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(picture snitched from the excellent blog of The Naked Pastor)
I remember sitting in this group of people when one guy spoke up,
“Sometimes I can be such a bastard.”
Actually, he was really a nice guy: he was just being honest, being real, about the state of his inner soul. He had decided that he was tired of pretending.
I remember that my first reaction to his self-disclosure was, “Wow, I’ve never been in any church or small group that you could SAY THAT in.” What I really meant was, “I’ve never been in a church or small group where we all weren’t pretending.”
Why is that? Why is pretending an art form, a life goal for everyone human? It seems we’ve been in the pretending business ever since Adam & Eve tried to pretend they weren’t in the garden and ever since Cain tried to pretend he didn’t know where Abel was.
Why do we have this problem of pretending? Let’s look at some of the reasons:
1. Shame— just like Adam & Eve & Cain, we try to hide our guilt. The problem is, if we try to hide it, we just isolate ourselves, from God and from others. That’s no good. Jesus died so that we could be free from shame & guilt, and from all the chains and prisons that go along with it, including pretending.
2. Acceptance— we want to be accepted, we want to fit in, so we mold ourselves to what we think will be acceptable to others. That can work, all right, but we lose our soul in the process. That’s no good either. Sometimes we try to fit a mold to be accepted by God. That can’t work, because He sees right through. It doesn’t matter to Him, anyway— that’s where Jesus comes in, to bring us back to God, warts and all.
3. Safety— we all want to feel safe. Sometimes fitting in feels safe, & sticking out from the crowd feels very unsafe. On the other hand, sometimes fitting in feels unsafe, so someone will deliberately stick out from the crowd to put distance between them and any possible hurt.
4. Pride— sometimes it’s not that we want to fit in, au contraire, we want to be superhuman, we want everyone to admire us & ooh & aah over us as having it all together. Or else we don’t want to be pitied, we can’t bear the thought of being seen as the screwed up & needy pile of crap that we are. Either way, pride drives us to pretend.
Any of those sound familiar? I’ve used all four, in different ways and at different times. Pretending will work, for a while, but it’s a dead end— all kinds of nasty side effects on the soul— fear, isolation, stagnation, burnout, lost dreams. The problem is, being real isn’t a bed of roses either in this life— anyone remember what the velveteen rabbit looked like at the end of the story?
This isn’t one of those posts with a neat little ending, because there isn’t a neat little solution to the problem of pretending. We all have fallen souls that fear being real, and we’re around a bunch of other fallen souls that often do hurtful things to people who do dare to be real. I just want to say, “Can we try a little less pretending, please? Let’s have the courage to try, to try & be real, & have the grace and compassion to accept each other and embrace each other for who we really are.”
I admit it. I read. A lot. About all kinds of stuff.
I scan dozens of blogs, I’m in the middle of four books, and I’m daily tracking what’s hot on several web aggregators like digg and reddit. I am the 21st century version of a hunter/gatherer— except that instead of spending my day going from tree to tree picking fruit to feed my stomach, I’m going from web page to web page to feed my mind.
There’s a good side to all this information gathering. I rightfully remind myself that gathering in all this information, sifting through it, and reconstructing it is helpful, both to me and to others in my sphere of influence. Knowledge is a good thing.
But there can be a down side to constantly hunting for more information, more knowledge, more insight. Slowly, subtly, the life of a knowledge chaser can become a trap. Are you a knowledge chaser like me? Then be sure that you’re aware of these knowledge chaser traps:
The first trap to consider is that chasing knowledge focuses my time and energy on accumulating more and more information instead of dealing with the information I already have. Two fundamental facts of reality come into play here. The first is that I only have 24 hours in a day. Every hour I spend chasing knowledge robs me of an hour I could have used elsewhere. The second fact is that knowledge acquired does me no good unless I act on it, and acting on it takes time and effort.
Which brings me to the second trap: knowledge chasing inclines me to define success in terms of quantity of things learned rather than quality of a soul changed. We all realize that mere accumulation of knowledge can’t be an end unto itself, but it’s easy to lose sight of that truth. Always has been. I’m reminded of what the Apostle James wrote two thousand years ago: “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.”
