–Michael Bird

What words or phrases come to mind? Failure, all have sinned, nobody’s perfect, sinful nature?

With that in mind, watch this clip from “Facing the Giants.”

Pure inspiration. As good as a Rocky movie.

I remember learning about self-fulfilling prophecy in high school. According to our good friends at Wikipedia, it is “a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true … due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.”

One of the core teachings of the church is our depravity due to our sinful nature. The inherent, unspoken message is “You are screwed up, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

I am not saying this is not true. I am not implying salvation lies within each of us, if only we can unlock the magic key inside or get on the path of self-discovery.

But what happens when the dominant, constant message I hear about myself is I’m a mess? And my own experience confirms this? I can become a hot mess! Hopefully, it drives me to the Risen Christ in total dependence on Him to remake me into a new creation.

But in the meantime, in-between-time, as I continue to fall short, what do I do? Wallow in misery or grow hard-hearted and cold over time?

Let’s allow Moses to throw his two cents in here. Moses, the great prophet and leader of Israel during the Exodus, the self-proclaimed “most humble guy ever,” is preaching his last sermon to God’s people. Moses is near the end of his life, the people are on the cusp of entering the long-awaited Promised Land, and God has established through giving His Law the way of life He intends for His people.

Here is what Moses says in Deuteronomy 30:10-14 regarding God’s intended ways of living:

The Lord your God will delight in you if you obey his voice and keep the commands and decrees written in this Book of Instruction, and if you turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and soul. This command I am giving you today is not too difficult for you to understand, and it is not beyond your reach. It is not kept in heaven, so distant that you must ask, ‘Who will go up to heaven and bring it down so we can hear it and obey?’ It is not kept beyond the sea, so far away that you must ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to bring it to us so we can hear it and obey?’ No, the message is very close at hand; it is on your lips and in your heart so that you can obey it.

Why would Moses go and say a thing like that? When he says God’s ways are within their reach, he doesn’t mean that literally, does he?

This is before Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and ascension. Before the coming of the Holy Spirit in new creation power, when things became upended and now through faith we are holy temples where God may dwell.

It seems our potential might be more than we realize. That the image of God (that has been cracked by sin, but still remains!) might mean more than we realize. Maybe our capacity for good and our capacity to obey is greater than we realize.

We do not put limitations on ourselves physically or emotionally. When we hear stories of great human accomplishments in the arena of sports, or stories of survival despite the worst of conditions (such as the Holocaust), we do not doubt their truthfulness. We realize and recognize our potential.

But when it comes to living God’s way, we see ourselves as defeated before we have even tried. Persevering and overcoming rarely enter our vocabulary, yet these are the very words we hear throughout the New Testament epistles!

I am not proposing we can be sinless, attain perfection, or earn salvation. But I wonder if our focus on sins and the sinful nature has actually become an enabling device to sin.

I leave you with one final thought from Hebrews 12:4.

In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

What you believe about yourself is critical. What you believe about God is even more critical.

Thoughts?

Today is the start of Lent, the forty-day period leading up to our celebration of Easter. It’s tradition to give something up for Lent, whether it’s chocolate, TV, Facebook, or the musical sounds of Justin Bieber. It is a wonderful, ancient practice that has been getting more attention the last few years. Its benefit is in preparing our hearts and reflecting on what our Lord Jesus went through for us. To suffer and find some solidarity with Christ’s sufferings.

Why do we need to do this?

Glad you asked. We live in a culture that is so bubble-wrapped and cushy that giving something up has become a felt need for many of us. Suffering is a rarity. It is, because when it comes our way we are always shocked. We live “blessed” here in America.

We have fully adopted this mindset in the church. We equate God’s blessing with the American dream. While we scoff at the ridiculousness of the “health and wealth/name it and claim it” gospel, we cling to a version of it. In Christ, God is ready to give us “The Life You’ve Always Wanted.” Not to pick on the book with this title, but this is such a popular message and an underlying layer of Christian sub-culture.

While I do believe God wants to bless His people (so that they in turn are a blessing), this was not the central focus of Jesus’ message about the kingdom or what life would look like for kingdom people.

