What Does This Mean for You?

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But I am struck that this type of argument is only held in certain circles. You never hear questions about the greatest country singer of all time. Or who is the greatest guitar player. You don’t hear debates about who is the greatest philosopher or ballet dancer.

It seems to be part of human nature to want to be great, but the enemy has rooted himself in some contexts to an even larger measure by quantifying greatness as the only obtainable goal.  Shaq was a 15-time all-star and won a fist full of rings but all that is irrelevant because he is not the greatest. Who benefits when we tear people down to make another great?

Part of the reason Jesus was so great was that He never entered these meaningless contests. He refused to list His top 5 greatest and never put Himself on any goat list. He quietly went about His business demonstrating to the people in the margins of society that the people who were considered powerful in society has no lasting power. He taught His followers that the truly great people are the people who flourished enough to make others great.

Jesus saw past the way culture wants to pit people against each other even when their only identity is found in which sports team they follow. It seems crazy to Americans when soccer fans get into physical altercations over their teams, but let’s be real, fighting over land, fame, and wealth is no less meaningless.

While walking toward Jerusalem and preparing for His death, the disciples themselves were arguing about which of them were the greatest. Some tried to curry favor so Jesus could put them in a place of greatness, but Jesus already showed them what greatness looks like.

To be great is not to have the most money or the biggest house, it’s flourishing enough spiritually and emotionally to kneel down and serve someone. It’s that person who can put their ego to the side and tell a coworker that their failure doesn’t define them.

It’s the mother who has figured that crazy mothering thing out, telling the frazzled mom in the restaurant that it took her a while to figure it out as well. Greatness is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking about other people more than you think of yourself. This is what Jesus did.

He saw the competition of the world, how they liked to pit people against one another, and opted out of that entire system.

When the Jesus was challenged to defend himself to Pilate, Jesus declined. He had no need to exert His dominance. He had no desire to make Himself great in the eyes of others through great oratory or displays of wonder. He had nothing to prove and no ego to protect.

Who is the greatest basketball player ever? My answer is, why does it matter? Aren’t they all better than you and me?

Imagine if we looked at the world this way. Imagine if we stopped seeing who we are better than, or seeing how we compare to others, and instead looking for how we can help share the little bit of greatness we have with the world around us.

I feel like that is the greatness Jesus is looking for.

I understand why a company would do this. They want their customers to know that they care and truth be told, they probably have received this complaint many times before I reached out. But in their efforts to show concern, I couldn’t help but feel they were not concerned at all.

As a Christian pastor, I have similar conversations that I have to struggle to be present in. There are objections to following Christ that I hear but I want to give a form response to. There are ways of viewing the Scriptures that are not faithful to the tradition that I want to give a form response to. And there are people who blame their problems on God and want me to defend God who I want to give a form response to.

 In these times I have to choose to be more present than ever. Because the opposite is to convey that their concerns are no concern of mine.

It seems that almost weekly, I interact with someone who finds the teachings of the Bible to be a stumbling block to following Jesus. Now I teach from the word of God every week. I fellowship with God through studying, reading, and memorizing the Bible. I love the Bible. But some people have been taught that the Bible is to have a place in their life solely reserved for the resurrected Christ.

When these people come to me with their concerns about this Scriptures, I have to deconstruct an entire way of looking at the Bible that is not faithful to what the authors of the Scriptures intended. These people have been formed by a culture completely foreign to the writers of the Bible.

We likewise have a problem understanding what the Bible is teaching. The Bible was written by a group of people we do not understand, to other people we do not understand, in a language we don’t understand in the midst of a culture we do not understand. The best we can do is try to study the background of the text, the people who wrote it, and the people receiving it to try to discern the meaning of the book we call the Bible.

As an American teaching Americans, there is a whole other layer to our difficulty in understanding the Bible.

Virtually the entire book was written by and to marginalized communities. And for many American Christians this is a foreign concept.

This is partly why admissions is so important to Western Christians. It gives us a glimpse into what the persecuted church looks like and how faith can thrive when society and even our bodies are suffering.

This week, Christianity today had an article entitled Haitians Are Ministering at the End of the World. It speaks of pastors who are risking their lives to carry the gospel in communities that are being completely destroyed by the effects of sin.

