And most probably, so do you. I believe in God, and I believe in Jesus. That belief is common everywhere, in church goers, and with those not going to church. Growing up in a southern baptist church, I was taught that believing in God was all that was required to be saved. Believe in your heart, and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and you shall be saved. Boom. Done and thank you very much, I have my “Get out of Hell” card stamped.
The problem is what we call belief, seems to be very different that what Christ called belief. When Christ said “follow me”, He meant it. Literally. As in, stop what you are doing now, and come do what I am doing. Come follow me and be radically different. A different purpose, a different mind set, a different set of values, come be completely different than you were before. Those that accepted the invitation, really did change. They believed and changed enough that the casual observer could see a difference. They believed and changed enough that people noticed them and called them “Christ followers”. Interesting to note that early believers called themselves “brethren, apostles, disciples” not Christians.
So what happened along the way? Why are we (modern day Christ followers) not noticeably different from our fellow students, fellow employees, our fellow anyone?
I would venture to say that we have corrupted the word believe. Even the demons believe, and they aren’t going to enter the Kingdom of God. Somehow, we have allowed ourselves to think that if we accept the truth that Christ existed, that He did come to earth, that He died for sin, then we “believe”. The problem with that line of thought is that nowhere in the Bible is that enough. Head knowledge of Christ without a radical new heart, without becoming a “new creation”, without a complete and total abandonment of self, is simply not enough. The rich young ruler wanted to be a Christ follower. He believed, and he obeyed the rules and laws as he knew them. So Christ showed him all that was required to believe and follow, and that all is everything. Literally everything. The rich young ruler believed, but drew the line with his wealth. We cannot have any lines. None. Because Christ calls for “all”. And His all is extreme obedience, and honestly, an extreme denial of self, and so we have chosen to water that truth down. Watered down truth is not truth. It’s simply a lie. A really comfortable, easy to wear lie. But a lie nonetheless.

Have you bought it? Math 7:21-23 scares me. It challenges me to ask myself if I have bought the watered down truth. I go to chuch, I give money, I go on mission trips, I’m a pretty nice guy.
In short, I believe.

I’m not sure I realized there are two kinds of biblical wisdom. The first kind is “earthly, unspiritual, of the devil.” It leads to bitter envy and selfish ambition. With that envy and ambition come “disorder and every evil practice” according to James 3.
Leads me to think that so much earthly success can be attributed to that earthly wisdom. I immediately think about those men, and women, who have built tremendous financial wealth and enjoy the power that comes with it. For so many of them, there’s never enough. As T. Boone Picken’s said, the first billion is the hardest. I know nothing about T. Boone’s spiritual walk, but I think the title of his book is enlightening to the mindset that drives him, and others like him.  Sadly, it’s insight into what drives me much of the time.

I admit, I have often looked around and wished for more. More money, to make life less stressful, and to do more good things for the Lord of course. More success at work, to broaden my spiritual impact in the workplace of course. On more than one occasion, I have played the “If I won the $100,000,000 lottery, what would I do with it?” game. Of course, the first thing on my list is always tithing and fully funding a couple of international missions my family works with.   Then I get to move on to the fun part – what I would do for me. While it’s a fun game for a few minutes, it’s all too easy for me to end up really wishing for more, a lot more. Worldly wisdom thinking for sure.

So what about the other wisdom? James says the wisdom that comes from heaven is “first of all pure, then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.” He also says we should show that wisdom “by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.” I have to admit, I’m much closer to earthly wisdom than heavenly wisdom as I compare them.

Let’s take a dive into heavenly wisdom. It’s first of all pure. Pure means “not mixed with anything else” or “uncontaminated”. That’s powerful. We are to be uncontaminated, we are to be pure. With all the words of Christ regarding money, it strikes me that perhaps purity and wealth is a really tough combination. Not impossible, just a camel going through the eye of a needle tough.