The message of Jesus could accurately be titled “The Life You Never Wanted.” Men come up to him asking to be his disciples, and he tries to convince them they don’t really want this. He tells stories of counting the cost, asks his closest followers if they want to drink the cup he’s been given to drink, and tells the crowd that to follow him is to GO TO THE CROSS.

That’s not a popular message. That’s not sunshine and gumdrops. That’s not the American dream.

And it’s not a message I like too much, either. I want just a little bit of Jesus. I echo the Apostle Paul, but I leave parts off: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.”

I have become too comfortable with one side of the coin and have justified not looking at the other side of the coin. I love my new identity in Christ, but I ignore my calling as Christ’s. The call to take up my cross.

Lent is an opportunity to embrace that call, even if it’s in a safe, small, temporary way.

So here’s my deal: I’ve been thinking about Lent all week. And now it’s here. And I still don’t know what I’m going to give up… and to be honest, I don’t want to give anything up.

Do you know what I told myself this morning? Maybe I don’t have to literally give anything up. Maybe I can just fully embrace the idea of being willing to give something up, and that’s good enough.

Pathetic. Cop out.

I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I will be giving something up for the next 40 days.

Maybe even longer.

How about you? Do you feel this tension inside you? That God is calling you to something grander than the American dream?

To A Life You Never Wanted?

–Rodney Reeves, Spirituality According to Paul (33)

Pretty simple, huh?

This past weekend our church hosted a marriage conference called Love and Respect. So many light bulbs went off for me, it was like a fireworks display in my head. If you get the chance to read the book or go through the material, jump on it. Several people had told me how good it was, and I believed them to a degree but was also skeptical. I’m dumb; it was better than they said it would be.

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, and since I need to blog about something, let me share an overview of the conference and a couple of the big takeaways for me.

Women need love the same as they need air to breathe.

Men need respect the same as they need air to breathe.

In Scripture, husbands are commanded to love their wives. Wives are commanded to respect their husbands. Interesting, right?

The marriage relationship was uniquely designed by God so that these two different needs would best be met within this relationship. A husband can meet the wife’s need for love in a way no one else can. Likewise, a wife can meet the husband’s need for respect in a way no one else can (with the possible exception of Chuck Norris. If he respects you, you’re pretty much set for life!).

It’s brilliant and simple. Of course, the difficulty lies in that women speak and hear through the filter of love; men through the filter of respect. So there is a constant issue of misunderstanding each other. Mutual understanding is more important than communication alone.

Over the course of the typical marriage between two good-willed people who love each other, what commonly occurs is both spouses seeing him/herself as right and the other as wrong. Misunderstanding abounds, wounds are given, and distance grows.

This is called the “Crazy Cycle,” and the point was made we can never totally get off this cycle because we are fallen people. But we can limit the length of time we’re on it and make things better. We can learn to recognize when we are standing on each other’s air hose, and then we can move forward.

It is not a matter of being wrong. It is a matter of being different. Not wrong, but different: I can’t tell you how many times they said that.

One other “aha!” moment for me was in regards to respect. We live in a culture that predominantly filters things through the eyes and ears and voice of love. Love is a given, love is prioritized (take this happy day for instance) and it should be unconditional.

But our culture does not see respect in the same way. Respect must be earned.

And we bring this way of thinking into our marriages, which creates an imbalance right off the bat. A wife should not need to earn love. But neither should a husband be striving to earn her respect.

Society has been creating this culture, and it is most clearly seen in our media. How many shows depict men as immature idiots? How many of the messages we take in daily are imbalanced towards love and away from respect? Men are being deprived of the air we need to breathe.

Furthermore, think about the current state of our country. There has been an erosion of respect. It is a rare commodity, hard to find. We should not only be concerned by what this is doing to marriage and the family, but what this is doing to us as a nation and to our leaders.

Men, love your wives.

Women, respect your husbands.

That will make this a Valentine’s Day to remember.

