Have You Ever Felt Outnumbered?

"Don't be afraid," the prophet answered. "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them." II Kings 6:16.

Have you ever felt like you were outnumbered? I have been, lately, in many ways: other religions out numbering Christians, my bills outnumbering my paycheck, the number of people who need help outnumbering the church's resources, the unemployed outnumbering jobs, the innumerable barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. It seems we're up to our eyeballs, just barely able to keep our head above water, let alone get ahead, and sadly in the minority.

I went back to school this year at my local community college. There is what appears to be a very active Islamic group there. I say appears because I've never actually attended a meeting to see how many people are involved in this group. But they paper the school with advertisements, some with pretty convincing statistics: "1 in 4 Americans are Muslim," "Islam is the fasting growing religion in America," etc. And then there are the non-religious, namely the ol' "New Atheists." I say "ol'" because there's really nothing new about atheism, not by a long shot. The only thing new as that they appear to be more mobilized than ever. No longer content with sitting back, outside the church, they've begun to attack. Just pull up any Christian video on YouTube, or any story involving religion on a news website, and you'll find their comments under the article, denouncing religion as superstitious, irrelevant, corrupt, false, a scam, etc, even bashing God outright. But they don't discriminate, they bash all religions. They're tolerant like that.

Financial woes are affecting everybody in The Great Recession. People get poorer and poorer while the cost of everything gets higher and higher. Even churches are closing down due to money. Hey, 10 percent of nothing is nothing. Hard to tithe off of nothing. With churches struggling just to stay alive, trying to help the poor is nearly impossible. Many churches simply have no choice but to turn people away with a prayer and an encouraging word. "Maybe try the church down the street." As a result, due to their situations, many people are simply losing faith and walking out of the church for good.

Looking at the circumstances it can seem pretty hopeless. Like Peter looking at the waves when he should have kept his eyes on Jesus, we can start to sink into despair as we allow the cares of this world choke us out. "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith." Hebrews 12:2. This is what the prophet Elishah was demonstrating to his assistant in II Kings 6:15-17.

"When the servant of the man of God got up and went out early the next morning, an army with horses and chariots had surrounded the city. "Oh, my lord, what shall we do?" the servant asked. "Don't be afraid," the prophet answered. "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them. And Elisha prayed, "O Lord, open his eyes so he may see." Then the Lord opened the servant's eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha."

It may seem to some like I'm mixing topics, providence and persecution, but I'm not, because the answer to both of these problems is the same: God. We are not outnumbered by cults, atheists, debts or barrels of oil. We serve a God who is all-powerful and all-knowing, and is the unending source of all our needs. There's a bigger picture here, the edges of which we are not able to see, and a Great Artist, the author and finisher (perfecter) of our faith. I like the words of Paul Harvey: "In times like these it helps to recall that there have always been times like these." There is nothing new under the sun and nothing that has happened has taken God by surprise, he is still in control.

Don't Get Caught Resting On Your Lees

"Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath settled on his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel, neither hath he gone into captivity: therefore his taste remained in him, and his scent is not changed.Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will send unto him wanderers, that shall cause him to wander, and shall empty his vessels, and break their bottles." Jeremiah 48:12&13, KJV.

Although I've been reading through Isaiah I came across this verse in Jeremiah. Both Isaiah 16 & 17 and Jeremiah 48 predict the judgement and invasion of the land of Moab. Dave Guzik is one of my favorite commentators. In his notes on Isaiah 15 he refers to this verse from Jeremiah. After quoting this passage he says, "When we are at ease, and are never “poured” from vessel to vessel, we “settle on the dregs(lees)” and are never refined. God uses the “pouring” process to refine us".(Insertion mine). I didn't pay much attention to the word "dregs" but when I read the verse in the KJV it used the word "lees". What are lees, you wonder? So did I.

