Wow…just wow

This ministry is causing me to lose a lot of sleep. Some nights I’m lucky just to get a couple of hours. God is just to doing too much here, and I am so excited that I simply cannot sleep. A couple nights ago I met with my friend who just became a Christian. He had had a rough week, and was feeling a greatly convicted and remorseful of his sin (something we could all use more of!). This gave us the wonderful opportunity to talk about these feelings, as well as about the grace that is always extended to us. He is so mature in already realizing that God’s grace is always there, but it is not to be taken advantage of, or used as an excuse to sin more. I talked to him about Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who is amazing) and how he distinguishes between free grace and cheap grace. God offers His grace to us for free, but it was far from cheap. Jesus paid a mighty high price in order to offer us grace, and so each time we accept it, we should remember and give thanks for it, as well as stop sinning. We also talked a lot about how hard it is to stop sinning altogether, despite how much we want to. I talked about aiming for progress instead of perfection, so it seems more possible. I also got to show him where James talks about endurance, and how enduring through these tough times develops maturity and wholeness in us.

This was a great conversation, but that was far from the best part. About halfway through our discussion, his roommate came in. I hadn’t met his roommate before, and I was wondering how this would change the depth of our conversation. Rather than hindering us, we just carried on. We kept talking, looking at different passages of scripture and listening to some music that we had heard at a free Christian music festival we had gone to last weekend. At first his roommate kind of stood around, just observing us but not really getting involved. Then, while we were reading another passage of scripture he pulled a chair up and really listened. As we began to talk about it, he began to ask questions of his own; about the Bible, God and Christianity in general. This was really exciting, and his face lit up when I offered to bring him his own Bible the next night.

This wasn’t even the best part yet. The next night I went to their room with a new Bible in hand, and was met by both of these guys, as well as by two of our female Chinese coworkers. When I handed the roommate his Bible, one of the girls ripped it out of his hands to read it herself. They were all waiting for me to talk about the Bible and Christianity, and were very excited that I had more Bibles for them too.

We talked for about two hours about what the Bible is, who God is and what we believe as Christians. As they had many many questions, it was awesome to see my friend that just became a Christian begin to answer them and relate his own, surprisingly mature reflections and experience. He was able to communicate what prayer is to them better than I could, and even talked about how we pray and trust in God regardless of whether we get what we want or not. He told them prayer is to help us be closer to God, not just to tell God what we need or are thankful for, since He already knows. At the end we all prayed together to thank God for all He has done for us and to ask God to reveal himself to everyone there so that they may have faith. You see, I just couldn’t sleep after that.

Also, this morning after our service, as we were putting our materials away, another girl came up to me and started asking questions. We’re meeting later to get her a Bible of her own too and see what questions she has! I’m getting a lot of practice putting my complex, second-nature faith into simple terms and concepts, and as I do I fall more and more in love with God. It is the greatest joy to be able to share with someone about the God I love and attempt to describe Him and His love to others.

I always get what I want…when I want the right things

I always seem to get what I want. Sometimes, if I don’t get exactly that which I want, I get something better. A couple of weeks ago, one of my bosses from our national office was here for a few days. One day we got the chance to go hiking together, and talk about a lot of things; including life, theology, existentialism, the future and the ministry here. On our way back he asked me a very involved question, “Raygan (I’m still getting used to that), what do you really want from this summer?” I said, “Yeah, that is an involved question.” That was why he asked it on the way back, he intended for it to take the whole trip. After an ample pregnant pause I said, “I just want to see God work in someone’s life. I want God to reveal Himself to someone, I want it to change their life and I want to witness it.” If you’ve read earlier posts, you know that I have been blessed enough to see this in one of my Chinese coworkers. What you may not know is that it happened about two days after I said this.

Meeting and working with him has been awesome. In one moment he’ll ask me what we believe about hell, and what we can pray for, and the next we will offer a beautiful prayer that gives thanks for God’s grace and requests peace. He now has a Bible in English and in Mandarin. He told me he reads them both at the same time to get a better sense of what the text means. He’s already better at studying the Bible than most Christians I know! He is learning a lot of basics, but I know God is working in him for a much larger purpose.