Speaking of self-deception, here’s the next trap to consider: knowledge chasing can be the excuse I use to avoid the hard choices. It’s easier to read a book on how to be a good husband than to have that hard conversation with your wife. It’s easier to check the latest blog on personal finance than to cut up my credit card. And it’s certainly a lot easier to bookmark that article on nine ways to develop killer abs than to actually get up early and sweat. But I can avoid all those hard choices if I convince myself that I’m learning something new and valuable. Ouch.
Lastly, I think constantly chasing knowledge can encourage a “lottery” mentality of personal growth. The trap plays out like this: if I just read this new book on self-discipline or listen to this author’s lecture on joyful living maybe I’ll get lucky and find that simple key that will solve all my troubles. If I keep learning surely I’ll one day stumble onto that one special truth that will revolutionize my life. It’s a variation on the lottery mentality— instead of spending all our money on lottery tickets hoping for that one big payoff, we spend all our time on learning hoping for that one big payoff. Of course, real growth, financial or personal, doesn’t come from a lottery, but from investing what we already have (or know) coupled with disciplined daily work.
Do you want a successful life? Don’t fall into the trap of simply chasing knowledge, but instead strive for a consistent lifestyle of applying what you learn. Don’t know how to start? Then pick something you’ve learned that demands change in your life, and focus on it and it alone this week. Think about how that knowledge needs to play out in your life, draw up some action points, talk to someone about it, and follow through. Don’t move to the next project or the next book until you can honestly say to yourself that you have mastered the life change that you set yourself to. Remember, the person who gazes with satisfaction from the mountain-top is not the one who read everything there was to know about mountains, but the one who set himself on the path & climbed, slowly, deliberately, one step at a time until he finally reached the summit.
No, that’s not a typo in the title. Yes, I know that needs explaining.
This is actually the first article in a whole series that I am writing as I slowly work my way through A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, a book by Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century philospher, writer, theologian, pastor, and president of Princeton University. A whole group of Christian bloggers are going through this book together, led by Mr. Uber-Blogger himself Tim Challies. I plan not to summarize everything that Edwards is saying in this very challenging and complex book, but each week to take out one important idea that is worth reflecting on and applying to our own lives.
Edwards wrote Religious Affections in the 18th century during what became known as The First Great Awakening. What was The Great Awakening? It was a complex phenomenon, but basically the experience of what it meant to live a Christian life changed radically for many people during that time. People became more emotional, more passionate, and more excited about following God. As a result, many practices both within the church and in individual lives dramatically shifted, and there was much talk as to whether they shifted for good or ill. Edwards wrote Religious Affections to meticulously examine the role of emotion and passion in religion from both a theological, philosophical, and practical perspective. His insight and perspectives on this subject have influenced theologians down to the present day.
What Edwards wrote was no “ivory tower” academic posturing. He was regarded as one of the leaders of the Great Awakening, and took heavy criticsm from both “old school” and “new school” pastors. Many said his appeals to emotion and life change were dangerous and inappropriate. But he also was very concerned about objective truth and maintaining Bible-based doctrine, and garnered himself enemies when he spoke out against pastors and practices that he saw had went too far in their reforms and new ways of doing things.
The book attempts to answer the question “What is the nature of true religion, and what practices actually please God?” He looks at the subject from both a negative perspective (things that may appear to please God but don’t) and from a positive perspective (things that we can assure ourselves truly do please God).
In the book’s preface he explains why he wrote the book. He correctly sees that when people become involved and excited about something new and became emotionally invested in it, the “rose-colored glasses” effect comes into play. People become less concerned about whether what they believe in and practice is Biblical, because it is exciting and seems to work. As a result, wrong and false beliefs and practices creep in unawares, which lead people off track and end up making a mess of everything.
This is a much more serious problem than most people, then or now, give it credit. Edward states:
It is by the mixture of counterfeit religion with true, not discerned and distinguished, that the devil has had his greatest advantage against the cause and kingdom of Christ.
