man.of.depravity

Part One

Creative Chaos @ The Soul.

Today I hope we provide some concrete answers. The beauty of this blog conversation and my conversation with Rose is that there are no concrete answers. As you can tell, I don’t deal with this very well, but I am doing my best to open up to God’s moving without specific answers. Here is the rest of our conversation:

Me: I totally understand that many of the things I feel called to cost money (guitar, schooling, etc.) and I need to have a way to pay for them. I also can see that God has blessed us with jobs, a car, a place to live, and I don’t need to give them up. But we still haven’t figured out how we can serve “the least of these” and also serve money. In some way we are serving money by working jobs, paying bills…all those things are money oriented. So how can we live to do these money oriented things and also serve the God who desires everything from us?

Rose: I think the biggest thing is how you spend your time. If someone chooses to work longer and allows that to be their top priority then I think they have their priorities wrong. In our situation, we don’t have a ton of money, but we do have time that we can give. I think everyone has time. When I spend time with my small group girls, I feel so much more fulfillment than anytime I have a big day at work. I try and focus my mind on eternity and not material things that are of the here and now.

Me: I like to think of how I can sanctify myself from unbelievers. How can I show that I am different? I think a lot of my life and a lot of the “average” Christian life, does show a difference but I don’t think finances is one of those ways. Christians spend lavishly just as much as anybody else. I look at my own life and wonder how much different I look than the average person with how I spend my money. Just because somewhere around 10% of our money might go to a church and humanitarian efforts doesn’t mean I have set myself a part with my finances. At the same time, I don’t think we spend money on anything crazy. But, I want to challenge us to think of ways to be sanctified with our spending outside the 10% we already give away. 10% is pretty pathetic if you ask me, and it is probably sad that I let it be the benchmark.

Rose: This takes me back to when we were really struggling financially and had some unfortunate things happen and people just gave us money…and we still don’t know who those people are. My trust in the Lord and confidence in His provision has never been the same since then. I want my spirit to be listening to Him so when others are in a similar situation, God can use us to help them through. To me the real giving of yourself, is giving of your heart, not just money. As long as your heart is rooted in Jesus and in love then I don’t think money is the problem.

Shane Claiborne was asked this: How do we combat the pull toward materialism, and what does simplicity look like in the 21st Century?

His response has stuck with me since I read it:

“I think the most important question is not what I should give away, because the Scriptures say you can sell everything you have and give it to the poor, but if you don’t have love it’s nothing. So the deepest question around simplicity is about love, and redistribution of resources is only meaningful inasmuch as it’s rooted in love. When we really figure out how to live in the personalism and love of Christ with our neighbor, then that defines what’s enough so that we’re not just driven by an ideology, but by a love relationship to our neighbor.”

Romans 12:8-10

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

A Christian buzz word I’ve heard a lot of is “extreme grace.” Yeah ok, it is 2 words. I know that. But the phrase is used all the time.

Whenever someone who was in jail, is a prostitute, or was addicted to drugs, accepts Jesus, people call this extreme grace. Whenever a 12 year old, a virgin, or an abstainer accepts Jesus, we call this grace. Let me be forthright with my opinion on this; the phrase “extreme grace” is derogatory. It really is. It means that those who received “extreme grace” needed more forgiveness than the others who simply received grace.

I do not deny that I worship a God of grace, but he provides the same amount of grace to the 12 year old as the prostitute. We are all in need of the same amount of grace. Grace is a miracle no matter who receives it, and it just saddens me that we cheapen God’s ability to provide grace to those who we would say barely deserve it. We say “our God is so loving he would even provide grace to that person.” I think we should be saying that our God is so loving that he provides a way to grace for everyone.

Thank you Jesus that your sacrifice covers a multitude of sins as much as it covers one sin. You have blessed us all with grace that we only need accept to receive.

I have thought a lot about my three posts on church politics this past week. Even though my hardest experience with them happened over four years ago, it still feels very real even to today. I guess that is the problem everyone has with politics in church,. Church needs to be more than a business environment. There are people, that if I saw right now, I don’t know how I’d react. I like to think that I could be cordial and leave the past in the past, but I thought a lot this week about that. I still think church politics exist in every church, but I hope I didn’t come across as hardened by my experience. Such as simply thinking that they exist and we just need to deal with it. Partially, this is true. But also, everyone deals with emotional hurts and pains different. Some people never recover from being hurt by church leadership or even in a small group and they allow this hurt to wreak havoc on their relationship with Christ. The bottom line for me is that if you are expecting church to be a bubble from the crap of life, you are fooling yourself. If you put yourself into church ministry whole heartedly, you will get hurt at some point. The saying goes…better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. This applies to church politics because you can only get out of ministry what you put in. If you never put your whole self into it, you will never get everything out of it that you can. Only CHRIST can be that safe haven from life’s crap. He is our comfort. Him alone.