Pastor's Page: June 16, 2009

The Problem With Prophetic Utterances Today

I want to begin by defining the term "eschatological orthodoxy". "Eschatological" means having to do with the end times. "Orthodoxy" means right belief. So eschatological orthodoxy is the right belief about end times. If you are eschatologically orthodox, you believe what is true (or at least acceptable, church-sanctioned) about the end of days.

Now, a story:

In 1995 my friend John received a prophetic word from a charismatic pastor. "John," the pastor said, "I have a word from God for you concerning your future spouse." The pastor shared what he felt God had put on his heart about John's wife-to-be.

John was excited and figured he would be meeting that special someone in the next day or two. But he didn't. Thirteen years of singleness followed, during which, he said, he felt that that pastor "should have been stoned, or at least rebuked." Last year, however, John finally met, courted, engaged and married the woman of his dreams. Joy is evident on both his and his beloved's face. He still puzzles, though, over why it took so many years for the prophecy to be fulfilled.

I do not share John's puzzlement, because I do not believe that the prophecy in 1995 and the marriage in 2008 had anything to do with each other. My reason for this disbelief springs from my zealous, unwavering commitment to eschatological orthodoxy.

By eschatological orthodoxy I don't mean anything like the nature and duration of the gap (if any) between the rapture and the second coming of Christ. Nor do I think that any of the competing views of the millennium, pre-, post-, a- or pan-, are unorthodox. (If you are unfamiliar with pan-millennialism, it's the view that punts the question away and says everything will pan out all right.)

To be eschatologically orthodox you must embrace by faith two very simple core doctrines:
1) Jesus will return, and
2) You must be ready for it, because it can occur at any time.

Christians may differ about what signs may precede his arrival, and whether those signs have already been fulfilled - but there is no mistaking the biblical urgency to be ready now, right now, for the appearing of Christ. He may arrive before the sun sets tonight, or before I have finished typing this page. 1 Thessalonians 5:2 says "for you know very well the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night." Jesus concluded a parable that contrasted those who are prepared and those who are unready by saying "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour" (Matthew 25:13). In 1 Corinthians 15:52 Paul says it will take place "in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye". Our constant state of readiness for this moment must stir us to holiness: we are to live "self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope - the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:12-13).

I do not know if Christ will return today or 100,000 years from now, but my orthodox faith insists that I be spiritually prepared should it occur just seconds from now. I know nothing that would prevent it from happening that soon.

And that is the problem with confident prophetic utterances today. When a man says, for example, "God has told me such-and-such about the woman you will some day marry," he is necessarily (though of course unintentionally) saying "God has revealed to me that Jesus will not return any time soon." Think about it. Jesus taught that marriage is for this age only: "those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage" (Luke 20:35). Therefore, in order for my friend John to have believed that his pastor's prophecy had to be true, he would necessarily have had to believe that the possibility of a sudden return of Christ could not be true. Any time a prophet today proclaims a "thus says the Lord" about some future event that necessarily pertains to the conditions of this present age, he or she is - in effect - denying the doctrine of the imminent (that is, "possible-at-any-time") return of Christ.

Just a couple days ago I was asked about what I was discerning of the voice of the Lord in circumstances pertaining both to my personal life and that of Faith Bible Church. In answering I clung doggedly to my eschatological orthodoxy, saying that, while it sure looked to me like things were lining up beautifully under the hand of God for A, B and C to happen, it was impossible to know for sure. How could anyone know that? How dare anyone pronounce a "Thus says the Lord" over such possible future events? After all, Jesus could return before I finish this senten

Pastor's Page: June 9, 2009

"Do It Again Just The Same Way, God"

Nine-year-old Michelle wanted a bicycle very badly, though it seemed unlikely that her father, a struggling dairy farmer, could afford one. She decided one night to pray for a bike with all the spiritual effort she could muster. At church she had heard about fasting, and also that Jesus said that when you prayed you weren't supposed to tell anyone about it, but go to your closet and shut the door and pray there. (Our newer translations of Matthew 6:6 say "your room", but the old King James Version said "thy closet".) So she dismissed herself from the dinner table without eating, went to her room, shut herself in the closet, and prayed for a bike as long and as hard as she could. Then she went to bed.

