Social Media Musings March 20-27 2018

3/20/18

I am not a fan of memory verses.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a big believer in memorizing Scripture, but verses out of context can be worse than nothing at all – because out of context they can seem to mean the exact opposite of what they actually mean.

Let’s look at the oft-quoted “I am the Lord, there is no Savior except me.” It pops up a lot throughout the Tanach/Old Testament and is a favorite among those trying to get people to deny Yeshua/Jesus as Messiah. Because we are a religious society trained to take verses, by themselves, at face value, and because most folks do not read Scripture end to end, over and over again – some people don’t understand what it means and are led away to their own destruction.

There has never been any Savior except God, obviously, but how does He save? Well, usually when there is a verse like that, it is being used as a slap in the face of adulterous Israel or Judah who is paying some foreign nation to come to their aid militarily. God says to them, “Hey! Remember Me? I am your Savior! Not them! They can’t save you!” As they would strip the Temple treasuries to pay for foreign chariots and soldiers – well, we can all see how ridiculous it was, and what lack of faith it represented, Without turning to God, there can be no salvation at all, not through anyone. God was repeatedly having to remind Israel of that fact. They weren’t going to win a battle simply because they were paying off Assyria or Egypt to protect them.

How does He save? Well, by Joseph’s own words, God sent Joseph ahead to Israel to be a savior during the time of famine. During the Exodus, He did great works through Moses and Aaron – He saved the Nation through them and worked miracles through them. During the time of the Judges, he sent Judges to save Israel from their enemies. Throughout Israel and Judah’s history, He saved them through angel armies, through natural events like rainfall, through this and through that. In these last days, He has saved us through His one unique Son.

But, out of context, as a mantra or a memory verse, not taking the whole of Scripture into context or how God chooses to save time and again – it looks like Yeshua cannot be the Savior, only God can. Well, as you can see – that’s not the Scriptural view. We see HOW God CHOOSES to save.

Truly, we have no Savior but God – but though He is the author of our salvation, He sends saviors and, finally, a Savior to do His saving. Never allow anyone to confuse you based on any verse, and especially if you are not extremely well-versed in the Bible from beginning to end. If you have tasted salvation, then you know it is real. As God told me on the night I came come to denying Yeshua, “What will you have to CHOOSE to FORGET in order to deny Me?” This is why we are commanded, over and over again, to remember and recount His deeds. Write down your testimony – read it often! Do not forget your first love, how you came to salvation, how real it is. The changes worked by God through His Spirit because of faith in the Son, and not just by you through willpower. Remember what evils you have been delivered of – and be humble. You didn’t accomplish that by yourself. Do not deny so great a salvation. If you have trouble remembering what you knew so well at first, ask the Spirit for wisdom.

But don’t allow people to come in and take you as one of their trophies. And I am going to say this very plainly – it is through Christianity, because of faith in Yeshua, and not because of Moses, that a world once utterly dominated by paganism and abject cruelty is now a more righteous, just, and compassionate world. Yes, there are still problems – but crimes once commonplace and legal are now unthinkable. Why? Because the Cross changes everything it touches, including the unbelieving world – where even atheists now care for the poor and oppressed. In the first century, no one cared for anyone except their own limited clan. Yeshua changed that – not Moses, and certainly not some sort of godless social evolution. That’s the proof of the New Creation inaugurated at the Cross. When we take the long view of history, the change is evident. All glory to God, through His Son Yeshua.

3/24/18

What was Yeshua/Jesus saying no to when tempted?

I am nearing the end of Watchman Nee’s The Normal Christian Life – haven’t been writing much about it because it is quite complex and I have not been up to the task, but this morning I am making an exception. Honestly, I haven’t agreed with him on everything, and some of it irked me, and then after sitting on it a few days, or more, I started to see where he was right, or at least more right than I gave him credit for. That’s the stuff I am still mulling over and can’t write about yet. But this morning I wanted to write about something I read last night:

“For even with all these experiences, we are still unsafe for him to use until this further thing is effected in us (God’s working out of our salvation at the deepest level of the soul). How many of God’s servants are used by him, as we say in China, to build twelve feet of wall, only, when they have done so, to undo it all themselves by pulling down fifteen feet! We are used in a sense, but at the same time we destroy our own work, and sometimes that of others also, because of there being something undealt with on the Cross.”

