This is Church

This is the last of my three-part (for now) series on the power of grace. I hope you’ve come even just a little bit closer to knowing deeply the richness of God’s grace. But before I write anything more, I want you to watch this video and do your best to emotionally engage. Feel it as deeply as you can, even if you’ve seen it before.

Are you a bit emotional right now? If so, I want you to take some time to figure out why.

I get emotional every time I watch this video. And apparently so do quite a few other people, because it’s been viewed over 55 million times as of the writing of this post. I think it’s possibly the best Gospel metaphor on all of YouTube (it includes Gospel elements such as: a free gift for all people, the outcasts of society coming to a healer, scoffers and doubters, the good leader empowering disciples to carry on the same message, restoration to the hurting and lonely, strong opposition from the powers that be, triumph and victory in the end, and heck…he even fits our Anglo image of Jesus).

But let me go ahead and list the reasons why I think I get especially emotional when I watch it:

1) People become real and come alive; they let their defenses down and make themselves vulnerable in the presence of a safe environment where they can simply receive. I long to exist in that place.

2) Something good is offered freely to everyone; regardless of who they are, what they look like, where they come from, what they’ve done, whether they’re a “good person” or not. For a brief second, everyone is equal in their eligibility to receive this gift.

And our world is longing for this.

Christians, non-Christians, everyone.

And I think it’s overly simplistic to say this video is so popular because ”we just want to be loved” and this video demonstrates acts of love. There are tens of thousands of YouTube videos with parents showing a rich, warm, unconditional kind of love to their children; a love that’s probably much stronger than what this guy has for the people he’s hugging. 

And though those videos may make us feel warm and fuzzy, we’re not crying, showing our friends, and spreading it to 55 million people, causing subsequent “Free Hugs” outbreaks among young people in public places across the nation. I think the thing that makes a person tear up and want to send this video to their friends is the grace of the act.

There’s something in us that expects the parent in the YouTube video to love their child immensely. The act may be beautiful, but it’s not startling, and the video almost certainly isn’t going to be watched by anyone beyond immediate family and random passers-by.

But something about free hugs is just different.

That someone would do something so wild and radical as offer love freely to complete strangers in full sight of the whole world makes us want to tell someone. And when we watch it, we want to take part. We desperately long to be able to give and receive this undiscriminating kind of love. I think it’s what makes grace the most powerful thing in the world to behold.

I ache for the Church to hone their ability to similarly tell stories of grace that makes the world want to tell their neighbor.

I want to make better videos. 

So I want you to ask yourself how you can personally proclaim and demonstrate this kind of grace in a way that touches something deep within the heart of every human being; something that might provoke someone to tell all their friends of the good news. How can you start a “free hugs”-type movement in the name of the greatest grace-giver the world has ever known? Because as God’s Church, we’re the ones who have actually experienced the divinely gripping realities of this video; the ones who have tasted the Kingdom. 55 million hits says the world longs for a taste. How will you offer it to them?

In my last post, I shared about how I’ve struggled to boldly speak truth to others because I fear messing it up, even if my intentions are good. This blog post is going to deal with how we can respond to difficult responses to our truth-telling when we acted in ignorance or foolishness, even if our intentions were not evil. In sharing this, I am making two assumptions about the circumstance:

1) Your actions were not perfect in every way.
2) You are receptive to God’s response.

My thoughts will not make sense of a situation that doesn’t satisfy those criteria.

That being said, I want to tell you a parable that has given me significant freedom from the prison of despair that once accompanied my well-intentioned but unwise truth-telling.

Suppose you are a parent who owns a house and you have a toddler who doesn’t really know much of anything yet. You desire to keep your house hospitable for guests and generally neat. One day, your toddler realizes how much he really loves you for being such a wonderful parent, so he paints you a lovely mural…all over your walls. It’s a picture of your beautiful, happy family, and he’s celebrating all of you through art. He delightfully screams, “Look, Daddy!!!”

You turn around…

…Only to see your previously spotless walls covered in all the colors of the rainbow.

