I believe that the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man’s mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God. I was into habit. I grew up going to church, so I got used to hearing about God.
What is this a description of? Auto-pilot. The bane of my existence, and a special gift to our gender. Powerful, it enables us to function without thinking. To handle repetition that would otherwise drive us insane. To continue to function in the midst of noise and chaos. We really can be robots! It’s not bad. It’s a glorious work of the creator! But it’s another thing the deceiver aims to twist.
Nothing hurts my marriage more than this very thing. I think falling into auto-pilot in relation to our wives is a great snare for men. I believe Donald Miller also successfully points out that it’s a trap in our relation to God. The gender of men in particular is really good at being religious. Once we get our auto-pilot setup, we can go on for years while putting all of our creative energy into something else. Woman are not as successful at just being religious. It forces them to continue to strive for a more intimate relationship with Jesus, and that is a very good thing.
Intellectual Christianity can be rich in truth, but it’s easier for men to set it on auto-pilot. Mystical Christianity doesn’t play so well with robots. It keeps you on your toes.
Allow me to exhort myself:
Men, let’s shed the robot and engage God and our wives with all our mind, soul and strength!
I drew this picture a while back when you couldn’t go to an evangelical church service without hearing someone trying to cover Matt Redman or Delirious. Come to think of it, maybe you still can’t. Now I like that stuff just fine, but I couldn’t help but think about how it’s just a drop in an ocean of music. I’ve spoken with young Christians who have actually had no exposure to any other kind of worship service. Whoa. When I look at the patterns of worship in the Old Testament, I don’t even see a whole lot of music. Worship must be much larger than that!
On the other hand, you can’t make worship TOO large or it loses all of its meaning. I’ve heard some people say that our whole lives should be a worship unto the Lord. Well, sure, I agree with that, but the word is now of no use anymore. Standing and singing a hymn of adoration to Jesus has GOT to be more worshipful than eating my breakfast cereal in the morning or the word has no potency.
So how large is the box above? What about the relative size of the music circle? This is one angle I hope to explore. I think I’m safe in saying that the little blue blip is the right size though! Now crank up that Vineyard-covering-Redman-covering-Martin Smith on “Did you feel the mountains tremble?” and get back to work!
In the introduction to For All God’s Worth, N.T. Wright describes the incarnation (Jesus) this way:
How can you cope with the end of a world and the beginning of another one? How can you put an earthquake into a test-tube, or the sea into a bottle? How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that fire has become flesh, that life itself came to life and walked in our midst? Christianity either means that, or it means nothing. It is either the most devastating disclosure of the deepest reality in the world, or it’s a sham, a nonsense, a bit of deceitful play-acting.
I think this is wonderful imagery! My former pastor, Karl Barden, put a practical spin on it:
If Christianity is anything, it is everything!
If you didn’t catch that, I’ll rephrase it: If Christianity is anything, anything at all, then it must be everything! Service to Jesus should absolutely dominate your life. I think both of these are another angle of the well-known challenge from C.S. Lewis:
I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I am ready to accept Jesus as the great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a boiled egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
So what do we do about this?! Lewis reveals his answer along with the question:
…fall at His feet and call Him (Jesus) Lord and God.
Bishop Wright goes on to prescribe:
…sheer unadulterated worship of the living and true God, and by following this God wherever he leads, whether or not it is the way our traditions would suggest. Worship is not an optional extra for the Christian, a self-indulgent religious activity. It is the basic Christian stance, and indeed…the truly human stance. “Worship” derives from “worth-ship”: it means giving God all he’s worth.
And Barden went on to put in 30 hard years of pastoring a congregation whose mission statement began with:
Lift up the Lord Jesus Christ in worship.
I think all of this is a wonderful place to start! The obvious next question to ask is “What is worship?” or “Can you tell or show me what it looks like?” From there we jump from our high position into a sea of confusion. I really want to come up with a working definition of “worship” over the next month. I think I’ll make it a series on this blog. I’ve had it explained to me many times, and each time, something quite different from the previous definition was being described. I want to work through all of this and come up with something more solid. Maybe it will be a long definition with 20 variations. Maybe it will be really short.
