Jesus Hugged Trees…Except that Time He Cursed One

It’s really sad that ecological concerns have been solely a liberal project. It may come as a surprise to some, but conservative Christians have a strong impetus ecological conservation – Our God created this world and He plans to restore it!

Our refusal to take ecological concerns seriously is due to at least two things:

First, we have overreacted to liberal politics/theology. Just because something is taken up by the liberals, doesn’t mean conservative Christians can’t also be passionate about it.  The environment is everybody’s concern – no matter your theological or political persuasion. Just because we disagree with someone on one issue doesn’t mean we must disagree with them on every issue.

Second, we have neglected a biblical theology of creation. In most churches when a sermon is preached on Genesis 1 it deals with Evolution vs. 6 Day Creationism. Unfortunately this approach to Genesis not only misses the point, but it also distracts us from the larger picture of creation as the good work of a loving God, a work which He made to have a certain order and balance. Destroyed by human sin, this world groans for its redemption. Christians do not merely care for the salvation of individual souls – we care for the redemption of the entire cosmos! This means earth-care is part of the Christian doctrine of salvation (soteriology). When we read the NT, we do not see a God concerned merely with “my” individual salvation and whether or not “I” am going to heaven when I die; we see a God who cares for the entire earth, who wants to redeem everything in His creation.

Our God created this world. Our God wants to restore this world. We, as redeemed creatures, have an opportunity to participate in the redemption of the entire world here and now. To be sure, let us be passionate for the souls of men and women. But let us also see that those men and women are a single part of God’s larger saving purposes – purposes which extend to the restoration of the entire creation!

Jesus hugged trees. Well, except that time he cursed one.

Theology Gone Wild: God Almighty

Should I begin with the fact that someone made God into an action figure? Or should I just comment on the whole God needing a gun thing?

His is the Power and Authority!

The Eucharist Needs Cheese to Go With that Wine

Sermon Point One: The Eucharist Needs Cheese to Go with that Wine

Sermon Point 2: Cheese Will Inhibit Eucharistic-Wine-Burp

Sermon Point 3: Cheese is a Good Trinity Metaphor

Sermon Point 4: The Right Cheese Can Give You Superhero Powers; In My Case, I Have Super-Blurry-Hand Abilities.

Sermon Point 5: Under the Foreordained Plan of God, The Walls of Jericho Were Made of Cheese

Sermon Point 6: It is Rumored that Cheese Has the Ability to Eradicate the Stain of Original Sin...But this is Just Conjecture.

Sermon Point 7: If Jonah Had Tasted Like Cheese, the Whale Wouldn't Have Spit Him Out

Sermon Conclusion: Therefore, Add Some Cheese to Your Eucharist Wine...Or Else!!

Try Jesus – C’mon, Man, Everyone’s Doing It

I’m a huge fan of setting ablaze 99% of church signs with the removable letters. You know what I’m referring to – the signs with the silly sayings:

A Scripture a Day Prevents Truth Decay.

Repent Now to Avoid the Rush on Dooms Day.

Stop Drop and Roll Does Not Work in Hell.

Last night as my wife and I were driving to have dinner with some friends, we came across one that read, “Try Jesus: If You Don’t Like Him the Devil Will Take You Back.”

Let me just vent my frustration with this…

We don’t get to just “try Jesus” as if he’s marijuana (C’mon, everyone’s doing it! If you don’t like it, you can go back to the lighter stuff!). Or if not drug dealers, it’s the model of corporate America exemplified most stereotypically in the used car salesmen (This baby comes with an eternal life-time warranty!)

In contrast, the model of Jesus is that you’re all in or all out. You’re giving your life or you’re saving it. You’re pursuing Justice or you’re part of the problem. You’ve set your hand to the plow or you’re going home where it’s safe and comfortable.

There is no trial run with Jesus.

You don’t get to take him back to the customer service desk and ask for a refund.

Bringing the corporate America business plan into the church’s understanding of salvation is incredibly dangerous. We, as the church, are part of a covenant community, not a contractual community. Covenants are irrevocable and completely binding (which is why there were signified by circumcision in the Old Testament). Contracts assume that if “I don’t get mine then I’m out of here. I’m in this for me and mine and if you refuse/can’t provide what I want in the future, then you have violated the terms!”

This sign assumes the same thing, “If I don’t like Jesus” (that is, if Jesus doesn’t fulfill me in some way or fulfill his end of the “bargain”) then I can trade him in.

In modern American you can do that with a car, a puppy, or even a spouse, but you cannot do that with Jesus.

Jesus isn’t like marijuana, folks. Not everyone’s doing it. And you can’t just “try” him out for kicks. That’s not how it works.

Right-Proper American Family…

Dear New Lynn Haven Friends,

While I love this first picture because we look like a right-proper American family, but….

