Christian Spiritual Formation – Page 4

I Am Responsible

The following post comes from an article I wrote for my church’s weekly newsletter but because it was related to the series I have been writing on Ephesians, I thought those who have been following my thoughts might appreciate this piece.

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As a church family, we have been exploring Paul’s description of the mission of God. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul will set forth what God has done for us in Christ in the first three chapters, in chapters 4 through 6 Paul will list a patchwork of virtues, dispositions, habits, and actions, God seeks in us because of what he has done for us in Christ.

These virtues, dispositions, habits, and actions will cover everything from how we treat one another, including those closest to us, our families, but it will also deal with values as personal as our sexual ethics, how we choose to use our language, or how we express our anger.

One thing remains clear: while we cannot save ourselves–this is the work of God–we are responsible for what we do with the salvation God has given us.

Responsibility may well be the missing virtue of our time. We always seem to have an excuse, a rationalization, or someone to blame so that we don’t have to feel the full force of personal responsibility. We become so good at (accustomed to?) using such tactics that we sometimes are unaware that we are using them.

M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, attributed much of what we call mental illness today to people’s mishandling of responsibility. According to Peck, neurotics take too much responsibility (often over other people), while psychotics take too little (even over their own lives). I’m sure Dr. Peck would add that things are more complex than this, but he is on to something.

Still my mental health is related to the level of personal responsibility that I take over things that are truly mine. As the Serenity Prayer reminds us, there are some things you can’t change and some things you can. May God give us power to discern between the two.

Built to Serve

In my continuing reflections, we have notice how in the first three chapters of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians has described what God has done for us in Christ. In chapter four, Paul turned the corner to begin to highlight what should be our appropriate response in light of what God has done for us in Christ.

Paul calls his readers to exhibit habits of unity (humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance and love), then he sets before them the basis of unity, ultimately rooted in the unified nature of God:

“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:4–6 NRSV).

From this point, the apostle explores the anticipated outcome of this unity: that believers in Jesus will grow into the “full stature of Christ” (Eph 4: 13) or stated another way, that we would grow to look more like Jesus with every passing day.

In Ephesians 4:7-16, Paul observes that God has given every Christian a “gracing” so that “Christ-ness,” so to speak, is shared among each member of the body of Christ.

More so, God has given special gifts to the church in the form of those called by him to lead. These leaders include apostles, prophets, evangelist, pastors and teachers—however, there is no reason to think this is some exhaustive list, as we know of other functional leaders in the church, such as deacons (servants) and preachers.

More important than what these leaders are called is their purpose—which is at cross-purposes with what is generally expected of church leaders today. God give to church leaders to equip God’s people to do the people’s ministry.

Thus, the ministry of leaders is to empower members in the pursuit of their ministry. This only makes sense if we see every Christian as having a ministry. However, to be sure, there are different “levels” of ministry. After all, leaders here have a specialized ministry to equip the body of Christ.

This equipping, though, also has a particular outcome: “for the building up of the Body of Christ.” This work is ongoing until, according to Paul,

all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ (Ephesians 4:13 NRSV).

So legitmate Christian ministry results in all of us growing up! And, as we grow up, we will become more like Jesus. And, as we grow up, we participate in the body of Christ in a way that promotes health. And as we grow up, we understand that each of us have a part to play as we build one another up in love.

We are truly in this together.

Leaving Something Behind

Following Jesus always require that we leave something behind. Some things to be left behind are obvious such as sins, bad attitudes, and selfish ways; some are less obvious like dispositions, privilege, or the need for power.

Last week I was with a small country church that was reflecting on the Gospel of Mark’s version of the “Rich, Young Ruler.” At the climatic turn in the story, Jesus calls for the man to sell all of his possessions, give them to the poor and then follow him.

Jesus did not require every disciple to sell their possessions so it seems that Jesus could tell that this particular man’s possession had a strangle-hold on him. The man’s response to Jesus validates this, as Mark narrates, “… he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions” (Mark 10:22 NRSV).

Later, Peter will respond to Jesus’ teaching about the difficulty the rich have in entering the kingdom of God with “Look, we have left everything and followed you” (Mark 10:28). While, somewhat self-serving, Peter did leave something behind to follow Jesus. In fact, in the Gospel of Mark several people left things behind to follow Jesus.

