Persecution or Judgement? When do we cry foul and when do we take our medicine?

medicineI am getting a lot of this kind of correspondence at the moment so I want to cover it here to save me some time in counseling people. Nice when I can just have someone read a blog post. I get letters like this quite often (this one will be a fictitious amalgam of quite a few situations over the years):

“Dear Tyler.

I have this terrible problem at church/assembly/synagogue/homegroup – the leaders are very controlling and they have suddenly turned on me, shaming me publicly, and even encouraging others to shun me. I don’t even know what I have done wrong – I just disagreed on something that didn’t seem like a big deal. I didn’t deny Messiah or anything, it’s just a doctrinal disagreement for goodness sakes – I never thought they would ever do something like this to me.”

I look at a letter like that and the same thing always goes through my mind, from long experience.

“I need you to be absolutely honest with me, have they ever done this to anyone else?”

“Yes, but…”

“Okay, when they did it to the other people, who did you support?”

“Um… the leadership.”

“Why?”

“Well gosh, I am not really sure – I mean, I guess I thought those other people had it coming and I really didn’t want to rock the boat.”

This is the point where I always /facepalm and /sigh and get very real.

“How is the rest of the congregation treating you?”

“Well, they are supporting the leaders – I have been trying to meet with them and everything, but most don’t want to hear my side of it and I guess they just don’t care – the ones who do listen, they pretend to feel bad about what is happening but they do absolutely nothing about it so they obviously only feel a vague sense of discomfort! I feel like everyone just wishes that I would shut up and go away so that they can continue enjoying their fellowship. I don’t understand why they don’t care that the leadership is treating people this way. Why don’t people care that I am being hurt?”

“When it happened to the other couple, did they try to reason with you about what was happening to them?”

*silence*

“Yes, they did.”

“So then – what you did to your neighbor is being done to you now. You are not being persecuted by the leadership, you are being judged by God for standing by and allowing the leadership to persecute other people. Goodness, you may have even financially supported them while they did it!”

“But they are wrong…”

“Yes they may very well be wrong and probably are – Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah, because God sent him on that task, but the *way* the Babylonians went about it was wrong because they were a wicked people. God has plenty of wicked people on the payroll (and many others in volunteer positions) that He uses to discipline people, He doesn’t ask righteous people to do underhanded things to people – He simply allows unrighteous people to do what they are already inclined to do. You took part in something wicked against another family, and now their own pleas of protest are coming out of your mouth. Make no mistake, you will be ignored by your former allies because that is what you did to someone else – but be encouraged because you are being disciplined for a purpose. It would be worse for you if you were simply the kind of wicked person that is actively being used to discipline and refine others. Goodness, congregations are full of people like that who are beyond discipline and have become powers unto themselves – get down on your knees and thank God because He is giving you a chance to get out of that side of the equation. You and the other families in your congregation sinned against that family and YOU are being given a chance to get out and stop being a part of that sin in the future. Your eyes are being opened.”

I’ve never explained that to a person who didn’t understand it but some refuse to accept it – they still strive to show everyone how wronged they were, to a bunch of people who just don’t care and may be absolutely incapable of caring at this stage of their walk. It would be nice if people did care when a congregation turns its collective back on someone over something either trivial or questionable, but in general we are a pretty unloving bunch – we generally don’t care unless the person being betrayed is someone who we actually do love in an egotistical way (and by that I mean someone who, if they are shamed, it also touches upon our ego – like a spouse, child, or very close friend). Situations like this show how incredibly dysfunctional the Body of Messiah is in every single denomination I can think of – although certainly not every single congregation!

This goes for a lot of different things (from gossip in the pulpit to full blown sexual abuse silently consented to by the congregation), really, and yes sometimes you will have that rare occasion where a total innocent gets swept up in such a situation – but generally, when it happens to us as adults, we have already watched something similar happen to others and we just didn’t care, or worse, we approved and participated. I used to mock people cruelly, and then I was disciplined and pulled out of that lifestyle. Now when I get mocked, I simply sigh and am not as surprised when people rally around the mocker – I remember how fun it was to watch before I was judged and how quickly my flesh moved me to see it as a good thing, to justify it at any cost so that I wouldn’t have to peer into the darkness of my own heart. Generally anymore, it just makes me sick – not just to see the public shaming of someone and to understand how much and how deeply it hurts them, but when I watch how people justify the behavior – just like I used to. I get sick because I remember, and it grieves me that I was ever so cruel and so eager to believe that I was righteous as I was doing it.

We need to learn a lesson from the Babylonians – God uses the wicked to refine those who should act righteously. Just because we are being used by God – well, it doesn’t mean that we are any better in the inside than Nebuchadnezzar. Coming out of Babylon is much more complex than people give it credit for – in the end, Babylon was judged because of the excessive cruelty with which they treated God’s people, even in the midst of the righteous covenant lawsuit judgement against them.

