When Theology Becomes and Idol

Our beliefs about God should never be confused with God. Our beliefs and doctrines may point us to God, teach us something about God, anchor us to the truth, or show us God in a different light, but they are not in themselves God.

When we elevate our beliefs about God to the level of God Himself we forge idols out of our own opinions, we carve images out of logical propositions, and we become priests who hold the keys to heaven and hell, salvation and damnation.

This is a dangerous place to be. When we start pronouncing who’s “in” and “out” of the kingdom of God because of their views on things like Creationism vs. Evolution, Calvinism vs. Arminianism, Rebublicans vs. Democrats, or even the role of women in the church and home, we are treading on dangerous ground, for we have elevated tertiary things to the level of ultimacy.

True worship acknowledges that our beliefs about God are but murky shadows next to the reality of His light. Valuable as doctrine is, it cannot compare with the grandeur of Jesus Christ. Wonderful as theological speculation may be, it pales next to the God who stands outside of human reason and refuses to be harnessed by our limited understanding.

And, yes, even theology can become an idol.

30 for 30 #11: When Getting Elbowed in the Face is a Blessing

The other night I got elbowed in the face in a basketball game. And it was a blessing.

I know that sounds weird, but let me explain.

3 or 4 years ago if I would’ve got elbowed in the face in a game, I would’ve jumped back up and gotten in the dude’s face with a vengeance. I wouldn’t have thrown a punch or anything (I’m not much of a fighter…at all), but I would’ve certainly laid into the dude verbally, even if it was an accident.

But the other night I got cole cocked in the face and my first thought, after checking to make sure I still had all my teeth, was, “It was an accident; he didn’t mean to do it.”

So why was getting jacked in the face a blessing?

Because when I thought about it later, it occurred to me that I didn’t even for an instance have a desire to retaliate or give the guy a verbal lashing. And by realizing that, I saw how far God has brought me over the last 3 years. It is a blessing to look back and see that God isn’t done with me – he hasn’t left me unchanged. There’s a story here of grace and redemption, and it reminds me that God isn’t finished with me yet.

Can there be a greater blessing than realizing God’s not done with you? I don’t think so.

Sometimes it’s hard to see how you’re growing from day to day. But moments like this, when it hurts and when it’s intense, show you the work God is doing to conform you to his image.

 

“30 for 30″ #10: Jesus Used to Be My Homeboy. Then I Realized That’s Stupid

In American culture Jesus has become another private commodity: He’s “my boyfriend,” “my CEO,” “my co-pilot,” or “my homeboy.”

But in all reality, he is not “my” anything. He is “ours.” Or more specifically, “We are his.”

When we only see Jesus in light of our private relationship with him, we miss the point. This is not to deny that we have a relationship with him, but this relationship is anything but private.

Jesus’ salvation transcends me. It transcends us. He desires to redeem all of creation. His plans are bigger than just saving me and having a relationship with me. I am included in those plans, but I am not the sole goal of those plans.

When we privatize Jesus, we not only miss the point about his redemption all creation, but the whole idea also suggests that, ‘Me and Jesus got our own thing going.’

But this is bad theology. I most certainly have a relationship with Jesus, but there’s nothing in that relationship that’s just between us. I am not beyond rebuke. I am not beyond correction. It is a modern, American notion that Jesus and me and Jesus have got our own thing going.

In scriptural Christianity there’s nothing completely private or individualistic about our relationships with Jesus. Our relationships with him always happen in the context of community, of creation, seeing his face in the poor, finding his grace as we seek for justice in the world – none of this is private. None of it is individualistic.

In other words, all Jesus’ intentions are bigger than just me.

He does love us individually, just as he did Lazarus. He does desire to be in a relationship with us, just as he did Peter. But his plans are bigger than that.

We can’t keep him to ourselves. He won’t let us. He shouldn’t.

“30 for 30″ #9: Some Things are More Important than Being Right

Men especially, but women to a fair degree, are culturally condition to never apologize. We justify mistakes. We make excuses. We shift the blame. Sometimes we even apologize passive-aggressively in an attempt to gain the upper hand in the argument. Indeed, for some of us, our entire identity is bound up in ALWAYS having to be right.