You know that he doesn’t know any better; you’ve never actually explicitly told him not to fingerpaint on the walls before, and it’s clear that he did this as an act of love, thinking you would actually rather enjoy it. But, of course, his artwork runs quite contrary to your decorative scheme and broader goal of keeping tidy. How would you (a loving, understanding, gracious parent who wants to keep a tidy house) respond to your child’s newfound artistic expression?

I’m not sure about the answer to this because I’ve never had kids (and am only seldom “loving, understanding and gracious”), but I think a loving response might look something like:

“Oh my goodness, thank you so much for that beautiful picture! It’s clear you really love Daddy a lot, and I really appreciate you making a painting for me. I’m not mad at you, because I know that you didn’t know any better. But from now on, I’d like you to keep your painting to the canvas and paper because painting on the walls actually hurts the house, and I also really care about our guests having a pleasant experience here. Can you do that for me from now on?”

And then I would paint over it.

Leaving no trace of the original offense.

The God of the Universe is a far more loving, understanding and gracious father than any of us could ever hope to be (Luke 11:13). To think that our Heavenly Father holds our foolish acts against us when they were done out of a sincere love for him seems absolutely ridiculous to me. In fact, we see in the Scriptures that God quickly forgives even the most heinous of sins when they were committed in ignorance (Acts 3:13-19, Acts 17:29-30, 1 Timothy 1:13-14).

But notice that in every case, he quickly extends the opportunity for repentance, because it would be unloving of God to just forgive us and allow us to continue in our destructive folly without offering a richer way of life in exchange. God desires intimate relationship with us, so he tells us his desires, that we might experience the fullness of his life. Just like the loving father who tells his child that he would do well to stick with painting on paper from now on.

I want you to know that it’s ridiculous of you to think that your foolishness and brokenness (apparent in your inability to boldly speak truth without some stain of sin) could somehow ruin God’s sovereign plan for another person’s life. It’s every bit as ridiculous as it is to believe that a toddler could forever ruin a household via fingerpainting while his father is present. Our God is powerful enough to completely remove the stains of your foolishness forever, gracious enough to not hold it against you, and loving enough to discipline you and lead you into greater understanding of his heart and character (“How much more will your Father in Heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”).

So rather than going through my 4-part godless grieving process I introduced in the last post when I hurt someone via my good intentions gone awry, I have actually begun to learn to:

1) Confess my foolishness to the other person and to God in the moment, apologizing for the hurt I’ve caused (regardless of my intention).

2) Repent of the wrongdoing.

3) Immediately walk in the exhilarating freedom that God is painting over all of the stains of my mistakes in both of our lives, in many cases covering over it with something even more beautiful than was there before.

Instead of despair over my inadequacy, I now know the delight of being broken but forgiven. For a perfect example of this kind of repentance, mercy and restoration, check out Job 42.

So I want to take this opportunity to speak some truth into your life. For your sake and the sake of the world, please(!)…

Go out and be bold.

Speak the word of God in the best way you know how, and do not fear the consequences. You are not so mighty as to be able to thwart God’s redemptive plan for this world. He loves the things that you do out of your desire to live for Him, and He is faithful to reveal and cover over all your foolishness with his grace, and to instruct you in the way you should go. If you are continually humble and attentive to his voice, you have no reason to fear his discipline. He does every bit of it because he’s crazy about you and longs for you to know Him deeply. Leave your life of fear and hiding behind, and begin to dance in the freedom of his rich mercy.

This post marks the kickoff to a three-part blog series on the power of grace. But I intend on blogging about grace for a long time to come, so don’t think that I’m going to stay at three parts forever. I hope the series would rock your world and free your soul.

To start, I would like to share with you a struggle of mine that, because of God’s relentless grace, I’ve experienced significant victory in. And I share it in hopes that you might know Him more deeply and walk in unprecedented freedom.

I would like you to raise your hand at your computer if you relate to my problem:

When I find myself in spiritually influential situations (say, sharing or demonstrating my faith to another person), I tend to feel great pressure to speak and act perfectly, and then take great responsibility afterward for things that I perceive as having gone poorly.