These men and women of God are faithfully carrying the grace that they have received to those on the margins of society. The article details senseless murders in marauding. Civil society has collapsed making way to a failed state. Haiti is ungoverned and ungovernable. And there is no easy answer in sight. When we read Christian journalism, we expect the articles to turn to a “but God” phase of the story. This one doesn’t. It just details the work of faithful Christians in the midst of unfathomable suffering. But this suffering isn’t for nothing.

In 1 Peter 2 we see the apostle begging new converts to live like these pastors in Haiti. The author of 1 Peter says that people will ridicule them and disparage them but he implores them to continue to behave as Christians. Why?

The Day of Visitation

Peter says that at some point Jesus is going to show up, and when He does, people will recognize Jesus because of the behavior of the Christians.

This is an amazing picture that every believer should pray and fast to lay hold of.

Jesus is going to show up to a group of people who do not know him, Peter says. And when He does, they will recognize Jesus because they had already seen Him in His followers. This is the work of Holy Spirit that we need today. This is how we should be praying and choosing to live.

We live in a sin saturated world and sinful desires get the biggest headlines and the most press. But Holy Spirit is working in the Church through her members discipling the world in the ways of Jesus. And one day soon, Christ will return and will be recognized because of the love His followers have shown.

Throughout history, the church fathers gave us a blueprint in combating the forces of evil. They speak of fighting the devil, the flesh, and the world. Unfortunately, the way we fight the devil in most churches looks nothing like what we read in the pages of Scripture. Long prayer meetings with shouting, stomping and yelling our declarations of authority take the place of any real manifestation of authority.

When it comes to spiritual warfare, we focus more on the war than the heart. We settle for language of fighting instead of the actions of resistance. In essence, instead of living in the land of freedom, we visit the field of battle.

The Devil

What’s lost on most of my tribe is that Jesus came as a Rabbi.

He didn’t come like Elijah calling down fire, or Moses turning water to blood, or Samson knocking over buildings. He was widely regarded as a teacher. And in that teaching we are told that he came to destroy the works of the devil.

I have been to a whole bunch of spiritual warfare meetings where there was a lot of screaming but very little victory. As 21^st century Christians we need to forge a new Spirit-Filled pattern of spiritual warfare that stays true to our historic faith and actually works.

Satan’s primary weapon is the simple lie and the concept of truth is under attack in the West. This is way bigger than the current culture wars or political discourse. This goes to the foundation of societies and the Church.

Lies are always destructive even when we are deceived into thinking that lying will be an advantage to us. This was highlighted in a court ruling last month. Wherever you stand in the political spectrum is irrelevant for what the judge said in the recent civil trial that’s ongoing in New York against Trump Enterprises.

In his summary judgment, the judge wrote,

“In defendants’ world: rent regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air; a disclaimer by one party casting responsibility on another party exonerates the other party’s lies…” Engoron wrote, citing multiple arguments made by defense to justify the allegedly inflated valuations of Trump’s assets. “That is a fantasy world, not the real world.” (emphasis mine)

As one commentator put it, “Trump resorted to a Postmodernist denial of objective truth.”

No one knows if any of us will be alive long enough to see the end of this proceeding making its way through the courts, but the truth itself is on trial. Is there absolute truth? Can we know the truth? Does it matter?

The truth not only matters, it is everything

The idea that there is no absolute truth is an unchristian statement. It’s the opposite of who Jesus is and what He said about his life.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me.” There is a wide way of the world and the narrow way of Jesus. The question is, will we choose the narrow way of truth?

Deion Sanders at the center of the war

This leads me to Deion Sanders and his recent interview on 60 Minutes. Sanders is known for being a flashy athlete playing football and baseball at the most elite levels. But make no mistake, Sanders has been known to play the fool for the press. In reality his football IQ coupled with his elite athleticism made him a Hall of Fame cornerback. A position eclipsed only by quarterback in complexity.

The interview was challenging Sanders on his coaching style. How he got rid of players once he came to Colorado and what he would do if a coach came into town telling his sons they weren’t any good and needed to leave the team.

You can find the full video here. 

For those not trusting me enough to watch the video, Sander said,

“Truth is good for kids. We are so busy lying, we don’t recognize truth in society. We want everyone to feel good. That’s not reality.“

The judge said, “That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”

God is talking here.

