Jun 2 2012

Does God want you to be happy?


God wants you to be happy! This seems to be the prevailing teaching coming from today’s Christian preachers and teachers. Those who will follow Jesus are promised “a better life” by sincere people.

One of the most often quoted passages of scripture is this one.

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. (Jeremiah 29:11)

This verse and others are often taken out of context and applied broadly so that people are led to believe that all God wants for them is a life of sunshine and butterflies.

The truth is that your life might get worse, not better, if you devote your life to Jesus. Consider this passage from Hebrews 11. Many people who consider this chapter to be the “hall of the faithful” have evidently never read the whole chapter.

Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life.  Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment.They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword.They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated— of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. (Hebrews 11:35-38)

This is a description of people who were sold out to God, they were people of great faith, and great faithfulness. They were not “happy”.

When the great Apostle Paul received his commission to take the gospel to the masses this is what the Lord himself said about him.

But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name. (Acts 9:15-16)

That Paul would suffer was as certain as that he would take the gospel to the masses. He was not told to expect happiness.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, we American Christians face little suffering because of our faith. In most of the rest of the world suffering is seemingly “normal” for believers. Frequently I read of Christians murdered in some far away country. What is their crime? They follow Jesus, that’s it.

Does God want us to be happy? Or, maybe we should ask “Does God want me to be happy?” The answer is clearly NO!
He does want us to have joy, and overflowing.
He does want us to have peace, it’s a gift from his grace.
He does want us to be content, whatever our circumstance.
He does want us to know and believe that everything we experience as believers are parts of a whole work by him that result in our best interests. (Romans 8:28) Suffering of all kinds is routine and should be expected. (Romans 8:17-18)

You may be asking, “Why would you write a post like this?”. It is a good question and I’ll give an answer. Several months ago my wife and I and others were part of a class at church for new Christians. One of the participants was a young man with a very bad past. He had been a Christian for only a few months. He tearfully told our group that his wife had deserted him, he had lost his job, he was being evicted, and he had no transportation. Now for my reason for writing this post. He was convinced that somehow he had failed since things were not going as he thought they should. He was very unhappy! I explained to him that his relationship to God is not conditioned upon how well he performs. We cannot measure our standing with God based on day-to-day circumstances.

This young man is typical of tens of thousands who have been taught that God wants his people to be happy and when you are unhappy it’s a sure indication you have failed or that God is not pleased with you at the moment. Each of us follows Jesus imperfectly. God’s love is “unconditional”. He is not fickle as we humans are. He does not turn his love on and off based on how we respond. We very often bring trouble on ourselves by making poor choices and acting in ways that are against God’s instructions but we can’t blame the results on God. Even our mistakes, yes, even our sins will be used by God for our good. We most likely can’t even begin to see the good at the moment but we must trust what God has promised. The life we live is a life of faith. Faith says “What God has promised is true no matter what I am presently seeing with my eyes and hearing with my ears. He will do what he promised”.

Dear friend, cling to God with all your might in the middle of your darkest night. When hard times come, (and they will come), instead of questioning your own performance and questioning God’s love for you, rejoice! Trouble in the life of a faith-follower of Jesus is a reminder of his love! You can confidently take God at his word.

May 24 2012

You can’t tell a book by it’s cover


Many thousands of years ago God gave Samuel a lesson about how to choose a leader. Just as Samuel was about to anoint the wrong person God gave him this admonition.

 “But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1st Samuel 16:7)

Samuel was using the only criteria at his disposal as a man to pick a leader. He could only judge with his natural senses. Each of us are like Samuel are limited to what we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. None of those or a combination of them were good enough to judge with worthiness of a man for God’s use. Neither are they good enough for me to judge you and your relationship to God.

Obviously, what we see and hear give us some great insight as we observe others. But as God told Samuel, we are limited to the external part of each other.

It’s very interesting that God gave his law, a written code, on tables of stone. “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy” was one of the ten commandments. He was pretty clear about what he wanted and rejected. Some of the Jews insisted God hadn’t said enough, so they added amendments. They wanted to “see” if someone was observing the day or not so they fixed it. They added about 40 things that were forbidden and under many of those were further additions so that finally there were literally scores of laws, any of which if broken by a Jew make him guilty, presumably before God. They went to such lengths that in their minds Jesus was guilty of breaking the law because he forgave sins on that day!  To add to the confusion, different groups of zealots had different laws about the Sabbath Day. Does this sound familiar?

