I’ve Been Thinking About This…

In the early 1970s Debby Kerner wrote a song “Behold, I Stand at the Door and Knock” based on this verse in Revelations:

[As an aside: I bought the record (Come Walk With Me - it's available at Amazon.com and looks to be a collector's item at this point) in the mid-1970s – it’s copyrighted 1972, but I know that song was on the first record produced by Maranatha in 1971 (some interesting notes on the discography here for all those of you who were into the ‘Jesus Scene’ in the 1970s!) ]

I thought of that song a few days ago as I was reading through Revelation, and the thing that struck me was that this verse is part of the message to the church of Laodicea. Alone of all the churches, there is no commendation for Laodicea – only condemnation. And that condemnation is brief - when there’s nothing good to say, the bad needs no qualification.

But then … comes this marvelous verse, and it is to the un-commended Laodiceans that the verse is addressed. Following blanket dismissal comes this chance of redemption – even now there is still time to change, time to listen, time to open the door, time to conquer.

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Somewhere back around 1500BC, Moses was in the desert being amazed at a bush that wouldn’t stop burning. This Holy fire was his first sign of God’s presence. When God told Moses His name – or we could call it one of His chief characteristics, since God has so many names – Moses gained new insight. The name which we translate Jehovah combines all three tenses of the verb ‘to be’ – past present and future. “I was, I am, I will be.” ¹ The meaning behind it? God is saying that all of Moses’ past, all his present and all his future are in God’s present. Nobody is hidden from God because of darkness (Psalm 139:11); nobody is hidden from God because they’re yet to be born (Psalm 139:13); nobody is hidden from God because they’re too far away for Him to detect (Psalm 139:9); now we are told that they aren’t hidden from Him by being too far away in time, either. Time is not a barrier to Him; He doesn’t even move back and forth through it as He chooses – it is all spread out before Him.

Apart from its obvious impact to the Calvinism/Arminianism debate, this has some staggering implications, and perhaps foremost is a re-shaping of our understanding about prophecy. Consider the Old Testament prophets predicting the Messiah and the events surrounding His birth and death. There are those who have spent many hours trying to calculate the probability of those prophecies coming true – coming up with numbers such as

• 1 in 537,000,000 for the final sufferings of Christ during the 24 hours leading up to his crucifixion ²;
• 1 in 10¹¹⁰ for 300 predictions of the Messiah in the Old Testament ³;
• 1 in 1/10¹⁷ in reference to 8 Messianic prophecies, and 1 in 10¹⁵⁷ in reference to 48 prophecies ⁴

… which may be a noble endeavor, but I think it completely misses the point.

We’re stuck in a one-way stream; we can’t go backwards in time; we can’t even slow it down at all. This idea of Time being a one-way flow of events is so completely ingrained in our understanding of how things work that we perceive such prophecy as being about the future. We say to ourselves, “Somehow, God has made an incredibly bold statement about an unbelievably unlikely event, before going on to fulfill that statement. What an incredible risk He took in saying that! It just shows how much He is in control of the universe.”

When we think along those lines, we impose our human limitations on God. Because it isn’t about the future – not to the Giver of the Word – it’s all in the present to Him. The point here isn’t that God should be given the glory for (1) taking a huge risk, (2) making a series of near-impossible statements, and then (3) manipulating events to make those prophecies come true. It is rather that He has made sure that the description passed along to us is so utterly impossible that we must believe that – since only Jesus can and has fulfilled them – He must be the Messiah that was prophesied!

If you believe what God told Moses about Himself in Exodus 3, then you have to accept that He is not constrained by time, and thus that He had all the details about the Messiah in front of Him as He spoke through each prophet in the Old Testament. That was the point of the prophecies – not so much to reflect on the Father’s manipulation of events, but to ensure the recognition and acceptance of the Son. Messianic prophecies are a passport - God’s proof of who Jesus really is – His ‘identity papers’, embedded unchangeably in Time.

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On January 20, 2009 President Obama was inaugurated. Some Christians voted for him, and some didn’t, but even many of those who didn’t were still keen to recognize the Biblical injunction to ‘pray for our leaders’:

Nearly a quarter of a million people signed up on Max Lucado’s site to pray – others may not have signed up there, or even heard of him, but they too prayed.

And then what?

How easily we forget. If Biblical Christianity is indeed correct, then the battle of evil against good hasn’t stopped just because we had a nice bit of a prayer in January. Who’s praying now? And who’s getting ready to say, “Well, I don’t like what Obama says, or does, or stands for” … without having added their voice to what I suspect is the pitifully small number of people still praying? Do we only pray for our leaders when we feel like it? That’s not Biblical. Do we abandon them - stop praying for them - when they don’t follow a policy we believe in? That’s not Biblical either.

Let’s change that.

Politics is a hard enough arena to be in – let’s at least look after the people we voted about. One single vote in a presidential election seems a tiny thing when we compare it to the many millions needed to elect someone – but it all adds up, and every vote counts in one way or another. A prayer also seems to be an inconsequential thing – but each one matters.

We expect President Obama to make good decisions on our behalf about seats on the Supreme Court, foreign relations, the economic crisis – everything. It’s his job.

We should get back to our job – praying for our leaders.

What are your thoughts? Leave them in the comments…

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I wanted to play around a bit with Sparklines – cool little in-line charts and graphs that run off the jQuery library base. I’d found them several months ago in my regular trawling through the ‘net. So I took some of the CDC stats on N1H1 (aka swine flu) that they Twitter each day, and put this and this little Sparkline together. These are running on this page.