So embrace the judgement and allow it to teach you compassion – the people who do it may seem to prosper, but goodness, Babylon seemed to prosper for a long time too, until another wicked nation was used to judge it. We must be patient and allow God to work within the hearts of individuals, and sometimes the methods He uses are kinda ugly because… well we are kinda ugly. Until we get to the point where sins against others outrage us more than the sins committed against ourselves, we aren’t there yet, and we need every ounce of discipline we can get.

And yet, woe to those who are being used to deliver it!

 




Why So Many Mature Voices From the Hebrew Roots Movement are Heading Back to the Church – Lessons from The Cross and the Switchblade

HRM church(FYI: I have long since stopped publishing comments on this particular blog due to shameful behavior. It brings shame to our King and Messiah when believers respond to other people’s comments with mocking, or ascribe to me beliefs and motivations that are inaccurate and amount to false accusations. Accuser of the brethren is not the calling is believers, but the calling of the evil one. No one can read one article from a person and know them (especially when they can’t even get the gender correct), and it is terribly sad that people mistake their fears and assumptions for the leading of the Holy Spirit and/or discernment. I will not publish any comment on this or any other blog that demeans any believer or is posted to start a fight. I also will not allow accusations to be made about myself or anyone else. Humility demands that we exalt others, and not ourselves. What you have here is my honest opinion from two years ago, and you are not at liberty to assume anything not expressly laid out here.)

It’s no secret that I believe the Hebrew Roots Movement is dying, and a lot of folks are starting to see it. Too much anger, too much division – and yet, what did we expect to happen?

People came in to this movement and were told that Christianity had “lied about everything.” Christians had “everything wrong,” and their holidays were “full of pagan child sacrifice rituals.” That was the party line. Oh, and the Jews couldn’t be trusted to know anything because they were too rebellious to accept Yeshua as Messiah. That left only us, there in the middle, as the “faithful witnesses.”

Is it any wonder why some people can’t hold a conversation about the flaws in this movement without saying something like, “Well, the Jews and the Christians are worse!”? That’s like scolding one kid and having them point out the faults of another. As parents, we don’t fall for that obvious diversion.

We, the Hebrew Roots Movement, were a bunch of people who felt wronged and lied to and were angry about it. In our passion, or passionate rage, we tried to preach to friends and relatives—who of course didn’t believe us. We saw lies everywhere and in everything—to the point where some of us were tempted to throw baby Jesus out with the bath water. We were willing to turn so vehemently on our heritage because we were either sincerely angry about the lies we had been told, or we desired to have special insider knowledge. Our new pastors and teachers wrote online articles and uploaded videos, and just like our former pastors, they quoted from books we ourselves hadn’t read. But we felt that the people who wrote these articles and produced these videos had to be telling the truth, and furthermore, they had to have done their due diligence.

We no longer believed that Christians could be credited with any sound scholarship, but if someone was on the outside – where we were – we gave them a pass on proving their claims. We wanted and needed them to be right. Maybe we were so desirous to have allies that we were predisposed to believe absolutely anything. That was a dangerous and convenient assumption, and it resulted in a lot of angry and desperate Hebrews who mourned their relatives remaining in “Babylonian idolatry.”

So what happened? Angry people were made teachers before they were over their anger phase. Now, instead of being enriched and exhorted by mature teachers who have passed through that initial stage and tempered it with wisdom, we have teachers who encourage anger and division.

With the advent of social media, anyone can teach and produce videos without the usual local controls that keep immature and even unknowledgeable believers out of traditional teaching positions. Some of these started out bashing Christians and then turned on Jews. When they ran out of material, lo and behold, they started devouring people within the movement. This should not surprise us.

We have others who make the mistake that Jews warn clearly against: they get into Kabbalistic works like the Zohar before they have spent forty hardcore years studying the Tanakh. Personally, I don’t even peek at stuff like that.

Some people came in to the Hebrew Roots Movement simply following the knowledge train: they needed something new to tickle their ears. As Christians, they were bored; then someone taught them something interesting and new. They came in high on the exhilaration of being a remnant “in the know,” but that feeling never lasts. And when the anti-missionaries came and offered them even more knowledge, all too often they could not resist; off they went to deny Yeshua as Messiah.

Here’s the problem: unlike Christianity and Judaism, we are a movement largely without a safety net in place for new people. Most folks have no chance at a local congregation; they have nowhere to be nurtured and loved through those difficult first few years. As a result, we cannot help but become a movement of radically individualized people who operate as islands on social media. No support, no accountability, no guidance, and oftentimes no real growth of anything except anger and resentment.