God says to Christians “Don’t neglect to meet together as is customary to some, to encourage each other…” (Hebrews 10:25) Simple enough isn’t it? Not a lot of rules to be broken. Ah, but along comes a legal beaver with a Wal-Mart suit and he (and others like him) makes it more clear and easier to observe. You must be at “the building” on Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and all of the days of the annual “gospel meeting” (and many, many more). Violate any of these and you are in danger of hell, that is according to the zealots.

Once you get to the “building”, God says “Eat the bread and drink the wine together to remember the Lord until he comes. Sing to each other in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs…make melody in your hearts.” It sounds nice doesn’t it? Enter elder Joe Bob Dogooder. He and his ilk insist that you sing only a certain kind of song, a certain number of songs, decide who can stand where while singing, there can be no musical instrument, no clapping of hands, no raising of hands, and no solo singing. Not very inviting huh? Well, I could go on.

Presently there is a huge push back against those of us who teach that sinners are saved by faith. That is that God justifies those who turn away(repent) from their life of self and simply put their trust (faith) in Jesus who died to pay for their sins. God calls it grace. People who claim to be exclusive representatives of God claim it’s bogus and cheap. Their claim is that God needs to see what you are doing and they appeal to James and Matthew as primary sources for their proof texts. Oh, there is Acts chapter 2 as well.

Jesus said something unusual to Nicodemus when they had their late evening chat. Jesus talked about the wind. The wind? Yes. He told this well educated Jewish leader that those who are “born of the Spirit” are like the wind!

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John 3:8)

Being born of the Spirit is not something you can see, like the wind. You can hear it blowing the leaves of the olive trees but the wind is not observable. It makes some folks jittery to talk of spiritual things but Jesus did. A true Christian has been “born from above”, “born of the Spirit”. When God justifies a sinner and makes him his child it is a spiritual transaction. In God’s kindness he has given us some tangibles that point to this spiritual event. Confession is one of those. We can hear words. Apart from the Lord’s Supper, water baptism is the most beautiful illustration of this spiritual birth. As one goes into the water his object lesson says “I am dying with Christ, dying to my old life”, and when he is raised up from the water he is saying by that “I will now live the Christ life, I am a new man”.

God made it very simple. Along comes brother Dogooder again. He redefines the new birth to no less than 5 acts, (or according to some, 6 things). It’s as if God is only a spectator sitting on the edge of his seat waiting to see if some sinner will do all those things so he can say “Approved!”. God doesn’t wonder what a person will do, he knows. Added to his omniscience is the fact that Jesus can “see faith”. He knows what is in the heart of a man before he takes a step or says a word. But we tend to want to only affirm things we can physically measure or monitor. Not so with God!

Here are two contrasting examples of this. The first is from Luke

The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all these things, and they ridiculed him.  And he said to them, “You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God. (Luke 15:14,15)

Have you ever met anyone like this? I have. Jesus set the record straight. You see, they probably had some of those who observed them believing that, with all their trappings of religion, they were really fine men of God. They didn’t fool Jesus. “God knows your hearts”! It’s good to keep this in mind. What men think is very cool and might impress God, He finds to be awful! Now the opposite example.

And after there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, “Brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe.  And God, who knows the heart, bore witness to them, by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith.” (Acts 157-9)

Peter was defending having baptized Gentiles. And, he baptized Gentiles who got the order all messed up. They received the Spirit before they were baptized and were praising God! Peter, like Jesus earlier, set the record straight. God decided that “Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and…believe”. And moreover, “God, who knows the heart bore witness to them…” God knew they had put their faith in Him before a song was sung, before the invitation was given, and before the waters were disturbed. God Knows!

It seems to me a good plan is to stay out of God’s way. Love people, love them enough to tell them the good news, and God will take care of the saving. We have the joy of baptizing them in water and teaching them to become good disciples. Gospel song writer Mark Lowery wrote a song part of which says ‘I catch’em God cleans’em”.

