Profits

Aug 31/Jan 29

Dear Gary

I confess I’m still stuck on Jan 29 with Laubach, somewhere between desire and cynicism. I’m envious of his stated ability to be continually led by God: “I seem to have to make sure of only one thing now, and every other thing “takes care of itself,” or I prefer to say what is more true, God takes care of all the rest. My part is to live this hour in continuous inner conversation with God and in perfect responsiveness to his will. To make this hour gloriously rich. This seems to be all I need think about.” 

I like the idea of being able to focus, to trust that God is constantly at work “willing for His good pleasure” in my life. If I could be that focused, that centered, and that trusting I believe my hours too would be more gloriously rich.

My cynicism comes from the actions and claims of numerous preachers, especially those active on the public speaking circuits and on television. The closest to home when we lived in Colorado Springs was evangelical pastor Ted Haggard from New Life Church, just down the road from us. He preached constantly against the evils of premarital sex, adultery, and gay marriage. Then he was caught in a gay sex scandal in 2006. It was a sad interruption of his successful ministry.

Jim Baker and his wife Tammy Faye were synonymous with ministerial success in the 1980’s. Some of my parishioners in Berwyn repeatedly travelled long distances to hear them speak, a habit that ended when Baker was accused of sexual abuse and fraud. In 1987, after Bakker resigned from his ministry, he was convicted of financial crimes and sentenced to 45 years in prison. He was paroled in 1996 and now revisits the airwaves with a prophetic voice about the apocalypse, selling overpriced freeze-dried food to his listeners so they can cope with the end times.

As an American Baptist I have often been accused of having close theological ties to every other Baptist church in the country, even Westboro Baptist Church founded by Fred Phelps. Westboro is a fundamentalist ministry that was, and still is, known for protesting the funerals of gay people and gay pride events. It is classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Phelps had a brush with the law in 1994 when he was convicted of disorderly conduct, and 1995, when he was convicted for assault and battery.

Some religious people - and these are just part of what’s in the barrel, are inclined to proclaim that their word is the word of God, no matter what they truly believe. I’m not saying Laubach falls into that camp, only that I’m wary in the presence of self-proclaimed prophets, or even those who say they have an open link to the Lord. Especially if I thought one of them was me. It always seemed presumptuous to say I was modeling myself after the notes in the Scofield Bible, unashamedly asserting God’s truth when I wrote or spoke. With few exceptions I have always believed that conclusion was up to others to make and if what I said happened to be prophetic the words would proceed on their own merit.

The defining difference, which I see no sign of in Laubach, is the profit motive. For me profit and prophet just don’t go together. What I do see in Laubach is a readiness to claim God’s guidance in all the “little things,” wondering where personal responsibility comes in.

Pastor Mike

A Broken Heart

August 25 / January 29

Dear Gary,

Laubach has truly bypassed me. By my calculations he has been working on this “experiment” for about two weeks compared to one for me. (or as I read his letters, he's been at it for over a year.) That’s probably the reason for my lack of success. He has finally arrived at this stage: 

“I feel simply carried along each hour, doing my part in a plan which is far beyond myself. This sense of cooperation with God in little things is what so astonishes me, for I never have felt it this way before. I need something, and turn round to find it waiting for me. I must work, to be sure, but there is God working along with me. … I seem to have to make sure of only one thing now, and every other thing “takes care of itself,” or I prefer to say what is more true, God takes care of all the rest. My part is to live this hour in continuous inner conversation with God and in perfect responsiveness to his will. To make this hour gloriously rich. This seems to be all I need think about.” 

I confess my inability to keep up with him. I can maintain a continuous inner conversation for about ten minutes, then I get distracted. in that short time I often have a sense of God’s will, but I am certainly not perfectly responsive to it. I can get so far as asking for guidance in a certain matter. I even get an answer. But it always seems to be the answer I don’t want to hear. I try to talk God into suggesting something else and that’s when my companionable dialogue comes to a halt.

Jonathan Edwards would not, I think, be my first choice for a spiritual advisor. He seems a bit too willing to decide whether others are displaying Christian lives - and can expect eternal results because of their behavior. My thinking is that Edwards is frustrated by the fact that so many people have religious truth presented to them and show no change in their lives. His explanation, I think, is that those individuals have not been “affected” by God, and he names the affections that reside in persons who are truly religious. Those people are the chosen recipients of God's grace and salvation.

He lists several affections: fear (of God), hope, love, hatred (of sin), desire, joy, sorrow, gratitude, compassion, and zeal.  One of these stood out for me because our pastor’s message today focused on it. Edwards says, “Religious sorrow, mourning, and brokenness of heart are also frequently spoken of as a great part of true religion, a distinguishing quality of the saints. ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ said Jesus, ‘for they shall be comforted.’ It is also a pleasant and acceptable sacrifice to God: ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.’”

The pastor presented the same “affection,” but in different terms. We are broken-hearted about the evil in the world because God’s heart is broken. It is the broken-heartedness we share with God that motivates us to not be idle in the face of sin, but to engage it, to confess our own contributions to it, to abandon cynicism and to adopt the new heart of life and engagement God offers us. We accept not for Edward’s emphasis, that we allow the affections to move us so that God won’t despise us. The pastor’s approach built on our desire to become more Christlike, which means being centered in sorrow for evil and sin.

