Whatever bit of writing I’ll do in the future will be done as Notes on my facebook. The notes are visible to everyone at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1297012454&ref=mf (though you may need a facebook account).
Trying to consolidate.
Thanks!
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The Kingdom of God is good news because it reverses the effects of sin. What are the effects of sin?
The effects of sin are recorded early in Genesis. In ch. 3 we’re informed that the result of sin in Eve’s case would be difficulty in child birth and sexism. Yes, that’s right. She didn’t suffer “under” Adam in Eden. It was only after sin that the fact is stated clearly, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” There was nothing prior to sin to suggest that Adam was to rule over Eve. Together they exercised dominion over all creation. In fact, Adam couldn’t do it by himself, spurring on the creation of Eve. Male and female were created in the image of God (Gn.1). Vs. 28 indicates that God blessed THEM (not just HIM), and charged them to “fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” For those who believe that men have a moral right to dominate women, I suggest you reread the story and learn that men have an immoral desire to dominate women. Under the present circumstances wherein sin has taken up residence in the structures of the world, men continue with the monstrous drive to dominate even the one who is their created equal.
So after sin, the quest for domination of an ugly sort entered the picture. There’s obviously nothing wrong with domination or dominion if in God’s grace; e.g., human dominion over creation, each of us submitted to the other within a framework of grace, etc. Howerver, everything is wrong with dominion that flows out of selfishness and contempt. Cain looks more like a monster in Genesis 4 than a man. He kills his brother because of petty jealousy. And we’ve been killing each other ever since. It’s the effect of sin. We’re created with the pulse to dominate. Sin warps the pulse by ripping it from the grip of God.
But it gets worse. God cursed the ground because of man’s sin. Environmental chaos, a reality unimaginable in Eden, now defines earth. Everything from H1n1 to earthquakes is the result of human failure to wisely care for God’s creation. Sickness, death, disasters of all sorts–they all manifest the effect of our sin.
And finally, nationalism rears its ugly head in Genesis 11. The demise of authentic humanness continues from Genesis 4 all the way to Genesis 11 where the apex of God’s creation decided it would build a tower. And for what reason? The text states, “. . . let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”
Humanity was imploding. Without any acknowledgment of God people were consumed with their own greatness. They weren’t concerned about the creation or fulfilling their God-given responsibility. They wanted nothing more than to build a tall building (at what cost to the environment?) so that they could get a great name for themselves. Because we bear God’s image, because humans are so extraordinary, it was evident to God that unless He intervened humanity would continue it’s downward spiral up a worthless tower. People were dispersed and given different languages in order to to reverse the trend. But the little groups soon started competing for a great name.
The 20th century has shown us what graceless humans tend to do with power and imagination. How many millions of people were killed last century so that someone could get a great name–men like Stalin, Hitler, Mao Ze-Dong, Leopold II, Ismail Enver, Pol Pot, etc?
Now then, the Kingdom of God is good news because it will reverse all the above effects of sin. God promised Abraham in Genesis 12 that through him, through his seed, He would bless all the families of the earth. That’s the long-standing covenant, the gospel clearly described by Paul in Gal. 3.7f, that gives the world a glimmer of real hope. The Kingdom of God isn’t some marginalized religious experience, pushed away over in the corner, packed inside pointy buildings filled with wimpy people scared to death to crawl out from under their steeples. That’s not the Kingdom of God. Whatever it is, it’s little more than a parody of what Jesus intended for the new humanity He was innaugurating.
The church and the kingdom are not the same thing. The church identifies God’s called-out people. The Kingdom of God is His sphere of influence, His dominion, His power; it’s where His will is done. You don’t need me to tell you that there are plenty of churches that express no symptoms of a Kingdom relationship. If you want an old and obvious example there’s Laodicia, identified by the Lord Himself as a church, but one that was not depending on Kingdom resources and wasn’t capable on any level of aiding the King in the reversal of the curse.
The Kingdom of God is where His will is being done. It is where brand new humans of a different sort are latching on to the gospel of Is. 61, the gospel Jesus preached and lived, and who are therefore working in concert with God not to get a great name for themselves or (God forbid) their church, but who are embracing the long-lost mantle placed on Adam’s shoulders, and finally worn with dignity by the new Adam, the son of God–Jesus.
I’ll write in more detail about the salvation of the world in Christ and through His kingdom in the upcoming days and weeks (Lord willing).
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Sunset Over Dale Hollow
This past Friday I drove to Byrdstown, Tennessee, where I spent the next three days discussing the Kingdom of God with the Red Hill Church. It was memorable for me because we lived there for two years; in fact my first full-time work as a minister was at Red Hill. So, connecting with old friends was the best part of the experience. Secondly, it was the first time I’ve actually stood before folks and talked about God in about a year and a half. I work in the health care industry now (see here and here) rather than paid ministry. Thirdly, Byrdstown is one of the most beautiful places on earth. It’s rolling hills, rich and well kept farms, and slow pace gives it an oasis-like quality. It’s a drink of cool water in a hot, dry desert. I snapped a couple of photos prior to our discussion Saturday night while standing on a bridge over Dale Hollow Lake. Facing west, I enjoyed the view of a warm and fading sky while behind me the moon lazily climbed up the dusky, clear, blue sky.
