An UNboring Gospel

 NOTE: This posting is in response to an article by Pastor Geoff Thomas that appeared in my Facebook feed today.  You can read it here.

Not long after I started pastoring, I found myself chatting with a lady in my church who had been teaching children for, oh, about a hundred years, and was frustrated at the kids’ inability to sit still in Sunday school.  I told her that I had recently heard someone say that “It’s a sin to bore children with the Gospel.”  Her incredulous look surprised me – until I realized that she thought that I was saying that it’s a sin to teach children the Gospel, because she assumed that the Gospel is inherently boring, and that there is no other way to teach it than to keep it boring. 

This is the first of several errors that Geoff Thomas makes in this article.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ is absolutely, categorically, overwhelmingly not boring!  Shouldn’t that be startlingly clear to anyone who has found themselves staring into the holiness of God, comprehending the depth of their own sin – who has experienced their own death, felt the searing of the cleansing of God, and heard His voice speak to them with a life-giving and irresistible call? Oh, how I love Isaiah 6!  And how I LOVE to go back to that story – so much like my own – and be reminded again and again of the endlessly exciting and glorious Gospel!  How can anyone find that boring?  How can anyone think it’s OK – or, worse yet, imperative – to bore anyone – especially children – with this amazing news!  And how can anyone not repent when they realize that they have done such a thing?

The assumption that the Gospel is inherently boring has led to a dearth of Christ-exalting, God-glorifying worship and preaching.  At one end are those who seek to remedy the “boringness” of the Gospel by making it entertaining, or by twisting its purposes and promises to make them all about things that are not boring – like health, wealth, power and temporal happiness.  At the other end are those who decide that boring is good, and that being excited about anything – especially God – is sure to lead us away from a Godly, boring life.  The first errs by embracing worldly definitions of excitement and trying to morph the Gospel to match those notions.  The other errs when it refuses to find the beauty, joy and excitement that is inherent in the Gospel, and tries to redefine the Christian life as boring and insipid.

The one place where I must concur with Thomas is with his disdain for offering worldly entertainment to our children – and ourselves – as a remedy for boredom.  But I vehemently disagree with his assumption that entertainment is the only alternative to a boring Gospel or a boring life.  The far better answer is to fight the temptation to give in to boredom.  I know personally how hard that is. Boredom can actually be quite pleasant, as it gives us permission to do nothing, and to amount to nothing.  It lets us believe that, if our day-to-day experience offers nothing to excite us, then we should just accept it and remain bored, boring, and ineffectual for Christ. 

John Piper offers this remedy for a boring life and Gospel:

"My simple pastoral plea to you this morning is that you ... go to the word of God and let the Lord of glory speak life and energy and hope and zeal and passion and earnestness into your spirit. ... God calls you to invest your life in something great. There is not Christian warrant for the culture of acedia. Christ is too great for that. Boredom with Christ and his kingdom means we are blind. Open your eyes this morning and let him inspire in you afresh a passion for his supremacy in all things, including the cause of truth and life in our tired and decaying culture.”

I am convinced that if we are not igniting that kind of passion in ourselves, our people and, above all, our children, we have failed in our Gospel calling.

Geoff Thomas is right to come against a culture of entertainment, but he is sorely mistaken when he suggests that we must embrace boredom as a necessary part of life and the Gospel, and that we need to teach our children to do the same.  This only serves to create lazy, lethargic Christians who fail to fully embrace the joy and excitement of Kingdom living.

But that’s not all that Thomas does wrong in this article.  Regarding children, while he does make one valid point – that prior to hearing and responding to the call on their lives, children are unregenerate. This is true of adults as well.  But other than that, his view of children is tragically distorted and belittling.  He seems to think that children are not only unregenerate from birth (which, again, they are), but that they are unable to embrace the Gospel until they learn to be bored long enough to sit still without being a distraction to the adults and certainly without anything other than their folded hands in their lap and “sweetly learn to ... cry from their childish hearts to the Lord.”  But this poses two really BIG problems.  First, we must figure out how to convince “unregenerate” children to sit still for that long – and be sweet about it (which is nigh unto impossible), and second, we need to teach them to be bored (which seems to be Thomas’ primary thesis.)

