Come to Jesus

Here's the easiest way to make sure we're preaching love and grace and not emptiness:

Come to Jesus first.

Our church services build toward this culminating moment, usually somewhere near the end of Sunday morning, where the convicted, the contrite, even the faithful come to Jesus. Not just our church services, either. Our church retreats tend to do the same thing. Our denominational rallies. Our youth group events. Our conventions and conferences and seminars. All are designed toward this peak moment, this one emotional moment, when those in attendance respond and "come." 

Then the final song is sung, the final prayers are said, and everyone walks out to the parking lot. You come to church for an hour, get three minutes with Jesus near the end (if you so desire them; not everyone comes to Jesus every week), and then scurry on about your life before anything even has time to settle into your heart.

It's because it's far easier for us to bring a man to Christ than to know what to do with him once he gets there. It's the difference, as our week this week started out, between preaching wine and liquor and preaching grace and love. One is far more difficult than the other.

But if you read through the Gospel accounts of Jesus and His ministry, it's very clear that coming to Jesus was never the culminating event in a person's story. It was never the last thing someone did. None of these stories are told and result in masses of people coming to Him. No. The people come first. The men come first. The women come first. And then something holy happens.

And the truth is, if we'd get this right, it's much easier to preach love and grace. If we came into our churches on Sunday morning and the very first thing we all did was come to Jesus, then we'd have the entire rest of the hour to hear Him speak. We wouldn't have to talk about Him any more; we could simply let Him speak. Then we learn about love. We learn about grace. And it all feels very natural. Instead of building toward an emptiness that draws us to the Cross in the closing comments, we begin with our emptiness and build toward something greater. Instead of men walking away not knowing what they understand about God at all, they walk away knowing without a doubt that God is love.

When Jesus came to the hillside to preach, the people were there to hear Him. When the people were there to hear Him, Jesus came to the hillside to preach. When the blind men came out to the streets to call out His name, He passed by. When He passed by, the blind men were standing in the streets calling out His name. Jesus never did anything unless the people were already there, and the people were never there without the expectation that Jesus was going to do something.

Have we lost our expectation?

When was the last time you went to church and expected Jesus not only to do something, but even to be there? My guess is that it's been a long time. A very long time. Because we're trained to believe that once we utter an opening prayer, we have the next hour set aside to figure out if Jesus is going to show up or not and, if He does, if He's going to do something or not. 

It's not just church, by the way. It's not just preachers and pastors. It's all of us. We begin our prayer time in our own hearts, rather than in the hearts of God. We start with a "Dear Lord" and wonder if God will show up at all before we get to the "Amen." We sing a worship song when it comes on the radio, and just at the moment that we start to feel the tiniest inkling of God, the chorus is over and a new song has come on. We're talking with our friends, our families, our neighbors, and if God comes up at all, it's because we've run out of other things to talk about. Even in the secular things - we choose our career paths, our timelines, our adventures, our conquests, our investments, our families...you name it, and we only hope that by the end of it all, God will have shown up somewhere. Our entire existence seems to take on the church model: from our first cry to our last breath, we're always building toward some divine moment when, we hope, Jesus might show up.

That's not how any of this works. That's now how life was meant to be. That's not how prayer was meant to be. That's not how church was meant to be. The entire story of Jesus starts with coming. His coming to us, our coming to Him. That's the place where we begin. 

The rest...is love and grace.

Preaching Emptiness

None of this means that we should preach only to disturb people, or expressly to disturb them. Many of our priests, prophets, and pastors are very good at this, but it's entirely the wrong thing to do.

More and more, it's becoming difficult to go to church and learn anything about God. That's just the sad truth. Most of our services are planned around getting men and women to become dissatisfied with their lives, then draw them toward the idea of God as a solution to their unrest. More and more, I'm convinced that it's nearly impossible to be spiritually healthy in most of our churches.

Because if you show up on Sunday morning and you're confident in who God is, one of two things is bound to happen: either you'll find the message of church boring and irrelevant or the message will be so convincing that you'll leave the church building wondering if you ever knew anything about God at all. 

