Jesus and the Holy spirit responded by cleaning up the mess, Jesus cleaned God’s feet and clothes.  God just said that the particular item would not be served, no problem.  God never blasted Jesus for his mistake.  There was no fear of failure put into Jesus.  The relationship was more important than the mess.  The law did not dictate a response but Grace did, as in Galatians 3:1-14.

How should we be changed by this story in the Shack and by the scripture in Galations in response to failure, our own or someone elses?  Let’s not “cry over spilt milk”.

Young parents today, and some not so young, need to wake up and recognize the absence of maturity in their leadership as parents. We have given to parents the role of total authority without any experience. It would be like asking a first time driver to drive the Indy 500. Our culture and the world’s brokenness are impacting the way we raise up kids…and the impact is getting devastating. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that a parent must have the final say for their kids, but they must also utilize more knowledgeable people and at some point let that child make their own choices as an adult.

What is the underlying problem? First, we no longer have generational homes where parents instruct their kids on how to raise kids. Second, our culture is changing so fast that often the way we raised kids a generation ago is different from their needs today. Third, the individualism and brokenness we have as people is being thrown upon our kids and their future. It seems we have an entire generation of parents who either abandon or overprotect. Fourth, the internet with all of its information and mis-information is being consumed and utilized by undiscerning and totally inexperienced parents.

Why does it matter? If raising children is one of the most important roles in our society, why would we leave it to amateurs alone? Yes, I know the internet has all knowledge…but that is a far cry from all wisdom! We need more wisdom and experience in raising kids…and today’s parents shun it. I don’t think God ever intended for young parents to raise children on their own – that is our societal independence coming into play.

I implore all parents today, acknowledge your own amateur status and look for help from more experienced and knowledgeable parents, doctors, counselors, and mentors. Trouble knowing who to look to for help? Look to their kids! Consider the parents and specialists who have adult children who you admire and want your kids to be like. Spend some time with them…learn from them…consider their insight. They might know more of what is better for your kids then you do!

Pride only breeds quarrels, but wisdom is found in those who take advice. Proverbs 13:10

Open Mic

 Similar to an open mic night, I thought I’d make this an open keyboard blog.  What are your questions?  What are the things you’re pondering, thinking about, struggling with?  This blog isn’t for the elders of Evergreen to just spout off ideas, it’s here to serve as a jumping off point for discussion for you, dear readers. 

Have you had thoughts or questions arise as we’ve been working through the Pathways series?  Is there something about Evergreen or following Christ or the Bible that you’ve always wondered about or that is currently causing you angst?  If you’re willing, share it.  I can pretty much guarantee that we won’t have “the” answer…but one of us has surely grappled with the same (or similar) thing.

Secondly, after admitting your are broken and in need of restoration, the hope is that there is someone you can go to to help you through it.  Keeping in mind it might be a professional person.

I think in one way or time many of us have, need, will need to admit we are broken in some relationship.  I think it is the beginnig of the road to healing and moving into interdependence and restoration.  What about you?

We need relationships in order to grow spiritually closer with God.  Unfortuantely, it is relationships that can hurt us the most.  What has helped you get back up and risk again after such a broken relationship?  Your comments here can really be a help to others.

At the end of the service on Sunday, someone came up and asked me an excellent question: “How can we tell who really needs the help and what is the best way to help them?”  It is a good question and few people ask it today in order to make the most benefit of their giving.  When you give of your time, treasures, and energy to others in need, it should make a difference, not assist them in their brokenness.

But like an addict’s parents, far too many of us just want to bail someone out of trouble.  We want to feel good without much thought of the consequences.  Therefore, we help “fix” a person’s situation and often leave them no better off in reality than when we showed up.

So how do we know if someone really needs help?  Here are a couple of suggestions: (1) Look at the big picture.  Don’t just consider the immediate circumstances.  Ask about the surrounding issues.  If it is money that is needed, ask about their overall financial plan and how it is being addressed.  If it is help with a relationship, then ask about the background and what else is involved.  Get the full picture and think through the implications of helping.

