Month: August 2018

CORN-HOLE VICTORIES AND PARTYING WITH GOD

CORN-HOLE VICTORIES AND PARTYING WITH GOD

Thunk! “YES!” I fist pumped. Thunk! “Just one more!” I said to my partner, did my wind up, and tossed. Thunk! “We won! We won!” I shouted, threw my hands up and did a victory dance. It was a classic come from behind victory. I could hear Jim Nance intoning, “It was a cornhole tournament unlike any other.”

Everybody at the church picnic turned and looked at their nutty pastor and smiled.

Hey, don’t laugh. At my age, sporting victories are few and far between. I celebrate them whenever I get the chance. In fact, I celebrate—a word with roots deep in worship of God—any time I can think of an excuse to do so, and so should you.

“Joy is the serious business of heaven,” wrote C.S. Lewis. Joy is what heaven is about. It is the driving energy of life. Without it we wither. Partying with God is essential to a happy life.

Have you considered how much joy there is in the Bible? The New Testament begins with it and is filled with it. Do a concordance search on “joy” or “rejoicing” and you’ll be amazed. Maybe that’s one of the reasons Jesus said, “Unless you become like a little child you cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Children do joy automatically.

G. K. Chesterton explained, “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”[1]

God has an immense capacity for simple joy that we have lost and need to regain. The ability to party with God, the spiritual discipline of celebration, is a crucial step in reclaiming our joy. It is crucial because joyless Christians help no one.

Put yourself in the position of someone looking for answers in life. You’re looking around at the people you know, the people you see in the hair salon, the other moms at the baseball field. You’re watching them because you know they go to a church that says there is more to this life. Yet you don’t see any joy. You see crabbiness. You see selfishness. You see someone who can find the fly in every ice cream cone of life. Are you going to be interested in her spirituality?

Somebody out there in the spiritual world wants you to find all the faults in others and all the sadness you can swallow, but it isn’t Jesus Christ. Francis de Sales wrote, “The evil one is pleased with sadness and melancholy because he himself is sad and melancholy and will be so for all eternity. Hence he desires that everyone should be like himself.”[2] Misery loves company.

Joy is an absolute necessity for healthy spiritual life. Without it we shrivel and become vulnerable, more vulnerable to temptation than ever. Fulfillment, contentment, and dare I say it, pleasure, are essential elements for a strong soul. When we fail to find these good things God wants us to have, and then celebrate the goodness, sin seems better than what He has to offer. Temptation’s power is multiplied in an unhappy soul.

So, I urge you, learn the spiritual discipline of celebration. Learn to take each good thing out of each good day, even the corn-hole victories of life, and revel in the goodness of God.

[1] G. K. Chesterton, quoted by John Ortberg in The Life You’ve Always Wanted, p. 61

[2] Francis de Sales. Quoted by Ortberg in The Life You’ve Always Wanted. P. 64.

 

CULTIVATING SPIRITUAL DEPTH

CULTIVATING SPIRITUAL DEPTH

In an interview one morning with Shankar Vedantam, Steve Innskeep of NPR’s Morning Edition, offered a fascinating peak behind the façade of American religiosity. Innskeep reported the findings of a study that surveyed our actual church attendance versus our professed church attendance. The bottom line: 79% of Americans report themselves as associated with an organized faith group. Nearly half, 45%, of all Americans report that they attend weekly religious services versus only 20% of Europeans. But the actual attendance is about equal: 20 % of Christian Europeans attend religious services each week versus 24% of Americans. Why the discrepancy? According to Vedantam, Americans want to see themselves, and want to be seen, as the kind of people that attend church. But when the clock strikes nine on Sunday morning we’d rather stay in our PJ’s watching Meet the Press than slip on our shoes and shuffle off to Sunday School.

It’s like when the dentist asks if you’ve been flossing. Everyone wants to be seen as someone who flosses. But our teeth tell a different tale. [1]

In the same way, Americans want very much to be spiritually deep people. We want the power that comes from a real, intimate, experience of the living God. But we either don’t know how or else we are confused and disillusioned by what we see in the professing Christians around us. The Church, it seems, looks little different from the world. And in some cases, it looks worse. Our spirituality, measured by positive transformation into healthy, happy, and honorable people, is one thousand miles wide and one inch deep.

