Monday, March 19, 2007

does the future belong to those who plan for it?

Short answer: no. We don't own the future, God does. "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future" (Jeremiah 29:11). God has plans for us, but our choices determine how well or poorly we participate in God's plans.

So why do we often settle for less than God's plan for our future?

1. We tend to think of our inadequacies and our past mistakes.
Maybe Moses was settling when he was tending a flock for his father-in-law (Exodus 3). He certainly had plenty of excuses for not choosing to move toward God's future. When we dwell on our inadequacies or our past failures, we are a house with the electricity gone, a car with the battery dead, or the cold ashes of a fire. As a people we need to look to the Holy Spirit to power us, to heal us, move us, and heat us. We need to decide to let God work in us and through us, rather than defining ourselves by what we lack.

2. We forget whose image we are made in.
We often don’t know our real, God-made selves very well. Our culture spends plenty of time trying to tell us who we are, or who we would be if we just had the right products. But how well do we know the shape God made us in? How well do we know our spiritual gifts? When we know how God intended us to operate we begin to understand where the Enemy will attack us, and we can build on our strengths and make wise (God-driven) decisions despite the many voices and forces attempting to mislead us.

What is the single thing to remember about God's plan for our future?
God does the planning; we do the preparation. We prepare to "live into" God's plan for our lives. Preparing requires God-inspired thought and Spirit-inspired movement.

And a final word from Matt:
We need to cast our crowns at the feet of God. We need to give God the honors we collect as we live into God's future for us. That keeps us humble. It reminds us that without God's help we would be off doing the wrong stuff! Giving our victories to God also helps us celebrate the building of God's Kingdom.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

does a godly home guarantee godly children?

Short answer: No.

Why do parents feel overwhelmed today?
If you google "godly children" you get more than a million hits. On the top page a church from Illinois (their site meter lists over 3 million hits) will give you their seven keys for raising Godly children. The "Planning" key alone lists more than 50 scriptures and goes on for over four thousand words (14 pages in MS Word). ChristianParents.net gives 50 scripture references, then begins to tell parents in exhaustive detail all the goals we must set for our children, including salvation, confession, fellowship with God, daily growth, mental and psychological stability, respect for parental, political, and spiritual authority, mastery of the details of life (money, job, health, status, friends, social life, possessions, entertainments) INCLUDING "perfect inner happiness in the absence of one or more details of life." I feel tired just typing it in.

All these sites seem to teach that if we just master the seven keys, or fourteen principles, or forty scriptures, then yes, we will raise godly children.

Most Christian parenting resources name and claim Proverbs 22:6 as a central proof of this: "Train a child in the way he should go and he will not depart from it."

Why is this a problem?

1. It gives the authority of a "promise from God" to a proverb; the proverbs were meant to show "how life usually goes."
2. It doesn't take into account that rebellion happens.
3. It makes parents feel like failures (or lets us take credit that isn't fully ours).
4. It creates a false sense of hope for all those kids who don't return to God after running away.

The truth is: We have great influence, but not complete control.

A better scripture for parents is: Proverbs 21:30-31.
"There is no wisdom, no insight, no plan that can succeed against the Lord. The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but victory rests with the Lord."

BF Skinner – type thinking makes us think we can completely control behavior. Scripture teaches us that victory belongs to God. No matter how well we prepare or plan, we can't completely control whether someone will choose to come to, or turn from, God.

ways to increase the odds of success in raising godly children

1. Work on having a great marriage. Not a kid-centered marriage, though: center your marriage on God.

2. Be present. (Churchy way to put it: incarnational parenting.) If you can pull it off, having one parent at home is an incredible investment in your children.

3. Build on your childrens' strengths (don't work so hard to shore up their weaknesses). Jesus came to fishermen and called them to fish for people. Jesus came to tax collectors, and called them to handle money in a spiritually responsible way. God gave each child particular gifts to be fanned into flame. No point in fanning the weaknesses.

4. Get help from the RIGHT people. I don't like the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child." I don't even like "It takes a church to raise a child." What you need is the RIGHT church to help raise your child. And never leave all responsibility for raising your children in the Way of Jesus with someone else (schools, churches, godparents, etc.).

Friday, March 9, 2007

what satan wants


"Satan is not concerned with how many people gather in a service if all they do is sit and listen and leave. Satan does not care how much seed is sown as long as he can steal it away." - W. Oscar Thompson Jr., Concentric Circles of Concern (Broadman, 1981)

Saturday, March 3, 2007

does everything happen for a reason?

Yes, but not all reasons are good.

I think we sometimes ask this question because we are thinking, "Well, if God allowed it to happen, it must be good." And we convince ourselves to just wait long enough and it will be good.

The truth is that this (the post title) is not a good question!

A better question is: Why do bad things happen?
And: Is a bad thing ever a good thing?

