POWER PLAY

Over the last few years there has been a heart-wrenching number of high-profile leaders who have been exposed for abusing the power of their position. From Hollywood moguls to politicians and even church leaders, it seems that power really does corrupt. And yet, I cannot help but wonder whether the problem is power itself, or our warped perspective of what it means to lead. After all, electricity is a wonderful thing, but misused it can be deadly. In the same way, in any community or organization there will always be a need for someone to take the lead, but when a person misuses their position to control or abuse someone they’re leading, their power becomes destructive.

Many of us view leadership like a ladder. The higher you climb, the more power and influence you have. This perspective fuels a sort of superiority complex, where the people at the top can begin to see themselves as more important that those beneath them. And they can begin to treat those below them as nothing more than a means to an end, as people who are there to serve them.

But that’s not how God calls us to lead. Whereas the world tells us that the greatest deserve to be served, the way of Jesus tells us that the greatest in God’s Kingdom are the servants of all. In other words, the ladder is flipped upside down. Rather than climbing up, we climb down and the further we go in leadership, the more people we have to serve.

Jesus didn’t just teach this, he modeled it. He lived a life in service of others. He cared for the needs of the hurting even though they couldn’t repay him. He spoke up for those whom society ignored. He restored those whom society said were beyond redemption. He even washed his own disciples’ feet to drive the point home that they were to live a life of service, and shortly thereafter he modeled this value in the most powerful way ever: by sacrificing his own life on the cross to cleanse us of our sins.

So may we stop viewing leadership as a means to achieving our own goals, and treat it instead as a call to serve others. Because if service is beneath us, then leadership is beyond us.

“You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Mark 10:42-45

A Christmas Curveball

I wrote these words a year ago, but they seem as timely today as they did then. 

I never cease to be amazed at how God’s word, penned thousands of years ago, can speak directly into our current circumstances. Take the Christmas story for instance. It’s a story we’ve heard countless times before, especially Luke’s version that Linus recounted in Charlie Brown’s Christmas Special. It starts like this:

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. (James 2:1-5)

This is just the set up for the story. What follows are the parts we typically focus on: a baby born in a stable, angelic choirs and visits from startled shepherds and Eastern astrologers. But this morning, the opening lines of the Christmas story are what captured my attention. Because the Christmas story starts with a political edict that threw a wrench in Joseph and Mary’s plans.

Can you imagine what an inconvenience that edict from Caesar Augustus must have been? “Wait, you mean we have to travel 90 miles to Bethlehem at the tail end of Mary’s pregnancy all because of a census?!” I suspect that both Joseph and Mary had some not so holy words for the guy who made that decision.

And yet, despite how unexpected and inconvenient Caesar’s call for a census might have been for Joseph and Mary, it didn’t take God by surprise or thwart His plans. In fact, hundreds of years prior, God had prophesied that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2). So Caesar’s call for a census wasn’t an inconvenience to God. It was integral to His plans. He used the decision of an unbelieving ruler to fulfill His redemptive purposes.

Which brings me to this Christmas. Because, let’s be honest, there are some governmental edicts that threaten to upset our best laid Christmas plans. And this could stir up a lot of consternation for us.

“What do you mean I can’t gather with my extended family?”
“What do you mean we have to wear facemasks if we gather indoors?!”
“What right do our governing officials have to try and limit our celebrations?!”

May I simply remind you that God isn’t spun out by this Christmas curveball. He isn’t limited by the limitations that we’ve been forced to endure due to Covid. And as the Christmas story reminds us, He even works through the decisions of unbelieving governmental officials.

So don’t grow weary or lose heart this Christmas. God is at work despite the disruption to our lives. And even though it might be inconvenient to us, this curveball may be the very thing He uses to further His redemptive plan in our lives, just as He did in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago.

Sitting with Another's Pain

 Many of us have a hard time tolerating other people’s pain because it makes us uncomfortable. So rather than sitting with them as they struggle and allowing them the space to process, we try to fix it or reframe the narrative for them in an effort to alleviate their suffering (and ours).

One gift we can give to hurting people is to allow them to feel without giving into the urge to fix it. Hurting people often need our presence more than our solutions. And, ironically, more often than not if we allow them space and time and companionship while they process their pain, they will actually regain their footing far faster than if we try to force them to their feet to make ourselves feel better.

