Gracious legalism

Here are five Tenets of Grace that I believe that are radically different than anything I believed before.

1. I believe in the concept “once saved always saved”.

This means that once God has invited you into His family, there is nothing you can do to jeopardize His love for you.
This is to the Christian who killed their first baby. This is to the Christian that treated their child with so much hatred he/she committed suicide. This is to the Christian who was used and forgotten by the spouse that didn’t care. This is to the Christian who used and forgot that spouse. This is to the Christian who raped the little girl put in His care. This is to you.

God forgives you.

2. I believe that you can never do so much wrong in your life that God will give up on you.

This means that once God has invited you into His family, nothing in your past means anything. This is to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Osama Bin Laden, the cop in Ferguson, the people who bomb abortion clinics, the people who tell others that they’re not good enough for church, the child molesters and murderers, to you.

God will forgive you.

3. I believe that Christianity isn’t a set of rules that you must get right but a growing process of your relationship with God.

This to the Baptists, the Catholics, the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the non-denominationals, the Pentecostals, the Evangelicals, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, to you.

I believe in God’s love for you, and it is not dependent on your doctrine.

4. I believe that there is nothing you can do, nothing in your past, nothing in your present, that gives me the right to question God’s love for you.

I forgive you and let go of preconceived notions of your “goodness” or “badness” and choose to see you in the light of God’s love for you.

5. I believe grace is the epitome of Who God is.

I believe in you and your worth to God and His kingdom.

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I didn’t used to believe in these things. I used to believe these Tenets of Legalism.

A. Salvation could be lost at any moment. – Hebrews 10:26
B. There was a limit to God’s mercy if you committed enough past sins. – 1 Tim 1:13
C. Obeying the rules of the New Testament determines you salvation. – John 14:15
D. If I knew that there was some sin in your life that needed to be rectified, I had the responsibility to point it out. Furthermore, I could judge whether or not I could trust you as a friend according to how well you performed in my eyes. – 1 Cor 5:12-13
E. The requirement of obedience was the epitome of Who God is. – John 14:15

But, there’s something that has completely messed with me: Jesus came eating and drinking, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. I don’t know anyone like that. I know so many Christians who have “earned” my respect (see C and D above). But, there is not a Christian in my life who I would recognize as a friend of sinners. Everyone’s a sinner, and these are people of great grace. But Jesus was so close to the marginalized that He was derisively called a “friends of sinners”. His grace must run so deep, I can’t reconcile this one concept, this “friend of sinners” without reaching conclusions 1 – 5 above.

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Funny though, I always viewed myself as gracious, even when A – E dominated my life. I was extremely submissive and helpful whenever I could be. I was a friend to people and loved on people who didn’t live up to my expectations, who probably failed the standard set in D. I was very careful with advice. I listened more than I spoke and did my best to speak life into the situations of others, life and love instead of judgment.

But even writing these words, I can see the ugly head of pride and arrogance. It came up often. I constantly thought of myself as ministering to people who simply were not as good of Christian as I was. But I had a great solution to these thoughts. I knew they were wrong, and I didn’t want to be the Pharisee but rather the publican.

I focused and magnified the sins and failures in my life until I wasn’t just in the same level as everyone I had judged. No, I judged myself as worse than they, a crippling broken soul. Whether, I truly believed that I don’t know. But, whenever I found myself lifted up, I fixed things by tearing myself down in my mind.

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I used to measure Christianity on a scale of extreme legalism to extreme grace. I tried to be in the middle.

Extreme-legalism Christians were mean. They gave judgments without permission or concern of the hurt that they would cause. They bombed abortion clinics. The picketed the funerals of gay people. They routinely reminded people that they were going to hell. Neither Christians nor non-Christians wanted to be around them. They took concepts A – E to the extreme.

Extreme-grace Christians were hippies. They basically thought everybody could go to heaven. They basically thought that sin didn’t matter. They believed that everyone deserved to be saved and that you could say a prayer, kill a child, and God would welcome you into His kingdom with open arms. They didn’t seem to make the world better but ignored its problems under an umbrella of “God loves everyone, Yippee!”

