Caring for the Poor

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Trinity’s vision is what we want to see in the future.  The mission is how we are going to accomplish what we hope to see.  The vision motivates.  The mission activates.   I want you to see both side by side:

Trinity’s Vision: To see a gospel-believing, socially and culturally renewed Owasso & Tulsa Metro Area.

Trinity’s Mission: Trinity exists to glorify the Triune God by unveiling the beauty of Christ and His Kingdom for Owasso & beyond through Gospel-centered worship, community and kingdom-mission.

In light of last Sunday’s message, I wanted to share three resources to help us think further about our vision as it relates to caring for the marginalized and poverty-stricken in Owasso.

1. The inner ring article by C.S. Lewis.

Lewis addresses our relentless drive to be “insiders” rather than “outsiders.”  He suggests that this drive often leads us to do very destructive things.  This article presents huge implications for the poor and the marginalized near us.  Both the rich and the poor town have “in” groups that they want to be a part of.  And both “in” groups have some constructive and destructive negative feedback loops that lead them to move away from the “other side,” to view “those peopel” as “outsiders,” and view “us and our group” as “insiders.”   How might Trinity be a church that can help break down (often very complex social) obstacles that cause both groups to view the other as “outsiders”? As a young church we cannot afford throw good money to bad, nor afford to ignore the problem and focus building “our” church?  How can we make ministry to the poor and socially marginalized central to our DNA as a community that exists to unveil the beauty of Christ?

2.  A review of Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion by Tim Keller.  

In this new book, Douthat (author of Privilege and a New York Times writer) argues that five things have lead to the decline of Christainity in the west.  Those are:

1. political polarization;

2. decline of sexual ethics;

3. globalization and the question of exclusivity;

4. economic prosperity and lack of social good;

5. alienation of evangelicals in elite / gatekeeping American institutions).

I think he is right on.  I would simplify his analysis to say that the evangelical church has a head problem (we are valuing entertainment experiences over theological and acadmic rigor inside our churches), a heart problem (we are proud and self-absorbed, concerned about church amenities rather than the poor), and a hands problem (we are not publically involved except through politics, which is reinforcing the political polarization (reason for decline #1)).

One of those (#4) strikes at the heart of what James says in James 2.  The economic resources in the institutional Christian church (broadly defined to include all professing “Christians”) has led to the decline of the church.  This sounds completely counter-intuitive doesn’t it?  The prosperity that God has provided to the American church has led us to focus on amenities to heighten members’ experience within the church rathen than aid to those outside the church.  Douthat argues convincingly that many streams of Protestant Churches (including and especially evangelicals) have focused on private morality (drugs, sex, piety, etc.) over against social morality (healthcare, the poor, the arts, etc.). This makes the church akin to a social club with benefits to its exclusive community, but not to those “outside the gate.”  Contrast that with Israel’s role amidst the nations, or our call as New Covenant Christians to extend the gospel in all spheres and places.  This whole critique of the church forces me consider a diagnostic question:  If in 50 years Trinity disappeared from the Owasso landscape would City Hall be grieving?  I pray they would at least need to reallocate significant resources to fill in the gaps because of the cultural benefits we provided the city.  We are a young church and a long way from being “missed” (we’re just now in existence).   But this vision is part of our DNA and we want to start seeing how the gospel speaks to cultural engagement so that we might be prepared with opportunities for action arise.   We want to see the city changed through gospel-believing, social, cultural and spiritual renewal.  We want to help our members to love and serve the world with the gospel.  And this will involve “care for the poor and the widow” (social morality) as well as remaining “unstained from the world” (private morality) (James 1:27).   James brings both together to show the early church and us that the gospel is bigger than either the conservatives (personal morality) or the liberals (social-morality) realize.  It is off the scale BIG.  Wonderful.  Amazing Grace!

