Out of the Mouths of Babes

We had a Super Bowl party last night with a big group of folks from our church at a church member's home. There must have been 40-50 people in the house (it was a big house). In the midst of the chaos and mayhem of a group of adults yelling and watching the game upstairs and a group of kids yelling and playing downstairs, I was taught a valuable lesson. Before I share that lesson, I need to fill you in on some background.

Two months ago my wife and I picked up the newest addition to our family from an orphanage in Bulgaria. His name is Viktor and he's 6-years old. Vikki, as we call him, is still learning English and there are many things about his new life that he hasn't figured out. The rest of the family (along with my wife and I, our 12-year old son and 9-year old daughter) spends a lot of time correcting him and trying in our broken Bulgarian and his broken English to explain things to him. One thing that he didn't understand when we picked him was the concept of church.

For the first couple of weeks that he was home, we didn't take him to church. He was still new and we were trying to ease him into his new life and we were afraid he would be overwhelmed with all the new people and things at church. As the pastor, I couldn't miss, so mom stayed home with Vikki and I tried to tell where I was going when I left. I always used the Bulgarian word for church but he thought I was saying food (in Bulgarian the words for church and food are very similar). After a few times I realized, he doesn't know what church is. In fact he may have never even been to church, after all he had lived his entire life in a state-run orphanage so his never having been in church wasn't impossible.

After a few weeks we finally took Vikki to church and he really enjoyed it and did well. As a 6-year old in the nursery, what's not to love about church? New toys, new friends, new places. He quickly decided  that he really liked going to church. But his understanding of church was different than mine and at the Super Bowl party he reminded me of something I had forgotten.

In America, we forget that the church isn't a building or a weekly event. We forget that the church is a people. At the party Viktor kept calling what we were doing "church". The rest of us kept telling him, "No, this isn't church," when all of a sudden I realized, "Wait! He's right! This is church!" This is a group of people who love each other, are committed to each other and have decided to share life together. This little orphan boy from Bulgaria who had never experienced church before has figured out in only about a month that church is people! It's not a building, it's not an event, it's people.

I think many of us need to see the church through fresh eyes again. The old saying is true, "Familiarity breeds contempt." Many of us have lost sight of the fact that the church is people and if we keep that our priority we do much better in how we treat visitors, in our passion to reach the lost, and in our desire to see people grow in maturity as they follow Christ. I'm sure my little boy didn't understand all that he was saying, but God used his innocent confusion to help remind me of a very important truth. The church is people!

Love and Hate

I read a passage from Bonhoeffer's Discipleship and I was struck by the timeliness of his words. He was commenting on Matthew 5:43-48 from the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus told His disciples to love their enemies.

Instead of trying to summarize his thoughts, I thought it would be best to simply quote the passage at length.

The prayers of neighborly love and of non-revenge will be especially important in the struggle fought by God toward which we are moving and in which to some extent we have already been engaged for years. On one side, hatred is fighting, and on the other, love. Every Christian soul must seriously prepare for this. The time is coming in which everyone who confesses the living God will become, for the sake of that confession, not only an object of hatred and fury. Indeed, already we are nearly that far along now. The time is coming when Christians, for the sake of their confession, will be excluded from 'human society,' as it is called, hounded from place to place, subjected to physical attack, abused, and under some circumstances killed. The time of widespread persecution of Christians is coming, and that is actually the real meaning of all the movements and struggles of our time. Those opponents intent upon destroying the Christian church and Christian faith cannot live together with us, because they see in all our words and all of our actions that their own words and deeds are condemned, even if ours are not directed against them. And they are not wrong in seeing this and feeling that we are indifferent to their condemnation of us. They have to admit that their condemnation is completely powerless and negligible. They sense that we do not relate to them at all, as would be quite all right with them, on the basis of mutual blaming and quarreling. And how are we supposed to fight this fight? The time is approaching when we - no longer as isolated individuals, but together as congregations, as the church - shall lift our hands in prayer. The time is coming when we - as crowds of people, even if they are relatively small crowds among the many thousands-times-thousands of people who have fallen away - will loudly confess and praise the crucified and resurrected Lord, and his coming again. And what prayer, what confession, what song of praise is this? It is a prayer of most intimate love for those who are lost, who stand around us and glare at us with eyes rolling with hatred, some of whom have already even conspired to kill us. It is a prayer for peace for these distraught and shaken, disturbed and destroyed souls, a prayer for the same love and peace that we ourselves enjoy. It is a prayer which will penetrate deeply into their souls and will tug at their hearts with a much stronger grip than they can manage to tug at our hearts, despite their strongest efforts to hate. Yes, the church which is truly waiting for its Lord, which really grasps the signs of the time of final separation, such a church must fling itself into this prayer of love, using all the powers of its soul and the total powers of its holy life.

