The Importance of Starting with Jesus

I loved the place where I attended college. That alone isn't unique, but the older I've gotten, the more I've realized how different my college experience was from many people's–and I am continually grateful for it. I became interested in attending there because of people whose lives with God impacted mine as a youngster who had attended there and/or spoke highly of it. I wanted to learn to live an authentic kind of Christianity, and I wanted to be around people who would help me move in that direction, so after visiting a few places and taking my first few courses at a community college, I really wanted to be at that Christian college.

Going there has certainly been one of the most pivotal decisions of my life to date, primarily because of the people I met. I got to know faculty, staff, and students (including the one who would eventually marry me) who all helped me along toward the kind of life with God that I desired.

It almost didn't happen, though. I remember one night, sitting alone in my room at my parents' house, feeling down because it seemed like my hopes of going to school there couldn't come to pass. After visiting the school and taking a serious look at it, I had concluded that it was too far away and too expensive. As I was in my room thinking (pouting) about it, I heard my dad's footsteps coming down the hallway. He was my hero, and someone who never used any more words than were necessary. He stood in the doorway, paused, and said, "If that's where you want to go, we'll get you there." Then he turned around and I heard his footsteps heading back to the other side of the house. I graduated three and a half years later, full of encounters and relationships with people who knew God (and a good academic side of the education too).

I mention all of this not as an advertisement for my alma mater, but to point back to an idea that was planted in my mind by one of those people who impacted me. His name is Dr. Dennis Kinlaw. He was a former president of the school, and continued to return and speak in our chapel services regularly while I was there. He is a brilliant man, an inspiring speaker and author, and–though I never got to know him personally–I looked forward to any chance to learn from him.

One of his ideas that has stuck with me is this: If we're talking about anything involving Christianity, the best place to start is with Jesus.(1) That statement may not seem profound on the surface, but it needs to be stated because it's surprising how often we start the conversations elsewhere. For example, today's most influential critics of Christianity often focus on the horrible things that have been done in the name of Christianity throughout the centuries. Even though those parts of the story matter, it makes more sense to start with the life story of the ancient Jewish rabbi to whom groups so radically different from one another have all claimed allegiance. Let's not start with our history, though it matters tremendously. Let's start with Jesus.

Perhaps something that comes up even more commonly than Christianity's checkered history in firsthand conversations is people's claims of personal experiences. On the side that affirms Christianity, people will sometimes make claims about how God has interacted with them in some degree–that they saw, felt, or experienced something. The other side is more subtle, because it professes an experience of gaining knowledge that such things do not, or even cannot happen to people. Our experiences, or the absence of them, are very important, but they can't provide the right foundation for all of the questions. We have to start with Jesus.

Or, what about the typical college freshman's first exposure to a higher education course in philosophy or biology? Young people who were sure that God had a plan for their lives a year earlier while living with their parents suddenly have their entire structure of beliefs challenged with questions they may have even been taught to avoid. Then, within the course of one semester, God can go from having had a plan for their lives to suddenly being a psycho-socially constructed figment of their imaginations. The impact can be overwhelming of, for the first time, seriously being faced with challenging philosophical/scientific questions like where the world came from, how a good God could allow so much evil, etc. Again, these issues matter tremendously and need to be addressed, but they aren't the logical place to start. Let's start by looking at Jesus.

As I mentioned last week, the invitation of Christianity can seem absurd because of the kinds of claims it makes about Jesus and the kind of complete devotion Christians are supposed to give to this ancient rabbi who lived in a world so different from our own. Because those claims are so outlandish, we miss the point when we start by looking at what Christians did during the crusades, or what your super-religious aunt might claim to have been told by God, or even whether or not God is good or even exists. The only logical place to start is with him–with that ancient, total-obedience-demanding rabbi at the center of it all. As Kinlaw says, "I began to feel that the key to understanding all of this was to start, not with the question of whether God exists and what can be known about him, but rather with Jesus himself..."(2)

So, having spent these first two weeks trying to frame this exploration, next week, we will begin digging into it. Even if we agree with the idea of starting with Jesus, what do we know? Can we trust what the Bible tells us about him? Did he really even live, and if so, what do we know about his death?

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Scripture Readings for the Week*:

  • 1 Kings 19:1-15a
  • Psalm 42
  • Galatians 3:23-29
  • Luke 8:26-39

A Prayer for the Week*:

O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name, for you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure foundation of your loving-kindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

*Scripture readings are taken from the Revised Common Lectionary. Weekly prayers are from The Book of Common Prayer. (1) See Dennis F. Kinlaw, Let's Start with Jesus: A New Way of Doing Theology. It isn't long, but can be fairly heavy reading. Another great option is his daily devotional book, This Day with the Master. (2) Kinlaw, Let's Start with Jesus, p. 13.