In the last couple of days, a lot of people have been asking me why I chose Mount Rushmore, and each time I think I get a puzzled look on my face. I still can’t really answer that question. I don’t think I had a reason of my own that made me include it in my list of potential park locations. It wasn’t what I was picturing, it wasn’t what I originally wanted, but it’s exactly what God had in mind. I originally wanted to be out in a national park, like most of ACMNP’s locations are. I wanted to be out and surrounded by nothing but God’s untouched, unperverted creation, so that I would know I was surrounded by God and His work. Mount Rushmore isn’t really that place, but I got so much more. Instead of being removed from society, I was put in a very touristy area. Far from isolated, I see thousands of different people every day. So I’m not in the middle of God’s untouched creation, but I am in the middle of God’s active work. I didn’t meet God on my terms, but I found that He would surround me wherever I was. Now I’m at a point where everything I could have hoped to expect has been surpassed, and I am again reliant on God for a vision for the rest of the summer. When my friend became a Christian and I needed a Bible to give to him, I received six (thanks North Shore!). Let’s hope and pray we need them.

Experience is Important

Christianity is a lot of things; a religion (yes it is), a relationship, the narrative of the human condition, an intellectual journey, an experience, and much much more. I think of all these things, a lot of us tend to devalue the experience part of it. Though it is so vital, I can see why we don't always emphasize it. It's completely out of our control. It's scary. Not only do we not control it, we can't predict it. But I think we still miss out. We don't control how God acts, but we can control how perceptive of it we are. A lot of times we don't see it because we're not looking for it.

Being a Christian is experiencing everything it is to be human in the context of our redeemed, whole, nature and in the presence of our loving Creator. It's not simply an emotional experience, but it is so deep that we are limited to expressing it through emotional language. Maybe that's another reason we devalue it. We know emotional language isn't significant enough to communicate it, but we have no other means.

Where is this coming from? As I continue to work with my friend who just became a Christian, I am seeing him experience God in very real ways, and experiencing it with him. He talks of the peace that he feels has overwhelmed him. I can feel God there as we meet, talk, read and pray. I think he gets this a lot better than a lot of people I know who have been Christians for a long time. He's not only determined to keep reading, asking and learning, but also keeps asking what he can do. We talk not only about the different spiritual disciplines, but also how we can encounter God throughout the day. We're also going to his first church service tonight, and we're both excited.

I just read "The Practice of the Presence of God" which is a bunch of letters from a monk that were complied a few centuries ago about how he encounters God in the tedious kitchen tasks he has been assigned. Folding hundreds of T-shirts while while hundreds of customers are unfolding them in front of and behind you in the Mt. Rushmore gift shop is a great place to practices this. I think we as Christians can make the choice of when and where to encounter God. This reminds me of every Gospel, where after Jesus has performed healings, fed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish, walked on water and described himself as the bread of life, the people ask him for a sign to prove he is who he says he is (read the first 6 chapters of John). Understandably, this frustrates Jesus. God is working all around us, yet we don't recognize it, we don't look for it. God created us, our five senses and everything that those five senses encounter. How can we not encounter God every day if our eyes are really open to it?

As much as we can choose to encounter God everyday as Christians, as nonchristians we can't control our initial experience with God.

I think this is what makes relating to non-christians very difficult. We choose to live our lives differently because of our physical, emotional and spiritual experiences with God, that they haven't had yet. Last night on a midnight food run after work, me and two non-christians got to talk about this. Some people have pretty much written them off as a lost cause because of some of their actions and language. This was pretty much just a defense mechanism, against Christians because of some of the hurt that has been caused them by Christians. I was astonished at how they opened up when they saw I wasn't putting them off just because they swore or are different than a lot of people here.

It was heartbreaking to talk to them, because their problems are with Christians, not with God. They haven't experienced God for themselves yet, but have been judged by those who claim they have. The Gospels make it pretty clear that it's not our place to judge, only God's, yet we do it anyway. I hope it planted a seed when I said I only live my life in the way that I do because of my experiences with God, and that I can't judge them for not having that experience. I don't see how some people think that telling nonchristians to follow Christian standards, telling someone who doesn't know Jesus that they need "more Jesus in their life", saying "just go to church" or just be a Christian helps them encounter God, or in some way will make them more open to being a Christian. We need to be with people, listen to their hurt, apologize if that hurt came from a Christian and explain how we all fall short of the standard we want to live by. We can't force Christianity on people or force them to experience God. Ultimately that is under God's control. It is our ministry to model the Christian life, demonstrate God's love for them and hope and pray they encounter it directly. Then, when God does work in someone's life, we need to show them how to be open to see God's work daily.

I'm sorry if that doesn't make sense, ask questions if you want. I'm finding that I'm learning a lot about how God works in people from new Christians and non-christians, and it's really hard to fit it all into a blog.