Bonhoeffer wrote of the situation of the church in Germany under the Nazis. He could have just as well been describing the situation of the church in 21st century America. These words are timely and need to be heard. Persecution is coming, but our response to hate must be love, because love is our greatest weapon.

Grace and Drudgery

I read something this morning from Oswald Chambers that got me thinking.

BTW if you're not a reader (first of all you're probably not reading this) but if you're not a reader you should be. Through reading we can access the wisdom and counsel of a multitude of men and women both living and dead who can assist us in our pursuit of Jesus.

Sorry about the mini-rant, now we can move on. What was I saying? Oh right, I read something this morning from Oswald Chambers that got me thinking. He made the following observation:

Walking on water is easy to someone with impulsive boldness, but walking on dry land as a disciple of Jesus Christ is something altogether different... We do not need the grace of God to withstand crises - human nature and pride are sufficient for us to face the stress and strain magnificently. But it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours of every day as a saint, going through drudgery, and living an ordinary, unnoticed, and ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus.

I read those words and thought, "Wow! He's right." When we experience crises we instinctively turn to God because we recognize that we cannot handle the situation. As the old saying goes, "There are no atheists in foxholes." Crises, dangers, and emergencies heighten our awareness of our need for God. But no one lives in a constant state of crisis or emergency. By their very nature these situations are exceptional.

So what happens to us when we are not in the midst of crisis. Let's take a look at scripture. In Deuteronomy 6, Moses told the people of Israel to be on their guard once they entered and conquered the land of Canaan and were at peace (Deuteronomy 6:10-12). He warned them that once the crisis of the conquest of the land had passed and they settled comfortably into their new life in Canaan that they would be susceptible to forgetting God. Crisis heightens our awareness of our need for God. Routine dulls that same awareness.

Thus Chambers' admonition that it requires the supernatural grace of God to live "an ordinary, unnoticed, and ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus." We all understand that in the times of trial our devotion to Christ will be tested, but we must also see that a routine life of every day drudgery is often just as a big a test our faith as the times of crisis.

Most Christians will not have a life story that would make it into Foxe's Book of Martyrs or even warrant an article in The Voice of the Martyrs, but every Christian will experience the monotony of routine, every day life. Understand that it requires God's supernatural grace both to "walk on water" and to walk the every day paths of ordinary life.

Is It Wrong to Ask to Be Spared from Persecution?

As Americans, we are unfamiliar with most kinds of persecution, especially religious persecution. One of the driving motivations in the founding of our nation was the flight from religious persecution in the Old World. And the fact that Americans took possession of an "uninhabited" continent (conveniently ignoring the American Indians already here) meant that any time a group ran into religious persecution they could always pack up and move into the wilderness where they could practice their beliefs unmolested. This all adds up to a history of a people whose fight-or-flight reaction to religious persecution has always been flight.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw this is as a weakness of American Christianity. Because Americans had never been forced to stay put when religious persecution arose (they had always had the option to flee), they had never developed a theology of persecution. This was not the case in Germany and other parts of the world where Christians could not simply flee from persecution but had to stay, endure, and develop an understanding of how persecution related to being a follower of Christ. This in turn had led to the development of a dangerous belief among American Christians, namely, that Christians weren't supposed to endure persecution.

This belief flies in the face of centuries of Christian experience. In fact, the American Christian experience is the exception in regards to persecution, not the rule. The rule throughout the rest of the history of the church is that those who earnestly seek to follow Christ will invite the hostility and persecution of those opposed to God, and these individuals are usually in positions of worldly power. Furthermore, the American Christian experience runs counter to the teachings of scripture which consistently declare that commitment to the cause of Christ will invite opposition and persecution.

But a new day is dawning in America. Two unavoidable facts of history are going to dramatically change the American Christian experience. The first is, there is nowhere left to run. There are no "empty" places left in America (or anywhere else on the planet for that matter, unless you want to live in the uninhabitable polar regions) for Christians to flee to in order to avoid persecution. The days of fleeing instead and staying and facing persecution are over.