3. A couple of quotes from Sunday I wanted to pass along. Some I used in the sermon. Some I did not.

  • Historical example of living out James 2:  A deadly plague struck Carthage in the 4th c., killing upwards of 5,000 people per day. Citizens fled to the countryside to buffer themselves from the sick and dying. But Cyprian, one of the church leaders called his people together and challenged them to stay in the city, saying, “Christ gave up His well-being for others—we must also value others over ourselves.” These early Christians were the only ones who stayed in the city through the plague to care for the sick and the poor.  And it was at least in part because of their remarkable actions that so many flocked to the early church.  In fact, the Roman leader Julian, who tried to rid the empire of Christianity, attributed the success of the early church to their willingness to care for the suffering Christians and non-Christians alike.  “Atheism [i.e. the Christian faith, because it pulled people away from worshipping the Roman gods!] has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead. It is a scandal that there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the godless Galileans (the Christians) care not only for their own poor but for ours as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.”
  • Tim Keller on a vision of cultural engagement with a foundation in justification by faith alone:  “If we produce thousands of new church-communities that regularly attract and engage secular people, that seek the common good of the whole city especially the poor, and that produce thousands of Christians who write plays, make movies, express creative journalism, begin effective and productive new businesses, use their money for others, and produce cutting-edge scholarship and literature we will see our vision for the city realized and our whole society changed as a result.”
  • Trinity’s vision for renewal and rescue centers on Jesus’ life and death for the Church and all creation.  Being justified by faith demands that Trinity wrestle with the complexity of embodying the gospel in our culture.  As the church rediscovers its unique role in culture, and nurtures cultural influencers, we will unveil the beauty of Christ and be a force for good in Owasso, the Tulsa Metro Area, the State and even the world. There are highly talented people in Owasso and we want to help them see that the Gospel is not merely about the transformation of the heart (though principally), but also about the transformation of the world (an expected effect from true and saving faith in action).

In all, I am really convicted about James 2 and, frankly, hope you are, too.  Before preparing to preach, I don’t know if I thought much about the context of the “faith” versus “works” being about caring for the poor.  Now, I am giving a lot of time to thinking about it and hope you’ll come with me on that journey as we unveil the beaty of Christ and His Kingdom for Owasso and beyond.

Private Holiness & Public Good

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As I’m preparing to preach on James 2:8-26, I’m reminded of  an important era in American religion that I wanted to share with you.

One of my colleagues at the university where I was a campus minister was a friend named Paul Raushenbusch.  He was the Associate Dean of Religious Life and is now the senior religion editor at the Huffington Post.  We disagree on almost every theological issue, but we are cordial to one another; I enjoy his sense of humor and honesty.   Paul is the great grandson of a famous theologian man named Walter Raushenbusch.   A couple of years ago Paul edited the one-hundred year anniversary of a very important—though highly contentious—book in American religion, Christianity and the Social Crisis.  I want to tell you about it for a moment so you can see why personal morality and social action have historically been pitted against each other.   This story will help you understand why the evangelical church tends to put so much emphasis on matters of personal purity and why the more liberal mainline church tends to emphasize social action.   This is important because it helps us see why what James is saying in 1:27-2:26 is so important for a new church in Owasso.

Walter Raushenbusch  was born in New York State in 1861 to a devout Christian mother and  a dad who was a German Baptist preacher.  Raushenbusch  grew up learning evangelical doctrines and personally believed the gospel at seventeen. He wrote that he was “influenced by grace down to his depths.”   But in studying the Bible in seminary, Raushenbusch began to doubt biblical inerrancy, saying, ”it was not taught by Jesus; it makes salvation dependent upon a trinitarian transaction that is remote from human experience; and it implies a concept of divine justice that is repugnant to human sensitivity.”  (For the record, I completely disagree with this statement.)

Raushenbusch was a young minister when mainline Protestant churches were largely allied with the social and political establishment, in effect supporting the domination by robber barons, income disparity, and the use of child labor.  Most church leaders did not see a connection between these issues and their ministries, so they did nothing to address the suffering of the children or the poor caught in this system of injustice. But Rauschenbusch saw it as his duty as a minister and student of Christ to act with love by trying to improve social conditions.  In this way he was honestly trying to live out what James says in James 1:27-2:26.  “Faith without works, especially works toward the poor and marginalized, is dead,” he reasoned.

