a touch of truth…
One of my favorite lyrics comes from Jeremy Camp: “You gave me truth that lies could never reach.”
Here’s one…
“Every word of God proves true…”
This clause in Prov. 30 hit me profoundly this morning. It isn’t that I haven’t read this verse before. I read it right near once a month. But, I’m learning that Spirit pops things out when we’re going to need it. I don’t know when in the next bit I’m going to need this truth, but it will be there for me.
To take this thought to the next level, here’s a glimpse into how I’ve been reading Proverbs lately…
I’m testing a hypothesis. Test it with me:
–> Every time you see the word “word” apply the John 1 principle and think Jesus (the Word).
–> Every time you see the word “knowledge” substitute Jesus.
–> Every time you see wisdom, substitute Holy Spirit.
–> Every time you see “fear of the LORD” think Father.
With these substitutions see if the verse makes sense, perhaps even more sense…
In this vein of thinking, I take this clause from the verse in Proverbs this morning a step further and ponder it this way:
“Every [word=Word=Jesus] of God proves true…”
“All of Jesus who is God proves true…”
Work with it a bit and see how it goes…
1.30.10 been awhile…again…
Thanksgiving has come and gone. Christmas has come and gone. Now we’re headed into the second month of the new year. Time doesn’t slow down. All has been good. Really, really, good. Contentment is something I’ve always struggled with, but I’ve got something like it right now. It came from finally learning two truths I’ve always known. Jesus really does love me, and God really is in control (so I don’t have to be).
The wild part is that nothing is as I expected…
–> I’m not working on fixing a big organizational mess.
–> We’re living in Seward.
–> We’re pregnant.
…and it couldn’t be better…
–> I’m having a ball working on building a new company, which is better than being the employee, even the top employee.
–> We live in a very comfortable, paid for house that literally houses most of our memories.
–> I’m able to operate completely outside of local politics.
–> I’m largely able to work from home, and when I’m not at home I’m 3 minutes away.
–> We have another little one on the way, which we didn’t expect, given that we were unemployed and all. How cool to think that Jesus would make it abundantly clear that He trusts us with another one.
Like I said, all good.
why pray…
I was praying one morning last week. I pretty much messed it up by spending prayer time thinking about praying. It is the curse of the overly analytical to ruin the activity by pondering the activity. Still, the questions came, and they make me think:
- Why pray for one thing or another to happen when I already know that You are in control?
If You are in control, and it is happening, it is happening under Your control. - Why pray when I know that You already know the situation?
It isn’t like I’m bringing some mess to your attention that you were previously unaware of. - Why pray when You know the end from the beginning and the beginning from the end?
Am I going to change Your mind? If I did, what does that say about You? or Your control? - Why pray for Your will to be done?
Back to the first question. Your will will be done. More accurately, Your will is being done. - Why pray when Paul told us we don’t even know how or what to pray?
He’s right…
What I want is most likely what I don’t need.
My initial impressions, assumptions, and partial understanding leads to wrong conclusions.
I’m selfish.
I fall asleep when I pray.
I get distracted when I pray.
I ramble in my prayers. Really bad.
Most of the time prayer is a bailout plan.
I know the technical answer to the question of why we pray. It is about relationship. But, if it is about relationship, consider what kind of a partner we are in the relationship. Think of what a “normal” prayer list looks like…the one in our church’s prayer meeting looks something like this:
- 4 cancers
- 3 travelers
- 2 pregnancies
- 15 sick in the church
- 6 extended family medical issues
- 5 unsaved
- 2 jobs
- 4 soldiers
- smattering of unspokens
And what do we pray:
- 4 healings
- 3 safeties
- 2 safeties
- 15 healings
- 6 healings
- 5 salvations
- 2 jobs
- 4 safeties
- smattering of just do something, something good…
Where’s the relationship in this? I can easier find a rut in “normal” prayer lists than a relationship. Where is Your will in these prayers? I can easier find my will than Yours. Really Jesus, teach us how to pray…
words that just shouldn’t be used…
I go to a church that believes the King James 1611 is the only inspired Bible for English-speaking people. My Pastor is pretty good about not making this a huge issue, which is a good thing. I can’t say the same for the majority of the guest speakers that come to our church who seem to think it is a badge of honor to speak of their love for the translators of King James I. They even have songs about it.
