Category: Analogies

The Happy Dinosaur

Several years ago, while attending the Society of Exploration Geophysicists Annual Meeting, I had an opportunity to catch up with an old friend I had worked with in Alaska.  We hadn’t made a connection in quite some time, but Dean is the kind of friend you can easily pick up the conversation with no matter how long it’s been between visits.  This salt-of-the-earth fellow shocked me when he announced that he was divorced and remarried since we talked last.  As we compared notes about other co-workers from our Alaska days, Dean observed, “I think you are the only one who is still married to his first wife.  How does it feel to be a dinosaur?”  I wasn’t sure what to say.  I didn’t want to make light of his situation and the pain involved, but all I could say was the first honest thought that came to my mind, “It feels good.”

Yes, it feels good.  It feels good to keep your promise.  Again, not to ignore or minimize the circumstances and pain of divorce, but it feels good to be a dinosaur, if that is what keeping your promise is called.  I am also probably the happiest dinosaur you know.  But the happy part is a long story for another time.

A promise is a powerful thing.  I hate to break a promise.  I have and it hurts.  Why is breaking a promise so painful?  As Michael Card observes in his book Immanuel:  Reflections on the Life of Christ, when you make a promise you give away a part of yourself.  Something as simple as “I’ll be there at 3 o’clock to pick you up” gives a part of yourself to another person.  And something as serious as “I promise to love you for the rest of our lives” gives yourself completely to another person.  That is why divorce is so painful.  In marriage, you are giving yourself to another person.  In divorce, you have lost something you will never get back.  You have lost a part of yourself.  God’s intention in marriage is to give yourselves away to each other and to never get it back.  May I encourage you?  Keep your promise.

Building a Cathedral

A group of tourists went to visit a marble quarry in western Vermont.  As their tour progressed around the quarry, one of the visitors called out to a jack hammer-wielding worker below, “What are you doing down there?”  The worker snarled back, “I’m cutting this stupid rock into a square!”  Seeing another worker who appeared to be doing the same thing, the visitor called out to him, “What are you doing?”  The second worker, obviously happy in his work, called back, “I’m on a team building a cathedral!”

When we view family life through the eyes of the first worker, we are just a group of people living under the same roof.  Your contribution to the effort may go unnoticed in the busyness of day to day activities.  Conversely, you may not acknowledge the contribution of others to the family’s well-being.  In short, we are just cutting rocks into squares.

But when we embrace family life through the eyes of the second worker, our family becomes a team that is building a cathedral.  Each one in the family has a contribution to make.  Our job as Mom and Dad is to require a contribution, recognize the contribution, and celebrate the contribution.  Part of developing our family identity is getting your kids on your team.  If we require them to join the team with all responsibility and no celebration, family life becomes defined by rules; cold and rigid.  When we celebrate and reward without responsibility, we fail our kids.  We haven’t taught them the value of self-discipline, loyalty, and service.

As in all things family, building a cathedral requires balance.  A balance of responsibility and celebration.  A balance of love and control.  A balance of truth and grace.

Accounting 101

“Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8) is a fact of Scripture that we are quite comfortable with.  If you are part of God’s family, you are not only comfortable with that fact, but you believe it.  So what do you think of the fact stated one chapter later, “Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin” (Rom 6:6-7)?  The fact that “our old self died with Christ…” carries the same scriptural weight as “Christ died for us”, something we readily accept and embrace.  So what does God want us to do with “our old self died with Christ…”?

God wants us to do some bookkeeping.  God wants us to enter this fact into our ledger.  “Even so reckon yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6:11).  Because our old self was crucified with Christ (Rom 6:6), God is asking us to go to the ledger and remove our name from the “sinner by nature” column and instead place it in the “dead to sin” column.  A little cut and paste, if you will.  The Greek word, logizomai, translated “reckon” in Romans 6:11 is an accounting term.  And proper accounting, as we have learned from numerous business scandals, is the recording of facts, not fabrications.  God is asking us to record a fact that is true.  The fact is, the life of Christ has been planted in us by the new birth and its nature is not to commit sin (I Jn 3:9).  And God would not ask us to put in our ledger something that is not true.

Satan, on the other hand, has made a living out of challenging divine fact (Gen 3:4).  Why?  Because lying and deceit are at the center of Satan’s nature.  Jesus said, “[The devil] was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him.  Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature; for he is a liar, and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44).

Satan’s work continues today in his suggestion that we doubt God’s divine facts.  And his exhibit A is our daily experience.  Satan holds up a mirror to our life and asks, “Does this look like someone who resembles the moral excellence of Christ?”  Satan, the accuser, says you aren’t good enough to receive the promise of a life set free from the power of sin.