In 1907 he wrote that famous book called the Christianity and the Social Crisis.  The aim of the book was to re-engage Christian responsibility toward society in ways the church had overlooked or ignored.  In it he wrote, “Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.” That statement by itself is sound, but the premises upon which he declares it are not.  The problems with his theology are many.  Christianity was a force for social good; the Kingdom of God was eradicating injustice.  He said, for example, that that the sacraments of the church were not a sign and seal of being engrafted into Christ, but were merely an act of dedication to a religious and social movement.  Further, he didn’t believe in the substitutionary atonement, Jesus was just a moral teacher; he rejected biblical authority, the Bible is just an inspirational tale, etc.   The danger here is that when you choose social concern on the basis of anything other than faith in Christ’s atonement for sinners, then you miss the heart of the gospel.  They assumed their “human sensitivities” were accurate indicators of reality; but this side of the Fall, unfortunately, we cannot trust even our own desires to keep us straight (James 1: 14-15) without the “mirror” of the Word (James 1:23-25).

Through the years, however, this book caught the attention people who were frustrated that the Protestant church preached personal morality on the one hand but on the other had a very anemic theology of social concern.  They saw this as a kind of hypocrisy.   And they rededicated their lives to care for the poor and downplayed the hellfire and brimstone preaching, which “did no good except to lead to self-righteousness and religious bigotry.”

Over the years, you can see how this worldview has influenced many mainline denominations.   When you don’t believe in the inerrancy, authority and infallibility of Scripture, you are able to ignore passages that speak of sin and death and hell and keeping oneself “unstained from the world,” (James 1:27c), and raise the banner for the part of that verse that says “care for the widow and the orphan” (James 1:27b).   This is called liberationist theology.  Liberationist theology says that Christianity is about liberating the oppressed from systemic injustice and bigotry.  And it has influenced many important  people in our nation’s history, including Martin Luther King, Jr.

While all this was developing on the “left” in the wake of Christianity and the Social Crisis (and other books),  there was another group of Christians in America on the “right” who saw the danger of liberationist theology, and called people “back to the Bible.”  The “Bible Conference Movement” was born in places like Niagra Falls, NY in order to study the Scriptures literally and rededicate themselves to purity, knowledge and right doctrine.  Eventually, many great seminaries began out of this tradition, including my own, Dallas Seminary, and even, indirectly, Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia.  The call “back to the Bible” was indeed a needed correction for people who jettisoned the truth of God’s Word for “human sensitivities.”

Through the years however these two groups of people remained ideologically distinct within the “Christian” world.  People outside of the Christian church wondered what all the trouble was about.  “Why are there so many Christian churches ‘splitting’?” they asked.    Meanwhile these two sides of the social morality / private morality divide largely populated Protestant mainline churches and the Evangelical mainline churches respectively.   In due time, eventually the PCA left the mainline PCAUSA church because of these issues and others in order to remain “faithful to the Scriptures, true to the Reformed Faith and obedient to the Great Commission.”

In James 1:27, James offers  a unique definition of religion.  In Greek thrėskeia refers to the outward manifestation of one’s devotion to God.  And in explaining what our outward piety or devotion should look like, he brings together two elements of Christianity that are not often kept together: 1) concern for personal holiness, and 2) a concern for public action and social concern.  The first is often characteristic of separatists (like the Bible conference movement and many charismatic movements) and the second is often characteristic of progressives and called “social justice.”

Trinity stands firmly rooted in the conservative evangelical tradition, yet we believe both sides of this conversation have sometime to contribute.  Our core values affirm that the Gospel impacts into our lives in three ways:  worship, community, and Kingdom-mission.  Worship refers to our confession that Jesus Christ is Lord in all spheres of life, personally and corporately.  There is no private holiness / public activism for us.  They are linked together in biblical sanctification.  We also strive to be a counter-cultural community, where people love each other in ways rarely experienced in Owasso and Tulsa.   We also want to be a people on mission who are dedicated to publically extending God’s Kingdom through evangelization and social concern.  We are in effect trying to do exactly what James says in the verses we will look at this Sunday, James 2:8-2:26.  We are trying to bring two biblical things, “personal holiness” and “public action” to the forefront of our church’s calling because James says that both are implications of the Gospel.  In short, we seek to publicly engage Owasso and Tulsa with the Gospel of Jesus Christ’s work for sinners.  Come join us on the journey to do this in an exciting time of our City’s history and economic development.