A lot of your kinder and more mature voices are heading back into the churches. Why? Well, it isn’t to celebrate Christmas and Easter! It’s because they are coming to understand that we were never supposed to be individuals but instead a community—even when we disagree. We are supposed to love one another and cherish one another and be a family; we forgot that in our zeal to convert everyone around us like we were rogue Spanish Inquisitors. We forgot that our eyes were opened supernaturally and that we have to allow the same thing to happen to others: not despising God’s timing and patience.

I have found that I love teaching children for a specific reason: I am relieved of the burden of teaching doctrine to them. I just give them the tools that will allow them to make sense of the historical context of their Bibles. Wherever they are in their understanding, context will serve them well. Not having to convert people to the way I see things is an incredible burden removed from my shoulders; it keeps me from having to lord authority over people the way the Gentiles do. And let’s face it; we still do that because we were Gentiles for way too long. As I like to say it, “We’ve got too much Egypt in us.”

I don’t think this movement was ever meant to survive because we lack the infrastructure that all believers need in order to mature. We need real people that we can see, touch, and feel standing beside us. Only the rarest of individuals can thrive without that; we weren’t designed to operate in this faith alone. I think this movement was some sort of awkward intermediary sifting phase leading to…?

In David Wilkerson’s book, The Cross and the Switchblade (which I highly recommend for adults and teens), the author recounts the real-life story of the miracles he saw when God called him out of his cushy pastoral position in a Pennsylvania country town and into the unspeakable horrors of the gang-filled streets of New York. Wilkerson learned that while the Holy Spirit can change any heart, the lack of real, constant personal contact after conversion was often a recipe for disaster – sometimes even leading to death.

Many Hebrew Roots folks have come to see that a nurturing local congregation is not optional but is instead an absolute necessity. They are coming to find that even where there are disagreements over doctrine, the need for unity outweighs the desire for uniformity. Unity, and a willingness to accept and respect others, is something we have lost along the way in this movement. Though it did not begin this way, we have come to a crisis point.

Maybe the Church is the next great mission field: not for the purpose of converting people who are already believers but of being there for people whose eyes are being opened—by God and not by guile, trickery, indoctrination, hounding, or manipulation. Maybe the mature people who are going back with a balanced message will catch these believers before they end up ruined by the social media mess that has destroyed so many thus far. I have to say that I hope that is the case. What I know is this: This social media congregation is not working except in isolated cases by people who have either been very diligent and cautious – or who have been extremely lucky – to avoid the insanity. In truth, we have even more denominations than Christianity because each individual has their own private list of what constitutes a real believer and a real heretic. We have crazier arguments, often crazier beliefs, and we’ve made it some kind of twisted virtue to have a religion that is more anti-Christian and anti-Judaism than it is pro-Messiah and pro-Torah. This is a recipe for disaster!

I see people going back to Sunday churches, and I don’t try and stop them. I honestly think they might be hearing very loudly from the Holy Spirit. I am going to take the advice of Gamaliel the Elder in Acts 5:

“So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!”




Sure, something smells fishy – but what are conspiracy theories distracting us from?

OQTGLNQVS4Just woke up from a dream that had a couple I know personally in it. They are going through a time of discipline but haven’t figured it out yet. In the dream they had some sort of store dedicated to secret communications – the stuff they were selling was vile and was only supposed to be bought by people who were “in the know” – but the stuff they were selling was defiled, things that should not be eaten, much less bought. To say that something about that place wasn’t “kosher” was an understatement – even though this couple does eat according to Leviticus 11. So right away I knew that this dream had nothing to do with actual food – very much like Peter’s Acts 10 vision that used food to talk about people. Well, except of course my dream isn’t anywhere near as earth-shattering or important as Peter’s vision for a great many obvious reasons.

There were a lot of customers in that place considering there was nothing in there worth eating, not for anyone. Even the descriptions on the packaging would keep just about anyone (who wasn’t literally starving to death) at bay. Monkey pastries and caterpillar delicacies – dang.

As I walked to the back of the store I found the family on the floor trying to identify where the “fish smell” was coming from. They were convinced that it came from below the house. And yes, there was a fish smell but it wasn’t coming from below because I took a quick sniff at the gaps in the floorboards and compared to the air around me, it smelled pretty neutral.

Not three feet away, however, was their toilet – crammed to the top with feces and they couldn’t care less (even though they were aware of it and everyone who cared to look could see it). They were focused on what smelled fishy.

