Jesus and the Pharisees and Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

Now there's a mouthful.

I wouldn't say that I'm a terribly fearful person. I rarely make choices based on fear; in fact I would frequently do well to have a little more fear. But one fear I've had over the past year or so, in the background of my mind, is the fear of ending up a Pharisee. Especially as I've watched some of the Christian debate in the public sphere, I've asked myself both "What would Jesus do?" (and I mean that as non-trivially as possible) but also "What would the Pharisees do?" I don't want to be a Pharisee.

I've been listening to the New Testament in 2013, and it's been fascinating. These people seriously got Jesus' goat. Last week, we covered this on our reading plan:

You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

I read that, and I thought "Please God, do not let that be what you say about me. I don't want to be that guy." But over the past six months or so, I've also been spending some brainpower on America's national religion: Moralistic therapeutic deism, or MTD for short. According to El Wik:

Moralistic therapeutic deism ... is used to describe common religious beliefs among American youth.

• A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
• God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
• The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
• God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
• Good people go to heaven when they die.

It's not hard to imagine where this comes from: it's taught in churches all the time. People pick MTD up out of the air in America... it's not just teenagers that believe this. Over 90% of Americans believe in God, but the vast majority of them believe in this. It's not Fosterism (yet), but we're getting there. People are into Jesus because he sounds like this.

Except that he doesn't. He doesn't at all. Perhaps the most shocking thing for me, as I've been listening to the Gospels again, is how much of what Jesus says goes expressly against MTD. To the extent that such a belief system is compatible with Christianity, it's at the fringes. To the extent that these five ideas are true, it's as incidental to the core things that Jesus taught about himself.

And so the takeaway for me, as I've been watching the myself and the church over the past few months, is that I need to beware MTD just as much as I need to beware "Pharisee-ism." Both sides are equally seductive, and equally dangerous. I need to live in the constant tension between John 5:39-40 and  an equally terrifying verse: Malachi 2:17.

You have wearied the Lord with your words. 

“How have we wearied him?” you ask. 

By saying, “All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them” or “Where is the God of justice?”

Don't be that guy. 

What I Pray For My Kids

Every night, I pray for Liam as I put him to bed.  On Tuesdays, when Judi is at school, I pray for Jenna too.

Every night I pray the exact same thing.  The words may vary a little bit here and there, but my desires for them are consistent and so I try to make my prayers consistent as well.

Dear God, 

Thank you so much for Liam. I love him very much.

Please help him learn to love You, and to love all of the people around him.

Please help him to make good choices, and please keep him safe and healthy.

In Jesus name,

Amen.

There are other things I can think to pray.  Before I had kids, I thought praying for safety was overrated.  Instead, we should pray that God would use them powerfully!  These are things that make more sense before you have children.

Every prayer that you pray in front of your kids has to be an honest one to God (kids can tell when you don't really care), but it also has to be something you're teaching your kids.  "This is how I talk to God, kids," or "This is what I want most for you."

If I can pray anything I want for my kids, I want them to learn to love the 1st and 2nd commandments, to learn to make good choices, to be safe, and to be healthy.  Maybe someday I'll add to that prayer, but not today.

Take care of my kids, God.

God Breaks Through

I work at a church.  It's an incredible privilege to be able to give your best hours of the week to the Kingdom, and it's not a privilege I take lightly.  But there's something that happens when your church is your job... it's easy to miss the point.

It's so easy to get into "Work Mode."  Who do I need to talk to? What responsibilities do I need to take care of?  What am I doing after I finish this?  Even when I visit a different church where I have no responsibilities, it's easy to get stuck in my default (analytical/critical) state.  "Why do they play that song that way?  How have they set up their greeters?  Why are they mixing the sound that way?  Should I steal that line?"

It's easy to be in my own self-absorbed world.  Sometimes God just waits for me to get over myself, like a friend waiting for me to come to the door.  Sometimes I hear him knock.

But sometimes he simply breaks through.  Unwilling to wait, unwilling to be the second-most important thing in my life, unwilling to let me miss Him due to my own distraction... sometimes God simply breaks through.