FOREWORD BY N.T. WRIGHT

The Christian faith is kaleidoscopic, and most of us are color-blind. (11)

… “the gospel” is the story of Jesus of Nazareth told as the climax of the long story of Israel, which in turn is the story of how the one true God is rescuing the world. (12)

… we all urgently need to allow this deeply biblical vision of “the gospel” to challenge the less-than-completely-biblical visions we have cherished for too long, around which we have built a good deal of church life and practice. (13)

FOREWORD BY DALLAS WILLARD

At the root of the many problems that trouble the “church visible” today, there is one simple source: the message that is preached. (15)

INTRODUCTION: 1971

At the most conservative of estimates, we lose at least 50 percent of those who make decisions. (20)

CHAPTER 1: THE BIG QUESTION

I believe the gospel has been hijacked by what we believe about “personal salvation,” and the gospel itself has been reshaped to facilitate making “decisions.” (26)

Our biggest problem is that we have an entire culture shaped by a misunderstanding of the gospel. That so-called gospel is deconstructing the church. (27)

CHAPTER 2: GOSPEL CULTURE OR SALVATION CULTURE?

(Pastor Eric’s claims on gospel – hint: they’re not good!)

• The gospel is not a claim to imitate Jesus.
• It is not a public announcement that Jesus is Lord and King. (32)

A salvation culture does not require The Members or The Decided to become The Discipled for salvation… the gospel of Jesus and that of the apostles, both of which created a gospel culture and not simply a salvation culture, was a gospel that carried within it the power, the capacity, and the requirement to summon people who wanted to be “in” to be The Discipled. (33)

CHAPTER 3: FROM STORY TO SALVATION

To set the stage for defining the gospel we need to distinguish four big categories, and the themes of this book flow from these four categories:

• The Story of Israel/the Bible,
• The Story of Jesus,
• The Plan of Salvation,
• The Method of Persuasion.

… (they are) connected to one another and ought to build on top of one another. (34)

THE STORY OF ISRAEL
What Adam was to do in the Garden — that is, to govern this world redemptively on God’s behalf — is the mission God gives to Israel. Like Adam, Israel failed, and so did its kings. (35)

…the idea of King and a kingdom are connected to the original creation. …Finally, the Story has an aim: the consummation, when God will set it all straight as God establishes his kingdom on earth. (36)

PLAN OF SALVATION
… the more we submerge “salvation” into the larger idea “gospel,” the more robust will become our understanding of salvation. (39)

CHAPTER 4: THE APOSTOLIC GOSPEL OF PAUL

What this means is that the gospel is a whole-life-of-Jesus story, not just a reduction of the life to Good Friday. In my judgment, soterians have a Good-Friday-only gospel. (54-55)

N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said:
I am perfectly comfortable with what people normally mean when they say “the gospel.” I just don’t think it is what Paul means. (58)

When the plan (of salvation) gets separated from the story, the plan almost always becomes abstract, propositional, logical, rational, and philosophical and, most importantly, de-storified and unbiblical. (62)

We are tempted to turn the story of what God is doing in this world through Israel and Jesus Christ into a story about me and my own personal salvation. In other words, the plan has a way of cutting the story from a story about God and God’s Messiah and God’s people into a story about God and one person — me — and in this the story shifts from Christ and community to individualism. (62)

CHAPTER 5: HOW DID SALVATION TAKE OVER THE GOSPEL?

… four simple (and thin) points: God loves you, you are messed up, Jesus died for you, accept him and (no matter what you do) you can go to heaven. My contention is not that the Reformation created that sort of gospel, but that the Reformation’s reshaping of the gospel story has made it a pale shadow of what it ought to be. (73)

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy:
Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting. (75)

Willard again: ‘Gospels of Sin Management’ presume a Christ with no serious work other than redeeming humankind… [and] they foster ‘vampire Christians’ who only want a little blood for their sins but nothing more to do with Jesus until heaven. (76)

CHAPTER 6: THE GOSPEL IN THE GOSPELS?