The purpose? Intellectual exercise? No. I want to worship Jesus! I want to do it right. I don’t want to miss something important. I want to teach my children how, and I’m not exactly sure what it looks like.
One of my favorite pop songs has always been Bruce Springsteen’s Secret Garden. I’ve always really loved that song, but couldn’t quite put my finger on why.
She’ll let you in her house
If you come knockin’ late at night
She’ll let you in her mouth
If the words you say are right
If you pay the price
She’ll let you deep inside
But there’s a secret garden she hides.She’ll lead you down a path
There’ll be tenderness in the air
She’ll let you come just far enough
So you know she’s really there
She’ll look at you and smile
And her eyes will say
She’s got a secret garden
Where everything you want
Where everything you need
Will always stay
A million miles away
John Eldridge comments in Wild at Heart:
It’s a deep lie wedded to a deep truth. Eve IS a garden of delight (Song 4:16). But she’s not everything you want, everything you need-not even close. Of course it will stay a million miles away. You can’t get there from here because it’s not there. It’s not there.
Oddly enough, that turned out to be the most meaningful passage in the whole book for me. I think he hit the nail on the head. It’s once again our longing for God being replaced by the woman. That will never work. I hadn’t thought of the “secret garden” being sex, and I still don’t think it necessarily is. It’s just one of many things wrapped up in the desire for union.
Growing up, Cathedrals were always presented to me as being a huge wastes of money and energy. Nothing but monuments too Roman Catholic excess. Much better were our utilitarian Baptist house of worship (which apparently strived to be the most boring structure in town.) I remember being filled with awe when I first visited the National Cathederal in D.C. I remember clearly the beautiful moon window. The first thought that came to my mind was how amazing God was, not how amazing man was for building the thing. N.T. Wright, who served as the Anglican Bishop at Lichfield Cathedral in England for a time, argues for their existence in his book on worship:
From For All God’s Worth
(p. 14)
The true God is the one who became human and died and rose again in order to offer a new way of being human, a way of worship and love. Christ died, says Paul, so that we might embody the saving faithfulness of God: “It is all God’s work.”Now if that isn’t true, a building like a cathedral is simply an expensive monument to an impossible dream; and all we do in it is simply an elaborate way of turning over in bed, the better to continue the dream rather than wake up and face reality. But if it is true-if it really is the case that the true God is the one whose love overwhelms us in Jesus Christ-then the appropriate response is celebration, because this God is the reconciler, the healer. Celebration and healing: that is what a cathedral is all about.
…So it isn’t surprising that those who are grasped by this gospel have built cathedrals. People who have forgotten who God is produce concrete jungles and cardboard cities. People who remember or rediscover who God is build cathedrals to his glory, and homes where the poor are cared for.
I’ve been reading The Nautical Chart, a mystery novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte (translated from the Spanish). It’s difficult to like the main character because he is such a loser. Nonetheless, I really identified with this sentiment:
Coy let himself sail with the ship for a moment, lost in a daydream of a long chase at the first light of dawn, of fleeing sails on the horizon. When there was no such thing as radar or satellites or sonar, ships were little dice cups dancing at the mouth of hell, and the sea was a mortal peril, but also an unassailable refuge from all things-lives lived or yet to be lived, deaths looming or already accomplished, but all of it left behind on land. “We come too late to a world too old,” he had read in some book. Of course we come too late. We come to ships and ports and seas that are too old, when dying dolphins peel away from the bows of ships, and when Conrad has written The shadow-Line twenty times, Long John Silver is a brand of whiskey, and Moby Dick has become the good whale in an animated film.
There’s a reason Gene Roddenbery says space is the final frontier. We’ve run out of them here. There is no hidden city left to discover in the Congo. There are no pirate ships hiding in the mists. GPS and satellite imagery have laid the smack-down on adventure. I think we must turn to other mysteries and frontiers: To mapping the human genome, to sub-atomic particles and cold fusion, to artificial intelligence, and of course, to interstellar travel. There will ALWAYS be a space program somewhere. Even if it never accomplishes anything substantial. The sons of Adam have a calling to understand and dominate their world.
(OK, apparently there isn’t a whiskey named after THAT particular pirate. So we’ll grab a different one instead!)