I don’t hold this view. I read the introduction to the 1611, the fancy one that they put on the final draft/edition of the 1611. In their own words the translators, who did do a very good job, never claimed that their translation effort was divinely inspired in the same way the writing of scripture was divinely inspired. They even noted that others would come along behind them to do what they had attempted to do, to bring the Word of God to the common person.
Yesterday, I ran across this:
Acts 1:20
20 For it is written in the book of Psalms, Let his habitation be desolate, and let no man dwell therein: and his bishoprick let another take.
At the risk of sounding like a juvenile chuckling at the back of the auditorium, there is just something wrong about using the word bishoprick. I really try to have a sanctified mind, but I can’t help it when they used the word bishoprick. There is no way that you can read that word, moreso if someone actually read it out loud, without starting into a Beavis and Butt-head routine. Even my spell check had problems with bishoprick. There is just no possible way that the only inspired Word to the English-speaking world can include bishoprick. It isn’t common language. It is just wrong.
Alister McGrath, in Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, observes:
- “It is beyond doubt that the King James Version of the Bible was an outstanding translation by the standards of 1611 and beyond. Yet translations eventually require revision, not necessarily because they are defective, but because the language into which they were translated changes over time. Translation involves aiming at a moving target that has accelerated over the centuries. Living languages are developing more quickly today than at any time in their previous history.” [emphasis added]
Small print disclaimer: I love the Bible. I really do. I used the King James for a long time. It works. I still have great respect for it. I respect my Pastor’s position, and only teach in our church out of the King James. I’m fine with that (as long as I don’t end up in Acts 1). Not all translations are equal. Serious Bible study should be done in a reputable word-for-word translation. I love my ESV Study Bible. It doesn’t say bishoprick in Acts 1:20. It says “office”. I can understand office.
a reformed rapper…
I don’t like rap music. I have never liked rap. I tried rap a few times, but I can only say that I listened to rap twice. I don’t think either time counts. My first real experience with rap was listening to Run-DMC. I don’t think it counts. I only listened to Run-DMC because they were rapping an Aerosmith song. It can’t count because Aerosmith is a bunch of white guys who weren’t rappers beyond the occasional line or two that was rapped to create cross-over appeal.
The second time I listened to rap was during the One Bad Pig phase of my not-so-Christian Christian walk. OBP didn’t count for two reasons. First, I figure that OBP wasn’t really rap. But, they did yell and screamed a lot and they didn’t sing much, so it seemed like rap to me. The second reason OBP didn’t count was that I wasn’t listening to it for the music. I was listening to it because I wanted other people to hear me listening to it. It was outrageous, but Christian! I only did this because I was making a point. I don’t know what the point was. I’m sure that whatever the point was the point wasn’t a good one. I think it was my way of railing against the man, the independent fundamentalist version of the man. Yeah, that is just about as pathetic as it sounds…So, if I had really tried rap, I’d probably would have liked it to the extent that the man didn’t, if that makes sense.
My dislike for rap doesn’t come from a belief that rap is inherently evil. Much of rap and rap culture was, and probably still is, though I wouldn’t know, evil. I’d have to work hard to define any form of music as evil, but rap for me was nowhere near the line. Besides, labeling rap inherently evil would have been completely hypocritical for someone who listened to as much classic rock and 1980’s big-hair-bands as I did. I might have liked classic rock’s version of evil more than rap’s version of evil, but Jesus probably sees it as pretty much the same in the end. I don’t like rap because I don’t like to listening to it. It is hard for me to hear it as music, in much the same way that I have a hard time hearing clanging, twingy, pingy Indian and Asian music as music. For that matter, I’d say about as much for orthodox Jewish music. It is noise when I hear it. As the mostly wicked movie taught, I can listen to the music, but I can’t hear the music.
These are the facts I was fine living with. I could simply say in one sentence that I don’t do rap and could walk away from the conversation. But, today I had to reconsider. I might have made two fundamental mistakes in giving rap a bad rap. (Like you didn’t expect that pun…)
I tried the wrong rap. The rap that broke out into popular culture was wrong. People who didn’t love Jesus had serious moral and sociological issues with the lifestyle and culture that mainstream rap advocated. Tough to redeem. I didn’t need to or want to listen to songs of anger, pride, fatalism, sex, violence, degradation of women, and gang mentality. At least I didn’t want to hear it in rap songs. In fairness, much of my musical diet during the late-80’s and the entire 90’s might have included most of these themes. It would seem that I just liked a different sound to my sin. Still, rap as I knew it was wrong rap.
