The Call

---Part three of a three part series on the state of the Church in America---

Change starts with you. It doesn’t matter how large or how small your sphere of influence is, what matters is that you, in your heart and actions, become the person who will let go of the security of loving yourself and embrace the greater blessings God has in store for you.

We don’t need another fad diet. We don’t need another 12-step program. We simply need Christians and churches to understand the need and answer the call. The window is closing rapidly on the time that the American church still has the people, resources and the voice that is has now to speak into our culture. God does not need these things to shine His love, but my hope and prayer is that we will be good stewards of them while we have them instead of looking back years from now wondering ‘what if?’ Let’s not hit rock bottom before we learn from our mistakes and start rebuilding the church. Let’s start rebuilding the church now. For many this is going to require a paradigm shift of how they ‘view’ and ‘do’ church. But let’s not let the fear of change or the unknown keep us from becoming who Christ asked us to be. Looking at the American church the task may seem large, but you are only responsible for you. Let’s not focus on fixing the whole system; let’s focus on fixing you, your church, your family. If you would like some help on what steps to take next, please feel free to contact me. I am a part of a ministry that is built for the purpose of connecting with pastors, church leaders and longing Christians and equipping them to fulfill Christ’s mandate for their lives: making disciples by loving God, and loving others. If you are a person or an organization that would benefit from the church’s love please contact me and I would love to try and connect you with someone or some church that takes serious God’s call to love our neighbors as ourselves. 

The Answer

---Part two of a three part series on the state of the Church in America---

We are an ugly people reflecting our pride, greed and selfishness to the world. Our greatest goal should be to find the truth, beauty and goodness of God and shine that as bright as we can so people no longer see us but see through us to a loving God.

It may sound elementary, but what is the answer anytime you discover you’re doing something wrong? You stop, go back, fix the mistake and start doing things right. The mandate of the church is clear. In Matthew 28 as Jesus is leaving the earth He gives the church her marching orders “Go, therefore and make disciples of all nations…” But don’t check out because He tells us how to accomplish this task, by “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” So we ask, “what has God commanded?” In Matthew 23 Jesus says all His commandments are summed up by two laws: Love God, Love Others. This is the purpose of the church… To create disciples by loving God and loving others. But here is the problem; the church stopped a long time ago allowing God and others to tell us what loving them looks like. We’ve told God “I will love you by building big buildings, by making sure we keep the sinners at bay, by making sure the next generation sings the same songs I do...” We’ve told the world “I will love you by treating you well only as long as you are interested in converting, by makings sure you look exactly like me, by giving you the leftovers after we have spent, ate and indulged to our fill…” and the lists cold go on. If it is true that the whole purpose of the church is to love God and love others, it’s time we stopped and listened again to God, to the hurting, to the needy, to the world and figure out what loving them really looks like.

The Problem

---Part one of a three part series on the state of the Church in America---

For some it will take a moment of honesty, for others it will be merely calling out the elephant in the room, but the time has come to admit that the Church in America doesn’t look, act or live they way it should.

It’s time the church stopped and asked itself, ‘why do we exist?’ For the last several decades Christians have been so infatuated with keeping themselves clean from the ‘tainted’ world, arguing the finer points of high theology, and building programs that keep the masses coming that they’ve slowly drifted away from being the people that Christ called them to be. The result: when we look at the church instead of seeing and being drawn to a loving God we see a corrupt, political, broken social club. In Luke 6:43-45 Jesus tells us that all people will be known by their fruit. In John 15 he tells us that when Christians abide in Him they will bear His fruit, and in Ephesians 5:22 we are told what that fruit is: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self control. So we must ask ourselves, ‘when the world looks at the church is this what they see?’ The answer is a resounding NO. The studies, statistics and books abound in support of the fact that Christians are missing the mark. If you are a Christian I would urge you to go, read and study (I recommend David Kinnaman’s book UnChristian if you are looking for a place to start) and you will see the glaring problem: The church in America is doing something wrong.

Character Matters

We live in a society that tells us “the end justifies the means.” American culture cries out “who you are on the inside doesn’t matter… you are merely what you produce.” We see the effects of this worldview veining itself throughout our land. From the white halls of capital hill to the green pitch of our sports arenas we find people vacating the hard work of character for the quick fix of easy results. This, however, is not a sustainable ethos and everywhere you look you can see its cracks making their way through our foundation and threatening to bring down the house. I would claim that many of the major crisis we are currently facing as a nation: the looming double dip recession, threats of government shutdowns, the housing market crash, our unbalanced budget can all be traced back to issues dealing with character. What we have failed to realize is that in the same way the personality of an artist is reflected in their work so our character is reflected in even our smallest actions. Character demands that you cannot separate the end and the means, for they are merely two sides of one coin.

