WAS IT REALLY LIKE A ROCKY BOXING MATCH?

I know it’s a popular & understandable way to present Jesus’ death & resurrection in a dramatic way, so I apologize for pouring rain on the parade. 

Sometimes life makes us feel like we’re in a boxing match with the enemy. But we can’t allow our perceptions of life to dictate our understanding of who God is & what He is like.

The idea from which the “Jesus & Satan in the Boxing Ring” scenario arises is what some have called “dualism.” An implication of dualism is that Good & Evil have been battling each other throughout history, & that it is not certain what the outcome will be.

Here's the truth: God is in absolute control of history. This doesn’t mean that we always get what we want, nor does it mean that we always understand what’s happening in any historical process or turn of events in our personal lives. What it does mean is that nothing can ultimately thwart God’s eternal plan.

There are many biblical passages that should give us a basis for understanding how the Living God oversees & guarantees the outcome of His plan for His creation in general & for those individuals who trust in Him. These same passages describe His absolute power & authority over the process & all its details.

Here are just a couple:

Colossians 2:9-15:

For in (Christ) all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form…, and He is the head over all rule and authority…  When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him.

2 Chronicles 32:16-19

(Sennacherib’s) servants spoke further against the Lord God and against His servant Hezekiah. He also wrote letters to insult the Lord God of Israel, and to speak against Him, saying, “As the gods of the nations of the lands have not delivered their people from my hand, so the God of Hezekiah will not deliver His people from my hand…”  They spoke of the God of Jerusalem as of the gods of the peoples of the earth, the work of men’s hands.

The challenge for each one of us is not to just hope & pray that somehow God can rein in the evil that surrounds us & threatens to destroy us.

Instead, it is no simpler than “Trust & Obey, for There’s No Other Way to be Happy in Jesus, but to Trust & Obey.”

A very blessed Christmas season & New Year to you!

I HOPE GOD ISN’T LIKE THAT

A characteristic of our me-obsessed culture is the desire (or should I say the demand?) that God line up with our individual agendas.

It’s not really a new thing, because Scripture gives us a lot of cases where believing this idea has ruined people’s lives. 2 Chronicles chapters 17 & 18 give us a textbook example of how this happens & what can be the effects of it.

King Jehoshaphat had begun his reign well. He honored the Lord in the priorities of his rule, & experienced God’s blessings. However, he gave in to the temptation to do the easy thing by allying himself by marriage with a neighboring king, Ahab, who had a clear track record of not honoring the Lord.

Jehoshaphat probably hoped that God would not mind this unholy alliance.

Wanting to go thru the motions of honoring God, Jehoshaphat & Ahab summoned a large group of prophets to pronounce God’s blessing on a joint military campaign. This group of 400 “yes-men” did so, & when Jehoshaphat complained that he wanted to hear what a true prophet of God had to say, they brought one who (probably with a sarcastic tone) agreed with what the false prophets had said. When pressed, this prophet gave a very dynamic & poetic prophecy about how God had put a lying spirit in the mouths of the false prophets. He prophesied that the 2 kings would experience a crushing defeat.

Although his conscience was certainly troubled by this, Jehoshaphat probably hoped that somehow God’s prophet was mistaken.

When they were preparing for the battle Ahab, the older king, suggested that he disguise himself by dressing in a more common uniform, while Jehoshaphat would wear the royal uniform. Ahab hoped that by disguising himself & exposing Jehoshaphat to the enemy archers, that his own life would be spared even if it the cost of his son-in-law.

Guess who got hit with a “random” arrow & died before the end of the day? The guy in the normal uniform who hoped the prophecy wouldn’t be fulfilled.

“Me-obsession” leads us to hope that somehow God isn’t who He says He is. We should know better. We can hope all day long, but at the end of the day, God is still God. May this conviction about who God is stir hope, obedience, & faith in our hearts, & not a subtle, impending sense of dread about the future.

WHY DO YOU DO WHAT YOU DO?

I’ve been teaching a class this week on missions & church planting. I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect the students taking the class came with the expectation that I would spend most of the time talking to them & exhorting them to go & be missionaries & church planters.

That’s not exactly what happened. We started out the week by discussing together the need for a biblical basis for whatever we do in ministry. I began the conversation by asking them this question: “What happens if we do a ministry activity simply because we think it’s good or enjoyable or beneficial, or because we just feel sorry for the people we want to help?” I followed that up with the question, “What happens to the ministry we’re doing if we try to do it without first trying to understand & apply what the Bible says about it?”