The funny thing is that I totally believed A – E. But, I tried to be more on the gracious side of how I treated people. Ironically, this became my mask. I had to hide my legalism so that “lesser Christians” would feel loved and I had to pretend to be really good, even better than I was because I wanted the approval of the “better Christians”. If they thought, I was good enough to be one of them, maybe even to be a leader, then God must think the same, that I was good enough to be His.

Then, over the course of a few years, one of the best things that could have happened to me changed everything. I and my bride were routinely “given advice” by an extreme-legalist. We were told that we were simply not meeting God’s expectations, we’re not good enough in His eyes, and had plenty of sin to point out. The thing is that I was really good at hiding sin. And yet, the little that wasn’t hidden was enough to condemn me.

The problem was that we still believed A – E. And, the problem was that under that paradigm, it didn’t matter how good we were, how gracious we were, how nice we were, the arrogance still existed, along with the self-loathing.

Somehow, no one was good enough for me to trust, for me to love as an equal. Either I would love them as a “lesser” or respect them as a “greater”. And, somehow, I was never good enough, not for God. I never met my own expectations.

The concepts A – E became a box, a prison that kept me from feeling I could ever experience God’s love much less deserve it. But, more than that, it became an island, because there was no one who could “know”. Once they did, I would be abandoned … Not good enough to be a part.

I slowly realized that I would rather die than live in that prison. Sounds a bit melodramatic, but wouldn’t you? If life on earth was going to consist of me always trying to be better but never good enough – if it would always consist of the loneliness of always hiding the darkness in my life and only admitting it to the select few who were both better Christians than me but also ones who would not desert me (which they wouldn’t desert me because we could never become close enough for me to affect them negatively) – if that was life, death and the freedom of heaven just sounded better. Being somewhere I knew that I was loved with no expectations and nothing to live up to and no social games – it just sounded better, not in a suicidal way but in a realistic way.

Then, I realized something: as long as I held to concepts A – E, the very foundations of legalism, I would always be in that prison. Something was wrong, incredibly broken with Christianity that made me long for death. What happened to having “life in abundance”.

And it hit me, the foundations of extreme grace made more sense. Better yet, they gave me a Christianity I believed in, wanted to be a part of, and wanted to share with others. But, best of all, it gave me freedom, freedom to fail and not question my salvation, freedom to grow however slowly it happened, freedom to enjoy God’s love and not try to perform for it. When legalism was no longer the basis of my Christianity, I changed. I believed in people. I became more cognizant of my unfair expectations. I started to share more of my life and to see God and not just flaws in others.

I have a long way to grow. Years of believing in concepts A – E have left me with cynically judgmental heart. But, God is gracious, loving me and moving with me no matter how slow-going.

And, I am loved.

And, you are loved.

I used to be gracious legalist, trying to love others from a foundation of a performance-based belief in God’s love for me and them. I played my part well.

But, now I believe in grace that covers all. And, if I’m wrong I believe that God’s grace will cover that too.

I used to scoff at Christians who believed in extreme grace, but now concepts 1 – 5 are the background for my Christian beliefs. And, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Parish Dream

Dreams are a pain.

People know what their goals are.  People know what they are doing.  And, most of the time, people know what dream of God that they are pursuing.  But rarely, do they seem to know how to put it into words.

But, even worse, dreams are so ethereal and so abstract, that they are hard for the listener to wrap their head around, to truly understand.

I’ve run into a dream.  It’s beautiful and ingenious and incredibly specific.

To explain however, I need to define a word.

A parish: a local group of Christ-followers who live in a community and work together to bring God’s kingdom to that community.

This sounds a lot like the definition of a church.  In a way, it is.  But, a church has way too many connotations that come with it from our culture.

First, a parish should have no physical location (e.g. no church building).

A parish has nothing to do with denominations or belief systems.  It is simply a collection of believers.