Our world is embracing a postmodern ethic where those who are willing to tell the truth are treated as if they were at fault and the lie that feels better is celebrated.

The Bible is pretty explicit in warning us against this.

But Jesus still stands as the pillar of truth. To those who lie he says,

You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:44

Coach Sanders has been accused of coaching just so his son has a leg up in football as if that is something to shrink back from.

The reality is, Jesus celebrates when we tell the truth and Coach Sanders is letting it fly. And in this postmodern age, its leaders like that we need to celebrate.

Lots of people talk about the obedience necessary to follow God. Not as many people discover the vulnerability it takes to be truly obedient. We were never called to be followers of Jesus through grit and willpower.

Jesus said He would send the Helper. Holy Spirit draws us into the divine plan of God provoking us to believe beyond our understanding and seeing what we have never seen before.

He allows us to be disappointed at the failure of our own plans to help us to be amenable to His.

Photo by Kinga Howard on Unsplash

I have recently become struck by the concept of embodying the word of God.

We understand that Jesus is the word that became flesh but even that is a more complex concept that at first glance. The writer of Ephesians tells us that before the foundations of the world, God chose us in Christ to be holy and blameless in his sight and to be filled with love. That means that before all creation was, Christ was, and in fact we were.

The concept of Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary is complex enough. When you take a deep dive in the Christology you begin wrestling with the concept the writers of the Creed called fully God and fully man. The Council of Chalcedon helped pave the way for this concept and put an end to various heresies regarding the divinity of Jesus, yet the idea of the fully God yet fully man Savior of the world is a difficult one to pin down.

It’s like a blob of fluid on a table that is clearly there but anytime you try to touch it specifically it squishes away from you. From afar, Christology is very simple. The fact is that Mary was somehow inseminated by Holy Spirit and the child that she bore was Jesus the son of God.

If you are a Christian for any amount of time this is what we believe.

But if you break down that sentence it becomes extremely complicated to understand. How exactly was Mary impregnated? Was her egg used or was she a divine surrogate? How do we reconcile the concept that God is unchanging while at the same time understanding at one point Salvation was dependent upon the breast of Mary? John wrote that Jesus was the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Try to explain to me how Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary before she was ever pregnant.

These are all mysteries and Christianity is filled with mysteries. It is not the goal of theology to settle all mysteries. The goal of theology is to put mysteries in their proper context. All these things about Jesus are true and yet I do not understand most of them.

I have learned to become okay with that.

What I’m wrestling with more and more is not the word becoming flesh in Jesus but the word becoming flesh and us.

What most people call the embodiment is a result of discipleship. If I live a more holy life I will become more Christlike. I don’t know if that’s true. I’m certainly in favor of living a more holy life and I pray that I live a more holy life today than I did yesterday. Likewise I hope I live a more holy life tomorrow that I did today. Yet and still, I think embodiment is more about yieldedness.

The prophets of the Old Testament embodied the word of the Lord in a way we do not see on a grand scale today.

When we think of embodiment we think of living sin free, free from the entanglements of the enemy, and living in the perfect will of God. Unfortunately we have the will of God enmeshed with the American dream. The result of this is that we think yielding is to God produces prosperity in our lives.

The prophets knew better. They embodied the blessings and power of God as well as the judgments of God. They were the word of the Lord to Judah and Israel and sometimes that word was not pleasant. I meditate on this a little bit in this week’s podcast. I pray it’s a blessing to you.

Most people without seminary education are left wading through the internet looking for answers to tough passages of the Bible but for the cost of a few books, you can build a solid research library.

In this video, I layout how to start your research library at three price points, free, under $50, and under $100. I hope this is helpful for anyone wanting to grow in their knowledge of the Bible.

Most of these movements are born from a charismatic visionary. But it’s my contention that it only takes three generations to go from cult of personality to full-blown cult. Every legitimate revival produces Bible colleges. Every cult of personality produces ministry schools. The stream I am from produced a ton of ministry schools and no accredited Bible colleges.

A comparison:

New ministry schools focus on the ministry model of a “successful” Christian leader. This is the easiest path to cultic behavior. The center of faith has moved. It is rare that they admit that this is what’s happening but pragmatism wins out verse orthodox praxis in these schools. What they produce is revered so whatever is needed to produce it is fair game.

