Thinking-Christianly

Many of the “black Friday” advertisements offered great bargains at ridiculously low prices. But to understand the nature of the sale, you have to read the details. For example, a community of perhaps 100,000 has one Best Buy. The advertisement promises that the local store has five flat-panel televisions at the advertised price.  There are no rainchecks. The odds of any individual obtaining the price advertised drops dramatically if you are not one of the first few ‘early birds’ into the store.

Or consider a restaurant that offers you a $1,000 gift if you fill out an on-line survey. You need to provide the company with detailed information about yourself for marketing purposes. And you also discover that the survey covers all patrons over a four month period. If you provide the information they are looking for, you have a remote chance to be part of the quarterly drawing. The fine print and the listed conditions are as important as the ‘free money’ language on the back of your receipt. You are not at liberty to look at part of the promotion and ignore the rest. It all goes together.

Sometimes we ignore the details when it comes to the commands of God. We drift to a ‘big picture’ approach. For example, when we think about living a moral life, it is tempting to contrast our behavior with those who commit major social crimes. We tend to reason that if we are not guilty of murder, robbery, embezzlement, or assault, we have the right to call ourselves moral people. Scripture reminds us that the details do matter, however.

Like the fine print in a television car commercial, the details are significant with Christ. He said, “I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” Jesus tells us that everything God has said is important. There is no filler in the revelation of the Bible. God’s dealings with man will encompass every promise ever made to the people in the Old Testament and their posterity. Every pledge Jesus made to his disciples and their followers—the church—will be kept. The consequences of every blessing and curse expressed by God will run their course before history is completed.

While there is value in understanding the big themes of creation, fall, and redemption in the Bible, it’s also important that we not overlook what we can learn about God from the minor prophets, the poetic sections of Jeremiah, or the letter to Philemon. Even the chronologies in scripture reflect God’s concern for individuals, and the fact that the place each of us plays in the history of our time is fully known to God.

Resist the temptation to hurry in your contact with the Word. Slow down a bit. You might be surprised at what you can discover about God as you approach each sentence and each word with a spirit of learning and expectation.

How might you respond if I offered to sell you software that will do word processing for $100? I’d sell you a program that can print in all kinds of fonts, adjust the size and shape of paragraphs, check your spelling, and automatically number your pages. Most likely, you’d respond by saying, “No thanks, I have one already.” Some of you might add, “And it has more features than anything you could likely offer.”

One of the big challenges for software companies is to sell you a word processor, a spreadsheet program, or a photo management software program when you already have one or more full-featured packages. Unless you are stretching your current software to the limit and find it inadequate or you desire the status of owning the latest version of any software program, you are likely to have significant sales resistance.

How likely would you be to buy a product that was inferior to one you already possess? Most of us would regard that as a foolish choice. But it’s one offer Christ followers can accept frequently. There is one sales pitch that offers Christians something less than what they already have that continues to work.

In Matthew 4:8-9 Satan shows Jesus the kingdoms of the world and says, “”All these things I will give You, if You fall down and worship me.” He tries to impress Christ with the majesty of the civilizations on the earth. By simply bowing down to him, Satan pledges that he will bring all of these empires under the rule of Jesus. For all of his earthly journey he will face no opposition, but be recognized, honored, and obeyed.

When these words were spoken, Jesus owned little more than the clothing on his back. He was a poor Jewish carpenter without much human status or authority. The contrast between what he had and what he was promised seemed massive. But in eternal terms, that comparison was false.

Satan was offering Jesus what Jesus already had. At that moment Jesus did not exercise his claim to demand loyalty from all people. He would shortly begin to invite others to follow him. But in reality it was all his already.

You and I are often tempted to grab hold of small trinkets from this world. All we need to do is compromise. We are promised something here and now if we’re less honest, more manipulative, slightly deceitful, or somewhat selfish. And the prospect of gaining status, stuff, or power lures us to trade intimacy with our heavenly Father for garage sale goodies.

Those who have put their trust in Christ and his work on the cross as their substitute have passed from death to life. (See John 5:24.) They have also become owners of an inheritance that makes all the things of this world seem like dollar store knockoffs in comparison. (See Peter’s description in 1 Peter 1:3-5.) When we are challenged to yield to the offer of the stuff the world has to give, we need to remember what we have already. Like Christ, we do not have visible possession of the riches of life in the kingdom, but they are ours nonetheless. And we will have eternity to enjoy what Christ has bought for us through his death and resurrection.

Wouldn’t it be great if we habitually responded to the lure of sin, selfishness, and compromise by grunting, “No thanks, I already have something better”? In fact, followers of Christ really do!

