American business at this point is really about developing an idea, making it profitable, selling it while it’s profitable and then getting out or diversifying. It’s just about sucking everything up.

My idea was: Enjoy baking, sell your bread, people like it, sell more. Keep the bakery going because you’re making good food and people are happy.
—Ian MacKaye, member of Fugazi and co-owner of Dischord Records
(from Salon.com People | Ian MacKaye)

Thanks to 37signals for pointing out the great quote!

Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.  For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.  For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and is himself destroyed or lost?  Luke 9:23-25.

In no way do I want to ignore the concept of coming to Christ, but I’ve heard many conversations on “assurance of salvation” (especially through youth groups), hypothesizing about potential situations of potentially lost souls. A friend of mine started the process of shaking up my thinking on these concerns when he said his response to people asking about these things was always, “Are you following Jesus?”.

“Follow Me” is a phrase Christ repeated over and over again during his time on earth. What does it mean to follow Him? It means to do what He did, live how He lived, and be who He was, right? That’s how a rabbi and his disciples worked as I understand it. Not sitting around drawing lines in the sand about who is in an who is out. In fact, within the inner twelve disciples was His eventual betrayer, Judas. Christ, who knew all of their hearts, intentions, and futures, didn’t reject or seperate out Judas or try to label him as a non-disciple. (don’t misunderstand me as trying to reject labels of any type.)

The questions get thrown around all of the time about salvation and sin. What if someone did X unmentionable sin, could they still be saved? Really, what does asking and answering that question help? Wouldn’t Christ’s response to such a situation be to call it sin, and challenge the person to turn from it and follow Him. I’m thinking of the woman at the well, Zacheus, and several others, who were obviously in sin, and Christ isn’t afraid to confront it.

A friend who claims to be a Christian, and is doing X, doesn’t need his salvation questioned, but a true friend who will call him to follow and pursue Christ, and through that to see how his life contains things aren’t right (sin). Christ makes it clear that salvation is a necessary part of following him, and if that’s the step that my friend felt he needed to do in order to follow Christ then great. If he felt that he had already accepted Christ, then great, repent from your sin and follow him.

Please don’t get offended by what is quite possibly my mind’s oversimplification of a complex topic, I’m simply trying to help myself and others follow Him.

I’ve always had what I felt was a conservative view of how God spoke to his children (believers). I felt like I was justified in this position because of how God had spoken in his written word, and how he had chosen prophets and individuals in the Bible to communicate his words. I’ve had this working understanding that for the most part God spoke solely through his word, which the Holy Spirit revealed to us, meaning gave clarity and insight to.

But I’ve recently started reading Hearing God by Dallas Willard, and some of the questions he’s asked have gotten me thinking again about this (which is always a good thing). One quote that challenged me to start thinking was the following quote from his book. Speaking of the experiences of Moses, Adam and Eve, and even Enoch, he writes:

Aside from their obviously unique historical role, however, they are not meant to be exceptional at all. Rather they are examples of the normal human life God intended for us: God’s indwelling his people through personal prescence and fellowship. [p.18]

A thought provoking quote:

The Spirit who inhabits us is not mute, restricting himself to an occasional nudge, a hot flash, a brilliant image or a case of goosebumps.

Holy enough to hear from God?

I’ve been mulling over these two thoughts since reading them over the last few weeks. Along the same lines as the previous quote from Willard:

“We must think of ourselves as capable of having the same kinds of experiences as did Elijah or Paul” [p.37]

He goes on to say that we frequently feel incapable of this because we feel God is too great to deal with the likeness of us, and that he only speaks in this way to the likes of Elijah or Paul. But he goes on to say that we don’t preserve God’s greatness by believing this, because as Willard writes:

“his greatness is precisely what allows him to ‘plan his day’ around me or anyone and everyone else as he chooses.” [p.37]

That Important

Another thought which I’ve been mulling over while reading this book is that we are that important to God that he would speak to us. How do we know this?

• God gave His Son for us, to die for us even though we didn’t deserve it (while we were still in our most terrible awful state of sinfulness)
• God has chosen to dwell in us as believers through the Holy Spirit

God obviously loves us and values us enough to do these two things, which are incredibly amazing, undeserved and unwarranted.

Hearing God doesn’t make us important

The other side of this though is that we are not made important because we hear from God, because he reaches out to us when we are humble before him and in our brokenness. Consider Psalm 25:9

He leads the humble in doing right,

teaching them his way.

Actually the entire Psalm 25 is an amazing testimony to how David cries out to God in spite of the fact that he is a broken, sinful man, and cries out for mercy, grace, forgiveness, and victory. You can find the entire passage on bible.logos.com

I’m glad for reading and books that challenge my thinking about my faith and how I relate to God. I hope that it get’s you thinking as well, regardless of whether you agree with it or not, as I’ve been try to do.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

And this passage begins with this:

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

This peace was the very thing he was looking for in his final days and was unable to find. Seven Pounds is a sorrowful examination of a lost person attempting penance on their own, that misses the redemptive hope that is only found in Christ.

Becoming De-Westernized

By Don Toshach

Now that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s oppressive dictatorship in Iraq have fallen like so many political/military/ cultural/spiritual dominos, the the quest to bring democracy to these peoples. After years of Islamic extremism, a transitional government structure is now in place in Afghanistan under the watchful eye of the U.S. and its allies. Iraq’s future is still being debated at roundtables both inside and outside the country.