But rarely do we ever just take the burden of the mistake on ourselves. Rarely have I ever met someone who’s identity is bound up in a humble willingness to be wrong and apologetic.

Apologizing is especially hard when arguing with a spouse or a friend. The disagreements in these situations are usually so intense and emotion filled that it is incredibly difficult to apologize.

However…

I was reminded recently of Paul’s charge to the Corinthians (who were taking each other to court), “Why not just take the blame? Why not just say, ‘I was wrong’? Instead you drag your brothers and sisters to court, creating schisms in the church, and blaspheming the name of Christ among the gentiles!”*

Paul’s point is that unity and love, especially amongst Christians, are more important than being right. Catch that: THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN BEING RIGHT.

So be willing to apologize. Be willing to acknowledge when you’ve hurt someone else. Say, ‘I’m sorry,’ when you know you’ve done wrong. And maybe even occasionally apologize when you didn’t do anything wrong** – sometimes being right can be wrong.

Besides, you might be surprised at how a word of apology can change the tone of a conversation that might otherwise just get out of hand.

 

 

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*My paraphrase, of course. If you want to see it for yourself, just read I Cor. 6.

**Quite often we hurt people unintentionally. They are offended, but we didn’t really do anything to offend them on purpose. In such a situation, often the most godly approach is to just apologize. Your goal here is not to maintain your own dignity or pride, but to regain the other person as a brother or sister in Christ. Let me also say at this point, that this can be overblown, especially in abusive situations. I do not condone someone becoming a victim of abuse in order to fulfill Paul’s injunction. That is quite beside the point. I’m not advocating ignoring justice here, but just seeing that simply ‘being right’ isn’t all there is to justice.

 

“30 for 30″ #8: Giving and Receiving the Trojan Horse

In our culture, gift giving has become something you do out of obligation, something you do to gain status (brown nosing), something done to gain power in a relationship (think Trojan Horse) or put the other person in your debt.

But in all of this, we have lost the ability to see a gift as, well…a gift: A free, un-obliged, no-strings-attached offering to another person simply as an expression of love, not manipulation.

Because of this, we freak out when people give us gifts.

“Well, what am I going to give them back?”

Or

“How am I going to equal the score now that their gift has put me in a ‘gift-debt’ to them?”

Or

“Is there some kind of hidden agenda here?”

Or

“Man, I didn’t get them a gift this nice. What are they going to think of me?”

And this of course translates theologically: Since in our culture NOTHING is ever just a gift done out of an expression of self-giving love, we cannot possibly see that God offers salvation to us freely out of his own graciousness. We cannot possibly imagine someone so gift-oriented and so giving that they would offer their enemies the gift of forgiveness.

So we feel guilty all the time for our inability to pay God back. Oh, sure, we don’t express it that way. We never say, “Well I’ve got to pay God back now.” But that’s exactly what we’re doing when we ruminate on our own failures to live up to his standards (our failure to ‘pay him back’) or develop pride over our spiritual GIFTS (‘O, yes, I’m doing my part!’).

Gift giving is a lost art. Maybe I just notice it because it’s my love language. But I fear for us as Americans that we cannot receive gifts without thinking there must be an agenda behind them, that we cannot receive gifts without thinking about being in gift-debt to the other person, or that we cannot give gifts without being concerned about whether or not we will get something back.

Gift giving has become a Trojan Horse cultural practice, but it need not be. Gift giving can be redeemed. It must be redeemed.

“30 for 30″ #7: To Offer Correction is Love, To Receive It is Humility

We don’t like to hear correction, let alone heed it.

But this is the height of folly.

A wise man will listen to the voice of correction, even when he disagrees with it.

A wise woman will listen to the voice of correction, even from her worst enemy.

A wise man will listen to the voice of correction from voices of the past that seem irrelevant and outdated in today’s society.

A wise woman will listen to the voice of correction even from a little child.

