Wednesday Night Devotions: 1 Peter 2:1-3

“Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.” [[1 Peter 2:1]]

In the first chapter of his letter, Peter talks about God's great gift to us. Peter realizes that we're fallen, both body and soul. Because we're fallen and we live in a fallen world, we come with expiration dates. Our life here is perishable. Some believers come to appreciate this fact sooner than others. In this perishable life, we may have to face trials of different kinds. Peter says that these trials are permitted by God for a very simple reason: to refine us by burning away any of the selfishness that wouldn't fit in well in God's kingdom.

Peter also tells us that – long, long ago – the prophets were very curious about what God had in store. They knew that we weren't meant to be perishable. Peter says that they caught glimpses of the truth: that there would be a Messiah, a special Anointed One sent into the world someday by God, who would do something about our problem. Peter says that even the angels in heaven were curious about what all of this would mean, and what it would be like to fall and then be redeemed. Sure enough, God sent his eternal Son into the world as the promised Messiah, Jesus. Jesus died on the cross to clean us from our sins, which were the reason why we became perishable in the first place. Peter says that Jesus cleansed us by shedding his “precious blood”, which was worth far more than all the riches of the earth.

Jesus then returned from the dead and rose into heaven in glory. It's because of this that we can have “new birth into a living hope”. When our parents gave birth to us, they were working with perishable materials. But now that God has given new birth to us, our new birth is from something that can't ever perish or fade away: the word of God. This word of God is the gospel message that was preached to us. We all here became Christians when we heard the good news of what God's been up to: bringing his peaceful rule back to the world through Jesus. Because we've been born out of something imperishable now, we're no longer the people we used to be, long ago before we met Jesus. Now we're new people. Some of us might remember that when our parents passed on, they left us something behind that we could inherit. But our earthly inheritance can't compare with the new inheritance that we get in the new birth. Peter says that the new inheritance “can never perish, spoil, or fade”. Peter also says that God has it in storage in heaven, but that when Jesus comes back to earth and we welcome him in, Jesus will bring our inheritance of eternal life and honor with him to give to us.

In the meantime, we live in a perishing world, a world that's constantly falling apart around us. Someday we know that Jesus will come back and make it all new. But until then, we don't fit in. We're not natives here anymore. Nowhere on earth is our hometown. We're foreigners. We're immigrants here on a temporary visa. Peter says that as we wait for Jesus to come back, we should “set our hope on the grace” that Jesus will bring. We should be looking forward to how amazing that will be. We should also have “minds that are alert and fully sober”. It's very easy to just slide through life, not paying attention to the world around us. But that isn't what God calls us to do. God wants us to pay attention to what's going on in the world. More importantly, God wants us to pay attention to what he is doing in the world.

We should be ready every day for Jesus to come back. How should we be living today? We should be living today so that, if Jesus suddenly came back tonight, not only wouldn't we be caught off-guard, but we wouldn't have any regrets. We should live today so that, if Jesus came back tonight, we could look back on today and say to ourselves, “That's how I wanted to be living when Jesus returned”. Peter says that before we knew Jesus, we were ignorant and clueless, and we just kept following our evil desires – those temptations that sin puts in our heart to settle for less than God's best. But Peter encourages us to live a holy life, one that doesn't look like the rest of this world but looks like it comes from somewhere else entirely; and Peter tells us to love each other from the bottom of our hearts.

And that brings us to Chapter 2. Right off the bat, Peter says that for all these reasons – but mainly because we've heard the imperishable message about what God did and is doing through Jesus and have been born again because of it – we should live a certain way. There are certain attitudes and behaviors that God wants us to throw away from our lives. That includes everything deceitful. We shouldn't trick people, we shouldn't lie, we should just be tellers of the truth. It also includes everything slanderous and everything malicious or nasty. Everything that leads us to spread unpleasant rumors about each other, everything that leads us to be mean to those around us – all that has to go. And so does all of our hypocrisy. We need to practice what we preach and walk the walk as we talk the talk.

“Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” [[1 Peter 2:2-3]]

As Christians, we – just like Peter's audience – have “tasted that the Lord is good”. Peter's quoting here from Psalm 34, which is an acrostic Hebrew poem that David wrote after escaping from an enemy while pretending to be crazy. In that psalm, David opens by saying that he'll always praise God, because God is the one who delivers the righteous. When David looked for God's help, God was there for him. God rescued David, and David encourages the people, “Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him”. In other words, go ahead and see what it's like to trust God. Take the free sample; taste it, savor it. If you do, you'll find out just how good God is! If you side with God, you may not have everything you want, but you will have everything you need. Anyone who wants to live a good and joyous life should learn to follow God and not stray from his path, David says, because God will pay close attention to those who follow him closely. David says that God is “close to the brokenhearted” and will protect the righteous one. As we learn later on, Jesus Christ is the Righteous One, and when we hide ourselves in Jesus and cling to him, we live in God's presence, safe from the powers of sin. That's the message that David has for us, and Peter says that as Christians, we sampled what God offered us – which was nothing but his own self. And we liked it, and we've been coming to God's table ever since, since when we tasted, we realized, “Yes, the Lord is good”. Charles Wesley wrote a beautiful short hymn on Psalm 34:8 that I find very inspiring:

Taste him in Christ and see

The abundance of his grace;

Experience God, so good to me,

So good to all our race!

Celestial sweetness prove

Through Jesus' grace forgiven,

And then enjoy in perfect love

The largest taste of heaven.

Peter urges his audience to be like newborn babies who drink “pure spiritual milk” in order to “grow up in your salvation”. Now, this letter may have been addressed to a community with a lot of new believers in it. Elsewhere, Paul says that Christians need to grow out of being babies. He tells the Christians in Corinth that, because they were still full of sin and hadn't set themselves apart from the pagan world around them, he had to give them milk still, and not the 'solid food' they should've been having. The author of Hebrews also says that those who still need milk are “not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness”. So what we see here is that immature Christians are compared to newborn infants who can only take in the most basic spiritual teachings. They aren't ready for more advanced spiritual nutrition. But if they grow, then they can begin to handle more and more solid food and become mature in their faith.

But, Peter says, even if we're still on milk, it should be pure. It shouldn't be expired, and it shouldn't be mixed with anything gross. It should be fresh and clean and just the milk. I wonder how badly God's heart breaks when he sees some of the mistaken teachings that get passed off on his children before they're mature enough to see the difference clearly between the good and the bad. Sometimes God's children drink bad explanations of the Trinity – the one God we know in the three distinct persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are each the one God and who existed in perfect love and fellowship since before the world was. They drink it in music, they drink it in second-rate 'Christian' novels, they drink it in bad analogies that point to dangerous mistakes the church flat-out rejected hundreds and hundreds of years ago already. Sometimes God's children drink bad understandings of how God works in the world, so that we hurt each other with unbalanced clichés like “Everything happens for a reason” and “It must have been God's will” – which have some truth in them but can just as easily mislead, because part of what it means for the world to be fallen is exactly that terrible things happen senselessly, though God can bring good out of it all. Sometimes God's children drink skewed understandings of faith and works, either assuming that if we say we believe and have church membership then we must be okay and don't need to ever do anything, or else assuming that we get to heaven if we're decent, churchgoing folks who led a life with a bit more decency than villainy. Sometimes God's children drink bad understandings of worldly success and God's plan, especially the way some popular televangelists dish it up – we wrongly assume that anyone faithful to God will succeed by worldly standards, not remembering that the pure word of God talks about taking up our cross and living as a poor foreigner in this world, coming from somewhere with radically different standards.

