Engaging Scripture

The most important spiritual habit? – Honest Advent Week 4, Part 4

*Photo by Prophsee Journals on Unsplash*

I once had a class in seminary where we were talking about how we are embodied souls, which is our topic on the blog this week, and the professor asked the class what we would consider to be the most important spiritual habit we should practice. Of course there are the common answers of prayer and Bible study or biblical meditation, and while the professor said those were all important, none were most important. You know what he said was the most important spiritual habit? Exercise. Getting physical exercise.

What? How can physical exercise be a spiritual habit? Isn’t that contradictory? Nope. I agree with the professor. If we have a correct understanding of ourselves as embodied souls, then physical exercise can be seen, and I would say, is properly seen, as a spiritual habit. I will admit to you that I don’t always view my exercise from a spiritual perspective, but it always helps me both physically and spiritually. I’m not saying you need to run like I do. But I do ask you what it will look like to care for your body. Because when you care for your body, you are caring for your soul.

Caring for your body releases stress, which helps you think more clearly, which is good for the body and the soul. It is part of why one of the things we ask candidates at our denomination’s pastoral assessment center is how they care for their physical body. The emotional parts of ministry are hard, and without a healthy outlet they will be harder. The same goes for everyone, especially in a year like this one, 2020, which has been extremely stressed out.

Another time I had a mentor tell me that sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is….what? What do you think he might have said? It is very similar to the idea of exercise. That mentor said that sometimes, the most spiritual thing you can do is sleep. Our society tends to be sleep deprived, and that is bad for our bodies. That means being sleep-deprived is also bad for our spiritual side. Remember body and soul are linked, totally enmeshed, intertwined, inseparable. Think about it. Jesus slept. I love that the Bible tells us that Jesus slept. We could assume it. He was human, so he did everything we humans do. All the bodily functions and emotions. Including sleep. Obviously, we’re all different and that means we each need varying amounts of sleep. But it is something that we would do well to take seriously, as a spiritual practice, along with exercise, eating right, and mental health. All that we do in our body affects our soul.

What this means is that we need to consider how can we experience God in our bodies…not just our head. The primary way that people think of experiencing God in their body is by attending worship services. But I have to ask, is that all? Just by going to church worship services? Furthermore, if attending worship services is the primary way people experience God, we need to ask why American Christians have a steadily declining practice of church attendance. Only 44% of American Christians say they go to church weekly. Another 18% say they go once or twice per month.[1] If we are thinking that we can experience God by going to church, only 4 out of 10 of us are doing so weekly. Apparently we have found other ways to experience God in our bodies. Or have we?

Do we need a new view of how to embody our faith? Certainly attending worship services is one way that we use our body to engage the spiritual, and perhaps in 2021 you need to examine your practice of worship attendance. What else should we do? There is more. Check back in to the next post!

[1] https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/

Does your body have a soul? – Honest Advent Week 4, Part 3

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Does the body have a soul? Let’s talk about that. As we continue learning about embodiment during this fourth week of Advent, while we’re focusing on our physical or material side, what about the spiritual or immaterial side of humanity? Religion tends to emphasize the spiritual side. What we’ve been learning, though, is that Christians see our bodies as vitally important. Because God came to us in human form, which is what we celebrate at Christmas through the birth of Christ as a human baby, we are gravely mistaken if we think it is the spiritual side of our bodies that is most important. Both the human body and the human soul are equally important. So we must treat our body and our soul as equally important.

This is exactly why Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, “19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”

This is why we practice healthy eating, exercise, and why we avoid those habits and addictions that would do damage to our body. Moderation is a virtue for the body. These are also pro-life, which we talked about in the previous post.

At this point some might be wondering that it seems I’ve talked quite a lot about bodies. You might be wondering, “Aren’t you over-emphasizing the body? Shouldn’t you also talk about the soul? How do we care for our soul?” Good point. How do we care for our soul?

First of all, what is the soul? Pixar is set to release their next animated movie, Soul, this week, and I’m looking forward to how they describe the soul. There are Christian theologians who have misgivings about the immaterial or spiritual part of life. Is the soul just our thoughts? Is the soul just the inner part of what it means to be human, but not necessarily a separate spiritual being?

There are many ways theologians have attempted to answer these questions. We probably won’t know the real answer until we pass on to heaven. But what seems to be true, not matter how you describe it, is that we humans are both material and immaterial, we are both physical and spiritual, and every part of us is important. I don’t know if our immaterial part is body and thoughts, or body and soul, or body and soul and spirit. None of us know for sure. You are entitled to your opinion.

What I do know for sure, though, is that God the Son, who was spirit, took on human flesh and was born as a human baby with a body. We call that incarnation, which is a fancy word that means “to take on a body” or “to take on flesh.” God, when Jesus was growing as a baby inside his mother Mary’s womb, now had skin and bones just like us. It is a dramatic miraculous moment.

Think about how God identifies with us at that moment. What had only been a creator-and-created relationship was now totally different. The creator became like the created so that he could know our human experience.

