Category: Devotional Nuggets

I was chat­ting with De Wen (a stu­dent in our min­istry) yes­ter­day and he made a com­ment that real­ly res­onat­ed with me: “God wants friends, not fans.”

A lot of us set­tle for being fans. I often set­tle for being a fan. But there’s so much more avail­able — like Abra­ham, we can be friends with God (Isa­iah 41:8, James 2:23). As he did to the dis­ci­ples, Jesus yearns to say to us, “I no longer call you ser­vants but friends” (John 15:15).

But the temp­ta­tion to be a mere fan is strong. In Jim­my Tate’s mem­o­rable phrase, we sub­sti­tute praise for prayer. We allow the life of the church to dis­place our own spir­i­tu­al jour­ney and we live vic­ar­i­ous­ly through the pas­tor’s insights or the wor­ship lead­er’s zeal. Like a duti­ful fan, we turn out for the game (Sun­day morn­ing) and cheer at all the appro­pri­ate places. But we don’t call the coach after the game to con­grat­u­late him or shoot the breeze. We don’t invite him over for a vic­to­ry bbq. That’s the stuff a friend would do.

We’re just fans, so we go home and talk about how great the game was.

And we miss out on some­thing won­der­ful.

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A pret­ty amaz­ing sto­ry from NPR: A Vic­tim Treats His Mug­ger Right

He was walk­ing toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

“He wants my mon­ey, so I just gave him my wal­let and told him, ‘Here you go,’ ” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You for­got some­thing. If you’re going to be rob­bing peo­ple for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

Remind you of any­thing? I don’t know if Julio Diaz is a fol­low­er of Jesus or not, but the Lord approved of his actions. See Matthew 5:38–40

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ ” But I tell you, “Do not resist an evil per­son. If some­one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the oth­er also. And if some­one wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.”

The sto­ry has a great end­ing I won’t spoil for you: read the whole thing

(found via kot­tke

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Last night at Chi Alpha’s week­ly meet­ing we had a guest speak­er — mis­sion­ary Mark Orfi­la. He’s been serv­ing for over a decade in east­ern Europe and has been think­ing very deeply about Amer­i­can cul­tur­al val­ues and how they relate to the King­dom of God.

He said a lot of very help­ful things last night, but I think the most help­ful went along these lines (the thoughts are his but the words are mine):

If I had to choose between tol­er­ance and hatred, I’d choose tol­er­ance hands-down.

But we’re not fac­ing a bina­ry choice — we have a whole range of options avail­able to us. And tol­er­ance can’t be the ulti­mate good in a soci­ety for two rea­sons: one philo­soph­i­cal and one prac­ti­cal. There must be some­thing high­er of which tol­er­ance is a spe­cial case, because if tol­er­ance is the high­est good then you have a real prob­lem — how do you han­dle the intol­er­ant mem­bers of your own soci­ety? If you tol­er­ate them, then you allow intol­er­ance to flour­ish. If you don’t tol­er­ate them, then you pro­mote intol­er­ance your­self. Either way intol­er­ance sneaks into your soci­ety. That’s the philo­soph­i­cal approach. But there’s an even big­ger prac­ti­cal prob­lem. Who wants to be tol­er­at­ed? Don’t we all want more than to be put up with? Tol­er­ance is a neg­a­tive virtue — it’s about what we don’t do to peo­ple. I won’t hit you, I won’t insult you, I won’t stig­ma­tize you. It’s a pecu­liar inverse of the gold­en rule — tol­er­ance tells us not to do to oth­ers what we don’t want done to us. It cre­ates a dis­tance between us and nev­er forces us to cross it.

The prob­lem with tol­er­ance for a Chris­t­ian is not that it sets the bar too high but that it sets the bar too low. We are called to love one anoth­er; in fact, we are even called to love our ene­mies. And rather than mere­ly respect­ing the dis­tance between us, we are called to treat them the way we wish they would treat us. Tol­er­ance is a poor sub­sti­tute for love. If it’s the only offer on the table I’ll take it, but in most sit­u­a­tions we should demand more (espe­cial­ly of our­selves).

Thanks for the clear think­ing on a cru­cial sub­ject, Mark.

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At a Chi Alpha con­fer­ence in St. Louis I just heard Dick Schroed­er use an inter­est­ing phrase to com­pli­ment some­one — “he puts ‘us’ before ‘me’.” Here are some off-the-cuff and unpol­ished thoughts inspired by that phrase:

“Us before me.” What a beau­ti­ful phrase to describe ser­vant lead­er­ship.

“Us” puts the lead­er­ship into ser­vant­hood: “us before me” leads to the over­all good of the group where­as “you before me” can lead to the detri­ment of the group.

To be clear, the Bible does com­mand us to “in humil­i­ty con­sid­er oth­ers bet­ter than our­selves” (Philip­pi­ans 2:3). Does­n’t this lead direct­ly to “you before me”?