New Bible colleges teach a hermeneutic based on what sustained the move of God it was birthed from. Both have a skewed view but Bible colleges try to develop a systematic theology that views the text and tradition, even if they do it through a lens. Many people will be in those Bible colleges, study the text and come to very different conclusions than their tradition teaches. This is healthy and God-honoring.

In my experience, a move of God is normally started by someone who had Bible training but felt called to emphasize one aspect of ministry. They have a move of God and start a ministry school. Those students are unmoored from the text and by design find their spiritual identity in the move.

Three Generations to Birth a Cult

The first generation (the generation that were at the forefront of the movement) decided that large parts of their biblical education were irrelevant and teach a narrow orthodoxy to the second generation. They know more than they teach and their ministries are influenced by the “ancient boundaries” but don’t pass that knowledge on. So their acolytes don’t get the full picture of the text. They are taught that the ministry of the first generation is the main thing. They were taught by educated people but they themselves are not educated.

The third generation is where things get weird. The third generation thinks the move is the biblical foundation. Spiritual manifestations, conference size, social media influence, and the ability to think of “new things” are confirmation of God’s presence and favor. It manifests in a million different ways depending on the tradition but it is always the same.

We are watching this play out at Hillsong. They had a ministry school with the purpose of making Hillsong Sunday service cast members. It is starting to fall apart as it should. But like many who have gone before them, they have some decisions to make because this could go one of three ways.

Three Outcomes

1. They realize they are unmoored from the text and tradition and get some training. This is akin to deprogramming and it is painful. Disillusionment and a path to health is the result. A recent example of this was the Vineyard. Because the way Wimber emphasized education, they were able to grow and adapt. They don’t see the spiritual manifestations they once saw, but by and large they have healthy churches. What has happened at Anaheim Vineyard is a purposeful departure from this path toward the third possibility.

2. They slowly fade out. There are no deep roots and no lasting vision. The leaders of the Toronto Revival started Partners in Harvest. It had not theological roots and languished as a little more than conference mailing list. Near the end, they tried to knit them into a cult of personality group but there was no longer personalities strong enough to pull it off and it wasn’t healthy enough to move into the first group.

Since then there is a group of leaders trying to rebuild the network as a fellowship of churches. I was a part of the network when it collapsed. It was sad but not unforeseen.

3. This is the worst of all worlds. They become a full-blown cult. What the founder of their movement taught becomes the new sacred text. A recent example of this in my stream is the Branhamites, the remaining followers of William Branham. Branham was both a gifted prophet and a false prophet at various times in his ministry like A.A. Allen and Alexander Dowie. The later two were unable to leave a legacy but the WOF folks are feverishly trying to build their own.

Who is really hurt by this?

I recently met a girl who was interning at a church who had just finished ministry school at a leading church that is approaching the third-generation phase. She announced her graduation with such pride. I felt so sad for her.

Those ministry schools are never connected to a movement with career paths. Students graduate with a piece of paper and no credentials, no biblical training, and no job. Just three years of their lives dedicated to being baptized in a cult of personality. When these folks reach the real world, if they don’t have the talent to start their own cult of personality, they fail miserably.

So in my church I direct leaders to get bible classes from a place that could lead to denominational credentialing. Instead of saying, I went to famous author school of supernatural ministry. I want people to get a theological education that enables them to read the Sacred Text and interpret the timeless Gospel the world needs to hear.

Instead of being aligned with the flavor of the month teacher, I want them aligned with the historic faith. It’s that foundation that brings supernatural results, changes lives for generations, and births movements that stand the test of time.

The RCL Daily reading is good at painting a picture that unfolds in three acts, Psalm, OT reading, and NT reading. I read and take notes in my devotion time then share them on several platforms.

On Saturday I do a longer dive into the week or on that day’s if so lead. I plan to do Saturday with someone else in the future. In case you want to follow along you can find today’s episode on Spotify here or follow the link below to find it on your favorite platform.

