Lawyer-Christians

Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.  He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.  But whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him.  He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked.

-St John

When it comes to the Bible, I have found that most of us are scheming and conniving lawyers. We love looking for loopholes so we can get around its simple and clear commands. When we can’t find a loophole we yank out a Get Out of Jail Free card claiming a special dispensation. I’m confused, ill, suffering, or, a favorite go-to today, doing that won’t work in today’s culture.  Phew! Always feels good when I can figure out how to be a Christian while at the same time keeping the New Testament from intruding in my life.

Consider four direct commandments for those who say they are followers of Jesus Christ:

Love one another (John 13.34) Pretty straightforward command with plenty of descriptions throughout the NT as to how love behaves and does not behave (e.g. I Corinthians 13). Loving others is not left in a fog of opinions but has objective and concrete descriptions with which we can evaluate the nature and depth of our professed love. It is terrifyingly simple: whatever we do to or for the least of Christ’s brothers, we have done to or for him. (Matt. 25.40)

Walk in the light (I John 1.6,7) Be directed by the Light of God’s Truth, allow the Light of Christ to continually burn away all of our darkness, and be truthful and honest in all our dealings with others. And when we see that we have been walking in darkness?

Confess your sins one to another (James 5.16: Note It does not say to confess his or her sins to others!) Certainly we confess to God. Here, however, because our darkness affects the people around us, we are to humble ourselves and confess what we have done and left undone that is unbecoming for a child of God’s. Yet this command is not simply about asking forgiveness of those whom we have failed. It is broader than this, as it is describing a fundamental transparency with fellow Christians regarding our failures. Talk about an effective means for dealing deathblows to pride and vanity. Yowzer!

Bear one another's burdens (Galatians 6. 2) Our burdens—our concerns, internal battles, frailties, failures, fears, conflicts, and insecurities—are not for our shoulders alone. For many of us the challenge is not in serving others but in allowing other people to serve us where we most need their strength and wisdom.

“No problem, Wilson. I am all for love, light, confession, and serving others.”

Okay.

Show me where it is happening in your life.

Name the individuals with whom you are living out these commands in your day-to-day living.

It’s easy to agree with the demands of the NT without carrying them out in a specific context.  But Christ said if we loved him, we'd obey his commandments, not just parrot them. 

It is disingenuous to stand before the jury, telling them how highly we value Christ’s commands, while at the same time doing everything in our power to nullify or circumvent those commands. The jury of our peers may buy it: the Judge doesn’t.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

What Were You Looking For?

A terrible storm came into a town and local officials sent out an emergency warning that the riverbanks would soon overflow and flood the nearby homes. They ordered everyone in the town to evacuate immediately.

A faithful Christian man heard the warning and decided to stay, saying to himself, “I will trust God and if I am in danger, then God will send a divine miracle to save me.”

The neighbors came by his house and said to him, “We’re leaving and there is room for you in our car, please come with us!” But the man declined. “I have faith that God will save me.”

As the man stood on his porch watching the water rise up the steps, a man in a canoe paddled by and called to him, “Hurry and come into my canoe, the waters are rising quickly!” But the man again said, “No thanks, God will save me.”

The floodwaters rose higher pouring water into his living room and the man had to retreat to the second floor. A police motorboat came by and saw him at the window. “We will come up and rescue you!” they shouted. But the man refused, waving them off saying, “Use your time to save someone else! I have faith that God will save me!”

The flood waters rose higher and higher and the man had to climb up to his rooftop.

A helicopter spotted him and dropped a rope ladder. A rescue officer came down the ladder and pleaded with the man, "Grab my hand and I will pull you up!" But the man STILL refused, folding his arms tightly to his body. “No thank you! God will save me!”

Shortly after, the house broke up and the floodwaters swept the man away and he drowned.

When in Heaven, the man stood before God and asked, “I put all of my faith in You. Why didn’t You come and save me?”

And God said, “Son, I sent you a warning. I sent you a car. I sent you a canoe. I sent you a motorboat. I sent you a helicopter. What more were you looking for?”