Interestingly, First Peter, First Corinthians, and Hebrews all imply that the Christians they're written to are just infants and not mature enough to move on from the milk. That makes me wonder how the churches in our area measure up. In our church, how many of us are really able to pick up a knife and fork and sink our teeth into some spiritual filet mignon – and how many of us are, at best, drinking from a spiritual sippy cup and thinking that it's all we'll ever need? We can be sure that if we aren't being stretched and feeling filled from what we're getting, we probably haven't made ourselves move on from milk. But what do we get in our Sunday school classes? What do we get in our devotions and our prayer meetings and our commissions? What do we get in the songs we choose to sing to God during worship on a Sunday morning? What are we really getting? Does it seem like more than we can handle? Does it require hard work to chew? Solid food does; milk doesn't.

Some milk is fine as a nice frothy beverage to go with our grown-up meals, but if we don't start also eating something solid and keep it up, we can't grow. We also need to be sure that our meals are balanced. We shouldn't be spiritual vegetarians who eat only, say, creation or the end-times – just one part of the biblical food pyramid. We shouldn't always get chocolate cake for our main course, eating those parts of the Bible that make God sound so nice and friendly and fluffy while skipping over anything less sweet-tasting, like God's judgment on human sin. (We see people in our culture doing that a lot these days – and look at the spiritual tooth decay that sets in!) We need to dive into God's whole smorgasbord and develop a balanced spiritual diet. We need solid food that makes us chew and grow stronger, and we need the whole range of cuisine from God's table, not just this dish or that dish. What we get should make us think, it should make us learn, it should make us grow, and it should build up our spiritual muscles so that we have the strength to apply it. So how are we doing? What are we feeding on here? What are we feeding each other? What's the nutritional value on our sermons, our devotions, our spiritual reading, our fellowship with each other as believers?

Wednesday Night Devotions: Ephesians 4:1-16

Our devotional for tonight comes from the first half of the fourth chapter of Paul's letter to the Ephesians. This letter, written while Paul was in prison, was a general letter addressed to the Christian communities in the city of Ephesus and its neighboring cities in what is now western Turkey.

“As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” [[Ephesians 4:1]]

One of the overriding themes in Paul's letters is the relationship between Christian faith and good works. Earlier in this letter, Paul talks more about our salvation – our rescue from the clutches of sin and our delivery into the power of God's love and rule. Paul stresses that this salvation is not a result of human works. It doesn't matter to Paul whether the works in view are good human morality and being a 'nice person' or the specific works commanded in the Jewish Law that was given to Israel through Moses by God at Mt. Sinai in Exodus. Neither of these has the power to save. Paul wants us to know that salvation can't be gained by simply being an obedient member of God's chosen ethnic group, nor by being a decent person who carries her neighbor's groceries, always has a smile on her face, and never hurts anybody's feelings.

Instead, Paul says, salvation comes only by the grace of God – God's gifts given in an attitude of favor toward us, even though we have a track record of awful ingratitude. The only condition of this generous gift is that we have faith, an attitude of loyalty to God (we should want to please him and stick by him through thick and thin) and trust in God (we should believe that his promises are dependable, believe that he can and will follow through on them, and actively depend on him to give us everything that he's promised us, which is just what we need). Paul mentions that even this faith doesn't come entirely from within us; it, too, is a gift of God. This doesn't mean, of course, that we have no role to play in our own faith. John Wesley wisely saw that, although it is true that human sin ruins our ability to even react to God's offer of salvation, this isn't the end of the story. Wesley – and here he disagreed with earlier Christian thinkers like Martin Luther and John Calvin – realized that God doesn't leave any of us entirely on our own without hope. God reaches out in what Wesley called 'prevenient grace' – that is, grace that 'goes before' – to open up our hearts and give us the ability to respond either positively or negatively to his first move. All the glory and credit for our salvation goes to God, but we still have the responsibility to react rightly.

Paul recognizes that we're fixed and put right before God only on account of faith, not because of anything we earn – and this is what distances Paul from the very popular error in which we pull ourselves up to heaven by our own bootstraps. But Paul also takes pain to distance his teaching from another mistake, which is the belief that once we say we believe in Jesus, how we live is irrelevant, and our Christian good works are still meaningless. Paul wants nothing to do with this crazy idea. In the first verse of this fourth chapter of Ephesians, Paul says that we have received a calling. All of us are called – not just some special group in the church like pastors, not just Christians from this background or that background, but all Christians. This calling is simply to live under the kingdoms of this world as representatives of a kingdom that isn't of this world. In the world we call our true home – the heavenly Mt. Zion – we're all adopted children of God, who join Jesus Christ in inheriting all of God's promises. By being joined with Jesus Christ, who is the eternal King of Kings and the sinless High Priest, we together become a royal Christian priesthood. That means that, simply by being drenched in God's Spirit the way we were when we were saved, each of us has become a king or queen and a priest or priestess – but it isn't our own royal or priestly family tree that gives us this, but rather membership in the Church, which is the body and bride of Christ. This is an incredible calling! What Paul begs Christians to do in this verse is, therefore, somewhat intimidating: live up to what God has made us to be. Note that we don't receive the calling by living up to it. Note also that there's no suggestion that God will cancel out our calling if we slip from time to time. But note also that God really does want us to live a certain way. For God, there really is a right way to live as a Christian, and a wrong way to live as a Christian. For a Christian priest-king or priestess-queen, there are certain actions and attitudes that are unacceptable, and certain actions and attitudes that are necessary.

“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.” [[Ephesians 4:2-3]]

In these next couple of verses, Paul begins the lengthy process of spelling out for us exactly what kinds of attitudes fit together nicely with our calling as a royal priesthood in Christ. Paul says that part of that Christian character involves gentleness, humility, patience, and love. Later on, Paul spells out in more detail exactly what sorts of behavior these character traits would rule out. Paul's big emphasis here, though, is peaceful unity. In the early church, there were several different kinds of division that were very troubling, but one major kind of problem the church dealt with was the question of Jews and Gentiles. The Jews, after all, had a deep history of being the (tragically flawed) chosen people of God. They were the ones to whom God had given all the promises and all the gifts. Jesus was the Messiah promised to the Jews, was born as a Jew, lived a Jewish life, surrounded himself with Jewish followers, and founded a movement that, at least at first, seemed to mainly attract Jews who wanted to serve the God of Israel in the way Jesus had spelled out. So it's understandable why some early Christians struggled with the question of on what terms non-Jewish outsiders – that is, 'Gentiles' – could join in the fun. Did these converts have to become Jewish first in order to become followers of Jesus? Did that mean accepting physical circumcision and setting aside delicious foods like bacon and sausage and trusting in obedience to the Jewish Law in order to stay in Jesus' good graces?

For Paul and other major leaders in the early church, the answer was no. Paul held out a special place for Jews but stressed that it was nothing to boast in. Both Jews and non-Jews had sinned against God, and the God of Israel was God over the whole world and everyone in it, whether or not they recognized him. The God that the Jews had been worshiping wasn't a God they were ever supposed to pridefully keep to themselves; he was and is a God they were always supposed to invite people of every nation to come and share on very open terms. Still, even though Paul explained it so clearly, social and political pressures led some groups within the church to resist Paul's radical idea. (For one thing, by accepting Gentiles on non-Jewish terms, the early church made it easier for non-Christian Jews to say that Christianity wasn't a legitimate form of Judaism at all – which meant that Christianity wouldn't be eligible for special protections like exemption from the Roman requirement of worshiping the Roman emperor as a god.) Even though these groups caused trouble – which came out most clearly in the Christian communities in Galatia, as Paul's very angry letter to them made perfectly clear – Paul stuck by his message. Divisions like being Jewish or non-Jewish, being rich or poor, being a man or a woman, or being a free citizen or a slave were just not important when it came to finding our identity or calling in Christ. For that reason, those divisions shouldn't be relevant for living life together in the church, which is why Paul begs Christians to do everything that they can to keep living as one church that goes beyond silly racial or social or economic or political barriers, rather than splitting into separate parties. Paul wants us to remember that the unity we're called to in Christ isn't some fancy idea he or anyone else came up with. It's nothing less than a supernatural work of the Spirit of God, and shame to us if we rip up a miraculous gift for our own petty agendas.