That (like everything else in the 300+ pages in this book) is a mouthful. It’s much easier to say, “Satan loves excited Christians.” Not that excitement is bad, but that it can cloud our vision. Edwards goes on to give a list of all the results of this clouded vision and mixing in of off-track ideas and practices in with the true. Here is my 21st-century re-do of his list:
- Satan loves when people are excited about doing things that they think please God, when in actuality they are displeasing God.
- Satan loves when people think that their souls are in good shape with God, when in fact they are far away from His blessing.
- Satan loves when people forget about what God truly values as pure religion (which the apostle James defined as helping the poor and being holy) because they’re so excited in their religious worship experiences and other “exciting” stuff.
- Satan loves when people get excited and do openly foolish things (like claiming they can heal any disease or raise people from the dead) that give non-Christians plenty of ammo to attack and ridicule what they now see as Christianity.
- Satan loves it when people excitedly think they’re helping God when they’re actually openly working against God, like giving financial support to someone who teaches doctrine that is actually against the Bible.
- Satan loves it as people excitedly promote false ideas and religion and think they’re advancing the Kingdom of God, when they’re actually tearing it down.
- Finally, Satan loves how false doctrine splits churches and denominations and friends, and causes people to spend time arguing with each other. As a result, Satan can influence people to go to one extreme or another, and grow farther apart and farther out of the path of true religion.
That’s a pretty stark list. Read it over again. Think it over. The question we all have to ask ourselves is, “Where have I been guilty of that in the past? Where am I guilty of that now?”
Edwards summarizes his “terrible consequences” of the mixture of truth and untruth in religion by saying:
God’s people in general have their minds unsettled in religion, and know not where to set their foot, or what to think, and many are brought into doubts, whether there be any thing at all in religion; and heresy, infidelity, and atheism greatly prevail.
If we’re serious about loving and pleasing God and advancing the Kingdom, then we need to be serious about getting excited in a good way about it, and guarding our souls from the twin evils of apathy and lack of discernment. As the weeks go by I’ll explore these topics in greater depth.
I had just finished reading a really great book, Crazy Love (here is my review of it). It was one of those books that really blew me away, made me think, made me cry. I was thinking, “What was it about this book that was so great? What made it worth reading?”
Four words came to my mind, four words that summed up what I most appreciated about that book. And as I thought about it, I realized those four words were the standards that I wanted to use to judge any book. I decided that every great book is:
Beautiful: I want any book worth my time to be beautiful. If it isn’t revealing the beauty of God, His creation, His kingdom, why read it? I want to finish a book and be freshly blown away by how glorious God is. A book can be erudite, incisive, famous, or funny, but if it isn’t beautiful nothing else really matters.
True: There are plenty of feel-good books out there. The road that leads to destruction is wide and well-traveled. I generally don’t need books that I have to pick apart to find the truth amidst a sea of distortions and mistakes. I want books that are saturated with the pure milk of the Word, books that will point me along a path that’s true.
Hard: Not “hard” as in “hard” to understand, but hard as in hard to follow. I want a book to tell me to believe something and do something that my old self says “No way!” to. I want to be convicted and challenged. I want a book to make me squirm and force me in a corner. As the Harris brothers recently titled their book, I want a book to tell me to do hard things.
Transforming: In Crazy Love Francis Chan says that we have been conditioned to hear messages without responding, to feel that our job is done if we simply feel convicted. I want the message of a book to be explicitedly designed to change me. Although ultimately it is the Spirit of God who transforms a person, a book that doesn’t aim to catalyze and guide transformation isn’t worth my time.
Beautiful. True. Hard. Transforming. When I thought about it, those words describe the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels. Maybe they should describe the words of all His followers. All of us, whether we are writing a book or just conversing with a friend, should strive for our words to be seasoned with God’s grace contained in these four words. You may never write a book, but you can still speak words that are beautiful and true, hard but transforming into the lives of those you know.
Was that “the right thing to say”?
