Ridiculous Rapture

I’ve watched with mild amusement and irritation the news this week about the folks predicting the rapture and beginning of the end on May 21st.  Most of what I’ve seen from Christians on facebook the last several days has been either making fun of the whole thing, or simply taking the opportunity to remind people that Jesus says we will not know the day or hour of His return.  The coverage in the media?  Well, it’s what I’ve come to expect.  Lift up the crazies and the nonsense, but ignore the really good stuff (seen any high profile stories this week about the outpouring of Christian assistance in the south in the wake of the recent tornadoes and floods?  Yeah, me neither…)…

But there is a larger issue here much more significant than silly predictions about the end of the world.  There are a lot of Christians out there buying into really bad theology, and there are a lot of people being turned away from the Gospel because of it…

Let’s take this end times stuff as an example.  Lots of very sincere Christians (and I’m afraid many of their pastoral leaders) get most of what they think about God’s ultimate purposes for the world, Jesus’ second coming, and God’s final judgment of sin from fiction like the Left Behind book series and very questionable footnotes in certain study Bibles.  Simply put, much of what is assumed and discussed about the “end times” in popular Christian culture is based on really, really bad Bible study – whole series of verses taken out of context and strung together, entire books of the Bible misunderstood, reading contemporary things into ancient Scripture that just aren’t there!!!  But people buy into it…like this radio guy that has been all over the news this week.   And I think there are probably many skeptics and seekers who listen to this “Christian” nonsense…then shake their heads, change the channel, and maybe never really consider Jesus….

And that’s heartbreaking…

How we talk about God and for God affects how other people will see Him – and choose to respond to Him.  I asked a friend not too long ago about her spouse and whether he went to church with her.  She told a story about how several years ago, when his father was sick and receiving treatment for a disease, the church his family was attending prayed for his dad…and told the family they weren’t trusting God if they were still seeking medical treatments.  So the family stopped the treatments and joined with the church in their prayers.  His father died…and the church and pastor pulled away from the disillusioned and grieving family.  So as you might expect, my friend’s husband has some issues with Jesus followers and is not really interested in going to church with her…

When we paint a picture of God that makes Him look ridiculous or mean or impotent or cruel, we stain God’s character and do injustice to the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Jesus loves us and has demonstrated that love for us by offering Himself as a payment for our sin so that we can be forgiven and restored to life and relationship with God.  When we encounter Jesus, we turn away from our self-absorbed brokenness and wrongdoing, we trust and receive this gift of God’s love, and then we live our lives devoted to faithfulness and sharing this good news with others.  Our hope and our joy, now and forever, are found in knowing and loving the God who created us, then died for us, and now calls us to give ourselves away to care for others and the world…

Maybe God can just beam up all the ridiculous preachers and crazies.  Here’s hoping anyway…

Word became flesh

The Incarnation is the Christian doctrine concerning Jesus’ identity as both fully God and fully man, the Son of God and the child of Mary, the person Jesus of Nazareth and the second person of the Triune God.  In the words of John’s gospel, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and “Incarnation” is the word we give for this event.  The Incarnation assumes that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, eternal with the Father and Spirit.  It is by Jesus and for Jesus that all of creation comes to be and holds together, and we see and experience in the person of Jesus the fullness of the image of the invisible God.  The Incarnation also assumes the fullness of Jesus’ humanity.  Jesus is our high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses, was tempted in every way we are, and who experienced suffering and death.  Jesus is in His very nature God, and yet became human – was born, lived and ministered, suffered and died, and then rose again – in order to atone for sin, conquer death, and provide for our salvation.  The Incarnation is the testimony of God’s love revealed in God’s own willingness to atone for us and save us from sin; without the Incarnation, we have no hope – for only God can save.  Thus the Incarnation is the redemptive work of God to restore our broken relationship with God and provide for our salvation.