Gospel & Law Parenting

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How does one live out the gospel in parenting?  There is an old tale that Martin Luther once told about a drunken peasant who falls off his donkey to one side, only to get back up and fall off to the other.  Christians, Luther says, are like the drunken peasant.  We fall over to license on one side, and then get back in line with the Gospel (Gal 2:14) only to fall the other direction toward law & legalism.  Back and forth the drunken peasant goes until he returns home.

When it comes to parenting, it is so easy to be overly gracious in our attempts to show our kids grace. After all, aside from the incarnation, God’s grace is arguably the most mysterious concept in the Christian life.  How could God give us something we don’t deserve? How could Christ have lived for us and died for us? These questions are so huge that worship is the only proper forum for contemplating them.

Let’s get some skin on these bones and get practical:  Undoubtedly, discipline is going to look different depending upon the age of your children.   But what makes parenting uniquely gospel-centered is the chief idea that parenting is a way to communicate to our children the very character of God.  Yes, behavior is important (especially in the grocery store when they are going for the gold medal in temper tantrum!), but it is not the most important.  Patience & endurance is.  If God thought behavior was most important, wouldn’t he actually be more extreme with his discipline toward us?  As it is, “He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” And yet he “disciplines those he loves.”

You and I can have well-behaved children and fail to parent them in the way that God designed.   Gospel parenting is about the long-term goals of raising children who know and trust Jesus Christ, and rest upon His character, not their own, for significance, joy and meaning in life.  We can shortcut the path to Gospel-centered parenting when we make Jesus look like us rather than conforming to Jesus and his desires.  For example, this means that we can either have a (1) stern/disciplinarian style of parenting that expects emotional & behavioral maturity above our child’s developmental stage (“they must obey me…Ephesians 6:1!”); or (2) laissez faire parenting, non-interference which allows the child to run wild without parental intervention (“Let them be kids… Ephesians 6:4a!”).  Frankly, if you’re like me, then you battle these extremes.  I tend to “fall off the horse” when I get tired, angry, hungry or lazy.

Are you experiencing a season of grace in your parenting journey?  Are times tough?  How will Trinity’s Community Groups be a place where you can share your joys and trials in a meaningful way?  Let’s remember together that patience and endurance are chief marks of good parenting. And let’s remember that it takes a village to raise a child.  What more beautiful village can there be but the church?

Man on the Train

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Some things are so random, they must be from God.  Today, I was working on the Trinity Order of Worship for this Sunday while on the train from Princeton Junction to NYC.  Somewhere between the Call to Worship and formatting the first song, a 40-something-year-old man in business-casual attire came up to me with his hand out and said, “Hi, I’m Steve.  Do you want to talk about the Gospel?” It was totally of the blue.  Thinking he was trying to evangelize me, I said, “Sure, but you may need to know that I’m a minister and love Jesus.” He said, “I figured that.” I heard you talking with your friend (my friend, David Kim, waited for the train with me)…I wonder if you’d like to sit next to me and talk.”

Now, people in NY are by nature suspicious people.  Lots going on in NYC and there is little room for sentimentality.  And when I’m in NYC I tend to be wary of being “played the fool” by others as well.   But, knowing that the Order of Service can wait a day, I said, “Sure,” grabbed by ticket stub from the seat compartment and moved two rows up to talk with him.

