What's The Goal Of Being A Christian? - Part seven of Questions From the Lifehouse Youth Group

Last night, I asked the youths at Lifehouse a question every Christian should consider. We read 2 Timothy 2:4-6. "No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops."

These three people, the soldier, athlete, and farmer all work hard. But they have motivation to reach a goal. The soldier wants to please his superior officer. The athlete wants to become a champion and win his contest. The farmer works hard so he has a good crop. But what's the goal of being a Christian? A few said, "telling other people about Jesus."

Telling people about Jesus is good, I replied. Jesus himself commissioned us to do just that. But why would Jesus want us to tell people about him?

Some other youths suggested, "So we can go to heaven?" One even said, "So we can have all that great stuff up there."

I decided to stay away from breaking down the idea of Beverly Hills Heaven. Instead, I remembered something I had heard from John Piper a few years ago. "What if you could go to Heaven and know for certain you would have the sweetest house, with the best skatepark and a chocolate fountain? What if you could never feel pain again and see all of your dead loved ones? If Jesus wasn't there, would you still want to go?"

Some of them immediately responded with "No", but I really appreciated one of the guys saying, "Well, I know the right answer is 'no', but I don't always think about it that way."

How many of us do think of it this way?

Maybe the goal of a Christian is simply to know God and have a relationship with Him. Maybe the goal of evangelism is so we can introduce other people to God and help them to know Him. I told the youths, "Don't read your Bible or pray or come to church just because you think you have to. At the same time, you won't have much of a relationship with God if you don't put any effort in getting to know Him. We should do the stuff because we want to know Him."

What do you think is the goal of Christianity?

I Need To Stop Playing Catch Alone - A non-legalistic type of discipline

Recently, I heard a comedian say he had no toy more pathetic than a bounce-back. If you aren’t familiar with this product, you probably had more friends than I did as a child. Basically, it's a trampoline set on its side. When you throw a baseball, it'll "throw" it back to you. When my brothers didn't want to play catch with me, I hauled out the ol' bounce-back.

As you might imagine, it's accuracy in rebounding the ball made me jump and dive for a lot of catches. This helped me on the field when I needed to snag line drives, but my throwing accuracy was only so-so. And hitting? I was probably somewhere around .250 in my little league career. Not exactly the Mendoza Line, but nothing to crow about either.

Even though I knew my weaknesses, I kept practicing with that bounce-back. I didn't tape off a box on a backstop or hang an old tire to get better command of my throws. I spent more time on Mike Tyson's Punch-Out than I did swinging in the batting cages. Those wild throws and swinging strikes embarrassed me, even when no one saw them. So I kept practicing what I knew I could do well.

Okay, in terms of my life as a Christian, this analogy breaks down. But I did think about the bounce-back this weekend when John Privett from Lifehouse Church taught through Luke 5. Then he read verse 16, "But he (Jesus) would withdraw to desolate places to pray." John stopped and asked, "Now why would Jesus need to take time to pray? Why did he need to go off by himself in solitude?"

Lots of people object to the "do-this-don't-do-that" image of Christianity. In a way, they should. We're saved entirely because God offers to remove our sin and also credit us with the righteousness of Jesus. If we've accepted this forgiveness and receive His grace, we don't have to earn God's favor by doing all of the right things.

This went entirely against the four-point "what it means to be a Christian" lesson I learned in Sunday School. We would count them off every week: 1. Accept Jesus into your heart (always confusing concept) 2. Pray 3. Read the Bible 4. Go to church.

Maybe the list could have been cut in half and simplified. 1. Repent 2. Make Jesus the Lord of your life. Or maybe 1. Become a Christian 2. Try to live the way Jesus taught his disciples to live. I don't know. Maybe that's not helpful. But I think it gets more to the point.

Whatever the case, Jesus is my example. He knew God was pleased with him (Matt 3:17 and 17:5), so the fasting, prayer, and times of solitude weren't ways in which he made God happy. I think Jesus did it for at least two reasons. First, I'm sure it helped his growth and the strength of his relationship with God. When Luke 2 says Jesus grew in wisdom and favor with God, I doubt this happened without any action on his part. Earlier in the chapter, he's in the Temple keeping up on discussions with the Bible teachers as a twelve year old. The kid hadn't even been Bar-Mitzvah'd! How did he get to that point? Wouldn't it make sense he spent time in the Bible?

