We’ve all seen occasional comics of a robed and bearded street preacher with a placard sign that reads, “Repent, the end is near!”  Usually there’s a punchline of some sort that makes the prophet of doom seem silly.  Yet, as with most caricatures, there’s a kernel of truth in the mix.  And, I suspect, there’s more than enough truth in this issue for us to pause and reflect for a moment.  That kernel is that both John the Baptist and Jesus launched their respective ministries by calling on listeners to repent.  As did Paul after his conversion.

The rest of this week’s post can be found at the site I share with Peter Mead.  Please continue, if you like, at www.cordeo.org.uk/getting-repentance-right/

God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble—James 4:6.  The context for James’ words were affective, located in God’s jealous longing for the spirit he made to dwell in us.  Humility, James was saying, is at the heart of a proper relationship with God and it opens the door to a much deeper bond with him: “Draw near to God and he will draw near to you” (verse 8).

This promise sets out a dramatic opportunity for us to gain a stronger connection with God, but first we need to know, what is humility?  In human-to-human terms is it mainly behavioral—our waiting for others to celebrate our successes while we keep quiet?  Or is it an attitude of self-abasement—of thinking and acting as if we’re insignificant?  Or, in a more positive direction, is it a selfless devotion to others?  And how is humility best expressed to God, let alone to humans?

In James’ statement he treated pride as the negative counterpoint to humility.  That’s a clue to be followed.  Pride is something we readily sniff out in each other.  Proud people are selfish, narcissistic, arrogant, and careless towards others—hard to be around!  Pride is something I struggle with myself.  I’ve started to learn that when I take on the I’m-proud-of-myself attitude, the room starts to empty in a hurry.  So if pride and humility are eternally antithetical to each other we might do well to find the basis for our pride and then identify humility in whatever we see as its opposite.

And yet almost all of us have learned early on that pride is treated as a good quality; and that humility can be viewed as a weakness.  As children, for instance, we were often told, “I’m so proud of you!”  Or, “Be sure to take pride in your work!”  And, with that, “Stand up for your rights—don’t be a doormat!”

One question to consider is whether God himself is proud; or humble; or both; or neither.  As a starting point in asking this we find God calling people in both the Old and New Testaments to “be holy for I am holy.”  But I don’t recall his ever saying “Be humble for I am humble” or “be proud for I am proud.”

Yet there is certainly some connection between our own attitude and God’s stance in these issues.  Is it, perhaps, that God alone can be proud—given his incomparable greatness—and that we as his creation are by comparison utterly insignificant?  That seems to be a common answer, especially among those who portray God as ultimately motivated by receiving our glory.

This connection, I suspect, then sets up answers to our question of what humility is and what its evil opposite of pride is: pride is our act of being self-devoted while humility is to be God-devoted.  In this view only God is to be properly self-devoted; and we are to become more Godly by becoming the opposite of what God is!

Yet I quickly realize that this seems to be very different to what holiness calls for: that we are to be holy because God is holy.  Aren’t we meant to imitate Christ?  And isn’t it the humility of Christ that we were called to embrace in Philippians 2 where “in humility” we’re to “count others more significant than yourselves” by having “this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant” even to the point of death on the cross for our sakes.

The proper answer, then, is not to adopt a quality of character that is the opposite to God—that is, to his presumed self-absorption.  Instead we are invited to Christ’s quality of character where we discover God’s own humility.

Here’s the bottom line: as we come to grips with God’s Triune oneness we realize that when Jesus told Phillip (in John 14) that “when you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father” we also find the answer to our questions.  In Christ we see a God bold enough to embrace humility.  The Son’s crucifixion is the venue for the Father’s love to be made available to us.  The Father gave the Son over to death.  It was the Father who, in that sense, humbled himself for our sakes by sharing in the humility of the Son within their unending union and communion.  And from this came the glory of a plan that allows us to enter into this unending union and communion of the Godhead ourselves.

The sole gateway to God, we find, is to become like him even to the extent that we embrace our own crucifixion.  We no longer live for ourselves, but for him—the Triune God—who loves us even to the point of death.  How jealous is God for our spirits?  Jealous enough to die for our sakes.  What should our response be?  An awed and holy confidence that such love invites; and with that, a complete and selfless devotion in return.  We draw near to God because he first drew near to us; and then he embraces us ever more fondly as we draw even nearer to him in response.  And on and on and on.

Some—maybe most—of the dear people in a class at church today were startled when I said, “I don’t believe in a free will.”  Yet many readers, especially former students, may smile or yawn: “Not again!” 

Why?  Because each year in Patristic Theology I would explain Augustine’s view of the will in his debate with Pelagius.  Then in my Reformation course we reviewed the claims in Luther’s Bondage of the Will—where he drew on Augustine’s claims—over against Erasmus who promoted the primacy of the will.  In teaching Ethics my denial of a free will set up “faith ethics”—the approach to the spiritual life and morality I see offered in the Bible.  It was a common theme for me then and it remains a drumbeat now.

That’s not to say I ever expect that making the case will be easy or the claim quickly received by first time listeners.  It always calls for long discussions while they read and reread the Bible, along with some doses of church history; and even then many are still unpersuaded.

Resistance is natural, after all, when free will seems obvious in our daily experience: on any given day we make decisions about what to eat, who to meet, when to travel, and what to say.  Each of these activities is perceived to be a spontaneous and perfectly free—non-coerced—decision.  This experience makes the reality of a free will so obvious that any counterclaims seem bizarre.  And what’s more, the will of God is often cited in the Bible, so our own will is the proper yet human counterpart to God’s will.

