You re-create us in Christ, O God, to be holy, to be loving and generous, merciful, kind, and just in all our relationships in life.You re-create us in Christ, O God, so that we might be able to look you squarely in the face, to live with you and enjoy you forever.
You re-create us in Christ, O God, simply because you want all of your children to be truly happy now.
(Paul Chilcote, from "New Birth" in Praying in the Wesleyan Spirit
The Love of God and Yogurt
Recently my wife was eating some super-healthy kind of yogurt, and I got a laugh out of the description on the container:
Incase that's hard to read in the photo, it says, "Agapé" means "love" in Greek. When you discover how indulgently creamy and delicious this healthy, 0% fat yogurt is, you're going to discover pure, divine agapé. Prepare to be stirred...
This, friends, is how words lose their meaning. Simple observation will tell us that eating yogurt is in fact not a reliable way to "discover pure, divine agape," nor any other kind of love. Dallas Willard has a great definition of love: "to will the good of another." As he points out, as much as I may say that I love chocolate cake, it isn't true. I don't love chocolate cake, because I want to eat it.
The scriptures speak of agape as the highest kind of love, perfect love, the love of a perfect God toward his children, as expressed most fully in Jesus. This is something significantly better than the experience we might get when we eat organic yogurt.
The agape love of his Father that Jesus demonstrated to the world two millennia ago was powerful enough to begin a world movement of unparalleled influence by people committed to, above all things, love. After all, our Teacher's command on his last night with his students before laying down his life for them was, "Love each other as I have loved you."
Scriptures and history are full of people trying to put words around this love, and the most successful attempts are still stumbling efforts, but because they represent the reality of agape much more closely than the yogurt tub, here are a few that come to mind:
There's a wideness in God's mercy
I cannot find in my own
And He keeps His fire burning
To melt this heart of stone
Keeps me aching with a yearning
Keeps me glad to have been caught
In the reckless raging fury
That they call the love of God
(Rich Mullins, 1993)
–––
Love divine, all loves excelling,
joy of heaven, to earth come down;
fix in us thy humble dwelling;
all thy faithful mercies crown!
Jesus thou art all compassion,
pure, unbounded love thou art;
visit us with thy salvation;
enter every trembling heart.
(Charles Wesley, 1747)
–––
I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (St. Paul in Ephesians 3:18-19, about AD 60)
Scripture Plaques You Won't Find at the Christian Bookstore, #8
[This post is one of a series of potential Christian plaques that we would never find at a Christian bookstore. See the rest of the list here.]
Not only will you not find this one in the Christian bookstore (nor any of the hundreds of other similar possibilities), but I could also include this passage in a series called, "Scripture passages I'm thankful I've never been required to memorize."
The Best Decision for Us Today
I recently returned from a retreat on discernment led by Ruth Haley Barton as part of her Transforming Community. Ruth teaches, writes, and practices great stuff in regard to becoming discerning people and organizations. The church and world are desperately in need of her wisdom and the practices she encourages in this area. Leading up to this retreat, our group had already been together each quarter for 3 days over 18 months with shared commitments and practices that have brought us to being more the kind of people who could soak in and apply good advice from Ruth and others about receiving God's guidance in our lives. As she often points out, it's silly for us to expect discernment from undiscerning people. But thankfully, because of reliable rhythms of the spiritual life that we have practiced together over the last year and a half, many of us are at a place where we are ready for better ways of listening for and following God (and are desperate to do so).
Ruth encouraged us to come into this retreat with a decision, big or small, to take into the discernment process. That was easy for me to do, and Ruth's teaching on both the habit and practice of discernment were very helpful. I didn't leave the retreat with any clear decisions made, but I did leave with a clear assurance: We can never go wrong by making the choice that helps us to be more fully God's.
Certainly some decisions carry more weight than others. We understand the impact that the choice of a spouse or a career can have on our lives, and many other important decisions are of lesser importance. But there's a part of us that understands that we never really know the extent to which a decision is going to impact our lives. For example, I knew that choosing to leave home and attend Asbury College fourteen years ago was a big decision; I had no idea how much it would impact the rest of my life. The people I met, the passion for study that I found, and the opportunities that came my way in the course of living out that decision ended up having tremendous impact: my wife, the jobs I've had, the friends I turn to, and much of the kind of person I am have all been very heavily influenced by that decision. That's a very positive example, but we all know that the negative examples exist too.