His name, as I said, is Steve, an immigration lawyer from Princeton Township. He is married with five children, young twins, and three children from his wife’s first marriage.  We talked about the upside/down nature for the gospel: how the Gospel is news not advice, grace not merit, and the reversal of the weak and the strong.  He was curious about the reversal of the weak and the strong idea because he had dabbled in Buddhism for many years and there are similar paradoxes in that faith that intrigued him.   He is not a believer in Jesus, but doesn’t know why he can’t believe.  It makes “sense,” he said.  He wants to believe and could converse about the gospel as well as any well-read seminary graduate. He misquoted books and chapters, but understood the New Testament and had obviously read it many times. As the train rolled through Newark, NJ and Seacaucus Station (the last two stops before NY Penn Station), we talked about Bonhoeffer’s concept of cheap grace and of Augustine’s work On the Trinity.  He asked me about Bultmann and Tillich, but he knew more about those guys than I do, and I worked to get us back on the topic of the Gospel.

“So, why are you good at repenting of your sins, but not your self-justifications, Steve? What’s keeping you from believe in Christ?  Why are your fearful?”

He said, “I know, I don’t have any excuses, except….’I don’t know!’ I really want to believe but I can’t seem to….” And then he changed the subject, “Do you believe in Calvinism?”

I said, “No.  I believe in the Gospel but I believe that Calvin had it right and that we really are totally depraved, and without hope apart from the saving work of Christ. Why? Does Calvin seem hard to swallow?”

“Not hard to swallow; easy actually. He writes like a modern writer, not like a sixteenth-century Frenchman” (whatever that means, I wondered!?!).  He continued, “But I have a problem with predestination.”

“Why?” I asked.  “What don’t you get about being ‘dead in your trespasses and sins?’ (Eph 2:1).  What can a dead man do unless he is given ‘new life’?”

“I guess I’m weary of God being able to foreknow and elect some to eternal life?”

“Well, if there weren’t things in the Bible that couldn’t challenged you, then God wouldn’t be God would He?  Jesus would be a person you want, not a God you need.  If the Bible could never challenged you, then you couldn’t ever be corrected or rebuked or loved! Your Jesus would be a ‘Stepford God’ who was just a reflection of your own values.  That’s not a god you can worship because that would be idolizing your own values.”

“That’s interesting!” he said with a wry smile. “How did you come to believe?”

“The Gospel became more than just a historical fact when I was eleven.  It became beautiful and good. Through a difficult time in my parent’s relationship the Holy Spirit opened my eyes to the reality of my sin and my need for Christ’s righteousness to cover me.  I believed that Jesus’s righteousness was mine by grace through faith.”

As the train pulled up to NY Penn Station, we exchanged cards and I remembered that I had one of the Tim Keller CD’s that we give to visitors at Trinity.  I gave him one of those and said, “You say you don’t believe, but the Spirit is moving in your life, Steve. Be sensitive to His work. Remember, the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference. The fact that you walked up and cold called me on the back row of the train to talk about the greatest news in the world says something about the Spirit’s work in your life, don’t you think?”

As we walked up the platform, he said, “Yes, I assume it does.  Wish I knew what.”

I smiled.

We shook hands and he said, “If you know anyone who needs pro bono immigration advice, give me a call.”

“Thanks, Steve. Will do!”

We turned and walked in separate directions.

A New Friend of Trinity

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On the drive to NJ/NY, somewhere in Ohio, a lady from Rock Tavern, NY called my cell phone to ask where we got our church’s vision and content on the website.  I told her Trinity’s story, of our many committed brother and sisters, of how Chad & Steven helped us with the design while I wrote the vision and mission.  She wanted to know how we got to our understanding of discipleship, and our vision because it resonated with her.  Long story short, her PCA church is going through a soul-searching phase and she has been commissioned by the elders to form a task force to articulate their own vision and ministry focus.  They unfortunately have never written out their vision.

I told her that I would be in the NYC area.  This afternoon, she drove an hour to meet me in NYC to talk about how Trinity might help her think about her church’s own vision.  Totally random, isn’t it?  We talked for two hours and prayed.  Our conversation made me again so thankful for the Lord’s work in our midst at Trinity.

So, be encouraged that a bold & sweet woman in NY state is praying for Trinity, and cheering us on from a  distance.

The Cultural Divide

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Remember that I want this blog to be practical… but sometimes big ideas lead to extremely practical conclusions.  Read ahead knowing that this post is going to get practical…eventually, I promise.