[This post is part of How Jesus Got Hold of Me: Why I Believe and Why I Follow]

The Decision to Devote Myself to an Ancient Jewish Rabbi

If we're honest about it, the invitation of Christianity is absurd.

Apparently–we are told–two millenia ago, a Jewish boy was born in questionable circumstances to peasant parents. We know nothing about most of his life. Somewhere around the age of thirty, he became something of a wandering, unsanctioned rabbi. Though he gained enough of a following to cause a stir, it was largely among uneducated, lower-class, people who were at least as motivated by the hype of being around an up-and-coming new celebrity (who was rumored to have done things like heal people's dead children and fill the stomachs of crowds of people who had no food) as they were for any religious reasons. There must not have been much real allegiance to him among those crowds, since he died utterly alone, executed as an enemy of the state, after being betrayed by one of his closest friends.

So now, 2,000 years later on the opposite side of the globe from where he spent his short life, we are told that we should dedicate the entirety of our lives to him–this ancient Jewish quasi-rabbi about whom the majority of us really know very, very little. If I asked you to take any other invitation with that level of preposterousness to it, I expect that spurning the offer would be a prerequisite to being considered an intelligent person.

If we are able to step back and look at it objectively, we might have to admit that when we claim allegiance to him, the primary reason could be an accident of geography: the majority of us have been born and raised in families who lived in places where devotion to him was the socially accepted (or even socially expected) norm, and so we have simply continued to do what is familiar to us: we give our assent to the claims and stories about him, and we sing the songs about him–even if we neither understand nor believe what they say.  If you or I had been born in today's world but in the part of the world much closer to the geography Jesus knew, the likelihood that we would identify ourselves as his followers now is certainly drastically smaller. Perhaps this kind of conformity is a recent thing and new to us, or perhaps has been the pattern through the generations.

All of those things are legitimate parts of Christianity's invitation, and here I am as a person of (as far as I know) a normal degree of sanity and rationality and yet I have accepted the invitation. Not only have I accepted it, I have chosen to organize the entirety of my life around it to the best degree which I know how. I–a North American male in my mid-30s–have somehow become convinced that the best possible way to live out the relatively few days of my life is to devote them to following this ancient, poor, Jew who was condemned to death before he reached my age.

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As is probably normal for anyone born into a Christian family, for the first decades of my life, I certainly fell into that category of people who believed in and followed Jesus because it was what the people around me did, and had been doing for generations. I'm deeply grateful for that part of my own history, and I don't disparage it in the least. But there comes a time in the maturation of our faith when we have to face whether it is actually ours or someone else's. Regardless of whether or not each of our parents claimed to accept the absurd claims and invitation of Christianity, do you and I? Is Christianity part of our lives because it is part of the culture around us, because it was part of the way we were raised, or because we have actually become convinced that there is no other way of life that compares to the one we enter when we seek to immerse ourselves in the life and teachings of this carpenter from Nazareth who said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me"?(1)

When I came to the point of wrestling with the questions for myself, it was a bit frightening. I was already receiving my education to spend my life helping others get to know the ancient Jewish rabbi, but what if it was all a hoax? Did I really want to give my best efforts to following someone I know so relatively little about? (At the time, I knew more about the lives of a good number of my sports heroes than I did about his.) Every experience I had ever had with other people taught me easily observable yet important things like: bread doesn't multiply, human feet sink if they're on top of a body of water, and–perhaps the most preposterous part of the claims about Jesus–every dead person I had ever known was still dead.

So there I was: a young adult academically prepared for ministry, but with some pretty difficult, even seemingly dangerous, questions under the surface of what was going on in my life.(2)

Thankfully, the course I chose was not to give up on my efforts to follow this rabbi because of these difficult questions, but rather to make sure those efforts were well-informed and then put them to the test. Because of wise guidance I had been given in various places(3), I began to operate on the assumption that if Jesus really was who Christians throughout the centuries have claimed him to be, there had to be something more authentically formed by him than the kind of life I was experiencing to that point. If Jesus was who we claim, I knew that he would be exactly the kind of person who could relax and encourage me to seek the truth about my questions wherever they would lead, because if it is all true, they would lead to him.(4)

I am now about fifteen years into this experiment of wrestling with the questions and putting the claims of Jesus to the test in my life the best I know how, and I am as convinced as ever that living our lives as his students is the best option available to us. Over the next ten weeks, I will do my best to explain why.

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(A note on the readings and prayers for each week in this series: These are taken from the tools I normally use in my own reading and praying, which lead us through a yearly cycle. Because we're essentially in the middle of a year, the readings pick up in the middle of a sequence. That's okay. I recommend reading the four scriptures below, with the accompanying prayer, repeatedly throughout the week so that it can sink in, and then the sequence will continue through the weeks to come.)