That brings us back to the question of how we care for our soul. I would suggest that we cannot care for the soul, as if it is disembodied. We can’t separate the spiritual part from the physical part. They are intimately linked.

What you do in your body affects your soul and spirit. And vice-versa. If you do not care for your body, to the point where your body is affected negatively, you will automatically be affecting your spiritual side negatively too. You cannot affect one without affecting the other. Likewise, if you do not tend to your soul, to the point where your soul is affected negatively, you will automatically be affecting your physical body as well. We are embodied souls!

So how can we care for body and soul? Check back in to tomorrow’s post, as we’ll look at some practical suggestions.

Christmas and the abortion debate – Honest Advent Week 4, Part 2

Yesterday I mentioned that Christmas has a significant connection to the abortion debate. How so? Consider what we read in Psalm 139:13-16a, where the Old Testament King and Poet, David, writes: “13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16 your eyes saw my unformed body.”

We should always be cautious about creating theological views based on poetry, because poetry is notoriously difficult to interpret, mostly because it uses an economy of words and lots of figurative language. In other words, David is not writing a medical science treatise on human anatomy here. There is a major difference between a science textbook and a collection of poems. David is writing a work of poetic worship, and thus he doesn’t intend to tell us everything we might want to know about the human body.

But what about the soul? That is a theological concept. We can learn theology from the psalms, can’t we? Yes, but we also have to remember that because the psalms are worship songs, they were not originally written to give us detailed or intricate theological explanations. For instance, in verse 13, when David writes, “You created my inmost being,” is he talking about the body or the soul or both? We don’t know for sure, as this is poetry after all. Interestingly, the Hebrew word David uses for “inmost being” is literally, “kidneys,” which is really bizarre to our modern mind. Why would David care about the organ in the body that collects urine? Actually

David doesn’t care about that. Instead, he is using an ancient Hebrew idiom. An idiom is when we would say “2020 has been a dumpster fire of a year.” What do we mean? 2020 has been a really bad year. In the same way, David is not intending to talk about kidneys, but instead he is talking about our inner being, as the NIV translates it. Frequently, this word is actually translated “heart” in the Old Testament and often used along with “mind,” in verses that say, “God searches the heart and mind.” So while David is using a physical body part word, he is almost certainly talking about humanity’s immaterial part. Therefore David is teaching that God creates the immaterial part of us.

But what about the second part of verse 13, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb”? This doesn’t mean that God is at work specifically building the human body inside a mother’s womb. Instead, we know that God created the means whereby a human father and mother would create human babies. And we know that happens as cells grow and divide following the the information encoded in our DNA. Obviously, that scientific description is not what David meant. So what did David mean?

That God is a creative God. He is the creator. Furthermore, as David says, God is the creator in another way, he is the creator of the soul. Perhaps all David is trying to suggest is that at some point, the precise moment of which we may never know, God joins that soul with the body growing in the womb. In that sense, God is at work, creating the human. And therefore, a human is not just a body, but a body and a soul.

This is why Christians stand strongly against abortion. We don’t know for sure, but we believe that God is at work creating the human at the earlier stages of human growth, and we believe the earliest stage is the moment of conception. Therefore, we believe that abortion is a sin.

Also, because we are embodied souls, we don’t stop there in our beliefs about God’s concern for life and the sanctity of life. We are pro-life in a much wider sense! We are for life precisely because of our views about God’s creative work in both body and soul. Christians have strong theological reasoning, then, to be against killing of all kinds. Think about all the ways we should be pro-life. Pro-life means we don’t want people to be killed by gun violence. Pro-life means we don’t people to be killed by Covid. Pro-life means we don’t want people to be killed by war. Pro-life means we don’t want people to be killed by the death penalty. We see pro-life as tangentially related to issues beyond killing. For example, pro-life means we openly welcome the refugee and the orphan across our borders, but we do so in a way that preserves the family. Pro-life means we don’t want children to be separated from their parents. Because we believe God created humans as embodied souls, we choose to have a robust understanding of what it means to be pro-life.

It could be said that these are all political issues. I would counter that they are theological issues first. They are theological issues that have been politicized. We Christians must allow our theology to have priority over politics. When you think about these issues theologically, especially given the theology of the body, such that God is creator of the body, and that at Christmas we celebrate that God himself embodied flesh in the person of Jesus, these issues must be seen theologically first. To be pro-life is so much more than whether or not a law should be on the books banning abortion. To be pro-life is to understand how the God of life views all of life.

Christianity is not a purely spiritual faith – Honest Advent Week 4, Part 1

Our is an embodied faith. The opposite of this is the view that says ours is a purely spiritual faith. But Christianity is not a purely spiritual faith. Does that sound odd or wrong? Let me say it again. Christianity is not a purely spiritual faith. Upon hearing that some might think, “What are you talking about, Joel? Our faith is our spirituality.” Yes, our faith is our spirituality, but our faith is not purely spiritual. It is also an embodied faith. If you said, for example, “Our faith is purely spiritual, or completely spiritual, or only spiritual,” then I would say, “No, our faith is so much more than spiritual. It is spiritual, but it is also embodied. Our faith has a body because humans have bodies.”