Pastor and author John Ortberg summarized our angst well in an interview with Dallas Willard, “I went through this long era of intense dissatisfaction and confusion about spiritual life… It’s the cry of the heart,” he said, “God! I don’t know what to do. I know I need you. I know I want you. But I don’t know what to do. Then I picked up this book (referring to Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines) and opened to the preface and read, “authentic transformation really is possible if we are willing to do one thing and that is to rearrange our lives around the things that Jesus practiced in order to receive life and power from the Father.”

Church attendance isn’t always a good measure of spiritual depth. But that is only one of the spiritual disciplines, and one of the most passive. We can no more expect to experience the transforming power of life in the Spirit via one hour a week of sermonic spiritual dentistry, than we can expect to become professional baseball players by watching the World Series. We have to get in the game. If we want to experience the presence and power of God in our lives, we must put into practice the habits and attitudes that Jesus modeled, the Scripture encourages, and that serious believers have practiced for centuries. (See for example 2nd Peter 1:3-9; Colossians 3:1-4; etc.)

These habits, known as the spiritual disciplines, include: confession, devotion, Bible study, celebration, sabbath, serving, stewardship of time and energy, solitude, self-denial, secrecy, listening, and the many forms of prayer.

Perhaps that is what many of us are saying when we fib to the surveyors about our religious lives: We really want to know God. We just don’t know how.

Want to know more? Three sermons on listening to God from the series The Spiritual Disciplines, are on fccsobo.org. Click the “podcast” tab and then click “Topical Sermons.”

For further reading: The Spirit of the Disciplines, by Dallas Willard; The Life You’ve Always Wanted, by John Ortberg (John calls this “Dallas for Dummies.”); The Transforming Friendship, by James Houston; Restoring Your Spiritual Passion, by Gordon MacDonald; Finding God on the A Train, by Rick Hamlin; Celebration of Discipline, by Richard Foster. You may view the seven minute interview with Dallas Willard and John Ortberg, along with at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj5UaLzIiDA.

 

[1] See NPR.org /  Religion / What We Say About Our Religion, And What We Do

Shankar Vedantam and Steve Inskeep

 

 

ONE COMMUNITY & THE BASKETBALL BRAWL

ONE COMMUNITY & THE BASKETBALL BRAWL

High School basketball season, 1974, a mild winter’s evening in DeKalb County, Georgia, part of Atlanta’s burgeoning suburbs. My buddies, Randy, Paul, and I left the game and crossed Columbia Drive at the light in front of the high school and began walking up Irish Street toward my house, half a mile away. It was dark, but not too dark to see a group of black kids on the corner, fifty yards ahead, their bicycles laying in the grass either side of the sidewalk.

Randy murmured, “Maybe we should go the other way.” Racial violence was everywhere then, but especially in our school where integration had reached about fifty percent. Scrawny eighth and ninth graders like us paused before entering the school restrooms, hand on the door, listening for who was inside before risking a beating.

“Nah,” I said, “It’ll be alright,” and kept walking, right between the bikes.

“Don’t you touch my bicycle white boy!” I began to reply when WHAP! Something, a belt maybe, hit me and it was on. Outnumbered and scared spitless, the three of us broke and ran in different directions. Three black kids chased me across the street and into someone’s front yard.

I call it the basketball brawl, but it was not much of a fight. I managed to dodge most of the blows and skedaddle to the back door and banged on it asking for help. The porch light flicked on, the door opened slowly, and a large African American man looked down at me and said, “Yes?”

I am a dead man! I thought. But he turned out to be a very nice fellow and let me use his phone to call my folks.

That happened a very long time ago yet, every time I walk down a street and see a group of black kids my gut still does a double clutch.

Fast-forward to Georgia State University in the 1980’s. Atlanta’s races had reached an uneasy peace, with the city’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson. Racial violence had declined, but the tensions and many of the attitudes remained. Still, Atlanta was harmony city compared to Memphis, Tennessee, where I went to seminary later in the decade. We could feel the tension and see the hatred in the stares the first week we were there when my wife and I drove into a predominantly black neighborhood looking for apartments. Memphis felt like it was twenty years behind Atlanta.