The second mistake was not knowing how to hear rap. I listened to rap, but I didn’t hear rap. I listened to the music and couldn’t hear the words. The words were moving too fast, and with the music not much louder than the words, how was I supposed to listen to the music and keep up? I think that with rap you are supposed to hear the words first and then listen to the music. Given that you can find most of the musical side of rap in other musical genres, the thing that makes rap rap is the lyrics and the lyrical approach. Rap is about words. It is about words as much or more than music. Words lead and music is context. Rap is first heard through the words and not the song.
Perhaps my challenge with rap comes from that fact that this isn’t how I listen to music. When I buy a new disk I want to hear the whole disk through. On the first trip through I’ve already decided I like this song and that song based on the music that hooks me. I might pick up a few cool lyrics and lines on the first trip through, but mainly it is the music. It will take weeks to figure out the lyrics to the songs, often after cheating and using the cd jacket. I take nothing from lyrics and their importance. I like deep and meaningful lyrics. I like lyrics that take time and repetition to unpack. I believe lyrics are important and powerful, for good and evil. I do not think music is inherently flawed if I don’t get all the lyrics the first time through. The point is that in my experience and musical taste, most times I’m trying to figure out the words of the song long after I’ve identified with the music. To overstate the point, sometimes the words in song are more like bonus points. They are an integral and powerful add-on to something even more important, the music itself. (How else can one explain the pervasive presence of muzak?!)
It is here that I was challenged most today. Let us assume it is possible to find redeemed rap, even reformed rap. Let’s call it right rap. Right rap would make me think twice about rap.
I’ve already stated that I didn’t reject rap out-of-hand based on it being an inherently evil musical genre. If I did so, I’d have to toss out all secular music (for the independent fundamentalists, remember that this would include a lot of the classical stuff and some of the country and western) along with any Christian music that goes beyond psalms and maybe hymns played on anything other than pianos and maybe unplugged acoustic guitars. Now that I think about it, I would have to toss the hymns because some of the old ones were set to traditional (think pop culture) pub (think bar) tunes. And the guitar, well, the Devil used the guitar that was once acoustical and he made it electrical. Must mean there is something inherently evil in the guitar, so we’d better not risk it. Then again, the Devil used a fiddle in Georgia, so we might have to eliminate the fiddle and folk music too. And, a fiddle looks a lot like a violin, so we might want to get rid of those too. Of course, violins are a big part of classical music, so that probably proves the Devil is in violins and we were right to toss out classical music because it was secular to begin with…Of course, in doing this I would have completely have violated the scriptural principle found in said Psalms that we are to create a new song, but sometimes we just have to suffer for our beliefs…
Still, saying that I don’t reject rap on principle isn’t the same as saying I gave right rap respect. Some argue that right rap is closer to sermon than right rock, because right rap is defined by words. It is sermon in song not songs with sermons. If right rap is a sermon, the definition of good rap is based on how the words connect to the Word. Could right words make rap right? Put another way, how do we know if the punk rock-type screaming Pastor is more or less right than the John Denver-type wussy voiced Pastor is right more or less than the country music-type good-ol’ boy drawl Pastor is right?
If it is true that there is right rap then I have to think about what I’m missing because I stopped listening to rap because of rap music. This might be the exact problem. Perhaps I need to listen to the rap, and then worry about listening to the music. Maybe when right rap connects with my head the music will sound different. Maybe it won’t. But, even if it doesn’t I still might learn something. This might be the redeeming value of rap. As long as it is right rap I should learn something before I turn it off. You’d have to. The words are out in front. Rap is defined by words and the use of words. Words create ideas. And, Alister McGrath, in Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, states that “Ideas shape actions and attitudes.” If hip hop and rap are a cultures that need Jesus, there would seem to be a role for right rap and rappers. Put another way, how would hip hop respond to the screamer? the wuss? or the good-’ol boy?
Jesus can redeem anything He chooses to redeem. I found out today that there really is such a thing as a reformed rapper. I don’t mean reformed in the sense of he’s out of rehab and living a clean life reformed. I mean that the doctrinal underpinning of the life and lyrics of the rapper come from the protestant reformed school of thought–the Luther vs. Zwingli and Calvin vs. Jacobus Arminius (such a cool name you have to use them both…) style of predestination, justification by faith, big God/little man theology school of thought. C.H. Spurgeon got rapped, if that is a word.