Moonrise Over Dale Hollow
Finally, it was my honor to talk about the good news of the Kingdom of God. And, with hopes that the folks from Byrdstown (and others, of course!) might check out this blog, I’m going to revisit some of the thoughts tossed out during my visit. I hope that it will provide something of a review of the discussion, offer clarity on a few points, and stimulate further thought and discussion. I’ll introduce the main points here, and flesh them out over the next few days.
1. The Kingdom of God is good news because it reverses the effects of sin and the curse. That is, the Kingdom deals with individual sin, environmental chaos, and wars resulting from nationalism.
2. With reference to the first point, how does the kingdom reverse the curse? Answer: Through Jesus and freshly created humans.
3. How are humans freshly created? Answer: By faith in Jesus and the transforming work of His Spirit.
4. What is the kingdom and what does it look like? The kingdom is God’s sphere of influence. It flows out of the great singularity or ultimate reality–that is, the Divine Community. It reflects the ultimate reality out of which it flows just as the moon in the above picture reflects the light of the setting sun. Though the sun was running off over the horizon it was still glorified by the moons capacity to capture and reflect its rays.
5. And finally, the kingdom of God is good news because it gives the world hope. We’re saved in a particular hope, one which involves all of creation. The kingdom of God isn’t about an escape from the world; it’s about blessing for the world!
Check back in over the next few days and I’ll put some meat on these bones.
Grace to you all!
Ben Overby
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God’s story is much larger than our insignificant little religious stories. I grew up within a specific religious story that arrogantly supposed it had identified the glass through which scripture should be read, and by reading the text from that particular perspective the story went like this. God created man. Man sinned. Sin separated man from God. Israel was brought in existence in order to foreshadow Jesus, who eventually came into the world, died, and rose again. The church began on Pentecost, enjoyed a few years of purity before falling into shambles, only to be restored by a handful of American churchmen who read the text through the window of their culture–a culture shaped by the mood of modernism. Over time boundaries were determined, the goats and the sheep were identified, and the particular window became essential to the scenery. Orthodox restoration, within the scope of that smallish movement, required (and requires) all participants to stand in a place wherein they could (and can) see the text through the particular window–or hermeneutic.
Eve was doing quite well simply soaking in the reality of God and the garden until, that is, the Enemy suggested she take another look through a window of his (Satan’s) own imagination. Satan bent the truth, twisting it into a lie, until Eve no longer saw God as God. From the fresh angle God became a rather selfish bully who was keeping Eve from experiencing all that she could be.
The essential problem which afflicted humanity in the garden (and now) wasn’t academic or intellectual. The problem was personal. The problem had to do with trust. That’s why a casual reading of Genesis 1 through 15 tells a story of creation, mistrust (which was the fall and didn’t merely lead to the fall), and a spiraling down into the despair of a real God frustrated with his creation. So deep was the despair that he nearly destroyed the whole human project. Every man’s heart was on evil. Humans had stopped walking with God. At least Cain had the good sense to regret the fact that he was destined to be hidden from the face of God. However, by the time you get to Noah, God didn’t matter to most people and they were ruining their lives as a result. Even after the flood, God promised he wouldn’t destroy the creation with water, yet still lamenting the fact that human minds are on evil from their youth. Basically, he was saying that the project was so corrupt that even the littlest humans naturally pursue wickedness (Gn 8.21).
Humanity was trusting itself, glorying in itself, gazing at itself from the light let in by Eve’s window. An enormous tower was built. Why? In order for humans to make a great name for themselves (Gn 11.4). Eve was afraid God wasn’t sharing enough glory with her, Cain killed his brother because he feared Able had robbed him of glory, and humanity spiraled down the moral toilet from one generation to the next. But in the case of Gn 11, the toilet flushed upward into the sky under the guise of human accomplishment.
So what do you do if you’re God? You’ve made yourself intimately available, walking with man, talking to him face to face. You’ve tried to shape humans even after their rebellion. You’ve tried nearly wiping out the whole race in order to get a clean start. You’ve acknowledged that your creation is basically warped by structural evil at a very young age. You’ve watched their hunger for self-glory reach for the sky without any mention of you, any concern for you, any desire for you. What’s a God to do?
What God didn’t do was offer a new window as the way out of the problem. He didn’t send Abraham a new hermeneutic that was then supposed to be used as the necessary foundation to uncover his commands like a kid looking through a magnifying glass on an easter egg hunt. Only little people within the smallest of stories could ever suppose that the tragedy of humanity’s collapse could possibly be cured with a fresh angle, a new way of interpreting God’s will, or the cobbling together of commands, parsing out of examples, or building a gigantic tower of necessary inferences.