I hope this Easter, you can experience that, if just for a moment.  May God break through your preoccupation and meet with you.  May you be aware of that when it happens.

I hope your Friday was Good.

What I Said at the Funeral

Judi's grandmother passed away last week, and the family asked me to perform the funeral.  Helen was an amazing lady.  Two tidbits that stood out from her obituary:  she and her husband were married for 68 years at the time of his death, and over the past several decades she'd spent over 17 THOUSAND hours volunteering at the local hospital.

Quick math tangent:  17,870 hours, divided by 24 hours a day, makes over 744 days.  If you went into a hospital, and volunteered every single minute of every day (no sleep, meals, or bathroom breaks) it would take you over two years to do that.  If you tried to volunteer 17,870 hours by working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, it would take you almost a decade.  That's craziness.  And that doesn't count all of the cakes and blankets she made (at home, on her own time) for the hospital staff and patients.

The family asked me to perform the funeral, which was a first for me.  I've done a LOT of weddings, but this was my first funeral.  I spoke from the book of Job, chapter 7, where Job says that "life is a breath and our days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle."  Job's a tricky book to quote, because so much of it is stated by the Job and his friends but then refuted by God.

I've seen a weaver's shuttle exactly once.  It was a lady over in Southeast Asia, weaving a silk tapestry.  For the most part, you couldn't really even see the shuttle because it moved so quickly.  Just a flash, and it was gone.  But then it came back for another round; another line of thread laid down, and another, and another.  Our lives pass so quickly as a series of moments that we can never get back.  But each moment is the basis for the next, and the one after that, and the one after that.  Over time, we see this succession of moments not as a pile of individual threads but as a solid fabric:  the tapestry of our life.

I spent the rest of the time talking about Helen's tapestry.  The three dominant colors in hers were generosity, service, and faith.  What will yours be?

Porn and Seat Belts

Imagine if buckling your seat belt made your car go faster.    Hold onto that idea, we'll come back to it. 

I'm fairly sure this is the worst thing I've read in a long time. Summary:  Researchers want to study porn's impact on guy's brains, but they can't do any research because they don't have a control group.  They can't find any guys who haven't seen porn.

Think about that. 

If you're in the midst of a battle with pornography, this post isn't really for you.  Do the stuff I talk about here, but it's just a start.  I recommend reading this, and then talk to somebody.  I'll listen to you if nobody else will.

But if you're a guy who doesn't struggle with pornography, let me give you two easy steps to make sure you don't accidentally start.  Here's the best part:  they'll make everything about your internet experience better.  FAR better.

First, install (free) ad-blocking software.  

I use Adblock for Chrome.  Do you use Firefox?  Click here.  Safari?  Click here.  Internet Explorer?  Click here.  There are folks that argue against ad-blockers, because so many sites are supported by ad-based content.  Ignore these people.  I know from my own experience and the experience of MANY guys that I've talked to that explicit banner advertisements can be a gateway into temptation.  Close that gate up.

Here's the best part:  even if you never get served questionable ads, the internet is a better experience with an ad-blocker.  You don't get crazy popups, you don't get loud sounds that load in some other tab, and you can actually focus on whatever it is you're trying to read.  Plus, your webpages will load far faster, because they're not pulling down tons of graphical ads.  Getting an ad-blocker is like putting on a seat-belt, but it drastically increases the relative speed of your internet connection.

Second, start using OpenDNS (free).

If you're reading this blog, you probably live around me, which means you're probably on Time Warner Cable or Insight.  These companies use their own DNS services, which are generally sub-par, ad-driven, and SLOW.  I won't fully explain what DNS is (click here for a good explanation) but for now, think of it like an address book.  When you say "I want to go to Google," DNS is the one that actually routes you to that website.

A slow DNS service makes web addresses resolve slowly.  Getting a better one lets your computer "find" websites faster.  It won't make a difference in how quickly the actual content of the website gets downloaded to your computer, but it helps the process get started faster.