According to Wikipedia, lees are "deposits of dead yeast or residual yeast and other particles that precipitate, or are carried by the action of "fining", to the bottom of a vat of wine after fermentation and aging." Did you get all that? In other words, it's the junk that settles to the bottom of the barrel when wine sits for a long time. Now, sometimes lees can be useful to flavor other wines, but for the most part they're tossed out by "racking" the wine. Hmmm...racking...

Racking: the process of siphoning the wine or beer off the lees into a new, clean barrel. To put in language even I can understand, racking is the process of moving wine from one barrel to another, leaving the lees behind. As the lees settle to the bottom the purer wine rises to the top and is skimmed off. In order for wine to be refined it has to be moved to prevent itself from getting clouded up with dead yeast, the stuff it doesn't need anymore.

The moral of the story: we need to be kept moving to refine us and keep us from getting sedentary. Moab was resting on its lees. It was a small but prosperous community surrounded by superpowers that had been picked on since they were built. Interesting. Small but sedentary versus challenged and large. My wife and I often discuss where we would like to go someday to retire, to slow down, to live a slower pace of life. But so far God has not allowed that. We have moved, and moved, and moved. In 7 years of marriage we have lived in 7 different places, sometimes living with other people. Sometimes (ok, often) it's easy to look at that and get down on ourselves. If only we had stayed in school, if only we had better jobs, if only we had planned better, we shoulda, coulda, woulda...

I have even used the David angle: how long, Oh Lord? When is it ever going to just get easier?! Seems no matter what we try to do it fails or is just so painful we wonder why we try.

But maybe we shouldn't be so hard on ourselves. For this is God's fermentation process. We are being racked. Boy, are we being racked. Why? To prevent us from getting sedentary and to purify us of the lees, the dregs, the old junk that settles at the bottom of the barrels of our hearts and minds and keeps us from being as pure, refined, and full-bodied as we can be and to help us grow. Yet along the way, we had many opportunities to minister and to see God move in our lives in ways we wouldn't otherwise have known. It's no accident that there's a correlation between little, unshaken Moab and big and powerful yet persecuted Israel. There are tons of examples of this in the Bible: wine being racked, and eagle stirring its nest, gold being refined in the fire, Job being tested, and, not least of which, the temptation of Christ.

God seems to speak in threads, probably because he speaks to us right where we are, and the thread lately has been simply, "Press on. Don't give up. I'm not done with you yet. Yeah, you've taken some lumps and dropped a few balls, but I'm not done." I've come to realize this morning that God is racking me, sifting me, keeping me moving so to get the good part of me to rise to the top and leave the junk in the old barrel. If we will not rack ourselves, then God will rack us. I'd rather do it myself. I'm looking forward to my new barrel.

"Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on..." Phillipians 3:13-14.

The Christian Conundrum

This is my very first blog. This is actually something I wrote a while back, just to get started.

"For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon.' The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and "sinners." ' But wisdom is proved right by her actions." Matthew 11:18-20.
There's an old saying for the sentiment expressed in these verses, I'll digress from that, but it seems that no matter what we do as Christians we're going to be judged ether way. I just read an article on cnn.com (won't bother posting it) about a pastor in Chicago who is giving away money at his church. Every Sunday he gives $500 to two people in his congregation by drawing numbers from a bucket. Whoever's sitting in the lucky seat gets it. Granted, the guy's a little showy, however, consider this:
1) The church has long been criticized for being stuffy, boring, and out-of-touch with the here and now.
2) Since the actions of a few TV evangelists many people have become suspicious and hesitant to give to churches, not wanting to fatten the pockets of greedy, crooked pastors.

So what does this guy do? He makes his church un-stuffy by using a fun approach to do something that can sometimes be difficult for people to do: accept charity, and gets downright generous by giving away $1,000 per week to help the needy.
Now, what bothered me was not the video itself, but the (unfortunately predictable) comments of two individuals who had also viewed the article. For the sake of time and space I won't quote them completely but let me summarize.

