Love, Truth & Church

And Another Thing . . . Love, Truth & Church

My parents were church goers. So when I was a kid, I went to church too. The church of my childhood was the non-instrumental Church of Christ. This was a great church to begin in because they were big on teaching young people about the Bible. Every Sunday night, all the children five and older were asked to come up front and share a verse they had memorized that week. The preacher would then quiz the kids about the Bible. I remember as a preschooler sitting with my parents and longing for the day when I could go up too. I learned a lot about the Bible in that church.

In fact, I enjoyed many things about the CoC. It was only when I was older and began to understand their take on biblical truth that I experienced a growing sense of estrangement. As a kid, I felt loved and included. I especially enjoyed listening to the a cappella singing. It was fun to hear men and women singing, from the shaped-note songbook, the harmonies to all of the old hymns. Shaped-notes were a now archaic musical notation system that made it easier to read and then sing harmony and our church would teach new members this system, as well as how to use a pitch pipe, and to lead hymns in 4/4 time. My early perspective was that shaped-notes were somehow more spiritual. 

Superior spirituality was an underlying theme in my formative Christian journey—a theme that was subtle and somewhat insidious. The fact that it affected me the way that it did may have more to do with my weaknesses than any intention on the part of my teachers, but I nevertheless interpreted what I learned as “My group is right and everyone else is wrong.” My knowledge, my truth, nurtured a sense of moral superiority. Paul admonishes believers to, “speak the truth in love.”(Eph 4:15) This has always been a tricky thing to pull off. First Corinthians 8:1 says, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” I fear that much of my early Biblical learning resulted in a puffing up rather than a building up. Love gets messy, but truth feels clean and clarifying. Love involves giving of our self and dealing with all of our own insecurities in the process. Truth is of the mind and insulates our feelings and elevates our perspective above the fray of frailty. The challenge is to marry the two. To speak truth in the midst of our relationships with an awareness of our mess and insecurity is the call of the church. Love without truth is blind. Truth without love has clarity, but it isolates. Truth spoken with love directs, connects and elevates.

In the parlance of the KJV, the church is called to be a peculiar people. We are to love one another and the world like Jesus does. Unfortunately, it has become a cliché that our culture is frustrated and at times even disgusted with the church. Much of the atheism creeping into today’s culture has, at its root, a hurt or disappointment with people who claimed to be followers of God. Many are open to Jesus but are leery of his people. Not all of this is the fault of the church, but a significant portion of those who now doubt the church have been shaped by an encounter with her truth untempered by her love. Second Corinthians 5:14 says “Christ’s love compels.” God’s love is what changes everything. It is what changed each of us who claim to be Christ-followers. It is what changed me. 

The love I felt in the hearts of the good people of the CoC was the first taste of a reality I would continue to experience over and over again throughout my life. Later, I, too, witnessed hypocrisy and disappointment and doubted the truth of the Christian faith. It was the love of friends who were believers who showed me the reality of a God whose story I doubted, but whose love compelled. 

God’s love draws and changes us. 

God’s truth liberates and leads us. 

God’s Son makes all things new.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Screaming Mee Mee-E's and Changing Your Mind

And Another Thing . . . Change Your Mind 

As the Christmas of my eighth year of life approached, I was busy making a large list of all the things I either seriously needed or desperately wanted. Before the Internet existed, the Montgomery Ward Christmas catalogue served as the source of childhood fantasy. I stared at the pages in that brightly colored booklet the way my own children now watch YouTube videos of the things they desire. At the top of my list that year was the Screaming Mee Mee-E rifle. (Here is a link-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeSpk6YQw4o-- so you can see the thing my dreams were made of.). I wanted this toy badly. 