If you're like me, someone to whom deciding correctly is of inestimable value, the unknown future impact of our current decisions can feel paralyzing. What if we choose wrongly? Or what if we miss choosing what's best?
I entered the retreat feeling those fears, and when I left I understood that yes, decisions involve risk. A decision may or may not end up with things going as well as possible, or being the most lucrative in a variety of ways. In those terms, we may make the wrong decision, but... we never know ahead of time how those things will play out. And while I don't know those things, I usually do have an idea of which choice(s) will most effectively help me be more fully God's. I usually have some idea of which option(s) will be more conducive to growing Jesus' kind of character in me, so that qualities like love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness are most likely to grow in me. If I choose in favor of that, I cannot choose wrongly.
One of my heroes, Stu, taught me this in different words a long time ago when he said, "Make sure you're in God's will today, and you won't miss being in it tomorrow." The best decision for you and I today, regardless of which day of our lives today is, is always to be more fully God's, because God always has- and always will- see that we are cared for.
(If you're in leadership and want to know more about Ruth's ideas on discernment, check out her outstanding book, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership
Discovering Joy Through Contentment and Generosity
From a few weeks ago, as we began a study of Adam Hamilton's book, Enough. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/16395630 w=400&h=300] Enough: Faith in the Midst of Financial Crisis (CWS) from First United Methodist Church on Vimeo.
There's Nothing in the Election Coverage About This...
Although I'm never very involved beyond voting, I enjoy paying attention to politics. Of course there are things that greatly annoy me about listening to candidates or people in office, and one is how high a degree of confidence they usually ask us to have in them to accomplish incredible things. The reality is that there are things politicians can and should accomplish and other things that simply aren't in their domain or range of possibilities to see come to pass. Every election includes numerous candidates talking about "cleaning house" in Washington, fighting for the people, making our futures more secure and generally giving us good lives. As he always is, Dallas Willard is the master of offering a different perspective:
"We must at some point stop looking for new information or social arrangements or religious experiences that will draw off the evil in the world at large, abolish war, hunger, oppression, and so forth, while letting us continue to be and to live as we have since Adam... The monstrous evils we deplore are in fact the strict causal consequences of the spirit and behavior of 'normal' human beings following generally acceptable patterns of life. They are not the result of strange flukes, accidental circumstances, or certain especially mad or bad individuals." (From The Spirit of the Disciplines, p. 234)
As much as politicians talk about social arrangements and things like war, hunger, and opression, they rarely say anything about solutions that actually have the potential of a deeper answer to our problems: people changing their lifestyles, both individually and in mass, to allow more room for God to change us and our world. I don't expect candidates to talk much about these things, and honestly that's okay. It is primarily the responsibility of the Christian church (you and me) to put this to the test, and once reliable ways are found (or better, rediscovered) of living the life that is truly life, we should invite others to join us. So, church, the entire world is waiting on our progress in discipleship.
Big Spenders, Over-Savers, or Contentment and Generosity
I think that in a very broad and over-generalized way, every one of us becomes one of three kinds of people. It’s probably more accurate that we’re a mix of all three of these than just one of them, but by the end of my life, I think it’s true that people will be able to look back at the things I did and place me into one of the three of these categories:
Either we become
- a big spender,
- an over-saver,
- or someone that lives in contentment and generosity.
If I don’t intentionally make the decision to let the ways of the kingdom of God shape my finances, rather than letting my finances shape me, then I will most likely end up being either a big spender or an over-saver. In an average day, you and I receive 600 advertising messages, and almost all of them are trying to get us to be one of these two kinds of people. I mean, how often have you seen a commercial whose point was, “be content with what you have”? No, the tactic they take is by telling us that if we don’t spend in big quantities or save everything we have, then bad things are going to happen to us. Again, in one of the books from James Bryan Smith's Apprentice Series, The Good and Beautiful Life
, it says,
, it says, “Advertisers know how to play on our fears and desires. By the age of sixty we will have seen over two million commercials, which is the equivalent of watching nothing but those ads for eight hours a day, seven days a week, for six straight years. While they appeal to desire, more ads tapping into our fears get us to buy their products."