Throughout Advent we are following the themes of Honest Advent, looking for gifts that we can give Jesus. Gift he actually wants. We have seen how we can give Jesus our vulnerability, love, identity, and today…our bodies. Bodies? Doesn’t he want our hearts? Yes. But there’s more…

Let me make a comparison to illustrate. We are different from angels. Angels are purely spiritual beings. They do not have bodies. That means, importantly, that we are also different from God. God is Spirit. God has no body. That goes for God the Father, and God the Holy Spirit, and God the Son in his pre-incarnate form. I just used a theological vocab word there. “Pre-incarnate.” Notice that I did not say, “Re-incarnate.” We hear “re-incarnate” probably more than we hear “pre-incarnate.” What’s the difference? Reincarnation is when you die and then your soul comes back as a different person or animal, and it is a belief found in some eastern religions. That’s not what Christians believe about the after-life. Furthermore, reincarnation is very different from “Pre-incarnate.” Pre-incarnate is just a fancy way of saying, “that state of being that Jesus was in before he took on a human body.” What I’m getting at is that Jesus was 100% spirit before taking on a body. But Jesus became an embodied spirit, just like us.

Christmas is the celebration of God the Son taking on a human body. His parents, Mary and Joseph, gave that little ball of flesh the name Yeshua, which in English is Joshua, and more commonly, Jesus. God had become human in the form of a tiny newborn, vulnerable baby. That’s one of the most important beliefs we Christians hold to. That one of the persons of the one true God, one of persons of the Trinity, became like us. Jesus is God who is Spirit, and who also became God in the flesh. Very much like Jesus, then, we humans have a bodily part and a spiritual part, which is sometimes called a soul. We are embodied souls.

I will not pretend to understand how the combination of body and soul works. How are we both? There is no clear consensus.

We’re pretty familiar with how the physical side works, right? Suffice it to say that a human woman and man work together to create a new human baby. Their work is physical only. They create only the physical part of the human. We believe that it is God who creates the spiritual part of humans. In his mysterious wisdom, God adds a soul to a body. God creates the embodied soul. God makes it a reality that our faith, therefore is an embodied faith.

When I think about that, the first question that comes to mind is: When do we receive our soul? At the moment of conception when a sperm pierces an egg? Does the miracle happen in a mother’s womb? We don’t know. Maybe it happens when the baby’s heart first starts beating in the womb? Maybe it happens at the moment the baby leaves the birth canal and takes its first breath? Theologians debate this, have many differences of opinion, and they don’t know for sure. The Bible doesn’t tell us the precise moment that we become embodied souls. Of course this debate about body and soul has many implications, the most famous of which in recent decades is regarding how we think about abortion.

Check back in to the next post as we continue learning about our embodied faith, and how it might relate to the abortion debate.

The Crown and how to have love that endures – Honest Advent Week 2, Part 5

*Photo by Church of the King on Unsplash*

My wife, Michelle, and I recently watched season 4 of The Crown on Netflix, a show about the current monarchy in England. The more I watch that show, the more I think it should be called “The Marriage.” Most of the central story lines are deeply affected by the various marriages of the characters. Not just the Queen’s marriage, but Charles and Diana’s marriage and other marriages too. What we learn is that even for royalty, marriage requires what we learned in the previous post, that true love is costly. How, though, do we practice love, whether in marriage or in other relationships, like those in a church family, so that love endures?

Have you ever heard of the 5 love languages? I urge you to pause reading this post and check out the 5 Love Languages website. Some people receive love through the giving of gifts. But other people receive love through quality time, or quantity of time, or other ways. People are complicated…relationships are complicated. How can you be Jesus to someone? Loving God means we want to love people.

We can really easily fall into the fallacy of believing that other people are too difficult to love, while we ourselves are quite easy to love. “Why can’t everyone just think like me? Why can’t everyone just act like me?” we think, “Life would be great.” We can especially get caught in the trap of thinking like that with our spouses.

Or maybe it wouldn’t be so great. One of the enduring lessons of The Crown is the need to learn to love and respect one another’s differences, with the clear self-knowledge that we ourselves are not perfect. We sacrifice ourselves, in love, for our spouse, for this person who can upset us, disappoint us, frustrate us, because through it all, we learn that a husband and a wife are two people who, in their brokenness, are loved by God and can love one another.

As we love our spouses sacrificially, also think about what God did for us. He sacrificially gave Jesus for us, and we were far from perfect, right? So we, too, can give our lives in sacrificial love for the people around us. We can serve them, love them, and treat them with respect and kindness.

That doesn’t mean we allow them to use or abuse us. It also doesn’t mean that we need to be close friends with everyone, such as everyone in a church family. That’s simply not possible in most churches, even those of smallish size (note that the average size church in the USA is 75), so we need to have graciousness and be okay with the fact that some people are closer with others.

