July 2015: Featured Post lifeseek.org is featuring a thought-provoking essay that is designed to stimulate healthy dialogue and a collective resolve to seek the face of God for answers of some of the most pressing issues of our age. Your participation and feedback is very important to us and we encourage you to leave your comments, facebook or tweet this post after reading.
I went to a Dave Chappell show recently and of course, you are not sure what he will say. The only thing you can be sure of, at least in my eyes, 80% of it will be funny, the 20% will be meant to offend. Like many of his predecessors, he aims to make social commentary while making us laugh. For what it’s worth, no pun intended, he does a great job at doing both.
But, he said one thing that really struck me and it could not be overlooked. While shadow boxing with the audience, jabbing us with his humor, Dave punched us in the gut with, “Christianity is just like Whitney Houston, it sounds good but one day it’s going to end up dead in the bathtub.” Of course most of the audience groaned out a laugh. The show continued on with more laughs and thankfully, no banana peels, but his statement stayed with me.
I started thinking, maybe Dave has a valid criticism. Not that Christ’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection could eventually be ineffective, but culturally, in America, what Christianity is, could lose its effectiveness.
To borrow wisdom from my dear friend T. Simpson, “Christianity has become more about appearances than actual transformation and deliverance.” And so often churches around the nation have been the first on the scene but have also announced when the red light was on that they were on the scene.
As a cultural entity, Christianity has done very good things around the world. Feed the homeless, provide shelters, built hospitals and schools, and appropriated what is now, the greatest holiday ever. Sounds good.
But we have also made to some effect, Christ’s church, ineffective by incorporating things that are flashy but no substance. We have conferences and concerts with lights, smoke machines, lasers, and the like that it is more entertainment than it is about God. But in the midst of all of that, some people have been lost to who Christ really is and what the purpose of the church is. The mature, who are very small in number, can embrace it as worship and praise. The rest see it as just another event or something else sociable. That leads to disgruntled people like Dave who can say what he said.
If you allow me to go to the Bible, “do not by your eating, destroy someone for whom Christ died. Therefore do not let what you know is good be spoken of as evil” (Romans 14: 14-15). That is what the culture of Christianity has allowed to happen. We have put on a great show and from the spoils of it, we have poisoned ourselves.
So what is the answer to this problem? One is, decide that being a follower of Christ is not [just] a lifestyle, it’s the way, and I mean the way of life. Back in the ancient times, if you put on a cross that meant you were marked as a criminal for life. The cross was not a light thing, it was serious and if you were scheduled to be crucified, whatever you did to receive that punishment you did that knowing full well it would have consequences.
So in that, we have to live with purpose. We have to reach out to the world and to our brothers and sisters, cameras or not, and say that we put them ahead of ourselves. We will always have critics and cynics but when we show genuine love, we can rise out of that bathtub, referenced during Chappell’s performance, and be who are supposed to be, servants not divas.
This is a great observation, I completely agree. We have to stand up and be the church Christ called us to be, not the form, but truly BE the church.
browneyedsoulman
Thanks for the comment Faye. You’re right, we need to start walking in power
Mishalean
This is GREAT! I do agree that ‘We” Christians have alot of work to do just like anyone else. I think history repeats itself over and over again. Yes Christians are responsible for shinning our light and leading people in darkness to Christ but one also have to be willing to give Jesus a true chance just as they would anything else they do daily with no remarks. Also I believe GOD is raising up a New generation of true believers who will have a major effect on bringing people to Christ! Just watch GOD change things around, he LOVES EVERYONE!
It is hard to remember that sometimes. The world makes it hard to breathe at some moments. The word of God can get choked out in those moments. And we can get self-centered in those moments.
Now, before I tell on anybody else, I have to tell on myself first. I know in times when I looked at God to say where is Your love, I was only concerned for myself. I turned to self-help and professional development and dating apps and social groups and church activities to make myself better. But God is funny. He is the Only One that can fill that search for unfailing love (Proverbs 19:22a NIV).
God wants us to be His. Being a better person, being financially successful, being a social butterfly are all fine. But Christ’s death and resurrection is because God loves us and He wants us to be His. God loves us so much that He breaks the bank daily on us (Psalm 68:19).
God wants us so much, that He will take us, as traemari points out, even with our visible scars. If it means a loss of vital parts, God would rather us be damaged and with Him than to be whole in Hell (Mark 9:43 – 48). God wants us that much.
To the believer and non-believer alike – God wants us.