- Pastor Mike

Discipleship

August 22/January 26

Dear Gary,

Dr. Laubach comes a long way in a short time. He says that he is feeling God in each movement, willing that God direct his fingers in typing, his steps as he walks, his words as he speaks, and his jaws as he eats. 

“It is exactly that “moment by moment,” every waking moment, surrender, responsiveness, obedience, sensitiveness, pliability, “lost in His love,” that I now have the mind-bent to explore with all my might. It means two burning passions: First, to be like Jesus. Second, to respond to God as a violin responds to the bow of the master.”

This is  beyond me, or as Lewis puts it, beyond my “self,” which is destined for death. He says,”Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked - the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.” I think from this perspective feeling God in each movement would qualify as innocent or good. It becomes a matter of trading in my self for Jesus’ self, an even exchange. I have no idea what He does with the old ones.

Dallas Willard, in The Cost of Nondiscipleship, argues that the early Christians were first and foremost disciples, already part of the Kingdom  of God. They are contrary to modern church members. “For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian. … (They) do not require following Christ in his example, spirit, and teachings as a condition of membership. Churches are filled with “undiscipled disciples.”

I consider myself to have been an undisciplined disciple when I first arrived at seminary. It took me some time to realize I had chosen a religious profession but hadn’t made a personal commitment to follow Christ. In the years that followed I made many deep commitments, but I know I often confused my commitments to Christ with commitments to the church. The latter were always more easily accomplished. At the same time the difference between the two was noticeable to me in the attitudes of my parishioners. They often lacked, at least outwardly, much semblance of commitment to Jesus as Lord. As Willard points out, we are more prone to make converts, not disciples, and baptize them into church membership, not the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

I misunderstood Willard at first. I thought he was presenting discipleship and nondiscipleship as a dichotomy. Either you are or you aren’t, you have it or you don’t. I've been exposed to this sort of thinking many times in the past.. Either you’re a Christian or not; either you’ve accepted Him or you haven’t. For me the most frequent negative about this approach is the unsettled feeling that comes in our recurring separations from God. We think maybe we didn’t make a faith decision; maybe my initial commitment wasn’t strong enough. Maybe it didn’t take.

But Willard corrects that thinking. Decisions and commitments are recurring events, and each one takes us deeper into a life of faith. “In the heart of the disciple there is a desire, and there is decision or settled intent. The disciple of Christ desires above all else to be like him … The disciple is one who, intent upon becoming Christlike and so dwelling in his “faith and practice,”  systematically and progressively rearranges his affairs to that end.”

- Pastor Mike

Frank Laubach

Dear Gary,

You recently persuaded me as a friend (and your friendship is now in question), that I would find  Letters by a Modern Mystic both beneficial and growth-inducing. I say your friendship is in question because in my naiveté I assumed you meant I would find it a good read, not realizing you expected me to take the Letters to heart and use them as a guide to greater spiritual maturity. 

As you mentioned, the Letters were written by Frank Laubach during his missionary service in the Philippines during the 1930’s.  At the outset (January 3) he states his goal thus: “As for me I resolved that I would succeed better this year with my experiment of filling every minute full of the thought of God than I succeeded last year.” 

I can identify with his goal to the extent this has often been my desire as well, but it has always ended as a fantasy rather than an experiment. One of the challenges I face daily is my inclination to grandiose thinking. In the past I’ve decided that instead of studying a few Bible verses I’ll study all of them. I’ve set my sights not on working out once a week for a month, but every day for a year. I won’t construct a workbench, I’ll organize a whole shop and build cabinets for it. None of these have come to pass.  And I have determined in the past to fill all my waking moments with the presence of God. This one is still up for debate.

On some occasions I’ve found what I assumed to be God’s thoughts, or voice, speaking to me sotto voco, particularly in times of prayer. I have even considered that it was God’s words that found their way onto a sermon manuscript; after a time of study I would begin writing, struggling at first, but then feeling the words flow effortlessly onto the page I was typing. In retrospect I have most often attributed this to being focused on the sermon to the exclusion of any distractions, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe it really was God speaking. In addition there have been times when I determined to focus continually on God and God’s presence. My decision to do so would come on the heels of what I’d believed to be an internal dialogue with God, but I would quickly set my resolve aside. I have always been easily distracted from movies, sermons, and God, and thus irregular in prayer. It’s just hard for me to focus.

Laubach further defines his purpose: ”But this year I have started out trying to live all my waking moments in conscious listening to the inner voice, asking without ceasing, “What, Father, do you desire said? What, Father, do you desire done this minute?” It is clear that this is exactly what Jesus was doing all day every day. But it is not what His followers have been doing in very large numbers.” 

If I were going to undertake this exercise I thought it would be wise not to do so alone. My choice for a companion was Devotional Classics edited by Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith. They provide writings by about 50 individuals we would count as people of faith. I read this book thoroughly about 15 years ago and taught a Sunday School class using some of the chapters.

It intrigues me now that the first excerpts come from C.S. Lewis, who seems to be singing from the same songbook as Laubach: 

The real problem of the Christian life comes … the very moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving  them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system,  because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. 

I’ve never been troubled by the wild animals Lewis talks about. My animals are still asleep when I wake up, and it’s an accomplishment to get a list of the day’s responsibilities together. Nevertheless it takes all of my concentration to focus on what God might be saying. And I can only keep it up for a few minutes, let alone all day. This could be a long battle.

- Pastor Mike