The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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Risky Love

October 16, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.”

~C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Freedom to Live in Love

October 14, 2011 / / 3 Comments

“Justin Boots ALCS Back to Texas”

Sorry. That’s the best I can do with a corny headline from yesterday’s Game Five. You’ve gotta hand it to him, Verlander was amazing. And Ceej was not. Not at all. I’m still not sure why Wash left Wilson in for that whole sixth inning meltdown. To restore the bullpen? Maybe. But Verlander will make the start again for the Tigers if they force a Game Seven, which makes tomorrow’s Game Six a must-win for the Rangers. They will have no excuses. Everything’s set up. They’ll be in Arlington. It’s a night game instead of a day game. Holland’s had plenty of rest. And Beltre’s poised for another couple of homers. I’ll be shocked if Texas doesn’t put it away Saturday night. And scared to death.

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“You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: Love your neighbor as yourself.” ~Galatians 5:13-14

Love God and love neighbor. Old Testament and New Testament. Moses, the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles. All the commands, all the guidelines, all the restrictions we’re under as children of God are summed up by the command to love.

Human beings are created by God to live in relationships of love. God is love. God’s perfect law for his creatures begins and ends with love. Love is what sets us free. It’s what makes us alive. It’s the thing that gives us hope.

But love demands sacrifice and service. It calls for selflessness. It’s characterized by giving. It’s risky. Love is hard.

Strange, huh? Perfect life and freedom is found in love. But love involves giving up your life and sacrificing your freedom.

To those outside the Lord, those who have not submitted to God or his commands, his laws are the enemy because they announce condemnation. To legalistic believers, God’s law is oppressive, it’s a harsh master that does rob them of their freedom. But to those children of God who have grasped the significance of God’s mercy and grace, his law is a servant that actually helps us see the character of our Father. The commands reveal to us our God and exactly what he’s doing in Christ.

God commands us to love because he loves. He demands that we forgive because he forgives. He tells us to value every human life because he values every human life. The royal law, these love commands, give us our perfect freedom to become everything we were made to be.

Obeying God changes you. God’s not looking for your formal fulfillment of what he says. He’s looking for you to eventually realize your created potential, to eventually be transformed into the perfect image of his holy Son.

Peace,

Allan

It’s A Problem, Right?

October 13, 2011 / / 1 Comment

“Cruz Control!”

Nellie is dealing, man! His perfect strike from right field in the 8th and his three-run jimmy jack to put it away in the 11th have given the Rangers complete command of this ALCS. Young finally drove in a run and appears to be slowly returning to form. Kinsler’s running the bases like a seasoned veteran. Mike Napoli’s still red-hot; his throw to nail Jackson, coupled with his catch and block at the plate on Cabrera, were things of sheer beauty and grace. And watching Wash running in place in the dugout as Hamilton rounded third made everything seem just as fun as last year.

And: Is it a cobra or a sitting duck? What is that thing? Whatever it is, it’s not as cool as the claw and antlers.

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Jesus and the Church today don’t attract the same people. That’s a problem, right? While he was ministering on this earth in our flesh, Jesus seemed to attract a certain kind of people. But his Church today seems to repel those kinds of people and attract others.

In just about every Gospel account, anytime Jesus met up with a religious leader or a well-respected pillar of the community, they were offended by the Son of God. They were repulsed by Jesus. Threatened, even. But those who were on the margins of society, those who had no power or status or wealth, were intrigued by Jesus. They were attracted to him. The outcast is always the one who connects with Jesus. Those are the ones coming to Christ. The city rulers and “church” leaders were the ones trying to put Jesus down, trying to kill him.

Our experience today seems to be just the opposite.

Timothy Keller, in his little book The Prodigal God, speaks to this as he compares and contrasts the two lost sons in the Luke 15 account of Jesus’ most well-known parable. (What? You’ve never read Timothy Keller? Oh, my. Look, as soon as you’re finished reading and commenting on this blog post, the very moment you’re done, click here and buy Keller’s The Reason For God. And when it arrives, read it!) The younger son types were always attracted to Jesus while the older brother types were cynical and suspicious. But that’s not the way things are in our American churches today:

“Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to our contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we’d like to think.”

What kind of  a message are we sending when we relegate the poor of our community to a back room downstairs? What are we saying when the Hispanic church can meet in our building, but only after we’re finished with it? What do we communicate when the outcast feels more warmly welcomed at Wal-Mart and McDonald’s than he does at church? What’s the “gospel” we proclaim when we’re quick to hand a guy a five dollar bill for lunch but avoid like the plague the thought of ever actually inviting that guy to our homes for dinner?

That’s a problem, right?

If we ever came to the conclusion that acting like our Lord — doing Christ-like things in Christ-like ways — was the way to go and acting the opposite of our Lord was wrong, then things might change. But none of this will ever change a long as we think it’s OK the way it is. That’s a problem, right?