We do not always have to agree with the voice of correction in our life. We do not always have to agree with those who rebuke us.

But we DO always need to patiently listen to those voices, for every once in a while (indeed, more often than not) there is a nugget or a boulder of golden truth present.

Think of it this way: Even if the person who rebukes you IS WRONG, you should respect the fact that they love you enough to confront you with what they believe to be the truth. Do not cast aside this act of love.

The most profound, most love, most challenging voice in your life is NOT the person who always agrees with you (your ‘yes’ man), but is the person who is willing to tell you the hard truths about yourself, even when it makes them uncomfortable.

Surround yourself with such people. Be such a person.

To offer correction is an act of love. To receive correction is an act of humility.

“30 for 30″ #6: To Redeem Christmas We Must Redeem Advent*

I’ve never liked Christmas. Maybe I just have too many bad memories. Maybe I just don’t like what the holiday has become. Maybe I’m just a Scrooge (my wife’s theory). But for whatever reason, Christmas has never been a big deal to me.

Until the last few years.

A few years ago I was introduced to the season of Advent. Coming from a Baptist background, Advent was really never an option – or if it was, it was just some silly candle service where we sat around violating fire code.

But a few years ago I was introduced to Advent through Asbury Seminary. There, a whole community of people took Advent seriously – pleading with Paul in I Corinthians, “Come Lord Jesus!”

Preachers and others are often fond of lamenting how the season of Christmas has been robbed of its value by a culture of consumerism and materialism. But we’ve done little or nothing to combat it. We’ve forgotten that we have proven tools to fight such a co-opting of one of our Holy-days: Advent.

The season of Advent can redeem Christmas. It is the antithesis of everything Christmas has become in our culture. Advent is about waiting, mourning, repenting, longing for God to break through to us in a world that says there is no god but the individual self. Advent is about desiring to see, to escape the darkness, to look for our Messiah in a world that says, “I am your savior; just spend more money and you’ll be happy.”

Advent is the season where the church all of the world waits expectantly for the return of Jesus Christ, her true king and savior. Just as Israel waited 2,000 years ago for the first coming of her king and savior at Christmas, so now we wait, too, in Advent.

If we want to redeem Christmas, we must redeem Advent. And it cannot be one or two of us, it must be a community that together decides that waiting, repenting, expecting, mourning, and longing for more is better than all the promises of Black Friday and Christmas morning.

Come, Lord Jesus! Come!

—-My friend Drew is doing a series of blog posts on Advent. I think you will greatly benefit from them, and I think you’ll find them much more informative and formative than this merely introductory post.

http://exchangedliving.com/

*For those of you who are unfamiliar with Advent, it begins this Sunday and lasts for the next 4 weeks. A simple google search can get you a good start, but I recommend doing it as a community, not just by yourself. You’ll see how much more powerful it can be.

“30 for 30″ #5: The Little Guy Always Wins

My brother Travis and I are always in the mood for a good dog-pile. We’ve been known to dog-pile my dog Jet, sometimes toddlers, and quite often my wife.

The funny thing about my wife is that when she gets dog-piled, she keeps on mouthing…in her own Cassie sort of way. Even when she’s on the bottom of a Fuerst Brother’s Dog-Pile, you can hear her screaming, “THE LITTLE GUY ALWAYS WINS!!!!”

It always makes me laugh because clearly the little guy is losing.

Yet over time I have realized there’s a bit of truth to what she’s saying: the gospels teach us that the little guy does always wins. From the beginning of the New Testament, the message has been that God will overthrow the mighty and uplift the broken, the arrogant cannot stand and the poor in spirit are blessed.

The Little Guy Always Wins slogan was best embodied by Jesus, who taking on the form of a human being, died on a cross under the weight of Roman power, only to resurrect 3 days later and proclaim, “Death has no hold on us! We need not be afraid of the bigger, more powerful guys! The little guys always win!”

