Sunday, April 29, 2007
A Dark Providence
Our experience, unfortunately, all to often interprets for us the attributes of God. The old expression "God is good all the time" takes new meaning during a time of trials. Suddenly it becomes easy to drag His name through our dirt when we aren't happy. God is not good because our experiences are all rosy. Even when it is dismal, God is good because of His essence, not because of our circumstances. Our circumstances must be interpreted by the good, immutable character of God, instead of by our emotion-laden circumstances.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Job
I have been reading through the book of Job lately and it has confronted me with a few issues:
1) Job thoroughly expresses the darkest possible human emotions from a completely spiritual viewpoint. In college it was always tough for me to express the negatives of life because of belief that those down times were colored by a lack of faith rather than hope in God. While unbridled pessimism is a lack of faith, complete and utter honesty shown by Job's laments are as spiritual as the exalted praise towards the end of the book. Job didn't start being "spiritual" in chapter 38, he is spiritual from chapter 1. We shouldn't be afraid to honestly pour our hearts out before God in prayer during those times when we are laid low in the dust before God....but this brings up
2) Job was very righteous. Therein lies the conflict, when I "bellyache and complain" before God, I cannot stand on my integrity the way Job does. Does that mean the book of Job is something alien to Christian experience, and therefore unusable in life? No, and for two reasons. I. Job is a picture of Christ righteously suffering the wrath of God at the behest of the enemy in complete submission and obedience. Christ is the fulfillment that Job is pointing towards. There is suffering not linked to sin, yet it is still from God's hand. God works with good and evil, yet always for our good as Romans 8:28-30 assures us. II. Through Christ, though we bear the consequences of our sinful actions, we are not condemned by our sinful state. There is a sense in which Job's laments, through Christ, can become our laments. We may bear the pain of our own sins, yet as Job longed for God to deal with Him fairly due to his integrity, we can plead for God on the basis of Christ's integrity.
3) The book confronts us with the angst Job experiences because there is no mediator between God and himself. In his mind, there is no one who may take his claim before God. Job is alienated from God and His blessing in his mind, yet he is very comfortable with his integrity; whereas a Christian is communing with God, yet our righteousness seems so alien. Our pole of relation is completely the opposite of Job's it would seem. He knows his righteousness, he is at odds of his God. We know our God, we are at odds with our righteousness. Here's where Christ comes in, He knows God, He knows His righteousness. The one who suffers wrongly, suffers only in line with what Christ has suffered. The one who is blessed undeservedly, is blessed in line with what Christ has suffered. All suffering, and all blessing, passes through nail-scarred hands to the saints of God. He is the mediator for all events, the filter as it were, through which all events become encased in grace: whether they are ill or fair, they are for our eternal good because of Christ, who purchased these things for us by His death.
1) Job thoroughly expresses the darkest possible human emotions from a completely spiritual viewpoint. In college it was always tough for me to express the negatives of life because of belief that those down times were colored by a lack of faith rather than hope in God. While unbridled pessimism is a lack of faith, complete and utter honesty shown by Job's laments are as spiritual as the exalted praise towards the end of the book. Job didn't start being "spiritual" in chapter 38, he is spiritual from chapter 1. We shouldn't be afraid to honestly pour our hearts out before God in prayer during those times when we are laid low in the dust before God....but this brings up
2) Job was very righteous. Therein lies the conflict, when I "bellyache and complain" before God, I cannot stand on my integrity the way Job does. Does that mean the book of Job is something alien to Christian experience, and therefore unusable in life? No, and for two reasons. I. Job is a picture of Christ righteously suffering the wrath of God at the behest of the enemy in complete submission and obedience. Christ is the fulfillment that Job is pointing towards. There is suffering not linked to sin, yet it is still from God's hand. God works with good and evil, yet always for our good as Romans 8:28-30 assures us. II. Through Christ, though we bear the consequences of our sinful actions, we are not condemned by our sinful state. There is a sense in which Job's laments, through Christ, can become our laments. We may bear the pain of our own sins, yet as Job longed for God to deal with Him fairly due to his integrity, we can plead for God on the basis of Christ's integrity.
