I've Been Thinking About This…

Here are the supporting Scriptures from the message on Forgiveness, April 25, 2010 – they are all from the ESV. You can listen to the audio message here:

How Good Is ‘Good Enough’?

… and the slides are here:

1. Step up to your wrongdoing – own it.
   • “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” – 2 Chronicles 7:14
2. Repent of it & confess it.
   • I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. – Psalms 32:5
   • If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. – 1 John 1:8-9
3. Trust in God for forgiving and forgetting.
   • I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud and your sins like mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you. – Isaiah 44:22
   • The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. – Psa 34:18
   • “For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” – Hebrews 8:12
   • as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. – Psalms 103:12
   • For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 6:23
4. Stop bringing it up – start living. You’re free of it.
   • There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. – Rom 8:1-2
   • Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. – Romans 5:1
5. Make sure you do your bit too – forgiving others is essential.
   • “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” – Matt 6:14-15
   • Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” (22) Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven. – Matthew 18:21-22
   • “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.” – Matthew 18:35
6. Why forgive?
   • Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. – Ephesians 5:1
   • But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. – 1 Peter 2:9
   • See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. – 1 John 3:1
   • Applying to temptation resisted, sin confessed and life lived in Christ Jesus:
     Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. – 1 John 4:4
7. Summary.
   • Your best is never so good that you can redeem yourself; your worst is never so bad that God won’t redeem you.
   • The devil wants us to stay focused on our sin so we don’t focus on God.
   • If we are truly children of God, then we are princes and princesses of His family for all eternity – immortal. Isn’t it time we acted like it?

   Send article as PDF   

Something just popped into my head.

When you go to an evangelical-minded church, occasionally (or frequently or every Sunday) the preacher there will have an altar call. And how does he conduct it? He says the old ritual lines – ‘every head bowed, every eye closed. This is nobody else’s business – just between you and the Lord – yes, I see those hands…’ and so on.

And what I want to know all of a sudden is, WHY? Why are all the heads bowed? Why are all the eyes closed? And above all, Why is it nobody else’s business?

Shouldn’t everyone SEE who’s coming to the Lord? SEE who’s thrown off the chains? SEE who’s going to join them in Heaven? Isn’t this a time of God’s glory manifesting itself in the salvation and redemption of a sinner?

And shouldn’t those who are raising their hands want to jump up on their chairs and shout, “Woo-ha! I’m saved for all eternity by the Blood of the Lamb!!!!!” ? (Woo-ha is in the Christian dictionary, I’m sure. See the section on “speaking in tongues”.)

And shouldn’t the rest of the church be looking and seeing and clapping and rejoicing over the salvation of someone “once lost, but now found”?

The angels certainly go nuts –

What’s with the eyes closed and doing this in secret? Sure, it makes it easier for the timid to put up their hands. But I have an ugly suspicion that it’s a procedure being followed by the preacher for that very reason – so that he can gain some converts that he may otherwaise not be able to count.

I’ve always sensed that this was a silly or even childish practice. Now I think it through, I think it’s a very dangerous one as well.

We are called to tell the world about Jesus and bring them to Him. Good grief! If we can’t acknowledge Jesus as our Lord and Saviour in church of all places, how can we do it in the World?

Am I missing something here?

   Send article as PDF   

I’m not a big people-person. I’m an introvert.

The people I like, I like. But there are people I find it hard to like. The EGRs. The rough. The cynics. The cruel. The selfish. The bitter. The whiners. The broken.

People who are broken are sharp and prickly. They’re difficult. They interrupt conversations, or are opinionated or worse – they disagree with me.

The thing is, though: People who are broken were broken by others who were broken. Broken people break people.

So if broken people break people, who heals people? Healed people do, of course. You didn’t see Jesus going around breaking people – He went in the other direction and healed them (if they’d let Him).

I spoke about this last week in church (shameless self-promotional plug! – To Speak of Grace) as part of our stewardship series, and used a hospital analogy: If I break my arm, I don’t go to the bowling alley, I go where I know I can get help to get better – to a hospital. I don’t go to a philosopher or a witch-doctor, because they can’t help in this situation. Healing comes from a doctor. Similarly, when I need spiritual healing, I go to a spiritual hospital – which the Church is designed to be. The problem is, we’re sick of churches. We keep hearing about how they’re run by people who have not acted in a Godly manner – pastors or priests who have been abusive, or adulterous, or greedy. It’s hard to separate the institution from those who make themselves its figureheads.