In my view we should stop trying to reduce God’s plan of redemption to a neat little check off sheet as if he has appointed us to grade the papers. God was doing quite well before you and I came along and he can do well without our amendments to his plans. There are millions of people who don’t look like me, sound like me, worship like me, or live like me who might not meet my approval but are some of God’s own dear children. I think it would be good for all of us people of the dust to stop trying to be God. We don’t do a good job of it.

May 6 2012

Serving in the Lord’s Army – Why I stay


Maybe the title of this article should be, “The confessions of a combat veteran of life, and following Jesus, and some of his failures”. Or perhaps something like, “Why would a slightly Pentecostal, mostly Reformed, staunchly independent person with a Baptist background continue to worship in a Church of Christ? Why do I stay you ask? First, how I got here.

I was born a poor white kid in the mountains of Western North Carolina to a small time tobacco farmer and his wife in the summer of 1945. My dad was one of 13 children raised mostly in the wilderness areas in Yancey County, N.C. There was no talk of God or of faith or church from his branch of the family. They were not bad people as people go, but not people of faith. My father had been attending church some (maybe just to see his future wife…) My mother on the other hand had a solid ancestry of believers for generations. Mom came to faith at the age of 8 and was immersed at the age of 12 and was not happy she had to wait four years.

In my youth we had only attended church perhaps less than a dozen times by the time I was a teenager. I rode a bus to vacation Bible school some, built a bird house or two, but all I knew about God was what I had learned from observing my mother’s life and my father’s strict morality that I subconsciously attributed to God.

At the age of 15 I was drafted into God’s Army. I was not looking for God or a better life, I was looking for longer cigarette butts, fast cars, a free beer, and average and up girls. A cousin’s husband invited me to sit at his kitchen table and for the first time I remember hearing it, he told me the very good news. I can remember like it was yesterday how convicted and convinced I was that I must turn to Christ. The next day, on a Sunday, I went to church and when the invitation was given I made the long walk from the back of the church to the altar area and there I prayed begging God to forgive me and stood before those people and pledged my life to Jesus Christ. A few months later, at the very first opportunity, I was baptized in the chilly waters of the North Fork River in Buncombe County, N.C.

I took liberty time on the outskirts of Sodom and Gomorrah a few times and when I was eighteen I battled for my very life in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. God was there! At about 21 I reenlisted and volunteered for infantry duty. I received my basic training at Fruitland Baptist Bible Institute and started preaching every place I could find ears.

I disagreed with my Bible professors, my pastors, and my closest friends about what, in my tender years I presumed to be legalism, and rejected it outright. I thought differently than almost all of my peers and said so. The pattern has not changed much. I am a combat vet of the darkness of rejection and divorce, and of the ugly hand of death. I have navigated through the storms and tangles of the jungles of life when at times my only companion was the Holy Spirit even when some of the messes I found myself in were of my own making. I did a short stint as a mindless Christian robot whose only job was to find fault with others in the same Army, and by doing so, to try to elevate my rank.

Finally, in the providence of God, the One who is Patience helped my to see Jesus Christ with the goggles of error, sin, and self righteousness off, and it seemed for the very first time I knew what the rest of the righteous meant. I believe my hunger for truth was a gift from God so for many years as I have followed sometimes well and sometimes not so well, at almost 66 years I am striving to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus.

Over a decade ago two widowers met and I was one of them. In 1999 I married Carol whose daddy was a church of Christ preacher. His family and her mother’s back to Adam were all church of Christ. I loved Carol and she loved me and we both were convinced that God had brought us together. The problem was that she disliked my little Baptist church and I didn’t appreciate her progressive church of Christ. So, God solved the problem by having us move from the DFW area to Monroe, LA where we would devote much of the next decade to fairly new twin grandsons and their big brother.

At the invitation of my new next door neighbor the first church we visited was Whites Ferry Road Church of Christ in West Monroe, Louisiana. I had already decided that our new church home would not be a church of Christ but, the Commander in Chief had other plans. Within the first 3 or 4 minutes after I walked into the building at WFR I had my answer from God that I was home. I have not been disappointed. Do I agree with everything taught there? No. So what? These are a few reasons why I stay.