This soul-destroying phenomenon has gotten to the point where I’d consistently shrink back from taking bold steps of faith for fear that I might defame Jesus or cause someone to hate God forever. I’d take careful measures to hide my shortcomings; then, faced with an opportunity to speak truth, choose my words so carefully that I’d end up not saying much of anything for fear that the truth of God will make him out to be ridiculous and unbelievable. Because when someone calls me a hypocrite or tells me that the God of the Bible sounds like a big jerk because of how I live or what I’ve communicated, I assume that I’ve ruined God’s plan for that person’s life, and vow never to do anything risky in my witness ever again.

And it happens when I’m with other Christians too. I’ve had difficult conversations with close brothers and sisters where, in love, I ask a question or make an observation regarding a pattern in their life that concerns me. I’ve been met with accusation, yelling, fuming silence and crying, sometimes even resulting in running away and the slamming of doors. Once again, I begin to wonder if this scene is what God had in mind when he adopted me to be his chosen representative to the world. I figure I’m better off just keeping my mouth shut.

For those of you who like bullet points, I’ll carefully walk you through a faithless kind of grieving process I go through when my bold steps of faith seem to blow up in my face:

1) Rationalize away the other person’s reaction as absurd, citing many of this person’s personal issues that would cause them not to recognize my profound insight communicated with the utmost gentleness and care. (Dismiss)

2) When that doesn’t make me feel better, look to friends or other outside sources to justify my actions as perfectly righteous and loving. (Defend)

3) When that also fails to soothe my soul, take full responsibility for this catastrophic event, analyzing every single thing  that went “poorly” and try to figure out how to do it instead in such a way that would make everyone perfectly happy…but never find the solution. (Despair)

4) Vow never to say anything difficult to anyone ever again, because I clearly suck at it.

In this process, whether it’s a conversation over a sin issue with a brother or sister, or a conversation about Christianity with someone outside the faith, I become absolutely obsessed with the “catastrophe”: why it went wrong, how I could have changed it, how messed up the other person is, how messed up I am, how broken the whole world is, etc. In these moments, I feel a desperate need to understand the answers to all of these questions; some airtight explanation or solution that lets me flee the confusing gravity of sitting inside the realities of our fallen world and escape to the friendly confines of simple platitudes and a clear course for improvement.

And, of course, confession, repentance and grace are nowhere to be found in my escapism. At no point would I admit my powerlessness and lack of understanding, ask God to restore me, conform me to his image, conform my friends to his image, and call them into intimate relationship with him. I’d rather have a formula.

What’s really sad is that even our nation’s broken, flawed justice system understands more about the necessity of grace in this scenario than I do. We have an entire body of legislation known as Good Samaritan laws that release me from any legal condemnation for making my best effort to assist an injured, sick or dying person.

Even if I end up killing them.

One day some psychologist or lawmaker realized that when you penalize people for trying to help someone but messing it up, they stop wanting to help hurting people. I think that’s because we all realize we are prone to ignorance and mistakes, and the fear of penalty is just stronger than our flesh’s compulsion to good. In fact, I think just the sheer guilt and shame of being told by the legal system that a helpless person’s fate was your fault for being too incompetent to actually help in any way would be enough to keep people from helping someone in need; fines and jail terms completely aside. But regardless of the exact reasons why potential legal penalty would keep someone from helping a person in dire need, the truth remains that it does. At some point, our nation’s legislative bodies concluded the following:

The only way to make people feel free to do good to their needy neighbor was to offer a release from all the potential consequences of their imperfection.

In other words, the only thing strong enough to ever compel me to love my neighbor as myself is to know that even if I don’t love my neighbor right, I myself am still free from guilt and condemnation. This is the revolutionary power of grace. I think it’s what Paul was getting at when he wrote Romans 8:1-4. And I think it’s why the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only thing powerful enough to save the world.

The bolded statement above makes me wonder if this legislator/psychologist’s realization of the human condition resulted in their falling on their face in repentance, pleading for God to have grace on them, a sinner, knowing it’s the only hope they have to love others well. Probably not, but just think what would happen if all the people who support this kind of law would follow its basic insight to its natural conclusion for their own spiritual condition…

Regardless, it’s sad that our legal system grants me “Good Samaritan laws” to free me from this kind of fear for physical acts of good, but I’ve struggled immensely to believe that God does the same for me spiritually. In part 2, I’m going to let you in on something that really helps me believe that God is extending me far more grace than our legal system…

If you missed Part I, you should really read it first. Now onto the second installment of a thrilling inteview with New Life Church counselor-in-residence, Tim Courtois:

M: Why counseling, and why the college campus?