I’ve heard it said that there are cliques churches, but the reality is that it is natural for people to group off into smaller bands of friends, whether a small group or a Sunday school class. This is normal, as long as we love one another in the process, and as long as we keep an eye out for those who are on the outskirts and welcome them in love.

What will it look like for you to demonstrate sacrificial love this Christmas? Do you need to have a heart check to see if you need to be more loving? One of the greatest gifts you can give Jesus this Christmas is to receive his love, become his child, and then once you are his child, whether you just became his child today or you have been in his family for years, is to love him and love one another, and then to love those in need. Our love for other people should be impossible to miss because it is so active.

For love to be love, it will cost you – Honest Advent Week 2, Part 4

I had a difficult time finding the picture above, the one with a man holding an umbrella for another guy. My difficulty didn’t have to do with the photo, but with the fact that I couldn’t figure out how to get the search algorithm to give me what I wanted.

I use Unsplash for free quality photos for my most of my blog posts. It is an astounding resource. As I was writing this post, I knew I needed a photo that illustrated love. So I typed “love” in the Unsplash.com search bar. I don’t know how Unsplash’s algorithm works, but I suspect it has something to do with the tags photographers attach to their photos. The photos my search returned were all about hearts, weddings, and people hugging and looking dreamily into each others’ eyes. Pretty standard depictions of love, wouldn’t you say?

But that’s not the aspect of love I was looking for.

Eventually I discovered that I couldn’t use Unsplash to find a photo for this post. No matter what word or phrase I typed in the search bar, I couldn’t find words that gave me pictures of the kind of love we’re talking about in the post. We’re talking about a complete love. Those depictions of love I saw on Unsplash are incomplete. How are they incomplete? What we learn as we continue our study of Honest Advent, which in week 2 is about giving Jesus the gift of love, is that love isn’t love unless it costs you.

What we have already seen in our previous posts here and here is that love is participatory in helping those in love, and today we will learn that love is selfless and sacrificial within a church family. John repeats this over and over again in the letter we’ve been studying this week, the New Testament book of 1st John. For example, he describes this kind of love in 1^st John 2:7-8 as a command that we heard from the beginning. He curiously calls it an old command that is also new. What command is John talking about?

John is referring to something he mentioned in another New Testament book he wrote, the Gospel of John. Keep your finger in 1^st John, and turn to John 13:34-35. The scene in John 13 is the Upper Room, the place where Jesus had a final meal with his disciples on the night before he was arrested. Scan through chapters 13-17 and see all the teaching from Jesus, loads of it, all on that same final evening. In 13:34-35, Jesus says this to his disciples: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.”

That command applied not only to Jesus’ disciples, but also to all his followers since. In our church families, therefore, we should be known for loving one another. Even when we think differently about things, we still love one another. If we disagree about how to handle political or cultural situations, we love one another. If someone in the church family rubs us the wrong way, we love one another.

John repeats this over and over throughout 1^st John. For example, read 1^st John 4:19-20. “You cannot love God while you hate your brother. Whoever loves God must also love his brother.” These are such important statements. If you have a broken relationship with someone in your church family, then John is saying this is a serious concern. This is why the famous love chapter of the Bible, 1^st Corinthians 13, is so helpful because it is a great place to learn what love is like. “Love is patient, love is kind, love bears all things.” We also need the words in Ephesians 4, “Speak the truth in love.” What we learn about love through these various teachers is that love is not a feeling. Love is active, participatory. Love sacrifices. Jesus is our example in that. If your love is not sacrificial, it is likely not love. True love will cost you.

For example: A key part of loving well is listening to the one you love, getting to know them. Paul writes in Philippians 1, “I pray that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight.” Love is willing to sacrifice what one feels one needs, and it asks, “What does the other need?” What the other person needs might not be what we want to give them. What the other person needs might not be easy for us to give them. Instead love asks, “What is going on in someone else’s world? What things might be going on beneath the surface?” Love is really getting to know them. Love listens.

God is love. He knows what we need. He sacrificed for that need. You and I, though, don’t always know what the other person needs. Loving them means learning about their needs. In fact, loving people will look different depending on the person. It might mean meeting a financial need, it might mean giving them extra time to themselves. It might mean just sitting quietly with them. One thing we know for certain is that real love, love that looks like Jesus loves will require sacrifice. Loving someone will require giving up something of yourself in some way for another. Loving someone will almost certainly go beyond giving them gifts that are material possessions wrapped in a package with a bow that are opened on Christmas.

True love will cost you. And it will be 100% worth it!

Examine how you love – Honest Advent Week 2, Part 3

Examine how you love. Do you know how to examine your love? Or do you just assume that you are good at loving? Have you ever thought about that?

