Courage: being who God has called us to be

Willow Creek. Saddleback. Mars Hill (Seattle). Mars Hill (Michigan). Thomas Road Baptist Church. The Crystal Cathedral. Coral Ridge Ministries.

What do all these ministries have in common? Not much, in some cases. They’ve all taken a lot of flack for various reasons. If you like one of them, you don’t like all of them. They’re all huge. They’ve all been effective in different ways, reaching different people.

This may sound overly simple, but before Willow Creek, there was no Willow Creek/seeker sensitive movement (at least not on that scale.) Before Saddleback, there was no articulation of the Purpose Driven principles and pastors did not preach in obscenely ugly Hawaiian shirts. Before Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Seattle, fundamentalists didn’t cuss while talking from the pulpit about drinking beer. Before Jerry Falwell and Thomas Road … well, I’m going to leave that one alone.

The point is, all these ministries and their leaders have had the courage to figure out where God was leading them, and go there. There’s a part in the movie About a Boy where the boy tells Hugh Grant’s character that he might have a shot with the woman he loves, if he doesn’t bugger it up (or something like that). Then he comments in narration that he wasn’t trying to be excessively negative — he just doesn’t think that couples are the wave of the future. You need more people in your life; you need back-up.

Well, being like Saddleback is not the wave of the future. Being like Mars Hill (either one) is not the wave of the future. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum. What men like Jerry Falwell and Bill Hybels and Rick Warren have been showing us for years, men like Rob Bell and Mark Driscoll and Brian Mclaren (love them or hate them) are showing us now. God blesses us, and we are most effective, when we have the cojones to listen to God and find out his unique vision for us and our communities and then go for it. Our world doesn’t need a “next Billy Graham,” or a next anyone. Our world needs people of God who are courageous, who are willing to risk it all by learning from others yet not following anyone’s blueprint but God’s for their lives and ministries. True ministry effectiveness cannot be prefabricated and sold in a pretty package. It can only come as we humble ourselves and step out in faith towards what God has for us.

I am encouraged that I see this being worked out in the lives of churches and men of God whom I know and respect and, in some cases, love as close brothers. I see it in new churches like River Ridge and plants like The Dialogue Church. We are seeking to put it into practice at Living Hope. And I see this process taking place in the lives of friends like Scott, Matt Bruns, Tim and beaNie, and others whom I know but not as well, like Jared Byas and Steve Jesmer. (Actually, the genesis of this post lies in some wise words from Steve.)

Carry on, brothers. Go full out. Don’t be scared into taking the “safe” route. Cause in 20 years, I want to look around and see the amazing things God has done in our lives and ministries as we’re sown across the country and maybe the world. God has a plan, he is moving, and he will be glorified as we seek his will.

Loving Our City, 3

This is the last bit of those notes.

1. We communicate honestly (John 4:10-26)

Finally, as we begin to develop and pay attention to relationships with people outside of our church circle, we need to be open in our communication. This comes on a couple of levels:

1. Speak with simple openness about faith and life.

Honestly, this one is kind of tough at first. After we moved here from Virginia we started spending more time with friends and relatives and acquaintances who don’t know Jesus. And it was easy enough for me to hang out with them – but I felt awkward talking about church stuff and Jesus, because I didn’t want them to think I was trying to preach at them or that I was somehow flaky or something. But then I was challenged and taught while I was reading a book called “The Radical Reformission,” by Mark Driscoll. In the book, he’s describing the philosophy and approach of the people in his church to evangelism and says:

“Reformission Christians are not ashamed of the gospel, and they speak about Jesus and pray to him in front of their lost friends as they would around their Christians friends, and their lost friends appreciate their authenticity. Their lost friends are comfortable asking them questions about the Christian life, and these reformission Christians have earned the right to give answers as a result of their friendship and hospitality.”

This is so key. We don’t need to be preachy, and we shouldn’t expect lost people who don’t know Jesus yet to live like they do – but we must be open about our life and faith.

1. Be willing to bring the spiritual realm into natural realm conversations. (vv 10-14)

Jesus goes effortlessly from talking about physical water to talking about salvation – certainly, it takes the woman a while to catch up, but when she does, she is hooked.

1. Don’t ignore questions, but don’t get bogged down by them. (vv 21-24)

The Samaritan woman had questions about the differences between the way Jews worshipped and the way Samaritans worshipped. Jesus didn’t sidestep the question – he addressed it. And the answer he gave went beyond just the content of the question – where we worship – to the nature of worship – in spirit and in truth.