Then it has this quote from Martin Lindstrom that explains:
"Practically every brand category I can think of plays on fear, either directly or indirectly. We’re sold medicines to ward off depression, diet pills and gym memberships to prevent obesity, creams and ointments to quiet fears of aging, and even computer software to ward off the terrors of our hard drive crashing. I predict that in the near future advertising will be based more and more on fear-driven somatic markers, as advertisers attempt to scare us into believing that not buying their product will make us feel less safe, less happy, less free, and less in control of our lives.” (pp. 164-165)
So for the big spenders, the messages are presented in different words, but they go something like this:
- “You’ve got to have these clothes so that people will think of you the right way.”
- “You have to buy your wife this big diamond or she may not kiss you anymore.”
- “You need this new kind of phone or computer, or you won’t be able to get anything accomplished.”
- “You’ve got to drive this kind of car, with a great stereo and GPS and all of these safety features, or you’ll likely get into an accident you and all of your loved ones will probably die.”
I guess it’s harder to advertise to the over-savers, because by definition one is less likely to make money off of them, but the professionals find ways to do it. For the over-savers, the advertisements are something like these:
- “You need to invest now in gold, because the entire economy could collapse around us, and at least when it does, then you would own some gold.” (Recently I was using a site that I use often to look up scripture and there was an ad there encouraging me to buy gold that said, “It was given to Jesus by the wise men; wise men still own it today.” So, according to them, an important way to let my life be shaped by the scriptures is by investing in gold???)
- Or the ads might be pushing insurance policies, sure-thing investments for retirement. Or how about the car that can get you better gas mileage by 10 miles per gallon?
This is a bit of a tangent- from me, not the Bible, but that last one gets to me, because let’s say that what I drive right now gets 20 miles per gallon. I know that I spend a lot on gas, and I’m a big saver, so when the commercial comes on for the new thing that will get me 30 miles per gallon, I start thinking of all of that money I’ll save on gas. But, they’re counting on us not doing the math. If a gallon of gas costs $2.75, and even if I average driving 25,000 miles in a year, and the new car costs $20,000, it would take 17 1/2 years for me to break even on the money I save on gas with my new gas saver versus the money I had to spend to get it. And that’s if I paid cash... if I take out a loan for that new gas saver, it would likely take me at two decades to break even on the deal.
Now, I’ve got a lot of saver in me, so for all of you fellow savers, I don’t have anything against good gas mileage, or retirement plans, or insurance policies, or investments. And for you spenders, I don’t have anything against computers or diamonds or clothes. All I’m trying to do is to get us to ask ourselves: in what or in whom do we hope, trust, and believe? Paul said it very well in 1 Timothy 6:17-19; we either hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, or we hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. I’m trying to help us see that when we do not decide to let the ways of the kingdom of God shape our finances, our finances easily come to rule us by making us into a big spender or an over-saver.
Part of the reason this is true is because apart from the kingdom of God, it becomes so easy to be motivated by fear- either (for the big spenders) fear that we aren’t valuable without more stuff, or (for the over-savers) fear that we have to save all we can to try to protect our own futures. And these fears always stay a few steps ahead of our finances. Our finances will never quite be able to catch up to those things we’re afraid of. The big spenders will never have quite enough things and the over-savers will never have quite enough stored away.
John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839 and died 98 years later in 1937. He was the wealthiest man in the world, and was the first American to be worth more than a billion dollars. At his death, he was worth $1.4 billion, and that was a long time ago... adjusting for inflation, he is regarded as the richest man in history. What was $1.4 billion then would be $20.7 billion today. (Based on the first salary I had out of college, it would take me 1500 years to make that much money!) ... One day a reporter asked him how much money it would take to make him happy, and Rockefeller’s famous reply was, “Just a little bit more.”
Apart from the kingdom of God, we always need “just a little bit more,” and we work to satisfy our fears through spending to make ourselves feel happy or saving to make ourselves feel secure. But our finances never quite reach far enough, we never become the content and generous people that we wanted to be.
So what’s the other option? If we hope that at the end of our lives we it will have been obvious to others that we were neither big spenders, nor over-savers, but joyful men and women who lived with contentment and generosity, how do we make that happen? I'm no financial counselor, and won't pretend to be. Plenty of great information on the how-to of this is available from folks like Dave Ramsey or Crown Ministries. The only point I'm attempting to establish is that there’s a decision that we have to make intentionally, a decision about which will be placed in that central place in our hearts: will it be the kingdom of God, or will it be our own resources?