The second fact is, the culture is turning against Christianity. Although America hasn't been nearly as Christian as some would like to argue or believe, there is no denying that few nations in history have been as open and friendly to Christianity as America. That is changing. Christianity is losing its favored position in America and is increasingly being viewed with hostility and opposition by those in power.

The net result of these two historical truths? The American church is going to be forced to develop an understanding of persecution, whether it wants to or not. The American Christian experience will change into the common Christian experience throughout history in regards to persecution. In other words, persecution will become the norm for American Christians just like most other Christians around the globe.

I think most of us in America understand this, but what we don't seem to understand or want to accept is that God's hand is in this. Our reaction is to circle the wagons, petition the government, change the laws, and win elections to bring back the America of Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower. The reality is, that's not going to happen.

Now I'm not saying we should meekly submit to having our freedoms taken away. I believe we have a responsibility to ourselves and more importantly to our children and grandchildren to defend our freedoms, but the American church must see that the ultimate guarantor of our freedom is not the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights. No the ultimate guarantor of our freedom is Jesus Christ. And our ultimate freedom is not religious freedom or freedom of speech.  Our ultimate freedom is freedom from sin, self, and death. We must learn to put our hope not in a 200+ year old, man-made document, but in a 2000+ year old, God-made cross.

This then raises a question, "Should we pray to be spared from persecution or for persecution to stop?" I think it's always a good idea when we have a question to look to scripture. What did the early church do when it came under persecution? How did they pray? The first record that we have of persecution against the church is found in Acts 4. Peter and John had healed a crippled man in the name of Jesus and then had the Jewish leadership command them to no longer speak or teach in Jesus' name under threats of punishment if they did.

When these words were reported back to the church they immediately went into prayer. Here is what they prayed, "Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness" (Acts 4:29). They did not pray to be spared from persecution. They did not pray for the persecution to stop. No, they prayed for God to grant them boldness to continue in the face of persecution. They understood that persecution came with the territory, that it was unavoidable. They knew that they needed strength to endure.

Nik Ripken in his book, The Insanity of God, writes,

We seem to forget that Jesus Himself promised that the world would reject and mistreat His faithful followers just as it rejected Him. Could it be that the only way that Almighty God could actually answer prayers asking Him to end the persecution of believers... would be to stop people from accepting Christ as their Lord and Savior... persecution would end immediately. That would be the only way to completely end persecution.

It sounds like a ridiculous question, but should we really be asking God for the end of persecution? By doing that, we might unknowingly be asking that people not come to faith in Christ!

Ruth and I have seldom encountered a mature believer living in persecution who asked us to pray that their persecution would cease. We have never heard that request. Rather, believers in persecution ask us to pray that "they would be faithful and obedient through their persecution and suffering."

That is a radically different prayer.

American Christians need to stop praying to be shielded from persecution, that's the wrong prayer. We need to start praying that the millions of lost in our country would come to faith in Jesus, even at the cost of our freedom, our wealth, and our very lives. We need to start praying that rather than being spared from persecution, we would have the strength and courage to endure and to remain faithful in the midst of persecution.

We can no longer ignore the truth that persecution is coming. We must accept it and cry out to God to help us endure. We cannot pray for persecution to end AND for people to be saved. They are mutually exclusive. So the question for the American church is, "What's more important to you? The salvation of the lost, or the salvation of your freedom and comfort?" The first is the way of the cross, the second is the way of apostasy. 

Don't Pray! Just Do It!

My wife, Tamara, and I are in the process of adopting a little boy from Eastern Europe. The government of the country he's in requires us to travel there twice as a apart of the adoption process. We've already been there once, last month, and are hoping to return as soon as possible so we can bring him home for good. The story of how our lives intersected with his can only be described as divine intervention, because we weren't really looking to adopt when all of this started.

We have two biological children already, Zach is 12 and Hannah is 8. Zach has Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and his life has been difficult. I could share the details of all that this little trooper has endured but that's not the point I want to make in this post. Just know, Zach has been through a lot with this disease and it's not been easy. We know how difficult it is to deal with muscular dystrophy.