The next afternoon her father called her and her two sisters out to the barn where - Hallelujah! - there stood three shiny new bikes. The kindness of God gave her more than she asked for, because it even included her sisters in the bounty of joy.

But the climax of that story was not revealed till a quarter of a century later, when Michelle told her father for the first time that he had gotten those bikes right after she had prayed so hard for one. He teared up and told her, "You don't know the half of it." He explained that that morning when he checked the mailbox there was a blank envelope with three one-hundred dollar bills in it. He did not know, and does not know to this day, who put them there. He thought about paying bills with the money, and maybe a wise steward would have done just that. But he loved his longsuffering daughters, and wanted to do something special for them, and so he went to town and bought the bikes. I know this story is true, because I heard it from my sister Grace, Michelle's aunt.

Thirty-five-year-old Jennie's desperate prayer was starker than Michelle's. Jennie was deathly ill with what was later diagnosed as tularemia. She had prayed for healing but only got worse; now she just wanted to know whether she would live or die. She put a "fleece" before the Lord, like Gideon in Judges chapter 6. She prayed, "Lord, if I'm going to live, please let Laverne come over today." Laverne, Jennie's sister, occasionally stopped by to help with housework and take care of Jennie's four children.

Laverne, however, didn't come. Jennie did receive one kind visitor that day, old Mrs. Foster from church, but her sister never knocked on the door. Jennie went to bed that night thinking that if the Lord honored her request, she would need to put her affairs in order and prepare to die.

But, lying in bed, a sudden thought struck her with the force of a lightning bolt. She cried out to her husband, "Honey! Do you know what Mrs. Foster's first name is?" "Of course," he said, "Laverne." That was the only day, ever, that Laverne Foster stopped by to visit the mother of four who, three years later, became my mother too.

When my sister told me about Michelle and the miracle bike, I said, after recovering from gooseflesh, "I wonder what Michelle asked for the next week: 'Oh God! Now make it a car! I want a car this time!'." But Grace corrected me. "No, Michelle never asked like that again."

Good for her. Maybe Michelle understood that a holy moment like that was not the kind of thing that she should expect to be repeated. "Upping the ante" of a prayer like that would not be a sign of faith, but a sign of greed coupled with an effort to manipulate God.

My mother understood that too. Though she received a stunning answer to her prayer, she never again put a fleece before the Lord. She told me, "I should have just received whatever God would have chosen to give me, whether life or death. But in my weakness I had to know, and he graciously responded. I would never test him like that again though." And she advised that I never do it either.

In "Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer" C. S. Lewis writes, "It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore." That gets it exactly right. Christians must develop a sense of gratitude for those things that God chooses to do only once - without expecting (or, heaven forbid, demanding) that he repeat the pattern of yesterday. Look for new and different graces from the Lord.

I've been reading through the gospel of John lately, and several examples from that book come to mind. In John 6 Jesus miraculously feeds 5,000 men, but when the crowd follows him the next day looking for another meal, he refuses to give it to them, and even rebukes them. In John 11 Jesus resurrects Lazarus, who was probably killed soon afterward (see John 12:10). If Lazarus was indeed killed later, it is hard to imagine his sisters sending word to Jesus, "He's dead again. You need to come back!" Or take John 13, where Jesus assumes the role of a slave and washes his disciples' feet. How perfectly awful it would have been if, during one of his resurrection appearances, some idiot disciple approached him and said, "Hey, Jesus, glad to see you! Here's a bucket, go get yourself a towel. I'm afraid I stepped in it outside, and could really use a good cleaning."

There are some things, of course, that God does repeat. He repeats his pardon. His mercies are new every morning. I'll not test him on a one-and-done, but, for my daily offering of sin, I'll trust his daily supply of grace.

Pastor's Page: June 2, 2009

The Dearest Idol I Have Known

It is possible for a human being to become an idol for us.