“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 4:4-6]]

Some Jewish writings around the time of Jesus – give or take a century or two – use the idea of monotheism (belief in just one God for the whole world) for some interesting arguments. They stressed that there has to be a match between God and certain other things – for example, the number of broad communities who worship God. We've talked in church not too long ago about the Divided Kingdom, how after Solomon's death Israel got split into a Northern Kingdom of Israel under Jeroboam and a Southern Kingdom of Judah under Rehoboam. This sort of thing badly troubled some Jewish authors. They said that, if there's only one God, then there should be only one people of God. If there are two separate 'peoples of God' who don't appear to get along, then this makes it look like they must have different gods, which is exactly the opposite sort of witness that Israel had been created to give in the first place. Similarly, the Samaritans eventually founded their own temple on Mt. Gerizim in Samaria to rival the Jewish temple on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem. But Jewish authors stressed that, if there's only one God, then there shouldn't be a need for many temples. They developed a strict 'one temple per God' rule. Later on, when confronted in John 4 by a Samaritan woman about the temples at Mt. Gerizim and Mt. Zion, Jesus answers that the question of which to choose is about to become irrelevant. Since God isn't a physical body and isn't restricted to just one area, there's no reason the temple has to be a place at all. Instead, both the true temple on Mt. Zion and the false temple at Mt. Gerizim were getting replaced by the end-times temple, which isn't a building or place at all, but the whole united people of God who make up the body of Christ, since Jesus is our true temple and we as his body are the temple also.

Christian authors borrowed this theme. For instance, John 17 has often troubled people. Some groups, like Mormons – who also violate Jesus' teachings by building hundreds of separate physical temples on the earth today – try to argue that when Jesus said he was one with the Father, he just meant that they always agreed, but that he never claimed they were one and the same God. They point to how Jesus paralleled the oneness of Christians with the oneness he had with his Father, and they claim that since the unity of Christians is allegedly just a unity of mindset and purpose, this must be all Jesus meant for him and his Father, either. But when we understand this background, we can see that Jesus was saying that, just as he and his Father are one God, we as his followers should be one people, with all that that entails. And, since the one God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is full of perfect divine love between all the persons of the Trinity, so the one Church of all of us should be marked by God-given love for one another, which means we should keep peace and hold together in unity.

That's what Paul is drawing on here. If we all have the same God (the Father) and the same Lord (Jesus Christ) and are indwelt by the same Spirit, then it should be obvious that we all got the same baptism, since all of us were baptized 'into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit'. All of us, then, should have the same faith and the same hope and the same calling – and if that's the case, then there can't possibly be any basis at all for driving a spiritual wedge between groups of faithful Christians. And that goes for a wedge between Jewish Christians and non-Jewish Christians... or between rich Christians and poor Christians... or between male Christians and female Christians... or between ordained Christians and non-ordained Christians... or between Republican Christians and Democrat Christians... or between American Christians and Chinese Christians and Israeli Christians and Palestinian Christians... or between Lutheran Christians and Baptist Christians and Presbyterian Christians and Roman Catholic Christians and E. C. Christians. Just the opposite – quicker than 'Mr. Gorbachev', Jesus tore down all the 'dividing walls of hostility'!

“But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. This is why it says, 'When he ascended on high, he took many captives and gave gifts to his people.' What does 'he ascended' mean except that he also descended to the lower, earthly regions? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.” [[Ephesians 4:7-10]]

“So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” [[Ephesians 4:11-13]]

Paul wants us to know that, although there is only one church and we must stay united, this doesn't mean that each of us is identical. He wants to remind us that each of us has received certain spiritual gifts from the risen and ascended Christ. Paul uses a cryptic quote from Psalm 68:18 here to make his point. In that psalm, the image is of Israel's God, Yahweh, coming to his permanent mountain home as a victorious warrior leading an army of chariots. The Lord Yahweh rides up from the Sinai Peninsula to his holy mountaintop temple, carrying away captives and giving many gifts. In Paul's use, Christ is Yahweh, the God of Israel. Christ had to first go down from heaven to earth. But after his resurrection, Christ continued rising into heaven itself, and indeed 'higher than all the heavens' to the very throne of God, where he sits as the ruler of the entire universe. Because he is ascended and exalted, Christ can give any gift to the people he loves.

But these spiritual gifts aren't simply for our own personal use. They're for the church. They let us each bring different things to the same overall mission. In his first letter to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth, Paul used a popular image from political speeches of his day, where a city was pictured as a body. Instead, Paul adapted it to the church. The church is like a body, and the body belongs to none other than Jesus Christ. He's our head, meaning he's the chief and the source of everything else. We're all parts of that body, and all of us are necessary. But even though we're all the same body, we're all different parts; and even though we each have different functions and purposes in the body, it's still only one body, and we need to work harmoniously with the other parts of the body. Here, like the parts God put in a human body, so Christ gave to the church all sorts of spiritual gifts in the lives of various people. Paul's examples here are various leading figures that the church had in his day. As one gift to the church, Christ picked one group of people to be apostles, or missionary church planters. As another gift to the church, Christ picked some people to be prophets, who bring God's word into the worship service and into times of trial. Christ also picked some people to be especially powerful preachers of the good news everywhere. Christ picked still more people to be shepherds who are filled with love for the church and want to guide the people and nourish them and take care of them, and teachers who understand the Bible and the people and can pass along with clarity and passion what the church was taught by Jesus in the first place. And Christ gave many more gifts.

But why did Christ give all these gifts to the church? What relationship do they have for the rest of the people? Doesn't it sound like maybe these specially gifted people Paul mentions are set up above the rest – and so there'd be a place for division after all? Well, no. Christ says that all of these gifts are given for one purpose: “to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ”. These people – apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, and any others – don't get their gifts to puff themselves up. They get them so they can use them to help others grow. And by helping others grow, they get the rest of the church prepared to serve God better. As a result of their ministries, the church as a whole can carry out its ministry. And as the church carries out its ministry, the body of Christ is built up. Eventually, Paul says, there are three ultimate goals: (1) unity in the faith; (2) unity in the knowledge of the Son of God; and (3) maturity. We might summarize these as peaceful love, solid teaching, and overflowing holiness. That, as far as Paul is concerned, is our end game and our target. That is what Christ wants from us, and Christ himself took the initiative by giving us people who can help us find our way down that road. In the meantime, the church needs to daily become more unified in the faith, more unified in the true knowledge of the Son of God, and more mature in holy love.