“I cannot tell anyone this secret. If anyone finds out, I would just die. I couldn’t imagine suffering that way again or even wishing anyone experience the pain I went through.”
How many times have you heard those type of words before or even said them yourself? Those words came from a close friend. She suffered abuse in her childhood by a family member. It broke her into pieces as it went on for years. Today, she is still feeling the effects of it…going from one bad relationship to another. Such a beautiful soul, but torn by the wicked scars.
Often I encourage her with words that can hopefully heal her from her scars. But the thoughts of wanting to heal is not sinking into her to life. “I cannot forget the past. My situation is different from others.”
I’ve heard this rationale from others many times. It’s one of the enemy’s favorite deceptions. He makes us believe that the scars of our past or present are ugly and deforming. I have to admit, I live with SCARS. We all live with scars. My friend’s scars are different from mine, but how we live with them are different from everyone else.
When pain from scars calls, our most basic beliefs about God come into question:
Is God competent?
Is God really so powerful to get me through this?
Does God seem to care about my scars?
The answer to all three is YES! He does. He can redeem even our most painful experiences. We should not despair when we experience painful circumstances in the past and present. Rather, we need to look for how God can use those scars.
I’ve learned over the years to stop saying, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ Instead, I say to God, ‘Okay, what now? This has brought on deep pain, but where I can I go from here?’
Show Your Scars.
The way we allow God to use our scars is by sharing them with others. We hide our past hurts from people around us either because we are ashamed or because we fear rejection. Carrying the scars can limit the ways in which God is able to use us. If we allow Him to, God will use our deepest hurt to develop our greatest testimony. There are others around who have been redeemed from the most painful experiences and God wants to use our past to propel us and show others the way to redemption.
Musician TobyMac made a song called Scars. Part of it says, “When life cuts so deep, try and remember you are not alone. We’ve all been there. Scars come with livin. You are not alone. We’ve all been there…so lift your head. Lift your head up to where your help comes from. Yeah, you, you’re not alone. We’ve all been there. Scars come with livin.”
But our God can use those scars and transform our lives into something beautiful. Let Him do it.
It caught my eye as I scrolled through my Facebook news feed recently. A friend had posted a link to an article with the comment that explained a Christian organization’s stance on some issues in the “culture war.” I briefly perused the article and some attached documents from the organization. Ultimately though, what stuck with me was the idea of a culture war. Are we as Christians supposed to be at war with our culture? What about Christians who are from other cultures; are they engaged in a war as well?
War connotes aggression and a struggle for power; a literal war obviously includes violence. And while I know the difference between a word being used figuratively or literally, words are always chosen to highlight a point, a feeling, or an emotion. Many Christians feel as though their way of life and system of morality are under attack by the current “culture” in the US. Perhaps they consider their only options to be a choice between ceding more ground to the “unredeemed” culture or aggressively fighting to turn back the clock to a time where Judaeo-Christian values were more culturally embraced here. No matter where the idea of a culture war originated, I am left to wonder if the aggressive approach is the one that Jesus would take… Is it the approach he took when he was on Earth?
Jesus lived in two distinct cultures. He lived in the Jewish religious culture; but he also lived under Roman rule and all of the cultural ramifications that it entailed. Jesus’ strongest critiques were reserved for the religious culture that he was born into, and rarely for broader Roman culture. The elite Jewish leaders had established their power based on a corrupt culture of religious control marked by legalism. Jesus knew that if he could change the culture of the religious, their lives of faith would have influence on the broader culture in which they lived.
This is what Jesus spoke about in the parable of the mustard seed (Luke 13:18-19). His Jewish audience would have understood that if you plant mustard seeds in your garden, you run the risk of the plants becoming invasive and overtaking the whole garden. This is why the Jewish people in Jesus’ time were careful not to plant mustard in their household gardens at
all. Similarly, this is what happens with faith and the kingdom of God. When one gives themselves to faith in Jesus, that faith should begin to permeate their whole life, changing their heart and outward behavior in the process. And like the mustard seed, faith multiplies to the soil around it. It is as our faith multiplies to those around us within a culture that we begin to see the course of culture change.
Our faith is counter cultural. Our lives shaped by faith will look different from the dominant culture around us. In his book Surprise the World, Michael Frost speaks of living “questionable lives;” lives of faith lived so differently that it causes those around us to ask questions about why we live the way that we do. The multiplication of faith and the way it impacts culture is more organic than aggressive. In the end, it seems that Christians don’t make war against the culture, but we seek to influence it in a positive way by living markedly different lives shaped by our faith in the Prince of Peace.
