They'll Know We Are Christians By [You Fill in the Blank]

One of the closing songs we sang a few weeks ago at church was the classic "They'll Know We Are Christians".  The song is certainly biblical in its message and context, remains contemporary  in any age of the church, and has not suffered the same notoriety associated with other oldies such as Kumbaya.  And we know the way the song goes, paraphrasing as it does from John 13:35...the world (they) will know that we are truly followers of Jesus by our love.

Sadly, however true and biblically sound the song may be, I found myself thinking as we sang it that the practical reality of our witness in the world has been badly tarnished and the words seemed empty to me.  It is no longer true that the world knows that we proclaim to be followers of Jesus by the demonstration of our love.  They know we are "Christians" by our judgment, by our enforced isolation in our little enclaves, by our separation from the culture around us, by our dogmatic lecturing on a handful of issues, and by our legislative initiatives.  I always heard that it was very difficult to get a Christian to explain what they were for, but that they were never at a loss to explain what they were against.

How did we ever stray that far from the new commandment given by Jesus Himself as He faced the ultimate giving of Himself in love for the world He had created and now intended to deliver from futility and darkness?  The theme of love is scattered throughout the writings of the Apostle John.  Besides the recording of Jesus's words in his gospel, John writes " We know that we have passed from death to life because we love..." (I John 3:14; "Beloved let us love one another, for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God..." (I John 4:7);  "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another..." (I John 4:20); and  "Now I plead with you...not as though I wrote a new commandment to you but one which we have had from the beginning, that we love one another..." (II John 5).  You get the picture.

Church tradition speaks of John in his latter years, and consistently indicate that he was a broken record, always exhorting his audience, "My little children, love one another."  When pressed as to why he preached the same sermon over and over, it is recorded in that tradition that he replied, "Because it is the commandment of the Lord, and if we can attain only this one thing, it will be enough."  Perhaps in this Christmas season we need to be reminded that the entire message of the season is one, ongoing demonstration of the love of God towards the world He created, and then perhaps we can lay aside not just the sin that so easily besets us, but the prejudice and the doctrinal arguments and the righteous judgments that most easily beset us, and then let us run the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who exhorted us above all to love.  

What is Essential

I recently was asked to renew the small groups in our church congregation.  Our small groups were started back in 2005/2006.  Simply put, they were planted, given very little initial direction, and then left to fend for themselves.  Some have done well, others have waxed and waned, some have withered altogether.  It was time to step up and provide some direction to reorient the groups to the same general direction, to review the spiritual foundation of the groups, and to empower them to really do the work entrusted to them.  That is a long introduction to a very simple concept that formed the heart of what I tried to put into the training.  The whole purpose of the small groups, indeed the church as a whole, is not to make sure that we are well founded in doctrine, knowing what we believe, being able to defend it, cataloging and indexing it for ready use.  It is also not to make sure that we live or behave a certain way, that we do some things consistently and avoid other things altogether.  Right belief and right praxis do not create the type of living fellowship that the human soul earnestly seeks for.    But Jesus does.  And that is the point I tried to get across.  As the old hymn encourages, "tell me the old, old story, of Jesus and His love."  Who is this Jesus, what did He do, what did He say, what example did He leave behind, what was He like.  Too much of our preaching is from the Old Testament law, or from the New Testament doctrinal epistles, too little from the gospels.  The call of the disciple has never been to clean up your act, or to learn this tome of dogma; it has always been, and will remain the call to follow Jesus.  Enough said, time to stop talking about it, time to do it.

The Road Less Traveled

I used to be zealous for the Lord when I was first touched by His grace.  My deliverance, my healing, my salvation was new and fresh and I felt that everything else about my life was also new and fresh.  But as I have grown older the first blush has faded from that early bloom.  It’s not that my Christianity has tarnished or rusted and is now somehow a poor representation of what it once was, it’s just that I see my life lived as a follower of Christ in a different light that is somewhat molded by the reality around me.  The image of the ideal may no longer burn brightly inside of me, but the tempered reality of the foundation is still present, and I think that I am stronger because of it.  Somewhere along my spiritual journey the proverbial two roads diverged in the woods.  The first led into correct dogmatics and doctrine and it was very enticing to me for many years.  I struggled to get my doctrine just right and force my belief to match that doctrine, but I found that year by year it was hard to live by doctrine.  It tended to separate me from a lot of good things that filled my life, it put a hardened edge on me that always needed to be right and to make black and white pronouncements, and it turned out to be a cruel taskmaster that always demanded a lot of me but gave very little in return.  So I retraced my steps back to the other path and found that the more I walked down it, the less sure I was of anything.  Things I once considered sacrosanct were looked at in a different way, things I felt imperative to hold onto now weighed me down and had to be left at the roadside, convictions were examined and tested to see whether I would still stake my life on their tenets.  But somehow this road feels right and I am sure that ultimately it will lead me to the final destination I seek.  I don’t see as clearly as I used to think I once did when everything was new and fresh, and I find myself saying quite often “I see men as trees walking” and asking for a second touch from Jesus.  But that’s all right.  To go back to the poem about the two paths diverging, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

Twisted Perception of God's Word

If you have read the previous post, you will note that this is a followup to one of the thoughts I dropped there; namely, that the ultra evangelical camp has made a god out of the written scriptures and is ready to defend their god to the death. I only write this entry to give an example of this tendency through the American church.

I listen to Christian radio coming home from work. It is the one activity guaranteed to raise my blood pressure more quickly than being cut off in traffic or stuck in a construction zone. I find myself shaking my head at the message I hear, both the actual words that are spoken and the meanings implied by the voice inflections and examples used. And yesterday I heard this person describing their quiet time that they have each day, and mentioning that sometimes their reading of the scriptures is sort of dry....like when their daily reading happens to be the first six chapters of I Chronicles. But just as soon as that statement is out of their mouth, they quickly offer a disclaimer that goes something like this. "I'm not saying that these chapters of Chronicles or the list of names are not divinely inspired or that each of those chapters does not have a spiritual application for our lives, that God is speaking through them, I'm just saying they are different from the other passages of the bible"....well, you get the point. Is it really so vital to our spiritual faith that we defend this list of names and pretend that somehow we can mine great spiritual truths out of these lists? It's only important if you faith is precariously balanced on the cutting edge of the word of God and your whole practice of Christianity is dependent upon the verbal, plenary, authoritative, inerrant (and whatever adjectives you feel are important to add) inspiration of the word of God. But the scriptures themself remind us that the cornerstone of the foundation or the church and our life is Jesus Christ, and it is on this foundation that the spiritual house of God is being built up.

So here's my disclaimer....it's not that I do not believe the word of God has authority, has power, is divine revelation, or has application for my life; I am just not going to play the doctrinal definition game and build my life on dogma and apologetics rather than on a real relationship with Jesus. I don't have that much life left and I am certainly not going to waste it trying to get my doctrine laid out to the last jot and tittle. As the blind man said when questioned about the exact definition and all of the mechanisms of the miracle that had happened to him, "I don't know, but this one thing I do know, I was blind, but now I see."