I have to admit that this one is probably closer to our day-to-day reality. I hope you’ve got nothing against face-eating goats in Western Florida!

Or maybe this one is a little more family revealing.

Or maybe our version of a playpen can tell you something about us…

And maybe “best” of all….Be warned never to invite me to a tacky Christmas sweater party. You have no idea how creepy…uh, I mean, seriously I take these matters.

Something For Which There’s No Substitute

Fortunately, I was more passionate about Jesus as a youth than this amazingly bad James-Bond-like tuxedo.

Someone warned me early in my Christian walk that the passion I feel for Christ as a young convert would inevitably pass away. It’s a normal part of growing up in the faith, they said, your love for God and desire for the salvation of the world will settle into a flickering flame, no longer a furious forest fire ablaze with the fodder of infantile affections.

They said the decline is inevitable.

They said the decline is natural.

But I ask, what if they are wrong?

I’m not saying that all of the Christian life is roses, smiles, and sentimentality, but even in the hardest times – those times when you have the most penetrating frustrations with God, the death of a loved one, divorce, or a lost job – our passion for God need not subside. Indeed, the angry shouting and gnashing out at God can flare with such vitriol, not because our faith has a dearth of passion, but precisely because it’s packed full of passion.

And no doubt, there are times when we feel more or less intimacy with God. And no doubt there are times when sin or life circumstance steals our joy or makes it harder to hope. But what if this kind of warning to young results more from a pessimistic faith than a vibrant one, more the product of cynicism than courageous hope, or more the onslaught of apathy than awe.

I raise this issue for two reasons:

First, I want to warn you as my friends (and some of you as church leaders), don’t discourage your congregations, disciples, or young believers by telling them that their love for Jesus is fleeting or their zeal for Christ is something they’ll someday “get over” when they grow up a bit.

How can we ever “get over” the God of the universe?

Rather than preaching pessimism, teach them to fan those flickers of youthful passion, to set their zeal in the context of wisdom, and to explore the beauty of God under every rock and in the face of every person they meet. Yes, pain will come, but that can ignite passion; it does not have to dampen it. They have enough people trying to smother the fire of their love for God, they don’t need the church doing it, too!

Second, I want to encourage you to see that your current life circumstances, how you feel about your relationship to God, or even the struggles you have with sin need not destroy your passion to see Christ glorified and love Him fully. Use your current struggles, not as a time to be spiritually lazy, but as an opportunity to see where God is at work even in the midst of darkness. And when you can’t see where He’s at work, when you’re hurting and He seems absent, you don’t need to lose passion, you need to express it – even in anger!

There is no substitute for a passionate heart set aflame by a love for God. Nothing can stand in the way of such a person, community, youth group, or church. Nothing.

Here We Are Now, Entertain us

In my early years of preaching, I used to start all my sermons with a good joke, supposing that grabbing the audience’s attention in that way generated interest in my message.

After my junior year of college, however, when I started taking academics more seriously, I forsook the funny forewords and focused on my homily’s propositions and argumentation, assuming what people really need is not more entertainment, but more theological acumen. My favorite preacher at the time reinforced this assumption when he said, “America’s tombstone shall read, ‘We entertained ourselves to death.’”

Preaching, after all, I reasoned, is not a stand up comedy show. It’s not supposed to entertain us, it’s supposed to transform our minds through logical argumentation – even if it bores us to death along the way. In other words…

Preaching isn’t art, preaching is argument.

So I thought.

Over the last few years I’ve come to realize the wrongheadedness of this…or at least part of it.

I was right to reason that much of what represents the preaching craft in many churches is pure entertainment for entertainment sake, distracting from the gospel of Christ and reinforcing the “Here we are now, entertain us” mentality of churchgoers.

But I was wrong to bifurcate preaching and entertainment under the assumption that entertainment must equal shallow and trite messages.

This is simply not the case. In fact, more than just being wrong, it is unbiblical.

The very presentation of the Bible, with its symbols, images, and word-plays; it’s stories of mystery, love, intrigue, and murder all suggest that the Bible is intended to entertain us and stick with us! But that entertainment is not for entertainment sake, it has a telos: the illumination the kingdom of God and our role in it

That’s why Jesus tells parables instead of giving logical propositions. These stories talk about both mundane and fantastic events in life. They both reveal and hide the truth. They are literary genius, but were simple enough for illiterate farmers to comprehend. They entertained their audiences with both their form and their message, but they did so with the goal in mind of helping people love God and be conformed more to His image.

My avoidance of entertainment, then, was an attempt to be more “holy” than Jesus(you know, like Jonathan Edwards!). If Jesus entertained his audiences for a purpose, then we should understand that entertainment is not the Devil. In a sermon, entertainment without the goal of the Kingdom might be trite, but the problem is the wrong goal, not the means of communication.

Preaching isn’t argumentation. Preaching is art.