T: Why counseling?  I’ve already mentioned that life was lonely for me growing up, and that it was a total revelation when I realized it was possible to really open up about my internal world.  The thrill and the terror of being deeply known – it’s incredible.  I developed quite a hunger for it. 

Around that same time was when I first heard that Thoreau quote: “I wanted to live deep and suck the marrow out of life.”  It totally resonated with me.  I had spent years missing out on what seemed like the most important thing: real relationships.  So now I want to spend as much time as possible where “real life” is really happening.

People in counseling are in the thick of it: Fighting between the part of us that wants to be fully alive no matter what, and the part of us that wants to check out and be done with it.  It’s a terrifying and exhilarating place to be, and it’s an incredible honor to walk with people in those moments. 

In the Celtic Christian tradition, they say that there are certain places geographically where people seem to experience God more directly, where the veil between this world and heaven is “thin”.  So they will say, “such and such is a very thin place”.  In that sense, I would say that I love counseling because the counseling office is a very thin place.

Why the college campus?  The same reason.  In their mid to late 20’s, people seem to settle into their patterns of living and stop asking questions of life.  But college is a time when people are either sprinting away from God, or passionately crying out to him.  The college campus is a very thin place.

M: Finish the sentence: If ____________, then I would consider my ministry to be incredibly successful.”

T: I spent years of my life as a Christian wondering on some level if maybe I didn’t “fit” with the Church because I struggled emotionally.  I remember at church, during times of worship, everybody seemed to be able to just ‘turn on the joy’ so easily.  I thought, either there’s something wrong with me, or there’s something wrong with them.  But after many years of wrestling, I believe there is a place in the Church for the strugglers, those for whom life, contentment – and even Christianity – doesn’t come so easy.

I’ve noticed others who are like that, who sit in the back of the auditorium at church, wondering if maybe there’s just no place for them because they can’t seem to pull off the “Christian” thing as well as others seem to be able to. 

My dream is that those ones will find that they do belong, that there is a special place for “strugglers” in the Church of God.  I’ve found a lot of solace in the fact that “Israel” means, “he struggles with God”, and that’s what God named his people.

I would also love to see generational patterns changed.  My best friend got saved through New Life in college, and his wife learned to follow God through New Life as well.  Today I look at their kids and think, “You don’t know how lucky you are to be in this family, being raised in a godly home that almost never was.”  That blows me away. 

So I would say, my ministry will be incredibly successful when a generation of babies are raised in godly, loving homes, free of abuse, with moms and dads who stay married.  That will happen when people enter into relationship with God, and then walk closely with him through the complex process of redeeming their pain and breaking individual and generational sin patterns.

M: What is your hope for people’s involvement who are outside this ministry? (What does the ideal partnership look like?)

Two things. 

First is financial support.  I am focusing on a demographic that can’t afford to pay for counseling: college students.  These kids are more broken than ever: sexual addiction is rampant; most of them come from broken homes; many of them are struggling with the wounds of abuse.  Not to mention the crazy things they’ll encounter once they actually get on campus.  They need help to sort through these things, and they can’t pay for it.

I am passionate about meeting this need, and in order for me to be there to minister to them, I need people who will give financially to this ministry.  (You can find out how to do that by following the link on my website.)

Second (for those who want to go above and beyond the call of duty): Take some time to actually think about these things.  Read my blog.  Join in the ongoing conversation in the Church about matters of the heart: Have a conversation about these things with your friends, or with me.

I greatly enjoy college ministry, and think that I’d get along serving college students anywhere just fine. But one of the greatest joys of laboring at New Life Church is that I’m surrounded by a staff team full of people who stretch my faith in ways that very few people on this planet do (and trust me, I know quite a few). One of those people is Tim Courtois (pronounced Curtis, not Core-TWAH). He’s the only person I know who got a counseling degree just to be a more effective missionary to the campus. He’s a fascinating individual, and I have learned a great deal regarding matters of the heart by simply reading his blog.

