Love Songs to Jesus, a Confession

I want to confess that I find it difficult during Sunday worship or in special church settings to emotionally respond to songs that exhort me to "celebrate Jesus" or "love Jesus".  Heck, I have basic problems with the call to "worship and adore" Him.  It's not that I don't know the truth that is contained in those exhortations, or can't explain the great gulf between the supreme worthiness of God and sinners saved by grace.  I understand the theology and biblical teaching well enough to articulate it.  The problem lies with me and the fact that I don't really know Jesus, at least not like I know my wife, or my grandchildren, or my boss at work.  I know the truth and can pretend that He lives inside of me by the Holy Spirit but right now I react to my world about 90% physical and 10% spiritual.  The fact of the matter is I can't see Him, touch Him, sit across from Him or even talk to Him face to face, and no amount of bible quoting lifts me one foot higher towards His throne in heaven.  I don't mean to sound blasphemous, but it is difficult for me in the temperament I have to relate to Jesus in the way that is expected of a typical Christian believer.  Talking into the air or cutting the pages of scripture is not very much of a conversation for me.

I don't receive special revelations; when faced with a choice I weigh it as long as I dare to before choosing what seems right.  I rarely feel that I have been divinely nudged, I don't see every moment of every day as a divine appointment and rarely can I really say that something that happened was a "God-thing".  Being surrounded by people that do respond that way makes me feel out of step, on the fringe.  All that I really end up doing is seeking to faithfully do what the prophet said, I try to act justly towards all, to seek to move in mercy not judgement, and when it comes to spiritual stuff, to humbly do whatever it is that seems to lay in front of me.  Or as my wife is fond of quoting, all you have to do is "love God and love others".  Somehow I feel that there may be more substance in a life lived in this manner than some expressive emotionalism for an hour each Sunday.  We'll have to wait and see how that all sugars off in the long run.

Seasonal Givings Slump

We must be right in the middle of the seasonal charitable givings slump.  The not-for-profit NGO that I am treasurer for has seen a slump in giving, the ministry my wife works for has been touch and go on payroll for the last month, and the radio preachers on almost every program have been beating the bushes for support day after day.  I even hear it on Sundays at church buried in announcements and such.  We are a semi-numbers church.  We don't post weekly attendance, but we have been running the box score on what we need to take in week by week to meet budget (usually thousands of dollars) and what we do take in (usually hundreds of dollars).  The only objection I have to this annual hand-wringing time is the tendency, when a group or church or individual finds themselves in a financial crisis, to respond by stating or exhorting that we only need to trust God to provide.  I've heard that all my life, and frankly it is based on the assumption that what we are doing is what God wants us to do.  I have seen too many ministries where maybe God was drying up the storehouses of heaven to say that the purpose for your existence has been served and you are no longer needed.  But Christian ministries and churches are hard to kill off once they take root.  An appeal to the general Christian guilt factor or to history or to calling is most often enough to squeeze enough to squeak on by.

But it leaves the question hanging unanswered.  Are all the struggling churches, radio ministries, outreach programs, etc. really doing the work of the kingdom and therefore could be inclined to believe somehow that divine intervention will allow them to continue, or are they just afraid to face the fact that in the grand scheme of God's activities on earth they are not really needed.  Just for the record, I have never heard a ministry say "Well, giving is down, and we are taking that as a sign that our work is complete.  We are liquidating what we do have and reinvesting it in some other ministry that is growing."  Just because we do Christian things is no guarantee that they are God-called things.  That's why older churches in New England are more prone to turn into museums of past glory rather than a tabernacle of God's abiding presence.  They become centered on keeping the doors open and no longer impact their communities with the gospel.  The summer slump should be a time for inner reflection and honesty, not stepped up appeals and fundraising schemes.