How should we respond to this accusation?  After all, maybe our experience with sin does not line up with God’s promise about its diminished power.  We start by going to the ledger, going to God’s Word and believing what is written there.  This is a critical fork in the road.  Are we going to believe Satan’s accusation or God’s divine fact?  Are we going to turn the mirror back to Satan and show him Christ’s image etched on our new heart?  When we go through the reckoning exercise and believe what is written in the ledger, we are ready to tackle the next question.  “How do I put the divine fact to work in my day-to-day conflict with sin?”  The short answer is by walking in the Spirit.  The long answer is what the remainder of this blog is all about.

The Discipleship Earthquake

I am taking a one-post break from our new identity train of thought for this exciting development.  As a geophysicist, I am familiar with the physics of earthquakes; their magnitude, the tsunamis they produce, their precursors, and their aftershocks.  Precursors are hard to identify until after the fact, but most major earthquakes give some signal that something big is coming.  In the spiritual world, I believe we are feeling the precursors of a coming “discipleship earthquake.”  This idea was reinforced by the cover headline, “A Discipleship Revolution” on the latest issue of Mission Frontiers magazine.  The publication is available online and I highly recommend it.

Over the last century, by the grace of God and the work of His servants, the gospel message has reached around the globe.  People groups of all kind from urban to rural, simple to sophisticated, religious to pagan have turned to Christ.  But this turn to the gospel has not always been followed by a continuation to discipleship; the movement to Christian growth and maturity in communities and individuals.  In many places, a new “Christian” majority has been unable to lift their country out of political corruption, family dysfunction, petty crime, or a syncretistic mix of Christianity and local religion.

But all of this is about to change.  In the Great Commission (Mt 28:18-20), Jesus empowers and instructs His followers to Go, Baptize, Make disciples, and Teach.  The “Go’ and the “Baptize” have brought the gospel to millions of new believers.  But the “Make disciples” and “Teach” is only now catching up.  But catching up it is, like a rubber band being slowly stretched over time with little movement that has now let go and is flying forward.

And the flying forward is being accelerated by love.  Our previous error, myself included, was to think that filling one’s head with knowledge was the key to Christian growth.  In “teaching them to observe the commandments” have we focused so strongly on having the “right answers” that we ignored teaching the greatest commandment of all; to love God and love others?  We move true discipleship forward when we teach believers to love as God loves.  “Let us consider how to spur one another on to love and good deeds” (Heb 10:24).

The discipleship revolution is being fueled by love.  If we love Christ, we will obey His commands (Jn 14:15).  If we love others, we will serve them (Gal 5:13).  It is really that simple, no caveats, no exceptions.  And it is taking off in a million acts of love from Jars of Clay’s 1000 wells project to home building missions in Juarez, Mexico to serving a Thanksgiving meal to your family and friends.

The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization recently concluded in Cape Town, South Africa.  The conference brought together a diverse group of mission leaders and strategists.  As always with this type of event, a statement of belief was produced.  When John Stott, elder statesman of the sponsor organization, looked over the first draft, he approved, “Evangelicals usually write statements that affirm or deny, but this is the language of love.”

The Sin Closet

“As those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on [clothe yourselves with] a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience” (Col 3:12).  In both Ephesians 4 and Colossians 3, the apostle Paul tells us more than once to “put on” the new self along with its character attributes, and to “throw off” the old self with its sinful traits.  We often view lists of character traits to aspire to and those to avoid as somehow equal choices for the believer.  But based on the promises of Scripture, this is not the case.

The bad choices we face are not equals that we have to drum up the moral energy to resist.  They are simply clothes that do not fit our new identity.  They are clothes that don’t fit who we have become and should be tossed from the closet.  You know that shirt you still have from high school.  Stop wearing it!  It doesn’t fit!  Throw it out!

It is the same with sin.  Like clothes that are too baggy, too tight, too misshapen, or too small, sin does not fit your new shape as a believer.  The clothes of “immorality, impurity, evil desire, greed, idolatry, anger, wrath, malice, slander, abusive speech, and lying” (Col 3:5,8,9) do not fit you anymore.  In fact, Paul ends verse 9 with “since you laid aside (past tense) the old self with its evil practices.”  Clean out the closet.  Throw the old sin clothes away.  Start wearing clothes that fit; “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, and love” (Col 3:12-14).

Not only do the clothes of sin not fit the believer, but they are woefully out of date.  “For the time already past is sufficient for you to have carried out the desire of the Gentiles, having pursued a course of sensuality, lusts, drunkenness, carousing, drinking parties, and abominable idolatries” (I Pet 4:3).  In other words, the time for sin is past.  Sin that “fits” is long gone in the rear view mirror.

So go ahead.  Clean out the closet.  Get rid of those dated and ill-fitting threads and step into the clothes that fit.  They are not just clothes to aspire to, but at your core, are a picture of who you have become.