Appetite for Self-Destruction

My son is addicted to Takis. For those of you without a teenager, Takis are a rolled up tortilla chip with a toxic blend of spices that are guaranteed to cook your intestines. My boy will eat them until his tastebuds give out and then complain when his stomach hurts, getting irritable at us as if we’re the ones who made him eat himself sick. Ironically, even though he knows his favorite snack hurts him, he still craves them.

It’s laughable, but then I realize I’m not much different from my boy. No, I might not be addicted to nuclear tortilla chips, but it’s the things that I consume with my mind that can get toxic. When I get in the car my natural inclination is to turn on talk radio, or to spend the final moments at night doom-scrolling through social media, and then I wonder why I wake up feeling frustrated and irritable. Perhaps I should take my own advice and be more discerning about what I consume.

What do you crave that ends up hurting you?

GRACE SOUNDS LIKE FALLING STONES

The crowd was out for blood. Some religious leaders had caught a couple in the act of adultery and saw in their shame an opportunity to trap the pesky rabbi who’d been stirring up so much trouble for them.

Admittedly, the leaders weren’t all that concerned with caring for the couple – their guilt was obvious and the law left little room for grace. Nor were they truly after justice. If they had been they would have brought both guilty parties, but they didn’t need both for what they had in mind, so they let the man go and dragged the woman through the streets of Jerusalem. She was the perfect bait for their trap.

As they made their way towards the Temple, curious onlookers joined the procession like spectators in a 1st century version of a televised car-chase. They didn’t know what was going to happen, but they didn’t want to miss the spectacle.

When the mob reached Temple Mount and they located the rabbi known as Jesus, the religious leaders forced the guilty woman to stand before him as they aired her sins publicly.

“Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery and, as you know, the Law of Moses clearly states that we should stone her to death for her act. So what do you suggest we do?”

The trap was set. Now all they had to do was wait for Jesus to step into it. No matter what he said, they would benefit. If he agreed with their assessment and called for her death, he would be affirming their authority as the guardians of the Law. But if he argued for grace, as they suspected he would, he’d be openly contradicting the Law of Moses and, in so doing, he would expose himself as a false teacher.

What they didn’t expect was that Jesus would remain silent. Instead of talking his way into their trap, he knelt down and began to draw in the dirt. It was obviously a play for time, so they pressed him for an answer.

Finally, after several moments, Jesus stood up and looked them in the eye as he delivered a very unexpected judgement: “Let any of you who has never sinned throw the first stone.” And then he knelt back down and continued drawing in the dust as his words spread through the crowd.

After a few moments, the first stone hit the dirt, dropped from the hand of an elderly man as he turned and walked away. More stones quickly followed as Jesus’ words swept away their bloodlust and exposed their hypocrisy. After several minutes, only the woman remained standing before Jesus.

Looking up from the ground where he’d been writing, Jesus addressed her for the first time, “Where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?”

She glanced around at the stones sitting in the dirt where the mob had been. “No one, sir,” she replied, the relief evident in her voice.

“Then I don’t condemn you either.
Now go and leave your life of sin.”

*****

It dawned on me a few years ago that there was actually someone in the crowd who could have thrown the first stone. Jesus. He was without sin. He could have picked up a rock and thrown it and then the feeding frenzy would have been on.

But he didn’t. He chose grace over punishment. And that right there is the breathtaking audacity of the gospel in a nutshell. The only one who is worthy to pass judgement on us chooses to give us grace instead. We don’t deserve it. We couldn’t do enough good things to make up for our mistakes. But He chooses to give us grace anyway. And that’s what makes his grace a gift, not a prize we have to earn.

So if you’ve been holding Jesus as arms-length because you’re ashamed of the way you’ve been living, or you think you have to get your act together to be worthy of his love, may I be the first to tell you that you’ve misunderstood the heart of God. We may be guilty, but He’s way more interested in caring for us than condemning us. He’s not some self-righteous God who finds a perverse joy in throwing our sins in our face. Rather, He’s the self-sacrificing God who took our punishment upon himself so that we can be restored back into relationship with Him.

So don’t run from Him. Run too Him. Just know that if you're holding onto stones of your own, He's going to ask you to drop them, too. You don’t need to carry that weight around anymore.

Tough Love

 

Can I make a confession?