Our world is not very familiar with the idea of mercy. We don’t often talk about it in casual conversation. It seldom appears in print. You might find it in a film where a frightened bad guy pleads for mercy just before the hero dispatches him to the next world. But in general, it is somewhat foreign to the way we are trained to think.

I ask myself why. Maybe it is because we are uncomfortable with the idea that another person might truly have authority or power over us. Our spirit of independence tempts us to think that we measure up to our own standard quite well. We don’t fall short. Therefore we seldom need forgiveness from others, much less mercy. If we have problems, we will fix them ourselves. If we do something wrong, we’ll correct it. Mercy is for the weak and the fallible who owe a debt to someone else.

If we dare to consider our true status before a perfect and infinite God, it quickly becomes apparent that mercy is something we need. The Bible declares that God is the center of the universe rather than ourselves. It insists that we exist only because of God’s decision (through the indirect means of human reproduction), making us contingent beings. It asserts that we were given life for his purposes and not our own. If these realities are true, then we find ourselves in a subservient role.

And it’s not a role we handle well. We seem to always to find fresh things to complain about. We easily ignore God’s directives and drift away to our own formulas for making choices or setting priorities. We don’t hesitate to give excuses for our wrong choices, or to blame other things for our decisions. And we can quickly slip into indifference or forgetfulness—acting as though God does not exist or that he is totally irrelevant.

Part of the power of the Christian message is that God does not crush us with his purity and his holiness. Somehow he cultivates an authentic love for us. But in order to tap into the reservoir of kindness, we have to be honest about our true state. Proverbs 28:13 cuts right to the heart of the issue. “He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy.”

The invitation is very simple. Yet it is very difficult, because it requires that we face our pride. We are called to take off the mask before God, to abandon the pretense, to stop the charade. And when we do, he reaches to us with love and shows us mercy. For myself, and I suspect for many others, there is a lot of unclaimed mercy. It’s there for us to take because of the finished work of Christ on our behalf. It applies to this day’s crummy attitudes, selfish choices, and unloving responses. And because it is accessible, you and I don’t have to whitewash our genuine struggles and failures. We can dare to be honest with God and frank about our sins. His grace is always sufficient and his mercy is available. To ask for it with sincerity is to receive it. Why let it go unclaimed when we can apply it to our daily lives? The only thing that prevents us from receiving more of this gift is ourselves.

When we compare the narratives of the Bible to modern writing, something is often missing—or at least underscored. This difference speaks to issues of the Bible and our culture. Before I identify this element, let me give you some clues.

In Mathew chapter 3 we are introduced to John the Baptist. We’re told what he wore and ate and what he preached. In Mark 1 we are introduced to Jesus. We’re told that God affirmed his mission at his baptism, that he was tempted in the desert, and that he called men to be his disciples. In Acts 9 we are introduced to Paul. We discover his zeal to destroy the church and learn about his encounter with the risen Christ that transformed his life. We could back up to the Old Testament and look at Abraham, Sarah, Moses and Elijah. In those accounts we would learn about their character, their choices, and their interaction with God and man. But something that is common to modern writing is almost never mentioned.

In our visual world, we seem to major on appearance. What we and others look like is central to our understanding of people. People make jokes about Donald Trump’s hair and Nancy Pelosi’s facial changes. Editorial cartoonists portray George Bush with Dumbo ears and Barak Obama with a massive forehead. But even on the normal level we tend to focus on our appearance and that of others. Appearance becomes more critical to our definition of who we are than many other factors.

You have to dig deeply to find out much about the appearance of any Bible characters. We’re told what John the Baptist wore, but we don’t know anything about his size or facial features. We tend to picture Samson as a huge Arnold Schwarzenegger type, but the Bible says nothing about his size. (His strength came from God, not from a gym.) We know that King Saul was tall and that David was “ruddy” or “handsome,” as was Joseph. But even those cultural descriptions may not fit our picture today. (Renaissance paintings of beautiful women bear little resemblance to the centerfold pictures people think of nowadays.)

While it is true that the lack of descriptive material in the Bible is founded in a different culture than ours, it also reflects perhaps a more substantial view of who we really are. We are more than our external features. They create an image for others to see, but what’s really important is what the person inside the body does, believes, and feels. The Bible graciously goes to the heart of the issue and helps us see that it is the inner person that matters. Losing weight may be good, but shedding bitterness is better. Removing zits and wrinkles make us feel better about ourselves, but walking humbly with God makes us better people. Keeping our heart in shape lengthens our life, but bringing our sins to Christ deals with the toxins that make us dead even while we breathe.

Tending to the external things of life is necessary. But cultivating the soul offers us the opportunity to enrich our lives in ways that aging cannot destroy. And it opens the possibility to transformation that is satisfying and supernatural.

