Culturally Irrelevant

I tried to get a picture of them for you, but for some reason I couldn’t get my phone to send the file to my email address. And boy did they reek! I stuck my head in the pantry tonight to get a plastic Walmart bag and caught a faint whiff of something foul. I made a thorough search of the pantry floor, smelling everything from the bread machine to the griddle. No dice. But I wasn’t about to give up when I knew something that gross was in close proximity to my food!

The bottom shelf was next. As soon as I started pulling stuff off, I saw it. A very juicy, very dark bag of what used to be potatoes. Actually a few of them were mostly dry, but one was completely disgusting. No need to keep looking. Honestly, my very first thought at that moment, as weird as it sounds, was “Thank you God for my sense of smell.” There’s no way I’d have seen them there behind everything, let alone searched for them, if I hadn’t smelled them first. And that’s when it hit me.

The gift of discerning spirits is like the church’s nose. It is sensitive and detects things by the Spirit that other parts of the body just don’t register. I have a friend who regularly operates in this gift. Some people are just nosy, critical or insightful, but the Lord works through this guy regularly with the real deal. And he does it in love through prayer. When I’m confused about something in my life, I know I can call this guy and he nails it before I get more than a handful of words out.

A couple points to be made here. One, just like I needed my nose to find those rotten potatoes, we need the gifts in each other. It’s supposed to be that way. It keeps us humble, dependent upon others and God, and connected to Jesus’ body. Two, God cares deeply about what’s hidden in the secret places of our lives. Whether it’s the stuff we suppress from fear or shame, or those things that we cannot see because of our own self-deception, pain or ignorance, He cares about it. And He cares because it’s hurting us, wounding others and ultimately crippling His body. He wants us to be free, to have the rotten potatoes identified and removed. My pantry has good food in it, but I don’t want anything out of there if it smells like sewer.

Praise God for discerning believers who operate in grace, humility and boldness. It’s good for us to confess our sins to each other often, to have dark corners exposed quickly, before they become infested. I’m so thankful for the times my good friends and my wife have lovingly punked me to my face instead of tolerating my peace treaties with sin.

Lord, reveal the things hidden in secret, and start with my heart.

part 2 - Ahaz and raising kids

Yesterday I stopped with a grandpa with leprosy, a son with nauseatingly dying faith and a grandson on the way. Enter Ahaz. Here’s what Kings has to say about this young man:

Unlike David his father, he did not do what was right in the eyes of the Lord his God. He walked in the ways of the kings of Israel and even sacrificed his son in the fire, following the detestable ways of the nations the Lord had driven out before the Israelites. He offered sacrifices and burned incense at the high places, on the hilltops and under every spreading tree.  (2 Kings 16:2-4)

Now how did that happen? His dad and grandpa weren’t slouches. Sure, they didn’t follow through with the entire covenant, but they did their best, right? Well, I’m realizing maybe the problem’s right there. They did it part of the way. They were half-hearted. They knew what God desired and chose to keep a little back.

The Bible is silent on the details of Jotham and Ahaz’s father-son relationship. Whether or not Jotham was an absentee father who didn’t teach his son, or if Ahaz was somehow emotionally scared by some tragic event. So it’s probably complicated and we’ll never know. But it looks like the saying “like father, like son” is not always true. Yes, Jotham was like Azariah. But because Jotham didn’t advance, there was little chance for Ahaz to stay on the same course. This story tells me that sin is like spiritual entropy, constantly decaying things that don’t move or grow. Chances are that my faith will grow from what my father imparted to me or it will fall way, but it probably won’t just be the same. So Ahaz saw something irrelevant and powerless in Jotham’s life that he didn’t care for, or he just didn’t want anything to do with Yahweh because he wanted the pleasures of sin more.  Either way, it didn’t take. The baton didn’t get passed.

So what can I do to make sure my boys “catch it”? Well, I’m a new dad and I’ve never done this before, but here’s the way I’m approaching it. First, I’ve learned that I’m a steward over my kids. God has trusted me with their care, but ultimately they don’t belong to me. So, everything I do had better be pleasing to their heavenly Father because I’m going to stand before him one day and give an account for my words towards them, my actions towards them and my choices to steward and nurture the gifts within them.

Starting there, I believe my primary responsibility is to protect them and provide for them according to the gifts and grace God has given me. But in the middle of all that is the “how”. And at this point in my life I believe the most influential thing I can do is to chase God wholeheartedly. Really. I mean, to grow in my faith, to have a personal, intimate walk with God that is open and desperate and real. And then, I need to include my kids in that relationship, to let them look in and see it, and to be consistent with it and to let it affect the way that I treat them and talk to them. Katy and I have gathered basic teaching and discipline tools from Scripture and godly counsel, but even good tools are useless if my heart’s in the wrong place. But when my relationship with the Father is right, everything else seems to fall in line. And ultimately, when I’ve done that, it will have to be my kids’ choice as they grow up to pursue God or not. And I believe that they will because of what’s being deposited on the inside of them and the example that’s being lived in front of them, both from us as well as other mature believers who surround them.

part 3 – a burden

When I’m wearing the yoke of constant intimacy with Christ (abiding in the vine), carrying the load that I’ve been given is a joy. I have the grace for it. But when I carry that load, or more than I’m given, from any other “yoke”, I get outside that place of rest in Christ and begin to strive and strain. I start doing things my way, in my strength. That’s where burdens come in.

In the original language of the New Testament, this word burden, or “baros”, meant a difficult or imposing requirement. That’s different than the “load” mentioned before, which is a measured weight that is meant to be carried, like freight being loaded onto a ship. A burden is unmeasured and unfitting. It restricts movement and makes it difficult to be productive.

There are three different types of burdens that I see in scripture: 1) the weight of sin, 2) the traditions of men, and 3) difficulty during trials. In this post I’d like to stick to the first two. Paul covers the first one in Galatians 6: “Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. Carry each other’s burdens…” (vss. 1-2) Here, burdens are moral faults or the burden of sin. Sin is a self-imposed burden that breaks my intimacy with Christ.

This kind of burden is like a broken arm. The rest of my body may be just fine, but that one area of pain takes all of my attention and keeps me from doing anything else. Untreated sin is a festering wound that cripples my ability to walk in faith with God and in relationship with others. Until the burden of sin is removed from my life, I can’t fully experience life in Jesus.

So a burden can be self-imposed through a choice to get tangled up in sin, and it can also be imposed by those in authority. Leaders in the body of Christ are meant to guide and serve, but often they make decisions out of their emotions or past paradigms and place requirements on people that are not from God. When a leader relies on sources other than biblical truth and the leading of the Holy Spirit, the result will usually be an unmeasured response that imposes a difficult requirement upon others. The pharisees were famous for this, and the early church battled it constantly.

Fortunately, the New Testament gives us examples of heavy burdens appropriately being withheld from the church. In Acts 15:28, the Jerusalem council sent a letter to the Gentile world telling them “it seemed good to us…not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements.” This is similar to the way Jesus speaks to the Church of Thyatira in Revelation 2:24: “But to the rest of you who are in Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching (who have not known the deep things of Satan, as they call them) I place no other burden on you.”

I’m constantly checking my life for extra burdens. I’ve discovered that I am constantly in the state of adding burdens to my own life and the lives of others, even if it’s in very small, almost imperceptible ways. But the Holy Spirit is in the business of constantly removing burdens and weights. At this point in my life, I’m tired of carrying heavy burdens in my own strength. My only desire to is be yoked to Christ, carrying the load he has given me. Everything else in my life can take a hike!

…let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. (Heb 12:1-3)