Probably not in the literal sense, where we would actually render worship to the individual, or pray to him, or ascribe to him qualities unique to God. You see that in the Bible sometimes. In Daniel 6 King Darius, pressured by lackeys, wrote idolatry of himself into law, insisting that for 30 days no prayers be offered to any god but him. (Daniel disobeyed and got thrown to providentially meek lions.) And Herod Agrippa received worship in Acts 12:22 when a crowd heard him and cried, "The voice of a god and not a man!" He died soon afterward - it turns out he had the body of a man and not a god.

I don't think we worship people like that any more - though perhaps it is worth noting that that is one of the complaints Protestantism lays at the feet of Catholicism. Protestants detect in Catholic worship a tendency to treat Mary and other saints as gods whenever petitions are offered to them rather than through them. (And a good Protestant won't even ask a departed saint to pray on his behalf for the simple reason that the Bible forbids communication with the dead.)

But even a conscientious Protestant can find that he has made an idol of somebody. Colossians 3:5 is instructive here: it says that greed is idolatry. Just as a greedy person puts gold in the place of God, so also someone might be tempted to put a person in the place of God. I believe that is what Jesus warned about in Luke 14:26 when he said that a man must "hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters - yes, even his own life" in order to be his disciple. Of course "hate" is not literal (we are commanded to love our enemies - how much more our family members!), but serves to underscore the priority of Jesus first, and all earthly attachments - even family - after him.

A few months after my father died we sang at church the great William Cowper hymn, "Oh For A Closer Walk With God". I recall my mother confessing to me how hard it was for her to sing the 4th stanza:

The dearest idol I have known,
Whate'er that idol be
Help me to tear it from thy throne
And worship only thee.

Her eyes filled with tears as she said, "But my dearest idol was Dad!" It seemed cruel to her to have to rip him from the throne - as though he were some godless usurper of affection - when she knew him to be kind and worthy and a lover of God himself. I can't remember if I was able to say anything helpful to her, or anything at all.

A wise widow wrote to me saying that she was asking God what she could do to keep his good gifts from becoming idols to her. Her conscience likewise afflicted her about having idolized her husband, of having allowed him to take the place of God in her heart.

But I'm not convinced that either my mother or this widow were really guilty of shunting God aside and giving their husbands the honor that is due God alone. Wives are supposed to honor their husbands (Ephesians 5:33) and train younger women to love theirs (Titus 2:4). In the two churches I have pastored, I have yet to see even one woman who adored her husband the way my mom adored my dad - and I can't say I view that as a positive thing. It is not, "Good for them! See how well they resist the temptation to idolize their husbands!" but rather, "Why so little respect, deference, and spontaneous affection? Are all their men really so hard to love?"

I believe the better test of whether we have idolized someone is when we see that we have granted him or her the power to make us sin. It is not so much when we love, respect and delight in them but when we have let them lead us into wrongdoing that we have made an idol of them, and must rip them away from the throne of God. I know one man - I'm not making this up - whose young wife beguiled him away from a Sunday worship service by doing a striptease in front of him just before he was about to leave for church! She became his "golden calf" that day, standing provocatively between him and the appointed hour of worshipping the Lord.

Other forms of human idolatry will be more subtle, but I think that that spicy example illustrates the main idea. Human idols are not merely people whom we treasure - however highly - but people whom we permit to hinder our glad submission to God.

Pastor's Page: May 26, 2009:

On Discerning The Will Of God (Part 2)

Just to cover a few things left unsaid in last week's essay. And some personal testimony.

I believe the strong, sincere desire on the part of many Christians to "discern the will of God" actually tends to reflect a bit of a mismatch between something we want from God and something he wants from us. We are desperate to be guided in matters that are unclear, while he desires that we simply obey in matters that are already abundantly clear.

