Your church can be ridiculously frustrating, and you’ll want to give up and walk out and say you were right about them the whole time.

I know you’ve probably had a million ideas they didn’t listen to, and you want worship to be deeper, the Bible studies to be harder, the activities to tone down, the atmosphere more gracious, people more real, the pastor to be more serious or more in-depth or more thoughtful or more attentive. You want more missions, more conviction, more change, more open dialogue.

But please, please, please hang in there.

You’ve probably been trying for a while. I know it hurts to not be heard, to see others halfway committed, to hear the stories of two-faced lives.

Please consider that the “hypocrite” might be someone on their first lap of faith, and they just don’t know yet, and not everyone is paced at your speed. Consider that your pastor has a vision that he is desperately trying to tie together across dozens of conflicting opinions. Consider that what you feel are glaring flaws in your church are NOT sins against anyone, but simply a preference that rides against yours.

Church is exactly the place for you to endure through disagreement and discontent: because it teaches us patience when nothing goes “your way.” It doesn’t mean we remain complacent as things unfold: but that we extend grace for the growing pains of our church body, and we offer solutions lest we become part of the problem.

Continue reading “Church: Keep Afloat” →

Anonymous asked:

Does God answer petitionary prayers? If so then how does He go about answering them? It seems like the most obvious thing to do is get up and do something about it instead of praying to God about it. Petitionary prayer almost seems like an unnecessary waste of time when it is so much more efficient to get up and do something. Also it seems like God would have more reasons to not answer our prayers given our sinful nature.

 

Like Forrest Gump once said: I think it’s both.

I often see a false dichotomy between two biblical ideas that, plainly speaking, says more about our un-nuanced black-and-white 3 lb. brain than anything about the Bible. When my stupid human categories can’t fit something, I tend to run to one extreme or another. It leads to wildly unbiblical conclusions.

We do this with a ton of stuff:

– Predestination Vs. Free Will

– My Politics Vs. Your Politics

– Effort Vs. Legalism

– Grace Vs. Truth

– Receiving the Rebellious Vs. Religious

– Evangelism Vs. Discipleship

– Technology/Fog Machines Vs. Hipsters/Beards

 

People often are incapable of holding two extremes in balance together, but this is exactly what the Christian is meant to do: to hold such amplitudes in tension that a third unpredictable way is created. It’s almost never either/or, but usually both/and. This is why most mature Christians have hard-to-pin political views and theological opinions — because no Christian should ever be a carbon copy clone.

All that to say: Prayer is just as much trusting God as it is moving forward into where God is working. There is NO false split between prayer and action. The godly person prays AND acts.

It’s like the single girl who is patiently waiting for a man to fall out of the sky. Patience doesn’t mean “Let go and let God.” It also means getting into a scene where meeting a godly guy is more likely to happen: and that’s totally okay.

We are active participants in the Story of God, and we’re called to ask just as much as we’re called to act.

If you read verses like Philippians 4:6 about prayer and petition, there is a ton of context that sandwiches these verses which talk about action. Prayer is our conduit to the Giver of all our strength to move from step to step: to be thankful, to repent, to learn, to be restored to what is better.

Continue reading “Question: Why Pray When You Can Act?” →

In Bible study, sometimes a well-meaning gentleman will use this logic:

If you don’t have joy and peace and compassion in your life, what does that say to others about Jesus?

I understand this sort of thinking.  I know we’re supposed to be witnesses to the world about how God flexes His power through us, and often our lack of unity looks like God doesn’t make us any different than anyone else.

But some days — I just want to flip a table and kick a trashcan and race a cop car and jump out a window and tell everyone that I hate my life right now and I don’t really feel like repping Jesus everyday, and that it probably won’t get better if you tell me that I need to be a “better witness.”

I totally get that we’re called to bear fruits and endure patiently and other Christianese things like that, but it sort of shuts down my need to be honest and vulnerable and real with other people. 

So then I just fake it, and that’s no good either, and I end up feeling like a failure whenever I read that bumper sticker, “If you were on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”  I mean like jeez, I guess not if you put it that way.

Continue reading “Trying To Witness Vs. How You Really Are” →

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

— Søren Kierkegaard

If you know what He has done at infinite cost to himself—He’s put you into a relationship so that you’ll never be rejected by Him—then your motivation when you sin is to go get Him. You want fellowship with Him. When the thing that most assures you is the thing that most convicts you, you’ll be okay because when you’re convicted of sin in a gospel way it drives you toward God.

Without the gospel we hate ourselves instead of our sin. Without the gospel we’re motivated through all sorts of awful fear and pride to change and it doesn’t really change our hearts; it just restrains our hearts.

— Timothy Keller