Notice what God was looking for, is looking for, and will always be looking for in humans. He stood alongside Abraham, pointing him toward the stars, telling him that he would be a blessing to the world, that the blessing would come through his seed, his offspring. Abraham believed God and, as you read Gn. 12 and then 15, you can almost feel the whole cosmos breathe a sigh of relief as God finally was able to account to one of us a thing called righteousness.
Trust. That’s all God wanted then, and it’s all he wants today. Not trust in an angle, a window, or a hermeneutic. Not trust in the Bible or the church or a particular sort of church. Not mere belief in facts that then allows one to continue in rebellion. God counts as righteous those who trust him. And our mistrust was so deep and ugly that he had to strike a contract with us on the basis of blood, the blood of his own Son, a God/man who died but wouldn’t stay dead, and who reversed the ancient curse, giving us all fresh hope.
The image of God throughout the first 15 chapters of Genesis is simply gut-wrenching. It’s the image of a wealthy father giving his goods to rebellious children who want it all for themselves, children who end up floating in the flood or stacking bricks toward the sky, children who had forgotten him. And then he made a promise to an old shepherd, the shepherd believed, and the two of them–God and man–had relationship! That’s the beginning of restoration. That was the signal that God wasn’t going to leave us drowning in the sewer but that he’d come get us, that he’d show us the way out, if we’d just trust him.
That’s what reality boils down to now. God coming alongside each of us, that is, Jesus pointing us to the sky and making a wild promise, a promise that requires us to trust that he can create something out of nothing (our own nothingness) and give life to the dead (our own deadness as well as a captive creation). See Ro. 4 & 8 and determine if this is right or not.
I’ll end this where it began. God’s story is much larger than our little religious stories. His story is one of regenerated humans (Jn 3), reigning with him in an all out effort to bring light to the world (as the Father sent me, so I send you), so that in the end the world is redeemed and restored, heaven comes down to earth, and finally . . . finally we can be with Him face to face on the basis of grace and trust. Beware of the lies that highlight little and rather uninteresting stories. They may promise spiritual food, they may look good to all who share the same window view, and they might even promise to make one wise, but if you eat that stuff, you will die. (see Gn 3.6).
Let those who have ears to hear, hear.
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Blessed are the mighty, they shall inherit the earth. That makes perfect sense, right? So who can take a man seriously who’s under the impression that it is really the meek who are happy, and the meek who will inherit the earth?
That’s part of the challenge of following Jesus. Anybody can go to the cross for forgiveness, believing gospel facts; i.e., that Jesus died, was buried, and has risen from the grave (I said anybody can, not that everyone will). That requires belief not faith. Mere belief is sort of like what you know about Abraham Lincoln or Hitler–it’s historical fact. But faith goes much farther. Faith is trust, not just that someone will save you, but in the case of Jesus, trust that He knew what He was talking about, that He knew something about how to live a blessed life now and forever.
But it’s hard to trust someone who sounds like a lunatic. If I say to you that if you turn loose of the ball in your hand the force of gravity will push the ball up into the sky and deep into outer space, you’d think me certifiable. There are common sense laws that we all live within, laws such as gravity, and principles within which we can find happiness. And everyone knows as a matter of principle that it’s the mighty who are happy, the mighty who get the property, who own the stuff, and who will eventually inherit the earth.
To suggest that the meek will inherit the earth is to suggest that gravity pulls objects away from the center of the earth. How can anyone trust a person who can’t even accurately state the principles that the rest of us are so keenly aware of?
As I said, this is part of our challenge. When we trust Jesus we follow him, and we allow his worldview to invade, erase, and replace our own. What does meekness look like? Watch Jesus walk to the cross without using his infinite strength to harm a flea. Though treated unjustly he didn’t retaliate, curse his enemies, spit back at the crowd, cause fire to fall on the heads of the Romans nor cause the Jewish leaders to whither as he did a fig tree a few days earlier. Meekness is strength under control.
At a young age we learn to use our power to get out way. When we were hungry, we screamed until someone poked a nipple in our mouth. When we wanted someone elses toy, we yanked it out of their hands and cried Mine! When we were kids in school some got to the front of the line because they were big enough to do it without challenge. Others used the power of their sex appael, their comedy, their verbal manipulation. Those with lesser “powers” were confined to the back of the line. And now that we are big boys and girls we find that our culture still rewards the mighty, the person who unleashes his or her power in an effort to get in front of another at work, on the highway, in the home, the neighborhood, and in the churches.
Here’s the narrative we are called to live within. There was (and is) a God who took on the form of humans, lived on earth for three decades, loved everyone to perfection, taught by example and word, and was mercilessly murdered in the most humiliating manner imaginable, and though he had the power to prevent his own oppression and disrespect, he kept it under control in order to sacrifice his own interests for the sake of all others. He considered others more important than himself, all the way to the last drop of blood had dripped from his dangling body. All the Jewish leaders were forcing their way to the front of the line, fighting fiercly with Roman leaders for position in life’s long line, and God was little more than a nusance, held with contempt, and treated as if worthless. And yet, because he was meek, he’s inherited the earth he created. If he’d followed Satan’s advice, and took the earth by the force of power (desert temptations), he’d been in front of the line for a few years, and that would have been the end of the story. But he was blessed, happy, full of joy without compromising one inch.