Second, I think Jesus practiced these spiritual disciplines because they didn't fit in with the demands of his schedule. It seems he wants to get away and pray right when there's the most demand for him. With so many people to heal and so many messages to teach, where does a guy find time to sit and pray in peace? He had to make time. He had to say no to demands.

There, right there I thought about the bounce-back. I rely on what comes easily. I study the Bible. I pray. I worship. These are all acceptable. People tell me I do these things well and I know God is already pleased with me.

But then again, I don't necessarily see growth in other areas of my life. If I say I want to be a more humble person, then maybe I should practice doing something good without announcing it. If I want to grow in wisdom, maybe I could learn how to spend time with men who will actually challenge me and help me mature. If I want to have more joy, maybe I should learn how to celebrate my relationship with Jesus and demonstrate it once in a while. All of those things might be hard or embarrassing, but I need to show some initiative.

Sometimes you have to get over yourself and ask someone to play catch with you.

Be Holy – Some thoughts on punishment vs. correction

Somewhere around nine months ago, and once or twice since then, I’ve offered to answer any reader’s question in the form of a post. So far, Adam has been the only one to ask anything. It turned out to be a pretty good post, although I might explain the point differently now while using the same metaphor. Well, Adam, ol’ buddy, you wanted to know if I thought God still punishes us for our sins. I’m glad you asked…

For anyone who has read my weblog over the past few months, you know how I feel about God’s sovereignty. He’s perfect, self-sufficient, and ultimate. I talked about His glory as the sum total of all His attributes. I’ve written on how these things relate to us. In order to talk about God’s justice, I’ll have to make clear what I believe defines His holiness. Where God’s glory is everything about Him, His holiness is the perfection of His presence.

Throughout the second half of Exodus, God talks of making the Hebrews a holy nation and a people unto Himself. He instructs the people on how to build and use the tabernacle so that His presence might dwell among them. The people could come near God’s presence to worship Him in the Holy Place and God’s presence resided in the inner room called the Holy of Holies. What made these things holy? His presence.

Before God came to dwell among His people, He made a covenant with them, a contract that set up the rules of their relationship. In order for God to give them His presence, they needed to observe His law because sin separates us from Him. This, in itself, shows God’s graciousness. Man had previously proven himself to break covenants when Adam and Eve sinned in Genesis 3. The covenant given to Moses, much like the one given to Adam, essentially says “Obedience to the Law will bring life, disobedience will bring death.”

Some might object to the logic of this covenant because our relativistic society finds offense with anything so rigid. But for those who accept God’s perfection and self-sufficiency, its necessity becomes clear. Since He is perfect, His ways are perfect. Anyone who denies God’s law and goes his own way has challenged God and denied His sovereignty. They have given themselves over to idolatry not realizing how their idols will fail.

So, after God comes to dwell among the Hebrews, they continue to sin and break the covenant. God sometimes held back His anger in mercy, other times He punished their disobedience. But the people seemed to sin persistently. Even as God gave Moses the law (everyone clearly agreed to follow and obey God in Exodus 19), the people made an idol to worship. Moses told the people in Deuteronomy 9:8, “Even at Horeb you provoked the LORD to wrath, and the LORD was so angry with you that He would have destroyed you.” God loves His people and they continued to treat Him with contempt. According to the covenant, this brought death. Ezra 5:12 says about the sins of Israel, “But because our fathers had provoked the God of heaven to wrath, He gave them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, the Chaldean, who destroyed this temple and deported the people to Babylon.” Why would God send an invading army to kill and destroy His own people? Because for Him to overlook sin would be the same as an earthly judge releasing a known rapist without penalty. It would be injustice for Him not to punish a lawbreaker. Paul writes in Romans 4:15, “for the Law brings about wrath, but where there is no law, there also is no violation.” It seems no one escapes this responsibility. Romans 1:18-19 says, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.”

History shows how man, on his own, will sin. We are incapable of true righteousness apart from God. And God knew this. In Genesis 15, God makes a covenant with Abraham symbolically promising to take responsibility for the sin of him and his descendants. This covenant was fulfilled in Jesus, who never sinned and lived in perfect obedience to God. Yet He died in our place, sparing us the punishment demanded for sin (Romans 6:23).