So when we see and hear Jesus in the Gospels, we see the embodiment of God and the revelation of His character.  In what Jesus says and does, we see the actions and hear the words of the Living God.  When we read the story of Jesus’ complete obedience and submission to God’s will, his sinless life of works of mercy and signs of power, his acceptance of his betrayal, suffering, and crucifixion, the forgiveness he offers his tormentors from the cross – we see God’s self-humiliation and loving action on our behalf.  And in Jesus’ command to remember him when we gather and break bread, we hear a promise of Christ present with us through the Holy Spirit living in us and being present in the community of believers.

In the Incarnation, God “gets His hands dirty” by entering into His creation.  The implications of this truth are tremendous, both for the value God places on the creation itself as well as the call for his followers to become involved in God’s work to redeem that fallen creation…

At the heart of the Incarnation is God’s self-emptying and humbling Himself in love for others, as well as His presence and life lived among His people.   The Incarnation means that God has come near to us, and through the Holy Spirit, continues to be in and near and among us.  And so the Christian life and Christian ministry become an ongoing attempt to encounter and experience the God who has come near.  Whether in the breaking of the bread, the washing of feet, the touching of the sick, the laying on of hands in prayer – God continues to come near us through material means.  And just as Jesus in his time dwelling among us healed, prayed, sought out those on the margins, shared table fellowship across cultural and religious barriers – all as an embodiment of God’s kingdom, God’s presence in the world – so also we as Jesus followers are called to do the same…

Jesus humbled himself, suffered for others, touched the untouchables, washed the feet of a betrayer, forgave and loved those who persecuted and abused Him, and submitted to servanthood.  Such was his life and example…

The Word became flesh and came among us…continues to be among us.  And so we also must take His words and make them flesh in the world around us…

Bad stories…Bad God?

I’ve always found it kind of strange that Noah’s Ark is such a popular children’s story.  I guess it’s the animals.  Or the big boat.  My hunch is that most Sunday school teachers gloss over God’s mass destruction of the world and killing everyone…

Truth be told, it would be nice if we could gloss over a lot of stories in the Bible.  There are many when God causes bad things to happen.  God commands His people at times in the Old Testament to do some awful things that result in the suffering and death of others.  In my experience, these are among the hardest parts of the Bible for people to digest; and taken by themselves, these stories could paint an awful picture of God…

So what do we do with them?  Well, the Bible narrates these as a holy God’s acts of judgment – both upon His chosen, covenant people and others – for sin and unfaithfulness.  And these acts of judgment generally follow many, many pleadings to turn away from evil, come back to God, and warnings about what will happen if they don’t….

Scripture is also consistently clear that our choices have consequences, and that in human behavior and relationships, we will reap what we sow.  God made us free, allows us freedom, and that means we freely cause all kinds of havoc in God’s world and in our lives.  So God may discipline us; or God may leave us to experience the trouble we have created.  Even the most loving parents have to lay down the law or let their children learn the hard way sometimes…

God is holy…and God judges sin…and God allows evil and suffering as part of people being free and the fallenness of His broken creation…and so sometimes, the picture isn’t pretty.  Think Abraham and Sodom, the hard heart of Pharoah and death of the firstborn, Joshua and the destruction of Jericho, basically the entire book of Judges, and others……

But of course, these ugly stories are nowhere near the whole picture.  The whole picture begins with an all-powerful Creator of heaven and earth who makes us very good so that He can be in relationship with us and involve us in the care for His creation.  The whole picture ends with the Lord of History reigning for all of eternity in the glory of His kingdom.  And in between, the whole picture includes countless stories of God’s compassion and mercy, God’s patience and pleading with His children, God’s passion for His bride, God’s incredible humility alongside awesome displays of power, and God’s unending efforts to draw close to us and share life with us.  The whole picture includes countless promises of God’s goodness and God’s good purposes and plans for people and the creation.   And of course the whole picture includes a terrible but beautiful story of a cross where God embodies love, achieves victory over evil, and demonstrates once and for all that bad stories do NOT mean a bad God.  The ugly cross becomes the wonderful, beautiful, life-saving cross…

Even the story of the flood has the rescuing of a remnant and desire to start over, the restoring of covenants and undeserved promises. And of course, lots of cute animals…

Because God is good…all the time…

The problem of suffering

Monday night at community night, we talked about the very difficult questions of “Why do bad things happen?” and “Where is God when it hurts?”  I’ve blogged about this in recent days already (see recent posts “Arms too short” and “Hurricanes, Earthquakes & Tsunamis).   But I promised some additional blogs to continue the conversation….