“Then we will no longer be as infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” [[Ephesians 4:14-16]]

The goal, Paul says, is for the church to be like a well-adjusted adult person. But he worries that, instead of being the body of the Good Friday Jesus or the body of the Easter Jesus, maybe the church is just the body of the Christmas Jesus. If we aren't mature in our faith, we're like babies. And babies, says Paul, get tossed back and forth by the waves. I'm not sure where Paul saw newborns getting dumped in the ocean, but I imagine it's true. There isn't much a baby in the sea could do to stop from being batted around by the waves. A baby isn't strong enough to swim in the sea. A baby isn't strong enough to be stable. And if a Christian is still like a baby, then a Christian may not be strong enough to resist a different kind of wave: false teaching. It isn't popular today to talk about some people being – oh no! – wrong. But Paul doesn't share our scruples. Some teaching is false teaching. And while we like to talk a lot about having a relationship instead of a religion – never mind that every religion in Paul's world was a 'relationship' – that can take our eyes off of the need to teach the truth and not give in to charming presentations of what turn out to be mistakes at best and lies at worst. We've all met people who are spreading false teachings. We meet some at work, others at school, and still others on our doorsteps at hours of the morning we'd rather be asleep. It's tempting to just put up walls and disregard all these 'cunning', 'crafty', 'deceitful' people – but we also have to remember not to shoot the messenger, even when the message is a false teaching. Even the people on our doorstep, or the angry atheists in the news, may be sincerely misled.

What does God want us to do? The next verse tells us: just speak the truth in love. There are two easy ways to get this wrong. On the one hand, we could speak the truth without love. We could condemn sin all the day long, pour scorn on the media and American culture, and separate ourselves from the world and all the impure people in it. But last time I checked, when Jesus wanted to give the disciples a good example to follow, they were tax collectors and widows and Gentiles, and not Phil the Pharisee down the road. The church has gotten itself into a lot of trouble by speaking the truth without letting its love shine through – and, more often than not, that just drives people deeper into the arms of their errors or their sins. On the other hand, we could speak in love and just fudge a little bit on that troublesome 'truth' thing. I mean, after all, if the Bible's “Thou shalt not” gets under people's skins a bit too much today, well, maybe it wasn't for today after all, then, right? Worst of all is if it sounds to someone somewhere like it might discriminate or make anybody feel excluded! Well, it may be true that a lot of people today say that ideas like 'true' and 'false' are outdated – at least, until you challenge something they deeply hold to be true. But as a third-century Christian named Tertullian once put it, Jesus called himself the Truth, not the Custom. As Christians, we can't afford to compromise on our message. And if our message itself (and not just the way we say it) is an offense to someone, then as much as our culture hates anything offensive (unless it offends people who don't matter, like those silly Christians), then offensive is just what it'll have to stay. We need to share the truth. We need to share what we know. And, although we Americans are a complacent people who don't like to have to think to hard, we need to hear the truth from the pulpit, put simply but not oversimplified, whether or not it seems 'practical' or 'relevant' or 'useful' or whatever standard we've come up with for what we personally want out of our preaching this week. Because if we aren't getting deeply into the truth in our sermons and our Sunday schools and our prayer meetings, then we might as well be eating from jars of baby food – nutritious, sure, but how fast will we grow into the 'mature body of Christ'?

But as Christians, we also can't afford not to let the world know that we love them and would die for them. Jesus died for the world on his cross, even the atheists and the sex fiends and the God-haters and the dictators – and it may just be that, when he defined discipleship as taking up our crosses and walking in his footsteps, he might have envisioned something of the same attitude in our hearts. These days, when the average American thinks of a 'Christian', the first thought that flashes through her head is probably not, “Oh, they're those people who built that free clinic that took care of my son when he got sick and we couldn't afford treatment, and who brought me groceries when I was out of work, and who helped me find a new job that treated me better than my last one, and who also taught me patiently what they believed and invited me into a life of following this strange, deep, challenging man named Jesus”. They probably think of some much less pleasant things. But if we speak the truth in love, real love, then we'll at least have given them a reason to think of the better things. And Paul says that, if we as the church go around speaking truth in love, then that is how we mature. We mature together, not separately. Because we're not just a collection of people who all just happen to have the same bumper stickers and T-shirts. We're one body. And if each of us will truthfully, lovingly, and faithfully serve the church with whatever spiritual gift Christ has given us, then that is the way that 'the whole body grows and builds itself up in love'.

Wednesday Night Devotions: 2 Corinthians 4

Paul wrote this letter of 2 Corinthians when the church in Corinth had been visited by some very impressive preachers who had a very fatal flaw: they thought that what made a good minister or missionary was a matter of human skill, and they belittled Paul to the Corinthian Christians because of his weaknesses and trials. Paul, on the other hand, knew better. Paul saw that it wasn't just about our natural talents, but instead it was about how we let God use us for his mission and about how we followed in the footsteps of Jesus. For Paul, it isn't about our strength, but about God's power being shown off completely in the middle of our human weaknesses (cf. 2 Corinthians 12:9). Paul thought that the priorities of these preachers were so out of line with what Jesus taught that they might as well have been talking about someone else entirely (cf. 2 Corinthians 11:4); their values were more like the world's values than like God's values.

“Therefore, since through God's mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways. We do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God.” [[2 Corinthians 4:1-2]]

“And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” [[2 Corinthians 4:3-4]]

“For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God, who said 'Let light shine out of darkness' [Genesis 1:3], made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ.” [[2 Corinthians 4:5-6]]

In this chapter, Paul stresses that his ministry is completely above board. He isn't attempting to trick people or trying to make Scripture say something it's not. He isn't hiding what he's doing, and he isn't holding back any part of his message. Instead, Paul is being completely honest. Paul says that the fact that the Spirit of the Lord is with him means that he has the freedom to boldly tell the truth without trying to dress it up. The preachers he's criticizing may have prided themselves on using all sorts of word games to get their message across, like a lawyer, but Paul wants to lay it all out on the table when he does his ministry. Paul's ministry is marked by his good conduct, his sound biblical teaching, and his honesty. Not all of us are apostles, and not all of us are pastors, but all of us are given some kind of ministry by God. Our ministry also needs to be honest in explaining why we as Christians believe the things we believe and do the things we do, and when we do that, we need to be clearly rooted in the Bible and relate to people by seeing them as God sees them, so that we can 'speak the truth in love'.

Paul admits that, even with his honest ministry, not everyone will be able to get the gospel; for many people, it seems to go right in one ear and out the other. Paul says that this is because people are made blind by the devil, who loves things to be dark and unclear so that people will stay in their sin and not turn back to God. Paul doesn't say this to judge those people, because he knows that before we turned to God, we were also in that same boat. None of us had the power, before God touched us and lifted us up, to see through Satan's scheme. We couldn't do anything unless God made the first move. It's easy, once we've seen the light, to be judgmental of those who “can't see the light of the gospel”, but while we do have to speak God's truth about human sin, God didn't put us here to put the world down. God put us here to shine God's light of love on the world, and trust him to do the rest. And no matter how dark it gets, Paul reminds us that God's motto from the very start has always been, “Let there be light”.

But Paul's emphasis in these verses is that it isn't our light that ultimately gets through the darkness. As Christians, when we bring the good news to people, it isn't the good news of how good we are, or how gifted we are, or how rich and successful and accomplished we are. It's the good news of how good Jesus Christ is, and he makes that goodness clear by showing off his strength especially when we're not strong. We're just called to be the faithful messengers and to play our role by listening to God. And that's when God's light of glory can shine in our hearts. Making a comment on these verses, the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas commented that when we turn to Jesus, “the power of the glory of Christ’s brightness shines in us, and it shines on us in such a way that not only are we enlightened so that we can see, but we enlighten others”. When we put a candle or a light bulb inside a clear lantern, people can see the light clearly; but if we try to paint over the outside of the lantern to make it look pretty, all that paint just gets in the way of the light. When we paint over ourselves by focusing on our gifts, on our talents, on our abilities, then the focus is on us – the shell, the clay jar – instead of on the light that God put inside of us.