I don’t wake up most mornings thinking about the theological implications of rap. Well, I can honestly say that I’ve never woken up thinking of the theological implications of rap. So, credit for this vein of thought goes to an interesting interview on the 9marks website. Mark Dever, Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., interviews Shai Linne and Voice about the role of rap in Christianity.
shai linne
Check it out, and see if it doesn’t change your thinking, maybe just a little bit…If you are into rap, Capitol Hill is an amazing and largely old-school church that sings hymns in corporate worship. Only hymns as I understand it. But they aren’t legalistic about it. They love hymns. And, they are good at singing them. The congregational singing on the Sunday morning I was there was better than most choirs I’ve been part of. Hearing the congregational as a choir proceeding on in perfect and heart-felt, four-part harmony when the piano and organ dropped out was in itself a spiritual experience within the broader Sunday morning service. That rap gets air time with Dever and CHBC is a cool thing for rap. If you aren’t into rap, you just might have to think about why…
http://media.9marks.org/
if nothing else, check out the discussion starting at 43 minutes and running through 46
mistakes…
6:49-7:12 am, a Tuesday, in September…
Jesus, Pastor says that You didn’t make a mistake when You made me. Pastor said this after laying down a pretty solid biblical analysis that proves his point from the letters of Paul and Peter. I agree with Pastor’s statement. I know it is true. You don’t make mistakes. This is my theology. And, I just know it to be true.
But…
I made mistakes. I can’t use the argument that I didn’t know you Jesus. I did. I knew better. I did it anyway. Peter and Paul told me that I don’t have to make mistakes. I did. Sometimes, I can’t let go of these mistakes. They haunt me. I take them seriously. They had affect and effect, then and now. You said that You took care of my mistakes, but look at what they did to You, as well as me, as well as others in my life…I believe You don’t make mistakes, so I know I’m the problem. I live as if I am. I take responsibility. My bad.
Now that I think about it, mistakes are interesting. They become collectives and patterns. Patterns because mistakes aren’t one-off. Collectives because a mistakes become patterns and patterns morph into conglomerates. Conglomerates can become identity. If a conglomerate of mistakes becomes an identity, then…I’m a mistake? No, can’t be. You don’t make mistakes. Perhaps failure fits better? No, can’t be…
Before first light and coffee, when the mind is still “booting up” the day’s philosophical framework and Your thoughts have space to creep in, for a moment, things look different. Plain, maybe clear. Sort of like how it is supposed to be, except that it seems backwards. Practical theology conflicts with cognitive theology.
october, already…
It is already the first of October–in 2009. We are enjoying a beautiful Indian summer in Alaska. The leaves are still on the trees, we haven’t had a hard frost, snow has descended no more than a third of the way down the mountains, and the skies have been clear for the most part in the last couple of weeks. I love fall in Alaska.
Much has happened in the past couple of months. I was able to go on a sheep hunt near Delta, AK with my father and brother-in-law, Larry and Lar, and we were successful in taking and packing out two full-curl rams. No small task, to say the least. I killed my first moose, and was able to enjoy sharing that experience with my oldest son Kade, who was on his first big-game hunt, and my buddy Matt. Shooting that moose was one of the coolest experiences of my life, as well as an enormous answer to prayer, given that we were really counting on the meat for the winter. We sold the trailer, but our house continues to stay on the market along with 100+ other properties in the greater Seward area. I’ve taken over part of Kade’s schooling, which I enjoy, because I get to work with him and it is a literature-based program. Keira turned 5 and Gabriel 8. Laurie had a birthday too, and I love her more than I ever have. She is so cool…
I also went past the one-year unemployment mark. This is an occasion that calls for ponderous thought. Actually, this is a pretty cool thing that Jesus has allowed. Awhile into this “sabbatical” I made a very conscious decision that I wanted to give my family a year where they weren’t the shared priority. I’ve come to see more and more over the past months how much I missed of our family life with work, work travel, and work stress. (There was a smaller, though similar corallary with church, church work, and church politics that was in play for awhile.) I came to appreciate more Laurie’s challenges with having to share so much of my time and attention with others. I came to reflect on how many times I said something like:
“Not now Kade, Dad has a meeting” or
“I’d love to Ethan, but I’m on a deadline” or
“Gabe, I really do want to come home now, but I really need to call someone back” or
“Dad doesn’t want to leave you to go on a plane for a business trip, Keira, but that is what Dad’s have to do…no, Dad doesn’t like meetings more than kids…” or
“Gideon! Put Dad’s blackberry down! I need to use it to send a message to someone “real quick”…Did you really dial Senator Stevens’ office?!” or
