christianity

Fresh Start(s)

/ jerrythinks / 1 Comment

We all have situations, relationships, or even seasons of time of our lives that we’d go back and do differently, if we could. Think about what situation or season that might be for you.

What is it about that situation that you look back on critically that would cause you to question how you handled it? Was it the outcome? Was it your attitude throughout? Is it that you now know things that you didn’t know then and therefore couldn’t act on? Was it something else altogether?

As a follower of Jesus and a pastor to boot, I am pretty consistently haunted (that word sounds ghoulish or negative, but stick with me while I hash it out) by the question: Is what/who the Church is today consistent with the desire of God’s heart for those who represent Him on earth?

I can almost hear you from here. I believe that we would collectively release a resounding “No.” as the Church universal. We all know that who we are and what we’re doing and the silly ways we can get sidetracked, making some non-essentials into the hill(s) we die on–well, it’s embarrassing.

So here at this moment in the history of the Church, we desire to and will, with God’s guidance and power, usher in a new start. And this new start will leave no thing untouched and unaffected, except for the Gospel itself. We step forward with no grip on what was in terms of tradition, preconceptions, personal preferences, or rhythms that at one point started with fervor yet have deteriorated into rote and nearly meaningless religion or even religious monotony.

The prophet Isaiah spoke these words that I fear apply to far too many church-goers: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught.” (29:13)

For those who don’t know, just this month I have officially started a new pastoral role at the local church I have served at for over twenty years. Along with being Pastor to Young Adults, I am now also Director of Discipleship. You better believe that the question “Are we even making disciples at all?” is at the top of the long list of questions that I’m asking in this new role.

Lest you think that question is too dire or drips with doubt, let me assure you that the question is exactly as it should be: teetering on the edge of being an indictment. Unless we ask this question as the Church, we are in full danger of neglecting and failing at literally the ONE THING Jesus told us to be about before He ascended into heaven where He, like us, awaits His return.

Just as this question must be asked on a wide-spread level, it must also be asked on the personal level. There will be no greater anguish than for us to reach the end of our time and realize that we completely missed the point. Regardless of the pain involved, we must face the question. I’m doing that in my local ministry context as a pastor, and I’m also doing it in my own heart as a person.

Here’s the rub: Have you ever played “the floor is lava”? It’s a childhood game (there’s actually a television game show for adults based on the same premise) wherein as long as you’re up off the floor, you’re safe. But let one little pinky toe touch the ground, and you’re burned up and out of the game.

In a way, we are all playing this game spiritually. We’re locked in and fearful of moving freely because we have grown so accustomed to what has been that what could be seems more terrifying than exhilarating.

But what would a fresh start in your spiritual walk with Jesus look like? What would cracking open and discarding the shell of religious activity look like? What would introducing zeal and fervor look like? What would a life set ablaze with the power of the Holy Spirit look like? What does a neglect of all silly and shallow distractions in favor of a full-bodied, full-life surrender and pursuit of Kingdom purposes look like? What does a day-to-day existence that embraces and insists on making disciples look like? What does it look like to consider your vocation and career not the point of it all, but the fuel and context in which God is calling you to make more disciples?

God helping me as a person and as a pastor, and God helping us as a local church and as the Church universal, there is a fresh start emerging. We are putting away those stale traditions that have eased us into ambivalence toward the Mission, and we are welcoming God’s refining gaze to guide us into the new approach to disciple-making that our world today calls for.

A Kingdom of Questions

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Read the gospels. Jesus asked far more questions than He provided answers. The critical role questions play in our faith development and in the discipleship and disciple-making path, cannot be overstated.

I’ve been a pastor to teenagers and young people for over three decades. I have always (and will always) seek to cultivate an environment where questions are celebrated rather than suppressed. The cancer that eats away at young faith in a young person’s life is not doubt, but the absence of any genuine place to process those doubts. Church, shame on us if we do not allow, invite, and encourage the hard questions being asked.