And today the autonomous free will is treated as a bedrock reality wherever we turn: I think of the court judgments in favor of the “freedom to choose” in cases of abortion, gay marriage, and more.  It was embedded in the United States by Deist forefathers such as Thomas Jefferson who set out the aspirations of personal autonomy (another label for free will) by affirming life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as our greatest and most noble aspirations.  Free will, it seems, is seen today to be the lynchpin of human identity.  God forbid that anyone should deny it!

Yet God himself denies it.  Again and again the Bible makes it clear that we’re shaped by sin as it rules our hearts—a vulnerability rooted in our actual identity as those made to love God but who have loved our world and ourselves instead.  Our heart—the affective and response-based center of the soul—always directs us.  Thus Proverbs 4:23, “Guard your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life”; Mark 7:21, “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts . . .”; Ephesians 4:18, “They are darkened  in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.”

God made us to be heart-based responders because God’s own Triune eternal union and communion exists in mutual initiative and delight.  Turning away from our proper love—as rooted in the relational image of God—makes us vulnerable to other loves.  And even in repentance our release from slavery to sin only comes about by our becoming slaves to righteousness in Christ (see Romans 6 on this). 

Paul couldn’t have stated our enslavement to death and sin more sharply than in texts like Romans 3:9-18 and Ephesians 2:1-3.  And even Satan, in tempting Jesus, gloated about his control over all the nations—a claim Jesus didn’t deny.  So, in sum, the Bible treats us not as people who have free wills, but as slaves to sin.  Only salvation changes this.  And even after salvation we still struggle until the day we get to be at home at last (see Romans 5-8).

Maybe we should take this up in more positive terms.  I’ll be brief and invite readers to bring their own reflections to the conversation.

I believe in real freedom.  That is, in a heart-based freedom to either respond to God’s love or to resist it.  This is apparent throughout the Bible.  God so loved the world that he gave his beloved Son to save as many as would respond to him in trusting faith; but most people have ignored that offer because they love darkness rather than light because their choices are evil.  The battle is always one of affection versus affection—of an inward sampling of what we “want” the most.

When we turn to Christ we love him because he first loved us and drew us to himself—so it was not by the will of the flesh nor by the will of man, but by God that we gain an affection for him that breaks the power of old affections.  So only God can overcome our self-love, and that only in some: it isn’t guaranteed to all.  How, then, is the selection made.  It seems that most often he woos the poor, the weak, the despised, and other sorts of social nonentities who find his love attractive.  The proud, the strong-willed, and the mighty, on the other hand, are given over to what they love the most: their freedom to ignore God.

I read a troubling newspaper article on the internet today.  It was one of the “most read” items and it spoke of a Christian writer who recently announced her departure from the church.  The report included a summary of what disturbed her and what, for many of us, is tragically obvious:

“But judging by the behavior of most Christians, they’ve become secularists. And the sea of hypocrisy between Christian beliefs and actions is driving Americans away from the institutional church in record numbers.”

The bottom line of the article is that too many professing Christians today—despite Christ’s prayer in John 17—are both “in the world” and “of the world.”  The distinction between followers of Christ and those who don’t know Christ is blurred to the point of being lost.

The full article has been posted at the Cor Deo website: http://www.cordeo.org.uk/called-to-christs-likeness

I’m very pleased to share a guest entry by my good friend, Steve Mitchell. Once again Steve stirs our minds and hearts, this time by asking how we should adapt to our changing times. Please read and reflect on his thoughtful and important counterpoint to some current strategies.

Rick Warren recently offered a strategy for keeping congregations involved in lengthy sermons, as they display increasingly shorter attention spans. His advice is practical and would probably work in most churches. Therein lies the problem. He writes:

In an upcoming book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, writer Michael Carr suggests the Internet is shrinking our attention spans. It’s not a new argument. And it’s not universally agreed upon either. But even President Obama recently got into the debate saying information can become a distraction because of our fascination with “iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations.”

But regardless of why, most people would agree that attention spans are shrinking. That means the people you and I preach to each week are less likely to sit and focus as long as congregations could a generation ago. We can complain about it and we can let it frustrate us. But we can’t change it.

Yet, that doesn’t mean we have to preach shorter and shorter sermons. That sounds counterintuitive, right? Shorter attention spans should mean shorter sermons. But for years I’ve been preaching an average of 45 minutes per sermon. I’d preach longer if it wouldn’t cause parking chaos at Saddleback!

That’s why I use what I call sermon features, which are special segments you add into your sermon to capture the attention of your listeners. I’ve found you can hold people’s attention much longer when you interweave a variety of features into your sermon.

I don’t know Rick Warren, but I remember meeting him when Saddleback was about a thousand people meeting weekly in a rented high school gym. My wife and I visited a few times. Rick preached clearly, biblically, and with a very engaging style. I liked him a lot. I still do.

But I think he’s wrong in his post, and I think the solution to the problem he describes cannot be based on a tacit acceptance of the cultural phenomenon he describes—increasingly shorter attention spans. The problem with Rick’s solution is his implicit surrender to his assumption that Christians share a lack of appetite for any preaching of considerable length that is not laced with entertaining features.

Clearly we live in a society dominated by distractions. Depending on whose research you believe, the average American daily views somewhere between 300 and 3000 commercial messages. These are the unwelcome ads we largely ignore. When you add the media-rich messages we welcome to our PDAs, laptops, iPods, iPads, the total is staggering.

We’ve been conditioned to consume huge amounts of disparate content at a blistering pace. Warren’s assertion that we struggle with longer and less entertaining sermons certainly passes the sniff test, but I believe the shorter attention spans he describes are indicative of something much worse than the cultural conditioning of the digital age. They indicate a lack of appetite for God and His Word. In short, we want Him less than other things.