Everybody has said that or thought that during a conversation. However, different people mean totally different things when they ask that question. The empath is thinking of the heart, and when he thinks of “the right thing” he is thinking of whether the heart of the listener was healed or hurt by the words spoken. The logician wonders if his words were correctly understood, whether his “right thing” was accurate. The authoritarian wonders if his words were ethical and just. And we could go on and on.
Oftentimes we are at a quandary because what may seem “right” for the heart may not seem “right” for the head or vice versa. We are unsure of ourselves, and unsure of others. That’s just part of being human.
It struck me that Jesus never seemed to have this problem. He always seemed to know exactly “the right thing to say.” To a woman with a broken heart he was gentle; with his often confused disciples he was patient; with self-righteous hypocrites he was venomous; with the men who were crucifying him he was forgiving. One time officers sent to arrest him returned empty-handed; they were so blown-away by this young rabbi that they simply told their superiors, “No one ever spoke like this man!” (John 7:46)
Why were Jesus’ words always right? We know that Jesus knew men’s thoughts (Luke 6:8), and in John 14:10 he explained, “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.”
As we strive to abide in Christ we can pray for the Spirit to “guide us into all truth” (John 16:13) so that we can serve as fitting ambassadors for Christ and always have “the right thing to say.”
Frederich Buechner, a wise and gifted man who has walked with God for nearly 80 years, was recently interviewed and asked what was the most important truth he had learned. He replied:
Pay attention to your life. It is so easy to live your life on the surface and not pay attention to what’s happened. Your life is speaking to you. Paying attention is to keep your eyes open, look at peoples’ faces, listen to their voices, smell the smells in the air.
hat tip to Best of the GodBlogs!
Whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock…Matthew 7:24 NKJV
Larry Crabb once noted that many people “follow Christ” for a single reason: it works. Though they don’t consciously realize it and would certainly deny it if asked, they do the whole Christian gig, saying the Bible is true, leading a moral life, participating in the life of the church, tithing, witnessing, etc., purely because their life “works”—they have a reasonably good marriage, comfortable job, assuaged conscience, overall things are smooth, and they have Jesus to thank for it, right?
But what happens when life is hard—a child dies, a job is lost, their marriage is unfulfilled, a church or pastor betrays them? You know what happens, you’ve seen it yourself—they fall away, “backslide”, or just plain rebel. The man who led the choir runs off with another woman, the couple who taught your son’s Sunday school class won’t even speak to anyone now, the girl who attended every youth group meeting goes “wild” when she gets to college. You realize that the person you thought you knew was a “baptized pagan”—to use Adrian Warnock’s term in a recent post. You realize that they haven’t figured out that their life is not “up to them” , as centuriOn talked about in this recent post.
How can we prevent this? Jesus tells us part of the solution: He bluntly says the storms are going to come, that at some point our religion will seem to stop “working” for us. Not “if” the storm comes, but “when” it comes, what will be our worldview, what will be our foundation?
Might I suggest Christ? Might I suggest the gospel & doctrine that He and the apostles taught? If before the storm comes, we have our feet set in the concrete of the gospel, and know within ourselves, NO MATTER WHAT COMES here is where I stand, my feet are set in concrete, no matter what doesn’t seem to make sense, no matter how howling the wind or blinding the rain, I absolutely know that Christ is true, that Christ is life, and there is no life or truth at all in anything or anyone but Him. Putting our feet in this concrete, building our house on this rock, is the only thing that will leave us standing at the end of the storm.
Jesus answered and said to them, “You are wrong, because you neither know the Scriptures nor the power of God.” Matthew 22:29 ESV
This is one of those famous verses that I had read dozens of times and thought, “Yea, they didn’t know the Bible or the power of God.”
Wait.
Think.
Jesus was talking to Saducees. All of them had been raised Jewish, had studied the Scriptures since childhood, held high positions within the Jewish religion of the time. Some of them probably had entire books of the Scriptures memorized. In the sense of the word that we usually use “know” in, they KNEW the Scriptures, much better than I do.
So, what was Jesus meaning when He said these scholars didn’t know the focus of their life’s study?
What does it mean to know the scriptures?
