Every Misery Has an Answer

Thank you all for your kind concern for our welfare over this past weekend. We were both down with the flu - thankfully Lynne's case was mild, but my case was perhaps the worst I've ever experienced. Many of you posted, texted, IM'ed, emailed, and called to offer prayer, comfort, and assistance. Steve Reitz was called on Saturday evening with an urgent request to preach the message Sunday morning, and we are particularly grateful to him. Thanks for being family.

Without giving a descriptive narrative of our year-end "adventure," suffice it to say that I faced a long, varied sequence of miseries. But now in the aftermath, I realized that every misery had an answer. The misery of nausea had an answer - meds to fight it, and facilities just hurried steps away to relieve it. The misery of chills so strong they caused seizure-like shaking had an answer - blankets, thermal clothing, space heater, and even a household furnace. The misery of a desperate desire for it all to just go away had an answer - prayer to the God who is there. And so on. As the illness progressed into new miseries, each misery had an answer. Lynne's care was the answer to many miseries.

The answers to the miseries didn't always make the misery go away instantly. But there was an answer - something available, something to turn to, something that helped. There was no misery, no matter how uncomfortable, that lacked an answer.

Then I thought of those who don't always have answers to their miseries. It was easy for me to imagine what it would have been like if I did not have those answers available.

Some people don't have answers for their physical miseries. Whether we talk about our friends in Kenya or our friends across town, some don't have the blankets or the space heater or the furnace or even the facilities. Some don't have the meds. The answers exist, but some don't have access to the answers. Even if the answers don't immediately eradicate the misery, having access to answers brings hope to the misery.

More importantly, some don't have answers to their spiritual miseries. I always had access to God in prayer (and when you're sick, you tend to pray more raw, more honest, more prayerful prayers than when things are going well). There is the great answer we need to our misery of sin and its penalty, and there are ongoing answers to the full variety of spiritual miseries. But those who do not have a personal relationship with God through Christ don't have that Answer at hand. The Answer exists, but some don't have access to that Answer. Even if that answer doesn't immediately eradicate every spiritual misery, having access to the Answer brings hope to the misery.

Everyone you know has spiritual miseries - perhaps evident, perhaps hidden, but certainly present. However, every misery does have an answer. Our access to the Answer to our spiritual misery is found only through Jesus Christ. A weekend bout with the flu makes it easy to imagine what life would be like without access to the answers to our miseries. Make sure your neighbor knows where to find that Answer.

We Want to Make Sense of This

Like most of you, I have read the array of opinions about the shocking massacre in Newtown, CT, last Friday. People blaming mental illness, people blaming gun laws, people chalking it up to free will, people saying its because we've taken God out of the schools (which is impossible to do!), even a certain religious group blaming the sexual morals of the country. While writing this article, I received an email suggesting that if we just put prayer back in the schools, we can avoid future tragedies.

We want answers - we want to know why. We can accept it just a little bit more if there's some sense to it. But this particular incident is more senseless, more disconcerting than previous tragedies. This one seems to have gotten under our skin more, grieved us more, and worried us more than just about every other.

An acquaintance of mine posted the idea that those who say "everything happens for a reason" are cruel, simplistic liars, and that some things happen for no reason at all. It certainly does feel that way. How can something like this make sense? How can this have happened for a reason under the auspices of a sovereign Being?

Others have posted words of comfort. On top of wanting reasons, we want comfort. We don't want to walk around scared, constantly worried about the welfare of our children going to school every day. We want some assurance that this could never happen to us, and yet we know that the surviving parents in Newtown thought the exact same thing less than a week ago.

I don't know about you, but out of all of this, nothing I've read has been satisfying. (This article won't be satisfying, either.) Most articles oversimplify the problem - but to be honest, the simplicity is appealing. Wouldn't it be nice and manageable if the problem were actually that simple?

My question, though, is not "How could this happen?", but "Why hasn't this happened more?" All the probable culprits, from mental illness to secularization of society to saturating ourselves with first-person-shooter video games, are traceable back to the fallenness of man. This is not to oversimplify the problem - it is complex journey back to the Fall. But since fallenness is the root cause, and all are fallen, why hasn't this happened more?

The answer is Grace. By God's grace, the destructive ferocity of our fallenness has not been allowed to rage unchecked. That is what Hell is - a completely grace-free zone where man’s fallenness is left unrestrained. Although this world is not Heaven (which is a completely grace-filled zone with no fallenness at all to restrain), this world has some measure of God's grace, and that grace protects us from ourselves.