Here’s what inevitably happens if we just jump in, come what may:

• We do it wrong
• We do it for the wrong reasons
• We give up when it gets too hard, resources aren’t available, etc.
• We limit our vision & understanding of what God wants to say to us & do thru us

I’m convinced that there is a process, guided by the Holy Spirit, that should take place when any kind of ministry is being considered:

• Theology – what does Scripture say about it?
• Philosophy of ministry – how does what we see in Scripture give shape to our ideas about that ministry?
• Strategy – in specific & practical ways, how do we plan to do that ministry?
• Application – how does it all work in the real world where people live?

 Why take time to get an understanding of what Scripture says? Why take time to pray, think, & discuss about how what Scripture says applies to ministry activities today? The needs are so great – why take to formulate strategy before we go & do ministry? Precisely because we want as much as possible to get the what, the how, & the why right first, according to what the Bible says, before we jump in & start doing something.

We need to wait for the guidance & wisdom that the Holy Spirit desires to give us. He knows better than we ever will the people of the place where we want to do ministry. He wants to purify our motives. He wants to give us the perseverance that we’ll need when it gets too hard.

Of course, there are times when circumstance demand that we just jump in & meet a need. But I believe that most of the time we need to intentionally set aside time to give the Lord a chance to speak to us.

Then we can have a much better answer to the question, “Why do you do what you do?”

POWER FLOWS THRU STRUCTURE

This is an extremely important concept I learned from Dr. David Lim.

Lim is a proven spiritual leader who has served as pastor of Grace Assembly of God in Hongkong & as President of the Asia Pacific Theological Seminary in Baguio City, Philippines. You may have read his book Spiritual Gifts: A Fresh Look. 

One of the pastors in our weekly meeting was having real headaches getting her people to come out to the weekly prayer meeting on Wednesday evenings at the church. When we would visit her church on Sundays, she would announce the service & encourage the people to attend. But rarely would more than just a few show up.

A few months ago we began to discuss this concept of power flowing thru structure in our weekly meeting, & she changed how she did the weekly prayer meeting. Instead of holding it at the church, she asked families in the church to host it on a rotating basis.

To her amazement, the people took ownership of it & really got involved. Now, every week it is a time of rejoicing & effective prayer together. Being an expectant mother, she can’t always be there. But, no problem – it still goes on, & the people are seeing a lot of answers to prayer. They are excited to be a part of it.

Power flows thru structure. Her people are experiencing God’s power because the change in the structure facilitates an occasion where they can more readily be touched by His power & grow together.

Too often we try to get the people in our churches to conform to what the schedule, program, organization, building, etc. requires. But all the time our responsibility is to help them conform to the image of Christ, not to the structure that is in place.

What is the purpose of an organizational flow chart, service schedule, church building, etc?

If it is not serving the ultimate purpose of glorifying God thru the making of disciples in the image of Christ, it may be time to look at some kind of change.

WE’VE EVOLVED PAST THAT

Although I don’t qualify as a trekkie, I do enjoy the old TV show Star Trek, along with many of the series that are derived from it. But that enjoyment is tempered by a line that is periodically recited by some of the characters. “We humans almost destroyed ourselves, but now we’ve evolved beyond that.”

This statement is based on a couple of assumptions. One is that mankind, if he tries hard enough & can change his environment, is perfectible. The other, related to this, is that evolution explains positive advances in mankind’s ability to fulfill his sense of what is right.

I don’t believe either of those things.

Instead I adhere to a couple of very important themes in Scripture. One is God’s ability to preserve His creation in spite of our depravity & sinfulness. The other is that we have a sinful nature & that we do not have the inherent ability to overcome it.

How do we explain advances in technology, social issues, & other developments which have improved conditions in the world? Some have called this prevenient grace.

One implication of this idea is that God works in sovereign ways to protect, bless, & provide for the needs of His creation.

Because God has placed His image in mankind, He has given us the ability to care for His creation. He has also worked in sovereign, often humanly indiscernible ways, to maintain His creation & insure its continuance. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the effects of wrongdoing are erased. We can see these effects all around us. But, for those who believe the Bible, we know that without this aspect of God’s working, the world would be in a much worse state.

I also believe that mankind is a prisoner of his rejection of God as He is revealed in the Bible. In spite of God’s prevenient grace, there are limitations on what man can do. He can’t improve or change what he is in his innermost core simply by changing his environment. That would be like expecting snakes to hatch into birds by moving their eggs to a bird’s nest.

God’s answer to this impossible situation is simple. We don’t need to evolve, change our surroundings, or redeem ourselves. We only need to surrender to Christ, who is our Redeemer. As we experience His work we are accepted, made clean, & transformed into His image.