As we continue studying Honest Advent, we are learning what gifts Jesus wants us to give him for Christmas. Last week we learned to give him the gift of vulnerability, and this week we are learning to give him the gift of love. We have been studying 1st John, written by the man who was perhaps Jesus’ closest friend (and maybe cousin!). John writes that, “We love him because he first loved us.”

Let’s start by looking at how John describes this love in 1st John 4, verse 18. I appreciate that John makes it very clear for us what this love looks like in real life. It is not just epithets, or statements about what we believe. God desire love that is evident by our actions. We show that God’s love is flowing through us by the actions of our lives. This is exactly how we see God’s love in action, right? God didn’t just say, “I love you,” and leave us stranded in our sins. He did something active about it. He embodied love, through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. His love was a body broken and blood poured out for us, which is what we symbolize and remember every month when we celebrate communion. Communion is a re-enactment of the symbols pointing to God’s love.

But perhaps even more importantly we also re-enact God’s love through the actions of our lives. Our actions, John says, show us whether or not we have God’s love in us. He goes on to illustrate this to make sure there is no doubt we understand the kind of love he is talking about. Go backwards to verse 17, and read there how John describes what love in action looks like.

We may never need to give our lives to the point of physical death like Jesus did on the cross. Some may, and many have through the centuries. But we do all have the opportunity to be generous to those in need. I would like us to dwell on verse 17 for a moment longer.

Last week I mentioned that Christmas, as commonly practiced by Christians, can be very strange, because it is Jesus’ birthday party, but instead of giving him gifts, like you would at a normal birthday party, we give each other gifts. What John writes in verse 17 is that we can give Jesus the gift of our love by blessing other people with gifts, and Christmas is as good a time as any to do so. It is not wrong, therefore, to give gifts to people, in Jesus’ honor, at Christmas. Those of you accustomed to receiving gifts for Christmas might now be thinking, “Whew. Good. Thank you, because last week you kinda had me nervous, saying that at Christmas we should be focused on giving gifts to Jesus.”

Well, take a closer look at verse 17, and you might start getting nervous again. Who are the people in John’s illustration? There is the one person who has material possessions, and there is the other person who is need. At Christmas we tend to identify with the person in need. We want to receive gifts. In fact, our culture wants all of us to identify with the person in need. But the reality is that John asks us to consider if we are actually more like the person who has material possessions. He makes it a test case for how to evaluate if God’s love is resident and alive in us. Are you and I people who have material possessions? I ask this even of the younger people who are dependent on your parents to provide for you. I ask this even of the older people who are trying to make ends meet on a fixed income. I ask this even of the people working like crazy trying to pay the bills and wondering how you are going to make it through Christmas and all the extra expense. John wants all of us to try to identify with the person who has material possessions. If we seriously examine our lives, the vast majority of American Christians in 2020, young, old, and everyone in-between, will find they have material possessions.

And what does John say about the person with material possessions? He says we should be on the lookout for people who have need, and we should give of our possessions to help that person. That is what the gift of love at Christmas looks like. So when you think about Christmas, rather than thinking about what gifts you want to receive, think about who the people in need are, and how you can give them gifts.

I’m writing this in early December, and my family put our Christmas tree a few weeks ago. As a kid, I remember looking at the space under the tree, excitedly thinking about how the space would soon be filled with gifts for me and my siblings. A pile of gifts under the tree is such a deep part of our culture. It looks so beautiful.

What John is telling us is that we should perhaps think less about filling up the space under our Christmas trees, and instead we should be thinking about how our homes and closets and attics and garages and rental storage spaces are already full! A few weeks ago some friends mentioned to me that they were working on cleaning out their storage unit, hoping to downsize because there was a lot of stuff in there they haven’t touched in years. How many of us could say that same thing about our stuff? Many of us have loads of stuff that we rarely touch. How could we use those possessions to bless those in need? Could we downsize to bless people in need? Could we sell off our extras and use the money to help people in need? What if Christmas was focused on that?

Christmas, so often, is an exercise in the rich blessing the rich with more riches. Yes, kids, I’m talking to you. And all the adults as well. The likelihood is that you don’t need the vast majority of the gifts you’ll receive for Christmas. Quite frankly, if you do have a need throughout the year, you just go buy what you need then.

The gift of love, John says, is when we open our eyes and hearts to those in need and we bless them. While it is not wrong to bless our kids and family and friends with gifts, the real heart of love in the Christmas story is God reaching out in love to those in need, to those who cannot help themselves. We show that God’s love is alive and working through us, and thus we give the gift of love back to Jesus, when we give selflessly, sacrificially to those in need.

I saw this heart of sacrificial selfless love when my congregation Faith Church, decided to loan ourselves $10,000 from our Building Fund to our Care & Share Fund, making that money available to people and organizations in need during the pandemic. To date, we have given over $8000 away. Some of gifts were matching gifts, and for some of the gifts we invited other Ministerium churches to join us, and they generously gave too. That means our $10,000 has expanded to over $12000! I praise God for that kind of generosity.

