Church Voices

From here:

DOES IT TAKE a village? Is America a shining city upon a hill? The answer might be yes, according to new research. Two psychologists had an actor make an audio recording of two versions of FDR’s famous 1933 inaugural address. The first version was essentially the original, but scrubbed of phrases and references likely to reveal the identity of the speech. The second version took the first version and replaced every word or phrase that evoked imagery with less evocative language. College students were then randomly assigned to hear either the high- or low-imagery version. The version with the original imagery was considered more charismatic, in part because it inspired positive emotions. The use of imagery helped the parts of the speech that discussed problems sound less depressing, and the parts that discussed solutions sound more inspiring.

Naidoo, L. and Lord, R., “Speech Imagery and Perceptions of Charisma: The Mediating Role of Positive Affect,” Leadership Quarterly (June 2008).

The application to sermon preparation is pretty obvious. Not to mention that there’s a reason Jesus used imagery in his teachings quite often. Its not about bullet points, its about word-pictures.

Wordle is this cool web thingie that’ll take a text and then create a graphic that displays how many times a particular word is used.

Here it is for this website:

George Carlin is dead. I don’t really know much about him. Other than having a college roommate who quoted him from time to time and watching about 1/2 an episode of the failed George Carlin show I have no connection with him. At least not until seeing the reactions to his death.

What I’ve seen has been, in many cases, anti-gospel. What I’ve seen has been an almost somber glee that George Carlin is now facing the wrath of God. It seems many Christians classified George Carlin as their enemy. So much so that his life is viewed as, at best, a cautionary tale, and at worst, a vanquished enemy who is reaping what he has sown.

And its this view of Carlin that makes me say that the church, or at least the vocal parts of it found in the blogosphere are devoid of living out the gospel. Jesus’ admonitions to love our enemy, as well as the writings of John, and Peter, that God loves the world and wishes none to perish leaves absolutely no room whatsoever for this attitude.

If we believe the gospel, and the scriptures, then we know, and admit the difference between ourselves and Carlin is Christ. Lets make this a little more personal. What separates me from Carlin is not the seven words you can’t say on television, and what separates me from Carlin is not the contempt he has for many Christians (many who don’t look a thing like Christ, lets be honest we gave him the ammunition he shot at us). In fact, what separates me from Carlin isn’t even the blasphemous things he said about Jesus Himself, because if we’re completely honest the attitudes we hold, and the things we say probably cross into blasphemy even when we don’t intend them to. No, what separates us who are a part of the kingdom of God is Jesus Christ himself. Its not that we don’t say seven specific words, or that we’re somehow inherently more moral than George Carlin. It is Jesus Christ.

So please, just save all the words that explain just how terrible he really was, and pretend for at least a second that if Carlin is found outside of Christ, and if he is separated from God that its worth mourning, or at least worth something a little more like Christ than somber glee. Instead of seeing Carlin as an enemy, maybe try thinking of him as the lost son who never came back, or the lamb that wandered off and the shepherd didn’t find him.

If Jesus can weep over Jerusalem who murders the prophets it might be time to adopt a slightly different attitude.

“I’ll take one of everything”, many customers say to me as they laugh at their own joke. I understand that it’s a joke, but you know, I think a lot of people go through life with a similar attitude. “I’ll try one of everything.”

The problem with this approach is its failure to realize that not everything goes together. The man who eats everything doesn’t consider how some things don’t taste or settle well with others. Before long, he will get a stomach ache and, eventually, throw up. Consequently, the man who eats everything winds up eating nothing.

On the other hand, the man who eats little of what goes together will not only be pleased with his meal, but well nourished as well.

While they were at Lystra, Paul and Barnabas came upon a man with crippled feet. He had been that way from birth, so he had never walked. He was sitting and listening as Paul preached. Looking straight at him, Paul realized he had faith to be healed. So Paul called to him in a loud voice, “Stand up!” And the man jumped to his feet and started walking.

When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in their local dialect, “These men are gods in human form!” They decided that Barnabas was the Greek god Zeus and that Paul was Hermes, since he was the chief speaker. Now the temple of Zeus was located just outside the town. So the priest of the temple and the crowd brought bulls and wreaths of flowers to the town gates, and they prepared to offer sacrifices to the apostles.
Acts 14.8-13

In Lystra Paul continued to preach the gospel, while there a man was healed because he had faith, the response of the Lystrans is interesting. Instead of turning to praise the Living God and leaving behind their previous beliefs they instead integrate what they have just seen into what they already believed. In fact, as they go to worship Paul and Barnabus, Paul continues to explicitly tell them what they believe about the two of them is wrong. The scriptures record, that despite this brute force approach it was still difficult to stop the people from worshiping them.

Quite a bit of noise has been made from certain segments of Christianity about the certainty of belief, they have attacked any theology that allows for any re-assessment of belief in any portion of any of our theological positions. These segments of Christianity have much in common with the Lystrans who despite Paul’s clear preaching and the demonstration of the power of the Living God still integrated Paul and Barnabas into their wrongly held beliefs.

As followers of Christ we are called to the truth, but we are also keenly aware of our own shortcomings in terms of both sin and ability (if the two can even be separated). As such we need to find ourselves in the delicate high wire act of clinging to orthodoxy, yet open to rebuke and correction by the Spirit through the scriptures. If our first reaction to anything we disagree with is to condemn the advocate of such a position as a damnable heretic of the most idiotic kind and then to complain to those who agree with us that this is nothing more than “itching ear” false preaching, it may be that we find ourselves in Lystra, instead of reality, and bending our knees to our particular culture, or intellect instead of Christ.