A parish both serves a community and is made up of that community.  A lot of churches are founded with the concept of serving particular communities or even cities; however, many of these churches are full of active members who do not belong to the communities being served, do not have a real stake in that community’s well-being, and do not belong to the community being served.  Because of this, churches struggle with disconnect.  The community generally feels that the church is not part of them but a bunch of outsiders trying to help when they know nothing of what is going on.  The church generally is split between serving a community to which its members don’t belong and serving members who don’t belong to the community the church was purposed for.  Churches generally find a balance.  But a parish wouldn’t have to.  A parish would be interdenominational.  It could consist of members who visit a plethora of different churches that are serving their community.  Furthermore, a parish consists only of people in the neighborhood.  It’s purpose cannot split by serving the members or the community.  By serving the members, a parish builds up the community.  By serving the community, a parish builds up its members.

The dream that’s been shared with me is that of a neighborhood being overrun with a movement for Christ, of the kingdom of God being advanced so much in this neighborhood that other neighborhoods take notice, that other neighborhoods want to see what’s different.

The dream is of this neighborhood becoming a parish, a place where the incumbent Christ-followers are galvanizing God’s work, and where, like a domino effect, this neighborhood is influencing others.

Does that sound like a dream you could get behind?

I Give God Two Years

A professor of mine from back in the day had an interesting device on his desk.  It looked like a little robot with a bunch of legs.  If you turned it on, it would bounce up and down all over the desk.  It was the embodiment of the phrase “spazzing out”.  I asked him about it, and he told me that it reminded him of what happens in life when a person has a lot of energy but no real focus.

I’ve been feeling like that robot a lot lately.

It’s funny, I was reading about Joseph in something Seth Barnes wrote and he mentioned that Joseph had dreams of his brothers bowing down to him, dreams sent from God.  But, after that, basically everything that could remove him from that future ever happening hit him.  His brothers nearly killed him; they sold him into slavery; he ended up some guy’s servant in a distant land with no obvious chance of ever seeing his family again (except maybe that dream); then, he went to jail; then, he experienced a rise to power and became second in command but still even more tied to the land of Egypt than before.  God’s miracles occur in the strangest ways, but His promises never fail.

My bride and I have a dream of finding a church family that goes far beyond anything either of us have experienced.  God went out of His way to close doors and to show us that we have a place here.  So, I give Him two years.  It’s the time we promise to this place.

It almost sounds sacrilegious to put a time limit on God doesn’t it?  But, He promised to give fish not a snake.  And, to be honest, if He doesn’t move and shake the foundations of everything I thought possible, my faith will take a hit.  My hope will take a hit.  I’ll probably put God back in a box and talk about how He does little everyday miracles that you’ll only notice if you know where to look and how He does little convictions in the privacy of your home where you can feel His presence most strongly.

But, He doesn’t.  He does MIRACLES that shake the foundation of everything we know, that no one in his right mind can deny, that make the concept of not worshiping Him with all our being seem foolish.  He CONVICTS us to the point of sobbing in front of everyone huddled together with other Christians who are sobbing for you.

In two years, I can’t wait to see what He’ll do.

Till then, I’ll bounce with all the energy He can give me.

You are enough

I want to say something to my blog readers who might not get this church thing:  people who think that church is full of people that you can’t trust with your problems, who are judgmental, who think that they are better than you, who just need to mature in love and grace and life with God before you could ever believe that they are any more than just “Christians” (exaggerated finger movements).

Because there are Christians.  And, a lot of us have met those.  They’re great people who would give the shirt off their back if you needed it.

Then, there are “Christian”s who will tell you everything that’s wrong with your life and how you need to change and how you don’t go to church enough.  And, these just happen to be the same people who you know are sleeping around or going to clubs and getting drunk or getting high.

And then, there are people who aren’t Christian or “Christian,” and they’d still give you the shirt off your back if you needed it.

And, the truth is that you find a lot more of those “Christian”s than you find real Christians, right?  In fact, you find so many “Christian”s that the word Christian almost inspires a sense of distrust for you.  Those people have to prove themselves real, moral, loving, gracious people before you’ll ever listen to a word they say.  Because, most Christians you know are nothing more than hypocrites.

