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

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!

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!

Heartbreak

Here’s an old journal entry I recently stumbled across.  I don’t remember the specifics of the situation, but obviously I was hurting pretty bad!  I’m sure I was only writing to try and process the pain, but what came out was an anchor for the brokenhearted.  I hope it encourages you!

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Heartbreak. This is the hardest state that I know of. In almost every other state good advice would be to “follow your heart”…but when your heart is torn into multiple pieces, all crying out for some sort of extreme action, what do you do? Do you bury things? Or do you let everything come out and wound the people around you? Do you cry, or find funny things to laugh at? What do you do when it hurts? This has been an enigma for me. My standard reaction to heartbreak is to withdraw and embrace self-destructive behavior. But what am I going to do now? What is the answer for a broken heart?

Acceptance. I accept that what happened, happened. I accept that what happened is not ok. I accept that I don’t know what to do, and I accept that I am perfectly acceptable in this place. This is where religion will destroy you, but God will lift you up…because if there is any distance that needs to be spanned in order to meet God, he might as well be a million miles away. When my heart is broken, I don’t need guilt, shame, or to analyze what portion of the blame I should be assigned. I don’t need to wonder if God is angry at me, or have any insecurity in that relationship. I need the God who is here.

I accept that God is here. In the midst of the chaos and the pain, and the rush of contradictory and violent emotions that flood through my being, I know that He is here, and His heart is big enough to hold me when my own cannot. So it’s not about what I do. It’s not about whether I shout or I cry, isolate myself or find comforters, lash out at others or numb myself and move on. When my heart is broken it is not about what I do, it is the knowledge that who I am is acceptable, that He sees me, He knows me, and He permits no dark cloud to hide me from his affection. Even the darkness is as noon to Him, and it is He that holds my days as well as my nights. I am allowed to feel what I feel without guilt because these feelings are just passing through. They are just temporary sounds that cannot silence the symphony of love that surrounds me.

It is God who gives life to my heart, and when it is healthy, it is my hearts beat that moves me to the rhythms of his grace. But when it is broken and no longer able to lead, I let my heart go on bypass and let his heart fill my veins. His heart is worthy to the task!

God’s Righteousness Revealed

What follows is an entry from my journal.  I delayed sharing it because I thought it might be too controversial.  It is hard enough for us to accept God’s forgiveness, but to accept ourselves as perfect (in biblical language: righteous) feels like dangerous heresy!  But as scandalous as it may appear, by his own actions, God has declared us righteous.

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” -2 Corinthians 5:21

“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. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” -Romans 5:17-19

This is not a polished blog post, just honest thoughts. I hope it inspires your own mediation on your redeemed perfection!

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I am at home with who I am! Matters of the heart can take years to resolve, and the mind can have long since accepted something that the heart continues to ignore. I knew that I was forgiven. I got that. But now to see that I am perfect….wow! I am perfect. And so are you! There is no fatal flaw, no bug, no mistake in our beings. We are as we were meant to be, and we were meant to be godlike! I am safe because I am known and trusted. I’m trusted not based on my past behavior, but based on my true nature. Who I am is trustworthy! Who I am fits into who he is with perfect ease. There is no need to try to shove a square peg in a round hole, and no need for Jesus to pretend he’s us so that the Father can tolerate us. We are not righteous by a shell game, or by some substitutionary trick…we are righteous first by design, and second by redemption.

At creation, God made man and woman, and said that we were “very good”. He said that we were made in His image. We were his children. Yet at the fall we get this sense that there must be some mistake. The fact that Adam and Eve sinned means they must have had some flaw. Then Adam and Eve had children who had children who had children who had children, down through the line this sense of inadequacy continued. We believed ourselves to be inadequate, we acted badly, and then used our bad actions to prove our inadequacy, thus trapping us in the sinner’s catch-22. A good metaphor would be the common racist attitudes that many white people had (and perhaps still have) towards black people. We enslaved them because we decided they were subhuman, didn’t educate them because they weren’t worth it, and didn’t empower them because they were not smart enough. Then when these uneducated, unequipped people acted uneducated and unequipped, we used that as proof of the inferiority of their race. What many whites did to many blacks is what the cycle of sin has done to all of humanity. We sin because we believe we are damaged, imperfect, only human, then use the fact that we sinned as evidence of being damaged, imperfect, and only human. Our belief produces an action that proves the belief…but does that make it true?

With Jesus, we finally get some clarity! At the cross we see all of mankind failing Jesus.  In killing Jesus religion sacrificed love to maintain control, politics did the necessary evil to maintain the status quo, the crowds who worshiped a hero gladly crucified a villain, and the radicals — the Jesus lovers, the sold out believers — ran and hid for cover. At the cross is the utter failure of humanity to do anything right! Surely, if nothing else, it once again proves our belief that we are inadequate, imperfect, broken? Surely this proves God made a mistake? And yet in our worst showing of all time, when humanity condemned our hope to death on a cross, the words “forgive them” and “it is finished” preceded a resurrection from the dead! And what did the resurrected hope do? He found his friends, empowered them, and let them loose to declare the forgiveness of sins and redemption of mankind to the ends of the earth! It turns out that even at our worst, God counts us worthy of the precious blood of Jesus! It turns out that while the fall distorted our understanding and distanced us in our hearts from knowing God, sin did not have the same affect on God! Even while our hearts and minds were in hiding because of our guilt and shame, God was ever loving us and valuing us according to the incredible worth he gave us at creation! If we were perfect then, we are perfect now! Sin did not change our nature, it only darkened our understanding!

In beginning to see this and accept this, I am finding freedom from self-suspicion. While religion promotes ruthless self-analysis as a means of rooting out sin, it turns out that finding oneself forgiven and redeemed restores innocence, and innocence is a much stronger power than self-suspicion! Forgiveness frees us from guilt so that we can enjoy God instead of hiding….and this is good! Discovering that there is nothing wrong with you enables you to make no more excuses, and to no longer assume the worst of yourself. Sin is not a fruit of my nature, only a fruit of a darkened mindset! As I feast on my true nature and the perfect fellowship I share with Jesus, I am unwittingly inoculating myself from the dangers of temptation. Childlike innocence is the greatest defense!

Counterintuitive

 

Many important truths are the opposite of what would seem logical. Our logic puts confidence in what it can control and distrusts freedom. Our reasoning finds comfort in what it can understand and avoids the naked wonder of the unknown. Our values see the sacrifice of a few (soldiers, refugees, the generic “others”) as being necessary for the benefit of the many.

Then a child was born. A hope dawned. And our logic was exposed for its folly. When the Son of God laid down his control in order to free those that religion and respectable society oppressed. When Jesus preached in such a way that many left confused and with more questions than they had ever had…but also found their diseases healed and their hearts touched by love. And when the One for whom and through whom all things were made chose to die at the hands of violent men rather than forge a human kingdom in the necessary sacrifice of others. At this time, all that humanity had discarded as too weak, too sentimental, too emotional, too unrealistic turned out to be the very force that overcame the darkness of the human condition.

It turns out that when love is killed, it grows. When grace is given, purity is born. Now those of us who never sought God have been found by him, and those of us who fought against him have been given the place of honor at his victory feast! Only the logic of God would benefit the vanquished as much as the victor!

So cheers to the counterintuitive hope that is ours! Today we celebrate a child that was born. Today we rejoice in the son that was given!

“…and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end.” -Isaiah 9:6b-7