The first comment basically pointed to the fact that churches have a tax-exempt status and stated they they are therefore a drain on the community, and should be stripped of their tax-exempt status. It is true that churches, as non-profit organizations, receive a tax-exempt status. However, they are still not completely tax-free. For example, they still have to pay property taxes. But what I'd like to point out is that they also do not receive any support from the government, either. I know of a certain church that is a government food shelter, and yet is still required to purchase the food FROM THE GOVERNMENT! They receive no funding from the Fed, State or local government and rely solely on the faithful giving of their members and fund-raising and believe me the recession has affected us all, even the church.

The second comment criticized the theology of the pastor, stating that he was preaching a prosperity gospel. Personally I didn't hear the preacher say hardly anything at all, really. It wasn't his fault; his preaching just didn't make the final edit---what a surprise. All that made the edit was him drawing a raffle ticket and giving away this cash to the tune from The Price is Right. I don't think from that video we have enough evidence to label anyone a prosperity preacher. So where did that idea come from? I can't but feeling, and I could be wrong, that it's because if someone sees money in a pastor's hand, or hears him talking about money he's automatically labeled a prosperity preacher. Like pastors are forbidded to touch or have money. Was Jesus anti-money? Not at all. We know the apostles carried a money purse, because Judas used to help himself to it. As a matter of fact the Bible speaks more about money-related topics than any other topic. Why? I think it's because God knew where our hearts would be. As Christ said, "Where your heart is, your treasure shall be also." In fact the Bible contains over 2,000 verses about money. But the first message Christ ever preached, after being baptized and tempted, was a passage from Isaiah:
"The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor..." Isaiah 61:1,2; Luke 4:18

Here we find the mission statement of Christ, and the first issue Christ addressed was poverty. How do you help the poor? By giving them what they need. And what many people need right now is money. Giving people food and clothing are important, sure, but mortgage companies don't except canned corn or blue jeans, neither does the landlord. Money is essential for life. So here's my question: if it was so important to Jesus, why are we so afraid of it? If Jesus gave to the poor, if the apostles gave to the poor (they even had to recruit more leaders to run the giving ministry) why is it such a taboo to see a pastor giving away money? Was Jesus a prosperity teacher? I won't open that can of worms, but in a word, my answer is no. For he also said,

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal."

Nobody had anything positive to say.

So, getting back to my point about greedy pastors, here's a guy who's giving away money and still he's criticized for it. If a pastor asks for money, he's suspected. If he gives money, he's criticized. I already granted that, at least from what we see in the video, he's a little showy about it, and there might be something to be said about not doing your acts of righteousness before men, but at least he's doing acts of righteousness! God uses weird people, and how lucky for you and me that he does. He uses the foolish to shame the wise. God spoke to Balaam through his jackass, and has been speaking through jackasses ever since, so I don't feel too proud if he should want to speak through me. There's no cool-factor with God, he is no respecter of persons. John the Baptist was a weirdo who lived in the desert and wore camel's hair and ate locusts and honey, Paul was a short little guy with a big nose and bad eyes, Moses had a speech impediment, and so on and so on. God uses faultering, damaged, used-up, beat-up ragamuffins and sometimes we have some quirks, but hey, who doesn't? Some segments of society have become quite proud of their quirks; should we be any different? By the way, we get criticized for being too perfect sometimes, too. Like we're all a bunch choir boys held over from the 50's. John came neither eating nor drinking and they thought he was a demoniac, Christ came eating and drinking and they called him a lush. There's an expression for this that some might use, that we're damed if we do, damned if we don't. Praise God, we are not damned at all if we believe in the good news of Jesus Christ. And in the end it won't matter what others said. All that matters is our faith and faithfulness.

In Peter's words:
"But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God." 1 Peter 2:20.

We're going to be judged, criticized, ostracized and so on no matter what. As the world hated Christ it will hate us. But at least we can make sure we are suffering for righteousness' sake. Better to be criticized for being a do-gooder than a hypocrite. Wisdom is proved right not by how cool you look or how much the world accepts you, but by our actions.