Boring and irrelevant church is a dangerous idea, for two reasons. First is that it may tempt some of us to become spiritually arrogant. The longer we sit in churches that are preaching spiritual milk, the louder we seem to chew on our theological steak. We're so far beyond all of that "basic God stuff" that it's easy to sit in our pews and reflect on how so very long ago it was that we had such silly questions, how long ago it was that we first contemplated the Cross.

Second, a boring and irrelevant church is one that struggles to retain its spiritual giants. Those who aren't growing spiritually arrogant are becoming disengaged as the message remains stagnant and the heart longs to grow. The more the message of God is preached for the sake of drawing people to the Cross, the easier it is for long-time Christians to sit there on Sunday mornings and grow increasingly restless. Is this all there is to Jesus? Then what do we need church for? If the entire message of God is that your life is terrible without Him, and you've come to Him earnestly, then there's no more need for a message. No more need to continue to sit in church on Sunday morning because you've heard all that God has to offer. Might as well go shopping or get some more work done around the house.

And that is the second concern of those who show up spiritually confident - the messages we're hearing in church today are deliberately disturbing in such a way that if you don't question everything you've ever known - about yourself, about your life, about your God - it feels like you're missing out on something. 

Our messages are designed to get you to think about all the dissatisfying things in your life. They're written to make you uncomfortable with yourself. They're preached to pierce deep into your heart. And if your heart is satisfied in God when you hear those words, all of a sudden...you feel heartless. You feel like there's something wrong with you because you're not connecting to this sermon that you know contains truth. Now, you're praying because your heart feels depraved, because it feels like you're not connecting with God as much as you thought you were, even though this couldn't be further from the truth. But you're convicted that you're not convicted, and this makes you question whether you have any real relationship with God at all.

By the final Amen on any Sunday morning, the church is filled with persons who are wholly dissatisfied with life, with themselves, with God, and who feel the sting of their own emptiness, either because they connect with the message in the sermon or they don't. 

We're preaching emptiness and pretending it's holy.

This is not the kind of disturbed that we were meant to be. This is not the way that love and grace are supposed to make us feel. This is not what truth does when it's spoken into the lives of men and women - believers or otherwise. And yet, it's very much how we do church. This is our Sunday morning.

When John spoke to Herod, he never spoke in order to disturb the king. He wasn't trying to make Herod feel bad about his life, about himself, about everything he'd ever known. He simply spoke truth because it was all he knew to do. He simply spoke grace because grace is all he had. He simply spoke love because God is love. And that's the difference.

So what do we do? How do we do it? Stay tuned. I have one radical idea....

Disturb Me

Love and grace aren't easy to preach, or at least, to preach well. It's easy to preach them as buzz words, as prosperity gospel, as a colorful candy coating over this troublesome life that we live. But that's not really love and grace. Love and grace don't sugarcoat this life; they permeate it, down to its very core. 

And that's disturbing.

It's disturbing because it forces us to wrestle with questions such as: what is love? What is grace? It forces us to look at the world around us and figure out, again and again, what love is. It forces us to look into the eyes of our betrayers and discover grace in the depth of our hearts. Not because love and grace are better than anything else we bring to the table but because they are more real than anything else life has to offer.

Love and grace, spoken well, shake us out of our shallow faith and draw us in the depths of life abundant.

There's a passage in Mark's gospel that articulates well what our preaching should be, what happens when we get the message right. It comes from Herod himself, as he's pressured into executing John the Baptist. Here's what we know of the relationship between Herod and the prophet:

Herod knew that John was a fair and holy man, so he protected him. When he listened to John, he would become very disturbed, and yet he liked to listen to him. (6:20)

John, we know, was not one to mince words. We have numerous recollections of how frequently John spoke truth against Herod, condemning him for an illegal (detestable) relationship. John's truth bothered Herod, Herod's wife, Herod's children, Herod's household...and Herod threw John in jail for it. But then he admits that even though he's disturbed by what John says (although, it must be noted, not disturbed enough to actually change his ways), he still liked to listen to John speak. Why?

Because John was getting love and grace right. 