Right action involves living with a split focus, half of your sight toward the future making sure you are headed toward the right goal and the other half of your sight watching every step making sure that you are acting in good character. I would claim that is it dangerous to lose focus on either and put 100% in one place. Focus only on character and you lose sight on where you are going falling into self-involvement and a loss of vision. If you are a theist this is a travesty because we have most assuredly been given a vision and that vision is not merely moralsim. Conversely, focus only on the end and when you arrive you will find that you are no longer the same person, for it is the journey that makes the man not the destination. With the end only in sight you might well lose your soul along the way, and this is right where we find our world today. Putting our materialistic and hedonistic ends aside (a different discussion for a different day) we need to get character back into our means. Character matters!

Is God Good?

So it's been a little while since my last blog.... sorry.

I've been re-reading the book "The Shack" by William P. Young. I'm not really sure why I picked it up again... but it is a good read and I'll post a review once I'm done (a new section I'm going to start called 'Cliff Notes'). However one of the main questions of the book is "Is God good?" It's a question I've struggled with before (probably one we all have at one time or another). A little while back I sat down to work out my thoughts on God's goodness. What follows is my thoughts on this subject. It gets a little bit 'heady' and again I'm not the best with grammar and all that jazz... but I'd love to know what you think on the subject.

“God is good all the time, all the time God is good!” I was introduced to this phrase when I volunteered to be a greeter for my church. As I welcomed people to church I found many of them saying “God is good all the time” to me and waiting expectantly for my response of “all the time God is good.” These lyrics from the song written by Don Moen have echoed throughout the Christian community for years. Many churches start each Sunday with this cadenced greeting. But what does it mean? When we say God is good, what are we really saying? Psalm 34:8 says, “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good.” However there is an ever-growing opinion in the world that God might not be all that good. If God is so good why does He let things like the earthquake in Haiti happen? If God is good then why is there pain and suffering? These and many questions like them have given rise to the question of God’s goodness. So, is God good? I attest that He is. But to fully understand what this means we need to understand what goodness really means and then how this goodness applies to God. When we see goodness for what it is and when we see God for who He is (or at least as clearly as we can see Him) we will in fact see that God is good.

In talking about the goodness of God it might be helpful to begin with what “God is good” does not mean. The problem for many lies in their definition of good. When most people say something is good they are in fact saying little about the object and are saying more about themselves. When I say, “this pizza is good” or “that was a good movie” I am often saying nothing about the nature of the movie or the pizza but only talking about my feelings toward them. Thus, by saying something is good I am merely saying I like it, or I have pleasant feelings toward it. The problem with using ‘good’ this way is that it becomes a total subjective word that is based on the individual. To understand “God is good” in this light would mean that all people must at all times ‘like’ or have ‘pleasant feelings’ toward Him. However it is clear that this is not true. We can find in the Bible many examples where people do not ‘like’ God. Revelation talks about years where people will continually curse God (Rev 16:9; 16:11; 16:21). But just because people do not like God does not mean he stops being good. If God is going to be good all the time the definition of good must be an objective and not a subjective one. I believe that one of the goals of Satan has been to subjectify all the attributes of God so man no longer knows what God is like but instead worships himself and his own emotions. We have certainly seen this happen with God’s goodness. Thus when there is an earthquake in Haiti people’s emotions are not happy and instead of glorifying God through the tragedy they glorify their own feelings and question God’s goodness.

The answer? We need to stop using the word ‘good’ in a subjective way. We already have the word “like” in our language and so it adds nothing to use ‘good’ in the same way. Instead we need to understand the definition of good and use it in its proper context. And what is the definition of good? Luke 18:19 says, “No one is good but God alone” (Luke 18:19). If this is true, the only way we can answer this question is to turn to the Bible and look at God. In doing this we quickly find out that goodness is not based on what people feel about God but who He is. Psalms 119:68 says of God, “You are good and do good.” The definition of good is based on God and God alone. He is the standard of good. Thus, to say that something is good means it lines up with who God is and what He has done. This makes it nonsensical to say that God is not good, for He is the definition of good. So to better understand what goodness is we need to understand who God is and what He has done.