Forget Soul-Winning, Let’s Be Friends

As a young Christian I used to haunt “The Square,” a single city block in downtown Springfield, Missouri. This was the Friday night hangout Springfield’s Trench Coat Mafia types who would congregate and party all night. I frequented their Friday assemblage, not because I enjoyed donning Goth garb and dying my hair a depressing shade of black, but because I wanted to “win[1] those lost souls to Jesus!”

On occasion this necessitated sermonizing to several sinners at once, but most often it was just me, dressed in my khakis pants and American Eagle polo, having an awkward conversation with a single person who was frenetically looking to flee because they rightfully perceived my plan to manipulate the conversation toward sin, salvation, and their eternal damnation.

As many of you know from your own experience, these exchanges were artificial and fated to fail. At best, people would politely converse with me because they were interested in discussing spirituality. At worst, they expressed downright anger – and not necessarily for “gospel” related reasons.[2]

For those of you zealous to share the good news of a crucified and risen Jesus with everyone you meet, let me propose a better alternative to this awkwardness: Friendship.

I know friendship is a peculiar sort of proposal in the world of Josh McDowell and Kirk Cameron, but humor me for a moment.

If you want to share a truncated gospel with someone, you can easily memorize Ray Comfort’s conversation-manipulator-techniques; you can mimic Josh McDowell’s “reasons;” or you can even street preach as passionate as Billy Graham.

But none of those things can replace having a genuine friendship with another person and therefore none of them exhibit a genuine concern for the person after salvation. Thus, they represent a truncated, stymied gospel, not only in the verbal presentation, but more specifically in the way you live it out. .

In genuine friendship you desire what’s best for a person. And as a Christian, you probably believe that what’s “best” is found in a relationship with Jesus. But because you are a friend, you never manipulate conversations, you never preach at someone, and you never violate your friends trust only befriending them for the purposes of gospel-expansion. Because the kind of friendship based on “soul-winning” is more damning than Ray Comfort or Kirk Cameron are willing to admit.

But genuine friendship, for its own sake, is never damning, even when it must respectfully disagree.

I am not advocating a silence about the gospel – indeed, I am telling you, by your friendship, to be an even more faithful prophet through your life and words spoken in a timely, not a hurried, manner. Genuine friendship with someone, based on mutual respect and love always trumps a 5 minute, stilted conversation. Indeed, it makes such a weird conversation unnecessary because you’re not trying to manipulate anyone.

In a world aware of the church’s sex scandals, hypocrisy, and our outdated soul-winning tactics, street preaching and fly-by evangelism are not sufficient (assuming they ever were!). In this disconnected and disillusioned world, there is no greater testimony to the gospel than genuine friendship, especially with those who are religiously different than we are. And that, friends, will take our time, efforts, and vulnerability – all things which drive-through evangelism is simply uninterested in.

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[1] Notice the “win” language here. As I will argue, genuine friendship is not about “winning” a competition or a war. Genuine friendship is about inviting people into a journey that you exemplify in your own life, but do not force upon them.

[2] Even when someone did ‘pray the prayer,’ I didn’t have a genuine friendship with them to know if they were really ‘saved’ or not. Of course, that didn’t matter to me at the time. After all, they had their Fire Insurance, didn’t they?

Saul’s Conversion: The Rest of the Story

The Gospel and the 2 Great Commandments

It struck me this morning that Saul’s conversion story in Acts 9 is just as much a story about his reconciliation with other people as it is a story about his reconciliation to God. After all, it is not God in some abstract sense that Saul curses in vs. 1. No, it is the Lord’s disciples whom he is “breathing out murderous threats against.” (1)

In other words, Saul’s sins are a violation of God’s law made tangible in his sin against the Lord’s disciples. It is precisely there, in that broken human to human relationship, that Saul’s sins against Christ exist and become incarnate, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (9:4)

Here the 2 Great Commandments – love of God and love of neighbor – are shown to be so intertwined that separation is nonsensical.

Saul is a sinner against God because he does not love his neighbor as himself.

Saul is a sinner against other human beings because he does not love God with his entire heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Interestingly, I’ve never heard this passage preached this way. I always hear it as a ‘gospel’ passage whereby God reconciles Paul to Himself and Himself alone.

But this is only half the story – God tells Saul to go into the city and await instruction. Saul later encounters a group of disciples who are afraid of him; he then spends several days with them (19), probably seeking their forgiveness, learning from them, and healing a very broken relationship with them. It is this part of the story I’ve never heard from an Evangelical pulpit.

But if contemporary Evangelicals wish to maintain some moral authority in the postmodern world, we must begin to pick up this other side of this story. No longer can we permit ourselves to believe the gospel is just a spiritual reconciliation of “my” individual self and God. No, no, we must see that the gospel inescapably entails reconciliation between “me” and the larger community of human beings created in God’s image. The true gospel necessarily holds together love for God and love for neighbor.