I also liked the Dow Jones Sparkline that they had on the screen, so I wrote a PHP server to get the closing prices from Yahoo! for the last 4 weeks and pass them to a Dow chart like theirs.

Unfortunately Wordpress doesn’t let me include server-side scripting, so here’s a screen-capture of it.

I must say I’m pretty chuffed with it all…

[Updated this page 5/22/09]

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How do you write an entire book about one simple thing? Dave Ferguson’s (@DaveFerguson) The Big Idea: Focus the Message, Multiply the Impact is a book about one thought, and you’d think it would be pretty hard for the author to get past the first chapter – after all, that’s a lot of extra writing to go through once you’ve presented your single thought.

It might be a simple thing, but it’s also profound yet counter-intuitive in today’s church – just say one thing at a time. Say it to everyone. Say it clearly and loudly. Strip away all the competition to it. Get everybody on board. Drop the busy-ness of multiple programs whose schedules and resource requirements conflict and simplify everything into a more-easily-led approach.

The Big Idea reminds me of a business book I read some 10 years ago - Jack Stack’s brilliant The Great Game of Business – a brief set of profound truths backed up by the mechanics of how to build them into the daily business structure. That was one of the most exciting business books I’ve ever read (and I’ve read a bunch) – head and shoulders above trivial feel-goods like ‘The Apple/HP/IBM/Microsoft/Starbucks Way’.

What Stack did, and what Ferguson has also done, is to flesh out the mechanics of the process in subsequent sections. This is a good approach – techies (like me) connect to a structure through the blueprint; those who need help understanding (also like me) appreciate the explanation of the details that make an example of it work.

Unfortunately, churches with a more traditional and committee-driven structure will not be fully free to indulge in this approach. But I’ve talked about this concept to several pastors, and those who were positioned to take advantage of the concept got very excited. The idea of replicating a single idea throughout the entire congregation has a dynamism that can be both exhilarating and freeing – a permission to follow the vision of their heart.

An excellent book – worth a re-read once in a while.

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Just finished reading Sticky Church (Leadership Network Innovation Series) by Larry Osborne (@LarryOsborne). When I started I was very resistant to his idea of small groups following the sermon each week. It seemed to be very limiting; if you were into something else (a book-by-book Bible study, for instance, or following a great speaker’s videos and discussing them (my small group has  just finished Mark Batterson’s Wild Goose Chase: Reclaim the Adventure of Pursuing God and is now on his In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars)), then you were in the position where the church was pretty much dictating what your group should study.

As I continued reading, however, I have to say that the points he made resonated:

• Page 91 - the need for the church to take real life into account - people are busy; today’s world demands it; the new (& reversed) Christian pop analysis along the lines of ‘Busy hands are the devil’s playthings’ is not universally true;
• Page 94 - the need to control how much ’stuff’ the church makes available for people to do. When the opportunities for events are moved onto the calendar, is the church leadership protecting its highest priority - or is it the church’s highest priority to be the busiest place in town?;
• Page 110 - small groups don’t run continually - they last for 10 weeks - and they have an easy exit strategy. However, once you have the relationships built, you may be with those people for many years (he calls this Mayberry, USA);
• Page 111 - small group leaders act as pastors to the group - when life throws a crisis, they’re in there for their small group members who need them.

Somewhere between chapters 5 and 12 I came to realize that he was talking about a rather different type of small group to the ones most churches have - these are mini-churches, people deeply committed to looking after one another, to the point that they do their own baptisms, even the hospital visitations. I also came to recognise the rationale behind the approach. Would it work across the board? Of course not, any more than the Chu method would (and indeed, Osborne is quick to point this out himself - every church is made up of a unique blend of people, cultures, economies, ages, and so on). But it has clearly worked for his church, and I’d love the opportunity to spend a few weeks there.

One thing I would have a real problem with, if I were at this church - the idea of  deliberately ‘hamstringing’ personal growth opportunities in the event that they get in the way of the small groups. The North Coast U. is crippled down to courses that consist of a maximum of 4 evenings.  The book makes the point that the average person can’t afford more than two meetings for church per week, therefore they put North Coast U on as a third meeting in the week! That’s just wrong. Now based on what I’ve read in the book, there are three alternatives they could use to support those people who wanted to know more - (1) they could run the school during the summer; (2) they could divert a group that was interested into the school for a 10-week session - this would also give the leader and the host an apparently much-needed break - or (3) the small groups are running for 10 weeks at a time - there would certainly be room to fit the course in between them. (Clearly this hit a chord in me!) This deeper education is something I think should be available in a church, and I think is denied to its members’ detriment. Too many of us do not know the Bible on anything but a superficial level. We therefore remain ill-equiped for either personal understanding or apologetics - and we’re missing a vital pillar of support during times of crisis, where we’re questioning rather than moving forward. However, the school is not the point of the book; I expect they redeemed it somewhere along the line.

I have to say I’m glad the author spent some time debunking some myths, including ‘divide to multiply’ - tried it and seen it fail - and challenged the standard views in a few other areas.

All in all, a great book with a great message. Interestingly enough I moved straight on to Mark Waltz’s book Lasting Impressions: From Visiting to Belonging, which notes that Granger Community Church takes almost the exact opposite view of small groups. The mindset is the same however, and as noted above, Osborne makes the point that no one way is correct for every church.

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