DownshoreDrift

Micah-the-Pastoral-Intern's Book Reviews

We have a brilliant pastoral intern this summer named Micah. He will be a senior in college this year and he is praying about going into vocational ministry. So as a formative experience, we developed a learning internship for him this summer. He has shadowed me to meetings and events and he went with me to the Alan Hirsch conference this past weekend in New Orleans. We've spent a lot of time together, and even though Micah's been a part of our church since he was 13, my respect for his heart for God and intellect has grown exponentially in the few weeks that we have been doing this.

I've given Micah quite a few books to read as the internship has begun and have asked him to write a short reflection on each book. We sit down and talk through it together, exploring different issues that emerge. Initially, we are looking at issues that might frame his perspective on ministry in the 21st Century. Where and how can he most faithfully represent Christ to a dying world?  He has posted his reviews online at http://collegerambling.blogspot.com/ .  You seriously need to check out his reviews from writers like Eugene Peterson, Ron Sider, Bob Roberts, Alan Hirsch, George Grant, Watchmen Nee, and Marty Duren (Micah is going to spend some time at Marty's church in North Georgia this weekend).  Micah will be interning with us through the summer and his experiences and learning have just begun. Keep him in your prayers, especially if you are a part of Gateway and you are reading this.  If you have any advice or encouragement for a young man trying to discern whether or not to enter vocational ministry, I'm sure that it would be appreciated.

Dallas Willard on the The Blessedness of the Beatitudes - Part 5

It is taking me awhile to get through The Divine Conspiracy, primarily because of busyness. Check out my previous installments of this series:

Pt. 1: The Folly of Believing In Jesus Without Wanting to Obey Him

Pt. 2: Living in the Reign and Rule of God

Pt. 3: The Gospels of Sin Management: Is the Atonement the Whole Story?

Pt. 4: Our God Bathed World

Today I am going to tackle Chapter 4: Who Is Really Well Off - The Beatitudes. This was a powerful chapter and I worked through it for about a week.  Of all the chapters that I have read so far, it might be the easiest to summarize and it might have made the most impact on me. Willard is saying that we have gotten the Beatitudes listed at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 all wrong.  He says that we have used the Beatitudes as a checklist of spiritual attainment. In other words, we have tried to become spiritually poor so that we would in turn, inherit the Kingdom of God. Trying to create a spiritual condition within ourselves so that we will be rewarded by God is not the point, Willard says. He is saying that Jesus is describing the actual position of those who are blessed by God. If you find yourself in spiritual destitution, do not worry, because God is coming to you. Jesus was speaking to the crowd and was describing what he saw. He saw a lot of spiritually poor people. He saw the misfits and outcasts. He saw those who did not have it together. They were blessed because God had come to THEM right in that moment. Basically, Willard is saying that Jesus was turning everyone's expectations upside down. They had thought that if they were rich or did everything right, then that was the sign that God was blessing them. But, Jesus said no to that. Our state of blessedness is not dependent upon what we do but upon who God is. The facts are, He has come to all of us, even the spiritually destitute - even those who mourn.

Micah Mandate: Doing Justice, Loving Mercy, Walking Humbly With God

Since last August, we have been going through a spiritual formation study on Wednesday nights at our church. We spent several months talking about loving God. Then, we explored what it meant to love people. Now, we are talking about how we do that "to the ends of the earth." We have taken a pretty different approach on each area and I have really grown through it. One of the books that we are using for this last movement is The Micah Mandate: Balancing the Christian Life by George Grant.  He deals with Micah 6:8, which says: "But he has showed you, O Man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you: To do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God."  His premise is that if we do those three things, then our lives will be in balance and we will be salt and light to the world. Jesus appealed to Micah's mandate in Matthew 23:23 when he said to the Pharisees, "But you have neglected the more important matters of the law - justice, mercy, and faithfulness." 