So, see the next few posts!

why bad things happen

1. We live in a broken world.
The obvious choice of stories here is Genesis, but I also like 1 Peter 4:12: "Dear friends, don't be surprised at the fiery trials you are going through, as if something strange were happening to you."

People: It's hard!
God: No kidding!

2. We mess up. Either accidentally, or by intentionally ignoring God's instruction (sin).
I always pray for my children to "make wise decisions," which has to do with them learning what God desires. But Paul says it of adults, too:

Romans 7:21-23 (The Message)
It happens so regularly that it's predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God's commands, but it's pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge. I've tried everything and nothing helps. I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question? The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.

3. We are caught in the wake of someone's else's mess-up or sin.
Jeremiah 31:29 says, "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." There was an article in last week's paper about methamphetamine addicts, and how they become so focused on a single thing that they forget their children for weeks at a time. That's what this text is about.

See the next post for the most important reason why something that seems bad can actually be a good thing...

is there ever a time when a bad thing is actually a good thing?

4. When God shoves us out of the nest in order to make us fly.

These kinds of "bad things" are usually only visible with hindsight. I lost that job, but got a better one. God had to kick me out of that nest. The trick is that if God's in it, it works for the good (i.e., to make you "fly"). So if you lose that job and get a worse one, and your life begins to spiral out of control, it's probably not God but brokenness you're looking at.

The upshot is that it's easy to give God credit in hindsight for the good stuff, what's hard is discerning when God is creating (or allowing) the rough patches while it's happening. Certainly God can bring good out of horrible situations (consider Joseph, consider Daniel), but it's hard to understand why God might actually engineer a horrible situation. We're not always as far-sighted as God. We're myopic, God's hyperopic. New word for the day, kids!

Still: did God desire that a man be born blind, so that Jesus might happen along one day and heal him, bringing more people to follow in the Way? Did God desire that Lazarus die so that Jesus could raise him? Tough ones.

three good reasons to have hope

1. God is crazy in love with us
Romans 8:32-39 (The Message)
If God didn't hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn't gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God's chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ's love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture… None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I'm absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God's love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.

2. There's heaven on earth (God is with us).
Heaven on earth happens when we actually accept and get in line with God's will for our lives. It's those places and events when God and God's people can hear each other! Of course, that's not all there is!

1 Corinthians 15:19 (The Message)
If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we're a pretty sorry lot. But the truth is that Christ has been raised up, the first in a long legacy of those who are going to leave the cemeteries.

3. And there's heaven!
Planet Earth isn't heaven. I used to have a friend who always asked me to read about heaven from the book of Revelation whenever I visited him. He wished that things could be perfect, already. We would read, then I would remind him that God had work for him to do here on Earth. But the truth of the matter is that we are hard-wired to look toward eternity. It just isn't in healthy people to say, "Well, I guess this is all there is."

what should I do when things are a mess?

1. Figure out why you're there:

a. Did you mess up?
Yep, it happens to all of us. The church word for doing the wrong thing when we knew what the right thing was = sin.
b. Did you get caught up in someone else's mess up?
This is more subtle. Sometimes the people around us drag us into the wake of their sin or brokenness. A parent's bad choices affect their children. It's rare that sin only touches the sinner.
c. Did God call you (or push you) into a spiritual valley/desert?
If you were doing the right thing when you found yourself in the middle of a mess, God may have sent you into the valley for a purpose. Jesus was prodded by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness in order to be tested and strengthened. The Hebrew children were called by God out of slavery in Egypt, but they were pretty scared when they found their backs to the sea and the army of the Pharaoh pursuing them.

2. Five pieces of advice for the journey through a spiritual valley:

a. Don't take short cuts (do the wrong thing) in order to get out.
That may seem obvious, but sometimes we'll do anything to ease the pain. All suffering isn't wrong. Sometimes it's important for us to go through it in order to follow God.
b. If you sinned, accept the consequences and get to work cleaning up the mess.
Hebrews 12:11-13 (The Message) says, …discipline isn't much fun. It always feels like it's going against the grain. Later, of course, it pays off handsomely, for it's the well-trained who find themselves mature in their relationship with God. So don't sit around on your hands! No more dragging your feet! Clear the path for long-distance runners so no one will trip and fall, so no one will step in a hole and sprain an ankle. Help each other out. And run for it!
c. If it it's God-given (see 1c above), hang in there, and don't change direction.
Larry Osborne says, "What God shows you in the light, don't doubt in the darkness."
d. Keep your commitments, have concern for others, and have concern for God's reputation.
I know the list of "good ways to behave" could get oppressively long. But these few things will stand you in good stead. Try not to have an "all or nothing" attitude; people use that to get out of doing anything all all.
e. Try to learn something from it, and maybe even pass your learnings on.
If you gotta be in the middle of a wretched mess (for any reason), it's nice to be able to say that you at least learned something from it. When my marriage was in a really tough place, the most helpful people were those couples who had been through the same rough valleys and come out better on the other side. I was deeply grateful they shared their stories.