So I thought I would bless you with his life an insights. This first part is mostly about who Tim is as a unique human being and child of God. Part II will be about the unique role in this world God is calling him to fulfill at New Life Church. Enjoy!

M: How do you think your story and character uniquely reveal the heart of God?

T: The first thing that comes to mind is the themes that have been prominent in my story.  My life has been a lot about loneliness and the struggle to find beauty and meaning – and even connection with others – in the midst of that.  I can remember from a very young age feeling alone and feeling a deep longing for something that would make it all make sense.  And then I remember listening to certain kinds of music and feeling such joy and a longing to exist within the beauty that I was hearing… So my life is, in a big way, about holding onto those two truths: that loneliness and pain are real, but so is beauty and meaning.

So I think my story shows that God doesn’t flinch at the difficult parts of life.  I kind of grew up learning that so-called “negative” emotions are just that – negative – and so it’s best to avoid them as much as possible.  But I couldn’t ignore that certain parts of my life were sad; it would have required me to cut off a huge part of myself.  I had to learn to find meaning in the midst of my feelings, even if they were “negative”.  And for me, out of that came a deeper sense of beauty and meaning – and intimacy – than I ever could have found by avoiding those things.

Through that, I’ve developed a passion to try and “incarnate” myself fully in my life.  I want to be as fully present as possible, celebrating wholeheartedly and grieving deeply as the circumstances of my life call for it. 

This is a passion that God has built in me over time, and it is a reflection of his character: He engages in life and relationships fully, with all of his emotions.  I can’t be only halfway incarnate in this world and expect my presence to have the redemptive value God intended.  I’m continually striving to learn about what it means to feel, to bring my whole self to bear on my life.

M: What are you all about?

 T: I’m all about life being full, abundant, and passionate.  One of my favorite verses is Ezekiel 16:6: “Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, ‘Live!’”  I love that exclamation point!

There are many parts of myself that I exiled a long time ago, thinking they weren’t “good enough” for some reason: my creativity, my love for art, my love for rest and quietness.  In college I began to see them as a waste of time, a hindrance to all the things I should be doing for the gospel.  Inviting those exiled parts back into my life as reflections of God’s glory has been a huge part of my own healing.  That’s how God said, “Live!” to me. 

I love finding parts – either of myself or of other people – that have been lost, rejected or exiled, and inviting them back into the conversation. 

It’s like the guy with the lizard on his shoulder in “The Great Divorce” by C.S. Lewis.  The lizard represents lust.  We think the lizard needs to be thrown out, because “surely something like that could never be allowed in heaven?”.  But what happens is that after the lizard is struck down, it becomes a stallion: it is reborn as something beautiful, powerful and passionate. 

I want to see Christians living full and passionate lives, seeing parts of their hearts that they’d given up for dead become something beautiful.

Second, I’m all about connection and intimacy.  Growing up, I felt very alone.  Until I was a teenager, I didn’t even know it was really possible to open up to another person about all the things that were going on inside of me.  And when I finally did, it was amazing and terrifying at the same time.

I long for intimacy and at the same time it terrifies me.  Every day there is a tug of war in me between the longing to be close to people, and the desire to avoid people.  The same is true with God: I long for his closeness, but at the same time, I avoid him.

I think this same tug of war goes on in all of us.  So I’m continually wrestling with this tension, wanting to discover how to really connect with others, and I long to see the Church grow in this, too.  And I think it’s really happening: To see men in the Church today being more and more able to look into one another’s eyes and show affection for one another …it’s a beautiful thing.

M: (much more to come in Part II…I know you’re all stoked)

There are a million and one bloggers weighing in on what has transpired in Haiti’s earthquake and its aftermath. I’m not here to talk about Pat Robertson, the U.N., the Haitian government, or the relief efforts, because there are way too many people who know much more than me about all of that. Instead, I want to share some personal experiences in the country, and what it has meant for the life of someone very close to me. I had the privilege of sharing a trip with her to Haiti in the spring of 2008 with an organization called Raincatchers. So without further ado, a guest post from Jessie Aja:

We left for the Detroit airport at 3:30 a.m. I had finished packing for the week-long, University of Michigan Spring Break trip to Haiti around 3:00 a.m. I was nineteen years old – my sophomore year at U-M. To be honest, my biggest motivation for going to Haiti that February was to see my best friend, who had moved there a few months before, on the last day of the trip. We’d be staying near his new residence.