We’ve all been there. We cry out to God for help, deliverance, salvation, comfort, but he is nowhere to be found. Or was He there all along? He sent a priest, then a friend kept showing up offering to help, a couple of buddies told us about this support group, “out of the blue” someone mailed us a book or a DVD  … yet we stayed on our knees begging God to come to our aid.

Read the scriptures: Divine, “face to face” encounters are incredibly rare. What we do see, however, are divine appointments with people whom God sent to speak to us, to serve us, to get us out of harm’s way before we drowned.

It’s easy to say, “I am trusting God in God alone.” It’s all quite spiritual sounding but actually displays a misunderstanding as to the ways of God.

God: Wilson, do you trust me?

Wilson: Yeah verily and spiritually I do, most Sovereign-eth and Loving-eth God! (Throwing in the Old English ought to impress Him.)

God: Then trust me to use that person over there for your welfare.

Wilson: Now wait just a minute Lord: her? (Believe me here: God has a tremendous sense of humor, as the “help” He sends is often the last person we want to talk to.)

Throughout Israel’s history, God sent people (Prophets) to point them in the direction of wisdom and spiritual health. They were pretty much always treated as pariah. Of course, if you are like me, when you read these stories you think to yourself, “What a bunch of idiots: I would have listened!”

That’s what the Pharisees said to Jesus. Remember?

Jesus: And you say, “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.” (Matthew 23)

He then goes on and tells them they surely would have stoned those men, and, to prove it, they were going to kill the very Son of God who comes in God’s name.

He closes his rebuke with this terrifying declaration: “You aren’t going to see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who come in the name of the Lord.’” You Pharisees want to see God? You had better welcome and bless me.

I don’t want to make this passage say more than what is actually being said. This is all about Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, I do believe there is a spiritual principle here. We cry out to God to come to us. He sends him, her, or them, to help us. If we want to see Him, if we want His aid, comfort, and wisdom, it’s a pretty good idea to face these people and say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Come right in!” Of course, we can always die, trusting in God alone. But then there’s that uncomfortable conversation with Him where He points to whom all He sent our way and asks, “What were you looking for?”

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

Your Tongue's On Fire!

Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless.

(T)he tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.

--St James

A couple of weeks ago I had a nightmare where I had discovered that someone whose respect and friendship meant the world to me had heard something about me that destroyed his trust in me.  It was one of those dreams where you wake up shaking and nauseated. For hours afterward, I had to keep telling myself it was just a dream. Ever since that night I have been thinking non-stop about the ability of our tongue’s to ruin lives.

By the time we are around 9 years old, we have all experienced the pain of discovering that someone we thought was our friend has been speaking ill of us, behind our backs. “She is such a baby.” “He is so arrogant.” “Did you know that she told me that she thought you were stupid?” The pain of those first experiences is world shattering and potentially life altering.

As we grow older, the stories take on greater sophistication and subtlety, as few people want to be known as gossips and backstabbers. “I’m really concerned about her marriage. I think she is hitting the bottle every night. We need to watch our for her.” In Christian circles, the added twist would be, “We need to pray for her.” Gossip baptized in a prayer request is okay, right? RIGHT?

I have seen businesses driven into bankruptcy by slander. I have witnessed first hand marriages sped along the path to divorce by “well-meaning” friends who thought it their duty to tell their friend about what “actually happened the other night with your spouse,” and then proceeded to tell a yarn they had heard second or third hand. I have repeatedly sought to help bring healing between friends whose bonds had been obliterated by a third party’s half-truths and false accusations.

Most all of us have seen the destructive nature of gossip, bearing false-witness, and slander. Many of us have been on the receiving end of such behavior, as well. It’s brutal, it’s deadly, and it’s morally reprehensible.

But I don’t want to talk about those gossips; I want to talk about you and me!

