Your Identity is: Peacemaker

(My back yard)

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 live for Him.
• 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 we 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 core message of Real Christianity, Linda and I labor to reconcile husbands and wives and friends and families in failing relationships. 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. Your identity is peacemaker (not peace-lover). 

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 will be outraged because, from their egocentric viewpoint, you are not "helping" them. They may even accuse you of not following Jesus, as if Jesus assists people on the road to destruction. In short, the enablee will likely dishonor you and, in their blindness, view you as trying to control them. How absurd!)

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 craziness. 

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. 

***

My books are HERE. 

Adventures With God - Episode 01 - "Desperation"

I'm with Robby Dawkins, Bryan Schwartz, Jamie Galloway, and Darren Wilson in the first episode of Adventures of God. 

***
Three of my books are:

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Encounters with the Holy Spirit (Co-edited with Janice Trigg)

Why I Pray

Downtown Monroe

This morning I received two e-mails from friends who have been desperately praying for answers from God. Today, they received those answers, and were blown away by this. One person wrote, “Why do I not expect this to happen?” Now, for the moment at least, they are motivated to pray more. God’s loving responses to them motivate me to pray more. 

In a few minutes I will walk to the back of our property, by the river, where there is an old table, and my praying chair. I’ll bring my journal, Bible, and a cup of coffee… to meet with God for a while, and pray. I will pray for others, and I will listen to God speak to me. At this point in my life, I rarely leave these prayer times without feeling encouraged and strengthened. 

Why do I do this? Why do I pray? The basic reason is: because Jesus did. Here’s my reasoning. 

1. Jesus is my Great Shepherd. 
2. My Great Shepherd spent much time praying. 
3. Therefore, I spend much time praying. 

How do we know Jesus spent much time praying? Because “Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him.” (Luke 22:29) What Jesus did there was: 

1) instruct his disciples to watch and pray. 
2) pray, himself. 

“As usual,” Jesus went to the Mount of Olives, and prayed. “As was his custom.” Praying was Jesus’ customary way of doing life. If Jesus habitually did this, who am I, one of his followers, not to? 

I read of a sign, supposedly on the Alaskan Highway, where the road turned from pavement to dirt. It read: “Choose your rut carefully. You’ll be in it for the next hundred miles.” Choose praying. Over time, it will become the habitual rut in which you live your life.

- From John Piippo, Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God (Kindle Locations 3636-3652). 

My Summer Reading

 

My parents were readers. I remember my mother taking my brother Mike and I to the library to get books.

My parents bought us books to read. As a kid I read through the entire Hardy Boys series.

I used to read books while driving. (I am not recommending this.) Even underlining while driving. (I don't recommend this, either.)

I have not only not stopped reading, I think my reading has increased.

Note, please: To better understand it is important read things from other viewpoints. For example, as a philosophy major, I learned I needed to read atheistic texts that challenged my theistic worldview. Everyone who is excellent in apologetics understands this.

Here's my current summer reading projects.

The Prophets, by Abraham Heschel

The Crucifixion of Ministry: Surrendering Our Ambitions to the Service of Christ, by Andrew Purves

Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things that Matter Most, by Jerry Walls

Free Will: Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation, Uri Maoz and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, eds.

The New Crusades: Islamophobia and and the Global War on Muslims, by Khaled Beydoun

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Johnathan Haidt

Covenant: God's Purpose, God's Plan, by John Walton

Ecclesiastes, by John Goldingay

Dr. Seuss and Philosophy, by Jacob Held, Ed.

Higher! Higher!, by Leslie Patricelli

(Because I have grandchildren.)

The Allure of Toxic Pastors

(Cancun - 3/1/19)

A e years ago Linda and I read The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus' Path of Power in a Church that Has Abandoned It, by Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel. It's excellent! The interviews with Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, and others are inspiring and instructive.

Chapter 8 is on the allure of toxic pastors and leaders. A toxic leader is:

• "someone who maintains power and significance by manipulating followers through their own fundamental drive to be powerful and significant."
•  someone who dominates and controls others.
• someone who wields their personality to cement their power.
• someone who relegates others to positions of dependence on them, rather than on Christ.
• someone who subverts systems designed to hold themselves accountable.
• someone who quickly establishes scapegoats when they fail.
• someone who does not develop other leaders, because they pose a threat to their own power.
• someone who creates "an unhealthy symbiosis between themselves and the organizations they lead, such that their absence would equal the collapse of the organization."
• someone who has ceased living "according to the way of Jesus - the way of love,  humanization, and truth, giving himself (or herself) to the way of manipulation, dehumanization, and deception."

Why do churches with toxic leaders do nothing about this? Because, say Goggin and Strobel, this is what we want. "These are precisely the people we believe possess the "it factor." This is what we are looking for." 

"The reason we desire toxic leaders, according to Jean Lipman-Blumen, is because toxic leaders promise to “keep us safe, anoint us as special, and offer us a seat at the community table.” We want a sense of safety, significance, and belonging, and they are offering it in exchange for loyalty." (P. 148)

A Worship Song from the Prophet Amos

I took my song "Reveal Yourself" from the book of Amos.

Here it is, recorded by our worship leader Holly. Linda sings backup. I'm singing backup and doing the guitar work.

In his book The Prophets, Jewish biblical scholar Abraham Heschel write:

"What is the nature of Him whose word overwhelmed the herdsman Amos? Is His grandeur like a towering mountain? Is His majesty comparable to an inscrutable constellation? Is He sublime as the morning and mysterious as darkness? All comparisons fade to insignificance when confronted with what a person such as Amos asserted:

For lo; He who forms the mountains, and creates the wind, 

And declares to man what is his thought; 

Who makes the morning darkness, 

And treads on the heights of the earth— 

The Lord, the God of hosts, is His name. . . . 

