Those Poor Pharisees

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Sometimes I feel bad for the Pharisees.  Yes, they are the “bad guys” in the Gospels, and they do end up conspiring to kill Jesus, but when I read some of the Old Testament, I can’t help but feel a little sympathetic.  I think if  I had no access to the New Testament and I decided I wanted to obey God fully, I would probably have done it like them.

Take, for example, the Sabbath.  If you are familiar with the Gospel stories, you will know that one of the things that enraged the Pharisees the most was Jesus working on the Sabbath.  There is an often repeated pattern where Jesus heals someone on the Sabbath, the Pharisees confront him for breaking the law, Jesus says something offensive, and the Pharisees plot to kill him.  To our compassionate eyes, we can’t help but wonder what is wrong with them.  Can’t they see that Jesus is healing people?  Why get all anal about the Sabbath when miracles are being done?  But then I read Jeremiah 17.  I’ll spare you the whole chapter, but let’s look at a few verses, starting with 21-23:

Thus says the Lord: Take care for the sake of your lives, and do not bear a burden on the Sabbath day or bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem.  And do not carry a burden out of your houses on the Sabbath or do any work, but keep the Sabbath day holy, as I commanded your fathers.  Yet they did not listen or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck, that they might not hear and receive instruction. 

Ok, well that’s pretty explicit.  But maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal.  I wonder what would happen to people if they didn’t keep the Sabbath?  Let’s check verse 27:

But if you do not listen to me, to keep the Sabbath day holy, and not to bear a burden and enter the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, then I will kindle a fire in its gates, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem and shall not be quenched.

Yikes!  So scripture VERY CLEARLY tells them to not do any work or carry any burdens on the Sabbath, unless they want their city destroyed by fire.  Do you understand the Pharisees a bit better now?  If I took those passages literally, had no other context of understanding, and saw Jesus doing his thing on the Sabbath, I’m pretty sure I would join with the Pharisees and ask Jesus, “can’t you do these things on another day?”

How did Jesus deal with the contradiction? In Matthew 12:11-12, he says,

Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out?  Of how much more value is a man than a sheep!  So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.

  And in Mark 2:27, Jesus says,

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.

This is powerful, and a complete departure from previous interpretations of scripture.  Before, scripture was seen as the value holder, with people deriving their value from their obedience to what it taught.  Jesus flips this concept on its head by restoring value to the person.  If something has to bend, he would rather bend the law in order to love/help/heal a person than try to bend that persons needs around the commandment.  That doesn’t mean that the old commandments are meaningless.  But the reason that the commandments matter and the new lens through which we view them are rooted in the revelation that it is humanity that holds the greatest value in God’s heart.

Jesus never says the Sabbath is bad.  He says that the Sabbath was made for man.  While it was written down in commandment language, what if we revisited it with our new understanding?  I think it would read something like this:

You work very hard, and your work is important.  Especially when you are behind on what needs to be done, it can be easy to put everything aside and just keep working.  But you mean so much more to me than what you do.  I know it can be difficult to slow down, but I want you to make time and space for yourself to breathe.  Rest in me.  Remember my goodness.  Enjoy your family.  Recharge.  Your work will still be there when you are finished, but you will be able to approach it with a new energy that will actually increase your productivity without enslaving you to the rat race.  Trust me, I know what is good for you.

What do you think?  If God’s primary focus is not the Sabbath, or the Law, or Scripture itself…if WE are the value holders that God is willing to bend heaven and earth to reconcile with himself, how does that change how we see ourselves?  How does that change how we treat other people?  How does that change how we read scripture?  I would love to hear your thoughts!

A God Like Jesus

I can never get over the “otherness” of the Gospel.  It is so improbable that there would be a God this kind.  Even the most wishful of thinkers wouldn’t have had the gall to assume that there was a God like Jesus.  It’s like a Hollywood actor, snot-covered and crying his eyes out on the street corner, desperate to win the heart of a wasted drug addict.  Like a courtroom judge, begging that he could be sentenced to prison, instead of the hardened criminal on trial.

The God proclaimed by Jesus on the cross has no sense of dignity.  He doesn’t seem to understand the superiority that belongs to his title.  He is so out of touch as to not even feel embarrassed to suffer at the hands of the humanity he loves so much.  Doesn’t he have any self-respect?  Can’t he see that the people he love just aren’t that into him?

