Cult Following

At this point, most of us are sort of looking around, wondering if someone else is going to ask the question or if we're going to have to. And that question is this: if we, as Christians, go around talking about this awesome Guy we know who has long hair, wears sandals, eats with sinners, and has some amazing thoughts about love and grace, well...isn't that kind of...like a....cult?

Yeah. Kinda.

We've heard a lot about these kinds of movements. Some charismatic leader shows up and promises people the world if only they'll come and live with him in his compound, throw all their resources into his bank account (you know, for community purposes and so forth), and wear the uniform. It's the kind of stuff nightmares (and some rather captivating television dramas...and documentaries) are made of. 

It seems to always lead to something like Waco. Or Jonestown. A whole lot of people drinking the Kool-Aid. I have to be honest and think that sometimes, I think about these sorts of things when we're taking Communion, and I can't help but laugh. 

To an outsider looking in, there's not much difference between Jesus and these other guys. It's easy to think that one day, the curtain will be lifted and Jesus will be revealed as just another fraud.

But there are some fundamental differences between Jesus and these other guys. There are some things that make Him stand out as not just another cult leader, as not just some charismatic character to be blindly bought into and followed. 

First, most of these charismatic leaders require their followers to move onto their property. They build whole towns cut off from the rest of the world, complete with their own schools and stores and security forces. Jesus never did that. Jesus sent His disciples out into the world. He told them to go to the world's schools and stores and not to worry about security. In Jesus's community, the worst thing you can do is separate yourself. You've got to be a part of the unfolding revelation, not apart from it. 

Second, Jesus doesn't require you to give any more than He's given. He's not asking you to live with nothing so that He can have everything; He's given everything for your sake. You're never going to see that with a real cult leader. He may smooth-talk and convince his followers that he's giving up something for them, but it's all smoke and mirrors. For Jesus, it was all blood and nails. That's legit. 

Third, Jesus doesn't clothe His followers in some pretentious garb or some bland uniform meant to make them distinctive somehow. No, He strips His disciples naked. Bare bones. Just the basics. That may sound more sinister, but it's really not. The cult says you need something to mark you so that people know who you are; the Christ says you need nothing else to be known, for you bear on you the image of God. You should wear it without shame. 

The cult depersonalizes; the Christ radically differentiates. You are who you are for a reason, for a unique purpose to bring about God's glory in this world.

So does it sound kind of like a cult? Yeah, kind of. But Jesus is no simple charismatic; He's the Christ. There's never been one like Him, and there never will be again. He's the real deal, no simple passing fad, and I promise you this adventure doesn't end at the bottom of a glass of sugar water.

It begins with an offering of Living Water.

Unconvincing

If we cannot convict unbelievers into coming to Jesus (since conviction is the job of the Holy Spirit alone), we must turn our efforts to convincing them of the greatness of our Friend and Savior. We must no longer waste our energies on condemning the sin in sinners' lives, but on sharing with them the love, grace, and goodness of Jesus, who we love so dearly.

The trouble is that for most of us, our love of Jesus is unconvincing. Primarily because it doesn't seem either deep or real.

Ask most Christians what they love about Jesus, and they will tell you that they love His grace. They love that He saved them from the depths of Hell by becoming an atoning sacrifice for them on the Cross. They will tell you that what they most love about Jesus is that He promises them Heaven. Which is all well and good, I suppose, but what about earth?

This is what the disciples knew so well that we seem to have completely lost - they knew that Jesus came not just for final redemption, but for redeeming friendship. Ask the disciples what they love about Jesus, and you get a far different answer from the one we usually give.

Ask the disciples, and they will tell you that they love the way Jesus laughed. They love the way that His eyes danced with joy when the Holy Spirit overtook Him. Ask the disciples, and they will tell you that they love the way that Jesus could speak with tender grace and biting truth all in the same tongue. Ask the disciples, and they will tell you that Jesus cooked a really mean fish dish.

Ask the disciples, and they will tell you about Jesus's power, the way all He had to do was speak a word and the demons fled. The way that He spoke to deaf ears and they heard. The way that He gestured to blind eyes and they saw. Ask the disciples, and they will tell you about His faithfulness. Not just the way that He always did what He said He would do, but about how He made it a point to study the Scriptures, to go to the synagogue, to make offerings to God.

Ask the disciples, and they will tell you a story of the living Jesus. Ask most Christians today, and they will tell you only of the dying one. 

See, that's the difference. That's what makes the Gospels such a vibrant story, one that's so easy for us to find ourselves drawn into. That's what makes us love the Jesus described there in a way that we just don't enthusiastically love the one we spend most of our lives talking about. The Gospels invite us to love a Lord with a heartbeat. They invite us to see Him living, loving, moving about, walking on the streets of Galilee, eating at tables, praying in real gardens, speaking with a real voice. 