A good friend sums up his theological position by quoting a Hagar cartoon. Sitting in a tavern Hagar pondered a question with his buddy about why he stayed out late each night, drinking. His sidekick answered with another question: “Because you want to?” Hagar sighed, “Yah, that’s why”.

So, we do what we do because we want to. In other words, our affections determine out actions, and any psychological experience we have that we’re making a rational choice is really a decision motivated by what we could call “love.” For example, we may love honor more than life and perform heroically. Or we may love football more than God’s Word and be itching to get back to our big screen when a sermon runs long. We don’t have shorter attention spans, we have more of an appetite for being entertained than we do for a deep and lingering encounter with God in His Word.

The Bible bears witness to this when it speaks of the heart as the wellspring of our lives. Jesus understands this when he says we are to love God with all that we are, so that anything else we might do will issue from that love and be pleasing to Him. Jesus offers support for this in the Sermon on the Mount where He gives us a description of the realized Kingdom. He ups the ante on sin significantly, tethering it to our heart’s affections. For example, if I longingly dwell in my heart on a woman, lusting after her, then I have commit adultery. I haven’t just considered adultery. I’ve actually sinned. Jesus teaches that the motivations of the heart are prior to and more foundational than any behavior.

He also makes it clear that if I do religious things in order to accrue status, then I already have my heart’s desire, my “reward”. But, if I do these things in secret—within the context of intimate communion with my Father solely in order to please Him—then the One who sees in secret will reward me. Giving, praying, or fasting—any and all of these amount to little more then prideful adornments without the right motivation of the heart.

And so I take Jesus to mean, when He speaks of the tares growing up with the wheat, that those who attend church do so for competing motives. The tares care little for God, and the wheat love God. They have an appetite for Him and His Word. The interest, or lack of, in a lengthy sermon points not to a universal cultural drift that impacts God-lovers and God-haters alike, but to differing appetites, or affections, of the heart that separate imposters from true children of God.

Will the cultural accommodation Warren suggests result in congregations less itchy for the door? Will they appear more “engaged”? Absolutely. But are they really drawn to the things of God or simply more entertained? If you have $300 million and the CGI artistry of a James Cameron or a Peter Jackson, you can get people to sit and pay attention for several hours on end, but you won’t change their hearts. Only the Spirit, birthing a living faith in Christ through the preaching of his Word can do that.

So what are we to do? How do we attack the problem Warren accurately describes? Head on. It is not the length of preaching that’s at issue. I believe it is the depth of preaching that is lacking. A friend of mine blogs on this very topic, and his views are well worth considering. In one post he references “thin-blooded” sermons, quoting Michael Quicke. Quicke maintains that one can preach attractive, even exegetically defensible sermons that do little to stimulate the Christian community because they are individualistic and confined to personal spirituality. In short, they fail to challenge those in the pew as a whole.

But what of a grand call to follow Christ by taking up one’s Cross and dying to self, bearing one another’s burdens in love? What about challenging “thick-blooded” sermons that tend to empty pews because they are rich with the offense of the Cross? What of a polarizing call that the church must be the church in the World? If those kinds of sermons were preached regularly—attended by features or not—we may well see a wholesale retreat of tares, but we’ll also enjoy a wonderful harvest of wheat. The fields are white, but sadly the workers are few.

Everyone has a read on God of one sort or another. The question of how we read God also has an applied element. Our view of God shapes the way we live; and, obversely, the way we live exposes our actual reading of God no matter what we say we believe.

This is a point made here before and it bears repeating. This time, however, let’s take up a variation of the question: that is, how does God read our reading of him? Is our view accurate? Do our various responses to him fit who he really is?

With that question in mind we become more open to his coaching us—ready to ask him to correct us if we’re off base. And if we have read him correctly, it’s likely to encourage us to be bolder in sharing him with others.

A brief Old Testament book, Zephaniah, gave the people of Judah a helpful reading of God’s perspective. When I reread it a couple of weeks ago it caught my attention more than ever before. The prophet warned of “the day of the LORD” that is coming soon. On that Day every false version of God will be corrected. Any human distortions will be dissolved by the reality of his actual presence.

Zephaniah offers God’s reading of the way these Judeans read God. That double reading applies to us as well. It’s what God is looking for in any age; and what his plans and promises are for that coming Day.

A seeking heart. The book begins with the promise that on that Day God will “utterly sweep away everything” (1:2). While restarting relations after a clean sweep sounds encouraging at one level, it really isn’t good news to those who haven’t paid attention to what God has expressed about himself in the past. Devotees of Baal and Milcom are listed among the false versions of God common in Zephaniah’s day who will be swept away. Yet in a summary sentence (1:6) we’re told of the timeless measure to be used by God in this final sweeping judgment: he will confront all those “who have turned back from following the LORD, who do not seek the LORD or inquire of him.” God looks after those who look for him; but those who don’t seek him are facing a frightening future.

A bigger God. Zephaniah also wrote about how God views the decayed morality that comes with either a weak view of God or in settings where he is dismissed. Zephaniah lists qualities such as violence and fraud, and even merchandising that isn’t true and fair as the sort of thing that God won’t accept. What is it in this corruption that stirs God? The naïve belief that he really doesn’t know what’s going on: “At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps, and I will punish the men who are complacent, those who say in their hearts, ‘The LORD will not do good nor will he do ill’” (1:12). God is not casual about those who are casual and careless towards him.

