All posts by ljmonson

Still my favorite Poem

Robert Frost

“The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost

Thank you for indulging me, it is my birthday.

A little piece of heaven in the middle of hell

We go through our days and there are few opportunities to make big choices.  I believe we are creatures of free choice. Never-the-less most of choices we make are small and make little difference.  Paper or plastic bags at the local market, English muffin or toast for breakfast, brown pants or blue for church, and thousands of other small seemingly small and unsubstantial decisions.  And in the same old, same old life we live, the big hard things that really will make a difference to ourselves or even the world around us rarely come up.  So we go ahead and live our lives making as few decisions as possible; mostly because we feel that each little aggravating decision really doesn’t matter.  We even get a little frustrated when the the waitress has at least five options to complete your order of eggs and bacon.

In Sunday School we studied the story of the S.M.A boys.  You know Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.  They were faced with one of those few and far between decision points in their lives.  It didn’t start out as a turning point type of decision.  They simply remained standing when they were expected to follow the crowd.  They were given the choice to bend their heads and kneel when the orchestra played to a 19 foot statue or keep standing.  Oh there were consequences.  But the first decision was not to go along with the crowd.  I don’t really know if these three thought very long or even realized the importance of their doing nothing while everyone else was doing something.

Nebuchadnezzar escalated the offense and made it about a competition between his grand statue and the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I have related this because some may need to know the reasons behind the what the title of this is all about.

The King bound the three up and cast them into the furnace which had been prepared for any one not following orders.  But for the SMA boys it was made expectantly hot.

Now here is the part that struck me.  The king looked in and saw the three unharmed and walking around with someone that seemed to the king as godly.  Think about it.  There is the picture.  There is the smile.  There is the sweetness of God’s care.  In the middle of Hell was a little piece of Heaven.

Instead of terrible pain and obliteration it was party time.  The heat was on but they were in the very presence of God.  Walking around and I can almost see these four with the biggest smiles.  Their little choice led to a big choice and that choice was to allow God to be their deliverer.  Their choice was not to go into the furnace; that was the King’s decision.  Their small, “toast or English muffin decision was to simply stand when the music played.

What do you think?  Leave a comment.

Greater is He….

What is it to be a true Christian?

What does it mean to be united to Christ?

What happens when we are accepted by the Creator Beloved?

To start with, it is not simply Christ stepping in the way between God’s justice and God’s Love.  He does not just step into our world and settle our debts.  He does this act of mercy and love but there is so much more.  He comes into our lives to give us a perfect picture, a divine example, of what we should be.

Jesus is the perfect personality.  It is not for us to make an imitation of that perfection.  It is not for us to copy.  Any effort at this will only lead to frustration, discouragement, defeat and utter failure.  It is only when we allow God to be God that He will duplicate Himself in us.

Greater is He that is in me, than he that is in the world.

If my God lives in me, if he is part and parcel of my life, then I am another Christ.  No error here, I am not like Him, but I have a same mind set.  I am not conformed to this world but transformed by the renewal of my mind.  Christ develops in me a new life. I have heard many times that man can never be perfect.  We all fail, we all fall short of God’s perfection.  But never-the-less, this quandary should not stop us from moving forward toward the high calling that is in Jesus. We must take God’s provision for our failure and rise above it through His grace.

We must take Jesus as a substitute for our miserable selves. It is not me who lives but Christ in me. Our lives are a constant giving up.  We must give up that which is bad.  And just as important if no more so, we must give up the good as well and take Him instead. It is hard for us to learn that we must relinquish even the good in order that we will depend upon divine impulses rather than even our best attainments.

What do you think?  Leave a comment.

 

Belief and Faith

We live in a “Christian Nation”.  I have heard this statement thousands of times.  Christianity is the most adherents at 31% of the world population. Many of these people say with confidence, that they ‘believe’ in God. Many of these same people think that this is enough to guarantee that their sins are forgiven and gain them admission to Heaven. However, is this simple ‘belief’ in God enough? Is this ‘belief’ the same as the ‘faith’ spoken of in the Bible? I wanted to share a few thoughts.