This grace allows us the chance to know and receive Christ. It is the same grace that expelled Adam and Eve from the garden and prevented them from returning to seal their fallen state forever. Without this grace, we would not have the opportunity to repent. When that grace is removed, there will remain no chance at all to repent. This kind of horrible incident is not more frequent precisely because God's grace presently protects us from the depths of how far we've fallen.

I don't know why this happened or how to prevent it from happening again. I can't say the words to ease our fears. But I am grateful for the grace that prevents our fallenness from wreaking the havoc it is capable of.

"Can I join your secret club?"

"Can I join your secret men's club?"

I have heard this question a few times in the last month or so. On the one hand, I love the question, because it means that men are interested in a quiet experiment that we've been conducting. On the other had, I reel back at the question, because our quiet experiment was never intended to be a "secret club" that makes men feel left out.

In the words of Inigo Montoya, "Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

The speaker at the 2011 men's retreat, Ron Bennett, has co-authored a series of studies geared for men called HighQuest (http://www.highquest.info/overview.html). The idea intrigued us, primarily because the format of this series is unlike any men's study we've seen before.

The series is designed for men to disciple one another. The studies are not fill-in-the-blank workbooks, but guides that slowly introduce spiritual disciplines, and keep men in the same passage, but gives them enough freedom to focus on different parts of that passage. So, when the men come together, they have individually wrestled with God's Word without anyone guiding their answers to a foregone conclusion. But, since the men are all in the same passage, they can compare thoughts and learn from one another.

We decided that instead of having a big, church-wide big splash launch of Yet Another Program that Will Revolutionize Your Church But Will Last Only 6 Weeks Before the Enthusiasm Wanes, we decided to start small and without fanfare.

Four of us asked up to three other men to consider forming a HighQuest group. Then we just started meeting, each group at their own pace. In my group, we are four men who didn't really know each other that well coming into it. We have different church backgrounds, different experiences and habits, but the same desire to grow as men in Christ. I get every impression that all the groups are similar.

The feedback has been very positive across the board! I could list dozens of positive comments, but I think the most powerful statement is that after finishing book 1, we had a 100% return rate from all the groups for men wanting to do book 2. (There are 9 books total, about 10 to 12 weeks each.)

Starting in January, we are going to explain more about HighQuest and then invite more men to start more groups. Not a big program, not a big splash, and not the only good way to do men's groups. Just a lot of good experiences with a "quiet experiment."

My thanks to Chad Krizan for being our coordinator - he will be the one to organize the groups and get people started. But once the groups are started, they pretty much run at their own pace, take care of ordering their own books, and so on. This is one part of our continuing drive to realize our vision, which includes intentionally cultivating relationships in order to disciple our world for God's glory.

So, it's not a secret men's group. But we're about to go from "Beta testing" to production for those men who want to join in. And I have both personally experienced and observed in others real spiritual growth and an improving set of spiritual disciplines.

We don't like normal killers

Have you ever noticed how the bad guys in movies are often portrayed to have particularly abnormal attributes? They are scarred or have been through some horrible, traumatic event or were abused. They look different, they talk differently, and their thinking is radically different than "normal." They've got to be psychopaths. Being albino is a repeated excuse - apparently that affects your moral compass somehow. In movies, we make the bad guys really abnormal. The truth is: we don't like normal killers.

We like killers who are scary because they are different than we are - we don't like killers who are scary because they are the same as we are. We want them removed from us. We want to think that we are very different from people who would do such things. We don't want to entertain the possibility that someone like me could do such a thing given the same moral make up that I have ... or that I could do such a thing given the moral make up that I have. We're better than that, aren't we? So, we make killers in movies categorically worse than we are so that we can be better than they are.

In my opinion, the scariest killers in movies are the ones who are more like us.

Consider the tragic events of last weekend with Jovan Belcher killing Kasandra Perkins, the mother of his daughter, and then taking his own life. I'm not commenting on Belcher - I'm commenting on society and its reaction to Belcher. There has been a lot of talk about what kind of person he was - heated debate, in some cases. In some of those discussions, people want him to be monstrous so that we can demonize him, distance ourselves from him, and not face the scarier kind of killer - someone who is like us.