At the beginning of the Gospel when Jesus called his first disciples, Peter and Andrew, they responded by “leaving their nets and following Jesus.” Likewise, when the next set of brothers, James and John, were summoned, they “left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired hands, and followed him” (Mark 1:16-20). The cost of following Jesus, it appears, means leaving something behind.

This does not appear to be an isolated theme in the Gospel of Mark. When Mark tells of the calling of Levi, a tax collector (Mark 2:13-14), Mark notices that Levi “got up and followed Jesus,” even though at the time he was on the job. Levi left working for the imperial government to serve the kingdom of God.

The healed demoniac was willing to leave his home and friends to follow Jesus. Here, against the normal flow of things, Jesus refused to let the man follow him personally, but calls on him to tell “what the Lord has done for you” among his own family and friends (Mark 5:1-20). This is how most of us will follow Jesus today.

Later in the Markan narrative, the blind man named Bartimaeus will seek healing from Jesus (10:46-52). In coming to Jesus, he will throw off his cloak, leaving it behind. Once Bartimaeus had received his sight, he “followed Jesus on the way.”

In a turning point moment in the Passion Narrative (Mark 11-16), when Jesus is arrested, Mark, sadly, no doubt, notes that the remaining eleven disciples deserted Jesus and fled (14:50). Almost ironically, the word deserted in the Greek is the same word for leaving something behind used in the stories about the calling of the disciples mentioned above. The left all to follow Jesus and now the left all to abandon Jesus.

Immediately following this announcement of desertion on the part of Jesus’ disciples, Mark tells the curious story of a young man who was following Jesus at the time of Jesus’ arrest (14:51-52). Oddly, it seems, the young man was wearing nothing but a linen cloth. The soldiers grabbed him but “he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.” This story, whatever its meaning, serves as an anti-discipleship story: here is how not to follow Jesus, so to speak.

So, consistently, throughout the Gospel, Mark illustrates that to follow Jesus one must leave something behind. Mark’s story of Jesus then raises two pertinent questions:

What are you willing to leave behind for Jesus?
What are not unwilling to give up for Jesus?

Discipleship is lived out between those two questions, don’t you think?

Declaring an Impossible Future

In Masterful Coaching, Robert Hargrove, asserts that leadership coaching seeks to help leaders “to dream an impossible dream based on the difference that [people and their] organizations would passionately like to make, a difference that will have earth-shaking consequences in [their] domain.”

While Hargrove is concerned about leaders, I believe every Christian should take up this challenge for themselves and the churches to which they belong.

In his letter to the Ephesians (3:14-20), Paul dares his readers to accept the impossible dream. Yet, for Paul, the dream does not primarily depend on what do but on what God has done and can do. Yet, it does depend on what we do as those empowered by God.

In this text, Paul continues the prayer he began in 1:15-23. Previously Paul wanted believers to understand, comprehend, and grasp the power available to them—the same power that raised Jesus from the dead. Here Paul prays that God might empower us in our inner being—our core self—who we really are.

This power is directly related to a relationship with God’s presence—the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, this will be played out in our lives because Jesus lives in us—in our hearts. This reminds us of God’s desire for us—the church—to be the place where God lives (see Eph 2:21-22).

We can dream the impossible because God has accomplished the impossible—he has made it possible for him to live in us. This gives us a place to take a stand—to declare the impossible because, in Jesus, we are “rooted and grounded in God’s love.”

God desires for each of us to have impossible power—the power necessary to apprehend what God’s work in the world, power to comprehend how

Wide
Long
High
Deep

is the love of Christ—a love we can fully know because it is beyond knowledge!

God’s impossible dream is that you might experience God fully, that is, that you might partake in the divine nature of God (see 2 Pet 1:4). God has declared for you an impossible dream since his power—which is a work in us!—is able to do abundantly more than we ask or imagine.

So what dreams do you have for your life? For your church? Do they have earth-shaking possibilities? Then, they are probably not God’s dreams for you … remember, more than we ask or image!