If we don’t do what we are taught in scripture, does it have any value for our lives?  What does it take for us to love our neighbors?

Being in the middle of a high impact natural disaster (I live in a small town on the Mississippi river that will flood most of the buildins on Main St. by next week), I’ve been thinking a lot about questions like the above.  After the second day of sandbagging, I finally had to quit early and so I got some time to finally watch Rambo (the new one) which we’ve had from Netflix for days.  I was surprised at how intensely the film dealt with similar issues and questions I have been thinking on. 

I was surprised to very quickly learn that this Rambo wasn’t really about John Rambo, is about the suffering of the people of Burma.  Stalone often likes to say something meaningful in his films, and for this one he found out about the awful situation (pre-natural disaster, so you can imagine how much worse it is now) of the Burmese under the rule of the military.  Of course, there’s lots of gory action, but I’d still recommend any adult to see it, partly because the gore is not out of place.  In fact, you’ll find some tame pictures on the sites listed below that provide the evidence for the brutatlity visualized for you in Rambo. 

The most convicting part of the film was the dedication to action of the Christians in the film.  One thing that gets me, both locally for our flood, and globally for situations like Burma, is how churches and christians can sit around and do nothing yet people who do not know the grace of God through Jesus Christ do everything from helping to fill sandbags to save a few homes to struggling for the lives of people half a world away.

Father, forgive us for walking on the other side of the street pretending not to see the need of our neighbor.  Create in us a heart of compassion.  Use us in your work to transform us into little Christs.

Watch the movie if you haven’t seen it yet.  In the mean time, check out these websites:

www.uscampaignforburma.org

www.freeburmarangers.org

I found this pasted into an old Bible of mine I opened up this week:

Over and above particular prophecies, the New Testament sees in Jesus Christ the climax and comprehensive fulfillment of the entire Old Testament. It is not simply in a few scattered texts that the ancient witness to Christ is to be discovered; the Old Testament in its entirety testifies to the truth…”
- Carl Henry, God Revelation and Authority, Vol. III, pg. 135

Tim Challies opines:

If we are not spending time immersing ourselves in Scripture and are not obeying what we have learned, we should not expect God to answer our prayers.

Travis Prinzi answers:

“The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

“But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best copy of the Scriptures and the prayer mat and send him into the chapel. I can’t hear him, and I refuse to pay attention to him, because he’s been sinning too much, and I’m not going to answer prayers of someone who has not been doing his duty.’ …

“Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard the sound of his brother turning the pages of the family Bible. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ’Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has commanded him to go pray and study the Scriptures.’ And the older brother said, ‘Good. I’ve been saying for years that father shouldn’t listen to sinners until they start doing their duty like me.’”That entire mentality is built on the idea that we are received back to God by grace, but after that, we need to start behaving like the older brother in order to get God to listen to us. We become better than the prodigal, and God begins listening to us and answering our prayers. Sorry. Every single time I come to the Father, I’m the prodigal.

I quote Relient K:

I’m giving up on doing this alone now
Cause I’ve failed and I’m ready to be shown how
He’s told me the way and I’m trying to get there
And this life sentence that I’m serving
I admit that I’m every bit deserving
But the beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair

Then Peter said, “Can anyone keep these people from being baptized with water? They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.” So he ordered that they be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they asked Peter to stay with them for a few days. The apostles and the brothers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God.
Acts 10.47-11.1

If you paid attention in Sunday school you know that the answer to the question “what is the word of God” has two proper answers: the Bible, and Jesus. You can write those down and move on to the next question.

Here’s the thing though, neither one of those answers are appropriate for what happened in Acts 10 and 11. These Gentiles didn’t receive a Bible (neither the Old Testament, nor the yet unwritten New Testament), and while you can argue they received Jesus in the sense of having faith in him, its not the same sense as “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”.

So what is the word of God?

Sometimes I come across someone who has a particular issue that has swollen so large in their mind that they can’t see or think of anything else. No matter what particular scripture they read, no matter what they are praying about it all comes back to that issue. The issue might be something like instruments in worship, worship style, once saved always saved, end times, pre-destination, or any other number of theological hot button issues that have occupied people through the years. When this happens invariably you end up with verse after verse being pulled out in defense of the scriptures, lots and lots of words spill out and phrases like “its right there in the Bible” pepper the fire-hose like stream of consciousness.

No matter how much scripture is found in this situation, there’s no word of God in it. Because the word of God isn’t just particular words written by prophets and apostles (and James) it is the core message of Jesus sometimes called the gospel. What the apostles and the brothers recognized as the word of God is what brought the Holy Spirit, and baptism:

You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, telling the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. You know what has happened throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached— how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.

“We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him from the dead on the third day and caused him to be seen. He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen—by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message.

What this means is that you can spend a whole lot of time quoting a whole lot of scripture, and still not have the word of God.

One of the most important questions a Christian can ask his or herself is “What is God’s will for me?” The number of books written on this subject by popular Christian authors such as Charles Swindoll and John MacArther reveals that the many lay Christians are either asking or interested in the question.¹ The vast majority of self-help style books that fill Christian bookstores to the brim, I’d be willing to bet, are likely to have a chapter devoted to the question. I want to suggest that the answer to the question is painfully clear. “If it is so clear”, you might ask, “then why do so many Christians find themselves at a loss as to how to answer it?” Part of what makes the question so knotty is its ambiguity. What exactly is the question? What do we mean by “God’s will” or “the will of God” when we ask it of our lives?

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