More from Accidental Pharisee

Quote: "In my mind, the quest for spiritual maturity was like an onion and a video game. With regard to sin, it was like an onion. There was always another layer to peel off. If people weren’t feeling seriously guilty about something, they obviously weren’t listening to the Holy Spirit. I rated Christian books and sermons by how bad they made me feel. The worse I felt, the better the sermon. The more difficult and challenging they were, the more faithful the message. With regard to growth, it was like a video game. There was always a higher level to attain. No matter how much people grew, no matter what sacrifices they made to get to that point, there was always a next level they needed to reach to fully please the Lord. Worse, I chided people who grew weary. I pushed them to work harder, pray longer, and study more.

Taking a break or temporarily stepping to the sidelines was simply not an option. Satan didn’t rest; why should we? My discipleship motto was simple: no pain, no gain. If you wanted rest, a lighter load, or an easier path, you’d come to the wrong place. I didn’t think that’s what Jesus offered. He offered a cross to bear, death to self, and eternal rewards to the faithful few who were willing to pay the price and stay the course. Or so I thought. In reality, as we saw earlier, if I’d read my Bible a little more carefully, I would have found that Jesus did offer something I had never considered worthy of a Christ follower. He offered rest, a light burden, and an easy yoke to those who were weary and heavily burdened. Imagine that! Maybe it’s a misprint. Maybe he didn’t really mean it. But then again, maybe that’s why he called his message good news. Maybe those of us who constantly demand more are the ones who’ve missed it.

Matt. 11:28–30: Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

For over two thousand years, those who fashion themselves as spiritual leaders haven’t been able to leave well enough alone. They keep trying to raise the bar to entry higher than Jesus placed it. They pile on heavier and heavier burdens and call it discipleship. They shut the door to the struggling and weak and call it purifying the church. Their intentions are noble. But their fruit is rotten. They unwittingly play the same role as the Pharisees of old, trying to keep out the very people Jesus came to reach. So why do we do that? What tempts someone to want to thin the herd that Jesus came to expand?"
Read the answers in the book!!


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Highlights from my reading of Accidental Pharisee

Accidental Pharisees: Avoiding Pride, Exclusivity, and the Other Dangers of Overzealous Faith by Larry Osborne

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JERKS FOR JESUS
You’ve probably known a jerk for Jesus, someone who thought they were advancing the cause of the kingdom when in reality they were simply embarrassing the King.
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It makes me wonder if any of us can lay claim to fully and completely taking up our cross, denying self, and loving him above life itself. I suspect that if truth be told, none of us has a devotion that is as absolute, undivided, or exclusive as we may think it is, even people who trumpet such devotion as the only acceptable mark of genuine discipleship. Second, it makes me hesitant to call out, write off, or tear apart those who struggle with full devotion and reckless abandonment. Who am I to blast a “secret disciple” as unworthy if Jesus didn’t? Who am I to write off the not-yet-fully-committed if Jesus didn’t? Who am I to say that God can’t use the kind of people he actually used?
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Sometimes I wonder if in our quest to purify the church, we’ve become more like Pharisees than like Jesus. Accidental Pharisees perhaps. But Pharisees nonetheless. When it comes to bruised reeds, smoldering wicks, and the weary saints, Pharisees have no patience. They pile on heavy burdens and lots of guilt. But they don’t lift a finger to make anything easier. They thin the herd at every opportunity. Not so with Jesus.
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I remember once meeting with a group of guys who were passionate about their walk with God. Somehow the conversation turned toward people in the church who were not so passionate. Next thing I knew, they were ripping on the way everyone else raised their kids, spent their money, read their Bible, and set their priorities. It was one of those “aren’t you glad we’re not like those guys?” conversations. Now, these were quality men. They were indeed doing a far better job than most in raising their kids, spending their money, reading their Bible, and setting their priorities. The problem wasn’t that they noticed it. The problem was what they did with the information. They used it to justify looking down on everyone else. They became arrogant.
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Years ago I was part of an amazing movement of God. I was lucky enough to be at ground zero. I saw everything. God’s Spirit was at work. Lots of people came to Christ. Lots of lives were radically changed. But then something happened. We began to compare ourselves with others, and we liked what we saw. We were on fire for God. Most people weren’t. So we began to look down on everyone else. We still loved the lost and the hard-core sinner. But we disdained the less than fully sold-out Christian. We were sure God was pleased with us and ticked off with them.

I have to admit, the view was breathtaking. That’s why some of my friends decided to set up camp there. Decades later they still haven’t moved. They’re living in the past, still certain that God likes them best. They have no idea how much he hates the place where they’ve chosen to live.
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the Pharisee who had lived such an exemplary life that he’d begun to look down on everyone else had no such luck. His prayers were ignored. Again, don’t miss that.
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Star it. Underline it. According to Jesus, it didn’t matter how moral or zealous he was. His arrogant trust in his own righteousness, and his pattern of looking down on everyone else, nullified all the good he had done. It left him worse off than a low-life tax collector.