What a beautiful revelation!  In Jesus, we discover that the primary attributes of God are not his bigness or his strength, but his undying devotion to his wandering children.  HE IS steadfast love that penetrates every barrier.  HE IS relentless passion that would rather drown in our sorrows with us than leave us to fight alone.  HE IS undying hope because if love is willing to be crushed for his beloved, what possible danger could ever tear us apart?

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“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.  But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.”

Isaiah 53:4-5

King in the Mud

It never gets old.  A King who acts like a Servant.  A God who loves the weakest.  A Saviour who welcomes children. 

An earthly person of importance thinks that they deserve to be treated with extra respect because they are important.  God lives out his importance by refusing the pedestal and staying down in the mud with his beloved.  The world thinks that the strong deserve control and dominance.  God uses his strength to empower the weak.

We could go around telling people, “God is really important!  He is worthy of your worship.  You must worship him because he is glorious!”  But our God’s glory is so humble!  His importance so practical!  He doesn’t mean for us to get caught up in abstractions and worship him because we know he is the biggest and the best.  He is too busy living out his nature by loving his children.  He is a comfort to the brokenhearted, hope to those in despair, a light to those who have lost their way.  Absolutely he is glorious, but it is his nearness and humility that display his glory better than a crown!

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“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.  It shall not be so among you.  But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”  Matthew 20:25-28

Always Food

I’m back!  I haven’t written in a long time…not since the birth of my youngest son who is now almost 10 months old!  The addition of my son has added a lot of joy, but also taken a lot of energy and focus away from writing.  I have been waiting for a return to normalcy (whatever that is) so that I can start writing again, but it finally dawned on me that that isn’t going to happen.  Instead, I’m going to embrace the new normal.  I’m going to write what I can as often as I can, and I’m going to give up my perfectionism and click the “publish” button whether I think it’s good enough for public consumption or not.  I don’t know what will come of it, but hopefully something real and beneficial to my readers.  I hope you enjoy!

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There is always nourishment in Jesus. I forget that sometimes. Especially when I let my mind wander for too long on theological problems and abstract questions. I will start getting bored of the technicalities spinning through my head and will project that boredom onto the underlying truth that all those words are trying to express. “Jesus loves me”.  I know. “He is always with me”.  I know that.  Blah, blah, blah.

What a beautiful escape it is to surrender the mental toil, the attempts to explain, the questions and paradoxes, and simply breathe the truth. Let it in. Let it out. This isn’t a mind game. The gospel is not a psychological theory. It isn’t a self-improvement seminar. It is a living, breathing reality. It is the image of the invisible God, made known to man. It is the revelation of Emanuel, God with us.

Something births in my soul every time I remember. Every time I drink of mercy. Every time I taste that He is here. Truly here. When I awaken to his realness, his invasive goodness. Jesus is good food. Jesus is good drink. He is hope. He is purpose. He is life.

Found

I wrote this post a year ago; 9 years to the day after the lights turned on.  I’m now celebrating my 10th anniversary, and hope that you will discover yourself deliciously found like I did.  Enjoy!

Stephen Fulton

September 19, 2016

Today is the 9 year anniversary of my awakening. It went something like this.

I was exhausted. I didn’t fully realize how tired I was, because when tired is a lifestyle….well, it seems normal. While circumstantially my life was pretty average, my soul and mind were under torment. I was in that special corner of hell described in Romans 7. I had great desires. I had a heart that wanted to know God. I wanted to be a good Christian. I wanted to “deny myself and follow Him”. These desires meant that throughout my childhood and teen years, I actually listened to the sermons in church. It meant that I actually read the bible for myself (though never having the self-discipline to achieve read-the-bible-in-a-year status), and perhaps most strange for my age, it meant that I devoured books on theology. But my actions failed me. I was…

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Where Sin Abounds

“but where sin increased, grace was carefully balanced with teachings of God’s judgment and fear of condemnation in order to ensure that repentance was genuine” – Romans 5:20…oh wait, that’s not what it says!

 

Romans 5:20 actually says, “…but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more…”

 

This is confusing to our way of thinking. As humans, most of us have learned to use whatever power we have in order to manipulate other people’s behavior. Parents withhold privileges from children, bosses threaten to fire employees, and friends threaten the relationship itself (“If you don’t _______ I’ll never talk to you again.”) all in the name of changing the other person’s behavior. And since God has all the power, we would assume that he would know how to use it to get what he wants. But that’s not God’s way!