No one is all good or all bad. We all have redeeming qualities, and we all have horrid ugliness in our hearts (that may or may not be on display for others to see). Without passing judgment on what kind of person Belcher was overall, we are more like him than we want to admit. We get angry. We have arguments. We sometimes feel like hurting someone, or hurting ourselves. We share the heart sin that was manifested in his life as action sin.

I don't have a $1.9 million contract, I'm not a public figure, and I didn't claw my way into pro sports through the unlikely path of going undrafted. And yet, I am more like Belcher than makes me comfortable. I don't need to demonize Belcher in order to feel better about myself. What I need is Jesus, pure and simple ... and only. I need Jesus, but not to make me different than Belcher - I need Jesus to make me different than me.

Getting the Point

On a few occasions, we have discussed in this column various methods of effective Bible study. We've talked about the value of reading in the literary context, understanding the cultural context, reading a passage multiple times, online study tools, marking up your Bible, looking for structure, and even creating the right environment in which to do your studying. There's one more that I find highly valuable. It's remarkably simple, but amazingly challenging.

The method is to write out one summary sentence that encapsulates the passage I'm studying. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yeah.

The idea is to get one full, grammatically correct sentence that says what the passage says. It focuses on what the passage says, and covers the idea adequately. The sentence is not more broad than the passage, nor is it more narrow. The sentence cannot list all the details, but it does cover them in some way. Here's the hard part - the sentence is not to be a long, complex, regurgitation of the passage, with a dozen subclauses, hyphens, and semicolons. Rather, it is a straightforward, hopefully even elegant, encapsulation of the passage.

The passage being studied could be just a phrase, a paragraph, and entire chapter, or even an entire book. The method works no matter the size of the passage.

If you can do this adequately, then you understand the passage! If your sentence misses the mark, is too broad or too narrow, or has the wrong focus, then you don't fully understand the passage, yet. What a great study tool! The process of developing this one sentence forces you to really analyze what is being said until you "get it."

The best way to do this is to identify the subject and the complement. Uh oh, Middle School grammar terms! Very simply, the subject is what the passage is about. What is the thing that the passage is talking about? But, be as specific as the passage. For example, "God" is usually too broad - the passage is rarely talking about all of God. Usually it's talking about His love or His compassion or His faithfulness, etc.

For an example, let's look at James 2:14-17:


James 2:14 What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? 17 Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.

What is the subject? Some might say "works." Others might say "faith," or even "faith and works." If you look carefully, you see that it is more about "faith" than "works," but even "faith" is too broad. It's not about the entire topic of faith. This passage is about "what kind of faith is a saving faith?" That's the subject being discussed. If we say this paragraph is about "works," then we won't understand what it's saying. If we say it's about "faith," then we're not specific enough, and won't fully understand the passage.

After you find the subject, find the complement. The complement is what is said about the subject. What does the passage have to say about the specific subject we identified? So, what does James 2:14-17 say about the kind of faith that is a saving faith? In this case, it's a little bit odd - what is said about the subject is what is not true about the subject.

The complement here is, "not a faith that is without works." That is what is said about the subject, "What kind of faith is a saving faith?" Answer? "Not a faith without works!" (The next paragraph answers the question in positive terms, but we learn in this paragraph something important that is not true about our subject, which is just as important to know!)

So, a summary sentence might look like this, The kind of faith that is a saving faith (subject) is not a faith that is without works (complement). That is what this paragraph is about - whatever kind of faith is a saving faith, we know here what kind of faith is not a saving faith. The sentence encapsulates all that the passage says, and nothing more. If you can create a summary sentence like that, you get what the passage is about (and what it is not about!).

Some people read James 2 and think it's about works, and then they get confused because it sounds like we can be saved by works. But ... they got they wrong subject to begin with, so of course they will draw confusing conclusions. The subject is about a type of faith that saves, and the what is said about it here says that faith without works is not a saving faith. Then, if we did the same exercise for the following paragraph, we would learn what kind of faith is a saving faith (a faith that has works). We are still saved by faith, but not every kind of faith is a saving faith. The faith that results in works is the kind of faith that saves.

Creating a summary sentence helps us to see this important truth, and to avoid the common error of thinking James teaches salvation by works.

Thank You for the Toys

This week, I got to speak for a few minutes about Thanksgiving with the students in our preschool, Grace Garden, and they taught me a thing or two about Thanksgiving right back.