A faithful devotion. If anyone believes that Jesus in the New Testament offers God’s grace while in the Old Testament the Father is angry and harsh, they’ve missed one of the great themes of the Bible: in both Testaments God is jealous for our love. Sin is ultimately faithless disaffection—a refusal to love God—even though he is the one whom we were created to love and enjoy. In the place of loving God fallen human hearts now love security and pleasure—as located in “silver” and “gold” (1:18). But this false love will be confronted on the coming Day: “In the fire of [God's] jealousy, all the earth shall be consumed; for a full and sudden end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth.” Faithlessness won’t endure that Day but, as will be seen below, faithful love is treasured by God.

A genuine humility. The main feature of a heart devoted to God and to his ways is humility. But it’s not as if humility is something we manufacture. Rather it goes with seeing ourselves for who we are while at the same time seeing God for who he is. He is our creator; we are his creation. He pours out his goodness to us; we receive it in full dependence. He directs; we respond. This spontaneous and appropriate humility is crucial: “Seek the LORD, all you humble of the land, who do his just commands; seek righteousness; seek humility; perhaps you may be hidden on the day of the anger of the LORD (2:3). The goal of all God-fearing people is to please the God who loves us, not to compete with him.

A deep trust. Zephaniah offered a review of the major world powers of his day. Each country is promised divine justice. Many are hostile to Israel and behind the anti-Judah impulses of that day is a Satanic hatred of God. This is an echo of the revolt in the garden of Eden. Nineveh, for instance, refused to trust God but trusted in themselves, using a title reserved for God alone: “This is the exultant city that lived securely, that said in her heart, ‘I am, and there is no one else’” (2:15). Thus her reward on the coming Day will be desolation. The same is true of any group of people—including Jerusalem: “She does not trust in the LORD; she does not draw near to her God” (3:2). God reads hearts and delights in those who trust him, simply because he alone is fully trustworthy.

A song of loving delight. As we have seen, much of what Zephaniah offers in anticipation of the coming Day is shared as warnings. The book ends, however, on an upbeat note. God looks for that coming Day when those who love him will join him in antiphonal delight. Decades ago it was the fashion of musicals such as the Sound of Music to have a lover and his beloved sing to each other. This is the final vision that Zephaniah offers of the future. In a coming day those who are forgiven in Judah will “Rejoice and exult with all your heart” (3:14). God will celebrate in return: “The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” (3:17).

This vision of the coming Day offered by Zephaniah tells us of a God who is both frightening and winsome. He wants us to read him accurately; and he reads us with unerring awareness wherever we are in respect to him. The invitation we have before us today is to be captured by him and by all he offers us. And then to wait for the Day when he rejoices over us with his “loud singing” of delight. What a God and what a future!

An update: I’ll be posting a separate blog every other weekend on www.cordeo.org.uk in a sharing of responsibilities with Peter Mead in our Cor Deo mentoring initiative.  His first post is already available on that site and invites a visit!  My first post there is set for next Sunday.  Now let’s turn to today’s concern.

What drives us? Are there aspirations that explain our priorities in life? Certainly, there are, and one of these is our love of power. So I’d like to reflect here on the role of power—including our desire to gain and hold power—as a motivator for all of us.
What kinds of power? There are too many to count! The power of personal security is a good starter. That comes through our earning power—the ability to work for a good wage—which then gives us purchasing power in the markets of life.

Another is social power: the ability to influence others. This is the power we find in any given pecking order and it helps us to manage. If we have high standing at our job, for instance, we’ll find that others volunteer to help us more readily than if we don’t. More privileges are granted and deference given. We also look for power in the status and competence offered us by our education. Physical power is another motivator: people will spend hours in weight training or aerobic workouts to feel more fit and able.

Another is political power: the ability to shape a community through writing or applying rules and laws. Political power can range from holding the presidency of a local golf club all the way up to holding the power of the American presidency. Any kind of office, in fact, carries power within the realm of that office—from serving as a secretary in a corporation to serving as a manager of a local coffee outlet. And there is the power that some have to influence those who hold the keys of power.

I suspect that somewhere in this listing exercise we’ll have seen something of our own links to power, and if not, keep looking: there’s also the power of persuasion, parental powers, the power to convince others, and more.

Now let’s shift gears by now applying the moral question: is power good or bad? Or is it neutral—a capacity that can be used for good and/or for ill?

On the one hand, think about a common saying: “power corrupts.” We’ve also heard the extension, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And we can think of any number of totalitarian leaders throughout history and certainly in the last century who have given power a bad name: Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, and many more.

Even at a more mundane level most of us have been in work situations, in school boards, or in churches where we’ve seen someone above us begin to gather power and then to exercise it in bringing about unhappy and even ungodly changes.

And remember that the connection made here between the great and the mundane is only one of degree: Hitler was once a modestly skilled painter who came to power through painting new social realities. He used lies, distortions, mythologies, and even blatant thuggery to climb to power. Only when we look backwards in time, after first knowing how the story ended in a Berlin bunker, do we see evil early in the trajectory he followed.

God, however, handles power without corruption. As believers we speak of his “omnipotence”—an inclusive power to rule over everything he’s created. In the Bible God sometimes speaks of his power as a potter: his ability to shape our circumstances. In the reality of the Trinity, Jesus has the power to create, to heal, to forgive, to raise people from the dead, and more. So clearly God, in the Bible, is not put off by the reality of his ultimate power. Christians also know that the final outcome on Judgment Day—a dramatic moment of power—will have a final score of God:1; the world-the flesh-and-the-devil: 0. That won’t be the actual margin, of course, but we know who wins.

I know I’m simply stating the obvious so far. Now let’s ask another more penetrating question: how does the love of power differ from the power of love?

Here’s a blunt but reliable answer as offered throughout the Bible: one is demonic and the other is divine.