3) The book confronts us with the angst Job experiences because there is no mediator between God and himself. In his mind, there is no one who may take his claim before God. Job is alienated from God and His blessing in his mind, yet he is very comfortable with his integrity; whereas a Christian is communing with God, yet our righteousness seems so alien. Our pole of relation is completely the opposite of Job's it would seem. He knows his righteousness, he is at odds of his God. We know our God, we are at odds with our righteousness. Here's where Christ comes in, He knows God, He knows His righteousness. The one who suffers wrongly, suffers only in line with what Christ has suffered. The one who is blessed undeservedly, is blessed in line with what Christ has suffered. All suffering, and all blessing, passes through nail-scarred hands to the saints of God. He is the mediator for all events, the filter as it were, through which all events become encased in grace: whether they are ill or fair, they are for our eternal good because of Christ, who purchased these things for us by His death.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Couldn't make it home on my own steam
I hit a patch of ice "whilst" traveling a few years ago. I was just walking along, minding my own business, being a typical overzealous college Christian when I ran into the Southern Baptist Convention in a big way. I had been raised SBC, so I'd heard the usual push for evangelistic fervor. I had always been quasi-Baptist for various reasons, until I got accepted on staff at M-Fuge. It is a Lifeway run camp, put on by the Southern Baptist Convention to get youth groups involved in mission work in some pretty scary areas. My assignment was to work in inner-city Jacksonville doing PCY (construction, painting, landscaping) with Habitat for Humanity in Jacksonville (Habijax). Going to training for the first two weeks with Fuge was amazing. You felt like you'd finally arrived at some spiritual plateau of leadership. You were going to be the role model for over 2000 kids by the end of the summer, and 200 of those would be in your group by summer's end. You could personally affect thousands of people by the time the ripple ended....
Needless to say, we got ready for camp. We slept too few hours, prayed too few (except for people to get saved), you forgot about yourself and your own temptations, and you just whisked through the summer at breakneck speed, trying to pour yourself into your students. By the time it was all said and done, I was exhausted. But I knew what I'd do, I'd go back to college for my senior year, and finally quit messing around on God, I'd give all of myself to win the lost and serve Christ.
When you are that revved up, you feel more like a Jedi Knight than a Christian. You are on some errand where you feel you are expendable in health, yet not in zeal. So what if you are stressed and angry and on edge, those virtues are expendable. But one thing is not: zeal for souls! If you lose that for an inkling of a second, somehow God's plan is over for you. If you let down on your passion for missions and the lost, you will blast outward like a supernova headlong into uselessness. It wasn't, for me, about connecting with God, as much as connecting with God's desire for people to be saved. I learned it from the SBC, and I learned it well. I still have not forgotten their ways fully. You don't care for the people either, their lives, their jobs, their houses, their defunct relationships, because all you care about is their soul, which is in your mind completely isolated from said circumstances....
I would wear myself out trying to maintain this "level" of zeal. My emotions would wear so thin that I'd be physically ill, but I'd try to witness, try to engineer conversations, try to share. I could connect with nobody for fear of not sharing...
"I may only have one conversation with this person..." and so all else seemed a bit irrelevant. Needless to say one cannot keep this level of activity up and remain alive. Within months after M-Fuge was over, I found myself afloat in a sea of lust and despair which did not abate for nearly 9 months. A deep discontentment with Christians, and evangelistic "strategies" began to emerge. I was in "the NET" training, and quit in the middle. I heard people talk about witnessing and I just thought, "You are into it now, wait a few months until you are stuck in your sins and see how zealous you are." But what was weird is that I did not lose my zeal fully, nor my desires to serve God. Quiet times ceased, but I was unsure of how they really added up with what I'd been taught about being a witness anyways. So many things happened, I caught pneumonia, graduated college, and got re-accepted to work M-Fuge in Philadelphia.
The summer started out with difficulty. I didn't like the camp pastor, I didn't feel joyful or zealous like before, somehow I felt I was being honest, yet not being zealous felt like being ministerially naked. I wanted people around me in my groups to experience something...I just wasn't sure what it was. I knew it was Christ, but not what I had wanted them to "pray" or "confess" the summer before.
The camp pastor and I had a talk one night, about how immense and glorious God was. I had believed and anchored myself on that many times in my life, but I had never been "taught" to base anything on that. All that theological speculation was not evangelism, and I was pretty sure that just evangelism was what was important. That summer, I spent many hours in front of an open Bible, reading of God's self-disclosure in Psalms 93, 97, and 99, and Isaiah 40-60, and wept at times before the manifold majesty of God contained therein. Waves of remorse for my own lack of conformity, joy unspeakable at His goodness, and every pang of grace in that free disclosure caused me to bend until I broke. God could have remained hidden, and we would have never pried deep enough to find Him. All those attributes seemed as pure gold hidden in the pages, and I treasured their discovery and disclosure to me by those authors. I found out the more I thought on them, the easier it was to disentangle the clutches of sin in my life. The more I valued those attributes, the more I wanted the world to hear. The more I beheld Christ's example, the more I wanted to serve my brothers and sisters. The less I sought the result actions taught to me by the SBC, the more God became a greater cause for them.