Our family is very active in the DMD community and as a part of this Tamara is on several group pages on Facebook for parents of boys with DMD (Duchenne muscular dystrophy primarily affects boys). On one of these pages last year she noticed a post about a little boy who was an orphan in Eastern Europe who had been diagnosed with MD. The person who posted his info wondered if anyone in the DMD community might be interested in adopting him.

Tamara saw the post and asked me about. We knew what to expect with DMD, we had the resources to take care of this little boy, and we knew how hard dealing with DMD could be. The clincher that broke our hearts was the thought that this little guy was going to have to endure all of this without a mommy and a daddy. Our only excuse for not doing it was that it would make our lives, which were already complicated, a little more complicated. In the end we felt that was a poor excuse.

Long story short, within two weeks of seeing the post we had legal papers filed in court in the country where he lives and the adoption ball was rolling. Tamara asked me, "Do you feel bad that we didn't really pray about this?" In a rare moment of spiritual clarity I realized that sometimes you don't have to pray about things when you know that God has clearly called you to do something. In fact, sometimes we can use prayer as a stall tactic to delay doing something we know God has told us to do.

There are certain things in the Christian life that we never have to pray about. Should I share my faith? Should I be a part of a community of believers? Should I honor God with part of my earnings? Should I be compassionate to those in need? Should I eat chocolate? You get the picture. Some truths God has made so self-evidently clear in scripture that we don't have to pray about whether we should do them or not.

Now I'm not saying we should pray less. We live in church culture in America that is painfully bereft of spiritual vitality due to a drought of prayer. I once heard of a Korean pastor who had traveled across America and visited a number of churches. At the end of his trip someone asked him what he thought about the church in America. He responded by saying, "It is amazing what the American churches have done... without the Holy Spirit." Ouch!

Prayer is important and prayer is desperately needed, but don't use prayer as a cover for disobedience. If you know that you are supposed to do something, don't delay by using the pseudo-spiritual excuse of, "Well, I need to pray about." No you don't, just do it!

The Myth of Discipling Children

Parents are clearly commanded in Scripture to instruct their children in the ways of the Lord. "...these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children" (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). Parents are to be the primary spiritual instructors of their children. However, we've created a church culture that I believe has unintentionally told parents that the church can instruct their children for them. In the past 40 years we've seen an exponential increase in the number of paid youth and children's pastors in our churches. We've also seen a precipitous decline in the number of baptisms of children and youth. Is there a one-to-one corollary between these two phenomenon. I don't think so, but I do believe they are related.

There is a scene in the movie Top Gun that talks about why the US Navy created the Fighter Weapons School (aka Top Gun) in the late 1960's. The reason was that pilots in Vietnam had become overly dependent upon their technology and had lost their air combat skills, also called "dogfighting". Missiles had lured them into a false sense of security and they had forgotten the basics of being a fighter pilot. Top Gun was designed to help them recover those skills. I mention that because I believe "professional" youth and children's ministry has done the same thing to parents as missiles did to pilots in Vietnam. Parents have become overly dependent upon a youth pastor and a children's pastor to provide spiritual instruction to their children and they've lost the ability to do it themselves.

Now I'm not saying get rid of youth ministry or children's ministry. The US Navy didn't get rid of missiles just because their pilots had become overly dependent on them. They simply reinforced the idea that pilots also need to develop their air combat skills alongside the use of missiles. Similarly, we need to help parents take responsibility for the instruction of their children themselves, and to view the ministry of the youth/children's pastor as a supplement to what they are doing already in the home.

I don't believe that parents are ultimately to blame for the situation in which many of them find themselves vis-a-vis youth/children's ministry. I believe the church must take the lion's share of the blame. With the rise of youth/children's ministry we've sent a subtle, unintentional but powerful message to parents, "Don't try this at home! Leave it to the professionals!" Unknowingly we've communicated to parents that if they will get their kids to church, get them in children's ministry events, get them in youth ministry events, that their kids will be discipled. There are a couple of problems with this approach.