Go and Learn: Mercy, Not Sacrifice

Jesus once told the Pharisees to “Go and learn.” He particularly wanted them to reflect on an Old Testament passage, “I want mercy, not sacrifice” (Matt 9:13 and cited again in Matt 12:7, both quoting Hosea 6:6).

The Hosea passage in it original context reads, “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6 NRSV). Here the prophet is calling to people to something deeper than just going through the motions. According to Hosea, God is seeking committed love tied to knowing God. He is seeking relational connection, not just obedience at the action level.

So how did we go from steadfast love in the Old Testament to the same text reading mercy in the New Testament? In Hosea’s text, as a further complication, steadfast love is directed toward God, but in Jesus’ citation, mercy refers to how we treat others.

Actually, the move from covenant love toward God and merciful consideration of others had already become linked in the Old Testament.

By the time of the prophets, the mistreatment of people is one of the most direct violation of covenant with God. For example, Jeremiah (in Jer 7) will scold the people for the mistreatment of each other, especially the alien, the orphan, and the widow.

This is one of the main reasons, according to Jeremiah, that God will exile his people from the Promised Land. Living in the Promised Land was one of the most important symbols of being in covenant with God. So loyalty to God is most often demonstrated in loving kindness toward other people.

Jesus certainly tied our love for God directly to our love for our neighbor.

So did the apostle John, when he wrote, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:20–21 NIV).

So, today, Go and learn: God desire merciful relationships over rituals of worship.

And the Greatest of These is Grace

Recently Fox News personality Brit Hume suggested on national TV that fallen golf giant Tiger Woods abandon Buddhism and embrace Christianity. Hume reasoned that Christianity allows for forgiveness and redemption, concepts not at home in Buddhism. Hume added that as a Christian Tiger could start over, find forgiveness, and possibly reconcile with his wife and children.

While such a move on Tiger’s part would seem to be self-serving, the suggestion is not unlike what the Bible actually says. The apostle Paul in the second chapter of his letter to the Ephesians paints a picture not unlike where Tiger finds himself. Lives without Jesus are empty: we were dead in our sins, following the ways of evil, and chasing after our passions and desires.

BUT—so begins the scandal of biblical Christianity in v. 4. In a decisive reversal of fate, so to speak, God acted. After all, God had to act; we could not. We were dead. God intervenes because he is “rich in mercy” and loves us despite our deadness.

This is a hard notion to embrace and so I can understand why most non-Christians misunderstand what is meant by salvation—because most Christians don’t really get it either. Salvation is not based on human action or worth.

It really is a free gift. Therefore, it is not like a home which I “own” but which I will spend the next 25 to 30 years paying off. And because it is a free gift, it has some of the embarrassments that are normally attached to free gifts.

For example, if someone gave me a free suit, I would be appreciative to be sure, but I would be uncomfortable wearing the suit to an event where I knew the giver would be present. I would be even more self-conscious if everyone in the room knew about the suit.

Also I would be bit suspicious. I would wonder what did the suit-giver want from me? Are there any strings attached? I would want to somehow pay back in some way the one who gave me the suit.

Furthermore, like all free gifts, it can be misused. The free suit, continuing our analogy, should probably not be worn to work on the car or to mow the yard. Nor would it be fitting to speak evil of the one who gave the suit especially while wearing it.

Anyway, analogies generally break down so I will not push this one too much more, but the point is clear: a free gift can be misunderstood. Yet, endure one more point: the acceptance of the gift is never seen a meritorious act on the part of the recipient.

Salvation, says Paul, depends on God’s initiative. Using resurrection language, Paul announces that God has made us alive, raised us, and seated us in a position of power—notice the threefold “with Christ/him.” Thus, what God did for his Son, he does for those who believe in the Son—for the sake of his Son (see Eph 1.20).

Paul beautifully simplifies the profound nature of God’s saving work in the formula: “For by grace you have been saved through faith.” Grace is what God has done; faith is our acceptance of what God has done; and works or deeds grow out of the dynamic interaction of the first two. Paul stresses salvation is not the result of human work or people really could say they saved themselves.

However, there is room for human effort—one can reach out and receive the suit, so to speak—if human effort is kept in its proper place.

Grace, Faith, Works. That must be the proper order.