How can that kind of selfless love continue? I ask that question to all of us. Choose to have different mindset about Christmas, moving your heart from a focus on what you will get for Christmas, to what you will lovingly give for Christmas. Who are the people in need in your life? Who are the people that don’t already have abundance, and who really have needs?

How to know if you a truly a follower of Jesus – Honest Advent Week 2, Part 2

I was recently talking with someone about their spiritual journey. They said that they grew up in a Christian family, and they didn’t remember having what some people call a “moment of decision,” which is a distinct memory of their willful choice to believe in and give their lives to Jesus. You might hear some Christians call it “getting saved,” or “being born again.” It is often a powerfully emotional experience, sometimes to the point where people can remember the exact day and time of the moment, like we might ask, “Do you remember where you were when you first heard about 9/11?,” and if you’re old enough, you can tell the story. That is the experience of many Christians, but by no means is it the experience of all. Instead for many others, being a follower of Jesus is just always what they have been, even from a young child. They have never known otherwise.

As the years go by, though, most Christians call the authenticity of their faith into question. Maybe God seems distant, and they wonder, “Shouldn’t a true Christian feel closer to God?” Or maybe they’ve allowed some bad habits into their lives, or they haven’t done much to grow a close relationship with God, and they wonder, “Am I really a Christian?” It is what John describes in 1st John 4, verses 19 and 20: hearts and minds that are not at rest, that condemn us. Do you ever feel that? Do you ever wonder what it means to truly be a follower of Jesus? Keep reading!

In yesterday’s post, we looked at how God, in his love for us, made it possible for us to become his children. How did God do this? Why did God do this? Read 1^st John 3, verses 4-10, because there John explains it for us.

There John tells us that “[Jesus] appeared so that he might take away our sins.” That vulnerable baby we celebrate every Christmas would grow up to be a man who would make himself even more vulnerable through his death. Jesus did that, John writes, to take away our sins. What, then, is sin? Sin is a multi-faceted concept that the Bible describes in a variety of ways. Missing God’s mark. Doing that which God does not want us to do, whether in our thoughts, words or actions. Conversely, sin is leaving undone what God wants us to do. Sin is contrived in the Bible as an evil power that we allow to take up residence in our lives and control us. Therefore sin is very much connected to our free will, such that we choose sin. Put together, I hope it is clear that our choice to sin or to enter into sin, is an affront to God. Sin results in a brokenness between ourselves and God.

Our sin needs to be taken away, therefore, because sin is like a barrier that makes it impossible for us to become God’s children. Praise God, then, that in his love for us, he so badly wanted us to be his children that he dealt with the problem of our sin through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Look at verse 8 where John describes this: Jesus appeared to destroy the work of the devil. Throughout the years on this blog, I have referred to Jesus’ death and resurrection like this, “Through his death and resurrection, Jesus defeated sin, death and the devil.” We know that from passages like this one in 1^st John 3. Jesus was victorious over sin, death and the devil.

Why? Most obviously, because Jesus is infinitely more powerful than sin, death and the devil. But also, and more importantly, because God is a God of love. Look at 1^st John 3:16: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.”

Keep your finger there, and turn back to the Gospel of John, and look at chapter 3, verse 16. Many of you might have heard of this verse, as it is considered to be the most famous verse in the Bible. John 3:16. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” Isn’t that wild how John 3:16 and 1^st John 3:16 are so similar???

Not surprising, really, considering that they were both written by the same guy. Coincidence or not, the important point is the message that God is love, and God initiated this love for all of us, and he clearly demonstrates his love through the gift of Jesus. This is why we make such a big of Christmas and Easter. They are like bookends on the life of Jesus. Of course God’s love was clearly evident before Jesus’ birth and after his death. But the message John wants us hear and know is that God’s love is freely given. Love comes to us without us earning it. To be a Christian, John told us, is to receive love. We do not earn it. It is a gift.

How then do we receive this gift? John wants there to be no mistaking what he means. In his letter he repeats himself numerous times. Let’s look at a few of the ways John describes for us what it means to receive God’s gift of love in Jesus.

For example, notice what John says in the rest of 1^st John 3:16, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.”

We receive God’s gift of love by believing in him and we show that we believe in him by doing what Jesus did. We know God loves us because Jesus laid down his life for us. Likewise, we will show that God’s love is alive and at work in us when we lay down our lives as well. Notice, particularly, how John describes the act of laying down our lives:

“If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.”

This is a critical passage. John is saying that we can know that we belong to the truth. We can know, John is saying, whether or not we are truly children of God. I appreciate what he says here because sometimes people wonder if they are genuine Christians or not. Maybe you have had one or more of those moments where you wonder, too.

Remember the person I mentioned at the beginning of the post? They said that when they would be at a youth retreat or other church event where people would ask the question, “Are you sure you’re really a Christian?”, they would wonder and doubt the validity of their own relationship with the Lord. So they would pray immediately, “OK, God, I’m just making sure…I want you to know I really mean it; I believe in you!” But John says we can set our hearts at rest in God’s presence because God is greater than our hearts. That’s another way to say, “Our emotions do not always tell us the truth.” Just because you don’t feel close to God, or you are doubting that you are truly a child of God, it doesn’t mean that you are not a child of God. I’d like to suggest that John gives us a far better way to evaluate whether or not we are truly a child of God. John’s is a non-emotional way to know the truth: Examine how you love.