 I like Star Trek, but it’s just fantasy. I don’t buy the false view that it advocates about human nature. 

WHAT I’VE LEARNED ABOUT EDUCATION

One of the big things we do is teach at a church-based training center which is the first of hopefully many on our island. Why do we have this kind? Because one-size-fits-all training is neither realistic nor effective. This is the first step of setting up what I like to call a “flexible training infrastructure” which makes ministerial training accessible to anyone who wants it. 

For example, the time available for new high school graduates to study is much different than it is for adults who are working & have a family.

Professionals who already have a bachelors degree will be able to study at a higher academic level than those who may have struggled to finish high school.

Also, what about using the internet for making classes & courses available for some who prefer to take part of their training that way?

My point is that if we want to serve students & potential students, we had better be ready to set aside our own convenience & agenda, & be ready to cater to them where they are.

While the analogy isn't perfect, there are a lot of things that can be learned about how to improve education in the US.

A big one is that training (aka education) must fit the needs & desires of those it serves. Education does not serve educators or organizations that hide their real motives by claiming to care about “the children” – it serves students.

THE PRETTY MUCH LOST ART OF DEBATE

I think almost everyone would agree that the term “debate” is really a misnomer for the pre-election Presidential & VP debates a couple of months ago. Out of the 4 people who participated in them, the only one who really succeeded in following what I would consider traditional ideas about political debate was the now VP-Elect Mike Pence.

I recently watched as much as I could stomach of a pre-election debate between Dinesh D’Sousa & Cenk Uygur. Uygur really did a great job of showing us how debate should not be done. Some of his more despicable methods were sarcasm, moral equivalency, mocking the messenger, deliberately misquoting (which is lying), doing what is known as “pivoting,” & generally treating his opponent like a fool. I couldn’t accept as credible what he was saying for a number of reasons. One of them was his apparent definition of what constitutes debate.

On the other hand, D’Sousa did his best to be civil, address what he could of Uygur’s claims, & try to keep the debate on track & focused.

One of the really important keys to getting our country back on track is to debate properly. The term “debate” implies that there are differences in opinion (& at the same time does not imply that all opinions are equal). But it would be nice to hear debate that shows respect for those whose opinions differ regardless of the validity of their opinions.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED ABOUT ECONOMICS FROM BEING A MISSIONARY

To put it bluntly, I have learned that what some call “re-distribution of wealth” doesn’t work. For a lot of reasons.

My wife & I have spent a lot of time doing what we can to leave the most positive & enduring legacy from our time of serving here. For her, it’s doing children’s ministry & training those who are & will be involved in children’s ministry. For me, it’s developing pastors to the highest possible level as spiritual leaders.

You may not understand this, but one of the biggest temptations that a missionary can face is that of becoming the guy who gives out money. After all, there are innumerable needs all around.

But what happens when we redistribute wealth? When we do it in ways that are inappropriate, it results in resentment, greed, & jealousy. Resentment toward the foreign “Santa Claus” who has come to be the source of provision for meeting economic needs. Greed & jealousy toward those who have benefitted from the well-meaning benefactor. We run a very real risk of creating unhealthy welfare addicts with our uninformed benevolence.

And all the while, we feel really good about ourselves because we did something praiseworthy in meeting a tangible economic need.

Luke 4:18-19 really speaks to this issue:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

I’m trying to communicate a lot of things in one short blog. Please feel free to ask about why I see things this way & I’ll do my best to clarify it to you.

But the bottom line is this: If you want to distribute something, it’s better to distribute the empowerment to create wealth, than to re-distribute wealth. You will never meet all the needs. Those needs will continue to afflict people long after you are gone or have used up your resources. The people will still be in bondage to satanic schemes to keep them in poverty.

But if you work hand-in-hand with the Lord to do what Luke 4 says, you will leave a lasting legacy of spiritual & economic freedom & empowerment.

This has implications not only in the place where we serve, but also in our earthly homeland.

ANOTHER LOOK AT HEBREWS 11

I read this wonderful chapter which some call the “Hall of Faith” today. It’s 40 action-packed, encouraging & challenging verses.

Early in my Christian walk I was introduced to the idea that faith is “now,” meaning that if we have faith we should expect to see the results of our faith right away.

The unfortunate thing with this view here is that such an idea is not really in the text. The word “now” in verse 1 is probably best understood as a transition into a different aspect of what chapter 10 was talking about. Also, this view of the text can lead us to understand that “now” is defined by the believer, not by the Lord.

When understanding Hebrews 11 that way, I didn’t see beyond the idea that all these incredible heroes of the faith saw extraordinary answers to prayer & the powerful working of God’s power.