Peace,

Allan

Do You See Anything?

October 12, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Yesterday’s Skip-shot in this space has started something. I received a text from Byrnes very early this morning that said:

 “Rangers Subdued by Iron Fister.”

I countered with:

“Colby Serves Up the Cheese in Rangers Loss.”

If you’d like to add a corny headline about last night’s game before this afternoon’s begins, jump in.

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We’re conditioned by our world — actually it’s in our nature and then reinforced by the world — to see the things we want to see and hear the things we want to hear. Anybody with a spouse or any children know this first hand. I’ll tell the girls “maybe” and they run to Carrie-Anne and say, “Dad said we could!” As a preacher, sometimes this works in my favor. Somebody will tell me how wonderful it was when I said such-and-such and I have no idea what she’s talking about. What this lady heard is nowhere near what I was preaching. But it meant something to her. And I still take credit for it. Of course, it certainly can work the other way, too.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus keeps asking people if they’re seeing correctly. Jesus asks the blind guy in Mark 8, “Do you see anything?” Same chapter, in the boat before Jesus and his apostles reach Bethsaida, he asks them, “Do you still not see?”

The blind guy in Mark 8 whose vision is blurry, whose eyesight is not perfectly clear, who sees something but not everything, represents everybody in the Gospel. And most everybody we encounter today. We see Jesus. But we don’t see all of him. We only see what we want. We embrace the Jesus who heals and forgives and feeds and loves and accepts and saves. We want to follow Jesus and live like that Jesus. But a Jesus who suffers and dies? Peter refused to see it. Most everybody did. Sometimes we don’t see it. And our picture of the Messiah is woefully incomplete. The Savior we teach is less than whole. The Gospel we preach is only partial truth.

We don’t see Jesus completely until we see his suffering and death. To see Jesus die is to understand who he really is and what he really came to do.

There are only two people in the entire Gospel of Mark who are said to “see.” One is Bartimaeus, the only other blind guy in the whole book, in Mark 10. This is Jesus’ final miracle, his last healing, as he enters Jerusalem to die. Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus, “Son of David!” That’s the Messianic title. The blind guy is the only one who sees. Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” And Bartimaeus answers, “I want to see.” And the text tells us that “immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus.” To the cross. To his death.

The other one is the Roman Centurion. At the cross. At Jesus’ death. The crowds were shouting, “Come down from the cross that we may see and believe!” When the soldier “saw how he died,” he confessed Jesus as the Son of God.

If you tell Jesus “I want to see,” what you’ll see is a commitment to trials and ridicule and persecution and suffering. You’ll see a road, a way, that leads to your death. What you’re promised is the same exaltation and glory that he now has as the resurrected Lord reigning at the right hand of the Father in heaven.

Peace,

Allan

The Prayer of the Fellowship

October 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

If I were Skip Bayless, I would have headlined today’s post:

“Rain-gers Cruz to Detroit with 2-0 Lead!” 

I received the news of Nellie’s 11th inning drive via David Byrnes’ iPhone during Valerie’s choir performance at Amarillo High School. The Rangers won it right in the middle of Jubilate Deo. It means sing with joy to the Lord. And we did.

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Yesterday’s post about our congregational prayer for Judy has pushed me even farther in reflecting on the importance of public prayer. So many times our hurried efforts at the pulpit or, worse, our rambling ruminations and repetition betray a careless attitude toward this sacred activity among the saints in the presence of God on his holy ground. Congregational prayer is never to be entered into lightly. It is serious. It’s heavy. It requires forethought and preparation. And it demands relationship. You really can’t pray appropriately for your brother unless you really know your brother.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says as much in Life Together. And I agree.

“The prayer in the common devotion should be the prayer of the fellowship and not that of the individual who is praying. It is his responsibility to pray for the fellowship. So he will have to share the daily life of the fellowship; he must know the cares, the needs, the joys and thanksgivings, the petitions and hopes of the others. Their work and everything they bring with them must not be unknown to him. He prays as a brother among brothers. It will require practice and watchfulness, if he is not to confuse his own heart with the heart of the fellowship, if he is really to be guided solely by his responsibility to pray for the fellowship.”

If you’re asking people to lead prayers in your assemblies, please don’t wait until the day before to make that call. Give them several days, maybe a full week or more, to pray and prepare and practice for this awesome task. And if you’re leading these public prayers on behalf of an entire group of Christian brothers and sisters, by all means please take great care in the things you say and the ways you say them. Pray about it first, just between you and God; you’re going to need his help. Prepare the congregational prayer in advance; write down the words. Practice it; know what you’re going to say when you dare to address the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

Above all, remember that you are praying on behalf of the group. And that sanctifies you. It transforms you. Because when you intercede for others before the throne of God and focus more on their needs than your own, you are being like our Christ who always lives to intercede for us.

Peace,

Allan

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