Christians are commanded to trust that God will direct our paths - not fear that he won't. I have known cases of Christians obsessing so badly about knowing God's will that it developed into a kind of neurosis for them. They feared missing the subtlest of clues, worried about not having said the right prayers or fasted long enough. Maybe they sinned and they figured that just ruined everything, irreparably, and made it impossible to get back on track. Sometimes they even got mad at God (how dumb is that?) when they tried everything they could think of to discover his will and things still turned out badly.

They need to relax, and learn wisdom from the prophet Jonah. I am indebted to Erwin Lutzer for pointing out a lesson from Jonah's story: if God will go to such extreme measures to re-direct a man who knows his will but chooses to disobey, how much more will he direct the person who longs to do his will, but is momentarily confused as to what it is?

Part of our problem I think is that we tend to assume we know what will be the end result of our having discovered and obeyed God's will for our life. If we get it exactly right, then of course we'll have inner peace, enjoy happy and exemplary marriages, serve God in productive ministries, etc. But how do we really know that any of that is God's will for us?

Jesus, Peter and Paul all lacked peace at times while serving faithfully in the center of God's will: see Luke 22:44; John 21:18; 2 Corinthians 11:28-29; 1 Thessalonians 3:5

It was God's will for the prophet Hosea to have a perfectly rotten marriage - the poor man was wed to a whore who cheated on him! (I think of a woman who complained about God "tricking" her into a bad marriage when she had done everything right - prayer, fasting, seeking good counsel, everything! - and her husband turned out to be a foul wretch of deep darkness. But how could she know that it was not precisely God's will for her to marry such a beast?)

I've never known a minister or missionary who did not pray for a thriving ministry. "So, if I'm stuck in a ministerial dead end, is that a sign that I have misread God's will?" No, not necessarily. It was God's will that Noah, Isaiah and John the Baptist - biblical titans all - wind up preaching to audiences of seven, zero, and one respectively. See 1 Peter 3:20; Isaiah 6:11-12; Mark 6:20.

I have had opportunity to reflect at great length on the topic of God's will concerning whom we should marry. My past marital woes are no secret, but to this day I neither doubt the leading of God in that area, nor regret having taken the path down which he led me. It is true that, almost certainly, had I married someone else, I would have been a much happier man all these years - but does that mean I would have been a better man? No. What could a person like me have learned from uninterrupted bliss, and how could that have shaped my character for the purposes to which God called me? It was by the severe mercy of God that I was kept from experiencing the kind of happiness that every man craves. So be it. Not my will but his be done. I praise him for his good leading.

And he will continue to lead, and do so with such deft care and a loving touch that I really don't need to worry or lose sleep over it. The analogy that suggests itself to me is that of being on one of those water rides in an amusement park. The raft will careen and bounce all over and jerk me from side to side, and it might even send me directly under that waterfall up ahead. But the course is safe, and pre-selected, and I can't go over the side if I just obey the posted rules. All I really have to worry about is keeping my arms in the vehicle at all times, remaining seated, with my safety belt fastened and my loose items secured. That kind of thing.

Pastor's Page: May 19, 2009

On Discerning The Will Of God

I was recently asked if I had any old Pastor's Pages on discerning God's will. I didn't, so here's one.

"Discerning God's will" is a favorite topic of some preachers (Charles Stanley in particular, I've noticed), but one that I ignore. The reason is because I think we already know the will of God in areas where it matters. Regarding doctrine, we know it is God's will that we believe the gospel of his Son Jesus Christ. Regarding behavior, we know it is his will that we be kind, just, fair, honest, compassionate, sober, diligent, faithful, loving, generous and pure, and that we avoid malice, lust, drunkenness, greed, slander, impurity, sloth, rebellion, dishonesty, theft and negligence. We could expound a bit more on the meaning of the gospel of Christ, and we could add a few things to the lists of virtues and vices - but we've already got the general idea. Believe what is true and do what is right. This is God's will for you.