Failure; a good thing

Okay, now I’m over it. I didn’t do as well in the delivery of my sermon on Sunday, but now that I have discovered why I failed (which took a while for how blaringly obvious it was), I have come to a peace with it. I was so proud of the words I had written and the illustration my insight had given birth to, and because of that I felt a great pressure to speak those proud words, exactly as I had written them. Depending on how well you know me, you may know that even though I have spoken to crowds many times, it is often pretty evident that I am nervous. Often, speaking about my faith and God’s word has been an exception, mostly because of my conviction and the focus of my attention on God. Last Sunday my attention was focused on the proud words I had written instead of the giving of voice to God’s Word as passed down through history and spoken through the Holy Spirit today.

God taught me a lot through that sermon on Sunday, and I regret that it may have come at the expense of what He may have been able teach others if I had been humbled into a malleable tool for God. This was a major lesson in my preparation for this calling; a lesson I hope never to have to relearn. At first I thought my error was a lack of preparation. It turns out that was exactly the wrong direction I needed to proceed. What I needed was to be less and less dependent on myself instead of even more. I was so happy with my sermon, and I really wanted to deliver it as I had created it. I failed, thank God. These weren’t my words. I’m in no contest to see who can write the best sermon. These were supposed to be God’s words.

I know that this likely sounds overly dramatic, and like I’m making a small issue to significant or being too hard on myself. It’s not true. I did what none of us should ever do, especially those who preach the word. I put my confidence, trust, and therefore faith, in myself rather than in the perfect Word of God. Throughout the Bible God uses imperfect people to be leaders to show that it is God who is working. Moses was a bad speaker, Abraham was very old, Paul persecuted Christians…but the poor speaker led a nation, the elderly man founded that nation and that persecutor wrote most of the New Testament. God uses imperfect people. I’m not the best speaker on my own, I’ve tried and failed. But God is calling me to this life and when my conviction, trust and reliance are in God, God speaks well through me. I took the Scripture too lightly; I was far more worried about my own words than God’s word being given through me. I want to call people to be fully reliant on God, not their wealth, status or talent, but God through them. If I am going to call people to this, I must first do this in order for God to work this message out through me.

Over the past few years I have learned to find great peace in situations that are out of my control, because I know that God is. I’ve also learned that when God has completely removed my control from a situation, it always seems to work out for the best. When I can speak from that orientation, it is God who is in complete control of what I say, how well it is delivered and how it is received. I must never forget to give complete control to God, and never put more focus on my own words than on God’s Word. And now, whenever I speak in that context I will find much peace and comfort in how little control I have over my own actions, because of the greatness of God’s control. When I am preaching, it must not be my words, but God’s. I am but a means and carrier.

Fourth of July Sermon

As you can imagine, thing get a little crazy around here leading up to the fourth. There has been a lot going on, and I will post about it soon, but I wanted to share my sermon from yesterday. The actually delivery went okay, I think I was really nervous to give the sermon and felt extra pressure because I was really proud of writing it. Given my frustrations with people who tie Christianity too close to America (instead of the world), I was really happy to find a relevant, significant and yet appropriately patriotic topic and tie-in. Let's face it, I probably wouldn't survive if I got through the whole message without mentioning the Fourth of July at Mount Rushmore. A little over halfway through it my notes blew away, and I actually did better without them. I forgot one part but other than that it went a lot smoother without them. More updates on how God is working here soon.

Salves of Righteousness

Good morning! Happy Fourth of July! Aren’t we extremely blessed to enjoy the freedom we do as Americans? What a great opportunity we have to reflect on and celebrate this freedom today. This morning I want to talk about this freedom, and relate it to the freedom we enjoy as Christians. These great freedoms also bring us great responsibility, and this morning I want to use our national freedoms to illustrate our freedom from sin. I also want to take the opportunity to explain how this great freedom we enjoy binds us as slaves to righteousness. I know slavery might be a dangerous topic for today, but it is the second half of freedom as Christians.

Up to this point in Romans, Paul has been explaining that we are all called to righteousness, but all fall short of this on our own. However, through our faith (belief + trust) in Christ we can attain this righteousness. In fact, we are expected to. In the beginning of this chapter, Paul explains that through our faith in Christ, we participate with Christ in his death and resurrection. “For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin- because anyone who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.” (Rm. 6:6-8) Through our relationship with Christ we die, releasing sin’s grip from us, and are born again in the freedom of God’s righteousness.

Now, we’ve used the term “righteousness” a lot here, and I think it’s important to clarify its meaning. Throughout the entire Bible, the terms that are translated as “righteousness” refer to actions that align with God’s Will. That is, to be righteous is to do God’s will. So, when we become “slaves of righteousness”, we become slaves to God’s will. Simply put, being righteous means just doing what God wants and what God has planned for you. Paul explains that Abraham was righteous because he picked up everything and moved to a strange land when God commanded him to. (Rom 4:3)

(Rom 6:17-18) “But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness."