When out with the guys, have you ever noticed how many of the conversations are about someone who isn’t at the table? And what about those conversations around the office coffee pot where we all laughed at the idiocies of a co-worker … who wasn’t standing there? If we were the subject of the ridicule and later heard about the running commentary on our performance or personalities, how will we feel, what thoughts will explode in our brains? And what is going to happen to our relationships with these people? And what happens to my reputation of being a person of integrity in this person’s mind?

How many times have you begun a conversation with the line, “I don’t want to talk out of school…” and then proceeded to “talk out of school”?

How often do we report to others the unconfirmed tabloid accusations du jure as if they were unquestionably accurate?

And what about those times where, yes, we did tell “the truth” about someone but it was with the intent to harm, ridicule, or gloat?

In other words, how often do people do to us what we have done to others?

Gossip, bearing false-witness, and slander, are sparks from hell. We can’t control what others say, but we can resist hell-fire from bellowing out of our own mouths.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

The Gift Of Creation

There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. --Wendell Berry

Eden. So, there’s this tree in the Garden with fruit that the guys are told not to eat. It’s the only thing in the Garden that doesn’t have God’s blessing. Being like me—or am I like them?—and seeing a line in the sand as something begging you to step over, they chow down. “I know what’s best for me, I am my own man, the serpent is only wanting my best, for me to be free, blah, blah, you’re not the boss of me, blah.” Bad News, guys. Before you stepped over that line all of creation, except that one tree, was given to you as life and blessing and a means for communing with God. Now? All you get to eat is death.

Think of it this way. God gives us the gift of the world. Everything in the world but the fruit of this one tree was blessed of God for our good. So what do we do? We go to the one tree that is off limits, telling God that we now choose to see the world as an end in and of itself: it is not a means for communing with him, not something we transform into life. Consequently, the world is no longer a gift from God for us but a possession of man to use for his own end. Tragically, in doing this we cut the world off from it’s Creator and Sustainer so that it is no longer a means for communing with the light, life, and love of God, for us, no longer something we are to steward for his sake. But nothing has life in and of itself. Everything depends upon the life of God. Cut off from its Source, it may still appear to be alive, but it is disintegrating and dying, along with all of the breathing corpses running around behaving as if there is any meaning to existence apart from God.

Reoriented to the World

And then God came into the world as the Person, Jesus Christ, and offered us His life and love, so that for all who trust in Him for forgiveness and salvation life is restored. However, this is not simply a restoration of life with God but a restoration that also reorients us to His creation. Now, receiving these gifts as intended, with gratitude and dependence upon him for all things, the world is once again a means of communing with the God of Life.

Sadly, many Christians still behave as if the world was not affected by Christ’s death and resurrection. For these people the world and all of its beauty, glory, and wonders are, at best, pleasantries to distract us on our way to heaven, or, worse, things to be shunned. Where God says (Genesis 1. 26-29) go out and make the world more beautiful, manage its resources for his sake and for the good of others, and do your best to see to it that it increasingly reflects the very glory of its Creator, these people say, “Nonsense, all that matters is getting ready for heaven.”  

When we treat the gift of his creation as irrelevancies, aren’t we then saying that creation is not to be received with gratitude and stewarded for its owner? Explain to me exactly how such ingratitude honors God.

When we eat to survive rather than as a communal act with loved ones and God himself, what is it we are saying? That food and the world are still divorced from God and ... what, an end to itself? I thought we were to be imitators of Christ, not of Adam.

If we insist that God’s gift in Christ has nothing to do with our relationship to creation, what are we saying? That we aren’t to see God’s creation as a reflection of his beauty, glory, and life, no longer see it as a means for communing with him, no longer have any calling to be responsible stewards of his creation. Again, exactly how does this honor the Creator?

Somewhere along the line, many religious people decided that there was the spiritual world and then there was the material world, and we all know what really counts, eh? The spiritual banquet prepared by religion is more sacred than the dinner that was prepared for you last night, right? Wrong.

