Christian One Liners-Humor w/ a Twist!

I wish I could credit the compiler of the following. I can't. For now, just enjoy them!

1.    Don't let your worries get the best of you, remember, Moses started out as a basket case.

2.    Many folks want to serve God, but only as advisers

3.    It is easier to preach ten sermons than it is to live one

4.    The good Lord didn't create anything without a purpose, but mosquitoes come close.

5.    When you get to your wit's end, you'll find God lives there.

6.    Opportunity may knock once, but temptation bangs on your front door forever

7.    If the church wants a better pastor, it only needs to pray for the one it has.

8.    Peace starts with a smile.

9.    We were called to be witnesses, not lawyers or judges

10.Be ye fishers of men. You catch them - He'll clean them.

11.Coincidence is when God chooses to remain anonymous.

12.Don't put a question mark where God put a period.

13.God doesn't call the qualified, He qualifies the called.

14.God grades on the cross, not the curve.

15.God promises a safe landing, not a calm passage.

16.He who angers you, controls you!

17.If God is your Copilot -- swap seats!

18.Prayer: Don't give God instructions -- just report for duty!

19.The task ahead of us is never as great as the Power behind us.

20.The Will of God will never take you to where the Grace of God will not protect you.

21.You can tell how big a person is by what it takes to discourage him.

 

Spirituality: Counter-Cultural (Part 3)

Part 3--This final section (of my post) of the Eugene Peterson interview poses the question about reaching different people groups. Remember, this interview took place in 2005. 

What if we were to frame this not in terms of needs but relevance? Many Christians hope to speak to generation X or Y or postmoderns, or some subgroup, like cowboys or bikers—people for whom the typical church seems irrelevant.

When you start tailoring the gospel to the culture, whether it's a youth culture, a generation culture or any other kind of culture, you have taken the guts out of the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not the kingdom of this world. It's a different kingdom.

My son Eric organized a new church six years ago. The Presbyterians have kind of a boot camp for new church pastors where you learn what you're supposed to do. So Eric went. One of the teachers there said he shouldn't put on a robe and a stole: "You get out there and you meet this generation where they are."

So Eric, being a good student and wanting to please his peers, didn't wear a robe. His church started meeting in a high-school auditorium. He started out by wearing a business suit every Sunday. But when the first Sunday of Advent rolled around, and they were going to have Communion, he told me, "Dad, I just couldn't do it. So I put my robe on."

Their neighbors, Joel and his wife, attended his church. Joel was the stereotype of the person the new church development was designed for—suburban, middle management, never been to church, totally secular. Eric figured he was coming because they were neighbors, or because he liked him. After that Advent service, he asked Joel what he thought of his wearing a robe.

He said, "It made an impression. My wife and I talked about it. I think what we're really looking for is sacred space. We both think we found it."

I think relevance is a crock. I don't think people care a whole lot about what kind of music you have or how you shape the service. They want a place where God is taken seriously, where they're taken seriously, where there is no manipulation of their emotions or their consumer needs.

Why did we get captured by this advertising, publicity mindset? I think it's destroying our church.

Spirituality: Ordinary Every Day Love (Part 2)

Part 2. Real spirituality is lived in a real world by real faith. It is superior to any methodology. Please read the following interview from Christianity Today with Eugene Peterson. The interviewer, Mark Galli queries:

You make spirituality sound so mundane.

I don't want to suggest that those of us who are following Jesus don't have any fun, that there's no joy, no exuberance, no ecstasy. They're just not what the consumer thinks they are. When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world's values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives. 

The Gospel of Mark is so graphic this way. The first half of the Gospel is Jesus showing people how to live. He's healing everybody. Then right in the middle, he shifts. He starts showing people how to die: "Now that you've got a life, I'm going to show you how to give it up." That's the whole spiritual life. It's learning how to die. And as you learn how to die, you start losing all your illusions, and you start being capable now of true intimacy and love.

It involves a kind of learned passivity, so that our primary mode of relationship is receiving, submitting, instead of giving and getting and doing. We don't do that very well. We're trained to be assertive, to get, to apply, or to consume and to perform.

Repentance, dying to self, submission—these are not very attractive hooks to draw people into the faith.