“…Well, I’m not going to recap the “conversation” Laurie and I had over breaking another commitment because of some emergency or the “discussion” we had when I was late again for one thing or another…if you are married you can probably figure this one out…
For a period of time, I have had the ability to break this cycle. At first, I wasn’t very good at it. I had to keep up with emails, to read books, to run a big road trip, to do anything or something that felt like it was “important and future oriented”. I started out trading one urgency for another; a self-absorbed tendency that I think is driven by an inherent need to feel like I’m always doing something “really important”. But, I came to learn during this last year–this cool but likely unsustainable season of life–that my really important thing wasn’t something outside of my house. It was being the Dad without distractions. I can’t remember the last time we couldn’t do something “because Dad has to _________ “. My Gideon doesn’t really remember Dad having to be gone all the time. Little Camden has never known anything but having Dad around all the time. All my kids are praying that I can figure out some way to work from home. I’ll save the blog post on pondering home business opportunities for those whose skill sets are dealing with politics, chairing meetings, creating conceptual models, discussing literature, podcasting sermons, reading dead white guys, and making a great french press cup of Starbucks coffee for another day…
I still struggle from time to time, but I think I can say that I’ve spent a year making choices where the pendulum swung to my family versus anyone or anything else when there was a conflict of priorities. (This would explain the lack or lateness of phone calls and emails, lunch or coffee meetings, and networking for career planning/job hunting, blogging, etc.) It changes you when you break out of the cycle, the rush, the rat race, the norm, and you get a plain cel phone instead of a blackberry. Your priorities are different. It leads to a quandry of figuring out if you have to walk away from a level of engagement with your real priorities that you’ve come to desire so much because it is time to head back into the “real world”.
I’ve come so far in shifting gears that I’m not even going to bother with the normal disclaimer that in the past I’d have felt compelled to give stating that I know how weird a place I’m occupying right now, about men and their responsibilities, the real world, get a job, yada yada yada…
Jesus needed to teach me something, and given that it has taken more than a year I accept that I’m in the remedial class…
We preach that a man’s first responsibility is to God, then to his wife, then to his family, then church and work come into play. I believe this is the correct order. I think I balanced things between these categories well and did so through some fairly challenging circumstances. I know that I can say that I tried really hard and that I was willing to set aside many other competing interests to focus on the above list of responsibilities. But, there was a fallacy in my efforts.
In balancing things I wasn’t living priorities. Somewhere between being a liberal arts major living in a gray world who married a black-and-white world-view woman and had six kids and chose an independent baptist church and being a type-A, overly analytical, and obsessively engaged leader I found what I thought was a reasonable balance in life. Having a sense of balance is not the same thing as having priorities. The fallacy was to define balancing priorities as making priorities equal. My challenge was to figure out how to do more in all sectors of life to keep the balance between all the major components of God, marriage, family, church, and work in an evenly distributed state of high-level engagement. This almost invariably led to defining priorities by time allocation. I reduced the time I spent in the office, but still had to spend the majority of my waking time there. I spent the reduced work time at home and with my family, though the quality of the time was never the same when I couldn’t leave the stress at the door knowing that I had things left undone at work. I’m a preaching junky, so I was pretty faithful to put in the church time. But, I sat through message after message that told me that I wasn’t doing enough, and that I needed to do more. But, with the family time we’d carved out after a long business trip… If I’d have pondered my priorities I would have realized that prioritization revolved around the time barriers allocated to major segments of life. As long as I wasn’t violating the time barriers or as long as I had a sense that I was making the time segments look more like how I thought they should be prioritized I was balancing things well.
Yet, my family never sensed that they got all that they needed. I regretted missing so much of the day-to-day activities of my kids. I was never able to clear my desk at work or to feel like I was completely on top of what needed to be done. I know I wasn’t. I disappointed people at church because I wasn’t involved in every ministry. Jesus suffered the most, because, in the end, He got the short stick on time and our time together was focused on dealing with all my challenges in the other major life categories. Laurie was probably a close second to Jesus, which is my view of her in general, but as it relates to my time with her I recognized that the marriage box and the family box were often compressed such that she got very little time that wasn’t already in the family category.