True faith is more than simply ‘believing’

Faith absolutely includes an element of belief. But they are not the same.  As I used to tell my kids, “if they are not spelled the same they are not the same.”  A belief in something or someone is required before faith can be manifested. I believe that Grand Canyon is still deep, even though I am not on its edge right now.  I can believe in things that do not affect my life.  I don’t have to worry about the depth of the Grand Canyon grabbing me up as I set at my desk. I can believe in things that do not affect my life. I can live my life without this great hole in the ground because of my belief.  So also you may well believe in God but if that belief does not directly affect your life it is not faith.  It will not save you, it will not justify you, it will not bring God’s favor on you.

To have faith is to put trust in that someone or something.  And who or what you place your trusting faith in is what has far-reaching, even super-natural, eternal, effect.

Story here:  A pastor and his wife was scheduled to attend a very large denominational meeting on the other side of the nation.  Pastor’s wife had never been on a plane before and was very frightened.   She believed that airplanes can fly.  She was terrified. Her husband trying to console her quoted scripture, you know the Bible says, “I will be with you always, even to the end of the world.”  After a moment of thought she replied, “LO I will be with you.”

We can well say that I believe a plane can take me from here to there, but if I’m afraid to get on it, I reveal that I have no ‘faith’ in that plane. Also, if I do not get on the plane, I have no reason to expect it to take me anywhere. I must exercise my ‘faith’ in that plane, by boarding it, if I am to receive the benefits it offers.

Faith results in changed actions

I am not one to judge anyone’s faith or belief.  Never-the-less I have personally seen those who claim to be followers of Christ but their lifestyle remained the same.  They still

I have heard of, and have known, some people who claim to be followers of Christ; however, their lifestyle remained the same after they became Christians as it was before they became Christians. They still lived the same way, talked the same way, and had the same mindset as they did when they were living in rebellion to God. Were they exercising true faith? Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15), meaning that our actions will reveal the change our heart has gone through when we became His true followers. Conversely, if our lives do not exhibit a change of allegiance from self to Jesus, we have good reason to doubt our salvation is real at all. John writes, “And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments” (I John 2:3). True faith is evidenced by a change in the way we act.

Faith results in changed priorities

If anything in our lives is more important than God, our priorities are misplaced and we should examine ourselves to see if we have truly given our lives to Christ. If our lives are focused more on our jobs, our favorite sports team, the next new technological toy, our love life, or anything else that diverts the center of our attention away from God, we should question the validity, or at least the maturity, of our faith.

Conclusion

The mindset of belief can well be simply a passive mental acceptance that amounts to nothing.  Belief must affect your life. Simply to say “I believe in God” means very little if it is merely coming from the lips and not from the heart. People can, and do, say that they ‘believe’ in God, but their lives never change at all. However, when one has true faith in God, one’s life cannot help but reveal this truth. True faith, dependence/reliance/trust, in God reveals itself in our actions, our thought life, and our priorities. If we claim we are Christians, but this is not the attitude of our hearts, it would be wise to ask God to search our hearts, cleanse us, mold us into the people that He wants us to be, and strengthen our faith.

What do you think.  Leave a comment.

Facebook as a creator of sickness

I sit here in my little place of authorship.  I have a TV on my right giving me the news of the day.  I have three computer screens in front of me.  One has my home security cameras going to make sure I know what the weather is like just outside of my walls.  The main monitor is 34 inches and is high definition; I justify it because my eyes are not as good as they used to be.  My third monitor has my email split with my instant messenger.  I guess someone looking in would think I was pretty well saturated with technology. I am often distracted by another app running behind the current task of writing by a new post on Facebook.

I have to ask the question:  What does all this technology and social media affect my life?  Further, what affect does this plethora of technology have upon the way that you and I have of the church?

Facebook is mostly positive.  Lots of pictures of dogs and food.  Once and a while there is a reaction to news or something really affecting one of my Facebook “Friends”.  I have a link on my main screen that takes me to the church I attend. The church has certainly leveraged this technology to advance the cause of Christ.  This blog is my way of making my voice heard in the din of voices in the internet.  I don’t know if anyone is reading this stuff, but it is enough to know I am out there.  The technology is not the illness.

The issue is the direct affect this glut of information upon the church.  I have concerns and so should you.