I am a firm believer that God only gives us the level of ministry we are mature enough to handle at that time. When I see ministers, and people in general, fall into gross sin (which Scripture, time and again, equates with sex, greed, and slander) or tearing people down instead of building up Messiah/Christ and His body, I know they either reached for more than they could handle, or took more than they should have when tempted.

Years ago, there was a ministry ran by a bunch of people who were way too new to minister. There was a lot of zeal there, but no depth because there just couldn’t be. I was asked multiple times to come on board and God never even gave me a chance to pray about it – one of those “smacked across the head with the holy 2×4 of discipline” moments. It appealed to my ego to be asked, but once I thought about it, I knew I lacked the skills for that type of leadership – and I still do. The offer for this or that has come again and again many times over the years and my answer is always no. I have literally watched ministry, out of season, destroy and drive people crazy – including two of the people who initially asked me to join with them. Ego takes over, people get drunk with the power that naturally comes from being listened to and agreed with and egged on. Having an audience has a way of bringing out the worst of our demons before we are capable of conquering them. Remember when Joshua and the children of Israel went into the Promised Land? God told them He would not drive out all their enemies at once because, if He did, the wild animals would be too numerous for them. He does that with our dysfunction too. Little by little, year by year, He heals and equips us. We must be humble like little children and wait.

Anyway, social media has become religiously toxic for this very reason – people are tempted with an audience that they may not have the ability to cope with, and they do not yet have any good fruit to represent God’s character adequately. They may just have a lot of charisma, which is an outworking of the flesh and very dangerous when left unharnessed and unbroken. The result is that they go the easy route – they rant and rave, they get controlling and insulting, they make mountains out of molehills, they slander and live in a state of offense, or they may just destroy their “competitors” behind the scenes. They lack the proper level of depth in that season of their lives and so they cannot step back and re-evaluate when challenged, they attack character instead of admitting their own faults, and they take disagreements as an affront against God Himself. As Watchman Nee wisely pointed out, they tear down whatever they have built, as well as the building of others.

I was watching an interaction the other day – it involved someone who I have been watching for years who has made a ministry out of publicly disagreeing with people, sometimes honestly and sometimes not, and I couldn’t help but think that this person is wasting what gifts they have (which are considerable) in an attempt to gain a bigger audience. It makes me sad, not only because of their wasted potential but also because they are ruining the perfectly valid work of others in an attempt to be more than they are honestly ready to be. Slow and steady may not win the race with a jackrabbit in real life, but we aren’t called to race with rabbits. We are called to bear the image of God’s character in this world. That takes more than spewing Bible verses, a lot more. Even the enemy can quote Scripture – as we saw in the Temptation in the wilderness.

And that was the point I wanted to come to. Each of Yeshua’s/Jesus’s temptations involved proving himself to be the Messiah NOW, to be the ruler of the kingdoms of the earth NOW, to be acknowledged NOW – to not have to go through any sort of waiting period, and especially not persecution and crucifixion. It is the greatest temptation of ministry, to be big before we are very small – to imagine we are big when it is God who either is or is not big within us. For that matter, it is a terrible temptation to see a “big ministry” as more important than a “small ministry.” I speak of big and small in terms of worldly standards here, and not according to how things look in God’s eyes,

All this is to say – resist the temptation to grab for more than you have been given. Allow God, and not men, to give you what He knows you are ready to handle. Do not desire fame, and especially do not crave influence beyond your ability to represent God’s character to a lost and dying world. When ministers fall, and when they fail and lack the integrity to fall back and admit error, it does such damage to others. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. We should heed the warning against becoming stumbling blocks – and a hateful experience with someone who claims to be God’s representative is the biggest stumbling block of all. Better to be a bit off on your doctrine than to butcher His character for the world to see. We should constantly and genuinely be asking for those refining fires, and then we must submit to them and not presume that the devil was the one turning up the heat.

There are more ways to be great in the kingdom without fame, and without an audience, than there are ways to be great through fame and influence. Yeshua knew that – He was even constantly telling people not to blab about what He had done but to give credit to the Father. Fame followed Him, and killed Him and thank God He had the maturity to handle it. Thank God He had the maturity to deal with the nitpicking of those within the leadership who wanted to tear down His wall, while mistakenly believing that they were building their own.

Tearing you down does not build me up.

Matt 23:12 Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Don’t reach for anything – except greater refinement. When you get that right, you will be handed greater responsibility, and then it won’t so easily destroy you and others.