But when I look for Jesus’ teaching about children, this is what I read:

 And they were bringing even their babies to Him so that He would touch them, but when the disciples saw it, they began rebuking them. But Jesus called for them, saying, "Permit the children to come to Me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.  Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all." Luke 18:15-17 (NASB) 

There are four things that Jesus tells us about ministering to Children, and none of them are, “bore them.”

First, Jesus calls for them.  So it is with all of us.  None of us can begin to come to Jesus until He first calls for us.  Like Isaiah in the temple, we are dead in our sin, deaf in our ears, and blinded by the light of His glory.  He must make the first move.  We know this, and we act on this, when we evangelize adults; why, then, do we inflate our importance to think that, when it comes to children, we must set them up for salvation?

Second, Jesus commands us to cut them loose, to permit them to go to Him, even when they are very young.  My daughter came to Jesus when she was in Kindergarten – not even in our presence, much less at our prompting.  And she was baptized when she was 6 – some said it was too young, but the pastor who baptized her ran her through quite a one-on-one interview first and was convinced that she was ready.  So often, I see parents who set up way too many hoops for their children to jump through – hoops that only serve to hold them back from responding to Jesus’ supernatural call on their lives. 

Third, Jesus warns us to not get in their way as they run to Him.  A couple of days ago, I watched as my son-in-law coached my grandson to take his first short bike ride without training wheels.  I stood by the garage, and Matthew stood at the end of the driveway.  No one hovered over Isaiah as he tried – and failed – to ride the 50 or so feet.  And certainly no one set up obstacles to assure that he was really ready to ride, or that he really wanted to.  But hey, that’s just a bike ride – a little kid’s thing.  Coming to Jesus – that’s for grown-ups, and we need to make it hard enough that we know they are making a grown-up decision.  We must hinder them – just to be sure.  Right?  Jesus?  We do, don’t we?

Fourth, Jesus tells us to watch them; he doesn’t tell them to watch us: Jesus tells us to learn from Children. “The kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”  Elsewhere (Matthew 18:1-3), when Jesus was asked, “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven,” he grabbed a kid.  That’s not what we would do.  Rather, we would side with the apostles.  We would look at these noisy, hyperactive, immature, unregenerate little brats and see anything but the Kingdom of heaven.  We would hold them back until they are ready, quiet, patient, sweet and happy with being bored.  We would tell them to become good little ladies and gentlemen – like we all are – before they could be worthy of the Kingdom.  But Jesus – well, He always seems to get things backwards, doesn’t He?

And that’s especially true in his final lesson about the kiddos.  In case you missed it:  “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.” Or, again, from Matthew 18:3 “Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” I find it very interesting – and not a little scandalous – that Jesus never tells children to behave like adults.  But He most certainly tells adults to be like children.  Or, “you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven.” 

Yes, it is time to repent.  We need to repent of our stupid notion that children need to be constantly entertained, as that has raised a generation of adults that think they must be constantly entertained.  But we also must repent of the sin of boring people with the most amazing, exciting, glorious, wonderful thing ever set before us.  We especially need to repent of doing that to children, because in doing so, we have raised not just one or two, but many generations of people who run from the Glorious Truth and now pursue a false “gospel” that won’t bore them.

And finally, we need to repent of holding children back from Jesus with our belief that they are not simply unregenerate like the rest of the unsaved around us, but that they are SO unregenerate that they need to stop being children before they can go to Him.  We need to repent of holding them back until they learn important things in life, like how to be bored and like it.  We need to repent of our failure to watch them as they joyfully, noisily, energetically and with great abandon and utter lack of decorum run to the arms of Jesus.  And we need to repent of our refusal to learn about the Kingdom of Heaven from them, lest we miss it altogether.

The Waiting Game

Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you,
and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you.
For the Lord is a God of justice;
blessed are all those who wait for him.
Is 30:18 (ESV)

One of the board members of an organization I work for has distributed a daily prayer sheet that begins each day with a verse or two. This was today's verse, and as I began to meditate on it, some exciting things started to emerge.

The verse is chaistic, with the first and last lines forming one idea and the second and third lines, a supporting or explanatory idea. In addition, lines 1 and 4 display a second chiasm of their own: "Therefore the Lord waits" connects with "those who wait for him," and "to be gracious to you" connects with "blessed are all." (Here, a note to the reader who may not be familiar with poetic chiasm. If you look at the verse above and draw lines that illustrate these connections, you will see that the lines form an "X." The Greek letter "X" is called, "Chi," hence the name for the structure, "chiasm.")