I think the minute you put the issue that way you're in trouble. Because then we join the consumer world, and everything then becomes product designed to give you something. We don't need something more. We don't need something better. We're after life. We're learning how to live.

I think people are fed up with consumer approaches, even though they're addicted to them. But if we cast the evangel in terms of benefits, we're setting people up for disappointment. We're telling them lies.

This is not the way our Scriptures are written. This is not the way Jesus came among us. It's not the way Paul preached. Where do we get all this stuff? We have a textbook. We have these Scriptures and most of the time they're saying, "You're going the wrong way. Turn around. The culture is poisoning."

Do we realize how almost exactly the Baal culture of Canaan is reproduced in American church culture? Baal religion is about what makes you feel good. Baal worship is a total immersion in what I can get out of it. And of course, it was incredibly successful. The Baal priests could gather crowds that outnumbered followers of Yahweh 20 to 1. There was sex, there was excitement, there was music, there was ecstasy, there was dance. "We got girls over here, friends. We got statues, girls, and festivals." This was great stuff. And what did the Hebrews have to offer in response? The Word. What's the Word? Well, Hebrews had festivals, at least!

Still, the one big hook or benefit to Christian faith is salvation, no? "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved." Is this not something we can use to legitimately attract listeners?

It's the biggest word we have—salvation, being saved. We are saved from a way of life in which there was no resurrection. And we're being saved from ourselves. One way to define spiritual life is getting so tired and fed up with yourself you go on to something better, which is following Jesus.

But the minute we start advertising the faith in terms of benefits, we're just exacerbating the self problem. "With Christ, you're better, stronger, more likeable, you enjoy some ecstasy." But it's just more self. Instead, we want to get people bored with themselves so they can start looking at Jesus. 

We've all met a certain type of spiritual person. She's a wonderful person. She loves the Lord. She prays and reads the Bible all the time. But all she thinks about is herself. She's not a selfish person. But she's always at the center of everything she's doing. "How can I witness better? How can I do this better? How can I take care of this person's problem better?" It's me, me, me disguised in a way that is difficult to see because her spiritual talk disarms us.

So how should we visualize the Christian life?

In church last Sunday, there was a couple in front of us with two bratty kids. Two pews behind us there was another couple with their two bratty kids making a lot of noise. This is mostly an older congregation. So these people are set in their ways. Their kids have been gone a long time. And so it wasn't a very nice service; it was just not very good worship. But afterwards I saw half a dozen of these elderly people come up and put their arms around the mother, touch the kids, sympathize with her. They could have been irritated.

Now why do people go to a church like that when they can go to a church that has a nursery, is air conditioned, and all the rest? Well, because they're Lutherans. They don't mind being miserable! Norwegian Lutherans!

And this same church recently welcomed a young woman with a baby and a three-year-old boy. The children were baptized a few weeks ago. But there was no man with her. She's never married; each of the kids has a different father. She shows up at church and wants her children baptized. She's a Christian and wants to follow in the Christian way. So a couple from the church acted as godparents. Now there are three or four couples in the church who every Sunday try to get together with her.

Now, where is the "joy" in that church? These are dour Norwegians! But there's a lot of joy. There's an abundant life going, but it's not abundant in the way a non-Christian would think. I think there's a lot more going on in churches like this; they're just totally anticultural. They're full of joy and faithfulness and obedience and care. But you sure wouldn't know it by reading the literature of church growth, would you?

Spirituality: Nothing to Be Afraid Of

Many good Christians have been afraid of the term "spirituality." True, there has been an inordinate emphasis on it from every quarter, reducing it's intended meaning to whatever suits one's fancy. We must not "throw the baby out with the bath water," and thus lose this good term. 

Help from Eugene Peterson

Who better to help us plow our way through this issue than Eugene Peterson, most popularly known for The Message, his paraphrase of the Bible. My experience with him has been through his very practical and very well-written books on pastoral ministry, Under The Unpredictable Plant, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, and Working the Angles, to name a few. His name has become associated with spirituality, though he does not particularly like it. In an interview with Mark Galli of Christianity Today, Peterson "exposed the shallowness of American Christianity and offered a bracing and invigorating alternative." I present but a snippet from that interview.

Many people assume that spirituality is about becoming emotionally intimate with God.