Heavenly wisdom is peace-loving, considerate, and submissive. None of those words are likely to be used when someone describes me. Not that I’m a combative, rude, overbearing person most of the time, but on the day in day out scale, I’m much closer to rude and overbearing than considerate and submissive. These words speak of a deep inner peace and confidence. A peace and confidence that comes from knowing Christ. Really knowing Christ. A surface- I know who Christ is- kind of knowledge will never produce peace and a gently submissive spirit.

Heavenly wisdom is full of mercy and good fruit.  Mercy is not something that I think about often as a component of wisdom.  Mercy is compassion or forgiveness towards someone when it is in your power to punish or harm them.  It’s exactly what we want/need/require from God.  It’s not something I think about dispensing to others.  Yet Christ calls us to be merciful to others in Luke 6.  What does mercy look like in life?  What should it look like?  Good fruit is a little easier for me.  A good tree produces good fruit, a tree that does not produce good fruit should be cut down.  In the end, all that lasts of my life will be the good fruit I have done.  Not my money, my house, my clothes, nothing of this world will matter at all.  Not at all.  Only what I have done for the Kingdom.

Lastly, heavenly wisdom is impartial and sincere.  Much like mercy, I’m not sure I would ever associate impartial and sincere with real wisdom.  Impartial is being fair and just.  Sincere is being free from pretense or deceit.  Pretty straightforward actually.  Be fair, be just, be who you claim to be.

I think all of us Christ followers could use a little more wisdom.  If you are lacking it, as I am, we are told to ask for it.  And believe that He will give it to us.  I do want to be wise.  Not as the world defines wisdom, but as the Word defines it.

Can a Christ follower be main stream?  I mean, can a truly sold out, on fire, Christ follower (who is light and salt) fit right in to the world?  Christ was pretty out there relative to society.  So were his followers.  The ones who actually fit in to the world were the Pharisee’s and Sadducee’s.  They were actually accepted, looked up to, valued, and admired.  They tithed, probably better than the vast majority of Christ followers do now, they went to church, again, probably more consistently than most Christ followers do now, and they did some teaching.  All that to say, they felt like they were being good stewards of all that they had.  Yes, some were really hypocritical, but last time I checked, so are many of today’s Christ followers, myself included if we’re being brutally honest.  Most truly felt they were doing what God had called them do, and were doing what the generation before them did and the generation before them and so on.

Fast forward to today.  In my last post I talked about my house.  I love my house.  It’s way bigger and nicer than my family needs if you cut to real need.  But I’m happy there, my family is happy there, we entertain friends, we use our house for bible studies, missionaries stay with us, you get the picture.  Why am I now thinking that I am doing exactly what the Pharisee’s did.  I am fitting into culture, accepting the world’s values, and finding a way to justify it by using what I like to call relativism.  As in, compared to other people (or relative to other people) I know in really nice houses, I do so much for the church.  Relative to some other people I know, I am really appreciative of all that God has blessed me with.  The justifications go on.  I can’t help but think that on the whole, God would rather me live a little (maybe a lot) leaner and have less bible studies in my home, and more Christ in my daily life.  Maybe more money to give away.  Maybe more time and money to go and share the gospel.  Across the street and across the world.

Mainstream Christianity.  I now believe that’s an oxymoron.  Biblical Christianity was never mainstream.  The disciples and early believers broke the mold of the world, and lived lives that changed the world.  The world has been trying to force Christ followers to fit in ever since.  You know, build relationships with people, fit in, do what everyone else is doing (job, house, car) but just add a little Jesus to the mix.  Go to church, pray every now and then – and of course pray intensely when in a crisis, just be normal.  There were, and are, Christians who refused to live “normal” lives.  Strangely enough, they seem to be the ones who are actually changing the world one new Christ follower at a time.

I’m still living in my comfortable house.   But I’m not really comfortable anymore.