But when Christian evangelicals talk about discerning the will of God (or, perhaps, "hearing his voice" or "following the Holy Spirit's leading"), they are usually not referring to things that have a clear moral or doctrinal component. They are usually thinking of choices between amoral alternatives. [Usage note: "amoral" does not mean "bad", it just means having nothing to do with morality.] These would involve questions like, "Should I take that job in Spokane or the one in Raleigh?" "Should I attend Illinois State or Northern Illinois?" "Should I marry Alice or Barbara?" "Boxers or briefs?"

I would not say that God is aloof, uninvolved in such decisions. He guides. But he does not play a shell game with us, hiding his true will behind a fast-moving blur of opaque shields that demand our utmost concentration in order to guess which one holds the peanut. I have seen long lists of "clues" for discerning God's will, and they turn me off when they wander into Da Vinci Code complexity. The Bible tends to present the will of God as something that may be hard to do but never hard to know. In fact, there are repeated reminders of its simplicity against those who are making it too complicated. Three examples below:

Deuteronomy 30:11-14:
Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, "Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?" Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, "Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?" No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.

Micah 6:8:
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Luke 10:25-28:
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
"What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you read it?"
He answered: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"
"You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live."

A few months ago I referred to a minister who obsessed over the will of God concerning a job opportunity, but who somehow missed the resounding clarity of the 7th commandment, "You shall not commit adultery." Talk about straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! Maybe one of the reasons I don't preach those "How to discover God's will for your life" sermons is because I perceive that they focus on all the wrong things, encouraging believers to guess at the unfathomable instead of just doing the good thing (or avoiding the bad thing) that is right in front of them.

Augustine famously said, "Love God, and do as you please," and he was exactly right. If you love God - which necessarily means obeying his commandments - you can go to Spokane or Raleigh, attend Northern or State, marry Alice or Barbara. Again, granting that there is no moral difference between the two. If, for example, Alice is a stunningly attractive, razor-tongued tart while Barbara is a gentle and sincere servant of God, then the moral component makes it obvious whom you should marry. You should marry Alice because you're not good enough for Barbara. For the sake of Barbara's happiness, you must leave her to a better man than yourself!

Pastor's Page: May 5, 2009

Cover Up

Summer approaches, when we all wear less clothing, so I thought this a good time to remind you (young people in particular) to be sure to wear enough clothing.

I'll set an example at church, as I do every summer. Though I shed my suit jacket around Memorial Day and don't put it on till September, I never go as far as to appear in the pulpit wearing shorts and a T shirt. That is because it would not be right of me to distract you with my finely sculpted calf muscles. And though I have 6-pack abs, I dutifully keep them covered at all times with a thick layer of subcutaneous fat. It is just one of those things that mature people do.

In the wake of the recent brouhaha about Miss California in the Miss USA pageant, I asked a couple friends if they would mind if their daughters participated in such a contest. One said "I'm not sure" and the other said "No way!". I said, "I'm just glad I don't have daughters." (It's the same thing I say at high school basketball half-time shows where the dancing squads not only wear inappropriate tights but gyrate suggestively in them, making me wonder why none of these girls have parents who say to them, "Young lady, you are not going out of this house dressed like that!")

Way back in 1996 I was teaching a Sunday School class to a group of about 20 senior citizens, and happened to ask if any of them had a problem with a Christian woman parading around onstage in a bikini so that spectators could ogle and grade her body in the swimsuit competition of a Miss America contest. None of them objected to that - they all thought I was prudish. Then, afterward, the oldest person in the class, a dear wizened widow who had never said a word, came up to me and quietly whispered, "I agree with you." So there it was, just me and a 93-year-old saint holding down the lonely fort of modesty in the face of a permissive onslaught within the church!

Another widow recently wrote to me saying, "The Bible says that women make themselves beautiful with a gentle and quiet spirit [1 Peter 3:4]. Is this something that is attractive to all men do you think?" I wrote back that it was certainly attractive to me! A gentle and quiet spirit is downright sexy - and sexy in the right way. An aggressive, public flaunting of flesh in tight or skimpy clothing only attracts the wrong kind of man - or attracts only the reptilian part of the brain of a good man.

Let the reptile have his rightful place in the marriage bed. Elsewhere, in public settings - especially church! - let your behavior be governed by modesty in spirit, speech, demeanor and dress.