It is a distinctly American thing for us to uphold a facade that would portray us as well-answered, put-together people; even followers of Jesus do this. Perhaps unwittingly, this desire to be seen as stable in faith causes the erosion of an atmosphere where questions are explored.

In essence, we’ve hung a “Closed” sign on the laboratory door.

How now do we reverse this reality?

First, we confess what should be obvious. That not one of us–from pauper to Pope–has every answer to every question of faith, God, spirituality, the Bible, or how to live the gospel effectively and redemptively.

And that confession should cultivate humility. Even while there are those with understandings and experiences that afford them the role of sherpa in others’ lives, there still remains a deep humility that drives every person to the posture of a student. This mindset reflects the expression we get from theologian Gerhardus Vos: that we do live in an “already and not yet” reality of God’s Kingdom.

Next step, we articulate the gut-level questions we have. Yours will be different than mine. And when we do that, we reject pithy, theoretical responses that try to put a bandaid over a gaping hole. “What kind of a God would watch a 22-month-old toddler get out a backdoor of their caretaker’s home unnoticed, make their way across several neighbors’ yards, and then watch them fall into a small decorative yard pond and drown?” That’s just ONE of my questions.

Write down every question about pain, faith, God’s character, scripture, heaven, hell, doubt–anything your heart is holding onto.

Lastly, utilize that list of questions (as ever-expanding as it may be) into your personal map toward growth. Seek. Explore. Ask. Wonder. Take the next hill. Cultivate a heart that embraces “I don’t know” just as readily as it embraces “I am convinced.”

Early in Jesus’ public ministry He began to call disciples to follow Him. This caught the attention of a couple of John’s disciples who would-be followers of Jesus. But first a couple questions needed to be exchanged…

Jesus (seeing them following): “What do you want?”

Two disciples (one of them was Andrew): “Where are you staying?”

If you’ll notice, every relationship begins with questions. The fallacy is that healthy relationships don’t have or need questions. That somehow we no longer have need for wonder or exploration once we know someone. I’d submit to you that the opposite is actually true. The more you know someone, the more we should: 1) rest in confidence of knowing and being known and 2) seek to know more because that confidence creates a safe place where more questions are welcomed.

In its correct form, the Kingdom of God is a Kingdom of questions. Taking a posture of a student hungry to learn, grow, and change more into the image of their first love and Master will also transform our view on worship, including how we gather together. Can you even imagine what it would look like this coming Sunday morning if everyone who was present was a true explorer, an excited participant in their own faith journey, and truly reveling in the wonder of a God who can be known now and yet not fully known?

I have used this analogy before, so forgive me if it’s a repeat for you long-time readers. I view myself as standing on a beach, my feet in the water as the waves lap up on the shore. I’ve got a ladle in my hand, and I’m sipping from it. I understand and am fully okay with the fact that all my life, I will never drink that whole ladle. And I’m at peace knowing there is an ocean of water in front of me that won’t ever be touched by that ladle.

This is how I view my questions and my doubts. I will continue to sip, seek, ask, wonder, and explore. Yet I know that I can’t know the expanse of all of who God is. One of my favorite verses in terms of this peaceful pursuit is Romans 11:33:

“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how unfathomable his ways!” (New English Translation)

Why Church, why have we allowed ourselves to become tidy, buttoned-up, satisfied recipients of the only life-altering truth and yet stopped there? Why have we turned into guardians of truth and not champions of exploration? A young generation is under the impression that there is little to no place for questions in a life of faith. Let’s reverse this as soon as possible.

After all, the words “question” and “quest” share the same Latin root: quaerere. Both mean “to ask/seek.” In other words, every question invites us on a quest. So take those questions, grab the map they create, and move forward in a faith that celebrates question marks as much as exclamation points!

Why I’m Choosing Love

/ jerrythinks / 3 Comments

If you know me, you know I’m a man in love. Deeply. In. Love.

My wife is, quite simply, the perfect human being for me. I’m convinced that God custom-made this woman to fill in and complement every one of my shortcomings–and there are many. I’m completely and forever in love with her. If you know her, you see clearly that we are a matched set.

