Sin Must Be Carved Out

We live with the end in mind, but two sub-points must be made. 

First, the biblical vocabulary for this eschatological authenticity is the term second nature. Our original nature has been misshapen by sin. When we invite Christ into our lives and cooperate with his spirit to change, our old nature is killed off and our new nature is cultivated.

Anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!

-2 Corinthians 5.17

Paul refers to this process as being akin to putting on clothes of righteousness (Galatians 3.27). Clothes must be put on. Clothing requires our involvement. Your pants don’t show up on your legs by accident.

Cultivating the second nature requires your participation.

Secondly, following Jesus will make you authentic. We must do good even before we are inwardly motivated, trusting that the process of obedience and cooperation with the spirit will eventually change our hearts and supply the motivation we currently lack. The discipline of being the person God wants you to be will form you into the person God has destined you to become.

The New Testament has several lists of virtues and vices that are helpful in cultivating the second nature. They are given to us so we have a concrete picture of life lived the way God intends.

Ephesians 4.25-5.2:

So stop telling lies. Let us tell our neighbors the truth, for we are all parts of the same body. And 'don’t sin by letting anger control you.' Don’t let the sun go down while you are still angry, for anger gives a foothold to the devil. If you are a thief, quit stealing. Instead, use your hands for good hard work, and then give generously to others in need. Don’t use foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them. And do not bring sorrow to God’s Holy Spirit by the way you live. Remember, he has identified you as his own, guaranteeing that you will be saved on the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage, anger, harsh words, and slander, as well as all types of evil behavior. Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you. Imitate God, therefore, in everything you do, because you are his dear children. Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ. He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God.

 

 Ephesians 5.3-5:

Let there be no sexual immorality, impurity, or greed among you. Such sins have no place among God’s people. Obscene stories, foolish talk, and coarse jokes—these are not for you. Instead, let there be thankfulness to God. You can be sure that no immoral, impure, or greedy person will inherit the Kingdom of Christ and of God. For a greedy person is an idolater, worshiping the things of this world.

Ephesians 5.16-20:

Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days. Don’t act thoughtlessly, but understand what the Lord wants you to do. Don’t be drunk with wine, because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, and making music to the Lord in your hearts. And give thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

These lists are in no way exhaustive. They serve simply as guidelines. At the very least, we know that our future selves, united with God in heaven, will never do these things, so we ought never to do them now.

The basest entry point for eschatological authenticity is avoiding sin and cultivating virtue. We must not be shy in talking about sin. Sin, properly understood, is the force of anti-creation. Sin makes life worse. God wants to make life better, to make all things new, and to remake the world.

No longer will babies die when only a few days old. No longer will adults die before they have lived a full life. No longer will people be considered old at one hundred!

-Isaiah 65.20

If we fail to take sin seriously, the forces of anti-creation lead us away from God’s promised future. This is why people who will not deal with their sin will never get closer to God. Sin must be carved out of us. Sin must be put to death, so the life of God has room to grow in us.

Every day, in every exchange, we must make the decision whether or not we are going to be people who ruin heaven or people who say,

“Yes, Lord. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

And that gives God glory.

Suck It, Emperor

Revelation 4.6-11

John’s Revelation was addressed to 7 churches in the Roman Empire. They lived under the authority of Domition, the ‘Lord and God’ of Rome. He ruled from his golden throne, and was surrounded by 24 councilors who represented the 12 signs of the zodiac twice over. They praised him, and his Empire continued to grow as more and more of his ‘creation’ was brought forth.

I love how John robs Domition absolutely blind! He takes every title the Emperor has claimed for himself, and places it back in its appropriate context with God—who was and is and is to come, the creator, the Lord and God, surrounded by heavenly creatures and earthly elders who—incidentally—fall down on their faces and worship God, demonstrating that all earthly power is derivative.

Suck it, Emperor.

In one fell swoop John reminds the churches that they’ve got their perspective skewed. They’ve been seeing the world from the ground up, and all they see is Domition and the might of Rome. But John takes them into the heavenly throne room, and changes the camera-angle so they see things from the perspective of the Almighty. The churches now look out on the world’s stage from the rainbow-crested, lightning-shouting, crystal-sea-striding, jewel-fired throne of God. They see the four angelic creatures blurring around them, watching everything and thrumming with heaven’s kineticism. They see the twenty-four elders down on their faces, calling out to God in reverential love. The churches look past the creatures, through the elders, and down onto the earth where—in one little speck of land, during one brief sneeze of time—Domition prances around like a show dog that holds his own leash.

Safe to say, when you’ve watching the world from heaven, Caesar’s bark is worse than his bite. And that’s the point of the vision.