As it turns out, my grandmother owned a children’s clothing store, and when we arrived in Kentucky for our annual family Christmas vacation, I learned that the grand prize in her Christmas contest was the aforementioned Screaming Mee Mee-E rifle. I could not believe it. There was the source of my Christmas wish vision being proudly displayed by my own grandmother in the boys section of her store. To say that I started begging and lobbying for that gun would be an understatement. I don’t remember the full extent of my pleading, but I know that it was so outlandish enough that my parents were embarrassed and made me stop.  But of course, by then the case had been made and my strategy worked. On Christmas morning I received the object of my desire. I eagerly removed it from its box, loaded its screaming dart, aimed and pulled the trigger. The dart flew out of the gun with a screaming sound that immediately annoyed the adults in the room—and, in a few short moments, even began to annoy me. Also, the dart did not go nearly as far as it had appeared to in the commercials. Horrifyingly for me, within about 15 minutes I was bored with the toy. But because I had made such a big deal about wanting it, I felt obligated to fake it for a while—even though it fell far short of my expectations. So after getting what I thought I wanted, I quickly changed my mind.

The notion of changing your mind is the thought behind the biblical word repent. The story of my Christmas gun has been repeated many times in my life, and I suspect most of us can relate to chasing something only to find it is not what we hoped it would be. Many things in our life look different when they move from fantasy to reality. Solomon, who is said to be the wisest man who ever lived, declared in Ecclesiastes that “everything is meaningless.” The King James Version of the Bible translates this passage as, “all is vanity.” Mick Jagger later translated it as “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Solomon concludes Ecclesiastes by saying, “Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” In other words, you cannot be the source of your own fulfillment. Only God can fill the emptiness we carry with us.

The process of moving from a life of self-directed ambition to a life of faith begins with learning to believe in God and then growing to understand that his plan for your life is both different and better than the choices you have been making. The second step, after believing in God, is to repent or change your mind about what is important in life. You change your mind about chasing after meaningless vain things in hopes of finding some sort of fulfillment. Jesus’ counterintuitive declarations begin to make sense, like when he says in Matthew 10:39, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” 

Whether it is a Screaming Mee Mee-E gun, a house, a job, or a relationship, unless we are seeking first his kingdom and his righteousness all of these other things will ultimately feel meaningless. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Changing our minds to recognize that there is a way more compelling than our own enlightened self-interest reveals the possibility of walking in a hope that is beyond what we can see. 

In our natural state, we are all Screaming Mee Mee-E’s and at some point we become annoying even to ourselves. The good news is that God has made a way for us to change our minds, even about ourselves.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

God in the Box

And Another Thing . . . God in the Box

The documentary “God in the Box” was a Heartland Film Festival selection for 2011. The premise is pretty straightforward. A portable box is constructed with cameras hidden behind a mirror. Random pedestrians walking by are invited to go inside the box and answer one or two questions about God . The first question is, “What does God mean to you?” and the second is, “What does God look like?”

The answers surprised me. Some were funny, like the girl who thought God looked sort of like Kenny Rogers. Some were sad, like the burly, shaved-head guy in sunglasses who said, “God used to mean everything to me . . . but not anymore.” Some were quirky, like the Elvis impersonator who said, “God is sort of like Elvis . . .” The Hindu and Muslim participants seemed to have a bit clearer perspective on how to address the question. Several people spoke of the way that God had changed their lives for the better. Several others were atheists who felt the whole question was the province of the ignorant, superstitious, or uninformed.  One man who claimed to be an atheist  said, “I wish could believe in God, because I would probably be happier.” 

Mystery is inherent in any discussion about God. God cannot be perceived by our senses and so he is intangible. Intangible is hard to quantify. Still, people claim to experience God but typically in an extrasensory way . The language that is used to describe these encounters is almost always on an emotional scale. We sense God’s presence and immediately wonder if it was perhaps something we ate. We have learned to not trust our emotions, and yet our emotions are an important part of any encounter with spiritual things. This quickly becomes confusing. At one point in the documentary, the narrator says something to the effect of, “I wish God would just show himself to us and clear this whole thing up!”