Our culture tends to celebrate efficiencies. We like accomplishing goals in the way that is fast, direct, clearly understood, and productive. We want to cut to the chase. We want to move from objective to plan to results. Our interstate system distributes goods and services much better than the scenic highways that once carried much more of the traffic. Instead of going to a retail store, many today shop on line and have the goods delivered directly to their home or office. Monitors at fast-food restaurants measure the number of minutes between the time an order is placed and the food is delivered. We build drive up pharmacies. We enjoy the simplicity of on-line bill payment.

In our minds, we tend to follow the maxim that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Detours are an unwelcome waste of time.

This mindset is significant because it impacts our relationship with God. We tend to become frustrated when God does not seem to work in our life by following a “shortest distance” rule. His solutions sometimes seem cumbersome. His working out of events comes across as obtuse and unnecessarily complicated.

In Matthew 2:13 Joseph finds himself in Bethlehem after the birth of his son Jesus. He may have had up to two years to establish his itinerant work as a carpenter since the boy was born. Luke tells us that he and Mary are living in a house. The events in the stable are now a memory.

Unexpectedly, an angel speaks to Joseph in a dream and directs him to take the child and flee to Egypt immediately. Joseph is told that Herod is seeking to destroy his son. Imagine the turmoil this brought to Joseph. He would have to leave the land of his ancestors and travel to a strange country. (International travel was not as desirable then as it is now.) He would not be living on holy ground but in a pagan culture. He most likely did not know the language. He would probably have to locate a Jewish community he could be a part of. He would have to struggle to eat kosher in such a place. He would have no old friends, no network of business associates or relatives. He would have to rebuild his trade all over again for day to day survival. Mary would start all over with new relationships. And they did not have a MasterCard to fund this instant move.

He and Mary would be separated from their family and clan for who knows how long. All the angel said was that they were to stay there until they received further instructions to return. Would it be decades, as it was for Joseph in Egypt? Joseph was not told.

If Jesus was the Messiah, then why flee at all? The same God who kept Elijah safe when he was about to be arrested by 50 soldiers in 2 Kings 1:10 could easily safeguard Jesus without such a drastic relocation. Certainly God could protect the boy without making the family run from the infamous and vengeful Herod. God could simply slay the king and end it there. Joseph could stay put, and God would not allow his Messiah to be killed prematurely.

Joseph took his family and fled that night. He did not do so because this was the easiest solution, but because he trusted God.

Following God’s ways through the journey of life is not always intuitive. It can be easier to harbor a grudge than to extend forgiveness. Loving enemies does not make sense. Cultivating humility in an age of self-promotion can seem counterproductive.

God’s commands do not always keep us on the superhighway of life. He has agendas and objectives that we cannot see. He calls us to trust him, believing that the roads that sometimes appear to be detours are designed to accomplish his goals for us and for his kingdom. Joseph’s action is an amazing example of the kind of response God seeks in our lives as we engage the word and apply its truth to our lives.

Persistence in the right endeavors is a virtue. Assume for a moment you face a new challenge. It might be installing drywall, baking an exotic dish, designing a complex spreadsheet, flying a kite, or repairing a clothes dryer. Your first attempt is unsuccessful. You fail. What you do next says a lot about your character. Do you give up? Do you try again?

As we mature, we realize that roadblocks, obstacles, and failures are part of life. We understand that some challenges require more effort, more sacrifice, and the willingness to endure more frustration. But in the end they are often worth the cost. If you are doggedly determined to solve the problem or make that thing work, you will often taste success—though not as quickly as you might have wished.

Think of a situation where a parent urges her crying daughter to pick up her bike, ignore her fresh bruises and skinned knees, and keep going. The mother does not blame the sidewalk or the bicycle manufacturer or the humidity. She believes that her daughter can master the balance and coordination necessary to ride a bike. So she does all she can to lovingly encourage persistence in the face of pain, shame, and limited failure.

Sometimes there is a fine line between persistence and stubbornness. When my efforts are anchored in pride, caught in self-centered thinking, or focused on an objective that is unwise or immoral, then my determination has morphed into something ugly. We can waste countless hours trying to figure out something at work when help is a phone call away. We know the problem can be solved in five minutes, but we want the credit for figuring it out, no matter what the cost. We can spend an extra half-hour grooming ourselves in the morning. We know it may make a negligible difference, but our pride does not allow us to be reasonable about it. Our stubbornness can lead us to resist useful change, refuse to forgive, or compete with others in doing something unhealthy or stupid.

