Revival springs from...

Some years ago, a church I was a member of was praying for revival. God told me a date, and said to quietly watch. The Sunday he had specified came. During the service, God's presence arrived like an express train and was overwhelming.

But pretty much everyone missed it, because they were all looking for signs and wonders.

While those are tools that can help bring about revival, revival springs from relationship. If you don't believe you really have an intimate relationship, if you think you have to do something to win approval (revival, healing, saving your marriage, seeing change in someone, whatever), you aren't likely to experience revival. Not because God doesn't want it, but because you aren't ready.

Inspired by a post by Monty Dickerson quoting Pieter Swart.

Success in Ministry?

I ran across this question in a youth pastor's group: "How do you define success in youth ministry?"

I hate phrases like that.

Did the youth encounter Jesus? Then I would call that success.

Hopefully some came to know God. Hopefully some went deeper in that relationship. Hopefully lives are transformed.

In John 4/37-38 Jesus briefly discusses one harvesting and another reaping. In I Cor 3/5-8 Paul discusses one sowing, one watering, and another reaping. In this light, westernized concepts of "success" melt away.

For years I wasn't sure how much impact I was making as a youth minister. It turns out the real fruits are not always evident until later. I found that I had a lot more than I had known. Yet some of what we all deemed successes then don't look like it now. I continue to trust, pray, and love and hope they will be. Not for my sake, but for theirs.

And there is, I think, another component. Did it transform you? Did you grow in love and grace? Did you grow closer to God, the youth, and their families? Basically, did the great commandments become more real? Do you see more fruit? There's some real success, too!

If we define success as the world does (regardless of how many preachers or local churches go along) we have missed the point, just as anyone who looked down on the widow for giving such a pittance (Lk 21/1-4) had missed the point. Clearly Jesus judged otherwise.

We should be the Church in the West but we are too often the westernized Church.

Are You a Stripper?

Context matters.

One of the biggest mistakes the Church has fallen into is approaching the Bible verse by verse, stripping them of context. Jesus didn't tweet the Gospels a phrase or sentence at a time. He told stories, he had conversations, he painted vast panoramas on verbal canvases. He was God; if he wanted to communicate in one liners he would have. He mostly left that to others such as Groucho, Bob Hope, Jack Benny.

For example, a friend recently asked about Matthew 5/37: "But let your `Yes' be `Yes,' and your `No,' `No.' For whatever is more than these is from the evil one." (NKJV). he wanted to know what it meant.

I understand; I learned to do this and did it for years. But eventually I rediscovered how much more sense the Bible makes when we read verses in context. In this case looking at just a few verses before helps immensely. Let's read Matthew 3/33-37 in two translations for even more depth:

"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, `Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.' But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply `Yes' or `No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one." (NIV)

"And don't say anything you don't mean. This counsel is embedded deep in our traditions. You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, `I'll pray for you,' and never doing it, or saying, `God be with you,' and not meaning it. You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say `yes' and `no.' When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong." (The Message)

Now the meaning is more obvious. "Speak the truth. If you need an oath to back up your agreement or disagreement, something is wrong... and no one can trust what you say without an oath. Just be real." Studying verse 37 alone does not provide the whole picture, but it does lend itself quite well to legalism, the trap into which so many Pharisees had fallen in Jesus' day. God is always about relationship more than rules. Look at verses in relationship to the verses nearby. No verse is an island.

 

Various Jewish and Christian scholars added chapters and paragraph divisions for multiple reasons, but verses did not appear in the New testament until the 1500s. While useful as reference points they should otherwise be ignored. Once you can ignore them (The Message really drove this home for me and was just what I needed to move back to a holistic reading) you begin to see things you would otherwise miss.

Even Jesus, quoting brief verses to Satan, clearly had a broader context, or he would never have associated those passages with the topics at hand.

1 Do yourself a huge favor. Read the stories 2 in the Bible as stories, 3 not as a chopped up group of 4 sentences and fragments.

The Logical Place To Look

Given the two greatest commandments:

1. Love the Lord your God with every particle and wave of your being, natural or otherwise;
2. In the same way, love your neighbor as yourself

The three most obvious sins are obviously failing to love God, yourself and others.

Since identity is key to relationship it also follows that three blatant sins would be our refusal and/or failure to let

1. God be God,
2. you be yourself, or
3. others be themselves.

If you're having a hard time living a life of love, here's a good place to look. Where do you need to let these happen?

In the Name of What?