I want to tell you a secret.  Many Christians – quote or unquote – think that way too.  Our churches are full of people who actually don’t trust each other.  Part of it is because they find others to be straight-up “Christian” hypocrites.  But, on the other hand, many people who make up church see themselves as belonging among the “Christian”s, and the fakes.

In fact, they not only belong or belonged in that group, but they know how to fake it, how to pretend to be super-righteous, godly, Christ-loving, etc … at least around the right people.  And, then they see someone and part of them thinks, “Man, I wish I could be that good and moral and righteous and perfect like her/him.”  But, another part of them thinks, “That person can’t be everything he/she is pretending to be.  I bet they x, y, z when no one is looking.”  You’ll have to prove that you’re this perfect/godly/good when no one’s looking before I’ll trust you with anything about me.

I’ve been on both sides, the “Christian” and the judgmental jerk.  But, I’ve realized something.  Nearly, every Christian I’ve ever met would probably claim to have been or even be a hypocrite.  No matter how hard you try to be Christian (because being Christian feels like playing the part – being moral, going to church, saying no); no matter how perfect you try to be, you screw up.  You list sins, hobbies, habits in your heads – things in your past and/or your present – and think to yourself.  “If they knew this or that about me, they would see for who I really am: someone who doesn’t deserve to be called a Christian.”

In fact, the only way you can feel good or happy about yourself and your own efforts is by projecting your feelings of hypocrisy on others.  “I bet they’re just as bad as I am.”  In fact, “I bet they’re worse than I am.”  The thing is … Christians do this.  Furthermore, non-Christians do this.  For a lot of people, the church is what is keeping them from God because they see so much hypocrisy.  But you know what?  You are just as guilty of judging people, of seeing the name Christian and projecting your own brokenness onto them.

And, I’m sick of it.  I’m sick of thinking that way.  I’m sick of navigating the waters of church worrying that others are thinking that.  So, I’m starting here.

You are good enough.

You – the “Christian” – are good enough.  You are good enough to worship with me.  You are good enough to love God.  You are good enough to be His child.  You are good enough to be loved.  You are good enough for Christ to give His life for.

You – the non-Christian – are good enough.  You are good enough to worship with me.  You are good enough to love God.  You are good enough to be His child.  You are good enough to be loved.  You are good enough for Christ to give His life for.

You are enough!

You are good enough to carry the name Christian on your back.  Regardless of what you’ve done.

You are good enough to be a part of a church that fights Satan.

You, with all of your imperfection, are good enough to be called a child of God.

We get so caught up in what’s wrong with church, its people, its structure, its make-up.  We forget the most important part of the Gospel.

You were enough for the God of this world to die a gruesome death.

If you think that you are a “Christian”, that’s okay.  You are enough.

If you think that you are incredibly judgmental, that’s okay. You are enough.

If you think that you are a hypocrite, that’s okay.  You are enough.

If you think that you could never be good enough to even pretend to be a Christian, that’s okay.  You are enough.

God created you.  In that single moment, He decided that you were enough for Him.  And, you can’t break that decision.

Oh, and then He died for you proving how much you are worth to Him a second time.

You are enough.

If you get anything, please get that.  You are enough.

Let’s be church together.

The Perfect Marriage

So, I’m kinda new to this whole marriage thing; so I always second guess saying anything because 99% of married couples probably have more experience and wisdom than I do.

But honestly, the past two weeks have been … well hard.  My bride is taking her hardest year of school and simply doesn’t know if she’s going to make it.  People thought we were crazy for going to a foreign country within our first two months.  But, it wasn’t so bad.  Maybe because we had a great marriage modeled for us ( 😉 ).

Compared to Vanuatu, the past two weeks have been full of stress.  Fortunately, my bride and I have really grown in our communication.  So, we can have tense emotional hard conversations without hating each other.  But as much as these conversations have to be had, as much as our roles have to be figured out and understood, as much as we have to find ways of balancing our needs with those of the other, all of its draining, and it’s easy to wish that our marriage was just normal and always perfect and life-giving.

But, then God led me to this blog:  There’s no such thing as a perfect marriage.