Thom Wolf says that when interacting with the larger culture, we start with justice issues, we the show mercy to people that we connect with, and then we share our faith with them. He calls it "Weeds, Deeds, and Seeds."  When we live in a culture that is ignorant or hostile to the gospel, we should seek to come alongside them and set right what has gone wrong by bringing the Kingdom of God. We should pull the weeds that have grown up around them (Justice).  Then, we should do good deeds (Matt. 5:16) among them (Mercy).  Finally, after their hearts have been made receptive, we should plant the seeds of faith through the gospel (Walking humbly with God).  Of course, it does not have to necessarily go in this order, but caring about justice issues and doing good amongst unbelievers surely does open their hearts to ask, "Why are you doing this?" I experienced that directly as we went down to help right after Katrina.  Dr. Wolf goes on to say that the Micah/Jesus Mandate is the same as what Paul is saying when he calls us to "faith, love, and hope." It's just that amongst believers, Paul starts with the heart and our relationship with God and works his way out to our effect on the world.

FAITH = Walking Humbly with God = Planting Seeds (faith comes from hearing the gospel)

LOVE = Mercy = Good Deeds (sacrificially laying our lives down for others)

HOPE = Justice = Pulling Weeds (our hope in in the salvation that is to be granted to us fully one day)

So, basically, the Christian life is a balance of all three of these components as they continue to mix and work in our lives.  Unfortunately, we often get out of balance and focus more heavily on one area over the other.  Throughout my life, I have seen this imbalance in Christians who were totally focused on trying to change America through politics and social action. I have always felt that wrong. On the other hand, I have met Christians who only wanted to pray and try and do 2 Chronicles 7:14 as though it was some magic formula to restore us to the 1950's. Also, wrong. George Grant says,

Dallas Willard on Our God-Bathed World

I just finished chapter 3 of The Divine Conspiracy called, What Jesus Knew: Our God Bathed World.  It took me days to read because I had to keep reading paragraphs again and again. I have almost the whole chapter underlined (which doesn't help much, admittedly), and I have notes scrawled all over the margins. It was probably one of the most amazing 30 pages or so that I have ever read by an author. There is no way that I can even begin to do it justice in a blog post, so I will just give a short synopsis in this installment of my review.

Reading this chapter, I realized why straight moralism (do this, don't do that - because the Bible says so) is so insufficient in a world where we are bombarded by messages from a secular culture constantly. That culture is in the "advanced stages of what Max Picard described as the 'flight from God'" (90).  There is a whole intellectual framework that supports rebelling against authority and doing what seems right in our own eyes. This past weekend, my wife and I were given tickets to the off-Broadway production of Evita. While watching it, it occurred to me that Eva Peron was being celebrated as a woman who destroyed all the taboos, slept her way to the top, and became a heroine to the people. The other play that I saw at this theatre was Fiddler on the Roof.  It was much better than Evita, but it had the same basic message: tradition is stifling, follow your heart, do what makes you happy. A few years ago, the movie Pleasantville came out with the same message.  Actually, almost every movie, TV show, or play has the message that true happiness is found in following your heart and breaking the status quo. Of course, this can be helpful if the status quo is evil, but we are given no guidance by our culture to know the difference between good and evil, so how do we know what to rebel against? We have all become rebels without a cause. This is why just telling people who are immersed in secular thought to do right because God, the Bible, and the Church says so, is insufficient. We need a deeper understanding of what God is doing in the world. In short, we need to be aware of God's presence all around us. We live in His world.

A part of the pursuit of pleasure that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, are our desperate attempts at transcendence. Deep down, we know that we were created for more than what we are currently experiencing. We know that we are missing out on something that we were intended for, so we struggle to break the bonds of this dull earth and escape into a sense of victory, beauty, uniqueness, and something lasting and permanent.  Eternity is written on our hearts. The Imago Dei upon our souls is still there, even though it is marred. We silently long to be reconnected to what was lost, but because of sin, we take our legitimate desire and sacrifice it at the altar of diversion. The only antidote for this tendency is to become truly “spiritual” through the work of Christ so that we can live in union with the world that God created us for.  Here are Willard’s thoughts:

Because we are spiritual beings, as just explained, it is for our good, individually and collectively, to live our lives in interactive dependence upon God and under his kingdom rule. Every kind of life, from the cabbage to the water buffalo, lives from a certain world that is suited to it. It is called to that world by what it is. There alone is where its well-being lies. Cut off from its special world it languishes and eventually dies.

This is how the call to spirituality comes to us. We ought to be spiritual in every aspect of our lives because our world is the spiritual one.  It is what we are suited to. Thus Paul, from his profound grasp of human existence, counsels us, “To fill your mind with the visible, the ‘flesh,’ is death, but to fill your mind with the spirit is life and peace” (Rom. 8:6).