And, when there was too much to do to keep them all balanced (because there was!) I employed the Gramm-Rudman approach to “balance the budget”, knowing that none of these sectors was willing to demand less. Across the board cuts seemed the only equitable way to balance priorities. In the end, this meant that I gave everything less than I could have. It means that I was always stealing the focus from one sector as I tried to balance the others. I diluted my influence in every area of life, because I robbed the present with anticipation and anxiety about the future and what I should or could have been doing in the other sectors. In the end, I checked the box in all categories, but I lived in a constant state of feeling regret that I was never giving enough to any of the things that matter most in life, my priorities. In the end, I spent less time with my family than my employees. I spent less time with my wife than I spent with my kids.
And, I spent less time with Jesus than my wife.
By definintion, making something a priority means that it isn’t equal to the things around it. My friend Carl would call this voting with your feet. You can say all day long what you think or believe or intend to do, but the rest of us just watch where you go and what you do. You constantly make choices as to what you are going to do in the moment you have, and, ultimately, you vote with your feet. This means I wasn’t living my priorities. I was balancing, and it was an act. I don’t have a clean conceptual model for this one yet, but I do see that prioritizing is balancing without evenly splitting things over the fulcrum. The conceptual model would need some work, given that you probably need the right fulcrum, the right things to balance, the right straight surface, and an ability to keep things from sliding off the bottom end.
All this probably explains why I’m still unemployed. I’m learning a lesson about balance and priorities. I finally feel like I’m living my highest priorities. There is very little balancing involved. I can see a positive difference in my walk with Jesus, in my marriage, and in my kids. I’ve found it is easier to balance things when there are fewer things. You just lop off major categories, like employment. I’ve already conceded the point that I’m in the remedial class, so this isn’t a mark of maturity or a model for all to try. But, I figure Jesus needs to keep me in class a bit longer. My fear, and probably His, is that if I get back in the game, the race, and on the blackberry, I might forget this little lesson. Now, to make this sustainable…
pondering calvin…
To all three of you that might actually read this post:
Been busy doing a myriad of home improvement projects to get the house ready to sell and we had family in town the last couple of weeks. So, I missed making a post last week. I’ll assume it was predestined to be so, because this is what I have to make up for it…
Here is one to ponder from John Calvin’s Institutes…
Legal vs. Evangelical Repentance
Immediately after developing his robust definition of faith in Institutes III.2.ii, Calvin discusses repentance and grace in III.2.iii. He makes a distinction between “legal repentance” and “evangelical repentance.” Legal repentance is the view that says, “Repent, and IF you repent you will be forgiven!” as though God must be persuaded into being gracious. It makes the imperatives of obedience prior to the indicatives of grace, and regards God’s love and acceptance and forgiveness as conditional upon what we do—upon our meritorious acts of repentance.
Evangelical Grace
Calvin argued that this inverted the evangelical order of grace, and made repentance prior to forgiveness, whereas in the New Testament forgiveness is logically prior to repentance. Evangelical repentance, on the other hand takes the form that, “Christ has born your sins on the cross, therefore repent!”
What this means is that repentance is our response to grace, not a condition of grace. The good news of the gospel is that there is forgiveness with God and God has spoken the word of forgiveness in Christ and that word summons from us a response of faith.
Credit for this content goes to Jul 21, 2009 post <http://theresurgence.com/calvin-on-faith_grace-and-repentance>.
For the Armenians in South Carolina, a good follow up to this is Driscoll’s Predestination message in the Religion Saves and 9 Other Misconceptions series. I don’t care where you are at on the doctrine, his presentation is the best on the issue of predestination I’ve heard. You must make sure that you make it all the way to the end and hear the analogy he uses from an experience with his young daughter. If it doesn’t move you, nothing will.
what do you know?…
I’m currently teaching a class on how Jesus=Knowledge=Jesus.
The premise is: the head drives the heart that drives the head.