The question of God’s relationship to suffering is among the oldest and most discussed of theological questions.  A very simple restatement of the problem goes something like this:

If God is both all-loving and all-powerful, then suffering should not exist.  But suffering clearly does exist.  So this means that God either could have prevented it but didn’t (not all-loving) or wanted to prevent it but couldn’t (not all-powerful)….

OK, so here is an (overly) simple response to that (overly) simple statement of the problem.   As Christians, we point to 2 things – the cross and the resurrection – to demonstrate how these things all come together…

We believe the cross is an act of an all-loving God.  Scripture tells us that the fullest expression of God’s love is Jesus giving His life on the cross for us.  In that act of self-sacrifice, Jesus experiences the fullness of suffering.  In love, Jesus chose suffering and death so that restoration with a fallen creation and unholy, fallen people is possible.  Our God did not remain aloof or indifferent or content to let us die without the hope of being cleansed of our sin and restored; instead, Jesus who was without sin and who had no need to experience suffering or injustice or pain or the effects of evil…Jesus suffers and dies so that we might live.  That is the ultimate expression of love from a God whose nature is love…

We believe the resurrection is the act (and promise) of an all-powerful God.  Jesus was raised from the dead, and the Bible talks about this as the first taste of what will happen for all of us.  We will ALL experience resurrection.  And in that resurrection, God will fully and completely reestablish His reign, His kingdom, as He designed and desired it to be from the beginning.  This kingdom will be a place without fear, pain, sorrow, hurt, grief…in other words, a place with no suffering.  Justice will be fully restored; death will be conquered; everything that is wrong will be set right through the power of God in the resurrection and restoration of creation.  This is the great hope of the Christian faith – resurrected, transformed bodies living in the presence of and sharing life with God forever…

So an all-loving God enters into the fullness of suffering and gives His very own life for us on the cross, and an all-powerful God promises through the resurrection to overcome death, pain, grief, and all other suffering and share life with us forever. For Christians, we can be assured that a loving God is with us in our suffering because Jesus experienced the cross; and we can be assured that a powerful God will ultimately overcome and eliminate our suffering in the kingdom to come…

Which means from the Christian perspective, suffering doesn’t create a problem that disproves God as all-powerful and all-loving at all; rather, it provides the greatest opportunity for God to demonstrate just how loving and powerful He truly is…

Or at least that’s my attempt at a short answer…

Arms Too Short

My Disciple Bible study reading this morning was the end of Job, chapters 38-41.  Then in the book I was reading today – Philip Yancey’s “Where is God When it Hurts?” – he discussed the same chapters.  So I thought I would blog briefly about them…

If you haven’t read Job, here’s the very basic story.  A righteous and blessed man named Job loses absolutely everything – possessions, family, health, etc.  And that’s by the end of chapter 2.  The next 35 chapters, Job and four friends dialogue about what has happened.  They offer a variety of explanations one might expect…and that people still offer today…about why he is experiencing such suffering.  Job holds fast to his faith for the most part, but towards the end of the book, Job also comes to question God’s righteousness for allowing this to happen…

Then after 35 chapters of silence, God speaks from a whirlwind.  God speaks for 4 chapters…4 of the most awe-inspiring and beautiful descriptions of God’s creative power in all of the Bible.  Magnificent words and images of God the creator of the heavens and the earth…

But God speaks in questions, not answers.  He doesn’t offer an explanation of why this is happening or why He allowed it. He instead answers in “who” – who He is, and who Job is not…

Sometimes, that’s all we get.

