he is getting at is the idea of continuously putting the Lord before us and trusting in the reality of His presence in all circumstances. Through the power of His Spirit, God continues to sanctify us and make us more Christ-aware everyday until it is no longer a conscious effort to remain in Him. God wants to break us free from our emotionalism so that our trust and our focus is solely on Him. If we are not abiding in Christ, we can do nothing. He is the source of our joy, strength, and hope. He is the rock of our salvation which can never be moved. He is calling us out of our simple emotional ideas about God's presence into the glorious truth of His constant willingness to abide with us, regardless of the circumstance.

Rather than praying that God would be present with us, we should ask Him to change us and speak to us because of His constant presence. We should ask Him to teach us how to abide in Him and to show us that His answers do not always come through a positive emotion or a clear direction which allows us peace but through the communion of our spirits with His and the changing of our hearts, whether we consciously perceive it or not. Often, we are not made aware of the most profound changes that God's presence makes in us until God reveals it to us. This is not instantaneous and we should not expect it to be. Let us take comfort in the fact that if we ask God with humble hearts to speak to us and to abide with us, He always will, whether our limited understanding grasps it at the time or not.