That’s the story we must trust, the narrative we have to work into our lives, finding along the way that God is right and the culture is wrong–blessing is for the meek. The mighty get the property today, but the meek get the earth tomorrow. And the meek get property today if they so desire, it’s just that they don’t have to grab it by manipulation or force. If we say we believe it but don’t live it then Jesus has no practical effect on our vision of reality. If we believe in Jesus but never learn to trust him, failing to follow him, then we entirely miss the point of everything that matters.
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It’s impossible to look well-off if at the same time you’re being transparent, admitting weakness, or at times looking as if you’re falling apart. But Jesus said Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Lots of our energy is spent pretending. Pretending we’ve got it all together, pretending we’re better people than we really are, pretending we aren’t afraid, pretending we aren’t worried, pretending we’re spiritual when we know we’re slaves to an innerness that is more shadow than light, pretending we are younger than we are, pretending we’re smarter than the next person, richer than than the other guy, etc.
We pretend because we’re born into a world that prizes youth, smarts, physical beauty, wealth, power, health–all of which fit nicely under the heading of “having it together,” or being well-off, or blessed.
If we’re not as well-off as we’d like to be, it’s much easier to pretend than to suffer the humiliation of being found imperfect, wrinkled, flat-chested, broke, sick, or a slave to our desires–donuts, sexual, material possessions.
The last thing anyone wants to do is mourn. Mourning doesn’t fit in a culture that prizes blessedness under the terms described above. Mourners are like lepers in our society. We don’t know what to do with them or what to say to them. Stand at the head of a casket and listen to the parade of stupid cliches well-intentioned people blurt out in an effort to comfort those who are in pain (I’ve blurted my share). Why do we avoid those who mourn or find ourselves so ill-prepared to comfort them? Because we’d rather keep our heads aloft in our fog-filled culture filled with unreal tones and expectations rather than face the facts. People hurt. We hurt. And at any moment we’re precariously close to being outed as an imperfect specimen whose teeth and emotions have been bleached white so as to hide the stains hidden under the thin veneer.
At this point Jesus says something completely opposite the culture’s message. The culture says look well-off; Jesus says being well-off depends on authenticity. It’s when we are honest about who we are that we find comfort. The artificially bright-toothed individual who’s smiling even as her white teeth are aching with cavities will never find comfort until she sees the dentist.
Our churches, or else some of our leaders, seem to be more in step with the culture than with Jesus. “You’re OK just as you are.” You’d think that mindless statement came right out of the Holy Bible as often as it is trotted out in our worship services in one form or another. If we tell that lie to each other long enough, we will come to believe it. I’ll pretend I’m OK just as I am, and I’ll lie to you and pretend that you’re OK just as you are, and we will sit on our pews under the silent realization that the one thing we aren’t is OK.
If we are OK just as we are, we don’t need Jesus. To pretend that we are OK and that all we need is just a bit of Jesus’ blood to take away our guilt problem is to turn grace into a license to embrace the culture, its standards of well-offness, its pretensions, and its lies.
Here’s a news flash that may not be popular but is at least true to some extent for most of us. You’re screwed-up. Your body isn’t perfect and will never be and the fact that you’ve spent so much money to conform to the culture is an indication of your screwed-upness. You’re not the richest person on the planet and that ring or watch or car or house isn’t going to change that reality. You’re always going to need more stuff to feel well-off on the basis of wealth. You’re going to die, and all the fake boobs, botox, hair color, or spanks in the world isn’t going to keep that from happening. You’re getting older every day. Your innerness and outerness are in a war with each other and have been since the day you were born. You innerness wants to live forever but your body is marching toward a grave. You’re incongruent. Your life is full of dissonance, sour notes–not just perfect ballads. In a sense, a real sense, you’re lost. The real you is buried under the layers of cultural quilts we tend to cover the self with from the time we hit the playground. You’re haunted by the voice of your long, lost self, though you can’t seem to uncover the hidden you. Each time you try to rip off an artificial layer you endure the pain of leprosy, the pain of being real in a culture that demands phoniness. And this culture dominates churches, covering you with religion, pushing the self deeper and deeper into smothering darkness.
To all of that Jesus says get real. You don’t have it all together, you’re not always OK. Mourn, then you’ll be comforted. Unshackling Jesus at this point, however, will be a bit like trying to cut yourself free from a rope after you’ve swallowed the saw. We know what we need to do, but we just don’t want to endure the pain necessary to freedom. In response Jesus says, Blessed are those who mourn.
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If you’re a parent like me, you know there are all sorts of things your children can do to make you proud. In the case of Kim and me, we beam at the knowledge that JT (20 yrs old) is continuously looking for ways to delve deeper into Jesus’ life, to help others do the same, or sharing his gifts leading worship. And Alex, who is 16, is spreading his wings with his first job working at chick-fil-a in a local mall. He told me how that he was on break a couple of days ago when he overheard a young, very obesse man telling someone on the other end of a pay phone that he needed a ride. He’d walked 15 minutes to get to the mall so that could apply for a job, but insisted his ankles hurt too badly to walk back home. Alex waited until the loud conversation was over and asked if he could get the stranger anything. He said, thanks but that he didn’t have any money. Alex went to the register and bought him a drink.