John Dickson, The Best Kept Secret of Christian Mission:
The core content of the gospel therefore goes something like this:

• Jesus’ royal birth secured his claim to the eternal throne promised to King David.
• Jesus’ miracles pointed to the presence of God’s kingdom in the person of the Messiah.
• Jesus’ teaching sounded the invitation of the kingdom and laid down its demands.
• Jesus’ sacrificial death atoned for the sins of those who would otherwise be condemned at the consummation of the kingdom.
• Jesus’ resurrection establishes him as the Son whom God has appointed Judge of the world and Lord of the coming kingdom. (81)

CHAPTER 7: JESUS AND THE GOSPEL

From the promises to Abraham of a land and a people and kings,
to God’s promise to David for an eternal king and kingdom,
right on through the prophetic visions of shalom and justice and heartfelt Torah observance,
all of this and more, Jesus balled up into the word kingdom and said,
“Get ready, it’s almost here. In fact, in some ways it is already here.” (96)

CHAPTER 8: THE GOSPEL OF PETER

(The gospel) is the Story of Israel that comes to completion in the saving Story of Jesus, who is Messiah of Israel, Lord over all, and the Davidic Savior… only by telling this apostolic gospel can we rebuild a gospel culture. This gospel culture does not displace salvation but puts salvation in the context of a gospel story that has a beginning (in creation and covenant with Israel), a middle (David), and a resolution (Jesus and final redemption). (131)

CHAPTER 9: GOSPELING TODAY

Anyone who can preach the gospel and not make Jesus’ exalted lordship the focal point simply isn’t preaching the apostolic gospel. (134)

When we reduce the gospel to only personal salvation, as soterians are tempted to do, we tear the fabric out of the Story of the Bible and we cease even needing the Bible. I don’t know of any other way to put it. (142)

CHAPTER 10: CREATING A GOSPEL CULTURE

… the gospel is Jesus’ and the apostles’ interpretation of the story of life. The gospel is the secret to life, and the gospel is the way to the truth and the life. (148)

… we have to become People of the Story… we need to immerse ourselves even more into the Story of Jesus… we need to counter the stories that bracket our story and that reframe our story… Finally, we need to embrace this story so that we are saved and can be transformed by the gospel story. (153, 157)

However, if we see the gospel as God becoming King on earth as He is in heaven, then faith means trusting Jesus as Savior and Lord (a.k.a. King). Now Christianity becomes all about obedience and allegiance, rather than mental affirmation of information. Discipleship is a natural outflow of this kind of faith, rather than an unnatural persuasion that feels more like a square peg being jammed into a round hole.

Now the purpose of life for Christ-followers becomes making God King on earth as much as we can until Jesus comes back and finishes the job.

Making God King on earth begins with me making God King of my life. And that is going to take some work.

It begins by looking again at Jesus’ gospel. I must understand what Jesus’ message meant to his original hearers if I am going to have any chance of properly contextualizing it for my life today.

Mark 1:14-15 is a good place to start:

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”

N.T. Wright writes in The Challenge of Jesus on the original meaning of repent:

Martin Luther … insisted that the word [metanoeite] referred originally to the “repentance” that takes place deep within the human heart, not in the outward actions prescribed as a quasi-punishment. He could not know that his reading would be used, in turn, to support an individualistic and pietistic reading of Jesus’ command to repent, which does no justice at all to the meaning of the word in the first century. Jesus was summoning his hearers to give up their whole way of life, their national and social agendas, and to trust him for a different agenda, a different set of goals. This of course included a change of heart, but went far beyond it. (p.27)

This is a much bigger, and demanding, vision of repent than I am used to or comfortable with. For the last however many years we have created an elaborate and comprehensive Christian sub-culture and christened it good. But, Jesus’ message is not live sub-culturally. It is live counter-culturally.

Maybe we need to have some conversations where nothing is off the table.

Maybe we should figure out what our relationship with (and faith in) the stock market, government, armed forces, insurance policies, social services, and technology (just to get us started) should look like.

Maybe we should look again at what it means to be the church, to eat with sinners, to be a blessing, to carry each others burdens, to give and live generously, to sacrifice and suffer for Christ (just to get us started).

And maybe then we should move from conversation to action.

Putting faith in Jesus as King is a lot bigger than it first looks. May our King empower us to live as His people and carry out the mission He has given us.

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