As people get to know you, they will be curious about your Christianity. Eventually, you will have the opportunity to talk about spiritual things, and they will have questions about all kinds of things. It may be question about anything from why Christians don’t support a woman’s right to choose, to how you can believe the Bible, to what you think about the death penalty, to why there are so many different kinds of churches. When these questions come up … don’t dodge them. Tell them what you think, and how that relates to your faith. If you don’t know or if you haven’t thought about it enough, then it’s probably best to honestly admit that you don’t know. But when the question involves a bigger issue – and most questions do, even though it’s unconsciously – we have to learn to see it and address it.

1. Speak from the perspective of the gospel into people’s circumstances. (vv 13-26)

1. Don’t ignore the problems in people’s lives. (vv 17-18)

Jesus didn’t pretend the woman’s problems didn’t exist – he actually pointed them out to her. Now we can’t normally look at someone and prophetically know their life story and all their issues – but we should be willing to listen to find out what they are, and to engage in conversation about them, which leads to the next point.

1. Be willing to talk about how the gospel can change people’s lives. (13-14, 26)

Jesus told this woman straight out that he could satisfy the thirst in her life for peace and fulfillment. He said he was the key to satisfaction, to contentment. When the opportunity arises, we need to be able and ready to communicate the truth about how Jesus can impact someone’s life.

So the big question on this front is, how do we know on what level we should be communicating at any given time? I think you can guess, if you’ve been paying attention. There’s a person who’s been involved with us at each step so far and who continues to be active in this one. That person is the Holy Spirit. Once again, we rely on God’s spirit to lead us and to help us say the wise and appropriate thing at any given time. If we take this stuff into our own hands, we just screw it up. But as we rely on God’s spirit, he makes us effective. And biggest means of being able to hear the Holy Spirit as he leads us is having a close personal relationship with God, where we’re spending time with him every day reading his word and praying and listening for his voice. We can’t be effective in reaching other people with the Gospel unless the power of the Gospel is being worked out and made clear in our own lives.

Conclusion:

In closing, I want to look at two things: First, the end of the story in John 4. We find that this woman is so affected by the truth of the gospel and Jesus as savior that she runs out and tells her whole town about it, so that many of them come out, meet Jesus, and are converted too. That’s the end result God can bring through our relationships with people who don’t know him. We end up making more disciples of Jesus. And as God’s people, that is our primary call in our community and in this world. We need to be making disciples.

Secondly, as food for thought for this week, I want us to look back at the story of Matthew once more. Mark 2:15 says “Levi invited Jesus and his disciples to his home as dinner guests, along with many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners. (There were many people of this kind among Jesus’ followers.)” Now, this is another thing that goes against our current norms and expectations. Uncommitted people, still in their sinful lifestyles, were following Jesus around and listening to all his teaching and hanging out with him. Now there was a later point when he called the people who were following him to a deeper level of discipleship, and those who didn’t want to commit left him then. But the fact is that these people – who had not yet trusted Christ as their savior – were so interested him and captivated by his life and teaching that they just wanted to be around him. As believers, we have Christ living in us. When was the last time that a person who did not know Jesus was so interested in your life and captivated by how you lived that they just wanted to be around you and come to church with you and do bible study? Honestly, I don’t know if that’s ever happened to me. But if we take Christ as our example, that should be happening. This was one of the most convicting parts of this message to me this week as I prepared to share, and this is the question we need to ask ourselves. Do I live a life that is so distinctively transformed that people who don’t know Jesus want to understand better why I am the way I am? Or have I simply set up my life in such a way that I never really even come into contact with people who don’t know him?

I pray for this community of believers that we will become a group of people through whom and through whose relationships God works to reach and transform our community as a whole. Let’s learn to follow him together.

Loving Our City, Par Deux

By the way, in case anybody’s wondering, I think the message went well on Sunday morning. It seemed to connect with a number of people … now if we can just work on applying it.

1. We learn to see people for their humanity (John 4:9, 27, 17-18)

There were all kinds of barriers between Jesus and this woman going into their interaction. There are two that really stick out, though, and these are barriers we still struggle to cross today.

1. Barrier 1: Culture (vv 9, 27)

Jesus was a man, and a rabbi or teacher. In the eastern common to both of them, rabbis didn’t talk to women – especially sinful women like this one. But Jesus consistently challenged this cultural barrier, both by his interaction with this Samaritan woman and by his direct interaction with women like Mary and Martha and Mary Magdalene and the other women who seem to have traveled with Jesus and his disciples and ministered to them.

Furthermore, we already talked about Jews and Samaritans. They did not get along, they did not interact unless it was absolutely unavoidable. The Jews possessed a racial hatred for the Samaritans, considering them all basically on the level of illegitimate children because they were the descendants of Jews who had hung on in the region and then intermarried with gentiles. This was no small thing. But Jesus completely ignored these conventions and addressed the woman in a personal and friendly way. It may look like he was kind of bossing her around, but culturally, he was honoring her by addressing her and asking her for this favor.