Yes. It does. But the prac­ti­cal ques­tion for me as a leader is how to be self-sac­ri­fi­cial in a way that hon­ors my oblig­a­tions to those I am serv­ing. And I have learned that there is a healthy way to pri­or­i­tize oth­ers and a destruc­tive way to pri­or­i­tize oth­ers.

To serve as ful­ly as pos­si­ble there is a cer­tain amount of self-main­te­nance that must take place. Bound­aries must be estab­lished and main­tained. Recre­ation and sab­bat­i­cals must be incor­po­rat­ed. Growth and learn­ing have to take place.

All of these things are self-serv­ing. They require us to say no to oth­ers and yes to our­selves. At times, we wind up say­ing “me before you today because I want to be able to serve you tomor­row”.

But at the same time, all of these things flow from a mature under­stand­ing of “you before me” — putting our fol­low­ers’ long-term good above their short-term desires. For an orga­ni­za­tion, a leader who says “us before me” builds strength. A leader who naively/hyperspiritually says “you before me” leads the orga­ni­za­tion to implo­sion (and like­ly to high lead­er­ship turnover).

Clear­ly, there is the poten­tial for “us before me” to become a pre­text for putting “me before you.” The anti­dote is to keep expand­ing our def­i­n­i­tion of “us”. When­ev­er we begin to sus­pect that our “us” is too com­fort­able, we need to rede­fine the group we are serv­ing in a larg­er way, and con­tin­ue to put “us before me.”

And so a big thanks to Dick Schroed­er for giv­ing me my new favorite phrase: “us before me”. It will prob­a­bly be my favorite for at least a week. 😉

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Inspired by the folks over at the ESV and at Blo­gos, I sub­mit­ted a data set to the Many Eyes repos­i­to­ry show­ing the per­cent­age of the New Tes­ta­ment writ­ten by each author.

I got my data from Tis­chen­dor­f’s 8th edi­tion Greek New Tes­ta­ment because it was free and pub­licly avail­able — big kudos to them for mak­ing all their work so eas­i­ly usable.

It occurred to me to do this because count­ing the Greek words has always seemed to me to be a bet­ter mea­sure­ment of the New Tes­ta­ment doc­u­ment lengths than count­ing vers­es or chap­ters, which are less pre­cise mea­sure­ments and are con­tin­gent on the whim­sy of church his­to­ry rather than being an intrin­sic part of the text.

Plus I vivid­ly remem­ber the day in sem­i­nary when I real­ized that Luke had writ­ten more of the New Tes­ta­ment than Paul had. It was an epiphany for me.

A few weeks ago I was dis­cussing wor­ship with David Jones, the leader of Reformed Uni­ver­si­ty Fel­low­ship at Stan­ford, and he put some­thing into words that I’ve been try­ing to artic­u­late for a while, “Wor­ship is both expres­sive and for­ma­tive.”

In oth­er words, wor­ship does­n’t only show what we feel and believe, it also shapes what we feel and believe.

My stu­dents will only hear me preach a giv­en ser­mon once — but they may sing a wor­ship song dozens of times. And if we’ve cho­sen catchy yet super­fi­cial junk for them to sing we’ve done them a real dis­ser­vice.

And that’s why we don’t just sing any old song in our Chi Alpha meet­ings. They have to be catchy while also being pro­found and ennobling. In oth­er words, they have to both sound good and be good.

For what it’s worth, I think that Chris Tom­lin and Ben Pasley (of Enter the Wor­ship Cir­cle) stand out for real­ly hit­ting the mark con­sis­tent­ly. Of the old hymn writ­ers, Isaac Watts real­ly had it going on.

Peo­ple often mock the Song of Songs for hav­ing bizarre roman­tic imagery. Song of Solomon 7:4 is a noto­ri­ous exam­ple: “your nose is like the tow­er of Lebanon” (to which I always want to add “which means you can think of that zit as more of a ban­ner, if you pre­fer”).

Stuff like that keeps many from tak­ing the Song of Solomon seri­ous­ly as a love song. We obsess over the pic­tures that the song employs and fail to get the point.

And we act as though we’ve nev­er seen such out­landish imagery before. Then with­out even real­iz­ing it we turn the radio on and hear the Com­modores belt­ing out “she’s a brick house

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.”

In the cul­tur­al smack­down between us and the ancient near east, I have to give this round to the ancients. Which would you rather be called? A tow­er is slen­der, grace­ful, and curved. A brick house is short, squat, and angu­lar. Quite frankly, we have no stones to throw.

And it’s that way through­out the Song.

So the next time you hear the Black Eyed Peas inquir­ing about the junk in your trunk, cut the Song of Solomon some slack and inter­pret it the way you would inter­pret any oth­er love song–poetically.