Lest you think I’m about to droll on and on, dripping with sap about how much I love my wife, I promise you I am not. I actually want to turn my attention to Jesus, and Him alone. And I invite you to hear the expressions of my thoughts and heart for the man I call my best friend, my Savior, my heart’s affection, and the One I choose to follow/walk with. But before I do, I believe the greatest quality my wife has is that she would absolutely want me to tell you that it’s Jesus who makes our marriage work. He’s it.

But first a quick diversion. My life revolves around ministering with young people. Ever since I was a young person myself, I have known that my life would be aimed at the young generation, and loving them well, showing them Jesus, and being available for them for…well…whatever.

Living rooms, hospital rooms, waiting rooms, courtrooms, backs of squad cars, funerals, jail cells…I’ve been everywhere seeking to love young people well.

In all honesty, I have nothing to offer any young person but Jesus. He is it. I don’t have life hacks, deep wisdom, tricks to help smooth out life’s road, or anything else. I only have and I only offer Jesus.

So you can perhaps imagine my surprise and concern when I recently found that some young people I interact with struggled to articulate much at all about who Jesus is and why they, too, love Him.

Seems like for someone who is in the context of a thriving spiritual community, such a thing should flow naturally. But it seems there’s work to do in this area. Yet, I cannot expect anything from them that I am not able and willing to do myself. So, this blog is about exercising the discipline of articulation. I’m going to articulate to you why I choose to love and more specifically, who I know Jesus to be and why I am now and–God helping me–will for all my days fix my gaze on Jesus.

If anyone from my high school days ever reads these words, I must apologize to you. I did not live as I should have lived in those days. I did not express my faith well; it was there, but it was not on display as it should have been. I hope you’ll forgive me for that. I should have been clearer. This isn’t about my upbringing as a “PK” (pastor’s kid), it isn’t about church attendance, and it isn’t about “religion.” I put no stock in any of those things.

This is about the person of Jesus: who He has been from the beginning, who He revealed Himself to be in the gospel accounts we all have access to, and who He is to me personally right now on a daily basis.

I want to do my best to paint a picture for you. I trust that then you’ll clearly see why I choose to love Him.

You can read other blog posts of mine that go into the granular details of my upbringing and my faith story. There are lots of details you can find in other writings I’ve already posted. So I won’t repeat myself in that regard.

Jesus is the fullness of God, who chose to be constrained to a human frame. God chose to become flesh in order to communicate the greatest love for humanity (that’s all of us) that He possibly could. Jesus came to us because we could never get to Him. The mission of Jesus from the very start has been to come and get us. To rescue us. To redeem us. To adopt us. To draw us back to Him, as He has desired all along.

The person of Jesus is the image of a God who would stop at nothing to have us in a loving relationship with Himself. I love Jesus because He is God, but also because He is a walking, talking, sharing, healing, and reviving God. I live and breathe at this moment because of the presence of God. This is not a poetic or romantic statement, though it is that as well. It is a statement of fact. My conviction is that I am alive because God has desired it. I am breathing and functioning because of His good grace. My whole self is wrapped up in Jesus because Jesus has shown Himself to be the author and sustainer of all I am and all I have.

Going deeper, this God has come to me personally. In the depths of my sin, He came to me in this relentless pursuit that was fueled by His love for me. Though I disregarded His love and chose to live selfishly, still He came for me and came after Me. He found me in my self-inflicted mess and invited me to be whole, to be healed, and to be changed day by day as I walk with Him. I have found no other solid ground to stand on because every other thought and belief system would be based on what I can do, and I confess that I can do nothing good on my own. If you are reading these words and you believe you are fine on your own and do not need Him, then know that while He loves you with an everlasting love, His love also gives each person their own decision to embrace Him or go on without Him. But as for me, I choose Jesus. He looked for me, He found me, He healed me (still is), He transformed me (still is), He adopted me, and He is patient with me.