1. Barrier 2: Sin (vv 17-18)

This woman was made further untouchable by the sin that had come to characterize and define her life. Now a normal stranger wouldn’t have known this, but everyone from her town would have. Now this woman wasn’t a prostitute, but she was almost certainly known as a “loose woman.” It sounds like she had slept with just about everybody in town, whether as a result or as a cause of failed marriages we don’t really know. But when you picture this woman … I don’t know how many of us have seen and spoken to real prostitutes. But if you have, you know that usually, you can see the hard-knock life on their faces. Whatever beauty they had at one point has been worn away by their destructive life. That’s the woman Jesus is talking to. And once again, if he had been following the prejudices of his culture, he never would have reached out. If he had been scared that her sinner-ness would rub off on him, he never would have reached out.

For another example of this, we should go back to Matthew. The story of how Jesus called Matthew to be his disciple is really mind-blowing. Jesus was walking by Matthew’s tax collecting booth and called him right out of it. Now we need to understand what’s going on here. First of all: who here likes to pay taxes? Who loves looking at their check and seeing that a quarter of their money is gone before they ever get it? Well, it was much worse in the Roman Empire. To be a successful tax collector in those days, you had to basically rob people. You worked for the Roman government, and you had to collect what they required. Then to make your living, you just added on as much as you could extort from people. You didn’t get paid a normal wage; you got paid whatever you could bring in. So the tax collectors were hated and vilified for their betrayal of their own nation and the way they made their living. Now, to once again draw a parallel for today, this is as if Jesus went and found the guy working at the adult bookstore in town and said “hey, come follow me. I think you’d make a good disciple.” Does that make any sense to us? It didn’t to the Pharisees. But Jesus looked beyond Matthew’s sin, saw him for who he was and who God intended him to be, and brought him out. You notice that there’s no mention that Jesus said right then, “you need to quit your tax-collecting.” That was something that happened naturally as Matthew learned to follow Christ.

So this idea is exemplified by Christ in his ministry in general. Let’s get something straight – all the people he was interacting with were sinners, religious and irreligious alike. But Jesus made no distinction between the two. The ones were socially unacceptable because of their sin actually got more of his attention. He didn’t ignore the religious people. He ate with Pharisees too. But it sure sounds like he ate with the riff-raff more often.

Application: Now this is something that we can easily blow off, but if we are to fulfill God’s calling on our lives, we have to do self-examination at this point. We should ask ourselves this question:


What kind of people am I uncomfortable being around?


What kind of people can I just not stand? This is tough, and once again, we have to rely on the Holy Spirit and we have to listen to him and be obedient. We have to allow God to convict of our sinful prejudices. This is important, because Jesus loves those kind of people just as much as he loves our kind of people. Their sin condemns them no less and no more than our sin condemned us before Christ redeemed us! And Christ’s love is most clearly demonstrated when we reach out beyond these barriers to build loving relationships.

Loving Our City, Part 1

Some notes from my message for tomorrow … I think I’ll post them in three parts.
How do you feel about sinners?

How do you feel about sin?

We talk about loving the sinner and hating the sin, but I think that our gut reaction to the word “sinner” is worse than our reaction to the word “sin.” This is because the concept of sin is abstract, but a sinner is a person at who we can look and whose character we judge by their most obvious flaws. This was the case in Jesus’ day, too. There were certain groups of people who were characterized by their behavior and judged to be sinners, people who were not “good Jews” but who very clearly failed to keep the law of Moses or fulfill the requirements of the Torah (the Jewish Bible) and the Talmud (the religiously binding commentary on the Jewish Bible). Today we’re going to learn from Jesus’ example how we are to go about loving our community, especially when they don’t look, speak, act, or believe like us. We’re going to see Jesus’ interaction, related to us in John 4, with a Samaritan woman who needed him.

I. We seek interaction with people who aren’t like us. (John 4:4-7)
A. We intentionally put ourselves in places where we can meet and get to know people who don’t believe in Jesus. (v 4)
Jesus didn’t have to go through Samaria, and a good Jew never would have. Samaritans were absolutely despised by Jews – they were held in utter contempt, they were seen as being of less value … if you want to understand the reaction Jews had to the word “Samaritan” gauge your reaction when I say “homosexual”. Now there is a difference, because it was no sin to be born a Samaritan, while the homosexual lifestyle is characterized by a particular sin. But this is still a good comparison, because what we as conservative Christians who believe in marriage and traditional values feel when someone starts talking about homosexual activists – that’s kind of like what the Jews felt when they thought about the Samaritans. It’s the same kind of gut emotional reaction.
B. We take the initiative to open communication (v 7)
You’ll notice that Jesus didn’t just sit and wait for this woman to come over and speak to him. He took the step to open the lines of communication. This is also a good dating tip, by the way. If you’re interested in somebody, don’t just wait for them to magically decide to speak to you. Take the initiative! Anyway, we get kind of shy about doing that sort of thing, whether it’s in a dating context or we’re looking to develop relationships with unsaved people (and hopefully it’s not both at the same time, because that’s a whole different issue.) But anyway, once Jesus did speak to this woman, she replied. She didn’t ignore him. She thought he was crazy at first, but at least the lines of communication were open.
C. We spend significant amounts of time with these people.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus spent enough time with “sinners” that he was accused of being one or at the least of behaving inappropriately for someone who called himself a rabbi.