“Look – there’s a throne…”
And it’s occupied.
And Caesar has no claim to it.
He’s a speck.
A mongrel.
And a dog’s days are seven times as fleeting as a man’s.
Which is nothing in comparison to eternity.

Live With The End In Mind

Typically people employ one of two tactics for living Christianly. They try to live authentically, or they try to be obedient. Let’s explore each of these in turn.

The first way people try to live Christianly is by attempting to feel everything before we do it. In order to make virtuous decisions, we focus on how we’re feeling and transforming our feelings so that they result in virtue. All of our energy goes toward the inner life and our ultimate motivations.

The problem, however, is that this kind of “authenticity” doesn’t take sin into account. For example, we might deeply feel like we should do something God might not want us to do. A child molester is just being himself and following his feelings. A thief is being true to his impulses and the way God made him.

But theft is not acceptable.

Child molestation is a heinous crime.

When your feelings tell you to steal or to harm children, they mislead you. They cannot be trusted. You’re sinning, not in spite of your authenticity, but precisely because of it.

The second way people try to live Christianly is by following a bunch of rules. They operate under the auspices that it doesn’t matter how you feel or who you are, you should just do what’s right and shut up about it. While it’s true that following the rules might produce slightly better behavior, it’s also true that rigid adherence without understanding creates brittle, angry Christians whose lives eventually shatter from exhaustion and unhappiness.

You can create so many rules, including (ironically) rules to keep yourself from breaking rules, that you will find yourself paralyzed for fear of crossing boundaries, either real or imagined.

You will despair.

Eventually, you will give up.

If obedience and authenticity don’t offer sufficient means to live Christianly, then there must be a third option. The alternative is to live with eschatological authenticity. The eschaton refers to the end of the world, the telos of new creation, in which God’s glory saturates the earth.

Eschatological authenticity, then, means being true, not to the people we are now, but being true to the people we will one day become when Christ has completely been consummated in us. We live as the best possible version of ourselves.

The problem is we’re not there yet. So we must imagine what the best possible version of ourselves entails. We have to ask ourselves:

• When I’m at my best, how do I overlook an offense?
• When I’m at my best, how do I love other people?
• When I’m at my best, how do I walk in step with the spirit?
• When I’m at my best, how do I use my resources, gifts, and abilities for the glory of God?

Then we have to imagine what it’s like to live this way even when we’re not at our best. We live with the end in mind.

The Ordinary Unfamiliar

Revelation 4.1-6

John has a knack for making the ordinary unfamiliar. A throne…that shoots lightning. A sea…of crystal, or glass. Seven lampstands…that are spirits, and—earlier—churches. But this is a good theological practice. God, after all, is familiar yet extraordinary. He’s our friend, our father, our mother, our maker, our creator, our redeemer, our lord…we have good earthly examples of all of these, yet God surpasses them swiftly. We know who God is…ish. Which is why we can relate to John’s vision. He sees things we ought to comprehend, but cannot—at least, not in the ways he’s put them together.In much the same way, we understand what God wants from us, but not always how. His thoughts are not our thoughts, and his ways are far beyond our ways. We yearn to know him more, yet tremble the more we know him.

Perhaps nothing captures this quite so well as the description of the jewels on the throne. We’re familiar with jewels, but somehow they don’t seem to fit here. At first, they seem too cheap and tawdry for the creator of the universe. If God can make entirely new creatures—those with the faces of men, oxen, lions, and eagles—then why does he have to resort to De Beers and Medawar Jewelers to decorate his big chair? But then, a realization slowly dawns. God is clothed in light. Always. And what happens when brilliant light shines through perfectly cut stones? They burst into brilliantly refracted beams of light.

Can you imagine standing there, like John?

The creator seated upon his throne? The 24 elders, leaders of Israeli tribes & the 12 apostles, laying down their crowns before him? Lighting and thunder proceeding from his resting place, reminiscent of Sinai? Lampstand-spirits, the churches we’ve just referenced in Revelation 2-3, burning in front of a crystal sea?

And fire. Everywhere the magnificence of God burnishing forth like jeweled flame.

That’s an experience worth writing about.

We Have To Change

My grandmother’s friend Alice was a sour, cantankerous woman who complained about everything. One fateful Sunday after church, as Alice was complaining about the preaching, the music, the government, and the old-age pension plan, my uncle Harry got fed up. Harry slammed his hands down on the table and shouted at Alice, saying, “Lady, you complain so much, if you died and went to heaven, you’d wreck it for the Lord. You’d ruin heaven just by being there.”

It’s one of my favorite stories. It illustrates an important spiritual principle.

We have to change.

Harry accused Alice of being a threat to heaven, but the truth is, if I go to heaven right now, the way I am now, I’d likely wreck it just as much as Alice would. The Christian life requires transformation.