I’m deeply grateful that our two boys are living off of kingdom resources rather than believing every lie our culture promotes. If Jesus is the center of our universe we radiate something of his likeness. If we’re the center of our own universe, we’ll ignore the pain of the world rather than have any sensitivity toward others or realization of the difference we can make. Part of what makes us deaf to need around us is our own constant attempts to grab happiness for ourselves–a selfish sort of snatching and clawing that makes our neighbor our competition rather than a companion to serve.
Jesus insists that we must rise above our thinking; we need a fresh look at the world and how it works. Throughout his life he tells us how to live and shows us how–especially as he dies. He wants us to live lives of blessing, or lives in which we’re well-off. He’s teaching, however, contrasts with the messages we hear all around us.
If you want blessing, be poor in spirit; yours is the kingdom of heaven. The reign of God, his profound influence upon the earth, isn’t dependent on gold bars, bank accounts, exceptionally well-paying jobs, or living in the right zip code. When we attempt to get blessing by means of wealth we find a sense of well-being to be allusive. Blessing can’t be grabbed. Eve tried it long ago and it backfired.
I heard a grinning preacher rattling his jaws on TV yesterday about how we can get health and wealth if we’ll just say positive things like, “I deserve good health. I will be wealthy,” etc. Jesus never even hinted at such a shallow gospel. It’s a wrong-headed gospel that has great appeal in a culture that worships wealth and youth. Unfortunately there are always going to be charlatans who’ll use any means necessary to swell their memberships, massage their egos, and enhance their own bank accounts.
Jesus taught that we’re blessed if we are content with nothing, that is, if we are poor in our spirit, realizing the lasting value of God’s kingdom. When Paul described his battle with sin in Romans 7 it was covetousness that he described as invading his flesh and making him captive, or a slave to it. To covet is to not be content with the things we have, supposing that we will be more full, happier, more richly blessed if we can just have the object of our desire.
But Jesus teaches us to be content, to find satisfaction in God’s kingdom, a sphere of power and influence that doesn’t care about the leading economic indicators. Part of the suffering we’re called to endure is putting to death the part of us that depends on something other than God’s kingdom in order to be well-off. Having a good job and being able to afford a nice home, a car, to pay for your kids education–those are all nice things, but our sense of well-being doesn’t come from them. Our sense of well-being comes from knowing that we’re OK regardless of external circumstances. What would we do today if we lost everything money can buy? I know it would be extremely painful, but what would we do, throw ourselves off a tall building, bury our head in the sand, or curse God and die?
The person is most blessed who needs the least in order to be happy. If you’re thrilled just to be alive, but I can’t be thrilled with life unless I’m surrounded by things money can buy, who’s the one that’s really well-off? If we’re poor in spirit, we’ll know we’re richly blessed with whatever we’re given by God’s good grace. If we’re rich in spirit we will not consider the self blessed or the object of God’s grace unless we are getting the stuff we want.
Buddhism and Hinduism teach that we can be happiest when we detach from our desires, including material wealth. Jesus doesn’t want us to be passionless. He teaches that the problem isn’t desire, but desire for the wrong things. He teaches us to settle into the kingdom of God, to find happiness in him, and to be good stewards with the little or the much we happen to have some say over. The original sin included a failure to be satisfied with God, to trust him for well-being. That thread is weaved throughout history and continues to be a bold color in the fabric of our lives today. Isn’t it about time we took Jesus seriously? There are multiple layers of covetousness that cover our spirits and we need to be careful and attentive if we are to seek God’s Spirit to aid us in this weakness. Begin by paying attention to what stirs your soul today. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself captivated by the desire for stuff. You’re in good company; we’ve all been tainted with the same poison. But don’t imagine you can change by a mere act of the will. In order to get to a place where we stop grabbing for happiness and just let God bless our lives we need to reflect (see # 4), to rise above our ordinary thinking so that we can see reality for what it is, and to really shift our perspective, we need the Spirit of God acting in our lives while we cooperate by suffering for a long time with him.
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Repent. That’s not a warm word. It feels icy, a bit like a command that’s thrust at us, and our immediate response is to cringe in expectation that it will hurt. We associate repentance with giving things up. But the word has Greek roots. Metanoia means above or beyond our mind. To 
repent is to get above our own mind, to transcend our own thinking in order to think a new thought our two. When John the Baptist, for instance, insisted that the Jewish elite manifest (in some tangible way) that they’d repented, he wasn’t suggesting they do penance, say 10 our Shemas or pluck their beards out one hair at a time. He was simply saying, Show us you’ve changed the way your think about the world. Tax collectors asked John what they should do. He told them to stop taking more money from people than was authorized . Soldiers wanted to know how they should manifest their repentance and John told them to learn to be content with their wages. The crowds were told to feed the hungry and to share clothing with those in need. None of this, that is NONE OF THIS was a form or penance in order to make up for sin, but was simply the natural result of getting beyond one’s typical thinking about how the world runs (selfishness, greed, extortion, oppression) and living within a radically different worldview, a worldview wherein Love reigns supreme, a worldview Jesus was coming to explain more fully.