One week passed.

Our group began to board the flight out of Port Au Prince. I lingered on the runway, looked out toward the mountains, and left a portion of my heart there. In the beauty. In that place. I returned one . . . two . . . three more times throughout the next couple years. I went to different cities and with different people and helped aide in water purification efforts and health needs. I did this, largely, because of the prompting of the Spirit of God and of Teresa Price (T).

On the last night of my first trip to Haiti, T, a twenty-something year-old P.A., said this: “When you return home from Haiti, don’t look around at your plenty, your excess, and your privilege and feel things like guilt or pity for the Haitians. Those are unproductive emotions. Those negative emotional responses ultimately allow you to – force you to – shelve your experiences here and move on. They move you toward nothing beneficial and nothing helpful – either for the nation of Haiti or for you. Instead, I want to urge you to feel a sense of responsibility. You are God’s children – you young people attending the University of Michigan – and these are God’s children – these struggling infants, malnourished kids, and ailing people in this broken nation of Haiti. God’s Church does not have state lines, national borders, or distinctions of any kind. There is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. I want you to return to your homes in Michigan and feel, not guilt for what you have or for where you were blessed to be born, but, rather, RESPONSIBILITY to care for and be a blessing to your brothers and sisters (and brothers-and-sisters-to-be) throughout the world. Feel empowered, feel a sense of urgency, and take responsibility.”

I have a heart for the nations – I dream that the nations would know the unfailing love of the Lord Jesus Christ and that all would be cared for, healed, and satiated in body and spirit. I am committed to living my life – whether I am stateside, in Haiti, or elsewhere – proclaiming the death and resurrection of the One who saves, defending the poor and oppressed, caring for the widows and orphans, and living to hasten the day when all tears are wiped away and when unending joy replaces all sorrow.

I am not sorry that part of my heart lives still in the mountains of Haiti.

I have a pastor friend (at H2O church at Ohio State) who is probably the world’s greatest expert in the study of mankind’s eternal longings expressed via ESPN. 

High praise, I know.

Most recently, he pointed me to this video as an illustration of the Church’s adoration of Christ:

I have to applaud Nike for this campaign…they have tapped into something very deep within the human soul. We all long for heroes. Someone to adore. Our heart cries out for a superman, someone who can conquer any foe effortlessly. We want to tell his story. We want to boast in Him. And LeBron James is the closest it gets to immortality for many.

Here’s something humbling:

LeBron James misses over half his shots.

And yet we can still get pumped by idealizing him, singing his praises. It inspires us to buy Nike products, hearing from all kinds of people from different walks of life who have caught unique glimpses of his greatness. The testimony of his witnesses makes us long to see his glory ourselves, and we believe for a moment that we might even share in it if we buy Nike.

And they’ve actually convinced me in the moment that LeBron James is something more than human. Until I watch a game, that is. Then I’m reminded that he still misses over half his shots. Like most every other professional. I wonder if that makes the people in the video feel at all silly for how great they made him sound. I wonder what it would look like if they could do the same for someone who could back up every praise, every time.

How about you? Do you dare sing the praises of someone who is actually worthy of them? Someone who will never put to shame his worshippers? I think that just maybe the testimony of his witnesses will be strong enough to make the world long to see, experience, and share in his glory.

For those of you who don’t memorize all of my blog posts, let me remind you that StrengthsFinder calls me a futurist. That means I’m always thinking about what’s next. I think God knew about my futurist tendencies when he decided to begin calling me toward relationship with him. Not many people know this, but my spiritual journey actually started when I heard a pastor preach on Mark 13 about the “signs of the end of the age”. I was fascinated by what the Bible said about the end of the world, and that led me to begin opening the Bible on my own, starting in Revelation (an interesting place to start, I know…but God totally used it). Then I went back to read the rest of Mark, and upon reading Mark 2:17, I understood for the first time that Jesus wanted a relationship with me and offered me a great journey, calling me to follow him. But my fascination with the end of the world continues today.