Once you're using OpenDNS, though, you can perform some additional magic here.  You can set filtering levels so that certain types of websites are routed around.  The DNS filter simply won't go there.  This is a screenshot from my settings:

This is better than a software filter for two reasons.  First, it applies to all devices (think tablets), not just ones that have the software installed.  Second, it doesn't slow down your computer.  Instead, it speeds it up!  To set up OpenDNS on your home router, click here.

If you're thinking "I don't need this stuff, I don't ever look at porn" then you're missing the point.  These two things will give you a better internet experience even if you've never once been tempted.  It's not an 8-foot fortress wall to keep the bad stuff away... it's more like a guardrail.  But guardrails aren't a bad thing.  And they don't get in your way.

A Reply for Dan

Hobby?  Not really.  But Dan made Wylio.com, which is cool.

I had dinner last night with my college roommate/best man and his wife.  Over the course of the evening's conversation, he asked me how my quest to write 52 blog posts this year is going.  I started to answer, got distracted (me?  imagine!) and never got around to answering the question.

The answer is that it's not going well, because the vast majority of what I write I never publish.  Almost everything on this blog in the past 3 years (admittedly, not that much) is something I wrote in 5 minutes and published immediately.  Anything that takes longer never gets published.  Some of that is distraction (me?  distracted?) but mostly it's that the more I look at something I write, the more problems I find with it.

Right now I'm functioning more as an editor than a writer.  It hasn't always been this way, but we are indeed shaped by our work.  The longer I look at something I write, the more work that I think it needs before it's worth sharing.  This is a pretty drastic change from earlier in my life, where I was much more careless with my words.

The only way (thus far) I've successfully broken the cycle is to publish without thinking too much about it.  So that's what I'm going to try for a while.  I'll start by going back through the hundreds of "draft" blog posts I have on Blogger, and picking a few to publish.

We'll see how it goes.

Three down, 49 to go.

I See Men Like Trees

The Vineyard is reading through the New Testament this year, which is less work than you might expect.  There are 260 chapters in the New Testament and 52 weeks in the year.  That works out to exactly 5 chapters a week, or one chapter a day Monday through Friday.  You even have the weekends off!  You can find the reading plan here.

This year I've been trying something new:  listening to the Bible instead of reading it.  Faith comes by hearing, after all.  I just open up YouVersion on my smart device of choice and play a professional recording of the day's passage (click here for more info).

It's been an interesting experience to listen instead of read.  I'm not much for audiobooks; I can read FAR faster than someone else can talk, so audiobooks are always too "slow" to be really mentally stimulating.  But this has been different.  My mind still moves at its normal speed, but the "slowness" of the audio recording has the interesting effect of drawing me back to passages that I race past.  I'm able to think about the words in a different way than I would if I were just reading through.

Today's chapter was Mark 8.  Jesus has just finished giving the disciples a hard time about their lack of faith, pointing out that he'd just done a pair of miracles where he'd produced (literally) tons of food, but they still doubted him.  "They" (the disciples?  The crowd?) bring Jesus a blind man and ask Jesus to heal him.  Jesus begins by spitting in the man's eyes, which is a more impressive feat than it seems.  How confident are you that you could walk up to another person and spit directly into their eyes?

Regardless, Jesus spits on the man's eyes and... it doesn't take.  The text says that the man regains his sight, but when he looks around he doesn't recognize anything.  The men he sees "look like trees walking around."  Obvious questions include:  why does the text say he regains his sight if what he sees doesn't make sense to him?  How does he know what trees look like, to compare people to trees?  And, most importantly, what the heck just happened?

On the surface, it looks like Jesus tried to heal the man, whiffed, and then got it right on the second try.  Why?  Jesus seems to do some sort of calibration, but he's never had to do that in his other miracles.  What's different about this one?  What would have happened if the man had left halfway through the miracle?

I've read and heard a lot of different thoughts on this, and some of them are extremely compelling.  But I wonder how many times I've missed the miraculous work of God in my life because it happened over a period of time, instead of instantly.  This guy goes to see Jesus unable to see, and leaves able to see.  That's miraculous.  But what about the changes that happen over the space of a week?  A month?  A season?  Are they any less miraculous?

Don't despise the small beginning.