Then I began to see that they were not all delivered (verse35b “And others…”). So the next view I had of Hebrews 11 was that it really calls us to be faithful to the Lord regardless of what does or doesn’t happen.

However, there is another important, big-picture view that I have been seeing over the last few years. That is God’s overall redemptive purpose in Christ. The theme of Hebrews includes the idea that Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament sacrificial system. The experience of those saints in the Old Testament who are mentioned in Hebrews 11 is only made complete with the coming of Christ & with what the original readers of the book had experienced in Christ.

Each Old Testament saint was part of the bigger picture. Their lives were somehow leading toward the fulfillment of God’s ultimate plan.

It’s the same with us today. There is no “improvement” on Christ or additional fulfillment of God’s plan apart from Christ. But God is still guiding human history toward the fulfillment that He has planned from eternity past. He has a redemptive plan. Every disciple of Christ is part of that plan.

Faith means that we are growing in our relationship with God to the extent that we are committed to Him & it no matter what it may imply for us personally. It also means that we do this because it has eternal, redemptive implications for others. We won’t know those implications in their entirety until we see them in the Lord’s presence in eternity.

That’s faith!

POPULAR VOTING

According to vote counts today, Clinton had as many as 400,000 more votes than Trump. Every presidential election when the popular vote is like this, we get treated to a lot of complaints about the Electoral College & why we need to get rid of it & change to a simple popular vote.

One thing we need to remember is that our Founding Fathers, the people who conceived the Electoral College, didn’t do it in the kind of setting that today’s disappointed activists do.

They spent countless hours seriously discussing & debating the issue. They had done extensive reading & thinking about how to best keep elections reflective of the will of the people & the individual states. And, their discussions weren’t in the context of frustration about how they wished an election had turned out.

I won’t go into the rationale that finally brought them to the place where they enshrined the College into the federal election process. There’s a lot of information online about that.

The other thing that is important to remember is that we shouldn’t assume that every single one of those 400,000 votes was legitimate. 

Voter & election fraud are real, & I’m very thankful that there apparently wasn’t enough to swing the election in Clinton’s favor. I hope that one of the priorities of the Trump DOJ is to investigate & prosecute cases of voter & election fraud (not to mention voter intimidation). If not, it will grow like a cancer & affect future elections.

WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?

Have you ever heard someone, when he reacted badly to a perceived wrong, blame the circumstances or something wrong that someone said or did to him? I have.

But here’s something I don’t remember ever hearing – someone who responded correctly to a bad situation saying that his right reaction was the result of the wrong that was done, said, or experienced.

That is because our reaction, good or bad, is more about what is inside us, not around us. 

What am I saying here? Simply that God in His wisdom uses negative things to bring out what is already in our hearts. For what purpose? So that we can see more clearly what is in our hearts, the things that are already open & visible in the sight of our Heavenly Father.

He knows that if left undetected, negative & sinful things can poison us spiritually, emotionally, & even physically. We will not be able to experience the fullness of His plan for us if we are affected by unseen, hidden faults or sins.

Rather than blessing others, we are in danger of poisoning them.

It may be that God is allowing you to go thru a difficult situation. It may seem to be unjust or unfair. The important thing right now is not so much that it gets made right. The important thing is that we use the situation to let God show us what is in our hearts. 

Then He can do the necessary work in us. And we can trust Him to do what is right in the situation that we are facing.

MADE TO BE BROKEN? REALLY?

Back in the mid & late 1960s a common expression among my peers was “Rules are made to be broken.”

It reflected a rebellious, smug attitude that considered our “enlightened” way of seeing things as superior to what generations of Judeo-Christian culture had established.

Another negative fallout of this “we know better” attitude is that not only are rules made to be broken, but relationships are also made to be broken. The truth is that the marriage relationship has God’s stamp of creation & approval. It is made to last for a lifetime.

Of course, my generation isn’t the only culprit in the creation of a “throw-away relationships” culture. Popular entertainment in earlier decades began to legitimize this way of seeing marriage relationships.

I’m not criticizing or condemning those who have experienced broken marriages. On the contrary, I’m saying that they are experiencing the results of a false view of what God intended marriage to be. The results of thinking that relationships are made to be broken aren't really so enlightened or wonderful after all…

What I'm saying is that no matter how smart of clever we feel we are as a culture, we can never go one better than what God has established. 

I'm also saying that it’s a lot smarter, not to mention more fun, to stay with His way of seeing the marriage relationship.