The old maxim goes “the best commentary on the Bible is the Bible.” Simply put, if we are unsure what a passage in the Bible means, our first response should not be “I think…” or “I believe…” or “what makes sense to me is…” or “What speaks to me is…” or even “This very wise man wrote…” What our first response needs to be is “What does the Bible say about this?”
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:14, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” This passage explains what theologians call illumination—the reality that although we may have great intellectual knowledge of the Bible, to overcome the innate distortions and darkness of our fallen souls, to truly know and understand the truth of Scripture requires the Holy Spirit’s work in our minds.
Jesus spoke to this inability to understand without the Holy Spirit’s work in his conversation with Nicodemus. Jesus asked him, “Are you a teacher in Israel and yet do not understand these things?”
When speaking to the disciples in Matthew 13 Jesus said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given…Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says: You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.” Jesus clearly refers to being able to understand the spiritual truth of His teachings as being a gift, a gift from God. (see a related article on illumination here.)
Another aspect of being able to “know” the Scriptures is what I would term experiental knowledge, that is, knowledge that can only be gained through actually experiencing the truth described. The old testament often uses the term “know” as in “Adam knew his wife”—which doesn’t mean he knew facts about her, it means he intimately knew her through sexual experience. Paul in Philipians 3 talks about giving up everything to know Christ, the fellowship of His sufferings, and the power of His resurrection. You can feel the passion, almost agony, in Paul’s voice as he wants to know God in such a deeper way than any mass of facts could take him.
There are things about the nature and power of God that can only be appropriated to our minds and hearts through humbly and obediently walking with Him. Charlie Peacock captured it well in his song Experience:
We can only possess what we experience
Truth to be understood must be lived
We can only possess what we experience
There is a difference, a qualitative difference
Between what I know as fact
And what I know as truth
It stands as a great divide
To separate my thinking
From when I’m thinking foolishly
And when I’ve understood
The facts of theology can be altogether cold
Though true in every way
They alone can’t change me
Truth is creative, transforming and alive
It’s truth that keeps me hum
ble, saved and set free
We can only possess what we experience
We can only possess what we experience
Straight up honesty, that’s my obligation
That’s the point when I obey the truth without hesitation
When faith gains consent
Of my stubborn will
And makes the irreversible commitment real
To the Jesus of my journey
To the Christ of crucifixion
Resurrection and redemption
To the Father of mercy
To the God of all comfort.
Then and only then, then and only then,
Then and only then, truth begins its
Saving and illuminating work within the heart
And not a moment sooner, not one moment sooner
And not a moment sooner, not one moment sooner
We can only possess what we experience
We can only possess what we experience
Truth to be understood must be lived
We can only possess what we experience
If there be no sympathy
There can be no understanding
You must surrender to a truth
To really understand it
We can only possess what we experience
Truth to be understood must be lived
We can only possess what we experience.
Even though you’ve been raised as a human being, you are not one of them.
They could be a great people; they wish to be.
They only lack the light to show the way.
For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son.
So, what’s that a quote from? Some wierd Bible transaltion? Some funky musical on the life of Christ?
If you look, even our debased culture carries echoes of a deeper reality, glimpses of God’s truth, even though partial and distorted. Some may be intentional on the part of the writer being aware of Christianity, some may be unintentional and orchestrated by the providence of God.
If we use a cultural “echo” to think about the deeper, truer reality, that’s ok. The problem comes if we read too much into it, start letting the distorted truth become our truth, and then have a false view of God and reality. The prime example in the past few years was how many Christians went on and on about the film The Matrix, which had some echoes of God’s truth but actually had a lot more toward Eastern philosophy and religion.
In the above quote, there are echoes that the person being talked about was not human, that he was an only son, that he was to be a light to humanity and be instrumental in their becoming a great people. All of that is true of Jesus Christ. Was is NOT true, however, is that humanity “wishes” to be a great people, lacking only light to illuminate their capacity for good—like all sub-Biblical views, these few sentences deny original sin and our fallen nature, a fatal flaw to any world view. A person who sees a Saviour as only light and wisdom can never come to Christ.
So, still don’t know where the quote is from?
The teaser trailer for the film Superman Returns, June 2006.
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