Scripture Readings for the Week*:

  • 1 Kings 21:1-21a
  • Psalm 5:1-8
  • Galatians 2:15-21
  • Luke 7:36-8:3

A Prayer for the Week*:

Keep, O Lord, your household the Church in your steadfast faith and love, that through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness, and minister your justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

*Scripture readings are taken from the Revised Common Lectionary. Weekly prayers are from The Book of Common Prayer. (1) Mark 8:34, ESV (2) I don't mean to give the impression that all of this happened at one specific time in my life. It was a sum of experiences and questions over several years. (3) Much of this was through personal relationships, but also particularly through reading the works of Dallas Willard and C.S. Lewis. (4) I certainly am not the first person, young or old, to wrestle with these questions. But I'm thankful that I didn't make the mistake of some, in that I never considered separating myself from the Christian community (the Church), regardless of what question I may have been wrestling with.

Money-Back Guaranteed Recipe for Humility

made_at_www-1.txt2pic.com A friend used to joke about having been given a button to wear on his shirt that said "HUMBLE". He said that it even came with blinking lights on it. That friend, who–despite his "humble button" joke–is one of the most humble people I know, remains one of the people I have continued to go to through more than a decade when I'm seeking God's guidance on something. When I need others to help me discern God's leading, we intuitively don't go to ego-driven people. Our instincts tell us that there may be nothing that squelches someone's ability to hear from God more than pride.

In a section of Hearing God, Dallas Willard wrote about this, and then–as wasn't uncommon when I read his writings or listened to him speak–he threw in this paragraph as something of a side-note even though it alone was worth the price of the book:

"In seeking and receiving God's word to us, therefore, we must at the same time seek and receive the grace of humility. God will gladly give it to us if, trusting and waiting on him to act, we refrain from pretending we are what we know we are not, from presuming a favorable position for ourselves in any respect and from from pushing or trying to override the will of others in our context. (This is a fail-safe recipe for humility. Try it for one month. Money-back guarantee if it doesn't work!)"(1)

In case you didn't catch it, there's plenty for us to chew on for...at least a couple of decades. The first thing that catches my attention is that humility is a grace. That probably doesn't sound counter-intuitive to many of us, but yet we certainly aren't trained to live as if it's true. Grace is God's undeserved action in our lives to bring about what we can't accomplish on our own, and if we apply that to humility, it means that God's work is furthered more when we become humble. (So, pastor friends, where are our seminary courses in "The Necessity Of and Path Toward Humility"?)

Then, Dallas' three-point recipe for humility is brilliant (and even though I'm sitting here writing about how great it is, I'm not particularly looking forward to going and putting it into practice). First, he says, "refrain from pretending we are what we know we are not." How many of our ways that we interact with one another would fall apart if our ability to pretend suddenly disappeared? Think of going to your next professional convention and presenting yourself as being as unsuccessful as you really are.

Then, "refrain...from presuming a favorable position for ourselves in any respect." What if, instead of being urged to stand out and get noticed as part of what it means to be a competent adult, we took it as our goal to get no credit for as much good work as possible?

And finally, perhaps the most radical part of the recipe, "refrain...from pushing or trying to override the will of others in our context." But he can't seriously mean...think of all of the kinds of things that might happen to us if we actually did that!?! What if we refused to fight for our own agendas? People around us will certainly continue to do it, so wouldn't we be conceding victory on everything that matters to...everyone but us?

While listening to a podcast from Dallas today, I heard him say, "The biggest threat to the kingdom of God in my life is the kingdom of Dallas Willard. I have to lay that aside. That means that I don't expect things to be done by my power. I expect things to be done by God's power."(2)

In that light, it becomes apparent that a humility-blocking issue for me is that I simply don't trust God and his kingdom that much. I think things are way too much up to me, and honestly–it raises fear in me to think about what things would be like if I abandoned the outcomes of things I care about in that complete of a way to God's hands.

But, based on the course my life has taken to this point, that fear should appropriately go in the opposite direction. Virtually everything genuinely good about my life has come about as a result of things I could not have orchestrated on my own, while everything I have tried to seize control of has gone crashing down. Rather than fearing what might happen if I lived Dallas' humility recipe, perhaps I should spend some time thinking about what might happen if I don't.

(1) Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship With God, p. 38 (1999 InterVarsity Press edition) (2) From August 14, 2011 Tree of Life Community Podcast, "Being Church (10): Dallas Willard" https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/being-church-10-dallas-willard/id453093989?i=124909144&mt=2

James Bryan Smith: The Encouraging Community

"While it may be true that treating churchgoers as consumers by trying to meet their stated needs may make them feel more comfortable, by lowering our expectations of them as active participants we are decreasing the possibility of genuine transformation."... "I want a community who will take an interest in my well-being, a community who is not afraid to ask me to make a commitment to my own spiritual growth and service to others, a community who dares to offer me a reliable pattern of transformation and then backs it up by challenging me to enter into some form of accountability in order to help me meet our commitments." ... "I know three things from experience. First, people rise to the level of expectation. We fail because we do not ask for accountability and commitment. Second, people intuitively know that when things are made easy there is little chance that any good will come from it. We lower our expectations because we think people will respond in greater numbers, but in reality we do them no service, and most people sense this. Third, while not everyone in every church is ready to make a commitment to transformation, there are many who are ready and are not being challenged. Far too much attention is being paid to getting people to come to church, and far too little is paid to those who are hungering for a deeper life with God."