We don't have any record of this. We don't know what else John had to say to Herod. We don't know what they talked about on a regular basis, whenever Herod would have John brought from the prison to chat with him. It's hard to imagine that the prophet preparing the way for Jesus would only speak about fidelity and infidelity and honorable relationships; the time is coming when Herod will be called upon, in some fashion, to sit in judgment of the man, Jesus. Don't you think that all his conversations with John in some ways began orchestrating that encounter? They had to. 

Herod is shaken. He's disturbed. He cannot fathom this love, this grace. He cannot wrap his mind around this man, Jesus, not even when his favorite pet prophet, John, tells him of it. He knows that John condemns him and yet, if this were merely a man condemning him, the man would himself be condemned, for no one speaks against the king. Herod understands, without even knowing, that the condemnation from John's lips comes from somewhere deeper, from God Himself - perhaps from Herod himself - and this man who speaks against the king speaks also for the King. (It's why John is only imprisoned and is executed reluctantly later.) 

That's what truth - love and grace included - do to a man when preached right. They disturb him. They shake him to his core. They give him a way to understand, even if he doesn't know, that this truth, this love, this grace is deeper than what seems to be right before your very eyes. There's something transcendent about it. Something ethereal. Something...holy?

And men, even wicked men, cannot get enough of it. Herod never says that John disturbed him so much that he refused to hear the man speak any longer. No. Rather, Herod liked to listen to John, even though the prophet disturbed him. This is what we must do with our message. This is how we - the priests, the prophets, the pastors - must preach. 

We must speak God in such a way that men are shaken. We must share truth, love in such a way that it disturbs people, that it rattles them out of their shallow lives and into the depth of God's incredible grace. It's the only way to do it. And even though it doesn't seem popular, even though it doesn't seem easy, even though it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that will keep men and women coming back to our churches, it actually is. Because it's quite possible, and indeed, we see it here even among the wicked, that men can both be disturbed and enticed. In fact, disturbing a man may be the very thing that keeps him coming back. 

The truth? The truth is that no one likes the prosperity gospel as much as they think they do. No one likes a sugarcoated life. No one adores, or even needs, a God who is nothing more than the colorful candy coating over a troublesome life.

But men are drawn by love and grace. So preach it. 

Wine and Liquor, Love and Grace

There's always been a tension in a man's heart between the God he seeks to know and the One he'd rather hear about. It's the tension between trying to believe in an incredible God who intimately loves you...and trying to find something practical in all of this theology.

And it's a tension that has always been a struggle for priests, prophets, and pastors. Today as much as thousands of years ago.

Micah talks about men who say, "We will preach to you about wine and liquor!" Then he concludes this prophecy by saying, "They would be just the type of preacher you want." (2:11)

I don't know about wine and liquor, but the same could be said of many preachers in our contemporary world. Attempting to be relevant, attempting to be "cool," attempting to grow church numbers or reach the unreached or evangelize the community, it's far easier to preach wine and liquor than love and grace. Why?

Because men understand wine and liquor.

Men understand beer and football, barbecues and fishing trips. Women understand good sales and cosmetic rituals, quilting and household chores. Men understand fathering. Women understand mothering. Men understand sex. Women understand relationships. These are, of course, stereotypes. When talking about any group of people, it's hard to deal in anything more tangible than stereotypes, but the point is this: we far more easily understand the things that are part of our daily lives than we do the things that tend to reside only in our hopes, tucked away deep into our theologies. Love, grace...these just aren't as "relevant" as wine and liquor. This is not our day-to-day.

And it's not just this. It's not just that wine and liquor are so relatable, that they're so "relevant." It's that wine and liquor do something to the spirit that changes it. They do something to a man; he gets drunk on them. This, too, is a hallmark of our preaching today. We're all so content with messages that make us feel something different, messages that make us almost drunk - disoriented, disinhibited, freer - that it doesn't occur to us to question whether this has anything at all to actually do with God. If it makes us feel good, we reason, it must be God. After all, isn't that what God is all about?

That's where our priests, our prophets, and our pastors are failing us. Tremendously so. And look at what Micah says about those I earlier referred to from his text as "men." Micah doesn't call them men; he calls them "liars and frauds." Liars and frauds preach wine and liquor.

