The Gospel Is Not A Slogan To Agree With

It’s late but I wanted to get some thoughts out and onto the page even though the coherency level may be a tad off. A friend just left my house and we had a discussion on how we present the gospel, and how the gospel is presented to us. It seems that the theme for my week has been God teaching me how little we think about why we believe in the things we believe in. Our culture has replaced words with pictures, and ideas with slogans, so that the truth about everything can be grasped in 30 seconds or less. However, I’m afraid that most of the time anything valuable, as it pertains to belief and the way we live, comes through wrestling and hard decision making.

Recently I posted a question on youtube for the presidential debate. My question obviously was a hot button issue because several people have left heated posts about my topic. One post in particular sticks out to me because of the absolute vulgarity of the diologue. Any semblance of understanding or attempt to understand one another was instantly replaced by name calling and profanity. The reason for this, I believe, is that we even converse in word pictures and slogans and not in well thought out ideas and a desire to understand. I think this has even spread into the way that we present the gospel.

The gospel has been reduced to slogans. Christian propaganda if you will.

Get Saved
Be Born Again
Turn or Burn
Get right or get left (ok nobody really says this…i think)

Jesus never had a slogan answer when it came to calling people to follow himself. He dug into their lives and challenged the very things that gave them their identity in order to present them with the choice…follow yourself or follow me. One Pharisee found his identity in birthright and heritage, so Jesus challenged him with the words, “you must be born again.” Or in other words your heritage and bloodline is meaningless, treat it as rubbish and follow me; a hard choice for a very Jewish holy man. In a rich young ruler he found another area of identity and asked for the man to trade position and wealth for poverty and a heart for the poor. The young man went away shaking his head because Jesus had pinpointed where the mans hope was and he could not replace it with Jesus himself. Jesus asked for everything a person valued in exchange for himself and the kingdom of God. Some would give all to gain all and some would not be able to. An adulterous woman would pour costly oil, that in many ways signified her trade, on Jesus dirty feet, and fisherman would leave their nets and livelihood to follow him.

We cannot boil down the gospel anymore to just a prayer or belief system. To believe is to follow and to follow is to lay aside everything we perceive as valuable in order to gain Christ. This is the gospel, it is not easy belief or an agreement with religious tenants. Belief is to repent, or turn from what we were running towards so that we can run towards Christ. I’m afraid that for many people their “fire insurance” is going to turn out badly in the end because as James says, “Faith without works is dead.” We must live the gospel. You cannot come into physical contact with intense fire and not be changed for life and you cannot receive the life of Christ without be changed for life. A true belief will be marked by following and following leads to the places that no one really wants to go.

Some Thoughts On Worship.

I remember the first time, and thus far the only time, I stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon. My friend Mike was moving to LA and I was part of the ride along, fly back crew that got him there. The Grand Canyon was not really on the way, but we decided that when you are that close to a hole in the ground that big and you happen to live in Alabama, you should probably take the chance to see it. It was one of the better decisions I have ever been a part of. The Grand Canyon was breathtaking. I stepped to the rail and looked at a picture that seemingly could have been from another world. It stretches on far as the eye can see and completely swallows the landscape in front of you. A person at the Grand Canyon can’t help but feel small in the wake of such a sight. A person at the Grand Canyon has to stand in wonder. The wonder is as natural as breathing in and out. And I, along with every human being who has ever seen it or ever will see it, was impressed. I did not have to force myself to be impressed, and no one had to pound a Grand Canyon pulpit yelling at me about why I should be impressed, I was impressed just because I was there, standing at the rail with my toes on the edge.

This is what worship should be. Worship is a reaction! Whenever a person encounters the living and powerful God there will always be a reaction, and that reaction will be as natural as breathing in and out . It is a reaction that flows out of God revealing himself to a person or group of people, and those people responding to that revelation. When we are burned it hurts, when we are sad we cry, when we are happy we laugh, and when we see God for who He is there will be an appropriate and natural response. The Bible is full of examples of this. Isaiah felt undone in the sanctuary of God, the disciples trembled and worshiped in the boat after Jesus walked on water, and the centurion wondered and proclaimed Christ as God after the crucifixion. We as the church, and as individual parts of the body, must ask ourselves if we have a vision of God that is so big and personal that it drives us to a natural state of worship, both personally and corporately, and if we do not have this kind of vision we must begin to ask the questions of how to get it, and even more seriously, if we have even missed not having it.

I look around in church settings week after week and wonder if we have lost sight of what the true worship of God is all about. We have built multi-million dollar buildings and filled them with every light, screen, and speaker money can buy so that we can “worship.” But the question that has to be asked is what are we worshiping? I’m afraid that in many instances we are only worshiping our lights, screens, and speakers, and that our worship reaction in these moments is not to the living God but to the experience itself. We are in essence training a generation of experience worshipers. I have stood on stages and seen teenagers sending text messages, stop to raise their hands at the emotional peak of a song only to continue the message when the song was over. There are definitely emotional reactions going on in these settings but the reaction of texting to hand raising back to texting is not a reaction to the living God but to the living rock show masked and marketed as modern worship. This is a tragedy, and byproduct of some modern worship experiences. I wonder sometimes where this phenomenon has come from. It is as if we are trying to hide the fact that God isn’t around, with the slight of hand trick that comes with intelligent lighting and 120 decibels. Like the Wizard in Oz that tried so hard to pretend that fierce image he was projecting was not a scared man behind a screen, we pretend that our wall of sound is the power of God. Perhaps it is our modern day golden calf, made in an attempt to conjure up an emotion that was lost in years past through mere tradition and repetition. I don’t really know the answer, but I do know that without a real glimpse and understanding of our glorious God these emotion based services can only lead to confusion and heartache in the body of Christ. How you may ask? Because as the old football coach Bear Bryant rightly said, “Emotion lasts until you get kicked in the teeth.” A faith based on emotional experience alone is no faith at all. It is in effect building a house upon sand. When the storm rages and blows it will be blown away and only leave heartache and the question, “Where is God?”

Many “traditional” services have the opposite problem. They act like as long as everything said was theologically accurate, God was happy and we worshiped because we said and did all the right things. I hear people say things like, “We base our worship on the word,” as if a rote memorization of scripture is all that God requires in worship. This is at the heart of Pharisaism. The problem with this scenario is that God is not just looking for people to have a correct systematic theology but a heart that is seeking after His own (Ps. 51:17, Isa. 66:2). Worship that comes apart from a heart that is broken and in love with God is not true worship. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees saying, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” (Mk. 7:6) The woman who washed Jesus feet with her hair had a fraction of the biblical knowledge that those in the room had, but she got it and they didn’t. Biblical knowledge is vital but it is useless without a life that has been surrendered.

We must have a fresh vision of God in our lives and in our churches. The honest question to answer in congregations everywhere is do they know God. You cannot worship something that you don’t know anymore than you can give directions to somewhere you’ve never heard of. We must pray that God will reveal himself to us so that we can worship in spirit and in truth.