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” [[2 Corinthians 4:7-9]]

“We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.” [[2 Corinthians 4:10-12]]

In Paul's time, some of these mistaken preachers thought that a good preacher wouldn't have to go through hard times. They'd overcome everything easily, God would clear away all their difficulties, everything about their lives would spell success, even in the eyes of the world. They made fun of Paul for everything he had to go through. Even today, we have some preachers who say that if we just have enough faith, then we'll always be rich and healthy and be liked by everyone. Paul says just the opposite here. The Christian life isn't the easy road. It's the road that Jesus took. And the road that Jesus took is the one that he carried his cross down on his way to suffer and die. Remember that Jesus defined being his disciple as setting everything else aside to take up our cross and follow him. Paul says that as Christians, we carry Jesus' death on the cross with us, because that's the only way that a Jesus-like life is made known in us. We often tell people that God has a wonderful plan for their lives, and he does! But we sometimes forget to share with them that this wonderful plan means “always being given over to death for Jesus' sake”. God's wonderful plan for our lives is seldom what the world calls wonderful. That's especially difficult to remember as Christians in America, where we aren't outright being persecuted for our faith, and where comfort is the #1 rule of life. But being a Christian the right way might not mean being blessed the way the world counts its blessings. Paul says that we have treasures in jars of clay – beautiful prizes hidden deep inside fragile, ungussied-up bowls – exactly so that we won't make the mistake of thinking that we deserve the credit for what God does in us. We don't. All the credit, all the glory, goes to God, who put the treasure there. His plan for us in this life isn't to stop being a jar of clay; it's to show off the treasure on the inside, and that is God's wonderful plan for our lives.

“It is written, 'I believed; therefore I have spoken' [Psalm 116:10 LXX]. Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the One who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself. All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.” [[2 Corinthians 4:13-15]]

As jars of clay in a world that doesn't understand how God does things, we're pretty likely to get chipped. In the end, we get broken into pieces, just like Jesus was broken for us. But God never planned to leave Jesus in his tomb. Jesus didn't stay there. Instead, Jesus came back from the dead; he came back to the body that was dead, and God made him alive again in his body, but this time with outward glory. Paul says that we know for a fact that God has the same plan in store for us. These jars of clay are going to be glued back together after they break. In the next chapter, Paul says that what God has in store for us isn't just to leave our bodies behind as if they weren't a part of God's plan for our everlasting life. Paul says that that would be like being stripped naked. Instead, Paul says that we put on a new set of clothes that God has set aside for us. Our certain hope is to be raised from the dead someday, but without the weaknesses or the pain or the sadness. Like we read last week, God will wipe away every tear. This is what motivated Paul to speak out in preaching the gospel, and it should be one of our motives to speak out too. We don't want our friends to be lost. We want them to meet Jesus, because we know from experience how Jesus can change someone, and he isn't even done with us yet! Paul says that ultimately, the point isn't even just for our friends to be saved. That's part of it, but being saved isn't the end, it's the means. The most worthwhile thing someone can do is praise God. When we get to help people come to know the Lord, we know that they'll be able to live with us and with Jesus in glory – but what's more, they get to finally live out the reason why God made them: to bring glory to God through receiving and sharing his love.

“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” [[2 Corinthians 4:16-18]]

In looking at what Paul said here, we've said a lot about how the Christian life isn't an easy one. Paul talks about being jars of weak clay, about being handed over to death, about being persecuted, about being struck down, about being put under a lot of pressure and stress in this life for the sake of the gospel. But Paul isn't one to end on a depressing note without shouting from the rooftops about the big silver lining. We need to remember, he says, that it's what's on the inside that counts. We might have to go through a lot of difficulties, but they're only mild and brief when we compare them to what's in store for us on the other side. It can be easy to be distracted by worldly things. We're surrounded by them all the time. Sometimes they can be the pleasures that the world is offering us – money, power, success, pleasure, the latest toys and gadgets – and sometimes they can be the hard times and inconveniences that come our way. But all of these things are temporary. An hour after Jesus comes back, it won't matter what the number in our bank account was, it won't matter how much stuff we had, it won't even matter how well people liked us; and our trials will also all be over. But what will matter are the things we can't see directly yet – things like what God has in store for us, the visible fruit of our relationship with him. We aren't supposed to focus our attention on the things that won't last. We do need to give our attention to the things that will. And if we have our eyes fixed on Jesus and his promises, then the Holy Spirit will do with our ministry in the world exactly what God has planned for it.

Adoption Through the Word: A Sermon on John 1:1-14

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [...] Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all humanity. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. […] The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. [...] He came to his own, but his own didn't receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who had faith in his name, he gave the right to become children of God [...] The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1, 3-5, 9, 11-14)

The story the Bible tells about us doesn't start with us at all; it begins with an eternal God who shows himself as holy love. He doesn't need anything, but he creates a whole universe anyway, through the 'Word' that was always with him¹. It's a work of art, a masterpiece displaying his glory. He creates it because he wants to share the life he has in himself. So he creates us to be his image in the world², and he gives us authority to represent him and to take care of the earth. He gives us everything we have and everything we are, all as a gift. He offers us endless life and happiness with him, chances to grow and learn and explore, and he offers us his love. It's the start of the happiest story ever.

But it's also the start of the saddest story ever. Because we decide that, even though he's given us so much and we should be grateful, we want just a little bit more, and we want it on our terms, not his. And so, whether we realize what we're doing or not, we decide that if his gifts come at the 'price' of gratitude and obedience, we want out. We want to break his rules and make our own, and that's just what we decide to do.

But what happens when we aren't grateful? What happens when we give in to temptation and the easy way out? What happens if we look the one who holds everything together square in the eye and tell him that we'd like him to back off? We told the Way that he wasn't worth following, and we got lost. We told the Truth that he wasn't worth knowing, and we find ourselves in a world of lies. We told the Life that he wasn't worth living up to, and we get hurt and suffer and die. We told the Light that he wasn't worth seeing, and our lives are painted in shades of gray. And because he'd given us the whole world, we dropped it – and it cracked.

We've got a serious problem, and there's no denying it. You know, all of us like to think we're good people. But we aren't the measure of all things³, and we aren't the standard of what's good. God is. And the standard he sets is perfect truthful love for him and for each other. The Bible says, “God looks down from heaven on all humanity to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. Everyone has turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.”⁴

But thank God he isn't done with us. The Bible says that he chose a man of real faith, and God told that man that his family would be a blessing to the whole world.⁵ And out of that family, God made a new people.

That people found itself in slavery in a foreign land, but God reached down, broke their chains, and led them out to freedom. But even the chosen people rebelled, and the Law God gave them became a spotlight on their own sins. God's chosen people, more often than not, were God's chosen problem. God wanted them to see him for who he was, and they let themselves be led astray by counterfeits. But they were still God's way of healing a broken world.

Then when the people went really sour, God let another nation lead them off as captives, away from the homeland God gave them. Eventually the people realized where they'd gone wrong, and God brought them back to the land and let them rebuild. But the people knew things weren't set right yet. They were still waiting for God to really set them free.

And then God acted, but not like any of us thought he would. The Bible says that when the time was right, God's own Message came down to save us. No one saw it coming when God's very own living Autobiography came to earth wearing human skin and pitched his tent down here with the rest of us. And that man, God's Word for us, was named Jesus.

He was the Chosen One, the 'Anointed One' – or, in Greek, the 'Christ'. He came to show us in his human life what it looks like to live out perfect love. He came to lead us in a exodus out of sin and into the promised land of new life; he came to bring us home from exile, back to the God we left.