As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal. We are destined for a time when our life will be entirely sustained from spiritual realities and no longer dependent in any way upon the physical. Our dying, or “mortal” condition, will have been exchanged for an undying one and death absorbed in victory.

Of course that flatly contradicts the usual human outlook, or what “everyone knows” to be the case. I take this to be a considerable point in its favor. Our “lives of quiet desperation,” in the familiar words of Thoreau, are imposed by hopelessness. We find our world to be one where we hardly count at all, where what we do makes little difference, and where what we really love is unattainable, or certainly is not secure. We become frantic or despairing.

The Gospels of Sin Management: Is the Atonement the Whole Story?

(NOTE: This is a long post - actually, inappropriately long for a blog. But, I feel that the subject matter here is so important that a full treatment is necessary. I hope that you will take the time to read and reflect on what is presented here. It is of grave importance and it deals with our own relationship with God as well as the way that we experience and share the Gospel with others.)

I am continuing my trek through The Divine Conspiracy and today I take a look at Chapter 2: The Gospels of Sin Management. Yesterday's post was so popular (zero comments) that I thought I would dive right into another post on spiritual formation and how we follow Christ with our whole lives!  :) 

Willard says that we have gotten the gospel wrong (or incomplete) on both the right and the left sides of the theological spectrum.  He says that on the right, there is primarily a gospel of forgiveness of sin.  Getting saved means getting your sins forgiven so that you can make it to heaven. On the left, salvation relates to overcoming oppression and rooting evil out of our world systems. He calls these gospels the Gospels of Sin Management and claims that they both, along with other gospel messages, miss the point of what Jesus was trying to do in bringing us to God. I'll focus primarily on the gospel that is preached on the right side of the spectrum (where I find myself and where most of my readers probably are).  I'll give you Willard's thoughts and then provide my own commentary:

Dallas Willard on Living in the Reign and Rule (Kingdom) of God

Back on February 19, I started a series reviewing the thoughts of Dallas Willard in his classic, The Divine Conspiracy.  I was interrupted by our trial with Caelan, but I wanted to continue that series with a look at some ideas from Chapter 1, "Entering the Eternal Kind of Life Now."  In this opening chapter, Willard considers what it means for the Kingdom of God to have come in the person of Jesus Christ and for Jesus to live inside of us. He declares that God's Kingdom is where He effectively reigns and rules. "Now God's own 'kingdom,' or 'rule,' is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or by choice, is within his kingdom" (p. 25).

Regarding humans and their relationship to God's Kingdom, Willard says,

The human job description (the "creation covenant," we might call it) found in chapter 1 of Genesis indicates that God assigned to us collectively the rule over all living things on earth, animal and plant. We are responsible before God for life on the earth (vv. 28-30).

However unlikely it may seem from our current viewpoint, God equipped us for this task by framing our nature to function in a conscious, personal relationship of interactive responsibility with him. We are menat to exercise our "rule" only in union with God, as he acts with us. He intended to be our constant companion of co-worker in the creative enterprise of life on earth. That is what his love for us means in practical terms.

Eugene Peterson on The Long Road of Discipleship

Peterson, in his classic, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction makes some powerful observations about the tendency to take short cuts to spiritual growth. We tend to think that we can microwave change, but we cannot. We must become disciples and pilgrims with God. We must take time to learn from Him and not just expect our growth in the Lord to be easy. It is through many trials and much suffering the we come to see God and understand His ways, which are infinitely higher than ours. It is impossible to reduce God or the movement of His Spirit to a 20 minute sermon once a week and some religious niceties. After what we have been through with Caelan over the past few weeks, I am grateful for how God revealed Himself to us and showed great mercy, but I am also aware of how shallow my faith can be at times. It seems that God is using every event in our lives, even the very painful and scary ones, to conform us to the image of Christ. How we reject that and want an easier way! Here are Peterson's thoughts:

One aspect of world that I have been able to identify as harmful to Christians is the assumption that anything worthwhile can be acquired at once. We assume that if something can be done at all, it can be done quickly and efficiently. Our attention spans have been conditioned by thirty-second commercials. Our sense of reality has been flattened by thirty-page abridgments.

