Delighting in the Gift, Not the Packing Paper

Dora the Explorer is my daughter’s favorite show. Cassie and I love it because it’s educational (man, has it helped her vocabulary expand!), and because it’s not schizoid and random like Sponge Bob Square Pants.

Today Cassie and I were on our weekly lunch date and while walking through the mall we saw a “Backpack,” Dora’s trusty companion backpack that has his own special song and carries all the items Dora needs during her adventures. The price of Backpack is normal nearly $30, but its sale price was down to $4. So we got it…fully expecting the Phoebus to get really, really stoked.

About 5 minutes ago we gave it to her. She looked at it. Got a smile on her face. Pulled the packing paper out. Then threw Backpack on the ground, taking absolute joy in the packing paper!

Immediately, with a smile on my face (because, after all, I could smile – I only spent $4, not $30), I realized that this is exactly what I do with God.

In the cross of Jesus, God gave the world the greatest gift it could ever receive – Himself! And for free, no less!

But in so many ways we are prone to look at God’s gift, throw it down on the ground, and get distracted by the “filling”: Blessings are good, but they are not the God who gives them. Feelings are good, but they are hardly ever consistent. Theology is good, but theological pronouncements can never fully represent or take the place of the God to whom they point. Material possessions are good, but they can distract from God. Love is good, but when pursued for itself, it leaves us lacking.

These things are mere “filling” when compared with the real gift. We are permitted to delight in them, but often we throw down the gift and trade it for something that, well, ends up being nothing more than a bowl of soup compared to the family inheritance, the packing paper when compared to the Backpack.

The real gift is the God who blesses us even when we don’t see it; the real gift is the God who is present even when we lament his absence; the real gift is the God who cannot be shackled by our systematic theology but seeks always to draw us deeper and deeper into Himself (a place no systematic theology can fully comprehend); the real gift is the God who can call us to give all our possessions away in order to have eternal life; the real gift is the God who is Love in the flesh, in it’s purest form – self-giving love that serves others and seeks them above Itself.

So let’s delight in the gift, not just the packing paper. After all, when the gift IS the Giver, delighting in the gift IS delighting in the Giver.

 

 

What are some other ways we trade the Gift for the packing paper? Is there a time where God showed you this was exactly what you were doing? How did He redirect your focus?

QoD: Prevenient Grace

 ”The Spirit no doubt works in and through the varied experiences of life, creating greater or lesser windows of opportunity and seasons of greater or lesser conviction. Obviously, the Spirit has worked in cultures and contexts where truth has been limited and where the name of Jesus is not yet known.

“But God has not left them without a witness to basic truth (Acts 14:17), assuring that all can perceive the reality of a Creator and the necessity of surrendering in thankfulness to him (Rom. 1). The sacrificial death of Jesus underwrites all of God’s saving activity and assures that all the redeemed explicitly confess him as Lord, whether in this life or on that great day when they first see and recognize him.”

Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell, Why I am not a Calvinist (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 72.

 

What are your thoughts on what they’re saying here? Specifically, in the last sentence. 

The Fuerst Best 3.28.2011

The absolute best post I ‘ve read all week came from my wife about Eating as a Social Event. Of course, I’m likely biased, but that doesn’t take away from the simple profundity of this piece.

To eat is to commune with others. Maybe this is why important holidays include a feast of some sort. Maybe this is why we ask new friends to join us for a meal. Maybe this is why God invites us to the Table to partake of the gift of His Son.

Amy Julie Becker explores the Divine Grace of Diapers and Dirty Laundry in another fantastic Her.Meneutics article.

It takes faith to be a parent. It takes faith for me to care for our three children day after day. It takes faith to believe that this 30-minute episode of crying, or this midnight, bleary-eyed feeding, or this time-out for hitting your sister, or this poopy diaper — that these will bear fruit. That they matter, and even eternally.

Brian McLaren has impressed me lately with his modeling of how to respond to those with whom we are in disagreement. Last week he did a fantastic, and well balanced piece on Albert Mohler’s article on Rob Bell. This week he provided a well articulated and generous response to John Piper’s claims that the Japanese earthquake was the result of God’s sovereign, unilateral decision.

Attempts like Piper’s to explain suffering and evil bring great comfort and security to some. But in the end, the practice of theodicy often adds to the evil and suffering that it attempts to explain. In arguing for God’s power, theodicies often depict him—this powerful God is almost always masculinized—as heartless. In defending God’s compassion, theodicies often depict God as inept at universe management or deficient in universe planning. Either way, the speaker leaves the stage (or the writer leaves the keyboard) feeling he has confidently defended the reputation of the Lord, but the hearers (or readers) feel the Lord has been somehow reduced in the process. And when you’re traumatized, a reduced but well-defended deity isn’t what you need. Yes, answers like Piper’s may help some keep faith, but speaking personally, if my only option for Christian faith required me to be satisfied with the explanations given by Piper, I would be driven away.

The brilliant Roger Olson tackles a subject I’ve been wrestling with for a few years: Neo-Fundamentalism.

 

 

“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.

Do I Even Want the Gospel for Timothy McVeigh?

Here’s the latest sermon I preached on the myth “All Good People Go to Heaven and All Bad People Go to Hell.” Timothy McVeigh is my case study for whether or not I would rather believe this myth or the true gospel. Let me know what you think.

http://www.mylhumc.net/502652.ihtml

A Labor Day Prayer of Confession

Last night JR, Amanda, and I wrote a Labor Day confession prayer which JR prayed this morning at his church. Here it is…

God, you made the world and everything in it. You are Lord of heaven and earth and do not live in temples built by labor, and you are not served by human labor, as if you needed anything, because you yourself give all humanity life and breath and everything else.