But the Church has always been God’s sole design for the spiritual hospital, and it always will be. Pursuing this analogy further, the medical staff is headed up by Jesus, and – for those who can only say, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” – there are ambulances. We are the ambulance. When someone is so lost and broken that they can’t (or won’t or even daren’t) get to church, we are sent out into the world to rescue those broken souls.

Which brings me back to the broken and to my comfort zone.

There are certain people that fit very readily into my comfort zone. Nice people. It’s true for each of us – you too! We’re very good at inviting the people we like to church; in fact, we quite comfortably invite friends who are already going to other churches to come to ours instead, because ours is ‘more alive’, or ‘has better worship music’, or ‘great preaching’. We’re actively pushing them to join us.

If you’re wealthy, or good-looking, or charismatic, or popular then – just like high school – you make the in-crowd. We want you. If you’re not one of those, but you’re useful, or hard-working, or clever then well, OK, we’ll tolerate you.

But if you’re noisy, or over-emotional, or have bad breath, or wear the same clothes all the time, or exhibit some other social lack; if you’re homeless, or an addict, or abusive, or a hooker then would you please stay away? You’ll mess it up for the rest of us. You don’t fit in our comfort zone.

I might expand my comfort zone for old people, or – up to a point – even for noisy tots, but not for you. You’re broken.

The problem is: The ones I don’t want in my comfort zone … are the very people Jesus does want.

The people I think will totally mess up my church … are the ones Jesus says it’s there for.

He hung out with the homeless, the beggars, the prostitutes, the adulterers, the maimed, the forgotten, the side-lined.

The keys to His church were carried by smelly wet lower-class fishermen and by reformed Quisling-style tax-collectors. He accepted water from an adulterous woman and foot washing from a prostitute. He healed lepers and sent them to the temple. He healed blind people, lame people, crippled people, unclean people, demon-possessed people. His admiration was spent on the sacrifice of a widow who gave her last farthing to the temple; on the faith of a soldier of the occupation forces, and on the importunity of a gentile Syro-Phoenician mother.

These aren’t the people who should be getting into the church, right?

Wrong.

They need hospital. They’re broken. And when we deny them access – either actively by saying, “You’re not invited” when they show up at the hospital, or passively by failing to send the ambulance out to invite them – we’re not healing them. And if we’re not healing, we’re allowing the breaking to continue. And if we allow it to continue, we’re one of the breakers. And if we’re one of the breakers, we must still be broken ourselves.

What if we went out to the broken people and urged them to come to church with us – to sit beside us in church – with the same enthusiasm with which we urge our friends to come?

   Send article as PDF   

My pastor has started to read through the Gospel of Mark for the rest of the month – you can follow him here: Saving Pastor Ryan. So a few of our small group members are joining him – thought I would too, even though I’m a few days behind here. As others join the blogfest, I’ll post their links.

Of all the things I think of when I read chapter 1 of Mark’s Gospel, I think that the idea of timing hits me most solidly.

First the promise of 2,000 years has suddenly come to pass, and who was ready for it? As a nation it had looked forward to this time since its infancy in Goshen, Egypt – as the patriarchs did before that – but it has been so long that expectancy had become the habit and realization just couldn’t take hold.

Then comes John the Baptist to ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’ – but very few are awake to hear his song in the Jordan Valley. He must have had some impact though: God never sends someone to do pointless things.

But most of all, he is there for the Christ – to make sure that the prophecies are completed:

• Mark 1:4 “John appeared…” (to fulfill Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3-4)
• Mark 1:9 “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee” (a prophecy referenced in Matt 2:23 that seems to refer back to something Isaiah references in Isaiah 11:1)
• Mark 1:15 “and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’

Secondly I’m struck by the immediacy of response throughout the chapter. Look at all these verses:

For all that few are awake to respond to the Christ, He Himself is in the center of a whirlpool of activity. Every few minutes some new event seems to be triggered; there is a sense of intense and irresistible urgency; once the Christ has appeared, there is no stopping the forward momentum.

   Send article as PDF   

I’ve been thinking about churches recently – reading a lot about church leadership, following some of the great leaders’ blogs and twitters, thinking about how churches start and about how they come to an end. I suppose there are some that shut down by being called to do so, just as they started up. But I can’t think of any offhand, and most die a long, painful, lingering death.

There are so many reasons for a church’s death – occasionally, people in a rural setting simply aren’t there anymore when the whole town shuts down; in an urban setting, sometimes the neighborhood becomes commercial or industrial and houses are pulled down and replaced with a mall or a factory. But mostly, I suspect, the church simply fails to listen, obey and fulfill its mission – to go into the world and make disciples. When it doesn’t do that, it lets Christ down; He pulls the plug.