Now the rules have changed. A person can be justified through faith in Jesus’s death and resurrection. Romans 3 explains this. The gift of salvation is given, not earned, through our faith in Jesus. But, as Wayne Grudem says in Systematic Theology, it isn’t enough for us to have the slate wiped clean in a legal sense. Adam had that advantage and blew it. Eventually, we would most certainly blow it. Nobody’s perfect, right? Then God did something so beautiful. He placed us “in Christ”, or as Colossians 3:3 says, “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Paul made this statement to support what he told the Colossians in chapter 1 verses 21-22. “And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach.”

The question was, “does God still punish us for sin?” In the case of those who have accepted Jesus, I ask, “how can God make us pay a penalty for sin when Jesus took our punishment on the cross?” The answer is, “He can’t, but better yet, He won’t. We’re hidden in Jesus and God sees us as perfect, blameless, and beyond reproach.”

However, this doesn’t mean life’s a gas from here on. Hebrews 12 describes God disciplining us as sons. Think about it, a good father doesn’t punish for the sake of rules. He disciplines in order to train his son to do good and avoid evil. The father does this out of love for his son. Again, in Revelation 3:19, God says, “Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline; therefore be zealous and repent.” Another word for “discipline” is “correct”. Correction means taking something wrong and make it right. Proverbs 22:15 says that foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, and the theme of proverbs revolves around a loving parent talking to a son. God has used hard situations to reveal areas of anger, unbelief, etc in my life. As one of His foolish children, I need this correction.

Now, hardship isn’t limited to either punishment or correction. Sometimes it’s accusation or condemnation from the enemy. Revelation 12 says that Satan accuses us day and night. Certainly he wants us to believe that God’s correction is punishment. To agree with such a thought would deny the completion of Christ’s work on the cross.

More importantly, I think we need to see that Jesus never eliminated the law of sowing and reaping found in Galatians 6:7-8. There were a lot of mornings that I reaped hangovers after a night of heavy drinking. Would you call that punishment or the fruit of a seed? God set this in place to help us recognize the consequence of sin and encourage us to reap the benefits of righteous living.

There are Christians who think God changes how He feels based on their behavior. Consider this: if your behavior didn’t save you, does behavior un-save you? According to Scripture, we’re kept by God’s power, hidden in Jesus, where nothing can separate us from the Father’s love (Romans 8:39). Romans 8:1 is very clear that God does not condemn us, and we even have His promise of renewal in 2 Corinthians 5:17. Going back to the old covenant, God gave a command in Leviticus 19:2, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” Think about that in terms of God’s presence and, as Graham Cooke says, it begins to sound more like a blessing than a stern rule. Through Jesus, God gave us the presence of His Holy Spirit, thus making us holy.

Fruit is important. What fruit comes out of the trials you face? If you are a believer who struggles with addiction, depression, impure thoughts, and so on, seek God’s correction knowing His love for you. Learn the difference between the accusing voice of Satan and the (mostly) gentle conviction of the Holy Spirit. One produces despair and a feeling of hopelessness, but godly sorrow is always meant to lead us to repentance and life.

How the Bears Became Bad News and the Ducks Became Mighty.

Baseball may have taught me a lot, but nobody taught me a lot about baseball. I remember getting yelled at in Little League for messing up a play or batting poorly. Lots of people were willing to tell me what I did wrong, but very few people would show me how to do it right. There’s a reason I gave up playing the game for playing punk music. Mistakes were acceptable if not celebrated, and it was easy enough to teach myself anything I needed to know. Even so, I still wish I had that cinematic baseball team where a coach comes to turn a bunch of misfits into all-stars.

I’ve been in Michigan for the last three weeks and seen lots of old friends. Some of them have asked me how I like living in Nashville. Even though I lived in Michigan most of my life and moved only a year ago, I tell them that Nashville is my home. When they ask me why I like it so much, I used to tell them that I’m pleased to live where God wants me. While that’s true, I realize that I have another answer. I have people in Nashville who train me in discipleship. It’s like I found the Little League coach I always wanted. Until I moved to Nashville, I never understood the value of discipline and discipleship.