3/25/18

Expectations of suffering

So much of our bad fruit, the works of the flesh, is rooted in a lack of faith. We really don’t believe in the world to come where everything will be okay, our tears will be wiped away, that everything we have done here will be worth it. We get sidetracked, panicked even, because we are focused on getting what we want, what we feel we deserve, and receiving justice. We long for the upper hand in this life, but we weren’t promised that – serving Messiah often means that, in this world, we have to revel in being on the bottom rung, being wronged, being slandered, etc…

3/26/18

“If Caesar and the dark powers that stood behind him were to be confronted with the “good news” that there was “another king, Jesus,” the community that was living by that message had to be united. This would of course be a differentiated unity (“God’s wisdom in all its rich variety”; and we may compare the vivid lists of ministries in I Cor 12 and Eph 4). But if it was all differentiation and no unity, Caesar need to take no notice; they were just a few more peculiar eastern cults come to town.” – NT Wright, Paul: A Biography, pg 324

The early church (the first three centuries) accomplished what it did because of unity – unity that they needed to have in a hostile world. They built the first hospitals and orphanages, and the first societies for the relief of the poor. Women soon learned that they were safer under the umbrella of Christianity than living as pagans, and the same can be said of children (especially infants), the poor, ethnic minorities, and slaves. They could accomplish it because they saw themselves as a united front, working for the cause of King Yeshua/Jesus, right under the nose of Rome. Unlike the zealot party in Jerusalem, they did not operate through violent revolution, but instead through the administration of love and good works. They honored those whom Roman society swept to the side, and they served the least of these. Within a few hundred years, Christianity had almost completely supplanted paganism in the Empire – not through syncretism, which history proves didn’t actually happen until closer to the end of the first millennium, but through carrying their crosses in everyday life. Like leaven mixed into three measures of flour, the Kingdom of Heaven was violently clashing with the kingdoms of the earth – through love instead of violence.

In a hostile world, that isn’t a one-person job but a many person job. They needed one another. The problem nowadays is that we are deceived into thinking that we don’t need anyone else, and that we can sit at home pontificating online to strangers (if anyone is even listening) and reading the Scriptures privately instead of doing the weightier matters alongside our brothers and sisters. I know the arguments – we want to be of one mind, but the problem is that we demand a one-mindedness where it is our mind that must be duplicated. No, what must be duplicated is a mind that believes first and foremost in “Christ, and Him crucified” and we have to learn to get over the discomfort of having folks disagree with us on other things.

Frankly, the biggest challenge in the Western church is a lack of real persecution – we have grown lukewarm to the point that we feel it is a sort of zeal to avoid other believers who simply disagree. That isn’t a spiritual zeal, that’s just conveniently avoiding anyone who disagrees with us, we have wrapped our self-centeredness, our desire to feel safe and comfortable, in a deceptive cloak of righteousness. The end result is nothing, zip, zilch, nada – we are getting nothing done. Oh sure, we have our own personal testimonies, but we can’t stand against the Caesars of our day because, instead of a united Body of Messiah, we look like a body caught in a bombing. pieces lying everywhere, separate and powerless.

In Brother Yun’s The Heavenly Man, he talked about when that happened to China. All of a sudden, groups and people who had once risked their lives for one another were splintered and suspicious and contemptuous of one another – not because of Messiah and Him crucified, but over this or that other thing. Make no mistake, everything, absolutely everything, is less important than our mutual belief that the Son of God was crucified, buried, and rose again. This week especially we should be mindful of it.

So we have disagreements on other things. They have to take a back seat. Heck, we can’t even influence people with whom we are unwilling to speak and meet with. Our government, our leadership, our culture is what it is because of us, and not in spite of us. We are too fractured to fight the good fight – and so instead we fight each other, and you know what our master said about a kingdom divided against itself. We cannot stand – we can’t stand each other and so we cannot stand against the enemy.

3/27/18

Accusers or Redeemers?

As per God’s laws, we ought to diligently search out a man’s vindication before we seek to believe the accusation. What kind of people are we? Heartless gossips or redeemed sinners? We ought to ask ourselves, are we more like the satan, accusing others endlessly before the throne (make no mistake, ALL accusations from the mouths of believers end up before the throne), or are we like our Lord, who refused to act even against Sodom before personally investigating the matter?

We are not wise enough to read a headline, and often even a full story, and know whether or not to believe the accusations. We do not have the discernment to know the truth without personal investigation – and how often we prove it!