Yancey makes the point in his book that the area of “cause” – of why things happen or why things are allowed to happen – is God’s territory, which often remains a mystery to us.  Our “territory” is how we respond in the face of suffering and things we don’t understand…

And so we have a choice to make.  We can trust the God of Job 38-41, the God of power and majesty who creates and cares for all of His creation, including us in the midst of our darkest and most difficult of moments.  Or we can – in bitterness and anger and pain – fight and turn away from that God…

I can’t really imagine the suffering of Job.  Whatever I’ve experienced, it’s nothing like that.  And I can’t imagine the suffering of so many others I’ve met or prayed for or heard about…

But I also just can’t imagine trying to fight the God of Job 38-41.  My arms are just too short to box with that kind of God…

So Lord, come what may, help me to trust you…

Hurricanes, Earthquakes & Tsunamis

Like many, I woke up this morning to the images of the terrible earthquake and resulting tsunami that have shaken Japan and the Pacific.  The footage brought back memories of the tsunami in southeast Asia a few years ago, the recent quake in New Zealand and the devastation of Haiti, and even the terrible images during Hurricane Katrina…

Whenever disasters like this occur, there are always questions about God’s place and God’s role in the midst of such tragedy and suffering.  It reminded me of something I wrote a few months after Katrina.  I will share part of that here…

God is at work in the midst of suffering.  In His compassion, God comes near to those who are suffering to bring comfort and hope.  God also teaches and disciplines through suffering, using our trials and difficulties to draw us closer to Himself, teach us to follow Him more faithfully, or move us to repentance.  God alleviates suffering through the care and generosity of His people.  God hears us in our suffering and receives our cries of lament.  And at times, God intervenes and rescues us from suffering…

The recent Hurricane Katrina provides an example of how we can approach theologically the complexities of God’s relationship with suffering…. the truth is that, outside of saying God allowed the storm to happen, we cannot say anything definitive about God’s relationship to, or potential reasons for, an event like Katrina…

We can, however, speak more concretely about some of the evils revealed, causes of suffering, and experiences of God in the midst of Katrina.  In the kingdom of God, the poor residents of New Orleans would not have been an afterthought, left behind to fend for themselves because they did not have the means to evacuate.  Poverty does not exist where God reigns; and thus, this suffering was clearly the result of human sin, or human systems and circumstances created by human greed and negligence.  In the kingdom of God, all of the neighborhoods – not just the affluent ones – are built on high enough ground to avoid catastrophic floodwaters.  In the kingdom of God, there is no looting because there is no fear, no desperation, no greed, nobody in want.  In the kingdom of God, there are no questions about where soldiers are needed more or what resources could have been diverted to better assist in the disaster because there are no wars to be fought.  God did not cause this suffering – human sin, both individual and institutional were to blame.  God did not cause levees to break or crowds at the Superdome to turn on one another; human negligence and systemic injustice did.

But in the aftermath of Katrina, as in the wake of any tragedy, we do see glimpses of God’s presence in the midst of suffering.  We hear stories of people risking their lives and their livelihoods to rescue their neighbors; we see a world united not in its resentment of power but in its desire to show compassion to enemies; we witness an outpouring of generosity and abundance for those who have been left with nothing; we hear the indomitable hope of children on the evening news who are living in a shelter and yet still believing a better day is to come; we hear of churches and shelters and families opening their homes to strangers.  We see God come near us in suffering through people giving to those in need and comforting the afflicted; this is a sign of God’s presence and a promise of the time to come when there will be no need and no affliction….

I don’t think God causes earthquakes and tsunamis that kill hundreds and thousands of people; I think shifting tectonic plates do.  But I do think God is found in the midst of suffering and tragedy, groaning alongside those who are hurting, bringing hope to those who have none, inspiring people to care for their neighbors.  Because that’s the kind of God I believe He is…

Short Attention Span

I had a great time today catching up with an old college friend.  She was in town this week for the Orange Bowl, and so we got together at a Barnes & Noble Starbucks to catch up on the last decade or so….