Change is occurring on the streets of both countries. Beards are disappearing. Women’s veils are being removed. Movie houses and bookstores are again open. With positive shifts that come with these developments, there is a danger of a people losing its distinctiveness and becoming wedded to another system of bondage as it embraces the values and mores of the West in the name of freedom and enterprise. As the Who’s classic song “Won’t Get Fooled Again” says: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The new/old boss is westernization. It might be defined as the “we’re right-you’re wrong” mentality. Have it our way. Be linked to the global economy and community. Use our technology, watch our television shows and movies. The influence of America and the West is infused into our political systems, music, higher learning, sports, and fashion. Look like us. Dress like us. Think like us. Be like us. Buy our stuff. Be hip, be cool. If you don’t, you’ll be behind, not with it. For those of us in the West, we don’t even recognize how westernized we’ve become because it’s so deeply ingrained within. Only when having to light a candle during a power outage or using an outhouse while camping do we catch a glimpse of how utter dependent we are upon the system and how sharply that contrasts with the rest of the world.

Westernization has permeated the church. The organic, apostolic, communal gatherings featured in the book of Acts have been replaced by ones run by suited professionals with stopwatches. Highly structured. Highly cerebral. Highly sanitized. Featuring a God who’s understandable and safe. Everything org-charted. A congregant knows what’s going to go on in this kind of church this week, next week, next month, and next year. Predictable and comfortable. What’s wrong with this picture? Welcome to the machine, Stepford children of God! Whatever happened to the Holy Spirit? The Western church bares little resemblance to anything in the Bible, but everything in our faster, better, cheaper business world. The consequence? It is largely devoid of life and power of the Spirit kind. It is as westernized as a Carl’s Jr. Western Bacon Cheeseburger.

via drewsams.com

In the music scene it’s really cool to search for God. It’s not very cool to find him.

Now, I think this quote could be applied to the pop culture as a whole today and not just music. And it can also be applied I think to large segments of the American population. Always seeking but never finding. And those that do find, aren’t acceptable anymore. Just a quote that got my mind moving, and it might do the same for you.

*Disclosure: This is a Moody Press book, and I work for a different branch of the Moody Bible Institute which Moody Press is a part of. Additionally, I heard the author speak about this book when it was first being published when I was a student at Moody sometime in the last year. And finally, I can’t endorse this book, I’m just slowly reading it.

I’m going to start out by admitting a few biases. I don’t think change is bad. I’m a fan of understanding your audience and communicating through a means that won’t poison the message or the hearer from even starting to listening to it. I accept that the Bible is an awesome big book of truth, and that it has many different parts because there are many different situations in life that need to be addressed. So from that I gather that 1 verse is never the end all be all of sharing the message of Christ. And finally until I can come up with more, I know I will offend some of you because I might talk about evangelism and not discipleship, or I might refer to sharing the gospel more than sharing God’s love, or I might talk more about talking with people than doing. Such is life in my mind. We are pendulums swinging back and forth from one extreme to another. We never are perfectly balanced in life, so I won’t attempt to claim I am. Please if you disagree, great, comment, create your own blog, challenge my thoughts, help me keep my crazy thoughts and ideas in check.

So here I’ll end my ramblings, and move on to the topic of this post. Just another thought from a child of God who is inwardly turned upside down by Him, but still alright.

evangelistic methods after modernity

I’ve found today’s society to be marked by three general characteristics:

post-modernism…truth is absolute…or is it?
post-consumerism…I have to get the newest…but maybe I don’t?
post-interruption…look at this flashy ,cool, new…please put me on your “do not call” list.

And as I consider the emerging society that we live in, I feel that street preaching-based forms of evangelism, tract and bible distribution, confrontational and five-law based evangelism’s are defunct and useless.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention with my extreme claims, I’d like to over the next few posts explain why I believe our culture has changed, what it is becoming, why our current methods are loosing effectiveness, and begin to explore what’s to come for the future of evangelism.

Photo of Statue from Downtown Montreal, Canada (from canada.com)

During our honeymoon in Montreal, we stopped at a statue depicting a crowd of people with varying looks,
expressions, and actions. When you looked at the front of the crowd you saw an expectant, excited look on the people’s faces, as if they were rejoicing over some coming light. As the group moved towards the back interested and excitement waned. By the time you got to the back of the group, complete chaos has erupted as the effects of the coming light are no longer felt.

I’m think that’s a great picture of our world today (and actually yesterday too). Some of us have seen the light, and we are being affected by it. But others are not and they are living their lives without experiencing the light, and the powerful life changing impact it can have on us.

I noticed that in the statue the artist did not depict many people helping someone else see the light. There was one parent holding his child on his shoulders but most of the characters in the statue were looking out for they’re own good, and I’m afraid that too often that is what I do too.

When I thought about this tonight it made me wonder what other “lenses” I have in my life affecting my cision and the way I see the world around me. More importantly how often am I ignorant or oblivous to there existance, blindly (no pun intended) ignoring they’re effect on my life. I clean my contact lenses daily and inspect it fir it’s quality. Do I ever do that with the “lenses” in my life though?