This morning as I was preparing for tonight’s service, my father-in-law forwarded me a book review from the Wall Street Journal written by Bradford Wilcox, a gentlemen I’ve never met but for some time had been following at the University of Virginia. When I was a campus minister at Princeton, we often talked among the same associates–he, from his chair at the Advanced Institute of Culture at UVA, and I from my lunches with friends, professors and postdocs at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion.  I like Wilcox’s writing, but something in his review made me simultaneously intrigued and impassioned–the mark of good writing I suppose.  His review was on Charle’s Murray’s new book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (Crown Forum, 2011), which came out last week.  Here’s the gist,

“Coming Apart” by Charles Mussay and is about the deteriation of the white middle class in America over the past 50 years.  His hypothesis for the reason is the loss of values of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion……While the lower class is losing/has lost….the upper 20% of the economic strata has embraced these values…. The book argues that a large swath of America—poor and working-class whites—is turning away from traditional values and losing ground.

You can read the entire review here. And a summary from Murray here.

When Lauren and I moved to Princeton in 2006 for me to serve as a campus minister I didn’t think much about a cultural divide.  I grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood in my hometown in North Texas, and lived a very comfortable life, won leadership awards, went to a large state school (A&M) and made lots of good friends.  Then I went to Dallas Seminary for another four years of study to emerge with a Masters of Theology–a degree that simply awarded me for the conscious awareness of my ignorance and the ability to ask more questions (my ordination process in the PCA prepared me theologically).   At DTS I studied history: the history of how theological ideas shaped behavior.  The overlap with sociology is significant and I dabbled in that discipline, especially those writers that helped me understand the early church.  I tell you this because I brought all of this with me into the pastorate. And at Princeton, I saw for the first time in my life that I was on the “underside” of the cultural divide, a divide I had read about through the centuries, but didn’t believe it existed in modern American.  But I felt it.   Here’s how Murray describes it:

The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated….

People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality.

I don’t have time to go into the details of how the cultural inequality demonstrated itself–let’s go to coffee– but it was “thick” within the walls of Fitz Randolph Gate (the gate that opens onto Princeton’s campus).  And truthfully, after seeing the utter desperation with which the world’s best and brightest students claw their way into the new “elite” of America,  I don’t know if I want on the other “upperside” of the divide.  The costs are high.  The process ate them alive and left some of them jobless in the end. Many moved home.  Many are still asking me to pray for job openings at firms.  But to their credit, they are out there knocking on doors, even right now.   And it is precisely this attitude that Murray writes about in “Coming Apart”, for many blue-collar whites have stopped looking for jobs.  Stopped looking, while the “elites” keep trying.  And according to history, the latter will succeed by the providence of God based upon their endurance.   Meanwhile, many Americans have been rejected so much that we sit watching “Modern Family” or “Glee” hoping that something will fell into their lap beside increasing credit card debt.  And this strikes close to home for me, for many in Owasso–especially with American Airlines facing imminent cuts–live this reality.

One of the challenges that Trinity Presbyterian Church faces is how to bring a biblical view of the world and a Protestant work ethic–as the Puritans made famous–to the members of a new church, and our communities.  How are we as a people grow in our understanding of what the Bible calls “work”–an activity larger than just our employment? The Biblical idea of work is more akin to what Charles Murray identifies as one of the top three qualities of the new “elite,” namely, industriousness.  In the Garden God called for Adam and Eve to be industrious:

[28] And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”  … [15] The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.  (Genesis 1:28; 2:15 ESV)

To “have dominion over” sounds like work, doesn’t it?  In fact, it is.  Good old fashioned work.  Isn’t it interesting that “work” is creational, “work” is good, “work” is what God intended man to do in order to extend the border of the garden to the ends of the earth?  And in the garden, just like we see today, man abdicates his responsibility. He disobeys God’s creational command to work and takes a fruit break by the one tree he was commanded not to flirt with.  Yea, yea, Eve was there and all that…but it was Adam’s responsibility, wasn’t it?  He failed to lead his family.  Something Murray talking about in his book.  The “elite” are leading their family’s in the areas of “marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity,” and the cultural divide is growing.  Those are four creational ideas that we see in the very beginning of the Bible.  Look at the passage again:

