Hanging Out In Painful Places

GOD has been bringing me back to a small, seemingly insignificant passage in the book of Acts. In chapter 16, Paul starts out on his second missionary journey: And, wait for it… Goes to Lystra! Wow! Do you see how exciting that is? No? Well, maybe if you realize that Lystra was the last place he visited on his first missionary journey. Now do you see it? How about if I remind you that it was in Lystra that a mob threw large stones at Paul’s head until they were all convinced that he was dead. They were so sure he was dead, they drug him out of the city and threw him in the dump. But God raised him up and he immediately went back into the city. Now, when he is ready to go out on another mission trip, he makes a beeline for the place where they almost succeeded in killing him.

So, why did Paul go back there? I don’t think it was the nice weather. He may have had some friends but he certainly had more enemies there. It wasn’t on the way to anywhere. I think he went back there to face his pain and his fear. It is human nature to avoid painful places and people. Paul was showing us how to confront the painful places in our lives.

Whenever the enemy hurts us, his goal is always to get us to quit. If he can’t get us to quit, he will settle for hurting us so badly that we will not walk in the fullness of God’s plan. He tries to create places in our lives that we are afraid to even think about. Paul refused to live in that kind of bondage. He confronted the very place of his greatest pain. We must be a people who will not back down. We must go forward and deal with the painful places. We might even need to go back and vacation there until the fear is gone.

Oh, another thing stands out about this. It is in Lystra that Paul find Timothy who become his protégé and friend for many years to come. Many times it is in the painful places of our life that we find the greatest blessing. GOD loves to build on our scars. When we confront our pain and let God heal us, HE just loves to use those scars as a foundation for blessing and future ministry. We will miss out on all of that if we run away and avoid our pain.

It’s Gonna Be Worth It

Well, this morning I stand convicted. I have allowed myself to slip back into a self-pity and borderline depression. Financial pressures have thrown me for a loop and all I have done for the past week or two is whine. Then this morning as I read Revelation 15, I was cut to the bone and convicted about my attitude. The verse 2 says, …those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of GOD in their hands. (3) And they sang the song of Moses, the servant of GOD, and the song of THE LAMB, saying “Great and amazing are YOUR deeds, O LORD GOD ALMIGHTY! Just and true are YOUR ways O KING OF THE NATIONS!…’

So what is the big deal about people in heaven worshipping GOD? Isn’t that what people do in heaven? Especially since they had conquered the beast, right? Then I realized conquered the beast didn’t mean they had a spectacular battle were GOD intervened at the last moment and smote the beast and then the saints got to go to a coronation ceremony and live happily ever after… Conquoring the beast means they did not bow down and accept the number and were subsequently tortured and killed. That is how they got to heaven…

Suddenly I am reminded how small and petty I am. I am whining about not getting to buy what I want to or go out as much as I would like. But I am not in danger of torture or having my head cut off. If those who were tortured and killed can worship the LORD, why can’t I? I know they are already there and seeing glory but I sing and preach and write all the time that I believe in God and in heaven, so why don’t I believe enough to believe all the pain in this world will be worth it when we see HIM? Every time something gets had, I whine and cry and act like there is no future and no glory. My lips say there is a heaven but my attitude says there isn’t. LORD, help me. Give me strength to live out my theology; to live out my faith…

Go Out Among Them AND Be Ye Separate

There seems to be an eternal struggle among followers of Jesus. I know there are many disagreements and theological arguments but there is one big behavioral diving line. That line seems to be between those who feel we should “come out from among them (sinners) and be ye separate” and those who believe we should be “in the world but not of it.” Which of these verses resonate with us in the strongest way, determines how we live out our faith.

If the first verse resonates with our spirits, we want to be holy and so we pull away from everyone who does not follow Jesus (not to mention those who do not follow Jesus the way we do). We form Christian alteratives to everything and pretty soon don’t know anyone who is not already a follower. Evangelism becomes going out on the streets and telling the sinners what is wrong with them.

The problem is that the first verse is Old Testament. Of course it is still inspired scripture but Jesus came to fulfill the OT. That means all of the Old Testament must be filtered through His words. It was Jesus who prayed that we would be in the world but not of it. He did not want us to physically separate from those who do not yet follow Him. He wanted us to engage them. To work with them, befriend them, love them. Evangelism is doing life with people who don’t know Jesus and explaining to them why He makes a difference in our lives along the way. Of course we keep our hearts pure in the process. But remember holiness is being set aside for a purpose, not just being set apart. The purpose is to change the world. We can’t do that from the commune.

This all jumped out at me recently when I was studying about Paul planting the church in Corinth. Corinth was the sin city of it’s day. It was THE commercial and business center of ancient Greek. It was the center of worship of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. They had a temple there with 1,000 temple prostitutes. Going to church consisted of sleeping with one of them (talk about a user friendly church). There was a saying at the time, “not every man can afford a trip to Corinth.” When Greeks did a play and wanted to bring in a character from Corinth, the actor always had to act drunk. It was the kind of city that made any God fearing person sick. But when Paul arrived, he did not run away. He stayed a year and a half. He wrote letters, he kept coming back. In other words, he engaged the culture. Instead of opening a church door and saying, “come in when you are ready to behave” he lived among the people and built relationships with them before they were ready to change.

If we avoid all the “sinners” out there, who will reach them? It won’t be the guy on the street. Overwhelmingly people start following Jesus because of other Jesus followers they know, not because of strangers.
They reason most people think Christians are judgmental gay bashers is that they don’t personally know any Christians. Who will change that perception? Who will go out among them AND be separate?

Keep Changing My Mind

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to one of YOUR followers is for us to begin to think we have perfect understanding of YOU and YOUR word. When that happens, we begin to think we speak for YOU and that our opinions are YOURS. It is dangerous when we stop listening to others and to YOU. We reject any thought that does not fit our system instead of being like the people of Berea and studying to see if it could be true. We are dangerous when we only study to prove things are wrong.

Even though this concept petrifies the average Evangelical (including me sometimes), YOU want us to remain open minded. In chapters 2 & 3 of Revelation, YOU address 7 churches. Out of those 7, YOU tell 5 of them to repent. To repent means to change ones mind and with a subsequent change in actions. So YOU seem to be telling people who are already YOUR followers that they still need to change their minds on some things. Could it be that even those who have followed YOU for many years may not have perfect understanding? Could we actually just be so stuck in tradition that we can never rethink the reasons for our traditions and/or repent from time to time?

YOU have not called us to a destination but to a journey. As we walk out this journey, we will need to continually change the way we think about things. We cannot assume YOU will always work the same way or speak the same way. We cannot assume that we understand YOU as well as we think we do. As Tony Campolo says, we should be humble enough to know that “we are never as right as we think we are or as wrong as we think we are.” YOU are constantly amazing us and showing new facets of YOUR character. If we close our minds and lock into one way of thinking, we may miss YOUR beauty. The minute we think we know it all and have it all together, we start falling apart.