(James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful Community, Ch. 6: "The Encouraging Community")

Beginning My Tribute to Dallas Willard

photo-4 copy I never met Dallas Willard, though I came embarrassingly close in 2009. (My wife arranged through a friend to have the book pictured above signed and sent to us.) He was my hero, and though I had been reading and re-reading his stuff for a decade at that point, plus listening to any recording of him that I could get my hands on, I had never heard him speak in person. Then, it happened that I had moved back to Texas and Renovaré was going to have its international conference in San Antonio that year, so I was eager to go and sign up for anything that had Dallas' name on it.

One way I did that was that I signed up to be a participant in a breakfast where he was going to speak, and to my joy I ended up in the buffet line right behind him. It wasn't to my joy that the person in front of him in the line was apparently just as happy as I was to have an opportunity to talk to him, and that person was apparently much more extroverted than me, and therefore had plenty to say. Even though I was standing right next to Dallas at that moment, I wasn't having a very Dallas-ish attitude toward that person and even invented a term for them in my mind: conversation hog. (If you're as introverted as I am, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you're as extroverted as I am introverted, you probably are one without even knowing it, but my attitude is better toward you now.)

After we waited through the line and got to the point of putting food on our plates, the–um–extravert apparently either ran out of things to say or became more focused on food selection. So, it was my chance. Among all of the people on the planet with whom I had never spoken, I was standing next to the human being with whom I most wanted to have a conversation, and I said absolutely nothing. In my mind, I wanted to give him a conversation break from the previous fifteen minutes. But actually, I guess it had to do more with my introversion taking over and I couldn't come up with anything appropriate to say while standing there next to the scrambled eggs and muffins.

Dallas died of cancer this week, and I've spent more time than ever before thinking about my time standing behind him in the breakfast buffet line in San Antonio. I haven't thought about it with regret about not saying anything; I still don't know what words I would have used. I certainly could not have conveyed my gratitude to him very well while also trying to allow him to choose between blueberry or banana nut. More than anything, I've just been grateful for the opportunity to have heard him in person which only added to his influence on me.

But the news of his death has been harder for me than I expected. I knew that he had been sick, and I knew that it would be a sad day for me when the day of his passing would come. Even though I expected it to be sad, because I never met him and didn't know him personally, I didn't expect it to have as much of a sense of real grief for me as it has.

I haven't really even wanted to talk to anyone about it, because it seems like it would sound silly to admit that I'm in mourning for someone with whom the closest I ever came to personal contact was that he might have handed me the muffin tongs. Thankfully though, my wife gets it–she knows how much Dallas influenced me, and she was able to help me see the issue for what it was the night that he died, while I was surprised at how hard of a time I was having with it.

She said, "You've lost both of your heroes." She was right. There are a group of people whom I sometimes describe as being "among my heroes," but only two men that I have referred to with words like, "he is my hero": Dallas and my Dad.

So I've given myself permission to grieve over Dallas, while also–alongside so many others–experiencing deep gratitude for his life and teaching. The day that he died, I had a sense of, "I have to write something about him," but I tried to start a couple of times and nothing good was coming out. I just couldn't figure out where to start, where to try to end up, or what to do in between to try to point at the extent to which Dallas' teaching has been helpful in shaping my life with God.

Then, again, my wife was very helpful and suggested that I write a series of posts communicating things I learned from him. Writing stories of my dad's life has been incredibly helpful to me since his death, and though my third-person experiences with Dallas are obviously of very different nature than my life with my Dad, I think I can tell some good stories about things Dallas has taught me through the years.

So, much more to come about life with God and how Dallas helped me into it.

A Brief Break

Just a heads up: In order to save a little money each month, I'm going to be reworking some details of the site–like how it's hosted and some other details of how it works. All of my past experience with stuff like this has taught me to expect that my first attempt at it probably won't go precisely as expected, but hopefully it won't take too long. I mention that to offer an explanation for why I don't expect to post anything new for at least the next week. I'll give the time that's usually given to writing to the process of moving the blog. Hopefully, in about a week, things will pick back up as normal here. (If you subscribe by email, you won't have to change anything. If you subscribe by RSS....I'm not so sure.)

In the meantime, I'll continue to send articles from the archives to those on the "I want to receive something every day" email list, and these also get posted on Facebook and Twitter.