The shape of demonic power is the pyramid. Only one being can achieve the highest place while all others are left to scramble up the steep pyramidic slopes in an increasingly cutthroat fashion. At the base level are the despised workers; further up are the middle managers; higher still are the major managers; near the top are the rulers; and at the very top is the king. He is the one to be served; all others are meant to serve. This is how armies work; how businesses work; how colleges work; how the world works—an aggressive self-love is needed in order to overcome all the others who are equally but less effectively selfish in racing to the top. Those who won’t or can’t race are liable to be abused and crushed.

Jesus, of course, is the actual “capstone” of God’s own kingdom structure, but he still didn’t fit this scheme. His life represents an inverted pyramid that causes every power-broker to stumble.

Think about this: Jesus, in the humility of his modest itinerant teaching role, was still crucified by the power-brokers of his day. Why? Because those leaders were steadily losing their power over the people in the face of Christ’s upside-down kingdom. Jesus was making the last first and the first last; he came to serve and not to be served; he cared for the sinners, not the “righteous”; he healed the blind, not those who thought they could see; and he came to be beloved by all who knew him because he first love them.

God, of course, speaks of his own power and at times he displays it by crushing evil. What is surprising, however, is that more often than not he withholds its use. It is only applied as a last resort. In the time of Noah, for instance, he destroyed the earth; but later—despite the continuation of the very evil among men that stirred that judgment—he promised never to flood the earth again. Similarly in one New Testament setting Jesus and his disciples were refused hospitality. The angry followers wanted to take advantage of Christ’s powers by calling down fire from heaven to destroy the town (Luke 9:54). Jesus refused and rebuked the followers instead.

What explains God’s use of power, then, is that it pours out from a heart of love; and—as the Triune One—his love is eternally other-centered. In John 17:24, for instance, we find that the Son’s great ambition is to bring others to share the eternal, glorious fellowship he has with the Father because “you [i.e. his Father] loved me before the foundation of the world.” And the Father’s salvation is offered because he “so loved the world that he gave us his only Son”.

What we do see of God’s heart in Scriptures is his purpose to save people who are enslaved by the power of sin. In his inverted pyramid the greatest power is unleashed when the greatest number receive the greatest care and compassion—all of which is offered in the context of unique, personal relationships. God works through us to reconcile the world to himself not through coercive powers but through the power of his personal love for us. And that love is never forced upon us; rather he invites us to reciprocate his own prior love with our own love, first in response to him; then in our initiatives toward others. His love is a spreading love.

Let me end by inviting others to comment on this analogy of the two opposed power pyramids: how is the explanatory force best presented and applied? At the least, we can see by it that Christ’s calling and ministry was and is more radical than those who are well placed on the slopes of the standard pyramid will ever grasp.

Most people have never heard of Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202). Yet his voice was notable in a Christian tradition that still has echoes today. He was a mystic and monk who claimed that God intended to work in human history in three stages.

The first stage was the age of the Father, that is, the Old Testament era with its divinely ordained rules that required full obedience. Then came the age of the Son, the era between Christ’s life and the year 1260. The year 1260 was chosen by taking the number of days cited in Revelation 11:3 & 12:6 (i.e. 1260 days) to be years instead of days. Thus, that year promised the arrival of a third age of the Spirit when people would finally gain direct communion with God by the Spirit’s coming to rule in the lives of individual Christians.

Joachim died well before 1260 but his followers looked ahead for the new era to come. What did they expect it would be like? The Gospel of Christ, Joachim told them, would still be valid in the third age but it would be surpassed as the letter of the law was replaced by the spirit of the law. The Spirit’s activities would also dissolve any further need for the organized and hierarchical church. Instead the Spiritualists—called the Order of the Just—would rule the Church. That was a pretty bold claim, given that the Western church operated within a well defined hierarchy from the Pope downward. The new Order would displace all of that.

Joachim drew some attention, both positive and negative. His main themes were dismissed by the Lateran Council in 1215 but he was still treated by the Catholic church as a saintly figure, though not as a saint. Dante, author of the Divine Comedy, drew on his teachings. The year 1260 came and went without any dramatic features.

We can now ask, “So what?” Did he offer something we need for today? Not really. And I’m certainly not trying to promote him or his ideas here. In fact, I’m convinced he was way off base.

But Joachim and his followers did illustrate a problem that has lingered in Christianity as a whole. That is, the sort of discussions about the nature of the Godhead and about the deity of Christ didn’t extend to an additional discussion of the roles and nature of the Spirit. We had the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Chalcedon in 381 that offered us, respectively, touchstone debates for the first two concerns; but there was never an early and equivalent council devoted to the Spirit.

Over 250 years after Joachim we meet Martin Luther. In Luther’s day the promise of a third age of the Spirit was still alive for some, but Luther himself was at best only vaguely aware of such themes. He did, however, recognize the importance of the Spirit in the Bible and also held that the Spirit engages believers both in conversion and in ongoing faith. His first publication was, in fact, a German translation of the medieval mystical work, the Theologia Germanica which invited readers to a more immediate form of spirituality. So when Luther began to resist the hierarchy of the Roman-led Catholic church while promoting a more lively spirituality, some of the radical Spiritualists of the day saw him as a possible representative of a new order of the Spirit.

Two of these figures were the “prophets” Nicholas Storch and Markus Stubner from Zwickau who came to Wittenberg to meet Luther. Luther quickly rejected them and what they taught. Later a separate spiritual movement led by Thomas Müntzer—who was also dismissed by Luther—produced the ill-fated Peasants Revolt. Then yet another effort to promote the new and immediate leadership of the Spirit emerged in the town of Münster, an effort that was also crushed. The net result of these Spiritualist efforts was a widespread disavowal of the Spirit’s active role in Reformation theology and practice. He was not a welcome presence if his work was to overthrow the church as an ordered body; and his purpose was to give some leaders divine—and sometimes dubious—prerogatives! What the radicals did accomplish was to scare away any additional Spirit-advocates for nearly a century.