THOUGHTS ON A THEOLOGY OF CIVIL GOVERNMENT

As I have watched various speeches that Donald Trump has made on domestic policy, it has occurred to me that he has a coherent underlying view of what the responsibility of civil government should be toward the citizens it serves.

We see a hint of the biblical view of civil government in I Timothy 2:1-4: “First of all, then, I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity. This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

This passage prescribes that Christians pray for all people, including government leaders. It also confirms that civil government exists to insure as much as possible a peaceful & safe environment in which the people can live, work, & be involved in their communities in positive ways. For Christians, this is the kind of environment where they can bear faithful witness to Christ & offer their neighbors the opportunity to know Him.

When Mr. Trump talks about safe communities where people can go to the store without wondering if they will be shot, he is echoing this biblical view. When he talks about revitalizing & bringing productive employment back to our inner cities, more of the same. When he mentions righting the wrong of illegal aliens stealing the work opportunities of minorities, he is advocating another aspect of the same principle that should guide how civil government functions on behalf of the citizens.

He often says, “What do you have to lose?” We cannot lose, if we embrace biblical values when we go into the poll booth.

MAKING DISCIPLES & DEVELOPING SPIRITUAL LEADERS

One of the things that spiritual leaders get confused about (or, maybe not even confused if we don’t consciously think about it) is the difference between making disciples & developing those disciples as spiritual leaders.

It’s really important to know what our job is as pastors & spiritual leaders. What is it? We could use Ephesians 4:11-13 as a basic description: “And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.”

Notice in the Book of Acts how Paul worked with Timothy:

·       When Paul met Timothy, he was a young disciple, whose character & faithfulness were already recognized by those who knew him (16:2)

·       Paul recognized this, & wanted to bring him along (16:3-4)

·       Paul apparently trained him, & left him with Silas to continue the work (17:14-15)

It’s not totally clear, but it my understanding is that Timothy’s mother & grandmother raised him to know the Lord & discipled him in the faith (II Timothy 1:5; 3:14-15). Paul then selected him & trained him for ministry.

From this we learn something very important about our work as pastors & spiritual leaders: Making disciples & developing workers or spiritual leaders are not technically the same thing.

Here are a few observations about these 2 things & how we need to understand the relationship between them:

The ultimate task of the Church is to fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20; Mark 16:15-18; Luke 24:46-49)

·       If I work hard as a spiritual leader to evangelize & make disciples, I will win some people to Christ & make some disciples

·       If I train & develop others to do these things, many more will be won & discipled

·       If their disciples can be empowered to do ministry, the Great Commission will be fulfilled much more effectively

What are the practical differences between making disciples & developing leaders?

·       Discipling:

o   Primarily about helping people be conformed to Christ’s image

o   Looks for the same general result in all disciples

·       Developing workers:

o   Primarily about equipping, training, empowering people to do ministry tasks effectively

o   Looks for the specific tasks that God has created them to do

o   May change over time as people become more aware of God’s plan for them

How are these 2 things related?

·       We make disciples so that we can develop them as spiritual leaders

o   Discipleship without development = lack of effectiveness, problems in the congregation

o   Development without discipleship = legalism, activity but no spiritual power

·       This is why the Bible has requirements for spiritual leaders in the local church (I Timothy 3:1-13; Titus 1:5-9)

·       It is true that both of these things can happen simultaneously

THE UNTOLD STORY OF EPHESIANS 2:8-9

It seems like one of the verses that I hear most often is Ephesians 2:8-9.

In much of the world, a major problem in Christianity is what I call the “I-prayed-a-prayer-to-accept-Jesus-so-now-I’m-OK” style of being a believer. One of the many sad results of this way of thinking about conversion is that it all starts & ends with the “Sinner’s Prayer.” Once that’s marked off the checklist, the “new believer” is free to go on his merry way. Maybe you know a few “Christians” like that.

It’s vital to be aware of what the verse immediately following, because it shows that our salvation experience is only the beginning of a new life which has been designed by God from eternity past.

This has meaning for me personally, because when I began to follow Christ at the age of 18, I had no idea that I would be involved a few decades later in mentoring pastors on the other side of the world. It’s true that God’s plan for us is beyond our wildest dreams.

Another aspect of this is the consideration that the Book of Ephesians wasn’t written to an individual – it was written to a congregation.

There are common rather than just individual considerations to think about here. God’s plan for the believer involves being part of the community of believers. It is in those relationships, during the hard times & the good times, that we grow spiritual & experience the grace of God. As we serve one another, we participate in the fulfillment of God’s eternal plan.

Believer, make sure that your story of Ephesians 2:10 gets told. Others need you & are depending on you.