However, the key note is grace. Grace is the engine that drives both faith and works. To misquote Paul just a bit: Now there remains three great truths: grace, faith, and works. But the greatest of these is grace.

When a person comes to God (or returns to him), it is like starting over or, as Paul says, being recreated. However, the end result of being recreated is that we become people, who like God, do good works which is precisely why God created us in the first place: to live as God would live for the sake of others.

So what do you think? Should Tiger become a Christian to deal with his mistakes? Should you?

Powerful Prayer

Ever pray just to make it? Sometimes, so it seems, that is the best we can do. We go from one fire to another, praying we will have the resources to put out the next one. It does not take much of this kind of living to bring us to despair.

However, there is another way of living, a more proactive, powerful way. Paul models that for us in his prayer to the Ephesians (1:15-23 which resumes in 3.14-21). Paul prays that God might give his readers a “spirit of wisdom and revelation.” While is not clear here whether Paul is referencing the Holy Spirit or that the Ephesians might gain the quality of wisdom and revelation, it is clear that both wisdom and revelation are gifts from God.

With wisdom, we can see past the next fire; we can see that some of our fires are the results of our loosely lived lives; and we could more readily live in sync with God’s life.

With revelation, we could see what God had in store for us and more readily anticipate the future. Most of us have the ability to predict more of the future than we practice. Certain ways of living produce life; others, death. One does not have to be religious to figure this out. God’s revelation in our life allows us to see this even more clearly.

Both of these gifts, wisdom and revelation, are supernatural—they come only from God.

Yet Paul seeks a particular outcome for God’s gifts of wisdom and revelation—that we might know Jesus! The NIV translation’s addition of the word “better” is probably correct on the sense of the text—after all the original readers were already Christians—yet it softens the sense that outcome here is to know Jesus.

Thus now Paul prays that the “eyes” of our hearts might be enlightened. This is also the work of God. While “eyes of our minds” might be more natural to the way we think today, “eyes of our hearts” captures the sense that Paul hopes we will see God at our deepest levels, in our heart of hearts.

Paul wants us to see three things: 1) the hope we have because God has called us; 2) the glorious rich inheritance we have among God’s people; and 3) the incredible power we can access as believers in Jesus.

Each of these is worth exploring, but Paul really wants us to get the last one. He really lathers up the descriptors: “the overabundant greatness of his power for us who believe based on the energy of the might of his strength” (my literal translation).

This same power, according to Paul,

raised Jesus from the dead,
seated him at the right hand of God,
raised him above every name, even of angelic and demonic forces,
made every thing subject to him, and
placed him as supreme in the church over everything.

That is a lot of power! And it is available for those who believe. You don’t have to live fire to fire because we have the power to live triumphant lives in Jesus. All you have to do is ask for it and then begin to live as if you have it.

God’s Partners in God’s Mission

While I am certain that we should see ourselves as working for God, I’m amazed and humbled by apostle Paul’s insistence that we work with God, more as a partner than an employee or even a slave. In one place, Paul will assert that he is among “God’s fellow workers” and that those benefiting from his and other’s ministry are “God’s field, God’s building” (1 Cor. 3.9).

In another place, Paul will talk about how his ministry is not based on his competency but on a kind of competency that comes from God (2 Cor. 3.5). Even more, Paul will root Christian ministry in sharing or participating in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Thus any suffering we might experience in ministry is like Christ’s own giving of his life for the sake of others (see 2 Cor. 4.7-12).

Therefore, in partnership with God, Christian ministry is a participation in the mission of God. God’s mission is nothing short of inviting people into a relationship with God that will shape them into a distinct people who live their lives for the sake of others.

Another way to frame God’s mission is that God seeks all people to become re-connected with or reconciled to him. God then recreates us in the image of Jesus to become agents of reconciliation and healing. This is based not on our competency—since even we needed help to become reconciled.

However, once reunited with God, we are initiated into God’s own project of healing the world. Paul calls us “Christ ’s ambassadors.” This is fitting language as we now belong to God’s kingdom but we have been called to serve as God’s delegates to bring Good News to the world.

Churches, then, should function something like embassies. Churches are God’s embassies in a foreign land to support the interests of God’s kingdom. However, an embassy also functions to help foreigners find out more about the embassy’s country and even help people who would like to enter that country to find out how to do that.