In the course of the conversation, we started talking about how saturated we are in our culture with various forms of media, and more specifically, how the development of smart phones – and thus the accessibility of information – has affected young people and their formation [if that sounds a bit nerdy for old friends in a starbucks, keep in mind that she recently completed a PHD in communications, and I'm a pastor who works with college students...so of course we started talking about things like this!]….

Then at one point, I suggested that smart phones (and similar technologies) affect how we pray.  Think about that for a second.  Most of my students have email and facebook connected to their phones, which means there are at least 4 ways to try and contact them – facebook message, text, email, or a good ole-fashioned cell phone call – in any given moment, all on the same device that goes with them wherever they are.  Instant communication, instant information, instant answers to questions (via web searches on the same smart phone), instant knowledge of any number of things through a seemingly endless number of applications…they can instantly be connected to virtually anyone and anything they want to…

So, here’s a question I struggle with: in such a culture, with the increasing expectation of instant answers, instant communication, immediate knowledge literally at my fingertips…do people even have the attention span to develop depth in their relationship with God?

Classic forms of spiritual discipline – prayer, fasting, silence, reading and reflecting on Scripture, and others – these things take time and focus and patience.  Spiritual depth is cultivated and created over time…not downloaded instantaneously.  There is no free “app” for spiritual discernment.  And while you can get the entire Bible on your phone, hearing the Spirit speak through the words, reflecting and meditating and discussing with others what those words mean and how to apply them in your life, gradually coming to see the character of God made plain in the stories He inspired…these are not things that happen in the course of a 2 minute conversation that is interrupted by 3 facebook notifications and 4 texts…

God + Football = Silliness

I felt the need to blog – and vent – briefly about an absolutely silly story I saw online today.  Yesterday, Buffalo Bills receiver Steve Johnson dropped a potentially game-winning pass in the end zone.  He was terribly upset about it.  Then he sent this Tweet after the game…

“I praise you 24/7!!!!! And this is how you do me!!!!!  You expect me to learn from this???  How???!!!  I’ll never forget this!!  Ever!!!  Thx tho…”

Now I normally just ignore it when players point to the sky after a touchdown or do similar kinds of things.  And while I certainly appreciate some athletes and coaches who use their positions and influence to share their genuine faith (Tony Dungy and Colt McCoy are a couple of recent examples that come to mind), I am often more than a little skeptical of post-game interviews that attribute the outcome to God and His goodness.  God is good all the time of course; and I know God loves each and every athlete who plays the game at any level; I’m just not at all convinced that God gets involved and provides a competitive advantage or influences outcomes…

But anyway, I digress.  What struck me about Johnson’s tweet is that it represents an attitude I feel like I see and encounter more and more.  It’s this not so subtle form of bargaining with God – if I do this, then you owe me that. Or even deeper and more to the heart of it is this warped idea that God exists primarily to answer me when I call and help me out when I need it, and so when he doesn’t help me win the game – or get into the school I want, or pass that test, or get that promotion, or whatever – that God has failed me and violated His nature…

Come on, people.  That’s just silly.  And shallow.  And it gives God and genuine faith a really bad name.  But this mindset is everywhere.  People who may or may not actually know and love and talk with God on a regular basis, people who may or may not actually be living lives that honor Him and who may or may not be wrestling deeply with how to live faithfully…people whose lives are but blades of grass blown to and fro by the breath of an almighty, eternal, all-powerful maker…are people trying to call out God for a botched 40 yard pass or a low grade on an exam? Amazingly silly….

Here’s a suggestion, Steve…work harder during the week on those over the shoulder catches, take responsibility when you make a mistake, and make up for it next week on the field.  And then still praise God 24/7 regardless of the final score and your role in it.  Let’s see how that works for you…

Judging others, continued…

So, I’m (finally) returning to the topic of judging others as promised.  I shared a message based on Jesus’ words about judging others in Matthew 7:1-5 a couple of weeks ago and invited students to submit questions for further blog posts.  One  student sent me a facebook message with this…

Student question: Is there a way to really get the plank out of your eye? Or is the whole point that we’ll always have a plank in our eye & that’s why we shouldn’t judge because God is the only one who can see the whole picture?

