Resurrection From Dead Spirituality
November 20th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Sermon audio (11-16-08): How To Pray For Our Region
Much of the deadness of evangelicalism today traces to an uncomfortable fact: it is often a religion of mere words.
Families go to church, singing, speaking, and listening to waterfalls of words, but after the families return home, their lives do not change. Christians read page after page of words. They listen to still more words on the radio. They surf blogs to find more words yet. But the words have at best a momentary impact.
Sometimes the words themselves are solid. Faith is an ancient term describing a real action of reposing confidence in God, and when the term is paired with a definite article, the faith, it describes a real system of thought. But if a Christian uses such terms without reverence for the realities they describe, he will become more insensitive to truth. Solid words can’t be thrown around without danger.
More often, the words are not solid, but squishy. Christian preaching, writing, and conversation reek of clichés, piles of vain phrases that stink up the mind’s moldy corners. Let go is an imperative that can be obeyed with reference to dollars, ropes, and Eggo waffles. Let go and let God cannot be obeyed because it cannot be understood. Let go of what, exactly?
There are two words today that seem to have become poisonous: ought and should. They both express obligations. “I ought to read my Bible.” ”You should witness to your friends.” But they also give a tacit qualification: should, ought to, but won’t. These two words now express primarily guilt and yearning.
The spirituality of ought and should is what many Christians live out, a religion of mere words that presses condemnation deeper into the conscience without any hope of redemption. The biblical term for this state is unbelief.
How can a person be raised from such a death?
The only answer is prayer. Concerning which, some semi-random thoughts:
1. The realization that faith and unbelief describe the two roads of ultimate human destiny can be a powerful motivation to seek God. It’s a realization that can move you from yearning to doing. It suggests danger and possibility at the same time — the danger of unbelief, and the possibilities latent in prayer.
2. Here is a discipline that can revolutionize your prayers. Treat each word you say to people as if it were a promise. Treating your words as promises means screening out flippancy, evasion, inaccuracy, and lies, and placing sincerity, justice, and simple accuracy into your speech. This is a recognition that others depend on your words.
What is the connection between this discipline and prayer?
I think you’ll find a strange dynamic begin once you weigh your every word. You start seeking God’s wisdom, consulting him in real time. You start organizing your biblical knowledge for application, for quick mental retrieval, and you start asking God for his priorities in each situation. In short, you start to pray.
What I have just written may seem strange. But it works.
3. A high view of God can draw your prayers upward. If you view Jesus Christ as royal, unstoppable, and intimately engaged with everything that happens in this world, then your mind will be drawn toward him irresistably. This is the view of God behind statements like Colossians 3.1: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.”
The religion of mere words has a view of God that is low. God is not royal, but remote. Far from being unstoppable, God seems hindered by our inability to do his will. Far from feeling his engagement in the world, we seem unable to hold his interest.
To be raised up from dead spirituality, we have to exchange our mute idol — an abstract, cool deity — for the living God. The God of the Bible listens to us and knows us. That is why Jesus taught (Matthew 6.7-8), “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this . . .”
Prop 8 and Evangelical Goals
November 13th, 2008 § 4 Comments
Sermon audio (11-9-08): The Blind Man Finally Sees
The ongoing furor over Proposition 8 — the successful California initiative banning same-sex marriage — heats up the question of how churches should relate to society in general and governments in particular. The intensified hostility against evangelicals, pointedly expressed on picket lines and in court rooms, is focusing believers’ minds up and down the state.
In our church, we have just finished studying the man born blind in John 9, the beggar who stood alone against the rulers. What are the potential applications of his example in today’s California? Will Christians face persecution because of their stand on marriage? More broadly, how does the New Testament portray the relationship between 1st century Christians and the societies in which they lived?
Some not entirely random observations, starting with the broadest issue:
1. The culture portrayed in the New Testament was diverse, and idolatry and sexual immorality were mainstream, institutionalized fixtures.
Roman society had many gods, with cultic practices that varied from city to city. The idolatry permeated civic and social interactions, and no Christian could escape direct contact with it (1 Corinthians 8-10). Places such as Corinth and Ephesus were notorious, but not unusual, for their public sexuality. In 1 Corinthians, Paul dealt with the impact of this immorality on the church, issues like which sexual relationships were legal and illegal, and the common use of temple prostitutes (1 Corinthians 5:1-2; 6:12-20).
The New Testament commands Christians to look after their own purity in sex and worship. It nowhere commands them to legislate Jesus Christ as the official God of their cities, or to pass laws that reflect biblical standards. Cultural and economic upheaval is anticipated as more people follow Christ, but only as a secondary consequence of Christ’s power, not as a result of direct agitation by Christians (Acts 19:21-41).
2. Christianity in the New Testament was an urban phenomenon. The apostles went from city to city, and the gospel thrived in the hustle of commerce and the competition among new ideas. Indeed, the fact that ethnic and religious identities were softened by so much cultural interaction was a major opening for the news that a Jew had died for the whole world.
3. We are living in the decaying civilization called Christendom, an accumulation of habits, institutions, and modes of thought rooted in Athens and Jerusalem. This era of decay is a monumental time in Western civilization, at the end of which a new collection of cultures will emerge with ethics, religions, and polities that are not entirely foreseeable now. In the sweep of human history, this process is normal. The Bible records many such shifts.
California is not at the leading edge of this transition. Europe is.
4. The end of Christendom is not something to celebrate.
The decay of old habits and institutions is destabilizing and even corrupting. The cynicism and decadence that we find everywhere now are signs of selfish and purposeless living, not signs of intellectual vitality. When a simple virtue like gratitude for our cultural inheritance is held up to scorn, we can be assured that other personal disciplines like courage, integrity, and fidelity have long since passed.
Declining to throw a party over the end of Christendom is not a sign of cultural arrogance. It is simple realism. All cultural decay, at all times, and in all places leads to moral confusion.
5. The fight to preserve Christendom is misguided.
Same-sex marriage is not the tipping point in the demise of Christendom. That point was passed long, long ago. (World War I might be a good candidate.) As much as we may mourn at the grave of our heritage, it is not a sign of health to try and dig up the corpse.
Again, Christians who mourn the loss of what was good in our inheritance are not wrong. But, as they mourn, they need to do the day’s work. The end of governments founded on broadly Christian notions is an opportunity to change what Christendom built in error — specifically, we can now detach the spiritual from the political.
6. Christianity can thrive in California.
Our context is more like the first century than the nineteenth, more like the societies in which Christian faith exploded than those in which it was dying. The predictions of the death of the faith in California are foolish. There is nothing happening now that hasn’t constituted an opportunity for believers in the past. The faith may indeed die out here, but if it does, it will not be the result of unstoppable external forces. It will die because Christians stop believing.
7. Christians can now thrive if they will think of themselves more like the beggar in John 9 than the rulers.
Evangelicals project a sense of ownership in American society, ownership that is at best debatable and probably specious. Their populist calls to arms are all based on the planted axiom that the rightful authorities have been usurped. This is the wrong posture. We face a confident and established culture of secular priorities. The unbelievers rule. Let’s be the beggars.
The beggar’s individual integrity is more powerful than collective activism. His first-hand testimony about Jesus Christ is more potent than arguments about the shape of social institutions. And the beggar’s suffering is for one cause and one only: the name of Jesus Christ.
I’ll put it differently. When each Christian in California has the simplicity and tenacity for Christ that the man born blind had, we won’t worry any longer about the death of our traditions. We will be at the beginning of a Christian counterculture.