That of course, from the Christian perspective, is exactly what he did. The great grace of the Jesus event was that God revealed himself by becoming one of us. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” “Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.” “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

Jesus entered the human story and showed us how God would act if he were in our shoes. He loved deeply. He pursued truth. He sacrificed his life. In his love he gave all of himself to others as he submitted himself to God.

God looks like Jesus. 

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!

Belief & Unbelief

And Another Thing . . . Belief

Selling drugs to doctors makes for an interesting life journey. I started my career in pharmaceutical sales back in the ‘80’s before things were regulated, and also before medicine had advanced to anywhere near where it is today. I remember calling on an old country doc in eastern Indiana who told me of an “off label” use for one of my products. The drug I sold was essentially a form of Tylenol packaged in an impressive two-toned capsule and with an obscure but powerful sounding name. This was in the days before the internet, and people had no way to Google what a medicine was, so the country doc used my drug essentially as a placebo. It was benign medically, but it looked impressive and he would sell it as a “powerful, rarely used drug, which he thought would help.” He mostly used this placebo to treat patients he had diagnosed as hypochondriacs and so it probably was an appropriate therapy. He was selling hope by creating belief.

Jesus said in Mark 9:23, “Everything is possible for one who believes.” This is both an inspiring and a troubling statement that has garnered many stipulations over the years. People have tried to minimize or make it more rationale, but one thing is definitely true. Everything is impossible if you have no belief. Belief enables hope and vision. Lack of belief leaves a person paralyzed or at least unmotivated. If you do not believe you can, you probably won’t try. Belief leads to action.

Jesus speaks this truth to a father who wants his son to be healed. The father responds by saying in Mark 9:24, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” His statement has resonated across the ages. This is each of ours confession. Each of us is aware of the bloom of faith in our life and of the shadow of doubt which lurks around and through it. We believe in God and yet we wonder at times. We step out in faith and hope that the ground will hold. We pray believing and yet know that there is a partial wish embedded in our amens.

Fredrick Buechner once wrote,
“Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep.
  Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:7, “For we live by faith, not by sight.” People are wired to trust the things they see. Seen things are easy to believe in. Doubtable things are the only things that may be embraced by faith. Therefore, those who “live by faith” are always vulnerable to the questions raised by people who only believe what they see. This is why it is important to live in such a way that “sight-livers” can see the evidence of lives changed by the hope created through faith in an unseen God. 

When we believe in Jesus he begins to change us. Belief stirs and inspires action. We begin to shine. Jesus is unseen, but the actions he inspires in the hearts of the people who believe in him are not. Jesus tells us to, “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”


A changed life is a great argument for God. Loving others is good one too. What we believe matters, because “everything is possible for the one who believes.”  

And that’s all I have to say about that . . . for now.

Lies of the Moment

And Another Thing . . . Lies of the Moment

It seems that we live our life in moments. And no moment yet has been the final moment. Everything is constantly in a state a change. Much of the time I feel caught in a stereophonic cacophony of positive and negative thoughts and circumstance. Optimism surrenders to pessimism and then rises again, and then surrenders, and then resurrects, and so it goes. Moments are a difficult place from which to judge life. It is difficult to know, at times, if one is winning or losing or simply treading water.

I read the story of Eli in 1 Samuel this week. His life ended in a very tragic way. His final moment was as horrific as could be imagined for a priest, filled with ominous foreshadowing. Samuel, the young boy in his care, is awakened one night by God and told that the priest and his sons had been judged and would all soon die. Later, a random holy man shows up and foretells the destruction of Eli’s family. His boys are the source of his fall from blessing. They had turned the family calling, being priests in the temple of God, into a family business and had gotten rich and fat off the sacrifices offered to God. They made a habit of profaning sacred things for their own benefit. Eli let this happen, and everything started to fall apart.