I grew up in a mainline denomination. There was a lot of good stuff there, but they were missing out on things. They'd given up on, or turned away from, miracles (they aren't for today) and the gifts of the Spirit (ditto, though the fruits of the Spirit are mostly fine today, thank you).

But just as the mainline denominations were missing some things, so were the charismatics and the non-denominations. Many have missed wisdom in one area in particular.

Some of us have wasted a lot of time looking for the secret formula, the right phrases, the right attitudes, some hidden message we've all somehow missed, the secret to getting God to do what we want done. "The Answer" has allegedly been revealed many times under many guises: Name it and Claim It, Word of Faith, Positive and Negative Confessions, etc. While all of these had a grain of truth to them, they ultimately became either an attempted means of controlling God (the very worst form of sorcery) or The Thing We Needed To Do To Please God (a kind of works-based grace).

The phrase "Christian Sorcery" is, I trust, an obvious oxymoron. But what are sorcery and witchcraft except finding the key words or works to force someone or something supernatural to cause a desired effect in the natural? God makes no distinctions I can find between "black" and "white" or "good" and "bad" witchcraft. He simply says, "No. Don't be trying to manipulate." He doesn't distinguish between killing curses and love potions, between lightning strikes and rain dances. He just says, "No."

There are even prayers that get into this territory. It's irrelevant how they are phrased; if what we're after is getting God to force someone to do something they don't want to, we're in a dangerous place. It's one thing to cry out to God that we need rain; it's another thing altogether to demand it, much less to try to to do something to force him to rain where and when we want.

Some Christians get irate at this concept. "Sorcery involves the Devil!" If you want to be picky, we can be picky. That's Satanism, which is a subset of sorcery or witchcraft. But it makes no difference. God is about relationship, not rules. God cares about the means, not just the ends. The means involve our relationship with him, and if that relationship isn't about getting to know him and trusting him, if it's about getting our way, it's an attempt to manipulate God. Do you really think that goes well?

Quit looking for the secret, the magic words, the right gestures and attitudes, the correct phrasing, to produce miracles, healings, or provision. If you pay any attention at all as you read the Gospels, you will notice that of the recorded things Jesus did, he seldom did them the same way twice. How many different ways did he heal the blind? How many different ways did he approach the lame? In some cases (the woman in the crowd) he did nothing, the woman reached out in a desperate faith and was rewarded.

If, indeed, there is An Answer, it's simply to have a desperate faith, a faith that recognizes there is no other answer, that one has nothing to lose. But that's not something you can work up. It has to be real, from the heart, giving up hope in anything else. If nothing seems to happen right away, just keep asking, reaching, touching. I can't tell you why we sometimes need to keep on this way, but Jesus recommended it. And when something does happen, recognize it is simply grace, a gift from God, a work of love. Don't check the last thing you did and think it's The Answer, a way to reproduce the miracle, a way to force God to do it again and again and again. He knows what we want and what we need, and he's capable of doing all those things. And he loves us. Trust in that, and see what happens. You won't always get the miracles you wanted, but you will always get expressions of his love. It's simply a question of whether we're willing to recognize and accept them.

God Is Enough... But Not In The Way You Think

Fellow blogger and all round cool sister Alise Wright recently wrote that God is not enough (do not bother to reply to that unless you read her blog). It was in reply to something on her Facebook wall that said, "If God is all you have, you have all you need."

This was my reply.

God saw that it was not good for Adam to be alone (note that God said this even though, technically, Adam was not alone-- Adam had God there!), so he gave Adam and Eve the gift of each other, then gave them more family and friends and community, growing over time. I would contend that if you have God, you have family and friends and community. That's what I see in the Bible, and what I see all around me. Those who try to live without family and community have serious problems.

If, indeed, God alone is all you have then he will be and provide all you need. But how many of us end up like Jonah or John in the book of Revelation? Precious few, thankfully.

I suspect the provider of the quote above was trying to encourage people (or themselves) in the latter situation, but honestly, if we have a computer and internet access, we probably have no clue what it is like to have nothing but God.

I've known people who went through times they had no one but God, and he became enough, but he brought them to a place with others in their lives. Because we were never meant to be alone.

One of the last things Jesus did on the cross was to provide family for two people he loved dearly-- Mary and John. Every time his followers turned around he was loving on people, and doing things that caused relationship... with their Father first, but never just with their Father.

Don't try to make it on your own. Love people. Let people love on you. Does it open the door to hurt? Yeah, it can. But in the words of Alfred. Lord Tennyson, "tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." But if you really, really love people, you don't lose. They might, but you won't. I think I Corinthians 13 covers that one pretty well. (I'll try to address that soon.)