It all reminded me of why I married in the first place.  It wasn’t because my bride was the perfect woman.  It wasn’t because my bride was the perfect woman for me.  It wasn’t because she met every need I had before we started this journey together.  And, truthfully, despite she has, without a doubt, changed me for the better, there are some ways that she’s had a negative effect on me, my character, my spirituality.

Nope.  I married her because God gave me this person to promise my life to and to love for forever.  He gave me someone to trust to take care of me, protect me, and love me no matter how hard it gets or how imperfect she is.  He gave me someone to support, to encourage, to protect, to build up, and to love no matter how imperfect my life is.

God loves me because He loves me because He loves me.

God loves her because He loves her because He loves her.

Marriage is the chance to practice that with someone, to love the way God does: no expectations, plenty of hard times, lots of stress, and more failures than you can ever believe.

So, I thank God for all the stress and craziness and the incredibly emotionally draining conversations, because knowing that we can make it as a team through this reminds me that the crazy future that God has planned for us will be met by an even stronger team.

In light of that thought, then my bride is the perfect woman; she’s the perfect woman for me; she’s meeting every need I have; and she’s, without a doubt, changing me for the better.  In the craziness that God calls life, I have a rock to help keep afloat.

My Problem with Lius

God’s kinda left me floundering on this one.

I wish I could give you something happy or something that makes me seem full of grace and holiness and God’s presence, but, if you read on from here, you best give me some grace.

Because right now, I’m not sure what is making me sick to my stomach: reflecting on what happened or the rocking of the boat that I’m writing this on.

We got to spend the last five days with Aiel and his five family members: his wife Nancy, his son Janson, his daughter Lorenzi, and his grand daughter Lexi. The past five days have been a blast. A man from the village chose to believe in Christ and be baptized. Jessica and I got to open up to our hosting missionary family about our thoughts on Scripture, concerns with what mission work should look like, and honest discussion of what the church should look like. I got to watch the cooking of a chicken from start to finish. In other words, I saw it caught and killed and helped pluck the feathers. I got to give my first sermon, entirely in Bislama (I had a lot of help with translating).

Sounds like a neat time. Not to mention the gorgeous sunsets or the fact that their house was about a hundred feet from the ocean. Combine that with island time, the concept of doing life slowly and completing on major thing a day and just having little pressure to do anything. Now, it sounds even better.

Now, if you’re a little neurotic like me, you’re probably thinking that I made a mistake. I must have been counting Aiel with his five family members because I only mentioned four. Well, the fifth is Lius. And, if it feels like her presence so far in this blog has gone by unnoticed, then you have a pretty good idea of the past five days.

Lius slowly lost feeling and use of her body and for the past four years, she has been bed-ridden. This grown woman who is Isle’s sister has about the body mass of a six year old. Lius is beautiful. She has the sweetest smile. But, Lius’s body is broken and it isn’t fair.

Lius has her own house. And her family has made her a bed. They have a wheel chair for her, but it is rarely used. So, Lius very rarely gets to move. So, Lius lies there looking at the wall across from her and that his her life. Lius’s family feeds her and I didn’t get a chance to see them take care of waste but I’m certain they do that as well. Surviving bed rest for four years takes a lot of work from your care takers, especially when those caretakers probably spend at least five hours a day making breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The first day, we got here Aiel mentioned but we were never introduced to Lius not until late into the second day and then it was by the Brandells. The third day we sang to her with Shawnda, our missionary mom. Every time, Shawnda would go to see Lius, she would check that Eric was taking time to read God’s Word with her.

The fourth day was a Sunday. The Brandells had pushed the issue to make sure that Luice was there for church. Usually, Aiel would worship with his family in Lius’s room/house, but with company with him, things were weird. Liuce was out of sight, out of mind.

Liuce seemed happiest on Sunday when she was with everyone. Lius had the biggest smile. I think she was starting to open up the most to us then.

Lius’s house was right next to the one my bride, me, and The Brandells were all sleeping in. Any time we went to get anything, we walked past her door.

Sunday was the only day she was with all of us. The day we sang with her, I could hear Eric leading a Bible study with some of the men. Each of the five days we were there, we had at least one Bible study and singing. Four of those days, she wasn’t a part of any of it.