That's a naïve view of spirituality. What we're talking about is the Christian life. It's following Jesus. Spirituality is no different from what we've been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It's just ordinary stuff.

This promise of intimacy is both right and wrong. There is an intimacy with God, but it's like any other intimacy; it's part of the fabric of your life. In marriage you don't feel intimate most of the time. Nor with a friend. Intimacy isn't primarily a mystical emotion. It's a way of life, a life of openness, honesty, a certain transparency.

Doesn't the mystical tradition suggest otherwise?

One of my favorite stories is of Teresa of Avila. She's sitting in the kitchen with a roasted chicken. And she's got it with both hands, and she's gnawing on it, just devouring this chicken. One of the nuns comes in shocked that she's doing this, behaving this way. She said, "When I eat chicken, I eat chicken; when I pray, I pray."

If you read the saints, they're pretty ordinary people. There are moments of rapture and ecstasy, but once every 10 years. And even then it's a surprise to them. They didn't do anything. We've got to disabuse people of these illusions of what the Christian life is. It's a wonderful life, but it's not wonderful in the way a lot of people want it to be.

Read the interview. It'll bless you.

Pragmatism-The Achilles Heel of the Church Today

Ravi Zacharias ranks among the foremost apologists of our generation. His website, replete with God honoring resources, promises to strengthen Christian resolve and to assist in waging battle with opposing spiritual forces in this world. Yet this erudite man reveals a deep and abiding affection for the Lord Jesus as well as for those who do not know Christ as Savior. 

The following quotation is plucked out of Modern Reformation magazine ("Evangelicalism's Winter," Vol. 17, Num. 7, November/December 2008), p. 28. It represents but a fraction of the God-exalting, doctrines-of-grace affirming, culture-reaching wisdom desperately needed in the Church today. This issue in particular contains a special section with eleven church leaders briefly answering the question: "What is the Future of Evangelicalism?" I invite you subscribe or to at least go online and check out their offerings. In an interview with Modern Reformation, Ravi Zacharias said:

"Sheer pragmatism is probably the predominant North American philosophy; do whatever works. But what we find out in the the long run is that sometimes what works isn't necessarily good or true. And we have to think these things through in order to determine the pitfalls of evangelism. . . . If you come to Christ through sheer pragmatism, there will always be somebody around the corner who can pragmatically give you something better."

Many in the evangelical camp seem to have imagined that no matter how they tossed the Gospel into the air, it would still fall the same way every time. Paul would disagree. He wrote: My speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom [one method] but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power [another method] that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (1 Cor. 2:4-5). Thus, one's engaging rhetoric may "earn the ear" of the hearer while losing their heart. Seemingly implausible words, on the other hand, promise to carry a far greater, and eternal significance. Both produce faith, one resting in man's wisdom, the other in God's power. Both spoke the "gospel," but only one succeeded--the one empowered through the Spirit. It is impossible to overestimate the tremendous importance bound up in this principle. It is a watershed issue which ministers and the Church must re-learn, lest they be "found opposing God" (Acts 5:39). To borrow from Zacharias, both work--sort of--but only one is true. That is one of the "litmus" tests for authentic Christianity. 

Historically, evangelicals have been known for their desire to "get people saved." But what was once their considerable strength has become their Achilles Heel.

Can We Be Good Without God?

For a number of years now, I have been receiving Chuck Colson's Breakpoint commentary, in which he editorializes on important current topics, or on new ways of looking at old topics. I found the following one (from 25 Nov. 2008) to be particularly helpful. Incidentally, a search of the above title will produce several insightful articles on the Breakpoint site. 

It’s the time of year when spoilsports come out in full force. You know who I mean—the kind of people who insist that people say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” or who go around suing city halls that dare to have a Nativity scene on public property. But this year, the Christmas cranks have actually launched an ad campaign to convince us that God doesn’t exist.

The Humanist Association is placing posters on buses in Washington, D.C., featuring a skinny Santa in dreadlocks and the words, “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.”

Fred Edwords, communications director of the Humanist Association, says that partly they’re trying to cheer up agnostics and atheists, who tend to get lonely this time of year when most of their neighbors are celebrating holy days. Pity. But he says they’re also “trying to plant a seed of rational thought and critical thinking and questioning in people’s minds.”