I’ve just started ready The Tempest by William Shakespeare. In the intro to the edition I have, editor Louis B. Wright goes on a rant about the historians who like to insist that Shakespeare couldn’t possible have written so many good plays; that he must have stolen other people’s material:
Most anti-Shakespeareans are naive and betray and obvious snobbery. The author of their favorite plays, they imply, must have had a college diploma framed and hung on his study wall like the one in their dentist’s office, and obviously so great a writer must have had a title or some equally significant evidence of exalted social background. They forget that genius has a way of cropping up in unexpected places and that none of the great creative writers of the world got his inspiration in a college or university course.
Living and working an academia for the past seven years, I’ve certainly seen the “my vita is longer than yours” contest and the “my degree is from a more prestigious institution than yours” game played pretty regularly. It’s funny though, Dan Bukvich, the professor in our music department with by far the most creative output and renown for pedagogical excellence only has a Master’s from a place nobody has heard of. Einstein didn’t have a degree worth mentioning at all, just enough to get his foot in the door as a bookkeeper while he pondered physics at night. I didn’t realize Shakespeare was another example of this.
I think I like stories like this because they fly in the face of snobbery. I think deep down I wish I WAS in the snob class with a degree from Juliard or MIT, working a “respectable” post. But I don’t have those things and never will. I wasn’t born into enough money. Stories like this give me hope that I can “be somebody” even though I haven’t been seemingly dealt the best hand. Now, all of this may be just trying to stoke up my own pride when I should just accept being humbled, but I think there is more to it than that. I want to “be somebody” just as much as the next guy. The drive for excellence is implanted in many of us. It can be twisted toward the ego, but I think the Lord put it there in the first place.
I was typing notes down from a stack of books yesterday and realized how much time theologians spend quoting the people that came before them. Sometimes they have long stretches of their own original ideas, but most of the time is spent quoting someone else and then discussing it. That’s exactly what I’m doing on this blog. Maybe I’m in good company. Or maybe we ALL aren’t very original!
Anyway, I found it kind of funny.
In “Wild at Heart”, I’m amazed at how often author John Eldridge quotes Philip Yancey.
From what I’ve read of Philip Yancey, he likes to quote C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton.
Lewis and Chesterton in turn quote Augustine a lot.
Now we’re starting to get into some more meaty content. I feel like I’m traveling down a funnel…
Augustine quotes, hmmm, lets see, the New Testament quite a bit.
And in the New Testament, we have some really good fresh material from Jesus and Paul, but even they are quoting stuff all the time! From where? Well, the Old Testament! (Jude also quotes the Apocrypha a bit too. Apparently he didn’t get the memo.)
And now in the Old Testament, we’ve got the raw WORD OF GOD, in the law and the prophets. Along with some inspired hymns, poetry, wise sayings, and a lot of straight history.
I think this is why sometimes, we just need to skip all the middle men and read BIBLE.
Here, Yancy quotes Paul Tournier. Who, from what I can gather was a Swiss physician turned Christian psychotherapist. He lived mostly during the first half of the last century.
The most wonderful thing in this world is not the good that we accomplish, but the fact that good can come out of the evil that we do. I have been struck, for example, by the numbers of people who have been brought back to God under the influence of a person to whom they have had some imperfect attachment… Our vocation is, I believe, to build good out of evil. For if we try to build good out of good, we are in danger of running out of raw material.
I see this now goes to reinforce one of the major points he established earlier in the book:
The world is good.
The world is fallen.
The world can be redeemed.
Yancy calls this the story of the universe. I can’t help but think I’ve seen this same idea in other places, but worded differently.
Donald Miller in Blue Like Jazz quotes a poem by C.S. Lewis:
All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through;
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.Peace, reassurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin;
I talk of love – a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek –
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
And then comments:
I sat there above the city wondering if I was like the parrot in Lewis’s poem, swinging in my cage, reciting Homer, all the while having no idea what I was saying. I talk about love, forgiveness, social justice; I rage against American materialism in the name of altruism, but have I even controlled my own heart? The overwhelming majority of time I spend thinking about myself, pleasing myself, reassuring myself, and when I am done there is nothing to spare for the needy. Six billion people live in this world, and I can only muster thoughts for one. Me.