Pastor's Page: April 28, 2009

Against Cheap Manipulation In Sermons This one is for my fellow preachers: Don't be a manipulative jerk in the pulpit. I suppose a stronger word than "jerk" could be applied to those who do the things I condemn below, but as a man of the cloth myself I will tame my tongue as I call to account some colleagues who irritate the living snot out of me. A pastor I'll call "Will Bibles" recently (according to a Christian journal) "challenged members of the congregation to raise their hands if they were willing to surrender their possessions and lifestyles fully to God and actually decide to use their resources to serve the poor and honor God...Then Will said he wanted to have a word with all the folks who did not raise their hands: 'I hope you have a terrible afternoon. And then I hope you have a terrible evening. I hope the Holy Spirit keeps after you, and you have to keep thinking this one through until you're able to raise your hand as well.'" What a cheap shot. First of all, Will doesn't have the moral authority to summon heaven's rebuke of the greedy. (I read one of his books where he wrote - guiltlessly - of tooling around in a sports car that costs more than double my annual salary, and about all the friends he made at his yacht club. Yes, his yacht club.) Second, it is so easy to turn the "I-pray-you-have-a-bad-afternoon" mantra against anyone - Will included - who falls afoul of the conviction you're harping on at the moment. For example, at my former church I hosted an organizational event for the Hike For Life, and the representative from Will's church explained that she couldn't make any announcements there because the church had a policy against public pro-life statements which might offend pro-choice seekers. (Grrrr. They have no policy of refusing to condemn racism just because that might offend seekers from the Klu Klux Klan.) A man of my convictions might want to thunder from the pulpit, "RAISE YOUR HAND if you are willing to take a public, uncompromising stand against the slaughter of the innocents," and, if Will were present and did not raise his hand, stare him straight in the eye and say, "I'll keep praying that you be miserable, miserable, until you repent." But that would be wrong. It is never right to try to influence behavior by calling for a show of hands and then browbeating, cursing, those who keep their hands down. A preacher I listen to on the radio was troubled that some in his congregation did not applaud one of his rhetorical flourishes, and at the conclusion of his message he actually prayed for all those who did not clap. I'm not kidding. I had noticed in the preceding months that he was developing the bad habit of crafting emotionally laden crescendo lines, slowly biting off the words of paper-thin monstrosities like "I...Will Not...Bow...To Satan...Even...If...He...CAN raise the dead!" and then stopping to wait for the applause. Sometimes he'd provoke up to five ovations in 20 minutes, and it always made me groan. I suppose that if he thought that non-applauders needed prayer, then eye-rollers like me needed exorcisms! But I maintain he was just being manipulative and should cut it out. One pulpit manipulation trick is to treat your audience like ventriloquist dolls. At both a Promise Keepers convention and at a mega-church service I was instructed to "Turn to the person next to you and say" something really inane. I did it, like a lemming, but if it happens again I'm not going to bother. That kind of thing needs to be discouraged. Some manipulations have heart-breaking effects. Years ago I talked with a sweet-spirited woman, a school teacher in her early 50s, who had recently experienced the sorrow of losing her husband-to-be to a sudden heart attack just before their wedding. In the course of our conversation she mentioned that she had gone to a large church where a multi-part "invitation" was given. If you were willing to give your heart to Jesus you were supposed to stand. Then if were already a Christian you should stand too. Then if you weren't in either of those categories but were "on the way" as a seeker and willing to respond to God's call, you should stand as well. She was left as the only person sitting surrounded by a sea of the standing, and she felt conspicuous and awful and never wanted to go back. I apologized to her on behalf of my Christian brothers. (Is this how we call people to Christ - through peer pressure and social embarrassment? For shame.) Thankfully she read and responded well to a copy of C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed that I gave her. Say no to homiletic pressure tactics. Gospel truth conveyed with conviction, reverence, earnestness and love has a power all its own and needs no manipulative gimmick to support it. You cannot straighten a soul by twisting an arm.