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We Are Justified By Faith -- Not Works

As part of my on-going effort to get people to read the Bible for themselves, this morning I'm pasting a few scriptures.  Drop a search for "Jesus Christ" in Bible Gateway and a beautiful string of verses hang there like a dangling Christmas lights on a doorway. I love Paul's letter to the Romans so much. Not just because it is a passionate plea to a world gone mad with power, but because Paul's aim was to make the Gospel -- the Good News -- clear, simple, and poignant! Notice that we are "justified freely by his grace" and "justified through faith."  

Romans 3:22This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile,

Romans 3:24all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.Romans 5:1[ Peace and Hope ] Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,Romans 5:11Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.Romans 5:15But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!

"Through faith" is the first action in the first verse. Righteousness does NOT come by any other means. Not by being a good person. Not by being in the right church. Not by being right about your opinions. Righteousness comes only "through faith in Jesus Christ." Period. Why is it so important to understand this? Because IF we fill in the blank here with anything else other than "through faith in Jesus Christ" then we are now "self-righteous." It's that simple. Only by believing in the completed work of Christ on the cross do we become complete and righteous in God's sight.

WE are all "justified FREELY by his grace." Notice this gift from God is a FREE gift. We did not -- nor can we EVER -- do anything to make it not free. At least in God's mind. In God's plan this is a free gift. But so often we get our wires crossed and begin to believe it is somehow not completely free. Most often this is the result of false teaching from a church leader. He may take the handful of verses in the Bible that mention "works" and build a case for a different gospel than the one laid out clearly by Paul to the Romans and found in the entire scope of the Bible. One must study the ENTIRE topic of grace and salvation in scripture, not just a select few verses. And one must NEVER blindly trust someone to do your thinking for you just because they are "smart" or "charismatic."

Read the scriptures! Really read them. We often make this way too complicated. And we often exalt men to positions of power over ourselves to become a mediator for us. Then we let them read the Bible and "teach" us what it means. And then we "oooo" and we "ahhhh" and we quote the wise man and honor him. And the man becomes a "scholar" and he writes a book and we clap and spread the "I follow Apollos" gospel. Meanwhile the mortar in the wall we have built between clergy and laity is setting up good a hard. Soon we won't need to read the Bible at all. And if we ever do we will be sure to ask Apollos if we got it right.

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So I challenge and even dare you to go back up and read these verses from Romans. Then read the entire chapter five and six and seven and eight. Ask God to enlighten your understanding of the Gospel. Then believe that He will.

Do you know that God wants to set you free in your mind? Free to come close to Him. To know Him as He loves you. But not just a knowing in your mind that you are His--He longs for you to FEEL His loving-kindness toward you. To rest in His arms. To be satisfied in Him. Nothing in all the universe satisfies like feeling the true love of God and knowing He did all this to save us when we were yet helpless and lost. His love is everything we long for. And now it is free. And when we accept this truth that we are justified freely by His grace -- I mean really and truly believe in the finished work of Christ -- there is but one result -- works. It's that simple. Now there's no longer any need for legalism.

How Christians get arrogant. [repost]

How Christians get arrogant. From here http://bit.ly/V199GB

The other day, a friend of mine made a comment about an author. He wrote:
“I’ll say he’s sloppy at best when it comes to sound doctrine and theology.”

I think the first half of that thought is awesome.

I think the author he was describing is sloppy at best.
I think I’m sloppy at best.
I think you’re sloppy at best.
I think there’s not a person on the planet who isn’t sloppy at best.

The longer I’m a Christian, the more I realize how big and mysterious and boundless God is. The idea that I can remove the “sloppiness” from my limited human understanding of him is comical. The idea that, at 36 or 56 or 106, I could reach a point in my life where I have him all figured out is silly.

In anything, the Christians I know with the deepest, most mature faiths tell me, “The closer I got to God over the decades, the more I realized how very little I knew about his wonderfulness and how very desperately I needed him more than ever.”

The fear in admitting faith is sloppy is that you’ll lose all sense of truth, and everything will become relative. As if admitting you haven’t figured God out completely is a single step away from “All religions basically say the same thing. God is too big to figure out so let’s not even try. Anything goes.”

But the more we fear that extreme example and refuse to have sloppy discussions, the more we invite something poisonous into our faith – arrogance.

My friend might not have had that in his words. But others do when they draw manmade boundaries around a boundless God.