1. It's not biblical: God commanded parents to take responsibility for the spiritual instruction of their children, not abdicate that responsibility to someone else. A parent is not passing on their faith to their children if the only source of spiritual instruction that the child gets is from their youth/children's pastor. The faith that is being passed along is the youth/children's pastor's faith not the parent's.
2. It ignores parental influence: Many parents feeling like they have little or no influence in the lives of their children, especially if they're teens. As a result they think someone else can do a better job of instructing their children because they have more influence with them. This is simply untrue. Parents (regardless of whether their kids will admit it) are the single biggest influences on their children. A youth/children's pastor may spend 3-4 hours a week with a child, whereas that child will spend 30-40 waking hours with their parents in a week. A youth/children's pastor may spend 4-6 years with a child, whereas their parents will be their parents for a lifetime. From personal experience of over a decade in student ministry, no matter how close or influential I became in a student's life, I never overtook the influence of their parents regardless of whether that influence was good, bad, or indifferent.
3. It stokes the myth of the "hired gun": A study was done for a PhD project to determine who could better teach spiritual material to students, parents or youth pastors. Now, conventional wisdom would tell us that the youth pastors (i.e the "professionals") would have the advantage over the parents. Presumably they have had some sort of theological training (i.e. Bible college, seminary, etc.) whereas the parents likely have not. The teaching materials were distributed, the lessons taught, and after a few weeks the students were tested to see who learned the material better. Well shock of all shocks it was not the students who had been taught by the "professional" youth pastors who learned the material better, it was those who'd been taught by their parents. There is power in a parent instructing their children in truths that are important to them personally.
4. The statistics tell a different story: Latest stats tells us that 7 out of 10 students who are actively involved in church as juniors in high school (meaning they attend at least twice a month) will not still be active in church after their sophomore year in college. The empirical data simply does not support the argument that the best way to train children is to let the church do what God has called parents to do. The church cannot pray for church members who will not pray, it cannot read the Bible for church members who will not read, nor can it disciple the children of church members who will not disciple (at least not as effectively as it should be done). When parents do not take an active role in the discipleship of their children they are sending a subtle but unmistakable message to their children that spiritual instruction is not important. Remember, actions speak louder than words.

There is a disciple-making crisis throughout the church. Collectively we've lost the ability to make disciples and the understanding that this is Christ's intended raison d'etre for the church. I suspect that part of the reason that we've lost our focus on disciple-making is that we've stopped doing it at the most basic level, with our children. If the church is going to regain its God ordained mission to make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19-20) then I believe it must begin in the home. Parents let's stop relying solely on the professionals and start using them properly (as supplements), and obey God's call to instruct our children ourselves.

A great resource for learning how to disciple your children at home is Voddie Baucham's book "Family Driven Faith". I don't agree with everything in this book, but it has helped our family tremendously. You can find it on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Family-Driven-Faith

Don't Listen to Godly Counsel, Always

You shouldn't always listen to godly counsel. When I say that I'm not saying you should instead listen to ungodly counsel. What I am saying is that even godly counsel, from spiritually mature people in your life, still comes from a human source and must be treated as such. I read something in Acts this morning that really jumped out at me. This is from Acts 21:4, "And having sought out the disciples, we stayed there [Tyre] for seven days. And through the Spirit they were telling Paul not to go on to Jerusalem."

I found this verse odd because here we have people who are giving godly, spiritual counsel that Paul is going to face trouble in Jerusalem. They are faithfully sharing the words that the Spirit has shown them to Paul, however, their interpretation of the meaning of those words is wrong. Paul knows that he must go to Jerusalem, regardless of the trouble that is awaiting him there. The Spirit had given these brothers insight into the trouble that Paul would encounter, but not into what He had commanded Paul to do.

Scripture doesn't say so, but it may be that these brothers had exceeded the instruction that the Spirit had given them. Yes, they had been shown that Paul would encounter trials and they were to share this with Paul, but they had not been told to keep him from going. Their genuine concern for Paul was at odds with the plans and purposes of the Spirit. We must remember that even godly counsel does not always have a complete picture of what God is up to because it comes from a limited source, that is another human.

Their counsel was helpful in that it prepared and steeled Paul for what was ahead. However, it was unhelpful because it sought to derail the purpose that the Spirit had for Paul going to Jerusalem. Whenever we encounter godly counsel that is at odds with a word or an instruction that we've received from God we must remember that ultimately we must obey God and not man. Paul could have used this counsel to avoid going to Jerusalem and no one would have faulted him for it. He could have justifiably claimed that he was listening to godly counsel. However, in his own conscience he would have known that he had simply used that counsel as an excuse to disobey God. We must guard ourselves from the deception of using godly, though incomplete, counsel to set aside a clear word from God in our lives. In such cases we must ignore godly counsel and listen to God Himself.