They never give up, do they? Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and now the Humanists—all spreading and making money trying to convince us that God doesn’t exist and that His followers are a bunch of irrational dopes.

Maybe these folks ought to take a break from decorating buses and read a book by my friend Professor J. Budziszewski. In his book—a classic—What We Can’t Not Know, Budziszewski explains why we cannot be good without God and why godless morality always fails.

You see, without God, morality itself loses meaning. Christians know we can learn about how to live from the way God designed us. But without God, we can’t think of ourselves as designed at all. In fact, the evolutionist says that “man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have us in mind.” If that’s so, then morality and human nature are mere accidents of evolution.

So instead of caring for our children, we might choose to eat them, the way guppies do. Why not? If morality is an accident of evolution, who can say that this would be wrong?

Apart from God, we have no reason to take morality seriously. Sure, we can do a few good things here and there without God. In fact, it would be great if atheists this Christmas were to give gifts to poor children or the children of prisoners like we do with Angel Tree.

But to think we can be good, that we can build a good and humane society without God, is pure folly. And it’s a folly with catastrophic consequences, as the untold millions of victims of the atheistic utopianisms of the 20th century bear witness. Or as we see today in our depleted savings accounts—the result of a subprime crisis caused by immoral actions on the part of mortgage lenders.

So if those ads make news in your town, or if you happen to see one plastered on a local bus, why not start a conversation with an unsaved friend about the impossibility of being “good for goodness’ sake”—that is, without God. And then offer your friend rational arguments for the existence of our Heavenly Father—the kind offered by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. You might even send a copy to your local humanist society as a Christmas present.

Who knows? They might develop rational doubts about why they are so obsessed with a God they believe doesn’t exist.

As Lewis—a lapsed atheist himself—put it, “An atheist cannot guard his faith too closely.”

The Gospel, Bound to Be Offensive

We live at cross purposes with this world. This is, as you can determine from my blog title, one of the main purposes of my writing, i.e., to bring out this fact especially in light of the opposition Christianity has been receiving from our postmodern culture. One way to offset such opposition is to provide examples of bold preaching from bygone years. Styles may change, yes, but not the truth. The following is an excerpt from one the Second Great Awakening's most notable and passionate preachers, Edward Dorr Griffin. 

“So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked one, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked person shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand (Ezekiel 33:7-8).

Even in the midst of unprecedented revival, Edward Dorr Griffin preached passionately out of great difficulty knowing that the message of salvation runs counter to this culture and that the hearts of man are hardened to it. In a sermon preached on the above text (The Watchman), Griffin says:

"It is impossible for a minister to deliver the whole message of God without giving offence to some. And the reason is, that the character and destiny of sinners are such as they cannot bear to hear described. The truth is, that heaven and earth are at variance. The world is not as it was made, nor as it ought to be. It has revolted from God; and God esteems the character of unregenerate men as bad, and is as angry with them, as any watchman ever represented. Else why is every page of his word filled with solemn accusations and complaints, which call forth resentments against this book more than against any other book on earth? Why is it that every eye, as soon as it is opened, sees this controversy to be as real as the existence of God? Why was this beautiful paradise changed to a vale of tears, to be chastened with griefs and shaken with tempests? Why did a view of divine wrath against the world press out the bloody sweat of Gethsemane? Did not the agonies of Calvary show that God was angry with men? If all these proofs fail to strike, one is at hand which, one would think, could not be resisted. Why is it that when sinners die, God puts them into an eternal hell? . . . Settle it then that heaven and earth are at variance, and that God has a controversy with men." (Sermons, 2:574)

Griffin avers that he takes no pleasure in giving his hearers pain:

"Could you point out any way in which I could disquiet you less, which would comport with the duty I owe to God and with tenderness to your immortal interests, and for which you yourselves would not reproach me another day, I would gladly spare you."

But we ministers (yea, all believers) will one day be called to account for how we proclaimed God's truth. Therefore, he says, "I dare not amuse you with softer tones, and neglect to warn you of the sins of your heart and the retributions of eternity."

This is the way we need to be thinking. Far too much time is put on what men want, what our culture deems "acceptable." Is it not our calling to represent the King, and be an ambassador for the courts of heaven? Then to our Lord we are responsible, he who loves far deeper, and whose justice requires far more than lost men can fathom.