Jesus preached a simple message: Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Basically he was saying that God’s reign had come to earth and repentance was the necessary condition for stepping into it. In other words he was telling listeners to rise above ordinary thinking and to see things from his perspective. He taught people to let go of anger and contempt, lusts, manipulation, vengence, hatred, religious performance, etc. In other words, he threatened to turn lives inside out and upside down with a way of being that encouraged self-sacrifice, vulnerability, a refusal to slap back, and the relinquishment of oppressive power.
In order to create disciples, followers who’d be like him, Jesus did not focus on the outside but on the inside. And this is where we’ve totally missed the boat in terms of his message. If we’re going to unshackle him and take his message seriously then we’ve got to break the chains that tend to keep him tied to pulpits where really stupid things are often said in the name of Jesus. Real Jesus and church Jesus aren’t the same two beings; one’s authentic and the other has become a ridiculous parody!
Church Jesus—you know, the safe, flannel-board, blue-eyed well groomed , perfumed Jesus—supossedly taught a form of repentance that means that we stop doing certain things while beginning to do other things. Don’t murder, don’t abort babies, don’t vote democrat, don’t drink or smoke or cuss, don’t miss church, give at least 10 percent of your income to the church, read your bible, pray, and above all keep your eyes on heaven because this world is not your home . . . “you’re just a passing through,” etc., etc.
And all of that looks swell except for the fact that we still don’t see churches that are learning to live without anger, that aren’t still full of more than their share of Christians hooked on porn (according to every survey ever conducted on that subject), who have given up on verbal manipulation (often engaging in it in both public sermons and long-winded prayers in worship), who want revenge for those who offend us (screaming at traffic on the way to and from church or else turning church business meetings into war zones), and who unapologetically pray that the U.S. physically destroy its enemies or else pray ceaslessly for our folks in uniform while failing to offer one word up to God for the sake of our enemies.
Do you see my point? We’ve embraced a form of Christianity that ignores Christ! The present religious situation is such that a person can be an outstanding “Christian” on the basis that he’s arranged the outside of his life in a particular way without ever being challenged to actually rise above his own thinking. And that’s precisely what the church Jesus has been twisted into–a teacher of superficial doings who was mostly concerned with eternity (meant as “life after death”) rather than life lived in the present.
I have a suspicion that if Jesus was walking among us today he’d demand that we repent of being Christians. That is, he’d challenge us to rise above, to get beyond the level of our ordinary thinking with respect to what it means to be a Christian. Jesus and Christianity are very different. Christianity cares about what we do. Jesus is concerned with who we are. Christianity, as it typically exists, generates a certain way of doing things. Jesus regenerates humans, transforming them from the inside out, insisting they die to the self, and as Paul points out, this is a form of suffering that we are supposed to share with Jesus.
And it all begins with repenting. It all begins with a new way of thinking about everything. After all, the kingdom of heaven is still at hand and we can step into if we will rethink our strategy for living. Christians who still stand outside the kingdom (some thinking it will not come until a millenial reign) can step right into it today. It’s available if we’ll unshackle Jesus from religion so that he can actually make a difference in lives from the inside out.
So the message continues to be important to restate: Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
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Governor Sanford’s mistress declared, “I can’t redirect my feelings and I am very happy with mine towards you.”
As I mentioned in #2, we can all relate to that statement. Again, the apostle Paul was quick to point out that when he wanted to do right evil was close at hand, indicating furthermore that sin had taken up residence in his flesh, his body parts. We have to take Paul seriously if we’re ever going to escape slavery to our feelings. If we can’t redirect our feelings then we, as Paul confessed, are wretched men. Of course Paul pointed immediately to the solution–Jesus.
Jesus knew the power of feelings within the self. He battled his own feelings in the wilderness and in Gethsemane. He met a woman at a well who’d been the slave and victim of her own feelings. She was thirsty and the force of the conversation clearly suggests they weren’t talking about mere water. She’d had five husbands and the man she was associated with at the time wasn’t her husband. We all crave relationships. When we’re rejected time and time again we become damaged goods. We weren’t created for rejection, we were created to blossom in a field fertilized by grace–acceptance and gift. Jesus offered her water of the sort that would quench her thirst forever. The water Jesus offered was the Spirit (see Jn 4 and 7.37-38). When we’re in Jesus and he’s in us we can be full and the shallow, yammering sort of feelings which tend to dictate our actions begin to lose their appeal.
And it’s the Spirit Paul points to in Ro. 8. When we move our lives over into Jesus’ reality he gives us the Spirit who helps us in our weakness and cuts loose the cords that keep us imprisoned to our feelings.