I just reviewed a book on the social media and how it is affecting the morals and behaviors of its adherents. MIT professor Sherry Trukle wrote to point to the dangers and advantages of social media. Here are a few thoughts I have to agree with professor Trukle as I look at today’s “Facebook culture.”  The sickness names are just a simple way to characterize the issues and are not from Trukle’s work.

  1. Facebook Attention Deficit Disorder (FADD)

I read a great deal.  Real books on real paper is my medium.  Sure I use the internet to get a different opinion on a subject, but for the most part, the books I have in my small library are the prime sources for both inspiration and new thoughts.  But the pervasive invasion of Facebook and like sources has become the only place where some find information.  Short texts, tweets, likes, and smiley faces have become the medium of today.  How do we expect a person from the FADD (Facebook Attention Deficit Disorder) to come to church and listen to a preacher for forty minutes?  Do we insist each part of the service to be accentuated by a slick video presentation.  Do we expect the message to be broken up by a joke or a funny antidote? I believe the only medicine for the church member suffering from FADD is to teach them on how important big thoughts can be.  To teach them that the message is more than a bunch of tweets and thumbs up, but the very prophecy of God.

  1. Facebook Authority Syndrome (FAS)

Our church small groups have changed by the mindset that everyone’s opinion is as worthy as everyone else’s.  There is no hierarchy of authority.  Social media has broken down the barriers of the authority of source.  If I say on my Facebook page that my opinion is just as good as the local minister, there are few that would contradict me.  Not because it is true but because I have freedom of speech and in the egalitarian world of social media there is no consequences to being wrong.  Everyone has a voice.  We all have a platform to speak our mind, to say our piece. After any article or news story, anyone can offer an opinion. And certainly much of this is good.  But it leads to the view that if all have an authority to speak, then no one can be an authority.  We have come to a place where no one person’s opinion should be valued or weighted more than any other’s. Needless to say, this presents problems for the church and pastors to have real God-given authority in the lives of its people.

  1. Facebook Artificiality Ailment (FAA)

In a book by a MIT professor Sherry Trukle, she states “On social-networking sites such as Facebook, we think we will be presenting ourselves, but our profile ends up as somebody else—often the fantasy of who we want to be.”  What she was saying was even though social media users may feel more connected, they become even more artificial. We post only what you want others to know about you.  The good stuff. Sometimes this good stuff is not entirely true but slanted to make the poster feel better. Consequently, those with FAD (Facebook Artificiality Disease) become more and more distant.  “I posted, therefore I am social.”

The church was founded upon and demands that we engage with each other.  And this engagement has to be truthful, loving and forgiving.  We have to engage with people as they really are.  It is only in honesty that we can face our sin and grow together with Jesus.

  1. Social Media Phantom Malady (SMPM)

I remember when the nickle postcard went up to ten cents.  It was a method of communication that was limited to just a few lines of script.  It was open for all to see. Sure this medium lasted quite a while but has morphed into a marketing tool and little else. Today, I find people readily admitting they would rather leave a voicemail or send an e-mail than talk face-to-face.  Social media has reduced human contact to a point which is limited to a couple of lines in a tweet.  Modern technology, can create an almost non-physical, quasi-phantom existence SMPM.

If I read the church web page and watch my favorite preacher on YouTube it is enough. But the church was born in a face to face encounter.  A hand shake or a polite hug is more gratifying that a million lines of tweets.

  1. Negative Accountability and Commitment Condition. (NACC)

Probably the most attractive features of the use of social media communications is that it does not require much of a commitment and little or no accountability.  We control to the last letter of our posts, the duration, degree of the radical, and level of our contact.  There is little commitment to the those we are spewing to.  There is a mindset that “everybody” wants to know my meal plan.  It is a low-commitment and low-accountability form of interaction.

But the Christian life and real Christian relationships don’t work this way. We do have obligations to one another to be real.  Oh there are times we would rather not have those obligations. There are times we would rather not have accountability.  But the Christian Church is one of commitments and obligations.  In the church there is something called a covenant. The Christian church has a corporate aspect that stands directly against the individualistic and self-determined relational patterns of our modern technological age.

The Bitter Pill

So is the answer is to unplug and shut it all down?  Should we all move away from it all and get back to our old time religion roots? Not at all.  Do we abandon technology, move to the countryside, and adopt an Amish-like existence? I am not here to condemn methodologies but to point out the symptoms. Symptoms of a sickness that could well be infecting your life.