Marriage:

[28] And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth (Genesis 1:28a ESV)

Industriousness:

and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”… [15] The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.  (Genesis 1:28b; 2:15 ESV)

Honesty and religiosity:

[15] The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. [16] And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, [17] but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:16-17 ESV)

So, the question remains, will Trinity be a church that is only concerned with personal piety or with a greater vision for discipleship?  Could it be that making disciples means that we must see the importance of renewal in the heart (conversion, piety), AND the community (marriage, vulnerability, repentance, forgiveness one to another, accountability), AND the world (identifying problems in Owasso and working with like-minded organizations to return things to the way they were–and will be in the New Jerusalem)?  I think so.  But this has rarely been done in the evangelical church.  There is too much energy being spent on controlling behavior, and not preaching the whole counsel of God so that we see how big the Gospel really is.

Tonight, I am preparing to teach our new members class on how to unveil the beauty of Christ for the world.  And I’m going to mention thee things that I’d like to invite you to join us in.

First, become a person of prayer. Invite your family to pray with you over lunch or dinner today.  Make prayer a more central part of your family activity.  This is advantageous according Murray–a secular sociologist–so why not, right?  Go head and try it.  And when you pray, tell God three things about Himself that you are grateful for before you start praying for personal needs. Listen.  Don’t talk so much.  Read more about prayer on Trinity’s Resource page and then come join us at a Community Group or a small group at your local church to experience prayer with other brothers and sisters in Christ.

Second, become a person of stewardship.  Use your gifts (time, talent, treasure) to extend the “garden into the wilderness,” to extend God’s Kingdom in Owasso or your neighborhood.  We have a Second Adam whom has equipped us to do this through His death and resurrection; now by the power of the Holy Spirit you can turn the world’s values on their head because you’re accepted and loved by God more than you can imagine.  Be industrious for the sake of something bigger than yourself.  And give until it hurts.  Otherwise, what’s sacrificial about it?  Industriousness isn’t easy or there wouldn’t be articles written about it in the Wall Street Journal.

Lastly, be a person of vision.  Allow the Gospel to affect everything that you do.  You’re roles at work, as a parent, a student, a player, what have you.  See that the Gospel changes everything and the Triune God intends to extend His Kingdom into every sphere of society through His people and by His common grace.  This is part of being intellectually honest about the Gospel, and not merely using it to keep our kids aged and staged through church programs that make them nicer adults (and often extremely bitter at the church).  Come to Trinity to learn more about these concepts and how they will help you see that the Gospel is bigger than you think.

You can’t get to first base in these things without the sovereign oversight and care of the Holy Spirit, nor will you grow without God’s means of grace: fellowship, prayer, the preached Word, and the sacraments.  These are the normal means of God’s interaction in the world. But as the cultural divide continues, you have a choice to make.  Stand by and let it happen.  Or equip others with the Gospel to be prepared to handle it when it comes, and perhaps even change the trend by working together to strengthen our families, work hard, and worship the One True God.  Trinity aims to help do this.  And we will keep trying together however unsuccessful we may at first be.

I’m Overly Sensitive

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I want this blog to be extremely practical, because the Gospel affects everything.

So, here goes. I’ll start with a confession:

“Hi, my name is Pastor Blake & I’m overly sensitive.”

Here’s the question you and I might ask ourselves:  “If I’m an overly sensitive person and get my feelings hurt easily. How can I develop a ‘thicker skin’ and not get hurt so much?”

That is a question that many of us in Owasso and NE Oklahoma ask. And I come at this as someone who does not have a thick skin. I am someone who is wired by creation to be so sensitive to how people treat each other, the issues of tone, the ways language is used, how that comes across to others, body language, looks, what voice and attitude communicates. My own struggle with this issue began with I became a Christian twenty-five years ago, and I’ve seen how remarkably the Gospel has changed me in this area of my life. I mention that because I was someone who had a great sensitivity to the way others treated me and therefore I was cautious about relationships. I pulled away. It was like I was looking out through a lattice and asking everyone, “how are you going to view me?” “Will you hurt me if I let you into my life?” And that only made me more self-consumed and self-oriented and I was not experiencing growth in this area.