I understand if, at first, this seems counterintuitive to the good news of the gospel, but the truth is that even though God loves us as we are, he loves us too much to let us stay as we are. God loves us enough to want us to become better people and enjoy the experience of life lived in closer proximity with his spirit.

In Revelation 2, Jesus warned the church of Pergamum that despite their faith in him, their lives did not yet reflect life the way he designed it. They had compromised. They had succumbed to the pressures of their culture. They had capitulated to the demands of their pagan surroundings. They had no hatred for sin. They gave themselves permission to be disobedient.

I have a few complaints against you. You tolerate some among you whose teaching is like that of Balaam, who showed Balak how to trip up the people of Israel. He taught them to sin by eating food offered to idols and by committing sexual sin. In a similar way, you have some Nicolaitans among you who follow the same teaching. Repent of your sin, or I will come to you suddenly and fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

–Revelation 2.14-16

The problem, though, is that you cannot transform yourself. We do not have the power to change or change much simply through strength of will. 

Yet we try anyway.

Recommended Reading on Revelation: Reversed Thunder

If you’re looking for something to help make Revelation a little more personal, Reversed Thunder by Eugene Peterson is a great place to start. 

Peterson digs through Revelation from beginning to end, keeping a meditative tone throughout. While he doesn’t get into the more difficult parts of the book, Peterson’s insights are well worth the read. As a devotional guide to Revelation, Reversed Thunder is an excellent choice. Of the book, Peterson says, “I have submitted my pastoral imagination to St. John’s theological poetry, meditated on what I have heard and seen, and written it down in what I think of as a kind of pastoral midrash.” 

 

Available here.

"Being Christian"

Revelation 3.14-22

I think the chief enemy of Christian spirituality in America is that we are a “Christian” country. There. Finished. What more is there? We’re already “Christian,” so what’s the big deal about church? The Bible? Jesus? His teaching? His divinity? We know all that already, and we’d rather just get back to politics, Nascar, and hating Arabs, thank you very much.

 We have no sense of the magnitude either of [a] our God, or [b] His requirements upon us to be His people. We’re oblivious.

Blind even.

And because it is so easy to be an American Christian—you don’t have to give anything up, in fact there are tax benefits for us to make it easier to give up our money to God—we never have to really stand for anything good or against anything really bad. Sure, we’ve got our single-issue political stances pretty well lined up, but that ‘love your enemies’ nonsense can wait until later. And the bit about ‘taking the plank out of your own eye’…well, we’ll leave that for the same day we take seriously Paul’s warnings against gluttony. I mean, those things are important, but there’s no need for us to be radical.

No need to be consumed by religion. We just want to be “good” Christian neighbors, citizens.

Lukewarm.

I could go on, but you get the point. The Laodicean Christians, unlike most of their peers, were rich. Consequently, they didn’t face any of the pressures to conform to the surrounding culture that the Ephesians (for example) did. They already fit into their culture. In many ways, it seems like they had a controlling interest in their culture. They had power. Money. Influence. They had all the things that Christian people have always wanted.

And it ruined them.

Just like it’s ruining us.

Look—if you love Jesus, give him everything. If “being Christian” is simply something that you think of as part of being a good person, then you’d better smarten up. Christ would rather have you be Bill Maher, Ricky Gervais, or Richard Dawkins—all famed atheists and adversaries to Christian spirituality—than a patriot in religious drag.

There Are Different Kinds of True

Revelation 3.7-13

Jesus says he is the True One. That’s right—in Christian thought, Truth is a person, not a proposition.

But that’s another riff for a different day. I’m more interested in the two Greek words for truth. One means the kind of truth that is distinct from a false statement.

2 + 2 = 4, is true. 2 + 2 = 2.3 is false.

The other truth distinguishes between that which is real and that which is imaginary, fantastical, or illusionary.

Bicycles are true. Talking rutabagas are false.

This is the kind of True that Jesus is. He’s the “Real” True.

When we’re afraid of worst possible scenarios, doomsday prophecies, and have concerns that every good thing in this life is merely a dream…look to Christ. He shows us what’s real. And the Truth is that—even if the world did end tomorrow (it is 2012 after all)—we will only be faced with a sweeter, better reality than this one.

The Truth is that you don’t have to be afraid.

The Truth is that you’re not alone.

The Truth is that you don’t have to be the best, nor are you the worst.

The Truth is found in He Who Makes All Things Real.

Pleasantly Numb

Revelation 3.1-6

No one at the church in Sardis ever made anybody mad. They were the perfect picture of inoffensive Christianity. By all accounts, they were well-organized, doctrinally sound, and perfectly suited to their cultural circumstances.

Which means they were useless.