Yes, we may well need a sabbatical from this all purveying contagion of illness.  But in reality we can’t get away from it all.  My bitter pill is to be honest with your posts.  Have accountability.  Don’t let the ease of communication become the only communication.  Realize there are authorities in life.  People are not all the same: love them, keep them in your prayers and go to church and shake a hand.

Tell me what you think.

Bible by Chapter and Verse

There are literally thousands of Bible study helps available.  There are commentaries written as academia and some for simple understandings.  There are handbooks, dictionaries, synoptic comparisons, expositions, translations, word studies in both Greek and Hebrew, parallel companions, daily Bible readings, prayer guides and on and on. I have to confess I have quite of few of these helps.  But every one of them depend on the work of another.  Never-the-less, without the work of a Bible scholar in England in the 13th century, it would have been much harder to study the Bible.

Stephen Langton was the medieval Archbishop of Canterbury.  He was the most prominent churchman in England. He was the one working with the Barons of England to force a faithless King John into signing the Magna Charta.  Quite a revolutionary for his time.  What this churchman is not well known for and the subject of this blog is something he added to the Bible that all the others that followed including me and you as we look through the Bible.  The next time someone asks you to lookup a verse in Isaiah they will give you a chapter and a verse number.  That convention was created by Stephane Langton.  He went through the entire Bible dividing it up in what, was to him, the most logical places to put chapters and delineate the verses.

Imagine how hard it would be to lookup John 3:16 if all you had was the text without any numbers to guide you along the way?  Each time the preacher says, “my text will be found in the fourteenth chapter and the third verse, you are depending upon the work of Stephen Langton.  Know full well his divisions were to the Latin Vulgate for the Holy Roman Church. But even after translation of scripture into all the languages of the world, Steven Langton stands in the background helping you find your favorite scripture.

Since the 13th century each expositor, scholar, printer, publisher, copier used this method.  Thank you Rev. Stephen Langton.

Requirements for Heaven

A teacher was testing the children in her Sunday school class to see if they understood the concept of getting to heaven.
She asked them, “If I sold my house and my car, had a big garage sale and gave all my money to the church, would that get me into Heaven?”
“NO!” the children answered.
“If I cleaned the church every day, mowed the yard, and kept everything neat and tidy, would that get me into Heaven?”
Again, the answer was, “NO!”
Now she was smiling. Hey, they’re getting it, she thought! “Well, then, if I was kind to animals and gave candy to all the children, and loved my husband, would that get me into Heaven?” she asked.
Again, they all answered, “NO!”
She was just bursting with pride for them. “Well,” she continued, “then how can I get into Heaven?”
A five-year-old boy shouted out, “YOU GOTTA BE DEAD.”

An echo and an AMEN to A.W. Tozer

The more I read of A.W Tozer, a mid-western born preacher, pastor, author, magazine editor and spiritual mentor to hundreds, the more he both puzzles and astounds me.  In very simple terms he internalizes the words of Jesus and through his writing Christianity is furthered.  He wrote, and preached thousands of words on a myriad of subjects.  He seemed to come back again and again to three themes.  What they are is a genuine heartache for the state of the church.

You could l characterize the first of these concerns as seeing the Bible as an end to itself.  It is seen as a recipe.  Take a verse here and another one from over there and use them to prove your point.  The Bible becomes nothing more than a collection of facts that can be dissected, positioned, extrapolated and preached.  Preachers today seem to have all the right illustrations and answers to any given problem.  They pour two parts from one test tube in the beaker and a couple of drops from another and the expected chemical reaction is the result.  There is little room for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Tozer saw this as the shortest path to dead pulpits and dead churches.  You can be,” Tozer delighted in saying, “straight as a gun barrel theologically and as empty as one spiritually.”  The goal of reading the Bible is not to know more about the Bible, or to be able to quote the correct scripture at the correct time, but to be a pointer.  A pointer to God Himself.  The Word of God, while extremely important, can become more than the source of those words.