Jesus announced that it's time to give up disobedience and turn back to God, because God is taking charge through him.⁶ He invited people to turn away from their selfishness and follow him, even if it meant suffering or being an outcast.⁷ He explained that God didn't send him to condemn the world, but to rescue it; and anyone who trusted and followed him would be saved and live forever with the God who loves us.⁸ Jesus said we needed a radical change of who we'd become, a change so dramatic that he compared it to being born all over again and getting a new life and identity from a new parent: God himself.⁹

To address the consequences of what we've done, Jesus made his way to Jerusalem, where he was sentenced to death. And not just any death: crucifixion, a painful, bloody, shameful death called “the slaves' punishment”, a death so awful you just couldn't mention it in good company. And that's how Jesus, God's own gift of Life, died.

He gave his innocent life freely in our place as a display of God's infinite love for each and every one of us.¹⁰ The Bible summarizes it in just a few words: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”.¹¹ We should have been punished, we should have paid the price, but Jesus died to save us and set us free.

But at the time, it must have been difficult to see that. Crucifixion was the end of many people who claimed to be God's Chosen One – and weren't. But after Jesus was buried, suddenly his grave was empty. His heartbroken followers didn't understand – and then he showed up again, very not-dead. Alive again, he visited people who believed already and some who hadn't. They were convinced.

The message had so much going against it. It was an offensive story about a guy from the backwoods of the Roman world who gets put to death in the most shameful way and then comes back to permanent bodily life – something no one but the Jews thought was either possible or desirable. The message was a threat to the ruling authorities, and if it wasn't true they could have easily stopped it by pointing to the body. And even though it cost them their lives and their comfort, those who knew the facts for sure spent the rest of their lives spreading the news. And it did spread, and it's still spreading today. The good news is true: Jesus who was crucified, was raised from the dead!

Death didn't have the last word. Jesus wasn't wrong at all; God gave his stamp of approval on Jesus by bringing him back to life. The Jews had long been waiting for God to set up his rule on earth. When God raised Jesus, the message was that it was starting there and then for those willing to follow Jesus, and that it'd come to completion when Jesus came back again. In the meantime, Jesus told his followers to go invite other people to follow him; he told his followers to baptize people as a sign of sharing in his death and resurrection¹², and he told his followers to teach them, to gather them into communities that can grow together, and to show them the way to live.¹³ And we need to live this way if we want to grow to be the people God always planned for us to be, the kind of people who are ready to live with God.

Jesus promised that we'd have God's own Spirit to guide us through life,¹⁴ and his earliest followers wrote down in the Bible what the Spirit taught them.¹⁵ And what they learned was that we can be forgiven for everything we've ever done wrong, thanks to Jesus. We need to turn from our disobedient ways and start following his ways. He asks us to love him, to trust him, and to obey him, just like we always should have. We can be forgiven if we ask to be forgiven. If we accept Jesus publicly as Lord and we believe that God raised him from the dead, we can be saved.¹⁶

It's not a matter of earning it; we couldn't if we tried. It's grace given freely.¹⁷ When we receive it, we commit to follow Jesus. That isn't always easy. There's a reason he compared it to taking up a cross and being led off to die like he did.¹⁸ But it's the way that brings us to everlasting joy, and I can testify that Jesus has brought it to my own life. It's the opportunity to live with God forever when he raises us up. When we receive and follow Jesus, we become a new kind of people: God's children, destined for a bright future. He's offering a new birth, a new life with a clean slate. Everything else is a matter of learning to live like Jesus, being light to the world just like he's the Light of the World.¹⁹

Maybe some of you have never really met Jesus. Maybe you realize that you've never received him and haven't yet had that new birth. If that's you, I want to encourage you to receive him in your lives, to really put your heart and soul into loving him and following him. Come to Jesus. Pray, ask him to take your life and reshape it. Let him be Lord of your life. Accept the gifts he's offering you. Just trust in him, put your faith in him, and he'll lead you and show you how to live. He'll give you the Holy Spirit, and “those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God”.²⁰

Or maybe you've received him, but you realize you've been trying to live this life on your own. You don't have to. When a crowd asked one of Jesus' first followers what they had to do, he told them, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off – for all whom the Lord our God will call.”²¹ And when they listened, they received baptism as “the washing of rebirth”²² and “devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer”.²³ Do that. Turn your back on your own ways; turn to God's instead, be baptized, and join together with other followers on a regular basis. Pray with one another, grow together, and listen to what Jesus has to teach you.

Or maybe you've been baptized, and maybe you've joined a local community of followers, but you realize that you need to follow Jesus more closely and more faithfully. That's where all of us should be, because none of us have grown all we can. Look to Jesus. Turn to him. Ask God for help, and study what the Bible says about how we should live – and live like that, as God's Spirit gives you the strength. Live as a child of God, born again from above. And know that “if we are children, then we are heirs – heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings so that we may also share in his glory”.²⁴ Amen.

---

1 John 1:3

2 Genesis 1:26

3 Cf. Protagoras

4 Psalm 53:2-3

5 Genesis 22:18

6 Matthew 3:2

7 Matthew 16:24

8 John 3:16-17

9 John 3:3

10 1 John 3:16

11 Romans 5:8

12 Romans 6:3-5

13 Matthew 28:19-20

14 John 14:26

15 2 Timothy 3:16-17

16 Romans 10:9

17 Ephesians 1:6

18 Matthew 16:24

19 Matthew 5:14; John 8:12, 9:5

20 Romans 8:14

21 Acts 2:38-39

22 Titus 3:5

23 Acts 2:42

24 Romans 8:17

With Glorious Clouds Emcompassed 'Round

I found this hymn, #22 in the Methodist Pocket Hymn-Book (1791), to be quite beautiful and moving:

With glorious clouds encompassed 'round,
Whom angels dimly see,
Will the unsearchable be found,
Or God appear to me?

Will he forsake his throne above,
Himself to worms impart?
Answer thou man of grief and love,
And speak it to my heart.

In manifested love explain
Thy wonderful design:
What meant the suffering son of man?
The streaming blood divine?

Didst thou not in our flesh appear,
And live and die below,
That I may now perceive thee near,
And my Redeemer know?

Come then, and to my soul reveal
The heights and depths of grace,
The wounds which all my sorrows heal,
That dear disfigured face.

Before my eyes of faith confessed,
Stand forth a slaughtered Lamb:
And wrap me in thy crimson vest,
And tell me all thy name.

Jehovah in thy person show,
Jehovah crucified!
And then the pardoning God I know,
And feel the blood applied.

I view the Lamb in his own light,
Whom angels dimly see:
And gaze transported at the sight,
To all eternity.

Revisiting Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames

Last night, my best friend and I attended a performance of a traveling evangelistic drama called Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames, presented by Reality Outreach Ministries. As I expected, I was somewhat troubled by what I saw and heard there. The general premise is simple. The show opens with a dramatic portrayal of the crucifixion and resurrection. An actor portraying Jesus stumbles up the aisle toward the stage, lugging a cross. As crowds gather at the foot of the stage, jeering the Messiah, Romans whip and crucify Jesus while an actor portraying a maniacally cackling Satan (complete with three demonic minions) eggs them on, handing them various implements. The effect is enhanced by strobe lights and music, of course. After all but Jesus (crumpled on the ground) and Satan have departed, Satan prods the body of Jesus with glee and then exits stage right. (I should mention that stage left is decked out in purple and gold to signify the gates of heaven, whereas stage right is decorated in glittering red to represent hell.) A short time after Satan leaves, Jesus rises slowly to his feet and likewise exits stage right, implicitly for a Harrowing of Hell sequence. (Not exactly a customary feature of evangelical thought.) As triumphant music plays, Jesus shoves Satan down a flight of stairs, tramples him at center stage, snatches a set of keys from him, and then sends Satan running back to hell as Jesus triumphantly displays the keys to the audience. It was a somewhat debased Christus Victor atonement model, I realized as I watched.