Taking a look at that second chiasm, we ask, What is the writer trying to tell us? First, it seems that he is saying, "God is waiting for us to wait." That sounds like a quick way to get nothing accomplished. Countless are the times Cherie and I have found ourselves stalemated because I was waiting for her while, it turns out, she was waiting for me. Such mutual inaction, however, is not what this is about. This is more like waiting at a stop light for the cross traffic to get the red light that tells them to wait so I can move. God is telling us, "I'm waiting for you to stop moving so I can have my turn." Now that makes sense. How often I go about my plans, seeking my agenda, trying to find my happiness in my successes that fulfill my dreams and my vision, when God is saying, "Let me know when you decide to stop. I'd like to have a turn."

Have a turn doing what? That's the second idea in that second chiasm: He is waiting to be gracious to us so that we can be blessed. Looking back at verses 15 & 16, He is offering salvation and strength, but we are riding off on our horses trying to win our own battles. He is offering all that we need, but we are so busy trying to meet our own needs that we miss his blessings and His grace. He is waiting for me to stop fighting my own battles and stop seeking my own happiness, my own purpose, my own meaning and just wait for Him to shower His grace on me and fill me with everything the world can't possibly give me. Oh God, cause me to stop! Let me see that my hope is in You, not in my own endless pursuits.

Now, moving on to the second half of the "big" chiasm -- the second and third lines. "Therefore" tells us to look back again: Because God longs to be gracious to us, He exalts Himself. The next phrase repeats the thought: "To show mercy to you" is the reason that He exalts himself. To our way of thinking, that seems backwards. How can God's self-exaltation be connected to His blessing us, or his display of mercy toward us? Shouldn't it say, "therefore God condescended to us..."?

Indeed, God did condescend to us in His Son who "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself..." (Phil 1:6-7, RSV). But the that passage continues (v. 9): "Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name." (NIV). Indeed, it was not the humiliation of Christ alone, but rather the exaltation of Christ in His resurrection and his eternal station at the Fathers right hand that brings us salvation. As Paul said, "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins." (1Cor.15:17, NASB) Indeed, it's not just here, but throughout the Bible God commits and recommits Himself to the pursuit of His glory above all other things. It's been said before and bears repeating: If it's a sin for us to worship anything above God, it is also a sin for God to worship anything above God.

This brings us to the third line of this verse: "For the Lord is a God of justice." Justice means that God does what is right. It is right for Him to magnify His own glory. It would be wrong for Him to let sin go unpunished. It would be unjust for God to allow our sinful, prideful, independent ways to take precedence over His rightful requirement of absolute sovereignty. Therefore, He guarded His own justice, His own righteousness, His own glory while at the same time provided the way for us to receive His gracious blessings in Christ. We just need to get out of the way and let God be God! He is waiting for me -- for you -- to stop and wait for Him.


Twitter: spiritualpyro

Pushing Through

There's a group of us at Central Church here in Fort Wayne wou are working through this whole idea of "sole delight." We're using the book, "Don't Waste Your Life," and we're discovering that the only way to not waste our life is to take delight in God and God Alone, to develop a passion within for more and more of God, and to use every opportunity to enable others to find their delight in Him as well.

But there's this question that keeps creeping in: How do I find my delight, my joy,my pleasure, my happiness -- whatever your word is -- in God? It's one thing to know in my head that He is ultimately desireable, but delight itself is such a viseral -- an emotional -- response that seems rather difficult to control.

That's where "pushing through" comes in. When we have an experience that delights us, there is a very strong tendency to stop with that delight and enjoy it for what it does to me. Whether it's a kiss from the one we love, a taste of our favorite food, or a view of a breathtaking sunset, we take it in for the pleasure it brings us, we savor it, as we go no further. It we are ever to learn to delight in God, we need to push through that stopping point to the One who made it possible, to the Grace that grants all good things, and to the Cross that delivered that grace to us. In other words, we need to push through everyday pleasures to turn them into moments of worship and sweetness with God.

More later ...

Sole Delight

“O God, rid my heart of all that isn’t Christ,

And cause me to find my sole delight in You.”