We confess that far too often, we do not remember that you are the source of every good gift, of every breath we take and of every calorie of energy we exert.

And we confess that in our darkest moments, we do not want gifts, handouts. Because to us, handouts are for losers. Handouts are for dropouts. Handouts are for beggars on roadsides. Handouts are not for us.

Because we are a people who labor. Our bodies labor to earn so we can eat, buy, sell and secure. Our minds labor with anxiety over all we must accomplish and all we leave undone. Our souls labor endlessly to win your affections – as though your heart could be won by the sweat of our brow. We labor, we produce, we strive, and all too often we consider ourselves worthy and deserving of that with which you have given us.

We confess that we often allow the labor of our hands to distract us from the work that your Spirit is accomplishing in our world – in your world.

Let us remember that you created us in six days, that at the end of your labors, you rested.

Let us remember that the work of our hands is to sow the seeds of our own destruction, not our salvation.

And let us remember that from those first days, you did not rest again until you laid in the Tomb, having accomplished in your work the redemption that all our labors could not purchase for us.

Let us remember that our salvation was a gift given out of the very depths of your love for us, and that it was given freely, graciously.

Let us remember that we are more than producers, more than the sum of our labors, more than our portfolios and purchasing power. Because at the foot of the cross, we are all beggars in need of the handout you so freely extend to us.

This is a weekend in which we break the surface of the sea of our daily toil to draw a collective breath to break from our many labors. So teach us in this time to rest as you created us to rest. Teach us to pause from our production. And in that rest, in that pause, give us eyes to see where your Spirit is already at work, that we may join into your labors. Because we confess that your work -

- proclaiming good news to the poor

- freedom to the prisoner

- healing the sick

- releasing those who suffer oppression

- and doing the hard work of justice

- these labors are what the Spirit anointed your Son to accomplish, and what we as his body are anointed still to do. Let us fill our brief lives with the work of your kingdom. Let the work of our hands become the work of your body, and your Son.

For in this hour together, we look to Jesus, through whom we know and receive your many good gifts and in whose name we gratefully pray.

The Spirit is Not the Marlboro Man

The Enlightenment, autonomous individual, that rugged, Marlboro man who needs nothing but his own cigarettes and skepticism, has fallen on tough times. To some extent[1] Postmodernity is the driving force of decay, falsifying our sense of self and reviving the idea that humans find their truest identity within community. I’m skeptical of what kind of community can ultimately be produced under a postmodern worldview, but whatever the case we can at least rejoice in the resurgence of the old axiom, “No man is an island.”

 

So it is with the Spirit: The Spirit of God is not an autonomous self. The Spirit finds identity within two communities: The community of the Trinity and the community of Ecclesia – the church. Ever longing to bring these two communities into union, the Spirit actively comes forth from the Father in wooing joy, enjoining the church to greater participation in the divine nature.

 

Trinitarian Community

The biblical picture of the Spirit is divine power and life. Within the Trinitarian community, the Spirit as power and life is the means by which the persons of the Trinity love one another. In Augustine’s terms, as cited earlier, the Spirit is the “bond of love” within the Trinitarian dance.

 

As the bond of love, the Spirit is seen here in terms of relationality. The Spirit relates to and submits to the other persons of the Trinity without losing individuality and identity. The community is not forced upon the Spirit in the sense of overshadowing the Spirit as an individual person. But neither is the individual person of the Spirit the primary concern overriding the community. Within the Trinitarian community there is a dance of love whereby each member sacrificially loves the others and places the others above themselves. This is essential to the nature of God and therefore to the nature of the Spirit.

 

Community of Ecclesia[2]

The Spirit is not restricted to heavenly relationships, but has willfully and ecstatically chosen to participate in the human community we call the church.[3] “Spirit brings persons together in heaven and on earth, being both the medium of the communication of Jesus with the Father and the medium of our communication with brothers and sisters.”[4]

 

The Spirit is the bond of love between the church and her savior. She sweeps the church up in her arms, carrying us to the Father, urging us to further sanctification, and all the while liberally lavishing on us the love of our Lord.

 

Yet the Spirit is not merely a force pushing us to God; the Spirit leads us with a chord of gentleness and compassion, convicting us when we fall behind, bestowing grace on us when we fail, and grieving with us when we mourn.

 

Furthermore, the relationship of the Spirit to the church is not just vertically oriented. The Spirit moves us to further union with our brothers and sisters in Christ. The Spirit works amongst Calvinists and Arminians, Complementarians and Egalitarians precisely because none of these systems can fully conceptualize Ruach. The wind cannot be constrained in our canisters of theological conjecture.  

 

The love of the Trinitarian community was perfect before the Creation. Yet that perfect love desired (did not need) someone to share its love with. God created humanity and called out Israel and then the church as the object of His affection. God desires to draw us, through the Spirit, into that Trinitarian dance of love whereby there is mutual submission and communion. The Spirit is the church’s answer to its individualism and self-focus by wooing us to participation in Trinitarian love. We were “created in the first place to reflect God’s own perfection, and [our] destiny is to participate in the very life of God.”[5]

---

[1] I qualify this statement because there are aspects of Postmodernity which cling ferociously to the myth of the autonomous individual. So, it is neither the final answer nor is it the only challenge to individualism.

[2] I hope to expand on these thoughts later, so excuse what is left out in this brief rundown.

[3] Let me add at this point that I do not think the Spirit is restricted to Ecclesia either. But I will spell that out in a later post.

[4] Clark Pinnock, Flame of Love. 39.

[5] Pinnock, 41.