They were sleepy, lazy, and dead—the zombie church, the pleasantly numb church, the church of fake plastic trees and homemade “proud to be a Sardisian” wall-hangings. I’ve been in plenty of churches like them. They’ve established a cozy equilibrium by catering to the lowest common denominator in order to keep folks happy. They’re the cute little church on the picturesque street with the nice garden and the wealthy old people. They’re the country chapel focused on the harvest and the high-school football team. They’re the television ministry with the big hair and teeth. They love their country and they’re never impolite to your face.

What’s the message to this church?

Wake up and smell the coffee!
Put your back into it—you leave a lot to be desired!
Get off your ass and dance!

I pastor a church full of life—full of some pretty broken folks too (including those of us that work here), and full of some pretty filthy sin (God—give us grace for those folks before we kill ‘em), and full of some pretty half-cocked ideas by a couple of smarty-pants power players who don’t know any better…but it’s better to be alive and wrong than dead and perfect.

Better to train a puppy than raise a corpse.

Love Service, Patient Faith

Revelation 2.18-29

That’s the connection that Scottish theologian William Barclay makes here, based on the words in 2.19: “I know your love, your faith, your service and your patience.” Barclay—who was the early 20th century version of Tom Wright—connects these two pairs. And, for what it’s worth, I think N.T. Wright would too.

There’s only two reasons why I do anything: either because I want to (or I really don’t want to face the consequences of NOT doing it), or because I love someone who wants me to. In either case, I’m serving someone. It’s my love that leads me to serve. The more I love Christ, the more I serve Christ. The more I love myself, the more I only do those things that serve me.

To be honest, I find this part easy. I love him A LOT, and it’s natural for me to connect the dots between loving him and helping others, loving others, serving others, befriending others, crying with others, etc. But I find the other bit absolutely excruciating!

It’s not that I’m impatient per se, it’s just that the instamatic coffee maker takes way too long.

I’m not in a hurry, but school zones are just suggested speeds, right? And those extra-large shoulders on I-94 are supposed to be for passing during rush hour.

Right?

I jest. The real reason I’m impatient in these areas isn’t because of a lack of faith. It’s because I’m a jerk. In other areas, however, the absence of faith is easy to perceive in my lack of patience. For example, I’m impatient with myself and my own personal development. I want to be a better leader NOW, a better teacher NOW, a better friend NOW. I want to conquer my anger TODAY, and curb my disappointments and melancholies THIS INSTANT.

But God isn’t into microwave maturity. He wants to slow boil me into a new man, to put me in the crockpot of Christ and get me done well through the middle. That’s hard for me to want, but I want to want to.

Right now.

Recommended Reading: Revelation For Everyone

N.T. Wright is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading biblical scholars. Revelation for Everyone is the last in his series of guides to the books of the New Testament, which aim to make the texts accessible and understandable for those who may not have a high-level degree in theology or other church-y subjects. 

“We owe it to ourselves to get our heads and our hearts around John’s glorious pictures as we attempt to be faithful witnesses to God’s love in a world of violence, hatred and suspicion,” Wright says in the book’s introduction. Using stories and recognizable examples from everyday life, Wright helps make sense of the confusing language and heady imagery in the book of Revelation.

This book is available at Soundwords (in the church lobby) for $13 (includes a special gift), or you can purchase it from Amazon here.

But Wait. There's More.

Revelation 2.12-17

Can we please acknowledge right away that the promises made to Pergamum are the coolest of all the seven churches?

Heavenly manna? A white stone with a secret name? Without explaining anything else, those base points are enough to excite my imagination.

But wait. There’s more.
(I’ve always wanted to say that.)

There’s an old Jewish legend that started just after Solomon’s Temple was destroyed in the 6th C BCE. The legend claims that the prophet Jeremiah hid some of the manna from within the Ark of the Covenant in the ruins of the Temple, and some in a secret chamber at the base of Mount Sinai. The Messiah was destined to come to those places and reclaim the manna, giving it out during God’s new age to all those who had remained faithful during persecution.

Manna was dessert in heaven.

And the white stone?

Law courts delivered their verdicts in black stones (for guilt) and white ones (for innocence). Winners at the Olympic games were given white stones. Priests sold white stones to their parishioners, believing that the engraving upon the stones gave them special access to heaven. Honored gladiators were given a white stone when they retired, with the inscription “this man’s valor has been proved beyond measure.”

The white stone was the mark of victory, blessing, and vindication. And the fact that Christ engraves our name on our own stone—a new name, no less, like Paul’s new name (instead of Saul), or Peter’s new name (instead of Simon), or Abraham’s new name (instead of Abram), or Israel’s new name (instead of Jacob)—just makes it that much sweeter.

To think, one day I’ll be sitting in heaven eating dessert with Christ and he’ll give me a medal that says…