Take a look at Luke 16:10-15. Christ says if you can be trusted with a little, then you can be trusted with much more. Then He says “So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?” It looks like Christ is saying that worldly wealth is “little” and is the first thing we are trusted with. Makes sense actually, we can see it, count it, measure it, and feel like we own it. But to a Christ follower, it’s just the “little” that we are first entrusted with to see if we are ready for more. Ready for “true riches”.
It seems most of us are wired to accumulate, to achieve, to compete in some area of our lives. I believe it’s a God inspired wiring. The problem is, God intends for us to engage in a war (think the armor of God), to engage in a spiritual battle against darkness for eternal salvation. Instead, we take our desire to compete, and we play with what Christ calls “little”, we strive for earthly things, material things. And everyone reading this (it means you have a computer and internet access) has effectively won relative to most of the world. So we have traded the high calling of God, to bring Him glory and bear the message of salvation to everyone, for a good job that allows us to drive nice cars and have nice homes to live in. We are missing the “true riches”.
Verse 12 says “And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?” I believe Christ is saying we are entrusted with little, our worldly goods (which are not ours, but His), as a trial. Can we be trusted with things that will be burned up in a flash when He comes back? Are we swayed by objects that stay here when we die? Do we invest our most precious asset, our time, to accumulate items of literally no value in the Kingdom? Everything we can see is “someone else’s property”. Namely, God’s. As I look at the life of Christ and His disciples, I see a complete disregard for the material things of this world. In verse 15, Christ ends with “What is highly valued among men, is detestable in God’s sight.” Strong words.

My question for me is, am I chasing what is detestable in God’s sight? What if I am using my nice home to house missionaries, and student interns, and bible studies, and other church meetings? What if other people comment about how I am using my home and money for good? That makes me a good steward right? I’m not so sure.

If it’s highly valued by man, it’s detestable to God. Detestable. My house is highly valued by man. Where does that leave me?

Why are so many Christians fighting a bitter war with disappointment? When life gets hard, why is the reaction one of hurt, anger, and soul crushing despair? Cancer, death, sickness and disease, mental illness, divorce, addiction are all the reality of this world.  Why are we so surprised?  Intellectually, we know it happens, we know it’s real, but when life altering pain and suffering strikes one of “ours”, or it becomes “our” reality (instead of the abstract reality of “out there somewhere”), we act like life is so unfair and “how could this happen to me” becomes our mantra.
We cry out to God and others in our pain, and all too quickly begin to question our faith, our God, and we let our core beliefs be shaken, broken, and sometimes shattered beyond repair.
I have to admit, as someone raised in the church, I lay some of the blame there. I never heard much about suffering when I was growing up, except for Christ suffering for me. And His suffering was so I could have eternal life, which seemed like a pretty good trade from my perspective. Christ suffered, I get salvation, life is good. Thanks be to God for grace and mercy and healing and peace that passes understanding and kindness and gentleness and all that.

Except that’s not the whole story. The rest of the story is that life is hard, painful, and we all die in the end.  But as Christians, we have focused so much on the blessings of being of Christian, we are simply stunned at life’s painful, ugly reality.  It’s like we know that one side of the coin has beauty, grace, and mercy.  We’ll call that side of the coin heads.  And every day, we wake up, flip the coin, and expect to see heads.  We expect life to be good, after all, we are Christians, and God loves us, and He wants us to be happy.  Right?  And for most of us, life is heads most every day.

But one day, we flip the coin, and we get tails.   Wait, that’s not right.  Hey God, hear my prayer, I want heads tomorrow, take this away from me.  It’s not fair, I’m supposed to get heads.  I’m claiming healing and mercy.  And I’m talking about now.  Hear me Lord?

What happens to our faith when tails comes up every day for week, a month, a year.  What happens to us when we don’t get what we expect, or when we don’t get what we think we deserve.  When the  cancer doesn’t go away after chemo.  Instead, it metastasizes.  When the pain after the wreck won’t go away.  Maybe ever.  What then?  Simple, we get angry.  We doubt, we nose dive in our faith.  We get depressed.  We wonder where God is in our suffering.  How could this happen to me or my loved one?  God, where are You?