Eventually, his boys decide to carry the Ark of the Covenant, the embodiment of God’s presence among his people, into battle. They hoped it would work as a charm, to force God into blessing them in their crusade. They had manipulated the religious system to their own advantage for so long that they thought God was just another pawn in their clerical schemes. “We will carry the Ark into battle and God will be forced to make us win,” they thought. The lies they believed about God were vigorously corrected. Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were killed in the battle along with 30,000 Israelites. The greatest tragedy, though, was that the Ark of the Covenant was captured by their enemies, the Philistines.

When Eli heard this news it made for a terrible moment. His thoughts were filled with failure and horror. God’s warnings were fulfilled in the death of his sons, and I’m sure he felt responsible. Eli had allowed his boys to make a mockery of holy things. He allowed them to take the most sacred gift Israel possessed, the Ark of God’s Presence, into a battle and now God himself was lost to the nation. The army was diminished. His sons were dead. He felt judged and rejected by his God. And the Ark of God was no longer residing with his people. This was the end of the faith. The thing that could never happen did happen. With the horror of this unthinkable circumstance swirling in his head, he fell off of his chair, broke his neck, and died. In his last moment, it seemed that all was lost.

1 Samuel  5-6 tells the story of the next moments. It turns out that the Philistines could not manipulate God any more than Eli’s sons could.  After months of dealing with tumors and rats, the Philistines had had enough and decided to send the Ark back to Israel – sort of. They created an against-all-odds-situation in which they yoked together “two cows that have calved and have never been yoked.” Then, with the cows lowing as if moving against their wills, they marched directly out of the land of the Philistines and straight home to Israel. This was an amazing moment for everyone. The Philistines were relieved and the people of God were ecstatic. God proved he was larger and more improbable than the schemes of the men on either side of the battle lines. He would not be manipulated or trifled with. His faithfulness to his people was stronger than the evil of the men who tried to ruin his name. Eli’s last thought was that he was witnessing the end of God in Israel. That was the way it looked for a moment. Eli’s story ended, but God’s story did not. 

In the next moment, the boy Samuel grows and becomes both judge and prophet and leads Israel back to God -- sort of. Then there is the moment where Israel rebels and asks for a king and a gets a lousy one. Followed by the moments where the lousy king, Saul, tries to kill the future amazing king, David. Succeeded by the moments when David presides over a glorious age of faithfulness and expansion. Continuing into the moments of his son’s reign when the temple is built and, conversely, foreign gods are reintroduced back into the kingdom. And so it goes . . .

This past week we held our second concert at the Carmel Gazebo. For many moments before the concert it looked as though rain, in contradiction to our prayers, was going to bring a halt to the whole event. Then there was the moment when the sun came out.

And that’s all I have to say about that . . . for now.

Of Slugbugs & Seeking

And Another Thing . . . Ask, Seek, Knock

When I was a kid (and as it turns out that was a long time ago), our family trips were far more primitive than those trips are today.  Our car had an AM radio, which my dad controlled.  His listening choices always seemed to be either static or boring-- and sometimes both of those together.  So, to amuse ourselves, we would play road games.  One of my favorites, though it usually ended up with someone getting in trouble, was “Slugbug.” For the uninitiated, the rules to Slugbug were pretty simple.  All the players examined the oncoming traffic looking for VW Beetles (or “Bugs”).  The first player to see one shouted “Slugbug” and hit the other player or players on the shoulder.  Of course, there was the inevitable cheating and bruising, followed by a parental halt to the whole fiasco. The interesting thing about the game though, was that once you started looking for Bugs, you found them.

Jesus said in Matt 7:7, “seek and you will find.” We tend to find the things we look for.  When playing Slugbug my brain functioned much like a computer. I saw, for the most part, two kinds of cars:Bugs and Non-Bugs.  (Corvette’s were always the exception; I always noticed them.)  Scientists tell us that the part of the brain which helps us focus on these distinctions is called the Reticular Activating System, or RAS.  Among other things, the RAS allows us to filter the data being received by our brain.  Parents sleeping in a noisy apartment can become immune to the sounds of traffic and trains, but the sound of their child crying will instantly wake them.  We are programmed to pay attention to the things we care about.