I would say that today I have not developed a thicker skin, but rather the sensitivity has been reframed. The problem is that the sensitivity is being directed the wrong way. We should be sensitive. We should be sensitive to how we’re treating each other. We should be sensitive to the nuances of language and voice and tone and all these things. But if it’s pointed in the wrong direction, then I’m self-centered; I’m self-absorbed and I’m easily hurt, because whenever anything happens, it rouses me; it’s self-referential.

And I can remember that this was a huge issue for me right at the beginning of my ministry as a campus minister. I realized how much I was owned by “how will they think of me?” “will I succeed?”. When you think of it, it’s a classic interplay of pride and fear of man. And that I think is just about the primal human sin. We lose God and His universe and then it’s about me and what you think of me: pride and fear of man.

I would say that the goal, rather than developing “thick skin” is to understand that sensitivity is a huge gift. You know what I mean? Consider the alternative, which is being callous, which is what being thick-skinned is. But our sensitivities ought to drive us to our relationship with God in terms of where is refuge (Psalm 73:25-26), where is safety (Prov 18:10), because the world is a dangerous place. The world will hurt us. And people are judgmental. They are snide. They are not thinking about us. They are thinking about themselves. So we are going to be hurt but where is our fundamental refuge? Is it in the vertical, in our relationship with God as his adopted children?

And then the sensitivity begins to get re-wired so that it goes the other direction. So it becomes a sensitivity toward other people. And we begin to think about, “Well, how does my life, my language come across to you?” Do I care for you? Do I use words in a way that is hurtful to the other person? I know this when I talk to a husband and a wife. Now, she said that in a way, with a flash in her eyes, that if I were him, I would feel hurt. So, how can I help her realize what she’s doing? How can I help him adjust his sensitivity. So ultimately, one of the greatest challenges here is to get over the inertia of sin that says, “It’s all about me?” Because its only through the work of the Cross that we can see this truth about ourselves. It’s scary, and yet so pervasive that it’s almost invisible. And if we understand our relationship with a God who always accepts us, then we can be free to think, not less of ourselves, but about ourselves less.

It goes back to the Cross. The awesome side of love that our Savior knows us so intimately, every hair on our head, that He truly knows us better than we know ourselves. And Jesus went to the Cross to die for us to redeem the world from all those hurtful things. And without His work, this divine re-wiring cannot happen. Because we are so well loved by the One who was resurrected from the dead, we can be re-wired. Otherwise it’s just psycho-somatic gymnastics. It’s Freud’s world to find some kind motivation to get over it on the one hand. Or, on the other hand, it’s boundaries, setting up boundaries so that I don’t get hurt.

The way Christ went to the Cross, which is then described by this ongoing characteristic at the end of Hebrews 4, “We do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize.” It has two negatives. In other words, we have a High Priest who is able to sympathize with our weakness. And that weakness biblically is having a dual reference. Part of it is our vulnerability and susceptibility to sin, to selfishness, to self orientation, to just be mis-wired. And the other part of it is we live in a world that ends in death and suffering. And we are weak in both ways, both aspects of suffering in a fallen world. And Christ sympathizes with our entire plight and he comes bringing mercy to us. And the Cross is the supreme fulfillment of all that care, in bearing our death, in bearing our sins in one single act.

But if Hebrews 4 and 5 is telling the truth, which we believe it does, then Christ continues to sympathize with us because He knows what its like to live in a broken world. And this question of being hyper-sensitive, this re-wiring does not make you vulnerable and pain free like a thick skin would. It actually makes you from a certain point of view start to bear the sorrows of the world. You actually feel more, not just for yourself, but for other people in that movement out of yourself. You want a thin skin in a sense. You’re safer because you’re in Christ, and yet you can feel wrong and can “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15).