A message by Pastor Mark at Mars Hill (a message so good I drove back to hear the same service twice) from 2 Peter 1:1-4 was powerful in starting me down this scriptural pathway. I have been hounded by vs. 2-3:
1 Simeon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ:
2 May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.
3 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, 4 by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. (the amazing ESV study Bible)
I have significant challenges with living like I believe the doctrine of regeneration, which is the content of verses 2-4. I didn’t see this problem when Pastor Mark was teaching through vs. 2-4. I saw it when he went further and preached through vs. 8-9:
8 For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins.
Read “nearsighted” in vs. 9 literally. When all I see is me and my perception of my life and past and potential, which is looking about as near as one can, I am blinded. Specifically, I’m blinded by my pride. If I take these verses seriously, this means that my pride allows me the audacity to exalt my view of my life and potential over that of Jesus. This means that I am in the category of Christians who put themselves as a god just a little higher than I AM. This has to be the case if Jesus is willing to forgive me of my sin and past, but I’m unwilling to forgive myself of my sins and past. What a kick in the spiritual tail.
Peter quite specifically tells us that Jesus gave us all that we need to live right and righteous. If I live today like I can’t get my act together, or if I wander about under a muddled cloud of regret about how I’ve messed up so often in my past, or if I believe the delusion that I’m not worthy to be used by Jesus going forward I am quite literally looking at Jesus in the eyeballs and telling him that all doesn’t mean all. “Sure Jesus, you can say that you died for my sin and forgave me, but you’re only saying that because you are a loving God. Loving Gods always say things like that. That isn’t how the real world works. See, I can see all my sin. The reality, Jesus, is that my sin was bigger than what you and that love stuff can deal with. Let’s be pragmatic about it…I’m not God, but…I can see this one more clearly than you, because I don’t have on those love colored lenses. Not to worry, I’m man enough to accept that this is my burden to carry. I accept my sin, and I’ll be man enough to hunker down and carry it through…”
This observation hit me like a ton of bricks. I don’t usually get up in the morning bent on making myself god. But, in reality, I do.
Having said all this, my struggle with living regenerated isn’t what Jesus is hounding me with. What He’s hounding me with is knowledge. Every time I go back to this passage my mind is drawn to knowledge as the driver for justification (v.1) and regeneration (v. 2-4). Going further, we see that knowledge of Jesus in v. 8 is something that can be made ineffective. Knowledge isn’t a loose collection of facts. It is something alive, more specifically it is someone who is alive. Everything that a Christian has, or could have, is completely predicated on knowledge of Jesus. This is what has been hounding me. What does this phrase really mean? I don’t have all the answers, but here is where Jesus took me this week…
- Need grace–when the bureaucrats are remapping your yard into a flood zone?
knowledge of Jesus = My grace is sufficient for you… - Need peace–when two people you love are tanking their life and marriage and kids by chasing sin?
knowledge of Jesus = You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you... - Need power–to get out of the funk that comes through a spirit of discouragement when a house sale falls through and you begin to think that nothing ever seems to work like it is supposed to?
through knowledge of Jesus = His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness…
Maybe some of you are like me. Often, when I read a passage like this my brain kind of glosses over it because it is vaguely familiar, which is to say that I’ve heard certain tag lines from the passage in messages throughout the years and there was a general sense of this being a positive passage. It is a form of saying, “Oh, that’s nice…”
The gloss came off for me. The “foolishness” of preaching broke open 2 Peter for me, and the Holy Spirit has been driving this principle so deep into my brain that I can’t read any scripture passage without seeing the truth of 2 Peter 1. Try out Eph. 1:17, 4:13 & 23; Col. 3:1&10; Rm. 1:18-23, 10:1-14; all of Job 38; Prov. 1:7, 2:1-5, all of 4 with focus on 20-23 (read father as “God the Father”), 15:13-15, 19:2, and the list goes on…
I struggle. A lot. I don’t like this fact, but I’m learning to recognize the spiritual battles in my life. More specifically, I’m learning to recognize that much of my struggle comes from playing god, and I’m not good at being god. Given that I’m not good at being god, I’m learning to let Jesus be God. But, I’m not really good at that either. I have hope. I have hope because I have the answer. The answer is simple, in that it is nothing more than always actively pursuing knowledge of Jesus. I’m still trying to figure out what that means exactly and in application, but I know that it is the answer. So, until I figure it out all I know is that:
- I’ll read about Jesus
- I’ll study Jesus
- I’ll teach Jesus
- I’ll listen to podcasted sermons about Jesus
- I’ll write about Jesus
- I’ll sing songs to Jesus
- I’ll listen to songs that sing about Jesus
- I’ll read books about Jesus and the things that Jesus cares about
- I’ll hang out with people who love Jesus
- I’ll learn to see people who don’t love Jesus through the eyes of Jesus
- I’ll figure out how to connect everything to Jesus
- I’ll talk with Jesus
