Month: September 2016

What Will It Take?

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
Don’t blame God when you are tempted!  God cannot be tempted by evil, and he doesn’t use evil to tempt others.  We are tempted by our own desires that drag us off and trap us.  Our desires make us sin, and when sin is finished with us, it leaves us dead.
 
 
 
 
            Many times we face adversity because of situations beyond our control.  But sometimes we face suffering not because of the circumstances which God brings in our lives, but because of our own unwise response to difficulty.  We compound our problems by blaming our troubles on others, and refusing to face-up to what God is trying to teach us.  It started in the Garden.  Adam said to God:  The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate. (Genesis 3:12).  He implies that he would have remained innocent if God had not put Eve in the garden with him. The blame-shifting in the Garden continues today. Our bruised hearts send us desperately looking for someone else to point to when we are confronted with our own trouble. There must be someone else—our spouse, sibling, parent, boss, co-worker, pastor, friend, or even God who is to blame. 
 
            We are sometimes so desperate to justify ourselves that we believe illogical and irrational things. You have likely heard these statements, and even said them yourselves (at least in your head): 
  • “I wouldn’t lose my temper if my co-workers were easier to get along with, or if my kids behaved better, or if my spouse were more considerate.” 
  • “I would be a patient person if I didn’t have so many things to do, and if the people around me weren’t so slow and incompetent!” 
  • “I would not worry about the future if my life were just a little more secure—if I had more money, and no health problems.”
  • “My spiritual life would be so much more better and I would struggle with sin less if the music in the worship service was more lively, or if the pastor did a better job.”
  •  “I would submit to my parents if they were not so out of touch.”  Or, “I would follow if we just had some decent leadership.”
  • “It’s not my fault that the people around me don’t know what they’re doing!”
  • “If you knew what I’ve been through, you would know that I could never forgive that person [or God].”
  • “It’s the people around me who start the conversations. There’s no way to avoid hearing what others happen to say. And when others ask me questions, I can’t avoid sharing what I know.” 
  • “I’ll never be happy as long as so-and-so is in my life.”
  • “I would be more generous if God gave me more money.”
The Holy Spirit has been bringing to me one question over and over this week:  What will it take?  We need to fill in the blanks of that question: 
What will it take for our churches to stop making excuses? 
What will it take to quit blame-shifting on others? 
What will it take to trust God and step out in faith and share Christ with our neighbors?
What will it take to stop worrying about what other people think and start doing what God thinks? 
What will it take to look at faith as a dynamic relationship with Jesus instead of just a static thing you possess? 
What will it take to read our Bibles as if our lives depended on it? 
What will it take for church members to serve instead of sit? 
What will it take to reach our communities with love for Christ? 
What will it take to grow in Christ?  What will it take? 
If you are in a circumstance you don’t like, what should you do about it?  What will it take to face down the difficult stuff you don’t like in your life?
 
Don’t blame God.
 
            God cannot be tempted.  God hates sin and disobedience; it does not appeal to him in the least.  It is a moral impossibility for God to even consider attempting to do evil because he is perfectly holy.  Since God cannot be tempted by evil, he therefore cannot tempt people toward evil.
 
            We practice blame-shifting because it is a cheap, easy, and pathetic way of absolving ourselves from responsibility for our own unwise choices, words, and actions.  There are only two ways of living with guilt:  either we humble ourselves through confession and repentance; or, we blame the sin on someone else.
 
            God does test us to improve our character and to bring us toward greater spiritual maturity, but he does not force us to make bad, immoral, or evil choices because of hard circumstances.  God may have very well brought the trial and testing into our lives; but how we respond to it is up to us.
 
The source of temptation is us.
 
            The real culprit behind temptation is one’s own personal desire.  It is our own strong intense have-to-do-it, have-to-say-it, and have-to-have-it desires which are at the root of temptation.  We all have legitimate needs and desires for love, security, companionship, and to make a difference in the world.  But we can often seek illegitimate means to satisfy those needs.  We are “enticed” to meet our needs through temptation toward sin.  Temptation lures us to satisfy our legitimate needs in illegitimate ways. 
 
            Temptation comes in many forms, but it always gives us amnesia about who we really are, and pushes out any thought of consequences.  It just looks like such a good way to deal with my anger, my anxiety, my impatience, my spiritual apathy, my bitterness, and my lack of spiritual growth.  Ah, blame-shifting feels so good; it gets the guilt-monkey off my back – at least for a time.  But like a bad addiction, blame-shifting has to occur in a bigger dose after a shorter duration of time.  Before you know it we are hooked.  The temptation has enticed us and we have taken the bait.  Like a fish-eyed follower of evil we succumb to the lust for ambition, revenge, sex, power, fame, and money.
 
The result of giving-in to temptation is ultimately death.
 
            Temptation, like a smooth operator, comes along and gives us a slick pitch about how our troubles can be taken care of through blaming others, even God.  And, all of sudden, like a hungry fish looking to be satisfied, we take the bait and go to bed with the idea.  We give in to sin.  Now it is within us.  Like a fetus, the small sin grows and grows inside us.  Eventually, this pregnancy must end.  But instead of giving birth to life, there is the agony of death.
 