I talk with Jesus. In this talking, our relationship grows stronger. That’s how relationships work. If you want to grow closer to someone, you talk to them, and you listen to them. I have become convinced that it is this ongoing conversation that gives me a healthy perspective on all other aspects of my life. Likewise, when our conversation wanes, all other aspects of my life begin to become misprioritized and mishandled. Simply put, my conversation with Jesus sets all other things in their proper place.

I choose to love Jesus not because I was given some insider information by virtue of being brought up in a Christian (let alone as a pastor’s) home. It’s not because I went to enough bible studies and learned enough information. It’s not because of some unfair advantage life handed me. No. None of that. I choose to love Jesus because He first loved me. He proved that love by painfully accepting the death that my own sin demanded. He took on my death in my place. What greater love exists than that?

I know Jesus as a friend because He continually shows me more of who He is. I enjoy a familiarity with Jesus because we have walked together for so long, but along with that comfort, there is equal part wonder and curiosity that is built into our friendship. I know that I’ll never know the depths of who Jesus is, and I revel in that mystery. I love Jesus because there is no end to what I can know of Him.

Jesus is the very embodiment of the love of God. I am drawn to belief in Him, to friendship with Him, and to journeying life’s road following Him. I honestly believe that apart from Jesus I could do and would be nothing. Again, if you are living a fine life apart from Him and believe that you are able to continue that, by all means go ahead. As for me, I’m a broken and helpless sinner in desperate need of a Savior. He is the Savior of my world. I know that for me, I am prone to decisions that are selfish and destructive. I need someone greater and higher to be Lord of my life. He is my Lord and He has given me wisdom, peace, and direction. He has saved me from devastating decisions time and again. Left to myself, I’d drive this life into a ditch or off a cliff. With Jesus in control, I have nothing to fear. With Jesus my Lord guiding me, I am free from all anxiety. That’s why I trust Him. That’s why I love Him.

What I want for you is that you would know Him, too. In fact, I’d love nothing more than for you to know Him even more than I do. Whether you or anyone else (and I know millions do) choose to love Him, I simply cannot turn away from Him. I’m far too convinced of His presence, His goodness, His faithfulness, and His grace. This is who Jesus is to me and this is why I choose to love Him.

Three Words.

/ jerrythinks / 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking lately about systematized spiritual growth. For much of my years on earth walking with Jesus, I’d have preferred to look at our relationship as 100% organic, free-flowing, and even undefinable. After all, if what we’ve got here is a love relationship, not only can it NOT be measured; it SHOULDN’T be measured. Doesn’t seeking to apply a metric to a love affair automatically take away the cache’, the soul of it all, and the essence of what a relationship is in the first place? So I thought.

What would happen to your thoughts if I asked you to qualify your most important relationship? What would you start thinking if I required you to prove empirically that what you say you have in that relationship is what you actually have? Where would you begin? What measuring stick would you use? I believe most of us would point to our actions as qualifiers of our affections, wouldn’t we? I believe most of us would start listing the things we DO as evidence for how we FEEL. If I say to you, “I’m in love with my wife” and you reply with, “Prove it.” then I’d probably start to tell you all the things I attempt to do on the practical level; visible, outward signs that I actually AM in love with my wife. (I am, by the way.)

Can we put such measures on our spiritual health? Does action always equal affection? Of course not. But I do believe that affection always leads us to action.

I was visiting a friend in the hospital the other day. I pushed the elevator’s “up” button from the first-floor lobby and waited for the *ding* that indicated my ride had arrived. While waiting there, a young woman with a child stood nearby, presumably waiting for the same elevator. *DING* The metal doors slid open and we all stepped in. The doors slid closed. There’s that awkward, almost heavy-ish silence in elevators with strangers, right? We had several floors to ascend, so this silence would be a little bit longer than usual. Then suddenly, the silence was shattered: “WHO ARE YOU?!?” The young boy, I’m guessing 6 or 7 years old had boisterously broken that awkward silence with a straight-forward, yet equally awkward question, given the context we were in.