As if any of us will get to heaven and have God say, “You got it all right. Every inch of who I am was perfectly understood by you while you were alive. That time in Isaiah 55 when I said, ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts,’ I meant that verse for everyone but you. You nailed it.”
Even the disciples, who lived with Jesus, were constantly getting it wrong.

I love what happens in Luke 9:
As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” But Jesus turned and rebuked them. Then he and his disciples went to another village.

I can’t help but imagine what Jesus wanted to say:
“Wait, what? What’s your solution? I’ve been preaching ‘turn the other cheek.’ And in Luke 9, or what you might call ‘Last Tuesday,’ I told you that if a town won’t welcome you, ‘shake the dust off your feet when you leave their town, as a testimony against them.’ What was the solution you just recommended? Call fire down from heaven to destroy them? OK, just checking. How did you ever think that was the right response?”

And then, the verse tells us he rebuked them.
If we were honest, I think a lot of us deserve a rebuke in that same way. When we add things to Scripture, when we put works as a means to grace, when we create rules in order to feel in control, I think Jesus wants to rebuke us.

Does this mean we should not study?
Does this mean we should not call ourselves to learn theology?
Does this mean we should not sharpen one another with truth?
Does this mean there are not doctrinal truths we must hold fast to?
Does this mean there are not slippery slopes that must be avoided?

Of course not.

It means we have to be honest.
To admit that we are learning, but we are sloppy.

Fortunately, we have a God who is not.



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Prove by the way that you live...

4 John’s clothes were woven from coarse camel hair, and he wore a leather belt around his waist. For food he ate locusts and wild honey. 5 People from Jerusalem and from all of Judea and all over the Jordan Valley went out to see and hear John. 6 And when they confessed their sins, he baptized them in the Jordan River.
7 But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming to watch him baptize,* he denounced them. “You brood of snakes!” he exclaimed. “Who warned you to flee God’s coming wrath? 8 Prove by the way you live that you have repented of your sins and turned to God. 9 Don’t just say to each other, ‘We’re safe, for we are descendants of Abraham.’ That means nothing, for I tell you, God can create children of Abraham from these very stones. 10 Even now the ax of God’s judgment is poised, ready to sever the roots of the trees. Yes, every tree that does not produce good fruit will be chopped down and thrown into the fire."
"Prove by the way we live..."
Prove by who we honor, Christ or men, or a man.
Prove by what we say about people behind their backs.
Prove by how we treat people who are different than ourselves.
Prove by how we respond to those who disagree with us.
Prove by making the choice to love no matter what the consequence may be to our future.
Jesus proved that sort of love.
"Prove by the way we live..."
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For a fantastic book check out Accidental Pharisee by Larry Osbourne. I'm on chapter four now and deeply convicted.
Conviction is a very good thing when it leads to repentance and grace. God help me.
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Accidental Pharisees: Avoiding Pride, Exclusivity, and the Other Dangers of Overzealous Faith
Larry Osborne
$14.99 $10.19
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We Have All the Answers [repost]

We Have All the Answers from here http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/churchrelevance/~3/gm_UWwA7RCA/

Mankind tends to be compelled to have it all figured out. We oversimplify complex things into 12-step formulas. We make stereotypes. And no matter how big and unanswerable a question is, we seem unable to resist creating a theory to make sense of it.
In fact, I just did it by generalizing the whole human race.
Sometimes the only way to remotely grasp reality is to simplify it through the lens of our unique worldview. Christians are no different. We do this with theology. And we don’t just try to understand the fundamentals such as the gospel, grace, and atonement. We also want to know and explain the weird, obscure, and unimportant like the Nephilim, the rapture, how old the earth is, and what Jesus really looked like.
But we cannot forget 1 Corinthians 1:25, which reminds us that God is always exponentially wiser than the greatest of thoughts from our best theologians.
You don’t have it figured out. No one does. We have glimpses of truth on which we build our faith. I don’t believe our minds have the capacity to understand the fullness of the ideas formed by the language of God. They are otherworldly, marvelous, and awesome in the most literal sense.
The best we can do is stay content resting in the shadow of God and latch on to every bit of divine revelation gifted to us by the Holy Spirit through prayer and Scripture. And if we must know more, then listen to other true believers who are from different cultures, denominations, theologies, and models of ministry because their perspective may reveal to us a new vantage point of who God is.

I John 4 truly is a favorite...

7 Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. 8 But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
9 God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. 10 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.
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16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love.* Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.* 17 In this way, love is made complete* among us so that we will have confidence* on the day of judgment,* because in this world we are like him. 18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear,* because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
19 We love because he first loved us.* 20 If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother,* he is a liar.* For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen,* cannot love God, whom he has not seen.* 21 And he has given us this command:* Whoever loves God must also love his brother.*
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Thank you, HLA staff, for a beautiful plaque with this passage mounted in it.