So first to understand goodness we need to understand who God is. This, however, is no easy task. God is larger and greater than our minds can comprehend, but this doesn’t mean He is totally unknowable. Jesus said it this way “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” ^[1] We can only see things about God that He chooses to reveal to us. However, what God does reveal is defined as good. In this way goodness seems to be the value God has placed on the rest of His attributes. God’s attributes, like goodness, are not things that define God but are things that God defines. His attributes include His immutability (Ps 102:27), His eternity (Ps 90:2), His omnipresence (Ps 139:7-10), omnipotence, holiness, justice, mercy, love and the list could go on. Through this we understand that these things define goodness. Something is good in so much as it reflects the attributes of God. Thus we can say that a government is good or bad based on how well it reflects God’s attributes of justice, mercy, love, etc. No longer is good based on how I feel about an object but it is based on something real, something concrete (namely God’s attributes).

Secondly, goodness is defined as what God has done. James 1:17 says “every good and perfect gifts is from above coming down from the Father of lights.” When God acts His attributes, including His goodness, are displayed in the results. Creation is called good (Gen 1:31) because it was God’s action. Romans 1:20 says. “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” Not only in creation but “the goodness of God is seen in the variety of natural pleasures which He has provided for His creatures.”[2] In Psalm 84:11 it says, “No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.” The second sense of goodness is reflected in what God has done and what He continues to do. Something is good in so much as it reflects that actions of God.

Putting these two definitions together we start to see a better picture of what it means to be good. God is good and all that He does is good. Some have tried to work these two into a definition and I think it helpful to look at what they have said. Wayne Grudem in his book Systematic Theology defines it this way: “The goodness of God means that God is the final standard of good, and that all that God is and does is worthy of approval”[3] A.W. Towzer talks about it this way:

The goodness of God is that which disposes Him to be kind, cordial, benevolent, and full of good will toward men. He is tenderhearted and of quick sympathy, and His unfailing attitude toward all moral beings is open, frank, and friendly. By His nature He is inclined to bestow blessedness and He takes holy pleasure in the happiness of His people.[4]

However, I want to remind us that all these words in these definitions are defined by God. Kind, cordial, sympathy, blessing all should come back to the standard of who God is and how He acts. We need to get away from judging God on our standard and remember that we are judged on His. I hope we now have a better understanding of what goodness is and have a better grasp of what it means to say, “God is good.”

But we don’t want to stop there. Once we see God for who He is we then can rightly see ourselves for who we are. If God is good, then we see ourselves as not good or as bad. The only goodness that we have in our lives is the goodness that God put there. And the only goodness that God has put there is what reflects His attributes and actions to the world. Thus for us to be good we need to better reflect the goodness of God in us to the world. We need to let God’s attributes and actions shine through our lives. This is why God has commanded us to love like He loved, to walk like He walked, and to live like He lived. We are reflecting His goodness to the world. On the reverse side we need to realize that when things are bad in the world this does not reflect back on God but it instead reflects on man and his sin. Man was the one who brought sin into the world when we desired to become our own gods. We wanted charge of our own life and in this we brought badness into the world. The result is that creation is under a curse and man is now a slave to his sin nature. Just like God’s attributes reflect goodness man’s sin nature reflects badness. So when we see bad things happen in the world it is only things that are not reflecting who God is and what He has done. It is the part of the world that man has brought in, it is our own nature reflecting back at us.

This brings us to what I think is the ultimate show of God’s goodness: there is still goodness in the world; He did not take it all away when we sinned. The fact that we can see bad means that there is good to compare it to. If the whole world were dark we wouldn’t know what light is. The only way we can discern dark is when contrasting it to light. In the same way the only way we know what badness is, is when we compare it to goodness. In the ultimate act of grace God didn’t take His goodness out of the world when man walked away. By all rights we should have no idea what good is. If we got exactly what we deserved when we pulled ourselves away from God He would have let us completely leave, which would have meant death. However God allowed us to leave and take His goodness with us. We told God that we wanted to be God and yet to do that we had to borrow all the good things He gave us (creation, intellect, life, etc...). And in His love, God allowed us to do this. He allowed us to use His goodness to curse His goodness. Why did He do this? It is a dangerous question to ask why of God, but if for nothing else it was because He loved us. But leaving all of God’s reasons to Himself the fact remains that He allowed us to do it.

So this is where we find ourselves today, using God’s goodness to question and curse God’s goodness. And I think that this has great practical implications for our lives. We need to understand God’s goodness in us and use it to reflect back glory to Him instead of using it to steal glory for ourselves. Our ability to reason, the pleasures of life, our health, life itself are all a part of the goodness of God. But we are living in the “me” society. We have convinced ourselves that I belong to no one but me. I worked hard for my money and it’s mine. Personal property. MySpace. We are perpetuating the sin of Adam and Eve and claiming God’s goodness as our own. The attribute of the goodness of God demands that we see ourselves for who we really are. I am a sinner and all that is good within me is God’s. Not only that but God has told us what to do with the good that He has put in us, we are supposed to let it shine, not for our glory but for God’s. God wants to see Himself reflected in His creation; it is how He brings glory to Himself.