Always a fan of the assertive and wanting to reward him with a reply, I turned my whole body toward him to show him I was fully engaged and ready to answer his question. “My name is Jerry. I’m a pastor and I’m here to visit a teenager I know who’s here in the hospital. What’s your name?” The mom, slightly aghast of the friendly outburst her son just filled the elevator with quickly and sternly corrected him, trying to use it as a training moment on how to introduce yourself to someone. Sadly, that training went mobile as the doors opened and they walked out of that elevator. I never got my answer on who that kid was. But I could tell we’d have had a great chat, given more time.

Since then, his question has hung in my mind like an elevator between floors.

I don’t suppose he meant it existentially. I think he probably saw a man (me), didn’t know that man’s name, and very practically went about the business of finding out. Good for him. But still, the question is more than that. Much more, in fact.

Let me disappoint you here and tell you that I’m not going to unpack all there is to unpack in this one single blog post. So please revisit to travel with me on this stroll. Or as I’ve invited you previously, you can email me or text me. I’m fine with either. Here’s the thought I’m thinking and trying to move forward in terms of systematized spiritual growth and health: The life of one who embraces their own spiritual journey will ultimately travel this continuum:

“Who am I?” —————————————————————————“Here am I.”

I’d submit to you that every living and thinking human on this dust ball speck that’s hurdling at a speed of 67,000 mph through the universe is, at some point earlier than later thinking that question on some level: “Who am I?” Or to break it down a bit more, we could ask accompanying questions like, “What makes me tick?”, “What are my passions?”, “What am I about?”, “What does/should my life look like?”, “Where is my value?”, “Who are my people?”, and even “Do I like me?” All these questions and more float through our conscious and subconscious continually; until they are satisfied(ish).

The shortcut I’d like to give anyone who’d like to take it is that the question “Who am I?” cannot possibly be answered apart from acknowledging some level of Other-ness. What I mean is that you’ll never find a suitable or satisfactory answer to that question inside yourself. No offense. It’s just not possible. And here’s more bad news. If you’re someone who has spun the Wheel of Origin and landed on “Humans are accidental beings results from millions and billions of years of evolution”…well…then….I got nothing for you. But I do tip my hat on the amount of faith you’re displaying in believing that drivel. Again, no offense.

That Other-ness must–hear me–it MUST acknowledge a cause outside yourself. More to the point, it MUST acknowledge a Creator. You’ll never ever find out the answer to “Who am I?” apart from embracing that you’re not your own. If this is where you slam this website shut in disgust, then so be it.

The rest of your spiritual walk will (and should) lead you ultimately to where the prophet Isaiah ended up in chapter six of his now-famous book. Isaiah is known as the “messianic” prophet because of his mile-long list of prophecies about Jesus some 700 years or so before Jesus’ birth. Read Isaiah 6. Look at the conclusion this prophet comes to after experiencing the full majesty of the King and Creator. Knowing precisely now who he was, Isaiah rightfully came to the only conclusion any of us can reach: “Here am I.” (Isaiah 6:8). I’m not a tattoo guy, but man that verse sums up the greatest posture any human can take in terms of spiritual vitality, passion, and mission.

So I told you I don’t have all this nailed down or packaged up, but I am going to think deeply and intentionally about what it looks like to help people move from “Who am I?” to “Here am I.” After all, these two coordinates on the map of spiritual growth represent two very distinct places we find ourselves. And in full disclosure, I’ve been at both points. Currently, my daily mindset starts with “Here am I” and goes from there because I know that since I’m breathing the work isn’t done. It’s good work and it’s God’s work and that’s what I want MY life to be about. I learned at the age of 16 the answer to the question “Who am I?” and now at the age of 50, I get to live a “Here am I” life. And in case I haven’t bee clear, I fully recommend it.

As always, I love to hear from those who read my blog (Hi, Mom!). Feel free to leave a comment. And realize this one isn’t over. Not by a long shot.