My Christianity was shot before I left for Philadelphia. I had been different since. I have not walked in it perfectly, but I feel as if I have been walking nonetheless. I don't know if I can call it walking before that. Since being humbled by God during that year, my resultant limp has covered more ground than my sprint the years before. I believe all Christians can benefit in practice and in piety, but uncovering that God has designed Himself to be the motivator for all resultant Christian virtues. "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit." 2 Co 3:18
Needless to say, we got ready for camp. We slept too few hours, prayed too few (except for people to get saved), you forgot about yourself and your own temptations, and you just whisked through the summer at breakneck speed, trying to pour yourself into your students. By the time it was all said and done, I was exhausted. But I knew what I'd do, I'd go back to college for my senior year, and finally quit messing around on God, I'd give all of myself to win the lost and serve Christ.
When you are that revved up, you feel more like a Jedi Knight than a Christian. You are on some errand where you feel you are expendable in health, yet not in zeal. So what if you are stressed and angry and on edge, those virtues are expendable. But one thing is not: zeal for souls! If you lose that for an inkling of a second, somehow God's plan is over for you. If you let down on your passion for missions and the lost, you will blast outward like a supernova headlong into uselessness. It wasn't, for me, about connecting with God, as much as connecting with God's desire for people to be saved. I learned it from the SBC, and I learned it well. I still have not forgotten their ways fully. You don't care for the people either, their lives, their jobs, their houses, their defunct relationships, because all you care about is their soul, which is in your mind completely isolated from said circumstances....
I would wear myself out trying to maintain this "level" of zeal. My emotions would wear so thin that I'd be physically ill, but I'd try to witness, try to engineer conversations, try to share. I could connect with nobody for fear of not sharing...
"I may only have one conversation with this person..." and so all else seemed a bit irrelevant. Needless to say one cannot keep this level of activity up and remain alive. Within months after M-Fuge was over, I found myself afloat in a sea of lust and despair which did not abate for nearly 9 months. A deep discontentment with Christians, and evangelistic "strategies" began to emerge. I was in "the NET" training, and quit in the middle. I heard people talk about witnessing and I just thought, "You are into it now, wait a few months until you are stuck in your sins and see how zealous you are." But what was weird is that I did not lose my zeal fully, nor my desires to serve God. Quiet times ceased, but I was unsure of how they really added up with what I'd been taught about being a witness anyways. So many things happened, I caught pneumonia, graduated college, and got re-accepted to work M-Fuge in Philadelphia.
The summer started out with difficulty. I didn't like the camp pastor, I didn't feel joyful or zealous like before, somehow I felt I was being honest, yet not being zealous felt like being ministerially naked. I wanted people around me in my groups to experience something...I just wasn't sure what it was. I knew it was Christ, but not what I had wanted them to "pray" or "confess" the summer before.
The camp pastor and I had a talk one night, about how immense and glorious God was. I had believed and anchored myself on that many times in my life, but I had never been "taught" to base anything on that. All that theological speculation was not evangelism, and I was pretty sure that just evangelism was what was important. That summer, I spent many hours in front of an open Bible, reading of God's self-disclosure in Psalms 93, 97, and 99, and Isaiah 40-60, and wept at times before the manifold majesty of God contained therein. Waves of remorse for my own lack of conformity, joy unspeakable at His goodness, and every pang of grace in that free disclosure caused me to bend until I broke. God could have remained hidden, and we would have never pried deep enough to find Him. All those attributes seemed as pure gold hidden in the pages, and I treasured their discovery and disclosure to me by those authors. I found out the more I thought on them, the easier it was to disentangle the clutches of sin in my life. The more I valued those attributes, the more I wanted the world to hear. The more I beheld Christ's example, the more I wanted to serve my brothers and sisters. The less I sought the result actions taught to me by the SBC, the more God became a greater cause for them.
My Christianity was shot before I left for Philadelphia. I had been different since. I have not walked in it perfectly, but I feel as if I have been walking nonetheless. I don't know if I can call it walking before that. Since being humbled by God during that year, my resultant limp has covered more ground than my sprint the years before. I believe all Christians can benefit in practice and in piety, but uncovering that God has designed Himself to be the motivator for all resultant Christian virtues. "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit." 2 Co 3:18
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