I am way harder on my own kids than I am on other people’s kids. I see this most acutely when I coach. It doesn’t matter what sport it is, invariably I am more strict with my own sons that I am with the other boys. It’s so obvious to me (and to them) that there have been several times when I’ve mentally told myself that I probably shouldn't coach my boys again so that I won’t be an impediment to their love of sports.

It’s not just sports, either. When my sons are hanging with their friends and they all start misbehaving, invariably I call out my boys first and most forcefully. When one of my sons points out this imbalance, as they often do, I quickly justify my actions because “I’m not their parent, but I’m yours.” And there is some truth to that. However, underneath that excuse is a deeper, less altruistic motivation: I’m hard on my sons because they reflect upon me.

I am patient and grace-filled with other kids because their actions are their own, but my kids’ actions reflect upon me. More often than not, the energy behind my response has more to do with my own embarrassment than with training them up in the way they should go. Truth be told, I’m often a better, kinder role model to other people’s kids than I am to my own. And I don’t want to mistreat my sons or tear them down in the name of building them up.

So I’m going to keep parenting my boys, keep calling them on their bad behavior. But I’m also going to strive to remove my own embarrassment from the equation. I’m going to give myself grace for my kids being imperfect so that I can give them the grace they need to grow. After all, why would I expect perfection from them when I’m still a work in progress?

One More Reason Why We Can Trust the Bible

 

One More Reason Why We Can Trust the Bible

This weekend, we discussed a number of reasons why we can trust the Bible. After all, “the Bible tells me so,” doesn’t mean a whole lot if we can’t trust it. Sadly, due to technical issues, we were unable to use many of the images I’d prepared, and I had to omit an entire section from my notes. So below are the images from this weekend as well as a section on how the Bible was put together.

Pastor Eric

Text	Number of manuscripts	Years between original and earliest known manuscript
Plato’s Republic	7	1,200 years
Caesar’s Gallic Wars	10	1,000 years
Homer’s Iliad	643	500 years
The New Testament	5,600 in Greek (24,000 total)	Less than 100 years (Gospel of John - 30 yrs)

The picture above shows the 63,779 cross-references in the Bible. The white bars along the bottom represent each Bible chapter, Gen. 1 - Rev. 22. The line’s color shows the reference’s distance from the other. A cross-reference is a scripture that references another scripture. Had the Bible been written by one person or at one time this would still be amazing; however, the Bible was written by 40 authors over the span of 1,500 years on 3 different continents.

Question: How did the Church determine which books should be included in the Bible, and which ones omitted?

One argument that people use to undermine the trustworthiness of the Bible has to do with how the early church determined which books to include in the Bible. After all, there were other supposed gospels and writings that were floating around out there when the Catholic Church convened a council to determine the Books of the Bible. So how do we know that the 66 books that we have in the Bible are the right ones?

It’s a fair question. In fact, there were several councils to discuss this topic, including the Council of Rome (382AD) and the Council of Carthage (397AD) in which they affirmed the 66 books that make up the Bible. However, it is misleading to suggest that they arbitrarily chose the books to include. For one, the Old Testament had already been universally accepted as scripture long before Jesus was born. As for the New Testament books, the councils did not arbitrarily pick which books they felt were inspired. Rather, they merely affirmed the authority that these texts had already been given within the Christian community from the earliest days of their writing. The 27 books of the New Testament had been passed around, treated as scripture, used in the early church's worship services. And all of the texts were either written by the apostles or by someone who was closely connected to the apostles. The only book that even remotely deviates from that is the book of Hebrews, because we’re not sure who wrote Hebrews. And there was some discussion during the councils about this, but eventually they decided to include Hebrews as well, because it had been treated as scripture by the early church, so they affirmed the same.

But what about the so called Gnostic Gospels? Why didn’t the councils include them? Because they weren’t even written during the time of the early church. They were written in the 300’s and we have no idea who the authors were. It would be like someone showing up today and saying, I have a fifth gospel. Mary Magdalene wrote it and you should include it. We’d dismiss that person’s claim on the spot. Likewise, the councils had no problem saying, “There is no comparison here. These 27 texts were both penned by the earliest believers and they were treated as scripture by the early church, so we’re going to simply affirm their authority as scripture, not arbitrarily pick which ones we like and ignore the rest.”

So that's how the books of the Bible were decided upon.