What we rarely do is dive deeper into our faith.  We of all people should know that suffering is part of life, it’s God ordained, it has a purpose.   God is still El Shaddai, the Lord God Almighty.
Take a look at 2 Cor 4. Read the whole chapter, but for now,  focus on 4:7-9 and 4:16-18. Paul says we have this treasure (the knowledge of the glory of God in Christ) in jars of clay. So our bodies are jars of clay, which is a pretty fragile container compared to jars of stone for example. He says we are “hard pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down, but not destroyed.
That cuts to the heart of our issue. Somehow, we believe that we DONT deserve to have bad, horrible, tragic, and life altering things happen to us. Why? Perhaps because we have not chosen to really understand our relationship with Christ and through Him, our relationship with God. Somehow, we expect that everything will go according to our plan. Yes, we expect it to go according to “our” plan.
Paul goes on to say that we do not lose heart. That these “light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all”. And then he tells us that we are to “fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.”  This is coming from a man who had been stoned and left for dead, been whipped 5 times, and each time was whipped the maximum number of times allowed to a Roman citizen (39 lashes).   He was beaten with rods 3 times, shipwrecked 3 times, in constant danger, thrown in prison several times, known hunger, gone cold and naked.  All while serving God as His apostle.
Paul serves as a stark reminder that we have lost our perspective completely when we fix our eyes on anything we can see, including the suffering and pain of this life.

My challenge is the same as yours in this life. Will I fix my eyes on Christ and His kingdom, or will I look around me?  Paul’s perspective was that literally nothing that happens to us on earth matters, and in fact, these troubles are achieving for us eternal glory.
That leads me to think about my relationship with Christ, and my expectations of that relationship. Next time.
Grace and Peace

If you knew you would never have to worry about money again?  If you never had to check the balance in the bank, if you could just keep pulling out the credit card and not worry about the limit (because there’s not one) and know that you will pay the balance in full when the bill comes due.  I think about that occasionally.  Mainly when I’m paying bills.  When the stress of just how expensive this life (that I’ve chosen) really is.

When Christ says no man can serve both God and money, I start to worry.  Because I seem to be serving money a lot.  And thinking about it.  And yes, worrying about it.  There was a time, very briefly, where I didn’t worry.   Life didn’t change, I just didn’t have to worry (I could always sell a little more stock).  It was a beautiful time.  But as I look back, I’m not so sure.   As I think about how do I make ends meet in a couple of months, not this month, not next, but soon, I get that old familiar feeling in my gut.  Fear.

This is when it all hits, it really matters.  Does fear take over?  Or do I believe that He is ready, willing, and able to take care of my needs?  Then I think, what do I “need”?  I’m pretty sure Christ would look at my life and say “sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and follow me”.

As I said early on, I have questions.  And I know where the answers are.  I’m afraid I just don’t like the answers, so I keep looking for different ones.

Take a look at what Mark says in chapter 1 verses 17-18.  Christ comes to Simon and Andrew as they are fishing and calls them to follow him.  Read verse 18.  At once they left their nets and followed him.

Think about that, they left their only source of income, their trade, passed down from their father.  And they followed.

What are the nets you have and won’t drop?  Is it security?  Pride?  Comfort?  Or maybe it’s the reverse, maybe it’s insecurity, or simply feeling unworthy?

My nets are not much different than yours I would imagine.  A little of all those, and a few more.  Somehow, I like my life as it is right now, even though much of the time if I’m deeply honest, I don’t really like it.  What is holding me back from truly following?

I would argue that what holds us back, is the hold that the world has on us.  When we read where Christ says you cannot serve God and money, we shake our head and agree as we think of those poor millionaires chasing more millions.  Rarely if ever does it cross our minds that Christ was talking to me.  He was talking to you.  If He walked up to you or I today and said “quit your job, sell you house and your stuff, and come follow me” I’m afraid that most of us (myself included) would have a hundred perfectly good reasons why we couldn’t.  Even more frightening, is that we would most likely really believe our own reasons.

Fortunately, the hold that the world has on us can be broken.  I believe there are some nets we  need to drop right now, and we should be in a constant state of prayer around the rest of the nets we have.  I don’t actually believe that Christ is calling every follower to sell everything, but I have to think that his words to the rich young ruler would be repeated far more often in Austin Texas than we would like.  Would He say them to you?