Part of our calling in the world, for the world, is to see and handle creation as the gift it is, to take it into our hands and, through our gratitude and praise to God, we are to transform it into life. In doing this, creation, once again, is reoriented to its God ordained purpose: a means for seeing and communing with our Creator and Father.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

The Restoration of Life

Christianity doesn’t offer to help us come to terms with death. Unlike secularism and religion, Christianity doesn’t offer comfort for breathing corpses, positive-thinking for a meaningless life, or pills to quiet the voices in our hearts that tells us there is something terribly wrong with “me.” Yes, sadly, when it comes to dying and death, the message of some Christians is only to light a candle at a memorial service and tell everyone that God is here for those who remain in the world and will be there for us after death, just as He is there for the dearly departed. (Please note my perfect imitation of Rev. Lovejoy.) Really? That’s what passes for the Good News of Christ?

The Christian message is not about comfort. It doesn’t offer us 7 Steps For Gliding Through Life Into Eternity or How To Rid Your Life of Tribulation and Suffering!  No. Its message addresses our tragic deformation and present relationship to death: not just death at the end of our lives, but the death that oozes out of our very pores as we go about pretending that life divorced from God is meaningful, and that suffering and death are normal.

The Norm is that death is more powerful than life? The Norm is to be subjugated to disintegration and death? Why then do our hearts recoil in the face of The Norm? Why is it that, deep within our souls, we long for something more than this? Why do we look at suffering, disease, and death, and sense that something is not right with the world or with us? Where did this “Not right” within us come from?

Why do we know that beauty is better than ugliness, love better than hatred, and life infinitely better than death: Because the God of beauty, love, and life created us in His image. And no matter how corrupted or deformed that image is within us, there is enough left to tell us that life, not death, is what we were created for: that death is abnormal, that death is our enemy.

The Restoration of Life

The message of Christianity is that the God who is Life came into this world to save people who had freely chosen to subjugate themselves and the world to death. The God of Life conquered death and offered us eternal life, here and now, not just after we die.

The Life of God did not come into the world as a Philosophy, an Ideology, an Institution, a Religion, or a set of rules to live by: this Life was made manifest in a Person, the Perfect Man – Jesus Christ. This God who took upon himself flesh, lived for us, died for us, was buried for us, and was resurrected for us. This God-Man defeated death so that life, once again, has meaning and purpose, so that Life is now The Norm, and time itself is filled with eternity, light, and love.

Christ died

Christ rose again

Christ has conquered death

Life reigns

“And this is life eternal, that they might know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17.3) In knowing God through Christ, we are united with the God who is Life eternal. By turning away from the death of separation from God and being united with Him, death is no longer an enemy, but is Christ himself. For in him, “all things are yours …. the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.” (1 Corinthians 3)

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

The True Face of Death

Death is loss, loss of life. Life is good. Loss of good is an evil. Therefore death is an evil. Loss of a great good is a great evil. Life is a great good. Therefore death is a great evil. Not to see this is a great blindness. Blindness is a great evil. Therefore not to see death as a great evil is a great evil. –Peter Kreeft, Love is Stronger Than Death

Our culture does everything in its power to cover the true face of death. “Life’s Good. Death’s Good. It’s All Good.” We hide our instinctual horror at death’s face behind beautiful chapels playing soft elevator music in the background, and with manicured cemetery lawns. We use euphemisms such as, “sleeping,” “eternal rest,” and “passed away,” so as to shield us from the terror of the finality of death. But whatever veneer or façade we use, as it was written of Jesus, so it will be true for us: he suffered, died, and was buried. Dead.

The New Testament never speaks of the human soul as being immortal or eternal. This is why we do read of “resurrection.” God alone is eternal. Throughout Scripture, we humans are seen as dependent upon God for every breath we take. To say that our souls are immortal is to say that we are not dependent on the God of Life, but have life within ourselves, regardless of and independent from God.

Throughout scriptures God is revealed as the source and giver of life. Nowhere is He seen as the author or creator of death. Death was not His doing but ours. Death is revealed as being contrary to God: The Enemy of God. For death to be “natural” would mean that God intended it from the beginning of creation. He did not.