“Caring about” is the heart of the Ask, Seek, Knock passage. Jesus wants to be one of the things we care about.  He wants his voice to be a voice we have trained ourselves to listen for. “Ask” implies relationship. We ask the people who are near us and who we believe are capable and willing to help.  Jesus wants to be near us (Mt 28:20). He wants to be our help (Ps 46:1).  He wants to be asked.  James 4:2 says, “You do not have, because you do not ask.”

So, ask God for the stuff of your life. Let him become part of all that you do. Seek him. Knock on his door, just as he is knocking on yours (Rev 3:20). When you look for him, you will find him. Ask and it will be given. The “it” in this case is God. All of the things we ask for are ultimately, as Oswald Chambers puts it, to be “our utmost, for his highest.”  When we ask for God, we receive him.  When we seek him, we find him.  When we knock, we find he has beaten us to the punch and he is already knocking on the door of our heart.

Ask, Seek, Knock is a formula for a relationship with God. That relationship will change the nature of our requests. As we know him better we will begin to honestly pray, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

As Rich Mullins used to say, “God will give you what you ask, only if he can think of nothing better to give you.”

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.

Scars Mean Healing

Paul Cowan is our guest blogger this week.

And another thing . . . scars

Dave Mullins spoke Sunday about scars.  Scars can be useful as reminders of situations we have faced in our past and pain we have been through.  Scars can disfigure us and scars can change us.  Scars take us back to instances we might not want  to relive.  Yet there is a certain hope we can find in scar tissue that simple wounds do not yet provide.  Something Dave said about scars and especially the scars that grace the body of Jesus struck me as incredibly profound.  Scars mean healing.  And healing means life.

The scars that I carry on my physical body are manifestations of injuries and wounds that have healed.  The only way these wounds could heal is by my continued life.  Cut flesh fuses back together and scabs slough off to reveal healed (if not perfectly restored) skin beneath.  The mark left behind is the reminder alluded to earlier, but the skin will function again as before.  In the instance of fractured bones, the very act of healing can leave the bone stronger than it was before the break; a powerful metaphor which can be applied to ourselves as we are refined by the inevitable fires of life.

In the case of our Savior Jesus Christ, scars He chose to leave on his body represent the same healing and even more importantly, life.  Without Jesus' scars it would just be too easy to dismiss (as many continue to do to this day) the resurrection as simply a reappearance of the Lord in spirit form, and not a literal resurrection of the body.  But what would this mean for us as Christians?  Without the physical resurrection, what hope do we have for ourselves?  What hope for salvation?  What hope for a future spent in the presence of the Living God?  For without physical resurrection, what Living God would there be?  (I don't mean to imply this is the only reason for the continued presence of scars on the resurrected body of Jesus, but simply that I believe this is at least one reason.)

We have faith and hope because we have heard testimony as to the scars on Jesus' body.  Spirits do not have scars.  For spirits do not require healing.  Only a body has scars and only a body which continues to live or is born again.  That makes me place a certain value on scars that is not only more than what I would ever have thought, but frankly is not something I had every thought about in the first place.

As we have discussed before, many of us have scars.  There are physical scars from accidents with bicycles, skateboards, cars, knives, asphalt, rocks, augers, and anything else we could think of that is even remotely sharp or abrasive.  There are also emotional scars from childhood and throughout life since.  For some of us they are too numerous to mention.  And while most of us don't have open physical wounds, many of us still have deep, open, gaping holes in our spirit that have yet to heal and form their own scars.  It is such a blessing to know that our Savior, who became flesh for us, can relate to our wounds in both physical and emotional form.  He experienced both and overcame them  both.  As well, if we remain in Him, He will be faithful to help us to do the same!  (John 16:33)

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now.