I used to identify the word “discipline” with punishment. Anything else was training. The Bible used the word discipline in terms of punishment sometimes and many a Baptist child heard these verses. Proverbs 22:15, for example, “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; the rod of discipline will remove it far from him.” Or the famous Proverbs 13:24, “He who withholds his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him diligently.” Dang, right? Imagine how blessed you’d feel hearing someone quote those verses after hitting you with a belt.

But more often than not, scripture talks about discipline as if it’s the greatest thing in the whole world. Hebrews 12 talks of how God disciplines to train us in holiness. Verse 11 says, “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” And in Revelation 3, in a letter to Sardis, God says, “Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline; therefore be zealous and repent.” Paul rejoiced at the discipline of the church in Colossians 2:5.

We can easily get the wrong idea about discipline. It’s not punishment for its own sake. It’s not hateful correction. Like children, we think we know the best way to live, but we would mature poorly if we didn’t have people to train us. The disciples weren’t masochists, as far as I know. They wanted Jesus to show them how He lived His life. Instead of studying in the back of some synagogue for an allotted amount of time, they followed Him everywhere, listened to every word, asked Him all sorts of questions. “How should we pray?” “How many times should I forgive my brother?” “Should I pay my taxes?”

Alright, so discipline isn’t as bad as it sounds. It develops a mature way of life. But what does that have to do with living in Nashville? I have people in Nashville who meet with me regularly, whether intentionally or otherwise, to encourage me towards discipline. Then I turn it around and help other people with the same encouragement. It’s created a community of people seeking to develop a mature relationship with God, help each other reach those goals, stay accountable, and celebrate the growth. This gives me even more incentive to build and maintain an intimate relationship with God knowing that it helps my church. Paul mentions this kind of other-centered discipline in Romans 15:1-2. “Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves. Each of us is to please his neighbor for his good, to his edification.”

I’m glad I grew up in Michigan. But taken away from the culture of discipline that I’ve found in Tennessee, I fall back into old patterns and live less than extraordinarily. How often does this happen to you? How easy is it? That’s a pretty good sign that I’m still learning. I’m not ready for the travel team yet. I found myself saying the very words a friend told me about his lack of discipline. The decline in discipline almost made me think that I had begun to desire God less. I’m a forgetful person who needs others to remind me of my hunger for God. If I could do it on my own, why would Paul spend all of 1 Corinthians 12 saying that members of the Church were given different gifts so they could work together as a body with different parts?

The different parts of the body depend on each other. They are responsible to each other. They train and build together. They become strong and focused. They are able to accomplish their goals with skill. If the body is supposed to be a picture of the church, how out of shape is yours? In 1 Timothy 4, Paul instructs Timothy how to deal with false teachings and says, “But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.”

I’ve said it before, but all I want from life is to glorify God and point others to Jesus. When I die, put it on the stone. I can’t accomplish these things effectively on my own. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work. I burn out too quickly and lose heart. I need people to cheer me on, train me, keep me going towards that goal. How else am I going to make a big play in the championship game?

I once wrote about the church as a team. Here are some questions that might apply well to the analogy. How well do you know the people in your church? When you gather, do you encourage each other in righteousness? Are you willing to submit to spiritual authority? You don’t have to answer all of those questions right now. Let’s start with this one. When you think about discipline, do you think of it as a means to victory?

Are Those Your Ribs?

We wear nametags at Lifehouse Church. It’s a practice I have historically avoided until now. Now I see the benefit of helping newcomers get to know about a hundred people. One Sunday morning, the woman writing out nametags gasped when I slapped the sticker to my shirt. Apparently, I had leaned back as I breathed in and she saw the ridge of my ribcage. “Isaiah! Oh my goodness! Are those your ribs? Do you eat?” She and I stared at each other for a moment. If she’s asking if I eat, I thought, that’s one thing. If she wants to know if I eat enough, that’s a different question altogether. It didn’t occur to me until later that I should have asked if she wanted to feed me. She apologized for making a scene about it and I told her not to worry. I’ve been this way my whole life.