Monday, I spent a lot of the day discussing with Eric, Shawnda, and my bride about the hallmarks of the true church. Loving our fellow Christians came up a lot. I didn’t go see Lius Monday.

Today, Tuesday, we left incredibly early. I managed to say goodbye. I had to cajole my PMSing bride to say goodbye and take a picture with Lius and me (I mean PMSing in a technical, non-degrading way; periods in the bush where toilets are a hole in the ground aren’t exactly fun).

This whole five days I’ve been crushed with an incredible guilt that I’m not doing enough for Lius, that I’m not loving enough, that I’m not spending enough time, that I’m not praying enough. But every time I saw Lius, I came face to face with my powerlessness in this world, face to face with brokenness that not only I can’t fix but I probably also can’t even make better.

I hope one day, when God asks Luice who cared for her as one of the least of these, who loved her as He loves, Luice has grace and remembers the little that I did do for her and not the times that I failed to give so much more.

Maybe reading this, you are angry for Lius … Angry at the fact that I honestly do not know the last time Lius sat and looked at the ocean 200 feet from her door.

Maybe, you’re angry at my bride for not wanting to walk back to Lius’s door to say good bye.

Maybe, you’re angry at me for even taking two minutes of my time to say hello yesterday.

Maybe, you’re angry at the Brandells for not demanding a higher level of care for Luice.

Maybe, you’re angry at Isle and his family for not providing that higher level of care.

Maybe, you’re angry at God for not preventing the situation in the first place.

I don’t have any good answers for you. I figure in the next year or two, Lius will no longer be with us. I hope that God keeps her happy until then.

The only answer I have for you is grace, the belief that all of us are just trying to do the best we can with what we know how, the honest truth that none of us are perfect and that all of us have times when selfishness wins and the love we are supposed to show just isn’t there, the realization that being angry or judgmental for another human’s failures comes from a deep-seated feeling of self-righteousness.

I wish I could tell you that I learned how to give unconditional love these past few days. If faced with the exact same situation again, I’m fairly certain that I would be different, that it would be better, but I’m pretty sure that I would miss the mark of what m called to be in Christ.

But, one thing that I have maybe learned is unconditional grace, this concept that I don’t need to believe that I’m better or more righteous than anyone else or that I would do a better job than anyone else, that truly all that I can and truly should ever be able to do is beg God to be merciful to me a sinner.

Because, all I can hope is that He has more grace for my soul than hatred for my failings.

Tata, Lius, mi glad tumas blong meetem yu.

Life

I’m married.

I get to come home to my bride every night.

In 10 days, we’re headed out to a nation we’ve never been before to share both God’s love and Word.  I wish I could tell you how many times I’ve driven home just rocking out in the car.  I’m happy.

Put simply, I’ve gone through a lot of depression in my life.  J – my bride – has definitely seen the worst side of it.  Have you ever been so content with life you don’t understand it?

I mean there’s still all kinds of conflict and anxiety in my life.  There are so many unknowns.  Don’t even get me started on money.  But, they aren’t at the forefront.

I’m actually happy – a little stressed with the incoming internship … learning the ropes of married life … and seeing our future, but happy.

It’s funny how that sensation comes with an impending sense of doom.  All those terrible thoughts where people die, lives are completely undone, accidents happen – now they’re flooding my mind even more than ever before.

I think there’s this sense in a lot of people – because I hope it’s not just me – that when things are going well, God is just waiting to make life awful again.  It’s not like we don’t tell ourselves over and over that it’s not true.  But just, the fear seems to stick.

But you know what, we worship a God who promised not to give us snakes when we ask for fish, who tells us not to worry about tomorrow, and who says be anxious for nothing.

I can’t shake the sense that there is an impending doom, but I have today.

And, you know what, life is good at throwing curve balls, and the secret isn’t dodging or catching them; it’s getting up to bat again after they hit you.

God’s dressing our lives just like the lilies of the field and today looks pretty beautiful.  So, no matter if tomorrow brings rain or snow, I’m gonna bask in the sun.

And continue to use stretched analogies. 😉