Tozer’s second concern was a growing practicality of  programs in the church; to insert methods and techniques to make the Church more palatable with the world.  He called it pragmatism.  It was an attempt to make the church more popular.  It was to add things that were more fun, more exciting, more attractive to the world.   He wrote,The temptation to introduce “new” things into the work of God has always been too strong for some people to resist. The Church has suffered untold injury at the hands of well-intentioned but misguided persons who have felt that they know more about running God’s work than Christ and His apostles did. Let me interject here.  There is nothing inherently wrong with any method unless it dilutes the message or pushes out God. Methodology has become rampant in the church today.  No longer do we sing hymns about the blood of Jesus.  No longer is the bread and cup venerated as a means of grace; instead we have prepackaged cups with bread in the tear off.  It is neater but is it better?  Is convention better than the graceful God.  I wonder what Peter would think of our church service if he silently crept in the back of these new relevant churches.

Third in his triad of concerns for the church was the lack of true worship.  He remarked over and over again about the loss of the sense of majesty, reverence and awe.  The Church as he saw it, was trivializing the very thing it was trying to accomplish. He saw it becoming a form of entertainment.  Hymns were being replaced by gospel songs, (and now by choruses sung over and over again).  The pulpit was becoming a place of humor and endless illustrations. He heard too many laughs and not enough sobs.  According to Tozer, “Worship is to feel in your heart and express in some appropriate manner a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder and overpowering love in the presence Our Father Which Art in Heaven.”

AMEN and AMEN

Your comments are appreciated.

Scooby-Doo

My children were raised with liberal doses of television.  I will admit sometimes I too was caught up in the cartoons of the day.  Now I am not to the level of a devote or a critic, but I do remember one series that sticks in my mind.  Scooby-Doo.  If you don’t remember this bit of comedic drama, here is the description from Wikipedia:

Each episode featured Scooby and the four teenaged members of the Mystery, Inc. gang: Fred, Shaggy, Daphne, and Velma, arriving to a location in the “Mystery Machine” and encountering a ghost, monster, or other supernatural creature, whom they learned was terrorizing the local populace. After looking for clues and suspects and being chased by the monster, the kids come to realize the ghost is anything but, and – often with the help of a Rube Goldberg-like trap designed by Fred – they capture the villain and unmask him. Revealed as a flesh and blood crook trying to cover up crimes by using the ghost story and costume, the criminal is arrested and taken to jail, often saying something to the effect of “…and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids!”

What brings this to mind today is that in reality it a picture of the change of the world has morphed through in the last couple of hundred years or so.  It is the transition from the perception of life full of monsters and witches to a world of science.  Scooby is always afraid of the monster and ultimately that monster is revealed as something considerably less frightening.  Previously our world was filled with ghosts, demon possessions, witches and things that go bump in the night. In that day there two worlds of the spiritual and the natural.   These two worlds were held apart only by a very thin veil.  One world was always invading the other. Now it is called superstition.  Black cats and walking under ladders was bad luck.

Scooby was always the first to acknowledge this invasion of the dark world into his by running away and grabbing Shaggy and crying in fear.  But once the mask was removed even Scooby had to acknowledge the impossibility of the monster.  But next week he fell for the same ruse.

Today there is little use for monsters outside of the movies.  We have become more modern.  We have put away childish things.  Science, technology and skepticism now rule. We have become so modern we have to purposely go to the movies to be scared.  An entire entertainment genera exists just to scare us. We have become so hardened to the spiritual we have to artificially experience something just to feel.

Thinking again about Scooby-Doo I realized how closely the show traces, in a single episode, this movement from enchantment to disenchantment. The episodes begin with enchantment, with a supernatural monster, specter, ghoul or ghost. But as the kids investigate they get suspicious, reason asserts itself and the monster–the agent of the occult–is eventually revealed to be Mr. Jenkins the greedy banker. The story ends with disenchantment. The supernatural was simply a “cover” for workaday greed, theft and corruption.

We moderns think the world has been rid of the dark forces–the ghouls, ghosts, demons and monsters. But these occult forces of evil haven’t been expelled, expunged or exorcised. They still haunt and torment.  We may well call them other things, but in reality the spiritual world exists.

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Ephesians 6:12

Contemplating Scooby-Doo I began to wonder. Perhaps this isn’t a tale of disenchantment after all. Perhaps Scooby-Doo really is a story about the occult and the demonic. We’ve just lost the ability to see it.

What do you think.  Leave a comment.