How do we examine our love? Check back in to tomorrow’s post, and we’ll begin to see what John has to say about loving the way God desires.

What it means that “God is Love” – Honest Advent Week 2, Part 1

During Honest Advent we are looking at what gifts we can give Jesus. Last week we learned that one of the gifts he wants is our vulnerability. What we are starting to find in this Advent series is that the gifts Jesus wants are gifts that he first gave us. Think about how Jesus gave us his vulnerability. He left the perfection of heaven to become human, and not just any human, but a baby human. A baby is completely vulnerable in this world, dependent on the care, the protection and the provision of other people, primarily the baby’s parents. But Jesus went even further, way further, to be vulnerable. As God he could have chosen to enter the human world from a position of power, such as being born into a really wealthy household, or a really influential household, like that of a King. Instead he entered our world in the household of lowly peasants, who were part of a people group that had almost no power or influence, the Jews in first-century Palestine. There he existed in obscurity, living a perfect life, and after three short years of ministry, he died a criminal’s death. Talk about vulnerability. The all-powerful God became a totally vulnerable baby, and then that same all-powerful God entered into death. Why? Love! Love is the next gift that we see God has given us, and that we, in turn, give back to him.

To understand this love, let’s open our Bibles. You might be familiar with the love chapter in the Bible, 1^st Corinthians 13. You know, the one that say, “Love is patient, love is kind…etc.” That love chapter gives us an amazing definition of love, but I want us to turn to the love book of the Bible because of how it focuses on God’s love. 1^st John.

So turn to 1^st John 1:1-4 and read what it says. There he writes to the Christians in his day, and all others who would read this, “I want you to know that what I am writing about, that what you have heard about from the beginning is the truth, because I saw it with my own eyes and I touched it with my own hands.” What was the author an eyewitness of?

To answer that, we need know who this writer is! From ancient times, Christians identified the writer of this letter as John who was one of Jesus’ 12 disciples. John wrote not only 1st John, but also the two other letters (epistles) that bear his name, 2^nd and 3^rd John, and the Gospel of John, as well as the book of Revelation. When he wrote, we believe he was the only one of 12 disciples still alive, and because life expectancy in the First Century was so much shorter than it is now, John was the rare man who might have been living into his 80s or 90s.

John has seen a lot in his years. The church has grown, but it has also faced persecution, false teachers, and the normal inner growth pains any organization faces. Furthermore, as the years go by, memories of Jesus fade. Imagine the weight of responsibility John might feel as the last of the original eyewitnesses of Jesus. What must it have been like to be the last person alive that actually walked with Jesus, talked with him, learned from him, saw his miracles, his death and resurrection? I can see John wanting to preserve the true memory and teaching of Jesus for future generations. So this is a letter about Jesus. In particular it is a letter about the love of God that John saw and felt in Jesus.

Look ahead to what he writes in 1 John 4:19, “We love because he first loved us.” God initiated this love. God’s love flows from who he is, John writes in chapter 4, verse 7. God’s love is entirely consistent with the kind of God he is. Love is God’s core. “God is love,” John writes in 1 John 4:16. All of God’s other characteristics are adjectives that describe his love. God is holy love. God is gracious love. God is merciful love. God is just love. God is truthful love, faithful love, and on and on we could go describing his love.

That love pours out of God. You cannot separate God or any part of God from love. It is who He is.

Here is what we read in 1^st John chapter 3, verse 1: “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” This is an astounding truth. God has lavished his love on us to the point where we have the opportunity to be part of his family, to be his children!

But how do we become his children?

Keep your finger in 1^st John 3, and turn to John’s Gospel, chapter 1, verse 12, where we read a bit more about how God’s love made it possible for us to become his children. There we read, “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children not born of natural descent, not of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” God did it. That’s how much he loves us. God made it possible for us to become his children, John says, for all humans to become his children, by receiving him, by believing in his name.

How did God do this? Why did God do this? And what does it mean to receive him and believe in his name? Check back in to the next post as we’ll seek to answer these questions.

Show vulnerability when you feel like an outsider – Honest Advent Week 1, Part 5

Being The Tall Guy At Concerts - We All Want Someone To Shout For

There’s one more story of vulnerability that I want us to learn from. Turn to Luke 19:1-9. At this point in the story of Jesus, he is on the way to Jerusalem where he will face his destiny. But Jesus is not quite there yet. He is passing through the nearby city of Jericho. Crowds continue to follow him, and on the outskirts of the crowd a man is watching. Like the other characters we’ve met, Nicodemus, the centurion and the sick woman, this man is captivated by Jesus. All three of those previous characters brought their vulnerability to Jesus, because in him they identified one who was the answer to their longings.