Mark 2:13-17
13 Then Jesus went out to the lakeshore again and taught the crowds that were coming to him. 14 As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at his tax collector’s booth. “Follow me and be mydisciple,” Jesus said to him. So Levi got up and followed him.
15 Later, Levi invited Jesus and his disciples to his home as dinner guests, along
with many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners. (There were many people of this kind among Jesus’ followers.) 16 But when the teachers of religious law
who were Pharisees[b] saw him eating with tax collectors and other sinners, they asked his disciples, “Why does he eat with such scum?[c]”

Now there are multiple instances of Jesus doing this kind of thing – he purposely detours through the hellhole of Samaria; and there are multiple accounts of his eating at disreputable people’s houses. The disciple Matthew and Zacchaeus are good examples. He did not hesitate to purposely go where he could meet and talk and laugh with and love on people who were looked down on, people who were obviously sinners.he calls a tax collector – one of the most hated sinners in Jewish society – to be his disciple and then goes and hangs out at a dinner party with that tax collector and all his sinful friends; he does something very similar with Zacchaeus in Jericho in Luke 19.
If you are a religious person in the time of Christ seeing this, or a religious person now reading this with an open mind, you have to be wondering: What is going on? Why is Jesus spending so much time with the wrong sort of people? That’s exactly what the Pharisees wanted to know, and Jesus even mentioned it in

Matthew 11:18-19
18 For John didn’t spend his time eating and drinking, and you say, ‘He’s possessed by a demon.’ 19 The Son of Man,[a] on the other hand, feasts and drinks, and you say, ‘He’s a glutton and a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and other sinners!’ (Here is part of the answer:) But wisdom is shown to be right by its results.”

Application:
For us, this means that in our work, or if we have hobbies or activities that lead us to interaction with members of the community in general, we seek meaningful interaction with people who think and believe and behave differently than we do. That is what Jesus did!
I don’t want to minimize the questions that come up when I start saying that we should spend lots of time with people who drink too much and curse a lot and prefer alternative lifestyles and don’t believe in Jesus. Because the Bible also teaches us that we need to have friends in our lives who will build us up, not tear us down, and Paul specifically says in

1 Corinthians 15: 33 “Don’t be fooled by those who say such things, for ‘bad
company corrupts good character.’”

There are a couple of principles that can guide us through this difficult ground:
1. We absolutely must be sensitive and obedient to the leadership of the Holy Spirit in all of our personal interactions.
The thing about relying on the Holy Spirit is that it is more challenging than following rules. Often, it involves making decisions based on general principles rather than specific guidelines. This is true in every area, and it’s why people get into legalism. It’s why the Pharisees of Jesus’ time came up with hundreds of rules about how to keep the Mosaic Law – it was easier to have everything spelled out than to bear the weight of making decisions based on the principles of the law and God’s leading. If we have rules set up in our mind that cause us to never go where certain people are or not to speak to certain people, it’s easy to keep those rules. But it’s challenging to bear the responsibility of walking closely with Christ so that we can listen to his voice and let him guide our day-by-day actions. And even though it’s challenging, it is one hundred percent necessary. If we don’t learn to do this, we won’t live effective Christian lives.
2. We do need to be part of a strong network of Christian friends where we can support each other and build each other up and help each other get closer to God.
Proverbs 27:17 “As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.”
Jesus, although he wasn’t going to sin, did as a human being have a need for companionship and Godly friendship, and he actually modeled this for us in that the people he spent the most time with were his disciples – they were believers.
3. We should focus on opportunities for meaningful interaction
When I say meaningful interaction, I mean times and places where there is opportunity for actual communication – it doesn’t have to be super deep, especially when we’re first getting to know someone, it just has to be valid. The reason I say this is because as I was talking over this sermon with my wife, she brought up the fact that when she was in high school, her non-believing friends had parties where the only purpose was to, as quickly as possible, get drunk and be sexually immoral. Should she have been at those parties? No. You can’t really have meaningful interaction with someone who’s drunk off their butt. But when the opportunity arises to pursue mutual interests, or spend time with someone in a way that you can get to know them better – go for it!