Delight. I like how www.dictionary.com, defines it:

1. a high degree of pleasure or enjoyment; joy; rapture: She takes great delight in her job.

2. something that gives great pleasure: The dance was a delight to see.

–verb (used with object)

3. to give great pleasure, satisfaction, or enjoyment to; please highly: The show delighted everyone.

–verb (used without object)

4. to have great pleasure; take pleasure (fol. by in or an infinitive): She delights in going for long walks in the country.

I love the breadth of this definition: pleasure, enjoyment, joy, rapture, satisfaction. All wrapped up in this single word. It doesn’t seem to leave out any human desire. It is a list of all that we long for, all that drives us. We are wired, it would seem, to look for delight. I don’t expect much argument here. Whatever it is that delights me, give me more, and more, and more of it!

But, hold on a second. Sole delight?? As if there is only one thing I should delight in? How dull can that be? And if I only delighted in one thing, I wouldn’t be very well-rounded, would I? (Well, unless that “one thing” was Extreme Chocolate Moose Tracks Ice Cream. Then I’d be a bit too well rounded. In fact, now that you mention it…)

Well, actually, there’s a difference between “Sole Delight” and delighting in only one thing. At least, the way I’m using the words. What I mean by “sole delight” is that one thing through which and for which I delight in other things.

For most people (and I have certainly been counted among the most) delight – that is my personal delight – is it’s own goal. Or, to put it another way, I take delight in whatever makes me feel good. If I believe that something will make me happy, or give me pleasure, or displace my sorrow and replace it with joy, I will pursue that thing. That can be something as simple as a bowl of my favorite ice cream (see above), or grand as a mountain view, as beautiful or as the face of a smiling child, or as seemingly altruistic as shoveling my neighbor’s walk. (Please, Barry, if you read this, don’t stop shoveling my walk!) If they are done because they make me feel good, they are done for the sole delight of, well, My Self Delight.

My Self Delight, then, becomes the standard against which I measure all other delights. That is, the desirability of a given experience is determined by how it makes me feel. Now, If I have a fairly well developed deferred gratification pattern, I may be able to find a less than pleasing experience to be desirable if I can look down the road a few minutes, a few days, or even a few years, and see that this experience will, eventually, make me happy. For example, I may find the unpleasantness of spending some of my money on a pretty girl if I expect that, eventually, she will return my wooings with her affections, and thus make me feel good. Or I can face the long hours of study if I can see that, eventually, I will earn that diploma or degree, and I will feel very good about it. Or I can stay in an odious job if I know that, at the end of the week, I’ll get a paycheck which I can spend on things that will make me feel good.

But there’s a problem with that. Because, when I measure the desirability of all things against the standard of My Self Delight, I attest to the fact that My Self Delight, my feeling good, is the most important thing in my life. It becomes my object of worship. It becomes my god.

And, as a Christian, that is a serious problem. As a Christian, I know that my object of worship, my god, must be none other than the one and only true God, Himself. Yet my desire for delight has led me to the wrong place. How do I fix that?

Some years ago, when I began to comprehend this concept, I came to realize that My Self Delight was really a delight in many things – anything in that would make me feel good. Fortunately, I had a degree of common sense that said not everything that makes me feel good for the moment will make me feel good in the long run, and not everything that will make me feel good in the long run will make me feel good for the moment. Nonetheless, there were many things in which I delighted, because there were many things that made me feel good. I had many delights, many affections.

But I was beginning to see that this was a problem. My delights, my affections, were leading me to the deadly end of self-worship. I needed to turn the whole thing around. I needed to get rid of the goal of self-centered living and start over with the right goal – God-centered living. But to do that, I had to check my long list of delights as the door, and I had to establish a new ultimate, singular delight – one that didn’t answer the question, “Will this make me feel good?” but rather the ultimate question, “Will this lead me closer to the heart and face of God?”

In other words, I had to replace My Self Delight for a new Sole Delight – a delight only in those things that pleased Him, glorified Him, and drew me closer to the One and Only who is truly worthy of delight: God Himself.