We live in a time where many question the goodness of God. People are looking around the world and see pain and suffering. The conclusions that people come to are: there is no God, or if there is a God He is not all powerful, or if He is all powerful then He must not be good. However as we have seen none of these are true. There is a God, He is all powerful and He is most assuredly good. The problem arises when we have a misunderstanding of the term good. In fact what most people are saying is: there is a God, He is all powerful, but He is not likable. And that might be true for their life. But to them God is not likable not because He is not good, but because He is good and He wants that goodness to shine through them. In their sin they don’t want to give up themselves. They want the world and life to be about them and their desires. What they fail to realize is that even their desire to be praised is a gift from God, it is God allowing them to steal a little bit of His goodness to glorify themselves. If the world were to rightly understand that fact that “God is good” it would bow down in submission to Him and praise Him for the goodness He gives. And someday this is exactly what will happen: “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.^[5]

---

^[1]The Holy Bible : English Standard Version., Lk 10:22 (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001).

[2] Arthur W. Pink, The Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1975), 58.

[3] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 197.

[4] A.W. Towzer, Knowledge of the Holy (New York: Harper Collins, 1961).

^[5]The Holy Bible : English Standard Version., Php 2:9-11 (Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001).

Best Week Ever- 1/15

Just for fun I thought I'd post my highlights (and maybe a few lowlights) each week.

__________________________________________

My New Schedule...

What my life looked like a couple months ago:

What my life looks like this month:

Yay for first retirement!!!

__________________________________________

Video of the Week

Thanks McNeeleys for the recommendation!!!

__________________________________________

Jon Stewart

I'm a big believer that if you can't laugh at yourself and your faults then you are sitting too high on your horse... Jon's great at taking those who are too high and knocking them off... a beautiful gift.

One of the funniest segments I've seen in a while... California outlaws the Happy Meal

(the segment starts 9:30 into the show...) Check it out, I promise you'll laugh.
Jan 3rd. Show - Happy Meal Outlawed

__________________________________________

Quote of the Week

"Like mom always said: If you can't say anything nice about someone say the bad stuff really fast"

- Mary, In Plain Sight

__________________________________________

Trupidity

Want to waste some time?

Check out this website...

Link:

Trupitidy

__________________________________________

Worst Thing of the Week:

Getting Hacked :(

Sorry if you got junk mail from me this week... I think I've fixed it now

__________________________________________

Hope you had a wonderful week...

"They might say "Wow! That sucks" but at least they are gonna say 'wow'" - Duff

Blessings

I Guess I'm A Runner...

They call it Stockholm Syndrome. It’s named after a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden. The bank employees, that had been held hostage for six days, became emotionally attached to their captures even to the point of defending them after the ordeal was over. They say that similar events happen in abusive relationships and cults. Our mind, in an effort to cope with something horrible, actually aligns itself with what is apposing it and in result we end up emotionally attached to that which is hurting us.

I’ve always viewed people who say they enjoy running as going through some sort of Stockholm Syndrome. At some point in all our lives we have been forced to run. Whether it was a part of a sports team or in gym class we’ve all had to run. For 99% of us we have the natural response to those horrible experiences… we think they sucked. But for that other 1% their mind doesn’t know how to cope with the horror and in an effort to deal with the pain they convince themselves that what they just experienced was fun.

Maybe I’m going though a psychotic break, but I have a confession to make: I’m starting to like running. Two years ago I made this crazy plan to participate the 2-mile fun run in the Whisky Row Marathon. At the end I thought it would be good to challenge myself for the next couple years and make the annual step from 2-mile to the 10K to the half marathon to the full marathon. Well last year was my 10k year and not being one to bow out of challenges I did the 10k. But honestly I didn’t really do the 10k. I started training about two weeks before the event and walked 90% of the race, only running on the downhill parts. However, this year with the half marathon looming 5 months away I knew I couldn’t put in the same half-hearted effort and hope to finish.

With this in mind about a month and a half ago I started training for the half marathon. Walking only at first and then slowly adding some jogging I was determined to put in my time. However a couple of weeks ago something strange happened. At the end of my run I felt good. At first I denied it to myself… “I’m normal” I told myself “I can’tenjoy this.” But now here I stand declaring to the world… I guess I’m a runner, because I enjoy running. Maybe I’ll be recanting all this in a week, or maybe down the road a counselor will help me recover from this horrible bout of Stockholm Syndrome. But for now I’m putting in about 20 miles a week and finding myself looking forward to my run days and tempted each time out to go further.

Crazy huh?!?!