That's what our faith is missing. That's what our witness is missing. The greatest thing we could do for an unbeliever is to invite them to fall in love with a living Lord, but we're far too busy preaching Christ crucified to realize how completely unconvincing that is to a world longing for more. The Christ on the Cross, without the baby in the manger, is no better than any other statue, any other idol. And the world sees right through our idolatry.

It's why they shake their heads at us. It's why they turn away. We claim to love this Jesus, but we've made Him both silent and stationary, forever hanging on a Cross, forever crucified, when even the unbelieving world knows that the story of Jesus is far more dynamic than this. Even the unbelieving world is waiting for us to say just one living thing about this Jesus, and most Christians can't seem to find the words.

If we want a faith that's convincing, if we want a love that's real, we have to do what the disciples did and talk about the Jesus who lives among us just as much, if not more, than the one who died for us. We have to talk about earth as much as we talk about Heaven. We have to have a friend not for tomorrow, but for today. 

We have to learn to speak a vibrant testimony of a living God. We have to become real disciples.

Convicted

For much of the modern history of the church, there has been a tension between believers and unbelievers, particularly as relates to the practice of evangelism. For a long time, evangelism was done with fire and brimstone, with the preaching of Hell and a clear theology of sin. We, as the church, seem to have always thought that we could never "win" souls unless we showed them their emptiness, showed them their need.

How else could the world come to God except to know how desperately they need Him?

But this requires us to be able to do something we were never meant to do, something we have not been given the power to do - convict. It's required us to step in and speak truth and pass judgment and hand down verdicts. It's required us to tell unbelievers exactly where they are wrong, not just in some general sense, but in a way that they would understand their own error and desire to turn from it. We have thought that it was our job to bring unbelievers to their "aha" moment so that we could then bring them to God. 

As history painfully shows, we've never been good at this.

What we've done instead is to further alienate the world. For every soul that may have been convicted by our Bible-thumping doctrine of damnation, there are a thousand souls who felt only condemned. They heard the judgment in our voices, but not the promise. They heard the arrogance in our voices, but not the humility. They heard the "truth," but not a lot of grace. So what they heard was condemnation, not conviction, and the world has rightfully called back to us, "Who are you to judge?"

Who are we, indeed.

We are, each one of us, products of the grace that we have refused to extend to those we have not yet called brothers and sisters. We are, each one of us, the very sinners we have so easily condemned. We are, each one of us, standing in the broken places where we can feel the fire, but see the holy rain clouds gathering. 

Why is it so hard? Why is it so difficult for us to bring others to this place? Why is is that what we seem to know so well, what we live first-hand, the very pages of our own stories that we see written on the hearts of others, is so difficult to convey in a way that is meaningful? Why is it that when we speak the hard, unpopular, unwavering truth, do unbelievers come to condemnation rather than contrition? 

Simply this: no man has ever been convicted but by the Holy Spirit. 

We're trying to do something we weren't created to do. We're trying to do something we weren't called to do. We're trying to do something that's simply not in our power to do. We have never been able to convict a man because that's the Holy Spirit's job. Of course it sounds like condemnation when it comes from our lips! We speak only to men's egos, to their own sense of self; only the Spirit speaks to men's hearts. 

I think that's why Jesus said to love our enemies and to pray for them. It's all we really can do. We pray for them, that the Holy Spirit might come and work in their hearts. We pray for them, that they might come not only to recognize truth but to be embraced by it. We pray for them, that the Spirit may open their eyes where our words would only close their ears. We pray for them because we can do no more. 

All we could do is condemn them, and condemnation has never redeemed a man. 

We pray for them, not that they may be convinced of the horrors of Hell that we so passionately preach, but that they might be convicted by grace and truth, which we seem far less better at. We pray for them, not so that we have done our work, but so that the Spirit may begin His work, which He alone is suited to do.

And we pray so that they might see what our preaching never shows them....what we wanted them to see in the first place...that there is a way for man and God in this world. More on that tomorrow. 

Dismissing the Darkness

There is one glaring omission from the conversation between Job and his friends. It is an omission that we know only because the story gives us more information than perhaps Job had, but it is important nonetheless:

Not one man in the book of Job mentions the tempter. 

At the outset of the book, we are told that God is in conversation with the tempter, bragging about Job's righteousness and faithfulness and permitting this dark force to mess with Job a little bit, confident that Job will never curse God, but continue to praise Him. And then as we go through the book, that's exactly what we see - Job and his friends drawing on everything that God is. Not one mention of darkness. Not one mention of evil. Not one mention of an opposing force.