The story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis shows us that death is the outcome of our choice to no longer be dependent on the life of God. We took God’s gift of the freedom to choose between Life and Death and we chose to subjugate ourselves to death.

Death is a poison we freely drank: a poison that inevitably and irreversibly leads to disintegration and death.

I believe that this is another reason – The Reason, in fact – why we seek to avoid thinking about the meaning of death, seek to cover its horror with beautiful chapels and beautiful words. When we witness death we sense that something is wrong with the world: that this (death) is not right, not how it should be. And then the horror of all horrors: What if it’s not a case where there is something wrong with the world? What if there is something wrong with me?

The bad news is that there is something wrong with us. We broke faith with God. We ripped ourselves away from a relationship with the God of Life, so as to go our own way. We divorced God. This is why we don’t want to speak about death, why we avoid, at any cost, seeking out its meaning, why we work so hard to cover death’s face. At the core of our souls, we know we are guilty and that the cause of disease, suffering, and death, lies within us.

Here is the good news. In our guilt and blame we find hope. As Peter Kreeft points out in his book, Love is Stronger Than Death, there is nothing wrong with the Cosmos. There is nothing wrong with God. Death is not natural. Life is not insane or guilty: I am. And if there is something wrong with me, maybe there is hope that my wrongness may be righted.

We may seek to put a different face on reality so that it appears other than what it is, but we do not, thereby, change reality. Our only hope is in facing reality, facing the fact that Death is pointing his guilty finger in our faces. And this is the beginning of hope. I say, “beginning,” because it is only the first and necessary step in discovering the meaning of death, and the possibility of changing or transforming our relationship to it.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014

Death: The Last Enemy To Be Conquered

My first encounter with death was when my Uncle Harry died. When my dad told me, I went into my bedroom weeping and retching. I was so traumatized there was no way I was going to his funeral. As I was only a boy, my parents were very caring and respectful, so did not force me. The closest thing I could come to explaining to dad what I was feeling was—terror.

As I grew older I was haunted by thoughts of my grandfather dying. (Monte, Sr.) However self-centered and juvenile, I frequently begged God to rapture us all to heaven before this could happen. (As an aside, I think many of the people who profess a belief in the “soon return of Jesus Christ for His Church” are actually whistling in a graveyard, hoping there won’t be a coffin in their futures.)

Death is Not Natural

During my formal studies in psychology one of the bon mots that we were taught was to “Teach people that death is natural.” What intrigued me was that I was hearing this from a professor who was a Christian.

Professor: Mr. Wilson, I can see that you disagree.

Mr. Wilson: I do. I think death is bloody well the most unnatural thing we will face in life.

Death is not natural. It showed up as a consequence of our free will choice to follow after God or to go our own way. God offers us life in and under Him, but we prefer death and going our own way.  

St Paul goes so far as to assert that death is not only unnatural, it is an enemy: “the last enemy to be destroyed.”

“But Monte, I want to die. In death I am freed from sickness and suffering, and from this evil world. I don’t fear death, I desire it.” Sounds quite spiritual, doesn’t it. The problem is that people who say such things usually have yet to first face the fact that death is an enemy. And how do you think God responds to those who speak and live as if the world and life that He gifted us with as something to escape as quickly as possible?

Tell me, when Jesus was in the garden praying in the shadow of his death on the cross, was he saying, “Whoopee, I am about to be outta here”? Or did he pray, “If there is anyway around this, Father, I’ll take it…let this cup (death) pass from me”?

When Jesus’ friend Lazarus died did He let out a shout of glee? No. He wept. Death is agony. Death is not natural, not what God intended for us.

Death is a terrifying enemy. YES, it is far more than this, or, rather, can be. But until we first face the reality of death being unnatural and an enemy, all of our rejoicing and celebrating that Brother Wilson is now with Jesus, are akin to Jesus skipping the bloody agony of the cross and going straight to heaven. As Peter Kreeft wrote, “Death cannot be a friend; it can only become a friend, after first being an enemy.”

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2014