It is the Apostle Paul (whose name literally means “the little guy”) who tells us of Jesus’s humility in Philippians 2. I won’t bore you with the Greek grammar, but the point he’s making is that central to God’s character, before the foundations of creation, was the fact that God is humble. The incarnation of Jesus is just the logical and natural manifestation of God’s humility.

“THEREFORE,” says Paul, “HAVE THIS MIND IN YOU!”

It may not look like the little guy is winning when he’s hanging on a Roman cross. But 3 days later, when death could not hold him, the truth became earth shatteringly clear:

THE LITTLE GUY ALWAYS WINS!!!

“30 for 30″ #4: The Pain Doesn’t Go Away, You Just Learn to Live with It

I stood by my dad’s casket at the visitation preceding his funeral nearly 3 years ago. People were coming by expressing their condolences in their own, often uncomfortable and frustrating, ways.

At some point an elderly man came up to me and hugged me. He had lost his wife a few years before and, obviously, still mourned her passing even though life had gone on for him. He knew something of the pain of death and its lingering effects.

As he hugged me, he whispered something in my ear that has never left me, “The pain doesn’t go away, you just learn to live with it.”

I know on the surface it might sound a bit morbid or even an ill chosen group of words. But that was EXACTLY the thing I needed to hear. I didn’t want people solving my pain ‘problem.’ I didn’t want cheap cliché’s and easy answers. I wanted someone to feel my pain with me, which means they needed to be HONEST with me.

What he whispered in my ear has rung true. To this day I cannot remember a single, cheap cliché someone said as they shook my hand. But I will never forget the elderly man who embraced me with honesty, vulnerability, and love.

In some ways, I think his words are almost the thesis sentence of my life. In some ways, I think they were the theme of Jesus’s life. They said to me, ‘I know the pain doesn’t just disappear when the funeral is over; I’m with you through the journey.’

The pain doesn’t go away. You just learn to live with it.

“30 for 30″ #3: In 20 Years I Won’t Remember I Went to Bed

My college dormitory’s name was Crouch Hall. And it was as dirty as the name might suggest. The showers smelled like foot. A special funk emanated from some unknown origin. J.R. Top, I remember, once commented in an assembly, “I’m from Crouch; it smells like pee.” And I won’t even tell you about the dudes on my wing that used to shave each other’s backs… just know it happened and that it added to the already established persona.

As funky a place as Crouch Hall was, I will never forget how much I grew in the Lord in those halls. We would stay up late debating theology, holding each other accountable, encouraging each other to wage war on sin, and, of course, doing stupid college-guy things like try to crush unopened soda cans on our heads.

One night I remember my friend Brandon Fredman being incredibly tired as we sat in the Crouch foyer late at night. He was yawning and looked like he was about to pass out as we were having our usual theological arguments.

So I said to him, “Hey bro, why don’t you just go to bed?”

Yes, I have braces. If you make fun of me, I'll pick you up and body slam you....and I'll remember it fondly in 20 years.

His reply was something that stuck with me even till this day, “Because in 20 years I won’t remember that I went to bed, but I will remember that I stayed up late hanging out with guys who love talking about God.”

Here, 7 years after college, I know he was exactly right. I cannot think of a single time I went to bed and was responsible. But I think fondly on 4 years of learning from a fantastic group of guys, most of whom are still serving God today (and I attribute part of it at least to those late nights).

There’s no doubt we were probably an arrogant bunch of jerks. There’s no doubt that we thought we knew everything about life and love and predestination. But there’s also no doubt that we loved God and loved each other.

In 20 years you will not remember getting your to-do list done. But you will remember the lives who touched yours and the lives that were touched by you. Take advantage of the time you have to spend with good friends. In 20 years, it will be these times that you remember with much fondness. Good friends really are a sacrament. (Just don’t say that around HLG. They’re Baptist!)

Christian Abernatha, Brandon Fredman, Caleb Chapman, Jesse Hill, Jesse Baedke, and Luke Bray – I love you guys. We may not see each other much anymore, but you are still with me. I am eternally indebted to your friendship. Thanks for being men of God.

Oh, and Brandon….T.F.