This man standing in the back of the crowd trying to get a glimpse of Jesus is no different. Deep down he has an emptiness, something is missing. That’s ironic because if you look at his life from the outside, he seems to have it made. He is a tax collector, in fact a chief tax collector, and that was a job in first century Palestine that could make you wealthy, as it did for this man. But it wasn’t like everyone in their school days was studying to be a tax collector in hopes of striking it rich. It wasn’t like there were so many people trying to become tax collectors that competition for the job was tough. No. Tax collectors were despised. Yeah, you could get rich as a tax collector, but it would cost you. It wouldn’t cost you financially, it would cost you relationally. Why?

Because you had to sell you soul to the Roman overlords, and at the same time you had to sell out your fellow Jews. How? The tax collectors were Jews who overtaxed their own countrymen, in cahoots with the Romans. The Romans forcibly received whatever tax they wanted, and the tax collectors profited off any additional inflated amount they charged. They could get away with it because Rome was in charge, and as long as the tax collector kept the Romans paid up and happy, the Romans were quite willing to provide personal protective services for the tax collectors while the tax collectors ripped off their fellow Jews. So as the tax collectors got rich, their friends and family hated them, calling them traitors. You know what this meant? This guy’s insides were rotting out. He probably had few friends and family, and was essentially an outsider to his own family.

He was also short. You might have heard of him: Zacchaeus.

I can see the crowd of Jews saying to him, “Get out of here you wee little man. Go enjoy your nice house and food that you stole from us.” Have you ever felt the emptiness Zacchaeus is feeling? Maybe you’ve tasted success in life, filled with things, but there is some deadness in your insides. You’ve made choices, and they turned out way different than you hoped. Or maybe you knew what you were getting into, and you knew it was wrong, but you did it anyway. It was fun for a time, but now you’re stuck in it, you hate it, you know it was a mistake, and you want out. You want a different life. But you’ve offended so many people in the process, they don’t want you back.

Are you like the traitorous Zacchaeus who doesn’t know how to get back into the family?

Do what Zacchaeus does! What does he do? He runs ahead, noticing a tree with limbs hanging out over the road, seeing that Jesus will be walking right under those branches. He climbs the tree and places himself directly above Jesus’ path.

Talk about being vulnerable. He put himself right out in the wide open, in view of everyone. For the people from Jericho who knew and hated Zacchaeus, he was low-hanging fruit for the picking, easy to make fun, to revile, or yell at: “What are you doing up there, traitor? Can’t see because you’re so short?”

Right then, under the tree, Jesus stops and looks up at Zacchaeus. I wonder if anyone in the crowd hoped Jesus was going to confront Zacchaeus, like they were. I wonder if they thought Jesus should confront the traitor! Instead Jesus shocks them. If they knew Jesus, this probably didn’t surprise them, as Jesus previously invited a tax collector (Matthew) into his group of 12 disciples. Jesus says, “Hey Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” Zacchaeus is elated! But the crowd? Not so much, muttering about Jesus hanging out with sinners.

For Zacchaeus, that bit of making himself vulnerable was all it took. Jesus noticed him. Jesus saw his vulnerability. Jesus knew Zacchaeus was empty, an outsider, and Jesus brought Zacchaeus back into the family. Just like that Zacchaeus responds with transformation, embodying a saved live.

Jesus says that Zacchaeus is a son of Abraham too. Jesus is saying to the crowd, “Zacchaeus is part of the family!” Jesus then describes one of the many phrases that emphasize his mission: the Son of man came to seek and save what was lost.

“Lost” describes the emptiness that Zacchaeus felt inside. “Lost” describes the emptiness many of us feel inside. “Lost” describes the way we feel like outsiders. When we bring that vulnerability to Jesus, he wants to save us, to bring us back into the family.

Jesus meets us at the lost point of our vulnerabilities, our weaknesses, the places where we aren’t enough or not doing it right. There he says, “Reach out to me, return to me, and there you can find what you’re looking for.”

Notice how Zacchaeus responds. He doesn’t say “I choose to believe in you.” He makes a change. He gives half of his possessions to the poor, and he pays back four times the amount of those he has cheated! When Zacchaeus brings his vulnerability to Jesus, he realizes that he has all he needs, and he can part ways with the false promises he hoped would bring him a full life. That’s what salvation in Jesus does. It brings an inward change that leads to outward change.

So one of the best gifts you can give to Jesus is your vulnerability. He is the only place we will find the true satisfaction we long for. As we begin Advent, what will it look like for you to spend time being vulnerable with Jesus? Being vulnerable can be scary, but in his loving kindness he will treat us just like he did the four people we met this week, with grace and mercy and hope. Pour out your heart to him. Be honest with yourself and with him about what is going on in your heart. Go to him in Faith. In the knowledge that he is good. That you are loved by him. That he desires to be known by you. How can you be more vulnerable, more teachable, more open with Jesus?