I offer this historical content as background for this question: what is the biblical role of the Spirit? Does he only work through established church authorities and activities today—as something of an undercover presence? Or have we entered into the new age of the Spirit, characterized by his unique works of leading and speaking through Spirit-anointed activists? Or is there some happy medium somewhere between the extremes?

All I can do is raise the question here. Any efforts to answer need to be book-length efforts. And in recent decades there have been some projects offered along that line. Here the most we can do is to suggest some key elements that must be part of any conversation.

First, we need to embrace God’s call for us now to live by the Spirit rather than by the “flesh”. Luther properly recognized that Christ’s coming signaled a new work of God in history. Luther looked, especially, to Galatians as central to this claim: there he found that any effort to make the Mosaic Law into a basis for spirituality is broken. Why? Because the Law looks to human performance rather than to Christ. So while it offers certain moral boundaries it must never be treated as the focus of faith. Instead Christ alone is to be the focus of faith. And the Spirit’s work is to elevate Christ in our hearts—to open the eyes of our hearts to see God as fully revealed in Christ. Luther was absolutely on target here.

Second, any efforts to elevate the status of the Spirit to a new position of functional primacy in the Trinity violates the eternal reality of the Father-Son-and-Spirit communion. In the Bible we find the Father and the Son to be uniquely devoted to each other in an eternal exchange of love and glory—a reality celebrated by Jesus in John 17:24. The Spirit never seeks to displace that unique dyadic reality, but he does eternally facilitate that bond of love by communicating the love of the Father to the Son, and vice versa. In an insight offered by Jonathan Edwards we notice that the Bible never speaks of the Spirit’s love for the Father, or of the Spirit’s love for the Son. Instead he faithfully carries the mutual love of both the Father and the Son—as the one who searches the “depths of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10)—back and forth between the Father and the Son throughout eternity.

We, once we are united to Christ, are then drawn into this exchange by the Spirit’s communicating ministry. Thus, we are reborn into God’s life by the coming of the Spirit as he “pours out God’s love in our hearts” (Romans 5:5). Such a role does not reduce the Spirit’s full deity and personal participation in the life of the Godhead, but it does explain how God’s relational being is sustained as the Spirit serves the Father, the Son, and the Bride by eternally and actively witnessing to this affective mutual devotion.

To say more about his personhood, the Spirit can be grieved and quenched when we, mere mortals, despise his ministry. And Jesus warned his audiences that to dismiss the Spirit’s communicating, witnessing, and coaching ministry is an unforgiveable sin. Even as the incarnate Son, Jesus responded to the Spirit’s leading throughout his life and ministry on earth. And in that reliance he set up a model for us to follow. So Luther was correct in his dismissal of the radical Spiritualists of his day who tried to modify God’s eternal status of relations. The Son reveals the Father to us, and the Spirit elevates the Son in our hearts—but, although deserving and receiving worship as one present in the Godhead, the Spirit never seeks to be uniquely elevated in our worship.

Finally, we need to learn how to respond to the Spirit’s leading. How does he do this? Not, as Joachim or the Spiritual radicals of Luther’s day proposed, by bringing about new directions in human conduct through the teachings of self-appointed Spirit-spokesmen.

Instead the Spirit illuminates the Word that he has stirred in the hearts of Bible writers. That is, the Spirit first worked in the hearts of the Bible writers, moving them to hear and report God’s heart to us, the readers. And now he moves in our hearts to hear what God wants us to know by completing the Heart-to-heart-to-heart progression of revelation. So we will never understand what the Bible is telling us unless we have the Spirit whispering in our hearts, “Listen to this, because God loves you!”

Then and only then do we become true Bible students and true Christians: by responding to that love with our own love for Christ. So Luther was right, once again, in his call, “sola scriptura.”

As for Joachim’s notions: never mind!

“Now,” the pastor implored us as he completed his sermon, “in light of what we’ve seen in 2 Timothy 3:16 this morning, I challenge each of you to equip yourselves for life and ministry! God commands us to be obedient and to glorify him through our obedience so I’m asking each of you to spend at least five minutes in each of the next five days reading the Bible. This is God’s clearly stated will so let’s go out and do it!”

I looked around. Lots of heads were nodding positively: this would be the week to obey God and to give him his glory. Some were looking down at the floor. One man—he looked like a cutting-edge sort of guy—glanced at his watch. The service ended with a song and the benediction.

On the way out of church a man in the congregation took a moment with the pastor.

“Pastor, I’m pretty busy but I want to take up your challenge. With life as full as it is, when should I do it? Is there an especially good time of day to read?”

“No, it’s totally up to you! Maybe while you’re having breakfast, or maybe before you go to bed. Just commit yourself to find a little spare time somewhere in the day.”

“Great,” the man responded, “I’ll do it before I go to bed at night—it might be a good way to get to sleep!”

This particular scenario is my own creation but it summarizes some of the more common sentiments I hear from believers today—from both pastors and parishioners. In this post I’d like to ask a few tough questions about how we treat Bible reading today. Why do we bother to ask anyone to sacrifice their precious time in this way?

First we need to ask, do we actually know God? If we don’t know him—even if we know lots about him—then any invitation to read “God’s word” is like asking someone to read someone else’s mail. The appropriate response to that will always be, “If I haven’t met him, why should I be interested in his issues?” So it’s important for those who don’t read the Bible to start with a polite question: “Dear God, have we ever actually met?” For those who lack any appetite for the Bible I’m sure he’ll answer, “No, we haven’t, but I’ve been waiting for the opportunity for some time now!”