The question was: Was I willing to let go of those affections? They were so deep, so ingrained in me, and so many of them were so “right,” that I struggled to let them go. So, God gave me a simple prayer: O God, rid my heart of all that isn’t Christ, and cause me to find my sole delight in You. I knew from the moment that thought entered my mind that it had the power to transform my affections and, therefore, the power to lead me to a true, consistent worshipper of God. So I prayed it. Occasionally, often only half-heartedly. It scared me to think that it would make me let go of so many things I had come to love. So, God let me keep those things, and He let them keep leading me back into Self Delight. But he never let go of me. He never let me abandon that desire to find My Sole Delight in Him.

It’s been a long struggle. But God has stepped up the pace in this pursuit of My Sole Delight. He as expelled so many things from my heart that at times it feels rather empty. But then He steps in and fills it with more of Himself – fills it to overflowing. And out of that overflow, He allows me to find delight once again in those things that he had removed. But it is a different delight. It’s not a delight in those things because they make me feel good, but it is a delight in them because, in them, I see the excellences of God, or the sacrifice of Christ, or the drawing power of the Holy Spirit.

It’s been a long struggle, but I have yet to arrive. Every day brings new awareness of things yet unaddressed, things that still grab my affections, but don’t draw me closer to God. Things like Extreme Chocolate Moose Tracks Ice Cream. And stuff that’s even worse. But by His enormous grace, He’s giving me the guts to pray that prayer with more conviction, and He’s answering. He’s slowly, piece by piece, ridding my heart of all that isn’t Christ, and causing me to find my sole delight in Him.

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.

When a man found it, he hid it again,

and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

Matthew 13:44 (NIV) (emphasis mine)

One Thing

One thing I ask of the Lord,

this is what I seek:

that I may dwell in the house of the Lord

all the days of my life,

to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord

and to seek him in his temple.

Psalm 27:4, NIV

I call that my “life verse;” the thought upon which I hang all of my hopes and dreams, by which I measure my successes and failures, and through which I know I will find the thing we are all looking for: true happiness.

But what does it mean? Does it mean that I aspire to find a church someplace where I can sit 24/7/365 and stare at some image – physical, mental or spiritual – of God? Of course not. And I don’t’ think it meant that to David, either. What it means is that I have come to understand that God’s greatest gift to me – to all people – is not a gift of stuff, or wellness, or friends and family, or even salvation. Rather, it is that through all of these things, God has built a way for me to experience His greatest gift: Himself.

It means that, for all the days of my life (which, if I count heaven, will be forever!) I will seek after and treasure and adore and cherish and behold and experience the One who is, Himself, the fulfillment of all my deepest desires. Augustine said it well: You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You. Not in things, not in painlessness, not in people, not in anything but Him. Period. That is His greatest and foremost gift, and it is my purpose to pursue that gift will all I have in me.

That does not mean that I shun His other gifts; I just see them as ways to lead me to behold Him through them. Some examples:

I love waterfalls. Whether the immense power of the Niagara that screams of Him amazing power and strength, or a tiny fall of a mountain stream along a ledge of the foothills of Rainier, that reminds me of the simple intricate beauty of his flowing sweetness, they remind me of God.

And oh, do I enjoy a good storm. The lightning and thunder, the winds, the swirling clouds and even the tornadoes. I think of that line in the movie, Twister (I think), where someone asks what an F-5 tornado is like. After a pregnant pause, one of the storm-chasers says, with appropriate awe in his voice, “That’s the Finger of God.” Exactly!

But even more, I love the faces of the nations. An old Afghani Tajik man. A little Miao boy from southwest China. The Fulani peoples of West Africa. A Kazak woman from northern Xinjiang, China. A little Kalasha girl from the valleys of the Hindu Kush mountains in northern Pakistan. I look at their pictures and I see the Image of God in the diverse beauty of His creation. And I am filled with joy. But, at the same time, I am filled with sorrow, because I know that the face I see in those pictures is likely one that does not know Christ. And I sense again the real purpose of my life on this planet – to do whatever I can to see heaven populated with people from every tongue, tribe, people and nation, so that the glory of God will shine all the more fully through those who surround Him with eternal praise.

Oh, how I long for that day when my faith will be sight, when God’s glory will be revealed in all His fullness, and I will be joined with the millions upon millions of the redeemed, beholding the glory of God in the Face of Christ, and reflecting that beauty back to Him.

As the deer pants for streams of water,

so my soul pants for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

Psalm 42:1-2a (NIV)