If you can’t figure it out from my pictures, I’m a fairly scrawny dude. At a height of six feet two inches, I have, once, weighed a little more than one hundred forty pounds. There are a few reasons for this. First, I have a world-class, championship, gold-plated metabolism. Second, even if I have enough money to buy three meals a day, I usually forget about eating. One of my old roommates once said, “How can you forget about eating? That’s all I think about!” I’ll tell you how. I’m busy. I’ll get to reading and writing, playing music, cleaning, watching a baseball game, or anything besides taking the time to preparing a meal. Grazing typically gets me through the day, though. If I can wrap my teeth around a granola bar or bagel while I’m working, I can sustain for hours. Sometimes days. This will go on until I see an oversized, perfectly cooked steak advertised on television or smell someone grilling as I walk by their house. Then I’m reminded, “Oh right! I haven’t eaten.” Suddenly, I feel downright ravenous. The next chance I have to eat a meal, I will devour it without any thought towards table manners.

Like most stories, I didn’t see any significance in what Nametag Lady said until much later. I’m re-reading Lilith by George MacDonald and came across a certain passage. The narrator has come to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Raven. “We are in want of something to eat and drink, wife,” he said; “we have come a long way!”

“You know, husband,” she answered, “we can give only to him that asks.” She turned her unchanging face and radiant eyes upon mine.

“Please give me something to eat, Mrs. Raven,” I said, “and something – what you will – to quench my thirst.”

“Your thirst must be greater before you can have what will quench it,” she replied; “but what I can give you, I will gladly.”

The whole book is like that. One, big metaphysical knot that MacDonald takes his sweet time in untying. How can a person be hungry or thirsty, but not nearly enough to have the thing that will really satisfy? Wouldn’t it makes sense that if a person were only a little thirsty, a little water would take care of the thirst? Isn’t a snack sometimes enough? Mrs. Raven’s enigmatic reply reminded me of two passages in scripture. Psalm 42:1 says, “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for You, O God.” Then, in John 4, Jesus speaks to a Samaritan woman at a well. He asks her for a drink and this sets off a conversation that makes MacDonald’s dialogue seem elementary. Jesus then begins to talk about the difference between well water and “living water” that He has come to offer. He says in John 4:13-14, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”

A good friend of mine told me that he wanted to become more disciplined in spending time with God. Then just a few weeks later, he confessed to how little time he had spent in prayer or reading his Bible. He said, “It’s not that I don’t have the time, but when the opportunity comes to spend time with Him, I make up excuses to do something else. I think the reason is that I don’t desire God enough.”

I told him, “Dude, please, I know you. You desire God. You’re hungry. You just don’t know how hungry you really are. I’m not going to pray that you become more disciplined. I’m going to ask God to show you just how desperately you already want Him. If you want something bad enough, you’ll do whatever it takes to get it.”

Of course, discipline is a good thing. Paul commended the church in Colossians 2:5, “For even though I am absent in body, nevertheless I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good discipline and the stability of your faith in Christ.” But I believe that desire leads us to begin a pattern of discipline, after which we need to persevere in it. In 1 Corinthians 9:25-27, Paul talks of working hard for the sake of the gospel. “Everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things. They then do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Therefore I run in such a way, as not without aim; I box in such a way, as not beating the air; but I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that, after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified.”

My friend’s problem with discipline and my eating habits look very much alike. When I have the time to eat a meal, I toast a bagel or open a bag of chips because I think it’s more important to do other things. I’m misdirecting my hunger to something that won’t satisfy. My friend wants to spend more time with God. At the moment he has the chance to get alone with God, though, he chooses to do something else that he believes is more important, like sleeping in.

Jesus’s death and resurrection enabled us to come into God’s presence. We now have the opportunity to accept His gift of salvation. This is at the heart of the gospel, and we must want His presence so badly that we’ll do anything to get there and stay there. We have to love the gospel so much that we can’t help but tell other people about it. We have to need God’s presence like the deer needed water in Psalm 42. We must feel our need to drink the living water Jesus offered before our thirst is quenched. We very well could be starving, but sometimes we need a lady to ask us if our ribs are showing. Once I realize that a granola bar isn’t a substitute for a solid breakfast, one meal isn’t enough. I have to commit myself to eating three meals a day, otherwise nothing will change. And I really should stop losing weight.


P.S.
I wanted to remind any readers of my offer to answer questions in the form of a post. You may leave a comment here or email me at isaiahkallman@gmail.com