Our modern theology has been playing a lot with the idea of demons and of darkness, of Satan. We're not sure really how much attention we're supposed to give him. On the one hand, we know that powers of darkness exist; they are testified to throughout the Scriptures, from Job to the Gospels, where Jesus spends what seems like a good deal of His time casting out demons. Clearly, the demonic is real. At the same time, there's just something about it that we're not that into, so we're prone to dismiss entirely any effect that darkness might be having on our light.

I don't know what Job and his friends thought about all of this. I don't know if, in the backs of their minds (as so often in the backs of ours), they thought there might be demons afoot. I don't know if they were hesitant to say anything because they didn't want to accidentally give a foothold to darkness. I don't know if any such thoughts even crossed their minds. The Bible just doesn't tell us. 

But what it does tell us is that they didn't waste their breath on it. 

Throughout the entire ordeal, throughout their entire conversation, throughout their entire theology, not one of these men mentions the powers of darkness; they focus exclusively on the goodness that they know of God. 

We would be wise to do the same.

There are some who aren't going to agree with me on that, and that's okay, but what honestly do we owe the darkness? What do we owe it? Nothing at all.

And what good does it do us to know anything about the darkness if we already know everything about the Light? (Or everything that we can know about the Light?) Job and his friends might have known there were other powers and play, but what does it matter? The powers of evil do not change the powers of Good. Satan doesn't fundamentally change who God is or how He loves. God is pure love. He always is exactly what He is, and He doesn't change.

So what good does it do us to dwell on the things that try to stand against Him when we could invest our energies in the One who stands against those things? How does it benefit us to develop a theology of Judas in the shadow of the Cross? It doesn't! And that's what Job does so well.

He doesn't know what's going on - none of them do. But He doesn't waste his time trying to figure it out, either. He knows one thing for sure, and that's the very good nature of his incredible God, and on that, he rests. On that, his friends base their counsel. Nobody's talking about what to do with demons; they're all focused on how to trust in God. 

And isn't that all we need?

Deeper Faith

When we look at the exchange taking place between Job and his friends in the book that bears his name, the conversation probably looks familiar to a lot of us. As we saw yesterday, what's happening here is that everyone is speaking from experience about the God they know, the One they have encountered, everything they have learned about Him throughout their life.

It's not that one is right and one is wrong, or even that one is right and several are wrong, or even that several are right and one is wrong; they all are right in speaking about the God that they have become acquainted with through their own experience. 

But they are all limited. Even Job.

What is important for us to notice, however, is not the degree to which all are right, but the extent to which all are unmovable. For all their discussion, for all their talking, for all the time they spend going back and forth, laying out their own theologies and listening to the theologies of others present, not one of them, at any point, says, "Wow, you know? You make a lot of sense. I must have been wrong about that." Not one of them comes to a deeper understanding of God.

Until God Himself speaks.

When God speaks, He sets them all straight. He tells them all what's going on. He doesn't condemn them for the ways that they've spoken, but He shows them how limited their insights are. And when God speaks, they see, for the first time, that this is absolutely true.

It's what they've been telling each other for several pages. It's what they've been going back and forth about forever. They've all been trying to show the others where their theologies are limited, without recognizing the limitations of their own. But it hasn't done any good.

It doesn't do us any good either.

We spend so much of our time in this wasted effort, so much of our time trying to convince one another that maybe we have a good starting point, but our theologies are limited. We spend so much of our time adamantly standing on what we know about God, claiming that we have a more developed theology. Claiming that we know more than the guy sitting next to us. Claiming that we have it right where they have it wrong. 

But it doesn't do us any good. There's not a man on this earth that has been argued, badgered, or belittled into a deeper faith. Not one. There's no one among us who has been whittled down by the repetition of our own theology to the place where they just buy in to what we're saying. There's no one who hears our message again and again and throws out his own. 

We all have to be shown by God who He is. That's the only way we ever grow.

There are two reminders for all of us in this little truth from Job's witness. The first is that it is God who deepens faith. It is God who broadens theologies. It is God who reveals Himself. No matter how hard we try, no matter how much we argue, no matter how firm we stand, it is God alone who reveals more of Himself to a person. All our talking is, as is so often cited in Job, just hot wind. 

The second reminder is a call to humility. We want to pick a hero out of this story. We want to get to the end and say, see? Job was right all along. But when God speaks, He reveals what He's promised in other places in Scripture - not one is right. Not one is even close to the fullness of His majesty. Not one knows as much as he thinks he knows. We may be right in what we know about God, but we're still limited. We still know only a small fraction of all things holy. It's all that our finite minds can wrap around. 

So we must come together with humility and with grace, knowing that our experience of God is different than anyone else's experience of God and that all our talking can do nothing but blow in the wind. It is God who has to change hearts. 

May we pray that He will change ours also.