 

John 13:3-5 (ESV) says,

 

“Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” (emphasis my own)

 

It is exactly in the place of knowing who he is and how much power he has that Jesus chooses to be a servant. Rather than using his position to control our behavior, he loves us in our frailty. He humbly approaches even our most embarrassing weaknesses, not to condemn, but to wash away our shame.

 

This type of love offends. This type of love confuses. This type of love draws all of God’s children back to their loving Father — a Father who will never leverage their relationship in order to control, but who will always give of himself until you are made whole.

Risen!

We must embrace what the resurrection communicates. It is not an event that is best memorialized by a special Sunday service. It is an event that is best honored through lives that have internalized its message.

In the resurrection we learn that;

a) Even our worst sin (killing God in the flesh) can not derail God from his redemptive purpose.  In the crucifixion, we discovered that God loves us to death (see Romans 5:6-8)…but what hope is there in a kind but dead God?  While the cross revealed his love, the resurrection reveals his power.  Even a dead God cannot be stopped from returning to life and accomplishing his purposes!

b) The death of the body is not the end of hope, but only the beginning.  Everybody fears death.  Everybody!  But in the resurrection, we discover God’s mastery over death.  It proves that the eventual loss of our own lives is not the conclusion that it appears to be.  It shows that even the darkest of circumstances are no match for the power of God to work all things together for our good!

c) There is no need to fight evil with evil. Jesus chose the weak way of “not resisting those who are evil” (Matthew 5:39). When his more pragmatic disciple, Peter, attacked one of Jesus’ captors (no doubt hoping a little bit of force could salvage God’s failing plan) Jesus rebuked him and healed the soldier’s wound. Jesus chose goodness even when it proved impossibly weak; even when it meant surrendering all of the territory that could have been his. He trusted God to breathe new life into all of the things that his own unbending goodness required him to lay down. In the resurrection, Jesus proves all of our “necessary” evils to be utterly unnecessary. It turns out that we do not need swords and violence in order to build or maintain our foothold in the world. We only need hearts that trust our good, good Father to pick up all of the pieces that our love requires us to lay down.

Jesus finished work declares to us that we are loved, we are chosen, and we are in the care of the God for whom death is no match. What reason is there to remain in fear?  Let’s open our hearts to trust in his love, trust in his power, and trust in his ability to resurrect all of the good that has been left for dead.

He is risen!

Genuine Love

“Let love be genuine…..” -Romans 12:9a

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The world does not need our best imitation of love.  It really just needs love.  I think most of us read what the bible tells us love looks like, then try our best to live that way.  We think the Christian life is about learning what is right and what is wrong, then trying to do right and avoid wrong.  The problem with all of our effort is that it is not genuine!  Sure, we are genuinely trying to love, but since when have hearts responded to attempted love?  If your dad told you, “I’m trying really hard to love you”, it wouldn’t feel too good.  You wouldn’t be impressed by his obedience.  You would probably wonder, “why is it so difficult to love me?” 

For too long we have been trying so hard to love, and trying so hard to obey while remaining ignorant of where true love comes from.  So what should we do?  How can we learn to love?

This is the mystery. It is why we so desperately need to escape our rational, canned theology — and rediscover Jesus.  We must look deeper than the historical Jesus, because Jesus isn’t trapped in history, and we need to look further than theology because knowing God isn’t a matter of carefully structured definitions and tidy explanations.  We need to open our hearts to discover and encounter the God who was, but also is!  We need to recognize that the Jesus of the past is not dead, but alive and knowable!

In the bible, we can read about how Jesus healed the sick, welcomed the little children, forgave the sinners, and gladly associated with the outcasts.  How loved he must have made people feel!  Can you imagine what it would have felt like to be the object of his affection?  But here is the good news.  You don’t have to limit yourself to imagining what it would have been like.  Because the Jesus who died is also the Jesus who rose, you don’t have to limit yourself to knowing Jesus from a distance.  Jesus still is the God who heals, the God who forgives, and the God who welcomes.  He is that for you right now!  

While fear and guilt may motivate you to try, only experiencing love as the object of affection has the power to awaken true love. Ask Jesus to remind you who he is. Read the Gospels not merely as a historical document but as a revelation of the character of the God who still is.  Soak in how loved and accepted you are.  In this place, you will find love. Then go out and set the world on fire with the same genuine, unadulterated love!