The point is that our religious activities—whether we’re deeply involved in a cool and post-modern community of faith; or are members of a clunky and traditional old church—are not the real issues at stake. I think of Paul, for instance, when he was still Saul, being “zealous for God” as he chased Christians all over the landscape. All of that was so much nonsense when he was finally knocked off his chariot by God himself.

“Who are you?” Saul asked the one who spoke to him out of a brilliant light.

“Jesus, whom you’re persecuting” came the answer.

This, by the way, is an awkward point because in my experience it’s uncommon to hear church people talk about God as if he cares for them and vice versa—in contrast to Paul’s great passion for Christ after his own introduction that day on the Damascus road.

Yet the Bible assumes that all who really know God love him. Why? Because all who know him discover that he first loved us. And it’s impossible to ignore the Creator of all of heaven and earth as he regularly tells us, by his Spirit, “I love you” (Romans 5:5). Consider, for instance, Psalm 42:1, “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.” The Bible is full of portrayals of people with that appetite, who love him deeply. And all of us who get that, love to spend time hanging out with God in his Word.

Some in the Bible, of course, despise God. And many—take Jacob or Paul as two instances—move from one status to the other as the Bible tells the stories of their lives. The Bible offers such transformation stories not only to invite us to that kind of story in our own lives; but also to warn us that only those captured by the love of the Father and his Son—as those who “kiss the Son” (Psalm 2)—will prosper in the coming Day of Judgment. And those on that Day who claim to have been religious—even when they’ve done “many mighty miracles” on God’s behalf—but who never really liked him much, will be told, “Depart from me, I never knew you” (in Matthew 7).

So knowing God “in person” is a crucial starting point for Bible reading and John 8:31 treats our devotion to the Word as the measure of true life in Christ. Yet there’s a second obstacle to overcome for many of us with lots of church experience. It’s our utilitarian tendency to treat the Bible as a resource for successful living. In sermons we hear of Scriptures as a place where we learn how to be more Godly; how to have stronger marriages; how to manage our wealth; how to become more missional as truly authentic people; how to build strong communities; and so on and on and on.

In other words, because of our fixation on finding “applications” in the Bible we begin to be “fix-it” Christians and the Bible serves us as a moral manual. This, however, misses seeing God himself—the Father-Son-and-Spirit-God—as the ultimate moving presence in the Bible; and as the ultimate motive for coming to the Bible.

Let me make the point by asking whether we see the Bible as God’s deepest and most tangible self-disclosure that he makes available to us: is he sharing himself and his heart through it? Or is does it offer us a set of lessons God and our pastors wants us to learn, ideas we need to assimilate, and behaviors we need to adopt? These differing emphases separate those who treasure the Bible relationally from those who don’t.

It’s true, of course, that the Bible does offer us all sorts of practical benefits. The God who gave us marriages, resources, communities, and everything else, has lots to tell us about how these benefits are part of his love for us. But they all become idols if we worship and serve the creation while missing the God who loves us and who has given us all these things in the context of his love. God is not a means to our ends, but our ultimate aim in himself.

So what should we say to a pastor who begs his congregation to spend 5 minutes a day for 5 days a week in the Bible? Or even to read 15 minutes each day in order to complete a one-year-read-through?

God alone can answer that, but God’s answer might be, “Shame on you! Is your portrayal of me so small, so disaffected, and so utilitarian that all you can ask for is a useless bit of spare time? I’m the ‘God who is love’ and I’m offering myself as the dynamic center of life for all your people—so get in touch with reality!”

So, as spiritual leaders of one sort or another, quit using the small appetites of those who may not even know God as a measure for anything spiritual. Instead let’s use the measure of a real love relationship.

Would a good pastor, for instance, offer premarital advice to a young couple like this: “Be sure to spend at least 5 minutes a day, 5 times each week talking to each other: that’s what your marriage needs to prosper!” God forbid!

Instead, with marriage as a model, here’s what we might want to tell young believers:

“God loves you. He opens his heart to you in the Bible. You’ll need to have ears to hear that love and the Spirit offers that—just ask for it and you’ll receive it. You’ll also need to give up things that block your response to him—he’ll coach you in that as you read. And you’ll want to have other partners to share with, so always look for companionship in your reading. Then be sure to pray in response to what you’ve read.”

If they ask, “How much reading?” answer with a bigger frame of reference—God’s love—in view than the frame of what others are doing.
“One good measure is to ask how much time you have for internet, movies, and television—our discretionary time. Then ask how you can use some of that discretionary time to be with God and with his people. Don’t let the soil of your heart get packed down by what the culture is throwing at you! Maybe cut your present ’screen time’ down by half and offer the other half to Bible time. Just remember, the more time you spend with God, the more you’ll enjoy him! Go for it!”

Remember, the more we know God, the more we love him, and the more we love him, the more time we want to have with him. Try it. You’ll like it!

I spent two years in a locked psychiatric unit during my days at seminary. As a part-time “psych tech” in a secular hospital my role was to support the nursing staff in patient care. The real life of most of our patients was often heart-breaking: in some measure all were broken and hurting. We did what we could through the medicines and interventions at hand and sometimes seemed to make some headway. Yet in too many cases the patients we helped and released were readmitted after just a few weeks or months.

Let me take a pair of insights from those days to reflect on the real life we find outside such a unit. The first is that our world itself is “crazy”; and, with that, that one of our common solutions to brokenness is misguided and can only lead to patient recidivism—and to the regular recycling of problems that most people experience in any setting.

Before I say more let me note that I don’t mean for this post to be a wholesale indictment of what our unit offered: on occasions the interventions we used led to substantial and lasting relief. I praise God for that. But much more is needed, namely a cure that speaks to all our deep needs and that lasts forever.

