Examine Yourself Before You Examine Others

(Monroe)

How far do I want to follow Jesus?

As one of his disciples, my starting place is not to condemn and critique others. Rather, I am to look in the mirror and examine myself. I am to cry out, "Search me, Oh God, and know my heart!"

I have enough stuff to occupy my inner searching for a lifetime. 

As Jesus said:

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Matthew 7:3-5

This is wise, beautiful counsel. I can share, from my own experience, that it is hard being the judge of all people. It has kept me awake at times. It has made me angry. If affects how I view others. When entertained, the captive audience becomes bitter. 

Lisa Bevere once wrote that she probably had enough planks in her eyes to build an entertainment center. (Lisa Bevere, The True Measure of a Woman, p. 32)

It's demolition day, and I am a plank-remover.

Only then will my self-righteousness be gone, and, aided by the Spirit, accompanied by compassion and caring love, I might be used of God to engage in the delicate task of speck-removal.

You Are a Reconciler, Not an Enabler or a Divider

(Green Lake Conference Center, Wisconsin)

In 2 Corinthians 5 we learn the following.

• When a person gets saved they become a new creation.
• As a new creation, they no longer live narcissistic lives for themselves, but they live for Jesus.
• As a new creation they no longer view people "according to the flesh" (kata sarka), but "according to the Spirit" (kata pneuma).
• We see people, all of them, as either reconciled to God, or not reconciled to God.
• New creations are burdened by this. They "implore" ("beg) people to be reconciled to God.
• God gives new creations a "ministry of reconciliation." In this, we are "ambassadors for Christ."

If you are a Jesus-follower, you have a ministry of reconciliation. You bring people to God, and bring people to one another. You are a reconciler, not a divider. Any fool can divide; blessed and few are the peacemakers. 

The apostle Paul wrote: 

¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!¹⁸ All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: ¹⁹ that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

God reconciled you, through Christ, to himself. God did not count your sins against you. God did not look at you and the mess you made of life and say, "Nothing good can ever come from this person." You have the message that God did not treat us this way. You are to share this with others. This is Good News.

Because of this basic, core message of Real Christianity, Linda and I labor to reconcile husbands and wives in failing marriages. We have a ministry of reconciliation, just like you. Un-ity, not di-vorce, is the God-thing. 

Tap into God's creative, restorative, reconciling abilities to unite people. God can work, through you, to dissolve disparity between people. 

Abide in Him, and receive His empowering for a peace unlike this world dishes out. 

Do not assist division. Reconcilers refuse to enable dysfunction and sin. Have nothing to do with tearing marriages and families and friends asunder. 

Refuse to entertain words like "This marriage will never make it," or "We could never be friends again," or "Nothing good can ever come out of these people." (Warning: as you refuse to enable sin, the enablee may be outraged because, from their egocentric viewpoint, you are not "helping" them. They may accuse you of not following Jesus, as if Jesus assists people on the road to destruction. The enablee may dishonor you and, in their blindness, view you as trying to control them. How absurd! Yet Linda and I have experienced this.)

Your core belief is: God is able to reconcile. 

You know this is true, for He reconciled you, to Him, and to others. 

The idea is: If two people follow Jesus, and are "in him," they will come together since, in Christ, divisive relationships are nonexistent. 

View things this way. Think community, not individuality.

If you are a Jesus-follower, you are a gatherer, not a scatterer.

You assist people on the road to life, rather then enable people on the path of relational dis-ease. 

You are someone who brings people to God, and brings people together.

This is dynamic, far more so than those dark, mediocre voices of relational failure that enumerate sins against people and give up on them. 

Dr. John Piippo - How God Changes the Human Heart

To Experience God’s Presence, Abide in Christ

(Pear tree in my neighbor's back yard.)

This is from my book Leading the Presence-Driven Church.

***
We have an old pear tree in our back yard. As I bite into one of these pears I tell Linda, “This is the fruit of the gods!” The pears grow on the branches. The branches are attached to the trunk of the tree. This connection allows the nutrients of the trunk to flow into the branches. To produce pears, the branch just needs to stay connected. It needs to remain, or abide, in the trunk of the tree. 

To be, in the present moment, attached to Jesus is to abide in him. The word can be translated “to remain,” or “to dwell.” 

To dwell is to truly be with someone. “Abide” is an experiential word, describing a lingering, slow-cooked, togetherness. 

The Greek word is menon. It has the sense of tarrying, hanging around, “to be kept continually.” Menon is a kairos word. It connotes, “Slow down, spend the day with me. Kick off your shoes. Here’s a cup of coffee. Let’s recline in the fireplace room, and be together.” 

Menon is a being-word, more than a doing-word. It is a presence word. Menon is active, alert, focused, and engaged. It has the thickness and intensity of a lover, with their beloved. To abide with someone is to full-being be with them, interact with them, and meet with them. It is to hang out together, with cell phones off and stowed away.

Character Vs. Reputation

 

    (Sunrise in the park, across the street from our house.)

I have seen websites advertising ways to clean up your reputation. You may have an online reputation that is less than marketable. These websites promise to sanctify "you" by removing your sins (real or rumored) and producing a shiny, sparkling, attractive "you." This is called "reputation

 management." I kid you not.

Your sordid reputation can be manipulated, for a cost. But what about your character?

Money cannot help you here. Your reputation, which money can airbrush, is not your character. Your character is about the real "you." Money cannot change that unless, perhaps, you begin sacrificially, and from a heart of compassion, giving it away to the poor. 