The New Testament really takes this metaphor or servant hood seriously, and I think we should too. It is used several times throughout the Gospels, and is no coincidence that in the many parables that use slavery as an illustration, we are referred to as the servants and God is the master. In his introduction to Romans, verse 1:1, Paul refers to himself as a servant of Jesus Christ. In Ephesians 3:7, Paul says, “I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God's grace given me through the working of his power.” In Phillipians 2:7 Jesus taking on the human form and humbling himself is said to be an act of servant hood. Many of Paul’s examples of faithful Christians are referred to as servants of Christ. In James 1:1, James also refers to himself as a servant of Jesus Christ. This is more than a useful metaphor for us, it is a model that we are to follow.

We only have two options. We’re either for God or against God. We can either serve God, which is righteousness, or serve anyone or anything that is not God, including ourselves, which is sin. By following God, being in relationship with Him and serving Him, we chose to die to sin. By choosing to be released from the oppression of our slavery to sin, there is no other choice but to willingly submit ourselves as servants of God’s will. It is God’s will to lead you to eternal life, and any other will or plan leads to death, so cast them aside.

Don’t misunderstand this as a list of rules to follow. There is not a list of rules to follow now in order to be saved. In fact, reducing this call to do God’s will to a list of rules would be to greatly devalue it. Paul asks in verse 21, “What benefit does your sin bring you?” The answer is that it is a path of destruction that ultimately leads to death. Because of our faith in Christ, we have been freed not only from the debt of our sin, but through our faith in Christ we have been freed from having to do sin at all, and empowered to not sin. This is God’s will for us, to rely on our faith in Christ and pursue righteousness. That is God’s will for us, God’s plan for us, and we know that it is God’s plan for us that ensures our salvation. “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.” (v. 22).

So, through Christ we are freed from our slavery to sin, which we could not get out of on our own, and since we are freed from every sinful act, the only thing left is God’s will.

In a similar yet smaller way, our freedom as Americans compels us to do certain things. We enjoy the freedoms of religion, speech, press, the freedom to vote, to a fair trial, and the list goes on. And we are compelled to use them. What a waste it would be, how useless it would be not to use them! These freedoms also compel us to serve, honor and defend our freedoms, because that’s how we’ve kept them for over 200 years. Let us take a minute to thank those who have defended our freedoms in one of the most significant ways possible, through service in our armed forces (ask to stand and be recognized). Now, just as it would be pointless and idiotic to have these freedoms available to us, at the expense of the service of others, and therefore self-impose restrictions, limitations and slavery on ourselves, we actually do this to a much greater extent when we bypass our own call to righteousness in order to go back to being servants of sin. Jesus freed us so we don’t have to do that.

Being patriotic is a quite necessary reaction to the freedoms we enjoy in this country. But realize also that the freedom we have as a gift from God sets us free from our worst form of slavery, sin, and leads us to eternal life. So, our necessary reaction to that freedom requires so much more from us, our entire selves. Don’t limit and confine yourself to sin anymore, but accept the call to be bound by righteousness and wholeness.

Servant hood is a popular example for us in the New Testament. In Luke 12, Jesus explains that we are to be servants that are watchful for the master’s arrival. That is, they act like their master is watching and are responsible with the resources given to them. This is where the phrase comes from that says, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded.” We have been given great freedoms, and we should be using these to pursue righteousness.

Servant hood is a very powerful example and model that, given our past, carries significant, negative connotations. But slavery to God and God’s will is significantly different than slavery to any human, which no one was ever intended to be subject to. Serving God means coming back into relationship with Him. It means participating in His plan to rescue the world. At a practical level, Jesus tells us that by serving the least, the last, the oppressed and the widowed we are serving him. It is giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, being welcoming and hospitable to the stranger, clothing the needy, caring for the sick and being with those who are imprisoned (Matt. 25:34-40). It is not hard to hear God’s call, but it is impossible to accept it and do it without also being dependant on God to do it through you.

So, as Christians in America, considering what today signifies; recognize, enjoy and give thanks for your freedom, and consider what this freedom means you are called to do. Consider what this slavery you are saved from and called to means, and bind yourself to it.

And, if you’re not yet a Christian, consider this an honest look at the Christian life. It’s a call to be freed from your slavery to sin, and to be subject to the loving God that rescued us from that sin. God wants to be with you for eternity, and the joy of this salvation compels us to want to do His will. That alignment with God’s will is how we are simultaneously free and slaves.