God clearly understands our tendency to become unbending in ways that hurt us. Human stubbornness comes to light several times in the book of Revelation. God demonstrates his sovereignty, his holiness, and his power. He offers the inhabitants of the earth several last chances to let go of their self-centered attitudes, repent, and turn to him. In chapter 16, John writes of some catastrophes that will fall upon the earth. John describes them using the metaphor of bowls of difficulty spilling out on the planet. In Revelation 16:9 God describes the response to the fourth display of his wrath, which will bring great heat on the world. After describing the affliction, James notes, “but they refused to repent and glorify him.” Two verses later after describing the fifth judgment which includes darkness, pains and sores, he again writes, “but they refused to repent of what they had done.”

Thankfully, God demonstrates incredible patience toward our selfish, destructive, and unholy behavior patterns. The history of the Old Testament demonstrates God’s great tenderness with the people of Israel. He is often the same with us. In fact, sometimes we complain that he does not intervene quickly enough or often enough to interdict humans bent on evil.

When persistence morphs into spiritual stubbornness, it brings about the possibility of corrective judgment. When we refuse to learn from even that extreme form of divine teaching, we can face the natural and supernatural consequences of our sinful attitudes and behavior and shake our fist in the face of God to the end. That is when the frightening question of Hebrews 10:29 applies: “How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?”

In the afterlife we can take our pride to an eternity devoid of love, grace, beauty, and kindness. Our pride and self-centeredness become the prison bars that will hold us eternally in exile from the kind of life we were created to enjoy. We can be stubborn to the end. But in the end we lose.

The teaching of the Bible can be like a vial of nitroglycerine. You have to handle it carefully or people are going to get hurt.

I wince whenever I see someone draw wild and unfounded conclusions from the teaching of Jesus. Recently, I was reminded about a passage in Matthew 7 that is sometimes mishandled.

In Matthew 7:3-5, Jesus talks about our tendency to critique the behavior of other people. In an effort to help a mate, friend, or acquaintance improve, we may dump criticism on them. Our motive is good. We hope they might learn from their mistakes and improve their character or their performance. But sometimes we become so focused on their peccadilloes that we are blind to our own issues.

Jesus points out that we tend to ignore our own shortcomings while we concentrate those of others. He asks, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” Notice his critique that we give “no attention” to our own behavior. He condemns our spiritual myopia when he adds, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?”

After a superficial look at Jesus’ words in these verses, some conclude that He forbids us from making any kind of assessment of others. That conclusion is dangerously wrong. It fuels the relativism of today that pretends we can each have our own moral standards. We can operate on our individual morality shared by no one else and still find a way to live with each other. Such utopian thinking is a recipe for moral chaos. And we are increasingly seeing the ramifications of that moral free-for-all in our culture.

Jesus’ words cannot be hijacked to support a relativistic perspective where we withhold all judgment for all actions. Jesus’ contention is not we are wrong to assess the behavior of others. His complaint is not that we notice specks in the eyes of others. It’s that we tend not see our larger personal issues—our own logs. It is the blindness to one’s own failures that Jesus rebukes. This is reinforced in Jesus’ next statement, where He states, “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Notice the progression in this verse. It speaks of a “first…then” sequence. Jesus is concerned about priorities. If we are concerned about moral reform, we are to address the huge issues in our own lives before we target the smaller issues in the lives of others. Jesus does not forbid us from sharing our insights with others. He does want us to be mindful of our own issues. We need to take our own medicine before we start being the moral pharmacists for others. It does not require that we be perfect, but that we be active in addressing our own issues as well.

The next verse, Matthew 7:6, enjoins us to make careful assessment of people and be discerning. Jesus says, “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.” We are to assess the infinite value of the message we are entrusted with (the pearls) and the condition of those who violently reject the message of Christ, portrayed by Jesus as unclean animals.

I recently heard how this teaching was abused to label people as dogs or pigs. But Jesus is not endorsing name calling. If you look carefully at the text, Jesus refers to unclean Jewish animals to point out a very specific kind of behavior that shows disrespect for God’s truth.

Jesus is concerned about our responsibility in handling the precious things of God—the pearls. We are not to take the message of God’s grace, mercy, love, and sacrifice of his Son and repeatedly place it before people who treat it with violent distain. Jesus told his disciples to shake the dust off their feet of the villages where they and their message were not welcome. (See Matthew 10:14.) Jesus’ attention is on the infinite value of the message and the responsibility to treat it with honor. He is not giving us the right to smear those with whom we simply disagree. Christ clearly has a much more extreme response to his claims in mind, like that which Peter speaks of in 2 Peter 2:12.

If we are going to represent God’s revelation accurately, we must be diligent in how we interpret scripture. Careful students of the word avoid superficial conclusions and erroneous applications. Though wisdom, thoughtfulness, and lots of grace, we can accurately reflect God’s principles to a world where truth is hard to find.