It’s cliché, but my best friend in seminary, Robert, was a black guy from Augusta, Georgia. We had auto-mechanics in common. He had made the unusual choice—enabled by minority to majority transfer rules of the day—of attending a predominantly white high school. His stories of discrimination and abuse by white law enforcement in Georgia shocked me, but not as much as the fact that his fellow African-Americans treated him like an Uncle Tom for attending our mostly white seminary. Race relations are complicated, I learned. In Memphis, and through my friend, I began to understand what MLK Jr. meant when he talked about the content of our character versus the color of our skin.

Why am I telling you all this? I attended an event titled One Community last week, at the Prizery, our local community arts center. One Community’s mission is: To provide relevant enrichment opportunities and experiences for our community to address racism and diversity issues. My fear, frankly, was that it would be a politically motivated white-bashing party for people full of resentments who wanted to buttress a sense of entitlement. I was pleasantly surprised, met some very nice people, and heard some stories of what it was like to grow up black in segregated schools here in south-side Virginia in the fifties and sixties; stories told with grace, humor, and without animosity. I sensed a longing in that evenly mixed gathering of about 100 people, for understanding and harmony, not hate. Notably, the organizers of the event had invited white people who grew up at the same time to share their stories, but none volunteered. I wish they had.

Why did I attend? As a son of the South I feel no responsibility whatever for the “sins of my fathers.”  Besides my own experiences, I’ve had relatives who were denied career paths because they were, “the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Reverse racism is a thing. But I am also heartily sick of the chaos groups like Antifa are creating in our culture and committed to doing what I can to unravel it. Further, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the most powerful antidote to racism that was ever given to mankind. We are called to be ministers of reconciliation, of men to God and of men to each other. We can’t do that by sitting at home and stewing in our own juices. I do not want to stand before God one day and answer, “I had an opportunity to move our community forward and missed it because I wasn’t willing to listen and build relationships.”

At lunch recently with a good friend who is also African American—but prefers to be called plain old Frank—I heard the counterpoint to my basketball brawl, stories of white violence toward blacks that outraged me. And I finally realized, those kids are just as scared of me as I was of them. Isn’t it time we stopped our guts from double clutching and sat down at the table to talk?

BEST PARENTING PARADIGMS John Rosemond’s Parenting by The Book

BEST PARENTING PARADIGMS John Rosemond’s Parenting by The Book

The accuracy of our assumptions determines the effectiveness of our actions. If we assume, for example, that the power line to the lamppost is eighteen inches under ground then we can dig a fifteen-inch hole to plant flowers around the post. But if the line is oh, say, twelve inches deep, and we maintain our assumption of eighteen then we can still plant flowers, we’ll just have to do without the light at night. Visit my house one evening and I’ll show you.

Nowhere is this truer or more obvious than in the outcomes America is experiencing in child-rearing. Since 1965, about the time we traded in our traditional child-rearing assumptions for the new and improved psychological paradigm, “every single indicator of positive well-being in America’s children has been in a state of precipitous decline … The per-capita rate of child and teen depression … has increased at least five fold since 1965. In just one fifteen-year period, from 1980 to 1995, the suicide rate for boys ages ten to fourteen almost doubled!”[1]

Those stats come from John Rosemond’s Parenting by The Book, published in 2007. I’d been reading Rosemond’s syndicated newspaper columns for years, amenning all the way, but I’d never read one of his books. The intro to Parenting by The Book reveals how Rosemond came to his convictions and explains one of the reasons I enjoy his work so much. It’s another case of science catching up with Scripture.

John was not a born-again believer in Jesus when he began his career. He called himself a cultural-Christian up until his early fifties. But his work as a family psychologist kept exposing him to hard facts about human nature that did not fit the post-modern parenting paradigm he’d absorbed in graduate school. The more he wrote, spoke, and counseled based on his findings, the more he found himself in agreement with Christians and at odds with his profession.