Here is a link to everywhere you can find the podcast: https://linktr.ee/spiritwordpower

The easiest way to describe my first church was mildly charismatic fundamentalist. That church stressed holiness and weirdly, financial responsibility. It was the policy of the church that if a young man wanted to propose to a woman in that congregation he had to meet with the senior pastor and present his finances. At the time it seemed like he was looking out for the young women but looking back, that’s just so weird. Of course, it goes without saying it became commonplace that older men married younger women and many women never got married at all.

Theology wasn’t particularly important nor was Bible knowledge. Getting your life together and obeying the leadership was really all you needed to know. I did learn a lot about Jezebel, being cursed with a curse, and the blessings of obedience. But there’s not a lot that I learned that I would incorporate into a foundations class. If you weren’t looking at porn, earned more than you spent, and you tithed, you were good.

I was sent out from that church as part of a church plant which moved “into the river.” After a couple decades of maturity, I see that season with a whole new perspective. Having come out of that fundamentalist church background, my pastor dove headfirst into this river of grace and God’s love. The Toronto Revival was in full swing, and we were swept up into it. The pastor deconstructed a bunch of the fundamentalism from the church we were sent out from but conveniently still believed all the teachings on obeying your pastor. If my first church was light on theology, this church was downright anemic.

I saw God do incredible miracles and manifest in ridiculous ways. But the key to discipleship in this season was soaking in God’s love. You might put on some sappy slow Christian music, lay on the ground, and let your imagination run wild about God’s love invading your life. If you had experiences with God’s love in prayer you were good.

From the beginning I was a revivalist at heart. As I saw the church plant I was a part of drift further and further from anything remotely theologically sound, I effectively began being pastored by itinerant evangelists who didn’t know me. In my revivalist phase the goal was to get people saved and baptized in the Holy Ghost. That was it. You have encounters with God, carry those encounters to other people, get them to have similar encounters, and I guess Holy Spirit would pastor them. That last part was never really fully articulated in my mind. I guess I figured that if you connected people to God, they could work out the rest. Now the goal was to operate in the gifts, get lost folks encountering God, get caught up in worship and intercession, and you were good.

Eventually I started an outreach that turned into a church, and I entered the pastoral phase of my walk. I still embraced all the revivalist stuff, but I was really interested in a church culture that facilitated transformation. I used a lot of materials from a church that I admired at the time. Since I had been under such heavy-handed leaders in the past, I overcorrected by not being a strong leader myself. I allowed some people who refused to learn theology, grow in character, receive correction, or really make themselves teachable in any meaningful way to walk in positions of authority.

We did a bunch of culture of honor stuff in this season and as I watched the church I modeled it from begin to implode, I watched how narcissistic the same teachings made some people in my church. The goal was to see the gold in people and tell it to them. Be nice to people and encourage them and you are good.

Then I went to seminary learned stuff. Some stuff contradicted other stuff I learned. Other stuff I learned made stuff makes sense. Other stuff made me question if my earlier pastors ever studied theology. This was a painful season because I had to step back and look at the big picture in light of what was truth and what was false light. But in this season, if you knew the “stuff” and where it came from you were good.

Now, I am far more at rest. I believe in parts of all that I have been through. But what I am landing on these days is that people need to learn the rhythm of being a follower of Jesus. The measuring sticks are all man-made. The goals you were taught in the past all become fuzzy. Counter cultural spiritual formation, encountering the living God, engaging in the mission Jesus left for the church are the three hallmarks of my faith now.

I still agree with my fundamentalist self that my life should be different. But it isn’t defined by whatever hangups my senior pastor had, it’s defined by what counter cultural spiritual formation looks like in the context of my ministry. I still believe that we should regularly encounter the living God in worship and intercession. But I have transformative experiences with God in reading the Psalms in ways that were fleeting in my times soaking on the floor for hours. I so desperately want people to be baptized in the Holy Ghost and power but not as part of some sort of circus sideshow. I now see it happening in ways that connects people to God and becomes an open conduit of His love for them.

So, as I’m writing this instead of completing my class, I feel even more justified in how I plan to teach it. Most Christian foundation classes start with sin and justification. They go into the Bible and the Trinity. All that is good. But I plan on starting with how to pray. I’m going to talk about how to read the Bible as a way that shapes your beliefs. We’re going to talk about the role the community of faith plays in the life of a believer. We’re going to talk about living in the rhythm of grace.

I think that will be good.

Book Photo by Glen Noble