A couple of days ago, I was thinking about the parable of the talents ¹. We always think of it being applied to individuals, but I started wondering if it could be applied to a church. Do churches fit into this pattern? I think so.

Here’s the précis: Some fit the 1-talent mold: they’re holding a great gift, but they’re clueless about what to do with it. They don’t want to risk losing what they have, so they bury the chance for success. Some fit the 2-talent mold: they take the risk and they find expansion happens, even though their situation isn’t ideal – they used what they were given to great effect. Then there are some that are 5-talent churches: they’re in an ideal position – they have the geography and the population, the leadership is just right and they act on it. They experience tremendous growth – in evangelism, in discipleship, in missions, in spiritual vitality.

Let me flesh that out after the Scripture:

There are churches that have been ‘doing church’ for so long it has become a habit, rather than a mission. New people aren’t searched for, or even delighted in when they arrive – they’re tolerated, and that only if they stay inside the boundaries that the church currently maintains. But the most terrifying thing of all is change. For these institutions, any change at all is anathema – someone in the congregation will object: “It’s not the way we do things here!” – so if change is suggested by anyone foolish enough to risk it, the suggestion is quickly squashed. Things that annoy people may cause them to leave, and 1-talent churches are too small and frail to be able to afford someone leaving. However, people must leave in the end, and as the oldest of the congregation are carried out, the congregation dwindles slowly into dust…and their talent is taken from them – they buried it, quite literally, in their coffins.

Then there are the 2-talent churches that really ‘get’ their mission, but may be positioned away from the big population centers and so don’t get the huge numbers of people that the mega-churches do. But they get to work anyway, and they apply creativity to their situation where they are; they embrace change as not just inevitable but also useful. They listen to the Word and the Spirit; they do some things with future growth in mind; they steal ideas and look at how ‘big’ churches model innovation – and they connect to the culture around themselves and in so doing reach others…and their 2 talents become 4.

Finally there are the 5-talent churches. Mega-churches have gotten a bad rap these days, but I have to wonder how much of this is fueled by jealousy or belief that it happened by some sleight-of-hand. Ministry shouldn’t be a competition; it should be a partnership. This is a race we’re all in, not as competitors but as a relay team. God forbid we should decide that other churches are ‘the enemy’ – hasn’t Satan won then? Isn’t that exactly what he wants? Get us to fighting against each other and we won’t have time to bring people to Christ.

The 5-talent church has the highest strengths, but also the greatest responsibilities. So many of these churches are in high-population areas, and for them, the following holds true:

• Big business thrives in the big cities; big business seeks out and draws in high-performers and makes them live in proximity.
• High performers (Christian or not) want to excel – at maximizing income, fame, influence or anything else they see as their target. So they move to the cities.
• Some high-performers are great leaders; all great leaders are high-performers. The city holds many great leaders.
• Some great leaders are Christians, go to church, and become involved in their church’s missions.
• A church, like every other endeavor, grows fastest under great leadership.
• A church can only grow when it reaches out.
• Churches can grow fastest and largest where there is the highest population to reach out to – in the cities.
• Cities hold the densest population of broken people – some on the streets, some going there, some lost in other ways.
• Christ seeks to heal, to comfort, to meet needs and to draw others to Himself.
• Christ uses the church to do this.
• The Spirit will guide the obedient church into developing ministries to fulfill Christ’s desire.
• Big lostness requires a big response, which in turn requires big resources. The Spirit (an infinite resource Himself!) can marshal those resources through organizations willing to obey sacrificially.

Christ has always put a premium on healing the lost and broken – unfortunately His church has often felt they were a nuisance. 2-talent churches – and 5-talent churches even more – must and do put themselves in the role of the Samaritan rather than the priest or the Levite².

The only real difference in our parable between the servant who got 2 talents and the one that was given 5 talents is that their master favored the latter – presumably because he recognized higher potential – there was something greater that the 5-talent servant was capable of. The only difference between a 2-talent church and a 5-talent church is that the 5-talent church has similarly been granted access to greater resources – planted in a city, perhaps, rather than a rural area. There is no difference in the effort each put in – both doubled the original talents entrusted to them.

And the reward for each was identical. The master said, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.”

We may not be called to be a 5-talent church – but that better not stop us from being a 2-talent church. When the Master in question is God, entering into His joy is beyond understanding!

   Send article as PDF   

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

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.

(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!) )

   Send article as PDF