The bulk of the rest of the show consists in a series of skits in which assorted groups of characters (both Christians and non-Christians) die sudden deaths and find themselves in a sort of antechamber, faced with a cohort of angels, one of whom stands stoically on a dais behind a pedestal holding the Book of Life. All characters plead with that angel to find their names written in the Book of Life; the non-Christian characters, of course, are considerably more perturbed and panicked than their Christian counterparts. When the names of Christian characters are located, the angel points toward stage left, the lights get very bright, and Jesus appears at the gate of heaven to welcome the exuberant Christians in. On the other hand, when the names of non-Christian characters are not located, the angel points toward stage right, the lights grow very dim, other angels cross swords to block the path to heaven, and Satan and his minions emerge from stage right to taunt, mock, and drag the victim off to the fiery blazes of hell.

This occupies the bulk of the experience. After the final skit, in which a middle-aged mother is dragged off to hell in front of her crying daughter's eyes but the very young daughter is welcomed (rather somberly, I might add) into heaven, the drama itself concludes. At that point last night, a representative from Reality Outreach Ministries appeared on stage to summon people to come forth for an altar call. After continual refrains of "one more, just one more", the crowd was led in a "sinner's prayer" to "accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior". These apparent new converts were told that this would free them from their problems - most notably, a destiny of hellfire, but also of, say, the need to take medication - and, as an almost offhand comment, it was mentioned that they ought to seek out a "Bible-believing Christian church", begin reading the Bible, and find a Bible study to join. (Not, of course, that the apparent new converts were given any counsel on, say, identifying a "Bible-believing Christian church"...) And that was it.

I scarcely know where to begin in listing my objections to the evangelistic methods here portrayed. First, I deem it noteworthy that all characters were apparently either white American suburban evangelical Protestants or white American suburban non-Christians, with no middle ground or additional categories. In particular, I don't think it unfair to say that all Christian characters portrayed could justly be classified as Fundamentalist Christians, though the characterization typically underdetermined that. There were no clear examples of Roman Catholic Christians, Orthodox Christians, devout mainline Protestant Christians, or even non-Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians. Furthermore, all characters - including ardent non-Christians, once they arrived before the angels - spoke the same idiosyncratic dialect of Christianese. I have seldom encountered a group of Christians whose dominant imagery is that of the Book of Life, but here it was portrayed as the universal Christian language, since even 'informed' non-Christians had to explain to fellow non-Christians about the Book of Life, and several Christian characters mentioned having heard recent sermons devoted to the Book of Life.

In keeping with this particularly Fundamentalist vision of Christianity, the portrayal of the 'world' tended to be one that plays specifically to American Fundamentalist perceptions of culture. The first skit portraying non-Christians was one that depicted a raucous party filled with debauchery, frenzied dancing, heavy drinking, and ultimately use of powerful illegal drugs obtained by two naive and apparently promiscuous girls from a sleazy drug dealer offering "salvation" in "little white packages". Because, as we all know, most non-Christians are quite prepared to snort unidentified powder given to them by a complete stranger... right? Other non-Christians were portrayed as power-hungry, status-obsessed, materialistic, and complacent. And for many non-Christians, that may well be the case. (Painful to admit, the same is equally true for a great many Christians.) I noted with interest that not a single non-Christian was portrayed as having any intellectual reasons to disbelieve - say, a disbelief in the resurrection. No Christian ever had to defend their faith, nor did it seem likely that any of the characters actually could have, even within the context of the skits. That was somewhat disheartening. All the Christian characters ever had to do was reiterate that Jesus is the way and that he heals all wounds. For that matter, quite a few of the Christian characters came off as, well, jerks. And I'm saying that as a fellow Christian! Some of the Christians practically taunted non-believers with hell and judgment, and after death, they were so caught up in the excitement of their personal salvation and the beautiful place waiting for them that they just plain stopped caring about the plight of their non-Christian friends, sometimes even treating it somewhat flippantly. Not cool, guys. Not cool at all.

In a later skit, one woman put off a co-worker's evangelistic efforts by saying that Christians are hypocrites because she had seen some professing Christians in a bar doing a bit of "social drinking". Not to be outdone in judgmentalism, her Christian co-worker promptly retorted that not all professing Christians are really Christians, with the implication that any true Christian would never be seen in a bar with friends. The same message was reinforced in other skits later by Christians who had visited bars before their conversion but never after conversion. In short: any alcohol use at all is an evil, evil sin that shows that you aren't truly a Christian. Ye shall know them by their complete and utter abstinence from the stuff Jesus provided at Cana, after all. This, of course, is just plainly wrong. The Bible urges sobriety and responsibility to be guiding principles. The Bible warns against the very real dangers of abusing alcohol and allowing ourselves to become impaired. It says nothing against genuinely responsible use of alcohol... which even the perfect Son of God drank. But, of course, surely the characters in this drama have Jesus beat when it comes to holiness.

Another observation: the understanding of the Christian narrative itself here was radically askew, though (alas!) not in a way totally out of keeping with lowest-common-denominator American evangelicalism. The destination of each character was to be either in a seemingly self-absorbed heaven or an everlasting burning hell. Everything in this life was reduced to just an opportunity to decide between one of those two entirely unearthly destinations. Resurrection of the dead? Absent. New heavens and new earth? No. God's kingdom? Gone. Any task for the church other than offering cosmic fire insurance policies? None whatsoever. This is not the teaching of Jesus. This is not the teaching of the apostles. This is not the faith delivered once for all to the saints. This is not the Christianity for which martyrs gave their lives. This is a borderline-Gnostic concoction of our own devising, and it is a massively truncated version of the Christian story. And that's even apart from the massively crude visions of both heaven and hell! (Seriously, people, Satan does not rule over hell, and he does not get the opportunity to personally micromanage every single person's case. He is not God's opposite-but-equal force, nor is he - or any particular view of hell itself, for that matter - a core component of the gospel, as a perusal of the ancient creeds will bear out.)

Indeed, not only was the Christian narrative misrepresented, so was the Christian life. Every Christian character was effectively portrayed as fully sanctified. No Christian character struggled with faith. No Christian character doubted. No Christian character sinned. Nor did the evangelist afterwards give the impression that things would ever be difficult. The message was one of "accepting Jesus into your heart" and thereby being set immediately and miraculously free from every struggle and every hardship. Including, as I indicated earlier, the need to use any prescription drugs. I would love to believe that the evangelist was talking about prescription drug abuse. But how can I believe that, when the consistent portrayal of Christians throughout the entire performance was people who live blessed lives without any struggle? What, for Christ's sake (literally!), of the cross? Did the evangelist have any idea just what damage he could be doing, by (hopefully inadvertently) encouraging people to needlessly reject a God-given provision for healing?

Christianity was reduced to a simple formula and a panacea, where all one has to do is pray a simple prayer and then just... wait to die? There was no portrayal of baptism, for one. Or of the eucharist, for another matter. And that is just plain wrong. Not a single character ever mentioned either, nor did the evangelist. What's more troubling, there was no hint whatsoever that "accepting Jesus into your heart" is merely the beginning of a journey of discipleship. This right here is what terrifies me, for the sake of all those who came forward for the altar call last night. Are these people being prepared to be disciples, or merely statistical marks in a heavenly ledger? Are they being equipped? Do they even know that there's more? How can they grow in grace if they don't? How are they being prepared to stand firm, if they don't know that there will be storms? How can they not fall away easily? And how can those who do this sort of evangelism stand with a clear conscience before the judgment seat of God when their failures lead to the stumbling of so many babes in Christ? While they all prayed the simple (simplistic) "sinner's prayer", I prayed that God might in his grace direct these people to local churches that can supply the dire, dire lack in this drama's presentation of the gospel.