Great questions.  Here are my short answers: yes and yes.  I think we can (with God’s gracious help) get the planks out of our eyes, but it can be really, really hard.  And yes, God is the only one who can see the whole picture which is why we should be very careful about judging; however, we can and should discern right/wrong in our lives – and when needed, in the lives of others – and act on what we discern.  So let me expand on these ideas…

For those of us who follow Jesus, we believe the Holy Spirit is active and working in our lives.  The Holy Spirit teaches us and guides us, which includes teaching us about ourselves and those areas of our lives and characters God desires to transform and make more holy. Paul famously talks about the “fruits of the Spirit” like patience, kindness, self-control, generosity, etc., in Galatians 5:22-23.  These are fruits of the work – the transforming character work – the Spirit does in us.  It is an essential part of our spiritual growth and maturity…

But this work requires a heart that is open and humble before God.  The Spirit can convict us, show us areas we need to confess and work on, take us to Bible verses and stories that speak to our shortcomings, reveal to us how critical and judgmental we can be, bring trustworthy people alongside us to gently point out and help us with those areas we struggle with…in other words, the Spirit can help us identify our planks and point us to how to deal with them…but we have to be humble enough to admit the plank is there and want the plank to be gone…

Here is a simple and recent example from my own life.   A few weeks ago, Gabe started soccer, and I agreed to serve as the volunteer coach for his team.  From the very beginning, the director of the league stressed to all the parents and coaches that all the players would be evaluated the first couple of weeks and then placed on teams so that the teams would be evenly matched.  Well, we are two weeks into the season…and Gabe’s team has lost 5-0 both weeks to teams that clearly had superior athletic ability and soccer skill.  As a parent and coach, I’m pretty frustrated and have had a couple of conversations with the league director about it…

There is a temptation I feel to judge the director and the club…the evaluation process didn’t work, the director didn’t do his job right, the club misled the parents, etc.  However, I also have to be aware of my own potential “planks”…my own personal pride as a coach and parent, my tendency to think I can do things better than other people, etc.   And more importantly, I need to be open to how the Spirit may want to use this situation to grow me…maybe grow my patience as a person and coach, challenge me to become more encouraging as a father, help me learn to deal better with people when I am not in control, help me respond more creatively than simply complaining about it and criticizing people.  All of this and more may be holiness work the Spirit wants to do in me…if I am open to it…

So to sum up, God desires growth, maturity and holiness, including identifying and removing those planks – those sins, struggles, hurts, etc., that cause us to see ourselves and others through eyes of judgment.   But we need God’s help with this.  So one of our ongoing prayers should be for the Spirit to continue to grow us in holiness, to deepen our desire for God so that our hearts – and then our vision – can be restored…

One quick side note here.  In Romans 7, the apostle Paul describes his own personal struggle with sin and growing in holiness.  He describes how hard it can be to do what he wants to do and how he finds himself continuing to do what he doesn’t want to do.  In other words, even the apostle Paul continued to struggle with things, and the Spirit still had some transforming work to do in him.  That comforts me a little.  It puts my “planks” and continued struggles to be holy in pretty good company…

Judging Others, part 1…

So this is the first in what will be several posts on the topic of “judging others”.  This was our topic at community night (our on-campus gathering at FIU) on Monday, and I told the students I would take questions and blog responses.  But before I take on the questions in future posts, I’ll share an abbreviated version of the talk I shared…

Judging others – and ourselves – is something we are all guilty of at times.  And it is a huge and complicated subject.  Statistics indicate that many people in our culture…including a significant majority of young adults…perceive Christians and the church to be judgmental.  Unfortunately, we give people lots of good reasons to feel this way, in spite of some clear words from Jesus and others in Scripture warning us against judging others (Matthew 7:1-5 is a well-known example).  We in the church have much to confess and often don’t do a very good job being honest about that…