Dallas Willard on the Folly of Believing in Jesus Without Wanting to Obey Him

A few years ago, I picked up The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard. I had heard about the book for years, but had never bought it. After buying it, I didn't read it. It was one of those books that I was glad to have on my shelf and thought that I would eventually get around to reading it one day. Plus, if anyone mentioned it, I could say, "I've got that book!"  That way, people would think I was spiritual and what not.

Well, I finally decided to pick it up and start reading through it. I made it through the introduction this morning and was left deeply impacted by several statements that Willard made. I'll reproduce them here with some commentary, for your reading pleasure:

My hope is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. In his case, quite frankly, presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance.

Here, Willard has exactly described the situation among cultural Christians in America, especially in the South. People here have had just enough Jesus to think they know all about Him. They have heard some Bible stories and maybe attended church a little. But, they don't really know Him. You have to get into the quiet place to really meet Jesus, but we don't do that and we know just enough of Him to immunize us against the real thing. If we ever do truly face His claims upon our lives, we tend to think that they are too radical and unrealistic. In short, we have watered down the teachings of Jesus to almost nothing, and we wonder why He is not changing people. Perhaps we have not given Him a chance.

More Willard,

It is the failure to understand Jesus and his words as reality and vital information about life that explains why, today, we do not routinely teach those who profess allegiance to him how to do what he said was best. We lead them to profess allegiance to him, or we expect them to, and leave them there, devoting our remaining efforts to "attracting" them to this or that.

Whatever the ultimate explanation of it, the most telling thing about the contemporary Christian is that he or she simply has no compelling sense that understanding of and conformity with the clear teachings of Christ is of any vital importance to his or her life, and certainly not that it is in any way essential . . . More than any other single thing, in any case, the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.

My seminary professor, Thom Wolf, has said that most Christians are so subnormal in their walk that whenever we see a normal Christian, we tend to think that they are abnormal. He has also said that we teach people far beyond their desire to obey. If believers will not obey what they already know, then we should not keep teaching them new things hoping this will unlock something. Because of this, they end up thinking that obedience is optional. We think that we will change people if we give them enough information, when what they really need is to start obeying what they already know. What if we all started obeying what we already knew to be the commands of God? The world would change. We don't need more teaching - we need more relationship with God and more obedience to what we already know.

He also said that the vast majority of the psychological and emotional ailments in our lives were because of some unconfessed and unrepented sin. Much of our depression and anxiety actually comes from some way that we are trying to be in control of our lives or because of some sin that we are engaging in. Colossians 1:17 says that in Christ "all things hold together." If we are not walking with Christ, then our lives fall apart. When people hear the truth, they might lie to us, but they never lie to themselves. They acknowledge the truth internally, even if they don't acknowledge it to others. Then, they decide whether they will obey it or not. When they decide not to obey, this is when they walk away from the Church, time spent with God, fellowship with the Saints, ministry, etc. They want to be away from convicting influences. So, the lack of discipleship and follow-ship of Jesus in the Church today, is at least partly, because people would rather stay in their sin and selfishness than follow God. I'm not trying to be harsh, but that is really what it is when you get right down to it.

One more Willard excerpt:

Actual discipleship or apprenticeship to Jesus is, in our day, no longer thought of as in any way essential to faith in him. It is regarded as a costly option, a spiritual luxury, or possibly even an evasion . . . Discipleship to Jesus [is] the very heart of the gospel. The really good news for humanity is that Jesus is now taking students in the master class of life. The eternal life that begins with confidence in Jesus is a life in his present kingdom, now on earth and available to all. So the message of and about him is specifically a gospel for our life now, not just for dying. It is about living now as his apprentice in kingdom living, not just as a consumer of his merits. Our future, however far we look, is a natural extension of the faith by which we live now and the life in which we now participate. Eternity is now in flight and we with it, like it or not.

God is renewing me in some incredible ways lately. I am asking Him to search my heart and show me where I have been living for myself and He is being faithful to show me. I am asking Him to make me His disciple and He is being faithful to bring me under discipline. I am realizing that I have been living from my own strength far more than I thought. I am realizing that I have argued away many of the hard commands of Jesus and I have reconciled them with a comfortable American lifestyle, baptized in a Christian veneer. Back at the beginning of January I started praying specifically for God to take all of me, that I would live crucified with Him. I see it happening slowly and I am beginning to live in more freedom, peace, and joy than I have experienced in some time. I praise God for His faithfulness to conform me to His image when I begin to submit to the hard road of discipleship. Maybe God saved this book for me to read at just the right time? At any rate, I want my faith to be living enough to produce obedience to God and conformity to His will. In that, there is true life.