So let’s talk about the future then. As a Christian, my greatest hope for the future is that Christ would return to earth and establish his Kingdom, and the Bible says that is going to happen once the Church brings the Gospel of the Kingdom to all nations (Matthew 24:14, Mark 13:10). Combine this promise with my futurist tendencies, and you might soon realize that I live much of my life mentally pre-occupied with what’s next for the Church in her process of fulfilling this promise.

I wanted to let you in on my future-obsessed brain and tell you about what I think is a “sign of the times” in the Church today. You see, I’ve heard quite a few sermons on Jesus’ return and how we should be watching for signs and waiting in expectation, but there’s one sign of Jesus’ return that I think the Bible teaches that I’ve never heard mentioned in a sermon. Or by anyone, for that matter. Perhaps because you have to do some digging around and piecing together in the Bible first. Are you ready? Let me take you there.

I believe that the Bible teaches that the future situation surrounding Jesus’ return will be marked with an unprecedented movement of Church unity. And if we’re looking to be alert and keep watch for these signs (Mark 13:33-37), then I want to put this one on your radar, because I think it’s big.

Let me begin in Genesis (another obsession of mine is starting in the beginning and telling the whole story through). In Genesis 11, all human beings have the same language, and assemble to build a tower in honor of themselves. God sees that his little image-bearers have become quite powerful, and in honor of that power, have begun to worship themselves. Knowing that such self-worship runs contrary to what He designed them to do and will only serve to destroy them, God, in his relentless grace, decides to confuse their language and scatter them so that they might not so easily go down this path of self-worship leading to self-destruction.

And from that day of scattering, it seems that God has been working out a plan to re-unify human beings back into a place of communication and collaboration. God’s plan is to be patient in returning (2 Peter 3:8-10) until all nations have heard of his great work in bringing the Kingdom of heaven to earth in the form of Jesus, his Messiah and Son. But in order for all nations to hear, there would first have to be some way of getting this message to all nations. God had a plan to re-connect humanity, and it’s being executed to this day at ever-increasing rates.

But let me talk about the Church. You might think that Jesus’ last words regarding the Church that would come after Him might reveal his plan for the future. And I think you’d be right. In Jesus’ only recorded prayer for us believers today, Jesus prays that the Church might be brought to complete unity so that the whole world would know the Gospel of the Father’s love for them (John 17:20-23).

Think about that for a second.

Jesus is leaving the world and he’s praying for the future Church in order that they might reach the whole world with the Gospel. And what one thing does he spend his time praying for?

UNITY.

That is the prayer of our Savior for the Church. That we would “be brought to complete unity”. Because then we will reach the world. You can almost hear echoes of Genesis 11:6: “If they’re all on the same page, then nothing will be impossible for them.” It’s been the lesson from Day 1 after the Flood: A movement is effective only insofar as its people are unified.  No wonder Jesus said Church unity would be the one thing necessary to bring the gospel to the world.

So what are we to look for as a sign that the end is coming? The Gospel will go out to all nations. And how will it do that? The Church will need to be brought to unity. Take a look around at the Church today and tell me we aren’t more unified than we’ve ever been. Hillsong United writes a song, puts it on an album, and overnight, thousands of churches on every continent are singing it. The Willow Creek Association puts on a leadership conference that reaches 65,000 church leaders in North America and an additional 46,000 overseas in 114 cities in 50 countries, and those numbers are growing every year. All hearing the same message. Being brought to complete unity. This wasn’t even possible 20 years ago. And it’s only accelerating. Be watchful. Because as the Church unifies, the Gospel will go out in power. And we all know what comes next…

I am eternally grateful for the amazing musicians God has put at New Life Church. In so many ways, they’re the unsung heroes of our church. It might seem weird to call them the “unsung heroes”, first because “unsung” is a funny word for people who sing, but also because we generally don’t think of people on stage as people who don’t receive honor for what they do. 

But the truth is, their music has been behind so many intimate moments of worship that no one will ever hear about. And I can’t tell you the number of people who have said, “At the beginning, I just kept going to New Life because the music was awesome, but then pretty soon I got plugged in to the community, and God really started working on my heart.” 