Feelings are good, but as others have pointed out throughout time, they make good servants but poor masters. To say that we can’t resist them is to allow them to dictate our lives.
Jesus deals with feelings in words recorded in Mt. 5. It’s our desires that make us monsters and murderers. Anger, lust, the will to power, the thirst for revenge, hatred for enemies, the prideful use of religion in order to get status, anxiety . . . it’s all there, and Jesus tells us it has to cease being part of our character if we are going to live well-off, or blessed lives.
Few lies are as deadly to our souls as the lie that we can’t redirect our feelings. If we can’t redirect our feelings then we have to act on impulse. The will is both impulsive and rational. Kids act on impulse. Watch them in Toys-R-Us. They want what ever happens to be in front of them at the time. But we grow up and learn to control our desires within the broader scope of what’s rational. A dog in heat acts on impulse. Are we no higher than the dogs? Are feelings such as anger, sexual lusts, the will to power, revenge, jealousy, selfish ambition—are all of these completely irresistible? To live as a blind slave to such feelings is, as Paul put it, to be dead in our trespasses and sins.
But being rational isn’t enough is it?. That’s the rub. Highly intelligent people, thoroughly rational folks have behaved in the most bizarre manner when the will is taken out of the CEO’s chair and replaced by feeling. The S.C. governor is just the latest example. And the rest of us have experienced the power of our own feelings at various points throughout our lives. We’ve all felt like we couldn’t resist our feelings with the rational mind, whether it was the desire for a slice of pie, more possessions, anger, revenge, sexual lusts, anxiety, or religious pride.
Jesus doesn’t tell us to bone-up on logic so that we can rationally deal with our desires. He offers us water–the Spirit. It’s only when we begin to yearn for God’s Spirit to come to the assistance of our own spirit that we begin to taste the freedom known only to transformed, recreated humans. Even then a battle will ensue within us. As Paul put it, the Spirit wages war against the flesh (Gal. 5). But as time goes on our own spirit gets back on the throne and begins to manage the feelings. I’ll not suggest we ever really control our feelings entirely, but we can manage them. We can learn to discipline the self so that feelings don’t determine action. And we do this under the mysterious direction of the Holy Spirit.
Who is well-off? Who is a blessed person? Not the indulgent, impulsive, feeling-directed typical person of the 21st century. There’s a reason why there’s so much loneliness in our culture, so much unhappiness, so many prescriptions for anti-depressants, so many outrageous attempts to simply “feel” alive. To pursue feelings as if they are an end in themselves is to live a life with a crushed soul. We are never satisfied on the basis of feelings. We will forever thirst and never find enough water. Real life begins when we are reflective enough to consider what it really means to be a human, to be a created being with a spirit—personal power designed to live in the spectacular grace of God, being known and cherished by Him, and coming to know and cherish Him through the perfect expression of Himself, the Man, Jesus. And we are really blessed if we find ourselves in communities of recreated humans who stop the rejection, the attacks, and the withdrawals that define so much of human interaction.
An unshackled Jesus confronts us on the sidewalk, in our homes, at work, at play, and in church. He has absolutely no desire to make religious people who sing sweetly but live sourly. He didn’t establish a religion to be manipulated by men and utilized by slaves as an artificial sweetener to make us feel good for a few moments each week. The striking thing about Jesus that allows him to tower over me, and anyone else like me, is that he could resist his feelings without being reduced to a Spock-like figure. He felt the whole gamut of feelings without becoming the slave to them nor did he become a cynic, an Aristotle, or a Buddha. He was a man, a real man who in one long walk to a place called The Skull resisted his feelings—no anger, no verbal manipulation to get him out of a tough spot, no revenge heaped on those who were brutalizing his innocent body, no curses spewed upon his enemies; and in those moments he showed us the power of his teaching. His words were never simply academic, they were meant to be trusted for real life because the naturalized behaviors put on us by the sin structures of world lead only to death. He followed his own teaching, finding power to resist his feelings on a bloody cross, and by dying to self (selfish desire) showed us what a God really looks like as scandelous as the whole thing seems.
And we were made just a little lower than the Gods. In jesus we can really be well-off. But we have to suffer with him (see Ro. 8.17f). And the suffering Paul has in mind in that context has to do directly with this discussion. We must reflect on the self, see the parts that need their own crucifixion, trust Jesus as our guide, and allow his Spirit to put to death the deeds of the body. We, therefore, will all taste something within ourselves of the epic battle between good and evil. And it will not be easy. It will not be religious. It will not be soft and perfumed like our worship services. It will look more like the road to Calvary. That’s why Jesus invites us to pick up our cross and follow him. At the end there will be a death that will mark the beginning of life.
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Governor Sanford’s mistress in Argentina wrote him the following in an e-mail last year: ”Sometimes you don’t choose things, they just happen … I can’t redirect my feelings and I am very happy with mine towards you.”
Like everyone else, I feel for all involved in the South Carolina governor’s situation. As he said, lots of people are hurt. But we need a reality check, and who better to turn to than the author of reality–Jesus.