But judgment cuts both ways.  Christians are often judged unfairly as well.  Believing in an authority higher than ourselves and the particular philosophies that we create, knowing that the human heart is a factory for the creation of idols, and then proclaiming that there are in fact some God-given boundaries for human desire and behavior…that is simply being authentic to who we believe we are created and called to be as human beings and followers of Jesus.  And where that brings us into opposition with the world and its values…well, a true commitment to tolerance would include space for Christians and the church to be authentically who we are as well…[again, that authenticity needs to include a much more radical understanding and embodiment of the great command to love our neighbor...but that discussion will have to wait for another day]…

The other thing that makes this subject complicated is that followers of Jesus are actually instructed to pass judgment at times (1 Corinthians 5:9-13 is an interesting example).  We are supposed to discern and deal with wrongdoing and immorality within the body of Christ.  And Scripture gives us instructions for how to do this (Matthew 18:15-20 is the best known passage).  But how and where and when do we draw these lines and make these discernments???   The reality is that most Christians and most Christian communities don’t do this very well.  People generally don’t like confrontation, lack wisdom and sensitivity, and are oftentimes not very self-aware.  And so what often happens is we throw around platitudes like “love the sinner, hate the sin”, but rarely do the difficult work of real accountability and reconciliation…

So given all of that, here is a humble attempt at a few guidelines or principles on this subject (and the heart of what I shared with the students the other night)…

Judgment of others is ultimately God’s job, not ours. To judge rightly, we have to know the whole story – the motivations and intentions of all involved, a full understanding of the entire circumstances, and everything that led that person and that situation to that particular moment or choice or action that we are presuming to judge.  Clearly, God is the only one who has such knowledge.  And so while we certainly have to make decisions about how we will act or react and what our relationship with particular people will be going forward based on what we know and can discern….we need to be very, very careful about passing judgment upon others.  Character assessments are often caricatures that arise out of our own limited vision and own personal faults.  God knows all hearts and all things, and so ultimately God will sort these things out…

And by the way, this idea of judgment being God’s job is especially true when thinking about the question of salvation and who is “in” or “out” in God’s kingdom, now and forever.  Christians are often WAY too quick and glib in thinking and talking these things.  God is certainly holy and righteous, and Scripture clearly talks about the importance of faith and receiving the gift God offers to us….but God is also infinitely more compassionate and gracious and patient and persistent in sharing His love with others than we are…

Embrace people, avoid sin, and seek holiness. One of my favorite stories in the gospels is in John 8:2-11, a story of Jesus’ response to a woman caught (entrapped by the religious leaders) in adultery.  This is where Jesus famously says “you who are without sin cast the first stone.”  Jesus confronts the hypocrisy of those gathered, has compassion (not condemnation) for the woman, and then invites her into a new way of life (“go, and from now on, do not sin anymore”).  Beautiful and creative response in a great story about a difficult circumstance.  If we could manage to stay in relationship with people…live more holy lives that serve as an example to others around us, rather than be hypocrites…and then invite people into a new – more holy, and much better way of life – that would be beautiful as well…

Deal with our own “planks”. In Matthew 7:1-5 mentioned earlier, Jesus gives this famously absurd image of trying to deal with the speck in someone else’s eye when there is a huge plank sticking out of your own.  The point is well made and should be well considered.  There are too many examples to share from my own life when I and others have been blinded by our own issues and anger and other things to see anything clearly, much less to see clearly enough to do the delicate work of confrontation and accountability.  This plank removal idea is hugely important.  It’s sort of like how whenever someone speaks at 12-step meetings, they always begin with “my name is _____ and I am an alcoholic (or whatever else)”.  Before one can presume to speak, one must understand one’s own self and struggle.  Much judgment and hurt could be prevented if we were all better at looking in the mirror of our hearts and doing some eye surgery of our own…

Responses to specific questions to come in the next few posts…