That said, I came away from my two years there with deep concerns about the problems of real life found both inside and outside the unit. Let me start with our most common intervention, and then turn to the underlying problem itself.

The common cure for dealing with patients whose conduct was out of bounds—too extreme for those around them—was to apply behavioral modification programs. That is, many of our patients had attitudes and behaviors that were labeled “dysfunctional” by the staff. We then confronted those issues with a variety of pressures to get them to change.

Typically the staff would begin the care program by defining behavioral standards: coaching a given patient in what was and what was not acceptable. The next challenge was to link the care plan to some form of leverage that had enough power to change the patient’s behaviors. If, for instance, patients were smokers the staff would withhold cigarettes until they behaved, and then parcel them out as rewards. Or if patients prized opportunities to go for a daily walk outside the hospital with staff escorts that permission was used as a lever for change. The greatest reward, of course, was the promise of eventual discharge from the unit: “behave and be released” was an implicit and sometimes explicit message being offered every day. Pavlov and Skinner, two of the great behavioralists, would have been proud of us!

So much for the common cure. What about the problems we were addressing? First let me offer two examples of the sort of issues we faced.

One woman was in the unit for her deep episodes of depression. As a psych tech I was expected to engage patients in conversations about their issues, then to write up anything significant in their chart for others on staff to read. In one conversation this woman mentioned that she didn’t trust men, her husband included. Why not? I asked. She answered that all the men she knew were driven by sexual ambitions and while she was always willing to offer herself she still felt unloved and unlovely—with the exception of just one of her male counselors who had ended his own involvement with her “for my sake”—so, she concluded, with this one exception, men are never to be trusted!

In a second case a young woman had been unable to invest herself in any meaningful relationships and was wildly impulsive in her behaviors. The male staff were asked not to have any substantial interactions with her over the course of her three-week hospitalization. This was only reversed on the day before her discharge so she could have some re-socialization time with men.

My sense of a much bigger problem that stands behind these more immediate episodes—the problem of a crazy world—was reinforced by the way these two encounters went forward, and illustrates what I found in many other cases.

After the first conversation—with the promiscuous wife—I returned to the staff office to check through the patient’s chart to see if her multiple male relations and expressed loss-of-trust issue had ever been reported. Nothing was noted. But before writing up the exchange I mentioned her comments to one of our experienced nurses.

“Do you mean to include that in her chart?” she asked.

“Well, yes.” I responded.

“I’m not sure why you would,” my colleague, went on, “since it’s not all that significant.”

Only then did it dawn on me that this married colleague was, herself, freely active in her sexual partnerships—as would slip out to others during meal breaks. And she wasn’t alone on staff in that pattern. I was, she seemed to be saying, the one who was living by a different behavioral standard. And, in her view, the patient’s problem with depression could scarcely be related in any way to her sexual activities.

In the second case I had my only conversation with the young woman. It began with a basic question.

“What’s your biggest ambition in life after you leave us tomorrow?”

“Huh?” she responded. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, just that all of us operate with a variety of goals and ambitions in life—the things that set up our priorities for how we spend our time and resources. ‘Hope’ is a label for that, and hope is what orients us in life. All of us have some sort of hope that helps us figure out what we want to do. So I’m curious about what you hope for in life.”

All this seemed like a brand new concept to her and she asked a couple of follow-up questions that I answered. What surprised me, though, is that she was getting more and more animated in the process. Finally she was clearly angry with me!

“I don’t get it!” she said, “I’ve been here for three weeks and what you’re saying is the first thing that makes any sense to me and it’s only coming after my three weeks here and just before I get out!”

In both cases, of course, I was spilling out my Christian faith in a world that didn’t share that faith. So the values I was applying were sometimes very different from the values that were guiding others on our staff. This is not unusual for many of us. In a mostly post-Christian culture we often see the “real world” in very different terms: and each side of this divide is increasingly viewing the other side as socially and morally dysfunctional, and even crazy on some counts.

With that in mind let me return to the favorite cure used on our unit: behavioral modification. For a biblical Christian it represents a crazy approach. It seeks to change people from the “outside-in” rather than from the “inside-out”. It dismisses the point that helped launch the Protestant Reformation when Luther insisted, contrary to the model of virtue ethics common in his day, that we do not become righteous by practicing righteous behaviors, but we practice righteous behaviors only after we’ve entered into the righteousness of Christ’s work in us [thesis 40 in his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, 1517]. Real change in real (that is, eternal) life always starts with a heart change.

Our hearts, the Bible tells us, are the ultimate fount of all our behaviors: we were made by God, in his image, as lovers. We were made to be other-centered; to be holy and blameless in our devotion to God; and to engage in a life of faith, hope, and love.

The patient I spoke to who had her many men was looking for love in all the wrong ways. In that dysfunction—call it “sin”—she revealed a heart longing for what real sexual love offers: to engage in God’s plan for a devoted and singular commitment with just one partner for all of life, mutually bonded in an enduring trust and delight. To live otherwise is to enter into a world upside-down to God’s design.

The young woman—driven by the huge waves of impulsiveness—was hungry for an anchor in life: for meaning. And only through hope and a sense of meaning, with the worth and nobility that comes through a hope in Christ, would she find a basis for real stability in life. I’m afraid that all our unit offered her while she was with us—until our encounter—may have been some behavioral seasick pills.

So the question for today is this: are we presently living a true “real life”? Or are we living within sin while using short term behavioral pills to minimize the pain? The only way to guard our hearts is to give our hearts fully and freely to all that God offers us. Then and there we find an abundant life. The world needs us and our cure!