(2) Do things that bring about freedom AND responsibility from the underlying cause or situation.   Anything that offers freedom without responsibility only furthers irresponsible behavior.  Offering responsibility without freedom is just cruel.  Both are important in helping people in almost any situation of extended need.

(3) Offer grace somewhere in the mix.  Cheap grace is no good, but grace when mixed into the formula of freedom and responsibility offers dignity to the person or persons being helped.  And since personal dignity should always be a major consideration, we must find ways to give grace quietly.

How do we know the best way to help?  Ask the same questions!  Will this assistance bring freedom, responsibility, and personal dignity to the individual?  Is this just for me to feel better or is it really to change their situation?  Am I getting all the info necessary to make an informed decision?

After many years in both inner city ministry and overseas work, I have found these basic things to be important in helping others.  What other things do you think are important?

That said, the Spiritual Pathway is our attempt to describe how we can draw closer to God at an unseen level.  The Spiritual pathway acknowledges a fundamental Christian truth: that there is an unseen realm and that we, as followers of Jesus, have a part in it.

For many of us this is the hardest pathway, but because of its relationship to God and its reflections in the scriptures, it may be the most important.  The Spiritual pathway will result in spiritual buoyancy if we let it.  We share the broken world with others, and we are not to remove ourselves from this broken world or shield ourselves from the problems of others.  The spiritual pathway asks us to stay plugged into God and the result is that God’s peace, God’s hope, and God’s joy becomes the context of our existence.  If we choose to forgo the disciplines of this pathway, then we will fall into the same darkness that we are meant to illuminate.  While our salvation may be assured, our outlook will be bleak, and our witness will be non-existent at best.

” …each man is haunted by a fear of sinking to a lower social level and by a restless urge to better his condition. And since money has not only become to sole criterion of man’s social status…everybody is intent on making it, or if already rich, on keeping his wealth intact. Love of gain, a fondness for business careers, the desire to get rich at all costs, a craving for material comfort and easy living quickly become the ruling passions under a despotic government…Despotism alone can provide that atmosphere of secrecy which favours crooked dealings and enables the freebooters of finance to make illicit fortunes. Under other forms of government such propensities exist, undoubtedly; under despotism they are given free reign”.

The definition of despotism fits in well with the condition that the human heart was left in after what happened in the Garden of Eden.  However, everyday we stand at the brink of the solution: when you replace ‘love of gain’ with ‘love of God’ the Holy Spirit will begin to transform your life from a series meaningless acts of acquisition to meaningful acts of becoming more of who you were made to be. 

Perhaps we should credit the American mode of individualism, patriotism, and conspicuous consumption as an ugly but effective diagnostic and mirror into the human condition and the God-size hole that exists in every human heart.

I think that the problem that many of us feel with the political choices that we are given is that they do not represent the truer and richer reality that we have adopted (one that exists outside of nationalism and that has put aside independence as a myth).  Our politics ask us to put out a fire and then gives us a choice between gasoline or jet fuel to do the job.  Constantly having to choose between the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil, so where does that lead?

Matt Brown and I were chatting Monday night.  Here’s a blurb. 

 Matthew:  A Catholic can commit a murder and go to confession and receive absolution, but the priest will give penance. What is penance, but the ‘turning away’. So a good priest would say: ‘ your penance is to take the earthly consequences of your sin’
  Matthew:  The Wolf (murderer, abuser) probably was a victim at some point and has a story and needs grace, but even though there is love there are consequences. 
  me:  ?  Yeah?
 Matthew:  Yeah what? People mistake grace for letting someone off the hook.
People mistake love for leniency
  Matthew:  Jesus and the tax collector who pays people back more than he stole shows that God is interested in justice. Heck, the crucifiction shows that.
BUT God is also interested in love, grace, compassion, and truth
So that quote struck me
Struck me in light of a lot of the conversations we had yesterday

The conversation Matt mentions above was about castrating sex offenders.  Apparently, there is a move (I’ve forgotten where) to make castration an option after the first offense and mandatory after the second.  Certainly, we want to make sure that sex offenders never get the chance to repeat their crimes.  But, is castration the answer?  The Hemphills and the Browns had a lively after-dinner discussion.