He who made the Pleiades and Orion, 

And turns deep darkness into the morning, 

And darkens the day into night, 

Who calls for the waters of the sea, 

And pours them out upon the surface of the earth, T

he Lord is His name, 

Who makes destruction flash forth against the strong, 

So that destruction comes upon the fortress."

 

Amos 4:13; 5:8–9

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Prophets (p. 35). 

T

Guard Your Mouth, Preserve Relationships

(Monroe County sunset)

I'm reading from Proverbs, searching for wisdom.

Proverbs 13:3 says,

Those who guard their lips preserve their lives, 

but those who speak rashly will come to ruin.

I know a man who spoke everything that came into his mind. He had no filter. He thought he was funny. He embarrassed his wife and children.

I have opened my mouth and ruined a relationship. I was twenty-one. I occasionally played golf with our family's insurance agent. His name was Don.

I remember driving home after a round of golf. Don was in the car with me. We started talking about cats. I told Don about our family's Maine coon cat. He was huge!

"What's his name?" Don asked.

"I named it "El Gato." That's Spanish for "The Cat.""

Then I added, "I didn't want to give him some ordinary name, like "Mittens.""

"Don, do you have a cat?"

"Yes," he said.

"What's its name?"

"Mittens."

That was the last time Don and I ever played golf.

A fool’s mouth lashes out with pride, 

but the lips of the wise protect them.

Proverbs 14:3

(If your cat is Mittens, forgive me...)

Trying to Be Relevant Has Left the American Church Irrelevant

(New York City)

Neither the Old Testament prophets, nor Jesus, were trying to be relevant.

The Church's great distinctive is not We are way cooler than you and your tribe are.

Can a church have culturally relevant things? I believe so. But these things, as awesome as the lights and fog machines might be (we are so easily entertained) , are not manifestations of our great distinctive.  

See, e.g., this: 

15 Then Moses said to him, 

“If your Presence does not go with us, 

do not send us up from here. 

16 How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people 

unless you go with us? 

What else will distinguish me and your people 

from all the other people on the face of the earth?”

Exodus 33

The Gospel is relevant, as the antidote to, our miserable condition. But a presence-driven church is not trying to be culturally relevant. 

Os Guinness writes: 

“Rarely has the church seen so many of its leaders solemnly presenting the faith in public in so many weak, trite, foolish, disastrous, and even disloyal ways as today… This monumental and destructive carelessness has coincided exactly with a mania for relevance and reinvention that has gripped the church. So a disconcerting question arises: How on earth have we Christians become so irrelevant when we have tried so hard to be relevant? And by what law or logic is it possible to steer determinedly in one direction but end up in completely the opposite direction?… We are confronted by an embarrassing fact: Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously; never have Christians been more irrelevant.”

It’s not evil for a church to have a fair-trade coffee bar. I probably like coffee more than you do. Coffee-drinking was so much a part of my Finnish heritage that my grandmother literally had tears in her eyes when she learned I started to drink it. To her, I finally joined the Finnish Faith Community. But something has gone wrong when God communicates to us one thing (“better is one day in my presence”), and it gets misinterpreted as another thing (“better is one day with my barista").

- See my book Leading the Presence-Driven Church.

The Naturalistic Fallacy

The "naturalistic fallacy" is the confused idea that moral conclusions can be drawn from scientific evidence. It is the belief that one can derive "ought" from "is."

Science qua science weighs, measures, and quantifies. Science can weigh the computer I am typing on, but science cannot tell me if it's a "good" computer, or if it's "beautiful." "Good" and "beautiful" are value judgments, about which science says nada.

Science qua science gives no information regarding value. "Value" includes truth, beauty, good (ethical goodness), evil, right, wrong, and meaning. For example, when Crick and Watson discovered DNA they reported the scientific data and added that the double helix structure was "elegant." In saying this they left science, for the moment. When theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer helped to create the nuclear bomb, he quoted the Bhagavad Gita and said, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Not a very scientific statement!

Science qua science does not give us morality. The chief domains of morality are religion and philosophy. We cannot help but speak morally. Inextricably, we are moral creatures. Moral discourse requires a metaphysical framework. One must not make the mistake of thinking that science, despite all its powers, will be of much help here.

Metaethical Studies and Moral Nihilism

 

(Detroit)

Most atheists I know want to be moral. They make strong moral claims, saying "_______ is wrong," or "We ought to do ________." And, "Putin is a war criminal." Indeed, atheists like Richard Dawkins claim religious beliefs are morally repulsive and ought to be discarded. 

But it is questionable if atheism can take us this far. Probably not. Atheism can support utilitarianism, and emotivist ethics, but atheists overreach when they claim some acts are morally wrong. The atheist cannot, without warrant, call certain acts "good" or "evil."

This is a metaethical issue. Here are three books that help me understand this. 

Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can't Deliver,  by University of Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith. Smith argues that "the naturalistic cosmos that is the standard operating worldview of atheism cannot with rational warrant justify the received humanistic belief in universal benevolence and human rights." (P. 124)

Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality, by University of Virginia professors James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky. They write:

"When it began, the quest for a moral science sought to discover the good. The new moral science has abandoned that quest and now, at best, tells us how to get what we want. With this turn, the new moral science, for all its recent fanfare, has produced a world picture that simply cannot bear the weight of the wide-ranging moral burdens of our time." (Kindle Location 112)

This, say Hunter and Nedelisky, is "moral nihilism."

Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology, by theistic philosopher J. P. Moreland. Moreland writes: "Given scientism, moral knowledge is impossible. And the loss of moral knowledge has meant a shift from a view in which duty and virtue are central to the moral life, to a minimalist ethical perspective." (Kindle Location 422)