  1. Changed lives! This morning I witnessed a man, perhaps in his late 20’s or early 30’s, declare his faith in Jesus in the waters of baptism to the applause, whistles, and cheers of the family of God. And, for the past several weeks, adults are coming to faith, being baptized, getting acclimated to a new life, and being loved just like they are. We probably have more ex-felons, former junkies, and other social misfits as members in our forever family than any place in Louisiana. I stay because I love transformed lives.

  2. Unconditional love! I have seen on display in this most unlikely setting the most unworldly love and forgiveness I could ever have imagined. People come regularly who have fallen in some way, they confess their sin, and they are literally swarmed with loving hugs, words of encouragement, and tears of joy. I stay because I’m a lover and like to be around people who love people where they are, like they are, without regard to any pay off in the future.(I must insert here that never have I had people love and accept me more than here. And, even with all my doctrinal warts and theological bumps, I have many, many dear friends in the coc brotherhood who have decided for whatever reason to love me anyhow. I am deeply touched by the expressions of love given by so many to this square peg in a sea of round holes.)

  3. Grace! In the past decade and more now, I have seen a people who were dipping their toes in the waters of the grace of God then, who are now happily immersed in the matchless grace of God and splashing it on everyone in sight. I stay because I love people who are grace-filled and are not quiet about it.

  4. Gospel centered! I live with and love with people who understand what Christ has accomplished for sinners and make much about Him! I doubt that you could find a phone booth full of folks out of our forever family who think they will be saved because they are good enough. On the side of the pulpit facing the preacher this is carved into the wood. “It’s not about me”. I stay because I like being with people who keep the main thing the main thing.

  5. Global vision! Our troops go into the highways and hedges after sinners and to the ends of the earth with the good news that Jesus has made a way out of sin and a way to “get out alive” as one of our elders says. Recovery ministry, counseling, men’s groups, women’s groups, global relief ministry, world-wide radio ministry, church planting, missions to dozens of foreign countries, etc. are the norm. And as men get old and retire or relocate to glory, young men cut from the cloth of their predecessors are visionaries who see no limit to what God can do through the power of the Holy Spirit and the people of WFR Church. I stay because I approve of this sort of missional outlook.

  6. It’s Home! It’s my family! Why would I even consider leaving? I have been invited by a few online zealots to leave, called a Satanist, and a few other things because I sometimes too loudly reject their fire-breathing self-righteous legalism and sectarianism. I’m light years away from being all I’d like to be but I am a sibling with a seat at the table. I feel welcome here, I enjoy the company of this totally odd bunch I’m on my way to heaven with. It might surprise you to know that to the last one, all of our leaders readily admit that they too are about like me. Just sinners saved by grace who still mess up but never give up. I am led and mentored by people who are still hungry to grow, to learn, and to love Christ and our fellow-men even more. I’m staying, count on it!

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Come visit me sometime. We will love you with the love of Jesus and feed you spicy food.

Joy-filled,

Royce

(This article was also published at http:www.wineskins.org recently)

Apr 22 2012

Why Jesus saves


Image “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16

Yes, God saves ungodly folks like you and me because He loves us and doesn’t want us to perish. He rather wants us to live with Him forever. Of course this is a very brief and elementary statement but none-the-less true. Tens of thousands of volumes have been written attempting to mine the depths of the doctrine of salvation (Soteriology). I will not attempt to cover that ground but I will tell you what I’ve been thinking about today.

God doesn’t save people to make them religious. Nope. It was religious people who demanded that Jesus be crucified. In fact many of those whose voices were loudest were in fact the most religious!

God doesn’t save people so they can go to church. If you think so you are wrong. There are lots of people who go to church as regular as the movements of a Swiss watch and God is offended by them.

God doesn’t save people so they will be prosperous. Do you doubt it? Try reading the New Testament. What about Jesus and his disciples, how much stuff did they own? Oh, then there is the last half of Hebrews 11… If you follow Jesus your life might not be a happy one is a gentle way to say it.

God doesn’t save people so they can be happy. Hmm, how about the great Apostle Paul, or Peter? They were beaten, thrown into prison, etc., etc. Happy? Are you serious?

In my next post I’ll talk about some reasons God saves ungodly, undeserving sinners.

Thinking out loud,

Royce