transactions

I used to make the same mistake that Simon the Sorcerer made: I thought of my faith as transactional. Look at this from Acts 8:18-20: “When Simon saw that the Spirit was given at the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money and said, ‘Give me also this ability so that everyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.’

“Peter answered: ‘May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money!’”

Transactional faith is when I think I can get things from God by giving things to God, or doing things for him. Here are some ways I used to do that:

·       I thought my participation in worship, Bible Study and other church activities could offset some of my sins.

·       I thought, after sinning, that I had to do something good to prove to God that I was sorry before I dared to talk to him again.

·       I thought the amount of money I put in the plate could make me better than other church members.

·       I thought I could bind God by his own promises – you know, “Lord, you promised if I did X you bless that. Well, I did it. Where’s my blessing?”

·       I bargained with God in prayer. “Lord, if you just do this thing, I promise to do this other thing.”

It’s easy to make faith transactional because all of our other relationships are. All human relationships, even our closest ones, involve us doing certain things to win favor. But there isn’t a thing I can give God that he needs, or a thing I can do for him that will help him out. God is completely sufficient in and of himself.

But here’s the blessing: just like I can’t earn God’s love, or grace, or salvation, I can’t un-earn it either. None of that depends on my resume or record. It depends on God being true to his own character, and there isn’t a surer thing than that.

Transactional faith is attractive because I understand the rules of a transaction. But real faith is infinitely reassuring because its faith not in God’s greed, but in his love. And God is Love.

covered ears

I walked into my boss’s office the other day with bad news. He saw the expression on my face and said, “I don’t want to hear it.”

That’s how we often are about things we don’t want to deal with. When the doc says we should change our habits, or our accountant warns we’re not on a good path, sometimes we want to ignore what we hear.

But we don’t ever want to be like the church leaders in Acts 7:55-57: “ But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, ‘I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’

“At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him.”

Honestly, those leaders sound like schoolchildren, covering their ears and yelling because they hear something they don’t like. It would be funny but for how serious it is. 

But imagine this. Imagine you’ve put on trial one of God’s servants, a man filled with the Holy Spirit. And imagine, as you accuse this man, he is granted a vision of Jesus himself. Wouldn’t that seem like affirmation of his mission? Wouldn’t you stop and think?

They didn’t. Instead, their rage and hatred at this suggestion they could be wrong was too much. Stephen had to die.

It’s a warning to me never to become so invested in my position that I can’t hear the truth, to never become so convinced of my own rightness that I let my pride kill me.

Because that’s what these leaders risked. They put themselves in opposition to God’s kingdom. Unless something changed before they died, their intransigence cost them everything.

opposition

There’s a telling story in Acts 6 that explains why a lot of people lose heart with ministry. Here it is, from verses 8-11: 

“Now Stephen, a man full of God’s grace and power, performed great wonders and signs among the people. Opposition arose, however, from members of the Synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called)—Jews of Cyrene and Alexandria as well as the provinces of Cilicia and Asia —who began to argue with Stephen. But they could not stand up against the wisdom the Spirit gave him as he spoke.

“Then they secretly persuaded some men to say, ‘We have heard Stephen speak blasphemous words against Moses and against God.’”

When ministry succeeds, Satan takes notice, and when he takes notice he sends in his people. And since Satan is the father of lies, his people will use lies to take a ministry down.

I have a couple of thoughts about this. The first one is no-one that I know of has ever attacked me over anything I’ve done for God. Does that mean I haven’t been effective enough for Satan to care?

The other is, I wish I had back all the snarky things I’ve ever said about another Christian. I’d hate to think Satan was using me to help hold them back.

I read a saying once that went something like this: “Be the kind of Christian that, when your feet hit the floor in the morning, Satan says, ‘Oh crap, he’s up.’” I dismissed it as too simple at the time, but I think now whoever came up that might have been onto something. I’d rather scare the naysayers than be used by them.

fighting God

Some scary advice this morning from Acts 5. Peter and John were arrested for evangelizing, broken out of jail by an angel, caught back in the temple, and on trial. A wise elder called for a recess and advised his fellow accusers this way, from verses 38-39: 

“Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.”

It’s good advice, and it makes me think of all the times I’ve pushed back on someone who was trying to serve the way I wouldn’t. You know what I’m talking about: those people who want to stretch us too far in worship, or risk too much in outreach. The ones who want to practice the most radical kind of spiritual ministries. The ones who just don’t seem to show much common sense, who just aren’t practical, who don’t seem to understand all the possible bad outcomes.

But here’s the thing: what if they’re right? What if that is really what God wants us to do?

As this man advised, misguided human efforts are doomed to collapse under their own weight. But God-directed activity will happen whether I oppose it or support it. 

There have been times when good people have left our church because they were frustrated by the slow pace of ministry. There have been times when good people at work have given up and gone along with the culture because they didn’t get the support they needed.

In any of those cases, was I in the position of opposing God? Did I fail a test? Did that Spirit-directed ministry plant and flourish somewhere else, to the detriment of my organizations?

I hope not. But it makes me want some do-overs.

This morning I wonder if there isn’t less risk in being bold with our ministries and willingly throwing our support to all of the things that good Christ-followers want to try. After all, the price of being wrong could be fighting God himself.

ordinary

There are a lot of reasons not to do things, but one of the most common is that we think we’re not the right person. We’re not highly educated. We’re not very experienced. We’re young, or at least younger than the people we perceive as leaders.