As representatives of God’s kingdom, therefore, we speak for our King. As Paul said, we implore on Christ’s behalf—as though God were making his appeal through us. Our appeal or petition is that people would become reconciled to God (2 Cor. 5.20) and that is truly the mission of God

So That — Outcomes of God’s Mission

Almost any place you look in the Bible, you can find God’s mission to form a distinct people. In the Old Testament, God formed the nation of Israel to bear witness to God’s continuing creative work in the world.

In the New Testament, in the ministry of Jesus and later the ministry of the church, the mission of God remains central. God’s purpose remains forming a distinct people to live a God-shaped life for the sake of the world. The mission of God stands out even in the little letter called 1 John.

Emphasizing that God’s love has been lavished on beleaguered believers, the apostle John points at several outcomes, or “so thats” that result from God’s active mission. These “so thats” are somewhat veiled in English translation, so I would like to draw these out for you.

God’s Mission through Jesus was so that:

We should be called the children of God (1 John 3:1)
Jesus might take away our sins (3:5)
Jesus might destroy the work of the devil (3:8)
We might believe in his name (3:23)
We might love one another (3:11, 23)

That God, the God of the universe, should invite us into a relationship is amazing. Not only is God willing to claim us as his children but we increasingly become to look like our Father. As God’s children we have the same inheritance as his rightful Son. The apostle here promises that we will see Jesus because we will become like him (3:2).

Part of the process of getting us to the place where we look like Jesus is that God must deal with sin. The NIV adds “our” before the word sin, but this is not in the original. It is not just personal sin that God must remove but even cosmic sin, so to speak. Sin can also be seen as a force at work in our world; sometimes we call it evil.

Sin is the Bible’s word for that power at work in our world that causes things to fall apart. Thus, John aptly asserts that Jesus came to destroy the work of the devil. While people today may not easily buy into a real devil and may even scoff at the notion of sin: they know the effect of this evil, whether personal or diabolical—relationships that don’t work, innocent people suffering, countries vying for power by diminishing others, loneliness, drug addictions, and this list could go on.

Yet, because God has acted, we believe in the name of Jesus—that for Jesus sake, new possibilities can emerge. Thoughtful Christians are not oblivious to the fact that we live in a world that appears hopelessly broken. It is precisely against this brokenness that Jesus makes sense.

And in the midst of this brokenness, you still find groups of Jesus-followers who love one another. This, perhaps, is the greatest testimony that God is completing the mission he started.

Jesus: On a Mission from God

After Jesus’ baptism and temptation, according to the Gospel of Luke (4:14-30), he returned to his hometown Nazareth “in the power of the Spirit.” As a Torah (law) observant Jew, he customarily attended synagogue services and even took part in the services. One day the synagogue attendant handed the scroll of Isaiah to him and he unrolled it to the place we today call Isaiah 61:1-2 which reads:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (as cited in Luke)

After returning the scroll to the attendant and then sitting down, he announced, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” At first the audience was amazed by Jesus’ gracious words, but then they begin to think out the implications.

Wait a minute! Isn’t this Joseph’s son? Did he just apply that scripture to himself? We know this boy’s family. Who does he think he is? Now worked up, Jesus’ own friends and family are ready to throw him over a cliff.

Jesus understood that it was hard to do ministry in one’s hometown, so he reminded the people of their story. Back in the days of Elijah and Elisha, it was not the people of Israel who were blessed by the ministry of these two hometown boys, but a Phoenician widow and a Syrian commander, both foreigners.

Jesus understood the mission of God to be a mission for the sake of others, the outsiders, those marginalized and who do not belong. When Jesus wanted to highlight his mission, he chose the text from Isaiah.

Therefore, as Jesus’ followers, it would seem that the Isaiah text could point us in the right direction regarding the mission of God. The mission, based on this text, begins with God’s empowerment: the Spirit of the Lord is on us.

However, the presence of the Spirit is not primarily to fill the spiritual emptiness within us, but to send us to bless others, namely, the poor, prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed. To these we announce that now is the year of the Lord’s favor. We are faithful to the mission of God when we do this.