With reference to Maria’s note above, indeed we don’t always choose things and, yes, somethings just happen. Cancer isn’t chosen, it happens. Our height isn’t chosen, it happens. Floods and tornadoes aren’t chosen, they happen. A sexual fling never just happens. Indeed, it’s not always as simple as saying it’s chosen. It can be more complicated than that. But it doesn’t just happen like cancer or tsunamis.
Jesus insisted that it’s the stuff on our inside, the spiritual part of who we are, that defiles us (Mt. 15.10f). He declared plainly that “… for out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, . . . “These are what defile a person….” Mt. 15.19-20.
Part of the human dilemma rest in failing to grasp what Jesus is saying or to do anything about it. For those who claim to follow Jesus it must be understood that the key to living the sort of life he lived is discovered when we decide to really take him seriously as a guide into real life, trusting that he knows what he’s talking about and responding appropriately.
And he challenges us. He says basically, you’ve all heard that you shouldn’t commit adultery, but I’m upping the stakes, I’m telling you that if you allow yourself to turn someone into a sex object by intending to lust after them, then you’ve already committed adultery in your heart (see mt.5.27). The point is that if we’ve not been transformed on the inside then we will forever be the sort of people who live in the slavery that admits, “I can’t redirect my feelings.” The person whose inner world is full of adultry will at some point commit the physical act. Why not? We act out of our innerness. The religious masks we learn to wear to church offer no power in dealing with the lure of sex, power, and pride.
We are complicated creatures. We’ve been trained by structures of evil to behave in deadly and self-destructive ways. Salvation in Jesus doesn’t just mean we get our sins forgiven so that we can continue to live dreadful lives until we float off to the sky one day. Salvation, according to Jesus, means a rebirth and a dying to the old self.
Paul talked about this in a statement we can all relate to, a statement that captures the essence of what Maria wrote above, and no doubt what the governor felt from time to time. Paul, the great apostle, noted, “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” Ro. 7.21f
Understand what he’s saying. Sin is in our members, in other words our flesh (sarx), or our body parts. It’s been in you from a very young age and it will haunt you until you, by the power of the Spirit, “put to death the deeds of the body.” Ro. 8.13. Don’t we all know what this feels like? Haven’t we all found ourselves in situations where it felt as if we didn’t choose it, but that it was just happening? Slavery is the best word for this, because at such times our spirit (will) wants to make one decision but lacks the power, the body takes over and basically does what it wants to do. We have habits of sin in us, and sometimes out of the blue something triggers a yearning (for power, some material possession–maybe just a donut, or a relationship) and suddenly we’re fools with spirits (our innerness) chained to our body and seemingly helpless to choose anything!
Paul declared that we don’t have to live lives of desperation, slave-lives leading to destruction and unhappiness. He insisted that we can enjoy freedom in Christ. And that freedom means that we experience a transformation of our inner being so that we don’t twist people into mere sex object mentally. And if we can’t imagine it, we won’t do it. But transformation isn’t a one-off event that happens when someone is converted. It requires discipline at the feet of Jesus, following him in order to be like him.
But we have to take Jesus seriously; we have to unshackle him from the pulpit and the classroom and notice him out there in the gritty situations of life. Jesus said we have to die to the self if we want to live. He said that if we abide in his word, we’re really his disciples, and we’ll know the truth and the truth will set us free from slavery to sin (Jn 8). Abiding in his word means that we take it seriously and give it a try. If we do, we realize he knew what he was talking about, in fact, we come to realize that he towers over everyone who has something to say about living a good life.
If our lives are portraits of confliction, appearing to be one thing for the sake of on-lookers on Sunday morning, but monstrous, dark, and frighting on the inside—if we aren’t choosing life, but merely experiencing what’s thrown at us, then Jesus has a gospel for us. He’s got good news! His way of putting it was to describe himself as the true Vine, the Father the vine dresser, and us as the branches. His point was that we can connect to life’s true source and live in joy (see jn 15), or live lives full of a sense of well-being. He’s the true source of the joy-filled life. And a primary means of his grace is his words. He said that if we abide in him and his word abides in us then we can ask for whatever we want, and it will be done for us. Radical! We don’t have to live like slaves on the outside or in the hidden world of our innerness. We can be completely changed and made whole–the same person on the outside as on the inside.
Tomorrow I hope to write something about feelings. Maria from Argentina indicated that we can’t redirect them. That’s slavery. Jesus has a gospel that will set our feelings free too!
This is much longer than intended but the news of the morning gives me an opportunity to relate Jesus to a concrete example which I hope in some way helps you. There’s much more to be said about Jesus’ gospel and its effect on fallen humans but not enough space to deal with it here. Hopefully this will spark some interest for you to carry the thinking further in your own search for truth in Jesus. The first step is simply a desire to be free from the slavery of or body, our flesh. That is, the first step is to invite Jesus to make us kings and queens of our own kingdom with a spirit that actually gets its way over the clamouring noise of our body, our feelings, and our various social contexts. We don’t have to know how in the beginning, we simply need to begin to trust Jesus as our whole-life coach, guide, and King.
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