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First, I want to share how I got the interpretation. Unlike Moses, God doesn’t speak with me face to face as He would with a friend, whenever I get a dream it is full of riddles. My dreams are always full of puns and idioms, they just are, and it is fun to unravel them – usually. The #1 thing in dream interpretation is to consider the audience – which is why I put no stock in dream books because each person is unique in what certain things mean to themselves. I dream from the context of my own life, which is also why I am hesitant about interpreting other people’s dreams. I am not a Joseph! (Or a Peter..)

So, my friends were selling secret information but it was so defiled that no one who was following God’s laws should have been able to get past the packaging. The description itself should have kept them a mile away. In other words, idiomatically – no one who keeps Torah should have ever bought it in the first place or even spent time considering it.

As I got deeper and deeper in, my friends were on the ground searching for the source of the fishy smell and yes, there was a slight fishy odor but it was not coming from where they thought it was coming from, which was below. I told them that, but they weren’t listening to me.

So here we have an acknowledgment that something really is fishy, although it wasn’t THAT fishy, I never smelled it until I got in that specific spot, but that their identification of the source was incorrect.

I have had countless dreams in my life about clogged toilets in bathrooms – when they are about me I know one thing for certain, I am not getting my issues dealt with. Bathrooms are places of purging and cleansing, and when they are not in proper working condition in a dream there is a reason for it. This toilet had a special quality to it, it looked awesome on the outside, pristine, but inside was packed almost to the brim – and they were ignoring it. Not just ignoring it though, they knew it was full but were so focused on locating the source of the smell that it seemed unimportant.

I knew one thing in my dream, neither they or I were going to be able to locate the source of whatever was fishy, the only thing we could do is smell it.

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So, this the season between Shavuot (Pentecost) and Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles) when I can’t even bear to look at my social media newsfeed. The frenzy, in fact, has already begun and this year in the US we have a Presidential election thrown in just to make everything worse. (This is the point where a lot of folks will stop reading and will get defensive and react, but I want you to keep reading to see the point I am trying to make in all of this – which actually isn’t about conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories are simply a common avenue of distraction from what we are called to do – which is, to prepare ourselves from the inside out. There are a great many other distractions that we deal with – like “paganism” witch hunts and so many other side issues we get hung up on.)

Isaiah 8:12-13  “Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.”

This is the point where I point out that since I started noticing this in 1999, not one prediction this time of year that I have ever seen has ended up happening – and the really obvious tragedies happened without warning from anyone on social media. Of course, afterwards, they claimed to have known all about it…

Does something smell fishy? Yes, but do the people peddling all of these conspiracies know where the source of the smell is coming from? Evidently not, and in fact theories are thrown against the wall like spaghetti – but to what end? For all of the selling of this or that theory going on across the internet, the promoting of the secret information – it seems to simply be a distraction.

We are preparing to know about things that very probably can never be known with certainty, and certainly we have no power to prevent, and while we are busy making sure that our outsides look clean, we aren’t getting our issues dealt with – even when we know they exist. The lure of chasing down what smells fishy is too distracting – even more distracting an an open toilet filled to the brim with vile sewage.

We are called to prepare ourselves, first and foremost. That’s what the time in the wilderness was about, that’s what the first exile was about, and it’s also what this final exile has been about. If you want to prep and store food, that’s awesome – but if we are not spending ten times the effort and resources prepping our characters and dealing with our own issues, then we will just end up well fed corpses in the wilderness who were not prepared to be that generation which enters into the Land. I am not expecting you to believe or create any doctrine based on my dreams – heck, I don’t even do that – but we are nowhere near the end. I have seen a movement increasingly swelling to prepare the children, because I believe they will be the ones upon whom the heavy lifting falls. All of us, we are still too Egyptian with our jealousy, infighting, and outright rebellion against any manner of leadership whatsoever. Our kids have a chance to get it right, however, if we get our attitudes and distractions out of their way.

If we want to be a part of what they will be doing, we need to focus on the dirty toilet in the room, our toilet full of our own… well, I don’t really have to say it. Do we think that Yeshua wants that stuff in His face when He returns? Will He want to hear, “I was too busy telling people about things that didn’t end up happening every year, and researching a lot of things that my knowing about couldn’t change, and I didn’t spend much time preparing my own heart or my own kids to have the kind of character it will take to get through the Tribulation – actually, I spent far more time on conspiracy and controversy websites than in Your Word.”

Hmm… it just occurred to me that the couple’s children were nowhere to be seen in the dream. Considering what they were selling, I am not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Character is job #1 – and character isn’t defined by keeping the commandments any more than making a sacrifice constituted repentance. Then and now, our commandment keeping and their sacrifices were only pleasing if our hearts are right with God, and that takes a lifetime of concentrated effort and much pain in order to get right. It takes getting into the Word and allowing it to change us, it takes being willing to see our own issues, no matter how badly it hurts, and it takes the kind of person who can embrace discipline instead of blaming it on the enemy.