A number of times in the performance and in the evangelistic message afterwards, one encounters a very annoying yet obscenely popular Christian maxim: Christianity isn't a religion, it's a personal relationship with Jesus! This always gets on my nerves. A great deal. Christianity is a religion. Period. The only way to escape that conclusion is to define religion in a highly self-serving way that characterizes it as, for instance, an exclusively human, ritual-laden, impotent striving to reach out to God in unauthorized ways. But that simply is not the definition of religion! "Religion" and "relationship" are not utterly separate categories. In the first-century Mediterranean world, religions were all about the relationship between divine benefactors and human clients. The same was true of Zeus-worship, of the imperial cult, of Second Temple Judaism, and, yes, of early Christianity. And so it remains today. This may not be a "personal relationship", whatever is meant by that. (I suspect that the phrase had its origination for a good purpose - to insist that one cannot delegate one's need to serve the Lord to someone else - but twenty-first century models of 'personal relationships' carry a lot of baggage that's quite foreign to anything that the apostles would have experienced.) But it is a relationship - and it is religion. It's time to get over our allergies to the word.

Another concern: the evangelist and some of the Christian characters mentioned "God's love" quite a few times. But from the warped presentation of the Christian story that they offered, I had a hard time seeing where it fit in. The depiction of God was hardly a very loving one - or, at least, that was not made clear to the audience. See, no explanation was ever offered of why anyone would go to hell. All that was said is that it's for everyone who doesn't "accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior". Vague mentions were made by a few Christian characters of having been forgiven of their sins. But what is sin? Why does it need to be forgiven? Why does it merit hell - particularly the grotesque notion of hell depicted on stage - when unforgiven? And how is Jesus and his death on the cross relevant to dealing with it? The drama didn't say. Neither did the evangelist, to my recollection. And without that crucial context, God hardly seemed loving at all. He seemed capricious, harsh, and perhaps insane. That may be why I inadvertently found myself silently cheering for the Satan character by about the middle of the performance. Tip: If your evangelistic drama makes it even possible to root for Satan, then you might be doing something wrong.

Think I'm blowing the portrayal of God's character a bit out of proportion? In one of the earlier skits, a non-Christian woman falls at the feet of Jesus, repents of her sins, and begs him to be her Lord and Savior. And Jesus turns and promptly walks away without so much as a clear look of compassion on his face. This is a caricature of even much conservative evangelical thought on the afterlife. Many conservative evangelicals would be more inclined to say that repentance simply isn't a possibility after death. That wasn't what was portrayed here. Rather, a person's apparently sincere repentance and faith were outright rejected by Jesus. The idea represented is one that exists in conservative evangelical Christian thought, but even there, it seems quite hard-line. (Also, the depiction of young children being sent screaming and crying into hell did not exactly help.) While the words "God's love" showed up quite a bit, the dominant atmosphere of the whole performance was fear and terror, designed specifically to coerce conversion as a 'get-out-of-hell free' card.

The evangelist's methods after the drama also rubbed me the wrong way. While I saw no reason to believe that he wasn't quite sincere, his tactics for badgering people into making a 'decision for Christ' reminded me of two things: Elmer Gantry, and Charles G. Finney's Lectures on Revival of Religion. Right on the heels of a tearful separation of mother and daughter in the afterlife, he specifically addressed his message - numerous times - chiefly to "moms" and "dads", and also "teenagers". In addition, I lost track of how many times he urged that there would surely be just "one more person" needed to come down before they could proceed. I also noticed quite a number of Mennonite girls in bonnets going down for the altar call. I couldn't help but wonder how many of the people going down front were really doing this for the first time, and really were not Christians before, or really were making a decision to become Christians on this occasion - and, furthermore, would really stick with it and become disciples. Plausibly, only a fraction of the crowd.

Now, please do not misunderstand me. It's easy to read everything I've just written and think that I've completely written off this ministry and its efforts. It's easy to take all my criticism and think that I'm dismissing the possibility that some people will really begin their journey of authentic discipleship and true love for God at an event like this. But that's not true. I know that that can happen. I know it because I am one of those people. I became a Christian at a local performance of Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames in or around the year 1998. That is where my Christian journey began, and had I not attended it, I can't really say for sure when or even if I would have come to Christ. I remember that it was the final skit that got to me. I didn't want to go to hell. The fear of hell, moreso than the fear of God, gripped my heart. And I resolved in that moment that if turning to Jesus was what it would take to get some heavenly fire insurance, then it would just have to be worth it. So that is precisely what I did. If God hadn't led me to a nurturing church, it would have been so easy for me to simply fall away and never grow. Or, if my fear of hell hadn't been transformed through gratitude into a real love for God, it would have been easy for me to be spiritually infantilized at best or to simply apostatize at worst. Or, if I hadn't eventually attained a greater (though of course imperfect) theological maturity to see beyond the immensely crude half-gospel portrayed in the drama, much the same could have been the result. Nevertheless, God can work through ignoble means and base motives - if that's all we're willing to offer him. I'm grateful to have heard the Christian message, even in a distorted and garbled form, and to have been spurred to act on it, even through shoddy and shameful motives. So yes, real good can be done by Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames, and if even one of those conversions was authentic, then I truly believe that the angels in heaven rejoiced over it. But I still can't help but wonder, given how rightfully offputting a crude threatening with hellfire is when stripped of context, whether the net effect is positive or negative for the goals of God's kingdom.

I am no advocate of a Christianity that pretends that there is no hell, no devil, no sin, no judgment, or anything of that sort. Far from it. I do advocate a Christianity that hews closely to what the Bible says about those topics without proclaiming as gospel truth more than we really know. And I do advocate a Christianity that keeps a sense of balance while presenting the real gist of the Christian story, the story of God's love and justice and his righteous kingdom and the need for discipleship that doesn't kowtow to popular ideologies of power but that shows forth a Christian life that's really shaped by the cross and by the resurrection. I advocate a Christianity that would hopefully be recognized by Jesus, by Peter, by Paul, and by the blessed men and women who came after them and strove valiantly for the faith. I advocate an evangelism that can actually prepare new Christians for discipleship, not mislead them and strand them and leave them as though stillborn. And in that, I fear that I'm an advocate for something that Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames just doesn't deliver, to its detriment.

Christ is Our Worthiness

[Originally posted at Study and Faith.]

What I wanted to share for thought today consists of a few stanzas from a wonderful classic hymn, "Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy" by Joseph Hart (1712-1768):

View Him prostrate in the garden,
On the ground your Maker lies.
On the bloody tree behold Him;
Sinner, will this not suffice?

Lo! th' incarnate God ascended,
Pleads the merit of His blood:
Venture on Him, venture wholly,
Let no other trust intrude.

Let not conscience make you linger,
Nor of fitness fondly dream;
All the fitness He requireth
Is to feel your need of Him.

I find this to be a powerful, moving hymn with a view-enlarging message. Christ has suffered, Christ has died - what more could we possibly require to free us from our guilt and shame and sin? The one who suffered for us was and is God indeed, and he presents his blood in the heavenly tabernacle as an atonement; what ground is there for dividing our trust between Him and any other cause? Let us place our faith firmly in him. And although it's so tempting to shrink back in fear, believing our sins to be too great or supposing that we need some worthiness of our own before we can approach, we have this promise: All we need to enter into this forgiveness, to be set free, is to know that we need Christ and to surrender ourselves to him. And in turn, God accounts our faith - our feeble, barren, trembling trust - as righteousness in his sight, a righteousness that obscures and replaces our sins and works in us to bear good fruit. We need no other worthiness than to turn to Christ and follow.