Liars preach wine and liquor as though it's more real, more relevant, more meaningful than love and grace. As though baseball games and grocery runs, block parties and symphony tickets, even small groups and special offerings have more to do with life as we know it than love and grace, mercy and salvation, peace and promise. God's love and grace are the lifeblood of man; anyone who preaches anything else is a liar.

Frauds preach wine and liquor as though the entire aim of preaching itself is to make a man feel better about himself or about his life. As though getting a man high on good feelings and drunk on good vibes is the entire aim of the message. As though God desires nothing more for a man than this disinhibition, this so-called freedom. As though God is more about feeling good than He is about actual good. God is good; anyone who preaches anything else is a fraud.

Yet that's what we're preaching. That's what we're talking about. Those are the parallels we're drawing between God and this life we're living - we're surrounded by wine and liquor. We're all drunk. And we like it that way. 

Because we all understand wine and liquor.

Revelation

If the Bible is but God's story, and men are mere characters in it, then what about our stories? What about your story? What about my story?

Well, you're living it.

You're living your story right now, writing it one new page at a time, one new moment at a time, one new word at a time. No, that's not always a comfort when you're longing to know what your life means, when you're hoping to find it somewhere in the pages of another story so that you can finally understand not only who you are, but why. No, it's not a comfort when you're trying to figure out what to do next, where to go next, what happens tomorrow. 

But here's the beautiful thing: every new page, every new moment, every new word that you write in your story is more than just your next chapter. It's a new chapter in God's story, too. Which means every word of your story is like every word of God's story: it's revelation.

Think about all of the men and women we turn to in the Bible. Think about Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Moses and Aaron, David, Solomon, Mary and Joseph, James and John, Simon and Andrew, Saul/Paul...their stories are written into God's story in this beautiful way. So that when we read their stories, we come to know God. And when we read God's story, we come to know them.

We come to know what it's like to receive the promises of God in the very same scene that we discover the God who makes promises. We come to know the God who intimately cares for His people in the same chapter that we recognize what it means to be a people who are cared for by God. We read about a man's incredible transformation and know, from that very story, the incredible transforming power of God. Over and over again, we discover that the story of God and the stories of men are so intertwined that we simply cannot learn something about the one without learning something about the other. And we're not talking about men in general; we're talking about specific men, specific women. Human beings we can call by name.

And the same is true for us.

Our stories, as they're being written even right now, are God's stories, too. Our lives are revelation. They declare something about the very nature of God - something about His goodness, something about His grace. Something about His love. When others read our stories, they discover something about God Himself. 

And when they read God's stories, they discover something about us. Not some grand theory about mankind in general. Not some great story about the history of humankind. No. They discover the narrative of you. The narrative of me. By name. Our stories are being told.

That's what's so cool about it. We read God's story, and we could talk all day about what we know about the characters we find within it. We can talk about Adam and Eve not as abstract ideas, but as a real man and a real woman, the way we'd talk about the couple who used to live down the street. We can talk about Noah and his righteousness, but we can also talk about a man who built an ark, who was the father of three sons, who had his struggles with alcohol. We can talk about John the Baptist not merely as some prophet, but as the cousin of Jesus, the son of Zechariah. We can even talk about his wardrobe and his dietary choices. And think about all we could discuss regarding King Saul or King David! We could write entire books about either of them.

But if we did, we'd discover quickly that in reading their stories, we cannot help but read God's, too. That's how intimately interwoven they are. That's how intimately interwoven our stories are. We read the Bible and we know oh so much about all of these men and women, but the more we know about these men and women, the more we know about God. We can talk to one another, share our tables, stand in our streets and get to know each other, and the more we know about each other, the more we ought to know about God. Our lives are revelation.

Not to keep getting deeper and deeper into this interplay, but the more we know about God, the more we ought to know about each other, too. The more we know about God, the easier it ought to be to see the true nature, the true meaning, the true blessing of one another. The easier it ought to be to look at one another with grace, with compassion, with respect. With love. As we each write our story - one new page, one new moment, one new word at a time. 

One new page, one new moment, one new word in our books...and in God's.

These are our stories. This is His story. This is life as we know it.

A revelation.