The real "you" includes who you are when offline. This is what God cares about. God develops character, not reputation.  

Everyone has a reputation. Jesus did. Isn't he just the "carpenter's son?" "He's from Nazareth, right?" 

Reputation may align with character. You may have a reputation of being a kind person. If you are kind, in character, which means kind at home, kind on the road, kind in the workplace, kind to your spouse, kind when alone, then your reputation of being kind aligns with who you truly are.

Several years ago I was one of the presenters at an ecumenical prayer gathering. As I entered the auditorium a Roman Catholic leader approached me. He said he was surprised to see me here, because he had heard that I hate Roman Catholics. I told him that was untrue. I shared how one of our city's priests, with whom I was friends, had invited me to speak at the annual Unity Service. I have no idea where he got that from. Such is the nature of "reputation."

Forget about what people repute you to be. Focus on connecting to Jesus, who is forming himself in you. Grow and mature into Christ. Let God take care of whatever follows.

An Epidemic of Childhood Mental Illness

 

I am a Johnathan Haidt fan. 

Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind is one of the most important books I have read in the past ten years.

His new book comes out March 26. I'll be reading it, immediately, with anticipation. 

Look at the blurb on the book, plus some reviews.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood 

Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Jonathan Haidt is a modern-day prophet, disguised as a psychologist. In this book, he’s back to warn us of the dangers of a phone-based childhood. He points the way forward to a brighter, stronger future for us all.” —Susan Cain, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Bittersweet and Quiet

“An urgent and provocative read on why so many kids are not okay—and how to course correct. Jonathan Haidt makes a powerful case that the shift from play-based to phone-based childhoods is wreaking havoc on mental health and social development. Even if you’re not ready to ban smartphones until high school, this book will challenge you to rethink how we nurture the potential in our kids and prepare them for the world.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Potential and Think Again, and host of the TED podcast Re:Thinking

“This is a crucial read for parents of children of elementary school age and beyond, who face the rapidly changing landscape of childhood. Haidt lays out problems but also solutions for making a better digital life with kids.” —Emily Oster, New York Times bestselling author of Expecting Better

“Every single parent needs to stop what they are doing and read this book immediately. Jonathan Haidt is the most important psychologist in the world today, and this is the most important book on the topic that’s reshaping your child’s life right now.” —Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus

“This book poses a challenge that will determine the shape of the rest of the century. Jonathan Haidt shows us how we’ve arrived at this point of crisis with technology and the next generation. This book does not merely stand athwart the iPhone yelling ‘Stop!’ Haidt provides research-tested yet practical counsel for parents, communities, houses of worship, and governments about how things could be different. I plan to give this book to as many people as I can, while praying that we all have the wisdom to ponder and then to act.” —Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today

Desire Goodness, and Favor Will Find You

                                          (Which one is the world's most interesting man?)

It's Thursday evening, and I am in Proverbs chapter 11.

7:30 PM.

Every proverb is a meal, to be slowly digested, and assimilated into the heart until it becomes the heart.

Here are some thoughts on 11:27. Which says,

Whoever seeks good finds favor, 

but evil comes to one who searches for it.

If you have to search for favor, then you are on the lowest level of influence. Stagnate on this level, and bad things happen. You become, to others, an irritant, an annoyance.

Seek goodness, not reward. Seek goodness, not acknowledgement. 

Stop eyeballing favor! It's like growing spiritual fruit. Do not try to do this. Instead, focus on the connection.

The proverb says, seek goodness, not favor. Focus on that. Don't look to make favor happen. 

Stay attached to goodness. 

A heart that seeks after goodness is private. It does not live to be admired. The result will be, over time, that the Lord's favor will find you.

Piippo - Speaking Events

 Hello everyone,

Tomorrow I travel to Boston where I will be the speaker at the spring retreat of the Alliance of Asian American Churches.(March 15 & 16) (I'll be back for the chili luncheon!)

Sixty Asian pastors and leaders will be there.

This is an American Baptist Churches organization.

My three messages:

Fri. night - "The Presence of God as our Distinctive"

Sat. morning two messages

"Praying and the Presence of God"

"Abiding in Christ and the Presence of God"

Next Monday night and the following Monday night (3/18, 3/25) I am doing two zoominars on "Two Step Leadership." This is for ABC Indiana/Kentucky pastors.

Then, on Thursday night, March 21, I will speak at Monroe County Community College on "An Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Christ." We are thinking there could be 100 students/people there.

Thank you for praying!

John

Non-Discursive Experience (more on...)

 

                                                                  (Kitty Hawk, NC)

In his book Beyond Words, Frederick Buechner writes:

"I have called the collection Beyond Words because in one way or another all the words it contains point to the realm of mystery and depth that lies beyond our ordinary experience and thus could be called beyond-words. To say something is beyond words is also to say that it is beyond the power of even beyond-words to convey adequately. Beethoven’s last string quartets, falling in love, the death of a friend—how can we possibly describe such things other than to say that they are ultimately indescribable? You can know them only by experiencing them for yourself."

(For my take on "beyond-words," see my post "Non-Discursive Experiences of God.")

Expectations

 

                     (I hit this ball so hard that, as you can see, it started off low but then began to rise.)

Linda and I will have been married fifty-one years this coming August. One thing we have learned is to take time, every day, to share our schedules, appointments, and expectations for the day.

I am not exaggerating when I say we share expectations every day. And discuss how they can be met. 

This is crucial, since unmet expectations ignite emotions of anger. (See here.)