 

            Every single one of us struggles in some way with some sort of temptation.  We do not all wrestle with the same demons, but we all are tempted in some manner.  The cycle of guilt and separation from God can only be broken through humility and submission to Jesus Christ.  The glory of the gospel is that it breaks the power of sin.

Jeremiah 23:9-22

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year CLeave a comment
            Martin Luther King, Jr. was much like a modern-day prophet.  In all he said and did he kept asking people to close the distance between the values they espoused and their actual behavior.  The terrible treatment King and his allies received during the civil rights movement in marches and demonstrations brought-out the awful gap between our American values of freedom, fairness, and tolerance and the reality that African-Americans really did not possess these in any manner close to the white population.  King’s prophetic ministry forced many people to come face-to-face with the disparity between beliefs and behaviors.
 
            The prophet Jeremiah knew all about such a gulf between expressed values and actual conduct.  And it was a very large chasm.  Like King, Jeremiah was imprisoned, had rocks thrown at him, and was jeered for his message of calling people to live up to God’s agenda for humanity.  White supremacy, or at least white privilege, was taken for granted in much of America before King.  In the same way, Israelite privilege was taken for granted in Jerusalem in Jeremiah’s day.  False prophets kept proclaiming Jewish supremacy and insisted that the Lord would be on their side of things.  “But, I, the LORD, tell you that these prophets have never attended a meeting of my council in heaven or heard me speak.”
 
            The spirit of the age simply accepted power, privilege, and pedigree as the norm that ought to always endure.  But God thinks different.  And he sends his prophets to call us back to true justice, righteousness, and peace for all persons – not just for some privileged people who take their freedom for granted.  An exercise in healthy introspection would be to consider what our most cherished values are, and ask whether they are God’s values.  If so, then are those values truly being expressed in our everyday actions and behaviors?
 

 

            All-Seeing God, you know the true state of every heart and every people group.  Do your work of making me holy in all I do and say so that the treasure of Christ’s salvation might be expressed through me in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Luke 20:45-21:4

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year CLeave a comment
While everyone was listening to Jesus, he said to his disciples:
Guard against the teachers of the Law of Moses! They love to walk around in long robes, and they like to be greeted in the market. They want the front seats in the meeting places and the best seats at banquets.  But they cheat widows out of their homes and then pray long prayers just to show off. These teachers will be punished most of all.
Jesus looked up and saw some rich people tossing their gifts into the offering box.  He also saw a poor widow putting in two pennies.  And he said, “I tell you that this poor woman has put in more than all the others.  Everyone else gave what they didn’t need. But she is very poor and gave everything she had.”
 
            You often cannot tell a fake by the external appearance.  A pious religious person on the outside may not necessarily be a genuine Christ follower on the inside.  The teachers of the law and the Pharisees in Christ’s day liked to do things for a show, for the attention.  They were important and respected people, desiring and enjoying the accolades of others.  They lived to be noticed.  But it was really all just a façade, a carnival sideshow.  The outside and the inside were not synced together.
 
            There is a marked contrast between the rich Pharisee and the poor widow.  Whereas the rich religious man put a wad of money in the temple offering for everyone to see, the impoverished widow put barely anything in, but it was everything she had to give.  The widow’s outward giving and inward disposition were perfectly matched.  She gave everything out of the abundance of her heart.
 
            The kingdom of God is not a matter of outward eating and drinking and ostentatious displays of spirituality, but is a matter of inner righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.  Aim for the heart, and the hands will follow.
 

 

            Loving God, my heart longs to worship you with everything I possess.  Transform me from the inside-out so that all my thoughts and motives may humbly express my words and actions.  May Jesus be praised.  Amen.

1 Corinthians 9:19-23

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year CLeave a comment
19 I am not anyone’s slave. But I have become a slave to everyone, so that I can win as many people as possible. 20 When I am with the Jews, I live like a Jew to win Jews. They are ruled by the Law of Moses, and I am not. But I live by the Law to win them. 21 And when I am with people who are not ruled by the Law, I forget about the Law to win them. Of course, I never really forget about the law of God. In fact, I am ruled by the law of Christ. 22 When I am with people whose faith is weak, I live as they do to win them. I do everything I can to win everyone I possibly can. 23 I do all this for the good news, because I want to share in its blessings.
 
            What will it take?  What will it take to win the world for Jesus Christ?  What will it take to win your neighbor?  What will it take to win your relative, co-worker, or friend?  It will take becoming a slave.  That is, winning others to see the glorious and incredible good news of forgiveness and new life in Jesus takes giving up our rights and our freedoms in order to have a ministry of presence.  We have to be around other people in order to win them.  That’s why winning the party-crowd takes going to the bar.  It’s why winning young moms takes sitting with them at the park while the kids play.  It is why it takes being present among people in the community in order to reach them, instead of wishing that people will magically show up at church in order to experience our friendliness.
 
            The turn of thought that we need is this:  Other people do not need to show up on our turf and become like us.  Instead, we need to show up on their turf and become like them.  If it weren’t in the Bible we would think it blasphemous to say such a thing.  But there it is, and we must wrestle with its implications for our lives.  So, what needs to change?
 

 

            Merciful God, you want to cut me into the action of what you are doing in the world.  Help me live wisely among those who don’t yet know you, so that they can see the light of Christ in me, hear the words of Christ from me, and experience the salvation of Christ.  Amen.