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“This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.” 1 John 4:10 (NLT)

Why the Cross?

 

It doesn’t matter what culture you are from; the cross is strange and offensive. To those accustomed to the rigors of advancement under a religious hierarchy, the cross is offensive because it allows the people who DON’T EVEN CARE about holiness to have immediate access to God.

To those whose brand of spirituality is more abstract or philosophical, it is offensive for its violence and extreme measures. I mean, is it really necessary for God to suffer a violent death in order to redeem us? Surely we weren’t in such a terrible place as to warrant such extreme action! And surely the real God would have more self-respect than to humble himself to death on a cross…especially for people so ignorant as to hate him!

While the cross doesn’t cease to offend the thought patterns that dominate the world, it is only in the painful death of God that one thing could be made abundantly clear. God loves us.

He could have just let his voice boom from heaven and tell us that he loves us…but is that really enough for us to go on? Does humanity have a good track record for taking God at his word?  What if we miss heard him? What if he really loved only the people who were present to hear him? What if his love was just for a certain period of time? I’m sure you’ve seen enough debates over scripture to agree with me; when our faith is defined by words in human language, any number of scenarios could pop up to unravel our faith. Even if God made the perfect sermon to explain his heart towards us, in the process of time the meaning would be muddied enough to make room for doubt.

But while words can never be clear enough to erase all doubt, there is a language in which God speaks that does prove strong enough for our faith. It is the language of love. The fact remains, there is no scenario that is more disgusting or damning for mankind than for us to murder God in the flesh.  I know some people today are pretty disturbed by what they perceive to be the downward spiral of our society — but do we honestly think that sexual confusion and irreverent attitudes are a worse evil than killing God?

Jesus came giving us God’s best, healing the sick, welcoming the outcasts, and forgiving the wicked.  Then we murdered him!  There can be no greater crime, and therefore no better time for God to reveal his righteous judgment.  And reveal it he did.  He said, “forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”.  And when he finally breathed his last and the earth began to quake, it was not his murderers that were torn in two, but the temple curtains that were intended to keep God separate from a sinful world.  Our greatest crime ended in forgiveness and an outpouring of God’s presence.

If he could forgive the people who murdered God, what possible barrier could stop him from forgiving you?

The cross is God’s Good News to a confused world. It is not a theologically sophisticated act, but a declaration that there is no limit to his love for us. He is absolutely determined to absolve us of guilt. How offensive! But oh, how wonderful!

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For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.  For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. –Romans 5:6-8 (ESV)

Can The World Be Saved?

Take it from someone who has struggled with depression and anxiety for much of his life: There is SO MUCH HOPE!

The madness of our age is the blindness of our own eyes to see the potential in humanity. It is fashionable in Christian circles to look out on the masses and be overwhelmed by the sin and confusion and pain. Sad headshakes and weary “if only” statements are as commonplace as saying “amen” to end a prayer. Though rarely expressed in words, our pessimism would suggest that the victory of the cross is a loss-reduction strategy at best. As if the cross has no power to redeem and rescue, but merely to forestall the inevitable disappointment and destruction of all but a few. In our neutered gospel it would seem that the first Adam has retained his right to define humanity, while the second Adam has been commissioned to make a big show but little difference. This is a far cry from Romans 5, which portrays the new Adam as being of far greater consequence than the first Adam. In verses 17-18 it proclaims,

“For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, MUCH MORE will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for ALL MEN, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for ALL MEN.” (emphasis my own)

2 Corinthians 5:14-16a says,

“For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for ALL, therefore ALL have died; and he died for ALL, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

From now on, therefore, we regard NO ONE according to the flesh…”

It’s time for us to stop predicting what only our natural eyes can see. Yes, there are dangers and there is darkness, but there is also something greater.

When the Israelites saw only a harsh desert, God saw the place where he would give water, food, provision, and direction to his people. When Jesus’ disciples saw only two small fish and five loaves of bread, God saw a feast that would feed the multitudes.

So today when we look at the challenges of our age, let’s see them through the lens of redemption. Let’s look at the world around us not as hopelessly lost, but as already found and included. Let’s learn to declare these unseen realities to our own souls, and let’s learn to declare them to the world. Redemption is not finished with us yet. Not by a long shot!