Remember those assumptions? Psychology assumes that people are fundamentally good, that we are not responsible for our problems—it’s our parents’ fault—and that we can only be “saved” through therapy. Biblical Christianity assumes that we are created in the image of God with a free will and fully responsible for our choices. But we are also fallen, corrupted by rebelling against him. Our only salvation is in accepting responsibility for our sins, asking for forgiveness, and believing in Jesus Christ who died for our sins. Before he was born again, Rosemond discovered the difference in those assumptions by studying their outcomes.

“I have major problems with the direction my once noble profession has taken since the late 1960’s,” he writes, “when the American Psychological Association was hijacked by secular progressives who were focused more on advancing humanist ideology than advancing the human condition … I am absolutely convinced that modern psychology has done more harm than good to the American family.” These ideas were coalescing in his mind when Rosemond read Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, and submitted his life to Jesus.

“The raising of a child, once a fairly straightforward, commonsense affair, has become the single most stressful thing a woman will do in her lifetime,” he writes. “That’s not the way God planned it, but then, God’s way is not modern psychology’s way either.” Parenting by The Book not only dismantles postmodern parenting assumptions, it also lays out a clear path based on the biblical worldview for parents to follow. Every parent should read it.

[1] John Rosemond, Parenting by The Book, p. 66.

LAUNCHING THE LAST ONE: Five things I would say to myself as a young father

LAUNCHING THE LAST ONE: Five things I would say to myself as a young father

The last of my three daughters launched today, off to pursue her calling as a storyteller and begin her career as the digital video and media producer for a private university in a neighboring state. I couldn’t be happier for her or prouder. She worked hard and smart and with the grace of God achieved her goal. A biblical paraphrase comes to mind: This is my beloved daughter in whom I am well pleased. Followed by, WATCH OUT WORLD, HERE SHE COMES!

I am, of course, exceedingly proud of all three of my daughters, each of whom loves God and others, serves their respective churches, has happy, healthy relationships, and have become self-supporting adults who will contribute much to society. But watching the last one launch reminded me of how fast it all went by and how often I wondered how it all would turn out. No human life is without trial and tragedy. Our girls did not escape serious illness, hidden trauma, and acquaintance with sudden death as they grew up.

Knowing this, many people choose not to have children, but I’m so glad we did.  With 20-20 hindsight, here are five things I would say to myself as a young father.

First, don’t wait till you can afford it. I was earning less than $10 an hour when my second daughter was born. We had maternity insurance, but still, given our conviction that my wife should be at home with the kids till they entered school, (she home schooled them through third grade), times were tough. We used the envelope system of cash management and my wife was a champion shopper. God is faithful and provided just what we needed when we needed it. If you wait till you can afford it, you can become more attached to your standard of living than is necessary to raise healthy children.

Second, be present in their lives. The best parenting advice I ever got came from a very successful friend. “Don’t let your ministry consume all of your time,” he said. “I’ve worked too much and lost touch with my sons. I wouldn’t want to see that happen to you.” It was only too true. Sadly, one son took his own life as a high school senior. Some things only a dad can do and some things only a mom. They need both of you in their lives. This will require sacrifice of other things that may seem more important. Make the sacrifice.

Third, hold the reigns loosely. Keep the picture of the mature adult you are aiming for clearly in mind and guide them toward it, but don’t over control. Don’t let the daily details—the foolishness of youth, the ups and downs of adolescence—discourage or enrage you. Hold your temper and your tongue and keep the big picture in mind.

Fourth, be the storyteller in their lives. Read to them—the Bible and other good books—before they know what a book is and manage well what they watch and read as they mature. That includes, of course, worshiping with other believers each week, living out the story of the gospel in the body of Christ. The storytellers of a culture shape the values of a culture and of a family. Discuss what you read and the sermons you hear “as you go in and out, as you rise up and sit down,” in the car and at the table, everywhere life happens. Make sure they know how to analyze every story from the biblical worldview. Then they will know how to write their own.

Finally, let them fail and learn how to stand up again. “Success is never final,” the saying goes, “and failure is never fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” Life is no Disney World, and the sooner they learn how to suffer defeat and keep going, the better.

“Forgetting what lies behind and straining toward what lies ahead,” wrote the Apostle Paul, “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”[1] I’m so glad I became a dad, and look forward with great anticipation to see what God is going to do next in my daughters’ lives.

[1] Philippians 3:13-14.