But Peter and John, a couple of fishermen away from the sea, healed a man and were put on trial for it. And all of those educated, experienced, older men couldn’t figure it out. In fact, it says this in Acts 4:13: “When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.”

Unschooled, ordinary men and women have always been God’s choice as he goes about his work. Oh, he uses the other kind, too, people with doctorates and long resumes, but you don’t read about them much in the Bible.

No, God loves the world, mundus in Latin, the root of our English word mundane. God loves the ordinary. He loves the Joe and Jane Lunchbuckets who wake up early every morning to go to their shift-work jobs. He loves the farmer grandpas and inner city grandmas who worked for decades and are still working because they want so many things for their families. He loves the soccer moms with their frantic school-and-work schedules, and the ladder-climbing dads straining to get on the rung that means security. He loves the single men and women who bounce between inclusion and loneliness, and the childless couples who pour out their love on people who aren’t family. He loves this world in all of its day-to-day normality, and all of the men and women in it, with no regard to schooling or status.

It’s a huge encouragement, because it means I don’t have to be any more than what I am to serve him, and win his love. He already loves me, and has plenty of uses for me if I’ll just step up. No training necessary. No experience required. I can start amazing those so called “betters” immediately.

Because I have the same thing Peter and John had. I’ve been with Jesus.

expectations

I think sometimes I sell Jesus short. I'm like the crippled man Peter and John ran into on their way to afternoon prayers. Here's the nub of the story, from Acts 3:4-6: 

“Peter looked straight at him, as did John. Then Peter said, 'Look at us!' So the man gave them his attention, expecting to get something from them.

Then Peter said, 'Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.'"

This beggar wanted coins. He wanted a little something to buy food with. He accepted his disability; all of his dreams were now constrained within what he saw as an unchangeable reality.

But then, grace. The power of Jesus, given to his disciples to change lives and touch hearts, gave this man so much more than he ever imagined. 

That's me. I ask for daily bread and healing from my sniffles. I pray for incremental changes, small steps. I don't ask Jesus to blow up my life, because I don't think it's possible. So I limit not only my own experience, but what I contribute to God's people and the world.

I want more. I want Jesus to snatch me up into the glorious whirlwind of his redeeming work. I want to know firsthand his march through time and history, conquering and freeing and blessing as he goes. I want to be in the front ranks, at the tip of the spear. I want to be there when lives and changed and souls are won and evil goes down.

It's so easy to be complacent, to want another day of routine punctuated by pleasant meals and easy fellowship. It's easy to accept what I have as a blessed life, because I don't expect more.

But I'm too young to start coasting. God may choose to take me soon, but I probably have decades left to live. It can mean something, even in the same house and at the same job. God's kingdom goes forward here in Orange City, where there are sad and lonely and confused and hurt people.

Like the crippled man, I expect a little something to meet today's need. I don't expect Jesus to strike off my chains, knock down all the fences, and set me free to run after him. 

I don't expect that, but he can do it. I think all he's waiting for is for me to ask.

corrupt

Why do we need the Holy Spirit? I found an unexpected answer in the familiar story of Pentecost this morning. That event is recounted for us in Acts 2, and most of the way through the chapter we find this, in verse 40:

“With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’”

This is a verse packed full of amazing stuff. First off, it says Peter used many other words. He’d already been speaking from verse 14 to 49, that famous Passover message that most of us only know bits of because we zone out while reading it. But that wasn’t enough - he used many other words.

And he used them for a specific purpose: to beg. Peter used many other words to warn and plead it the people. This was really important to him. And what was he so worked up about? He was worried about the danger they were in. He begged them to save themselves from this corrupt generation.

The first few verses of this chapter tell us that this is a huge crowd, made up of God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. Although they didn’t know Jesus yet, these were good people who tried to obey God’s commands. Yet Peter knew that wherever they were from, the culture was different than God’s perfect plan. So he warned them of the people around them.

What’s so bad about our national culture? Why as Christians can’t we jump into it as much as we’d like to? Because non-Christian culture does three things.

It diverts us from Jesus. Every minute we spend in a bar or coffee shop talking politics or in a movie theater watching Avengers, every minute with non-godly people on non-godly topics, we’re not paying attention to Jesus. In fact, we’re soaking in ideas from people who don’t get them from the Bible.

It also coarsens our spiritual sensitivity - our consciences grow calluses. We get so used to profanity and revealing clothing and drunkenness and every kind of relationship that we forget how appalling this all is to God.

Even worse, our culture makes sin look positive. In fact, it makes our faith look negative. We can no longer speak truth about gender and marriage and morality. If we want to fit in we support transgender ideology and accept all other religions as equal to our own. We think hats meant to evoke genitalia are cool. We don’t want to stand against Planned Parenthood anymore because that organization is the darling of our political party.

Peter knew our culture could kill us - the wages of sin, after all, are death. And he knew we couldn’t really save ourselves. The only thing we can do is make the choice about where to put our faith and hope.

Salvation doesn’t come on Air Force One, as Chuck Colson famously said, or from any other power or idea in our nation. It comes from the cross of Jesus Christ. And, in this culture, we’re never going to see the cross without the Holy Spirit.