The way this quote strikes me is that, to me, it confirms the need to be in community.  We all see life through a lens.  Last year, Ed used the metaphor of the slats of a fence.  I thought that was brilliant.  People who are genuinely seeking Truth will arrive at some type of truth.  But, like looking at a yard through the slats of a fence, each person will see Truth a little differently.  Their understanding of Truth will be colored by their experiences, their histories, their belief systems.  Their truth may be correct, but, by definition, it will be too small to be Truth.

God is love.   Yes, He says that about Himself in His Word.  (That means it’s in the Bible.)

It is not God’s will that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.  (That’s in the Bible, too.)

So, God doesn’t want anyone to perish.  That’s certainly one slat.  But, what do you do, then, with verses like, “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”  (That’s in the Bible, too.  Revelation 21:8)

To help get your head around some truths that are too big for one person, you need other people.  You need other perspectives, other points of view.  Sometimes you need your friends to challenge you when you are “disqualifying testimony”.

Evergreen is really, really good at loving people.  But, do we do an adequate job of challenging each other?  Have you been challenged?  Is your truth larger now than it was a year or two ago?  Has your picture of God changed?  How?  Does the quote strike you differently?  How?

Exploding the Box

In the gospel of John the Word was God and the Word became flesh, the Word is Jesus.  As followers of Jesus we should learn about Jesus to following him better.  The scriptures are God’s word left to us for learning, teaching, etc (2 Tim 3:15-16).  What better way to learn about Jesus and follow him by reading the Word in the Bible/Scriptures.

But I get a sense that this is what many followers struggle with in their journey with God,  (Prayer is another on but I will not deal with that here), a consistent reading of the scriptures.  Why is it so hard to pick up the Bible and read a chapter or two or seven?  I think that Jesus considers reading of the scriptures important.  In Matthew 22 some religious leaders ask Jesus a question about a man dies and he has seven brothers.  The first response from Jesus is not to answer their question but he says, “Your mistake is that you don’t know the Scriptures…”(v 29). 

Why is reading of the scriptures, which I believe that we all know is important, hard to do consistently?  What hinders you?  Does Steven King (or any other author of your choosing) look more interesting or distracting?

I just had lunch with a friend of mine where we talked about the new story of Christianity.  It was odd because both of us grew up with the slogan that the message of the Bible can never change but the modes of telling it can and should change to fit each culture.  This sounded so right, so good, so easy to defend.  And yet, none of us believes that women should not be allowed to speak at all in church (at least no one reading this).  And yet the Bible is clear if read directly about this.

So, it must mean the main core of the message of Jesus cannot change.  Yeah, that is it.  But what if over time that core message has slowly shifted from the power to restore and redeem the earth to something totally other.  What if only one smudge is allowed to remain on a window each year…what would it be like to look through that window after 2000 years?  I imagine it would not be very clear.

I have been reading through the Bible again with a new look, trying to clear away some of the smudges I think have built up over the years.  And it is amazing what I am seeing.  More than anything else, I have been asking, “What separates the message of Jesus from any other message?”  At this writing, I have come up with two words: Grace and Sacrifice.

Grace seems to be absent from all other religious/spiritual doctrine of all kinds.  Grace is that choice of God to give good things we do not deserve or not give bad things that we do.  Another way to say it is that the message of Jesus was not laden with oughts and shoulds - it was filled with hopes and possibilities and ways to bring life, but rarely is it full of guilt and “you get what you pay for” thinking.  Grace reminds us that God’s love is unconditional - as Philip Yancey says, “There is nothing we can do to make God love us more and nothing we can do to make God love us less.”  Grace is a radical concept in our world.

Sacrifice, the very essence of Christ’s death on the cross, is a way of living where others are more important than ourselves.  Although doing good things is very prevalent in other religions, sacrifice or the giving up of one’s own comfort for the good of another or the world, is found rarely.  Sacrifice is not just living simply or giving away our money, it is orienting our lives for the restoration of a world gone bad.  It is choosing to do what brings life for others ahead of ourselves.

A New story of Jesus? Not really.  But what do you think?  Have we lost our way as we seek to tell and live out the message of Jesus in this world?