What I’m Saying Tomorrow Morning

Half-hearted Christianity is the mark of the American church.  We are infested with doctrinal compromise, cheap professions, nominal commitment, moral failure, and half-baked passion.  No doubt most of you would agree.  But I think that one of our biggest weaknesses in the conservative church is that we tend to think that these problems are limited to the “liberal” church.  In other words, we don’t think that we’re half-hearted or lukewarm.  We think that only “they” are — the people out there, the people who only claim to be Christians, those who are the real hypocrites (outside of our circles, of course).  We can tend to be like the Pharisee in Luke 18:9-14 who looks with contempt on those around him, living under the blinding assumptions of self-righteousness.

If the truth were known, we are actually far more dispassionate, materialistic, compromised, and spiritually lethargic than we would like to imagine.  Too often we grow sluggish in our commitment to God’s Word, back away from opportunities to serve, find ourselves with no love for unbelievers, flinch in the face of adversity and opposition, and find our identity more in our personalities and talents and jobs and financial status and friends than in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We are far more worldly and apathetic than we know.

What is the greatest challenge to this spiritual apathy and compromise?  What is the main antidote to lukewarmness and worldliness?  What has the greatest power to draw us away from earthly interests and to capture our hearts with the things of heaven?  A vision of the splendor and supremacy of our great God.

Many of the old hymn-writers knew this:  “Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart; naught be all else to me, save that Thou art.  Thou my best thought by day or by night; waking or sleeping, Thy presence, my light.”  “Immortal, invisible, God only wise; in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes.  Most holy, most glorious, the Ancient of Days; Almighty, victorious, Thy great name we praise!”  “Turn your eyes upon Jesus; look full in His wonderful face.  And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.”

Every single honest person reading this has seasons in which God does not seem to be glorious, when divine grace does not inspire gratitude and awe, when the cross of Christ ceases to be amazing, when the call to discipleship does not carry the weight that it ought to carry.  We struggle daily to fix our eyes on things above, to disentangle our hearts from the cares of this world, and to love the Lord our God with all of our heart and soul and mind and strength.  We are frail and fragile people.  Our spiritual passions are easy to smother and hard to kindle.

We turn to so many earthly methods to inspire and motivate ourselves, to help us get out of bed in the morning.  We feed ourselves with so many things that may be good but are not best.  All the while, what we really need to fuel and fire our souls is a biblical vision of the majesty and preeminence of God.  We need to saturate ourselves in the character of the Triune God who was and who is and who is to come.  We need to drink deeply of the perfections of Jesus Christ who is the exact representation of God, radiating the glory of His Father.  And we desperately need the indwelling Spirit to fuel and control us from day to day so that we might be filled with the love of God overflowing in the fruits of the Spirit.  We need, above all things, to see God.

John Piper said it best:  “People are starving for the greatness of God.”

These will be my first words to the Bereans Sunday School Class at Placerita Baptist Church tomorrow morning.  We will then turn to 1 Kings 18, and I will pray that God will light a raging fire of covenant loyalty in our hearts like the fire that fell on Mount Carmel 2,800 years ago.  Surely He deserves a full and fierce allegiance.

The First Few Weeks of August

This week has been SLS Retreat (Servant Leadership Staff), last week was RA Retreat (Resident Assistants), and the week before that was RD Retreat (Resident Directors).  That sums up my August and explains my online absence during the past few weeks.  Tomorrow is WOW Saturday (Week of Welcome), and we have thirty-four new students checking into the dorm.  All I know about them is what I see when I place them in their rooms via the online housing system — basic descriptors like name, age, hometown, and whether they have a car or not.  But the fact that they will live in this dorm during the 2007-2008 school year is not a bad accident, a good fortune, or a random neutrality.  They are here, for however long they will be here, because of the providence of God.  The implications of this reality are manifold.

My schedule is more low-key during WOW because the students stay busy with orientation, but there’s still plenty to do.  Some of my family arrives over the weekend to see Judah for the first time, closing out a month in which multiple family members visited for extended periods of time to meet him.  The TMCS semester starts on Monday, August 28, and my first seminary class will be on Tuesday, August 29.

This is my final year as an RD, a fact that is neither celebratory nor secretive.  I don’t plan on talking about it a lot since that would distract from relationships and ministry, but it does influence how I’m thinking about the year.  In the next few months Cindi and I plan to make a decision about the next four or five years, if God grants clarity.  Our main options at this point seem to be missions or doctorate, but I frankly don’t know which one (or if God may have something else for us to do).  Each possibility is dependent on several other factors, so we will wait and see as God leads.  I’m not against serving here in the States, and there are some types of ministry that would make me want to stay in America, but those opportunities aren’t present right now.  God would have to make that calling very clear, and there are some particular things that I know I ought to be involved in if we stayed in the U.S. for the next few years.  No one’s beating down our door right now, and I consider that to be God’s encouragement to be actively looking and initiating regarding our future.

Judah is doing very well, and the adjustment has barely been an adjustment.  He sleeps well, he’s happy almost all of the time, he’s much more comfortable with new people than he was when he first arrived, and our feelings of love for him are beyond what we can describe.  There’s lots more I could say, but not the time to say it.  He is a very normal part of our family, and he is an absolute delight to be around.

After several full weeks of silence, it’s difficult to know what to say besides giving a general update, so that’s where I’ll leave it.  Perhaps God will grant the grace and time to write more of substance in the days to come.

Our First Tickling Video (July 20)