   

Don't Read This Book - It Will Make You Angry

A friend of mine gave me a book before Christmas that I didn't think that I would read, but I opened it up and started skimming it and was hooked pretty quickly. It made me angry. I wanted to throw it across the room. I completely disagreed with parts of it. I thought that the writer was out of his mind. And, I couldn't put it down. It has caused me to rethink quite a bit, especially considering Jesus' very tough words in the Sermon on the Mount. Maybe I should start taking those words seriously? The book is The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne and I highly caution you against reading it. As a matter of fact, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. It will cause a great deal of emotional distress concerning your current practice of Christianity. Claiborne is a radical Jesus follower on the evangelical left (think Tony Campolo but much younger), so everything that he says should be thrown away and disregarded. He's a loon. He asks questions like: Is Christianity political? Should the ethic of Jesus affect how we see the poor, our enemies, and the forgotten? What should we do about injustice? What does it mean for the Kingdom of God to come? Claiborne shows how he has addressed these issues. I have not recovered.

Here is a quote in the book on page 294 from Danish pastor Kaj Munk, who was killed by the Gestapo in January 1944:

What is, therefore, our task today? Shall I answer: "Faith, hope, and love"?  That sounds beautiful. But I would say - courage. No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. Our task today is recklessness. For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature . . . we lack a holy rage - the recklessness which comes from the knowledge of God and humanity. The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets, and when the lie rages across the face of the earth . . . a holy anger about the things that are wrong in the world. To rage against the ravaging of God's earth, and the destruction of God's world. To rage when little children must die of hunger, when the tables of the rich are sagging with food. To rage at the senseless killing of so many, and against the madness of militaries. To rage at the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction peace. To rage against complaceny. To restlessly seek that recklessness that will challenge and seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of the Kingdom of God. And remember the signs of the Christian Church have been the Lion, the Lamb, the Dove, and the Fish . . . but never the chameleon.

Those words hit me firmly. Why am I not angered by the suffering, death, and lostness that I see around me? Why do I not work with every bit of effort within me to see God's Kingdom come? What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus in a land where Christianity is well known, but the Kingdom of God is often absent? What does it mean to live out and proclaim the scandal of the Cross when it has been encrusted with gold and diamonds and made the scepter of those in power?

I don't know, but I would like to find out . . . I think.  Nevermind. Claiborne's a loon. Ignore him. Sorry for the interruption. Carry on.

Retreat Into Comfort or Engage the World?

I am reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together, which is truly one of the most amazing little books I have ever partaken of on the nature of Christian community. He views the community of Christ (the church) very realisitically and through the lens of the Cross. Since I am teaching on spiritual formation on Wednesday nights and we are starting with the Cross in our first movement and will look at community and relationships in our second movement (about 2 months from now), I thought that this book would be fitting. Our third movement, which we will get into next spring will involve our spiritual growth and health always leads us out to engage a lost world - because that is what Jesus did. Bonhoeffer, at the beginning of Life Together points us in this direction, I suppose so that no one would think that he is advocating a cloistered, disengaged life. Here is an excerpt containing a quote by Martin Luther that should make the our hair stand on end:

It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians. Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his commission, his work. (Luther quote following - me)  "The Kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ!  If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared?"

What do you think of Bonhoeffer's words? Of course, Jesus had his twelve disciples, but he also knew what was in a man and he did the will of the Father. At the end, they all betrayed him because he did not do what they thought he was here to do. I am a huge believer in community, relationships, teams, and fellowship. I believe that Jesus died and rose for the dead to establish the Church. At the same time, we must all we willing to be persecuted and outcast and go into the world to represent Christ, even if no one follows.

What about Luther's words? They are very strong and definitely speak to our desire to withdraw into the Christian ghetto of our own making where we only have good influences and things are safe. Ultimately, I think that he is right and I am convicted. I have spent far too much time dealing exclusively with Christians, my church, the SBC, and those who are of "my tribe."  Of course, the Christian community is paramount, and as a pastor I am to be a shepherd to our body first and foremost. But, my main job is to get us to join with Christ where He is working. Perhaps God's intent is that we be a mobile, sent community, loving God and loving others as we go to the ends of the earth.