The crazy thing is, our band will never know how many secret, intimate moments of worship they were involved in. They will never know how many people wouldn’t have given God a chance if it weren’t for that glimmer of holy worship they heard in the music and saw in the musicians on stage. And for that reason, they are unsung. What they do is on stage is very public and often acknowledged, but what happens in individual hearts as a result is less known. Yet it is of infinite worth. So I wanted to introduce you, my blog audience, to these heroes via pictures taken at this year’s GCMC’s Christmas conference, Ignite 2009. 

Karen O.

Andrew

Dave, Christia, and Brandon

This post is meant as a follow-up to to Empty Promises Part I, which I published about a month ago (before a hiatus for my marriage proposal and the holidays). So if you don’t remember the thoughts there, go ahead and re-read Part I if you would like this to make sense.

I guess I want to start with a question. What’s the Church to do when the music industry churns out 15 year-old pop stars who generate 22 million hits on a single YouTube video all on the premise of exploiting the eternal longings of teenage girls? I can think of a couple that might be helpful:

1) Tell the better love story
Justin Bieber is making millions by performing songs written by people who know the formula for stirred teenage emotions all too well. They’re sort of poets of corruption; people well-acquainted with the desires and longings of the human heart who can weave words masterfully to illustrate a compelling, yet unattainable solution for them. But we can do better.

As followers of Christ, we have been been awakened to the deepest needs of our heart by the God who satisfies every longing. And He removes our need for the hiding and denial we relied on when we knew no one who could meet them. I think that means we should have the most compelling songs in the world. The Church should be the ones writing most beautifully of the perfect solution to our heart’s longings because we’ve actually experiencing that longing being met; its not mere fanciful imagination as it necessarily is with other songwriters.

I would love to see preachers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ begin to put the music industry to shame in terms of their ability to proclaim of a lover who satisfies. Imagine if Justin Bieber’s second album absolutely tanked because the next generation of young people has instead been captivated by a community of psalmists and storytellers who proclaim a love infinitely more beautiful than anything heard in a pop song. We already have the Scriptures (which tell of the greatest love story ever known to man) for inspiration. Now if only we would let the creative spirit of the Imago Dei work in us.  That’s what I mean when I say we could use to sharpen our storytelling.

2) Teach a Theology of Love
I think there needs to be an active effort in the Church to teach teens what true love actually looks like. Older (especially married) believers know that the expectations of romance cast in Justin Bieber music videos are fanciful, ridiculous, and extraordinarily unhealthy. It’s why you don’t see screaming 40 year-old women at Justin Bieber concerts or Twilight premiers. But our teens deserve to know better also.

Our youth pastors need to preach compellingly on what biblical love looks like. Yes, it looks like sacrificing greatly for the joy and benefit of another. Yes, romance is incredibly beautiful and meant to mimic the way Christ relentlessly pursues His Church despite all her failings. But we need to teach a clear understanding of depravity also. Another human being can bring you great joy, but not all the time. And if your expectation is that someone would make you happy all the time or deeply fulfill you, you will be a very depressed person.

You’ll be depressed because you’re practicing idolatry: putting a created thing (a human being) in the Creator’s proper place (Romans 1:25). Idolatry destroys the self because our heart and soul were not made for fulfillment to come from another human, they were made for fulfillment to come from knowing God.  Thus our deepest longings are necessarily left unmet if we expect another person to bring us that fulfillment. To put another human being in that place not only robs the Lord of his proper place in our heart, arousing his righteous jealousy, but it’s horribly unfair to the other person to put such a great weight on them. No wonder the first year of marriage is so often the most depressed year of a person’s life and the divorce rate is what it is in America. Our expectations (most of which come from popular media) have set us up for monumental failure.

The good news is that we can actually restore the deep satisfaction and joy that come from great relationships with one another by teaching young people what relationships can and cannot rightfully fulfill in this life. I truly believe that we could see the divorce rate in the Church plummet simply by teaching on relational idolatry from a young age. But as it stands, it seems that Justin Bieber is our teacher on relationships.

And just in case you forgot the implications of that, let me leave you with one thing…