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Quit Whining

Here I sit, on my deck. The first time I have been able to do this in weeks. It's been a long, hot day and the little breeze in my backyard makes this heat a little easier to handle. I feel the need to whine but I don't want to. Today I just feel tired and the brave words that I wrote in my last post about accepting the mission to create change feel like they came from a different person. I'm not that courageous person today. Even the thoughts of going for a bike ride and spending time with God (usually one of my favorite things to do) seems too hard.

What a whiner I can be. After reading what I have wrote so far, I want to slap myself. Why does it take so much effort for this not to be about me? Especially when I'm tired. On Sunday I had the opportunity to talk with a woman who I honestly consider a hero. Lynda Arthey runs Shepherd's House which is home to 12 people who would otherwise be living on the street. After hanging out with Lynda and people who live at Shepherd's House a few months ago, my thoughts on true Christianity changed. At the time I wrote my thoughts down and I'll post them below. At Shepherd's House Lynda provides food and shelter for these people and pays for much of it from her own pocket. She deals with city inspectors who give her a rough time about the condition and classification of the house. She deals with fights between the alcoholics who use a legal drug and the drug addicts who use illegal drugs. She helps these people with resumes and finding jobs. She prays with them and doesn't just talk to them about Jesus, she shows them Jesus.

And here I sit, whining that it's hot and I'm tired. Somebody slap me.

Arranged Marriage

We, the church, instead of showing people who Jesus is by our actions and allowing them to fall in love with Him naturally, have focused our attention on talking people into loving Him. We try to paint a picture of Christianity that is fun and exciting. We entertain people in our “services” and cater to the forms of entertainment that they enjoy the most; drama, up-beat music, lively speakers, etc. We tickle the ears of people with the words that they want to hear like “community”, “love” and “acceptance” but often we practice exclusion, and judgment. It seems like the best evangelists are the best sales people as they have the ability to talk people into things and sell them on the benefits – painting a pretty picture of Christianity and all the perks.

Jesus did things much different than we, “his body”, do things today. Jesus never painted a pretty picture of what life would be like following Him. The boldest statement of this is found in Luke 9:23 which says, “Then He said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”” That doesn’t sound like an invitation to come watch drama or listen to up-beat music or a lively speaker. It doesn’t really sound like a statement that would create a warm or sentimental feeling, either. If we look at the lives of the people who were closest to Him, people like Paul and Peter, we will see lives that were full of pain, discomfort, prison and beatings but also full of passion and a love for Jesus that drove them to keep getting uncomfortable for His sake.

God came to earth in the form of Jesus Christ to restore the broken relationship between God and man that was broken by sin. God created man back in Genesis to enjoy a loving and active relationship with himself but we messed up that relationship through our own selfishness by disobeying God and bringing sin into the world. Since the fall in Genesis 3 God has watched with pity and compassion as we have struggled to live life apart from Him. To clean up the mess that we have made of ourselves and restore the relationship that was broken, Jesus came and set an example through His life and was the sacrifice for our sins through His death. In doing this, He has invited us back into a relationship with Himself that He describes as a marriage. We are His bride. He is our bridegroom.

As I thought about this marriage with Christ I asked myself what were the things that attracted me to my wife. The answers that I came up with were probably the same as any other guy: her looks, her personality, her creativity and the way that she lived her life. I wasn’t talked into loving her by her parents or anyone else. It happened by spending time together and getting to know what she was like. Then I got to thinking about how we as the church try to get people to love Jesus. We do a sell job as I mentioned earlier. Sometimes we do a “bait and switch” by attracting people through fun and entertainment and slipping the nice parts of the gospel in somewhere but never really getting to the part where Jesus talks about denying yourself and taking up your cross daily. In terms of marriage, we seem to be in the business of arranging marriages rather than showing people who He is by following the example of His life and allowing them to fall in love with Him on their own.

This makes a lot of sense to me as I think about why people choose to walk away from the Christian life. If people are sold on all the benefits of the Christian life like acceptance, community, love and the things that make them feel good, if one of those things doesn’t meet their expectations or they don’t get that feeling any more then they probably feel like they have been sold a defective product. Or, if after coming to expect the things that make them feel good, they find out that Jesus was really telling us to deny ourselves and do things that are uncomfortable like serving and caring for other people, they probably would come to the realization that they were sold a lie.

Arranged marriage also explains the apathy and mediocrity that is so apparent in our churches. So many Christians are in a marriage with Christ that has been arranged by well-intentioned parents, grandparents, or friends and is not a result of falling in love with Jesus. Because of this arrangement, there seems to be a lack of passion and a lack of love for our Savior, as the marriage doesn’t seem to be genuine. I am speaking from experience because this describes my life until recently. Growing up in a Christian home, I was taken to church on Sundays and was involved in all the programs and through all this, God was real to me. I was in a marriage with Christ because of what I was told I could get out of it and occasionally my prayers were answered in real and obvious ways, which kept me in the marriage. It was all about me.

Over the last year or so things started to change for me but it wasn’t like it was a sudden epiphany or anything like that. I have neighbors that have struggled with cancer and other serious health issues for about a year. This has left them without the energy and strength to take care of their property. To be a good neighbor I started cutting their grass when I was cutting my own and continued to do this through the summer. This led to shoveling their driveway in the winter. As I was doing this, and not always enjoying it as I hate shoveling snow, I kept wondering if I was making a difference for them beyond the obvious chores getting done. At the same time I started getting uncomfortable about what we are accomplishing by gathering together as “the church” on Sunday mornings. Especially when I could open the paper on Monday morning and read stories about other groups and organizations doing stuff to help people in need. I started wondering what we were accomplishing and if this is the way that Jesus would have done things. I also felt really challenged by the T.V. show, “Extreme Home Makeover” as every show that I watched almost brought tears as I watched the incredible difference Ty Pennington and his team made in needy peoples lives.

All this thinking led me to look at Jesus life differently. If I were honest with myself, I would have to admit that I didn’t really care a whole lot about Jesus life. I knew that He died to pay the price for my sins and all the other stuff that He did was mildly interesting but I figured it was mostly just there to give preachers and other intellectual’s stuff to talk and argue about. Besides getting me into heaven, it didn’t really apply much to me because I couldn’t walk on water or touch people and heal them. But my discomfort with church and something about the phrase, “the church is the body of Christ” led me to take a look at Jesus life differently. I figured that if we (the church) are the body of Christ then wouldn’t that mean that we should do what He did. So I went through the gospel of Matthew and wrote down all the things that Jesus did. He taught. He healed. He fed the 4000. I noticed that Jesus did do a lot of teaching but the thing He did the most was that He took care of people’s practical needs. To me this meant that He showed people that He loved them more than He told them and when He told them He loved them He backed it up with action.

This new perspective on Jesus life changed things a whole lot for me. I finally understood that although I couldn’t touch my neighbor and give them back their strength and energy, by cutting their grass, I was taking care of a practical need that they would have needed strength and energy to accomplish. It also showed that I cared about them, which is something that Jesus was doing all the time. Jesus life started to become more relevant to me because I realized that I could do some of the things that He did. It also made me fall in love with Him. How could I not love someone who cared about people so much? How could I not love someone who cares about me so much? If “Extreme Home Makeover” could bring a tear to my eye because of the way they helped people, the stuff Jesus did should have me bawling. And somewhere in all of this I went from a marriage relationship with Christ that was arranged to a marriage relationship based on my love for Him that I discovered by seeing Him in action. I saw Him in action through me and I saw Him in action through other people who were committed to helping the homeless and the sick and the crippled - people who were being “the body of Christ”.

posted by Dave @ 8:44 p.m.