Revival

Yesterday at church some of the praise songs and part of the sermon was devoted to the concept of revival and I found myself thinking of that quote from the famous philosopher, Inigo Montoya in the Princess Bride "You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means."  And I found that I could not really do a credible job of defining it.  It must have something to do with the Latin verb "to live" and the "re" implies somehow a revitalization, a restoration, a reinvigorating, perhaps a new birth?  But it is a biblical concept or something we have cobbled together along the way to deal with the reality of a holy God and our own seeming lack of spiritual maturity.  Why do we pray for it in our churches week after week?  What do we expect it to look like if and when it comes?  Is it something God expects us to do for ourselves or are we looking for an easy out of self discipline by waiting for God to step in and do it?  Again I concludes that it does not mean what we think it means. 

I can't find the word "revival" in my concordance, and there are probably less than 20 places where "revive" is used depending upon the translation.  And when I read those verses, mostly in the Psalms, I get the sense of God lifting a heaviness or a weariness, almost a feeling of hopelessness from the psalmist who finds himself overcome by life and all it brings his way.  And so he cries out to God for relief, for the ability to lie down believing that tomorrow could be different, and wake up knowing that even if it is not that the day will not be lived outside of the grace of God.  And somehow that is enough to put one foot in front of the other and continue the journey faithfully.  That prayer for revival seems to me to deal more with consistently living each day by the grace of God, being faithful where we are able, and being aware that the love of God still holds us even when we fall short.  It is not a flash-in-the-pan that brings emotional response and spiritual blessing and complete change over night.  I don't have a good conclusion for this discussion, I only know that I have become more acutely aware of the baggage I have inherited in my own spiritual journey and that somehow the church has made the whole Christian life a lot more complicated that I think it was originally meant to be. If true revival came as the evangelical church seems to define it you would expect to see a lasting effect, something transforming, a kingdom of God on earth moment, but things seem to go on pretty much the same way they have always gone on.  I think true revival only comes on that final day when all that is dead is made alive again and death is finally swallowed up forever in victory.

I See Men as Trees

I am facing cataract surgery in August and the whole process of aging (a more palatable form of describing the process of slowly dying or decaying) brings fresh perspectives into this interesting time of life.  Cataracts are probably different for each person who experiences them, but for me I see men as trees walking.  Everything is blurry all of the time, and nothing I do can improve the focus.  The light simply enters into my eyeball lenses where it is diffracted all to hell and never quite hits the back of the eyeball on target, or at least all of the light does not hit the same place at the same time.  I am starting to better appreciate my physics about not really seeing something but rather seeing the light reflected from that something.  In my case I lack the properly calibrated equipment to collect and focus that light, hence blurry has become my way of life.

Now as you age, you learn to live with things, things like joint pain, difficulty in sleeping, having to fight against gravity, loss of muscle tone, and more of all that.  I used to think that you could get use to most anything, that over time what is abnormal would become normalized, you just learn to live with it.  But constant blurriness is difficult to live with.  Oh, I've adapted to it, I can drive but not read highway signs until they are right in front of me, I can still read books and papers but may have to adjust the lighting, computer screens are now my nemesis with their own light source but somehow I get by typing...you get the picture.  But I don't like it, it's more than a nuisance, it affects everything that fills every day and gives me a headache by the end of the day.  I can't get used to it, never will.

And somehow I thought there might be a parable in all of this because as I have aged, my spiritual vision has likewise gotten blurry.  I thought it would sharpen with time, but I find that I no longer see those clear, crisp lines between black and white, I see a lot of grey.  My eagle-eyed vision that used to catch every jot and tittle and nuance now seems content to just try to take in the big picture and make some sense of that at least.  I know that some would use words like "lukewarm" or "left your first love" or "compromise" to describe my condition.  But I don't think that's a fair assessment.  What cataracts have done for me is make me appreciate the miracle of sight and become really fearful of what my condition might be if I ever lost it.  And I thought that was probably true for me spiritually as well.  I need another touch of Jesus' hand; seeing men as trees walking may be better than darkness all of the time, but for one that was used to seeing clearly it is a step down.  But here's the hard part to put into words.  I don't want to return to the way I used to see things around me, I want to see the light reflected from all of those things, to believe again that the world was created good, that man is redeemable and life has direction and purpose, that God has not abandoned us to futility, that the gospel is still good news, and that in the end of all things in His light we will see light (Psalm 36:9).