I asked them, "What are some gifts that God has given us?" - fishing, of course, for things like family, food, homes, and so on. I knew one of the answers would be "toys!" And sure enough on both days, that was the very first answer. And on both occasions, I said, "What else besides toys?", and the response was "Toys!" After another "what else?" I got a list of specific toys. My fishing expedition was not yielding the species of fish I intended.

But later, after thinking about their answer and brewing on why kids are "so materialistic," I realized that they were exactly right. God is ultimately responsible for us having toys. He gives us the resources to be able to afford them. He gives us the families and friends who are kind enough to give them. He gave us safety to be able to enjoy them. And ... He gives us the toys.

If toys are a good thing, and they certainly can be, then they come from God, who is the giver of all good things (James 1:17), and we can be thankful to Him for them. In all my desire to be "spiritual" about the lesson, I overlooked the simple truth - so simple that children see it plainly.

Certainly, toys (kids' toys or grown-up toys like electronics) can become idols, of course. But for the good that they can be, it is not materialistic or non-spiritual to thank God for these things, also. In fact, being thankful for them can help us keep them in perspective, so that they don't become idols.

During my last trip to Kenya, we spent an evening visiting the same family we visit every time we go - Reverend Kute Wellington and his wife Margaret. They live in a hut with no running water or electricity, so every time we go, as the evening wears on, we have trouble seeing one another in the enveloping darkness. Except this last time. The evening progressed, the darkness came, but we could still see one another! And then I realized - the Wellingtons had electricity, for the first time in their lives.

I mentioned how great it was to be able to see them, and "Momma Margaret" proceeded to thank God for electricity. She repeated that praise several times throughout the night. I've had electricity all my life, and I had never in all my years thanked God for it. I had never thanked God for running water. I had never thanked Him for hot water, until my first trip and having to shower daily without it!

My Kenyan hostess and the kids of Grace Garden have much to teach me (the "pastor" and the "missionary"!) about Thanksgiving. And I'm thankful for them for teaching me.

No Matter How You Voted (or Abstained)...

As I read the social media of my friends and acquaintances across the political spectrum, I see just about the full gamut of emotions about the elections this week. Some are elated (a few are even giddy) while others are angry, some are disappointed while others are pleased, some say, "I told you so!" and others say, "Mark my words!" I won't comment on which set of emotions people should have, but my observation is about the intensity with which they experience them - positive or negative.

The question I wrestled with was why am I experiencing these emotions with such intensity? What is it that's going on deep down inside of me that results in that intensity? What are the basic needs of my soul that are being met or unmet, which then manifests itself at the surface as a set of emotions? All our emotions are expressions of deep matters of the soul that bubble up to the outside. For example, a man may become very angry when insulted because deep in his soul, he is unsure of why he matters in this world, and the insult puts a hot poker on that sore spot. So, what is going on deep in my soul that eventually finds its way up as an emotion?

Whether our emotions are joyous or dejected, what is going on in the soul?

The intensity of the emotions either way tells me that we are expecting government to satisfy something our souls need. If someone is happy with the results, they think that one political way will meet that deep need. If someone is unhappy with the results, they thought that the other political way would have met that need. This is an oversimplification of a very complex human machine, but in my observation, this is a significant reality. I doubt there are few political purists out there whose response is merely relative to a political theory - I think most people are operating from the felt needs of their souls, even though we couch it in terms of political theory.

The only problem is that no human institution, no government, no business, no civic club, no school can satisfy what our souls need. To look to the government, or a political system, or a politician to bring us the real peace that we want, the real sense of "rightness," the sense that things are actually under control, is to look for something only God can give, but to look for it in a source other than God.

Our peace, our joy, our security will not be met, or dashed, by the election this week. Perhaps the intensity of our responses comes from a false expectation of the opposite, whether we responded with hope or despair.

No matter what kind of government, what kind of leadership, what kind of economy, or what kind of job market we have, our task is the same: Be absolutely committed to advancing the Kingdom of God in every situation. If the government is as we prefer, our task is to work for Kingdom purposes. If the government is not as we prefer, our task is to work for Kingdom purposes. God's Kingdom is not confined to a particular kind of government, and His Kingdom workers have their responsibilities already defined for them in every circumstance.

If you are experiencing strong emotions either way, examine your heart for what is really going on in your soul. What are the God-given needs you have that are to be filled only with God-provided means? Furthermore, take a breath and remember your calling - God's Kingdom.