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A Typical Night

December 15, 2023 / Chris

The Christmas season is upon us. I’m annually reluctant to enter the Christmas Spirit; however, I wouldn’t consider myself a Scrooge. God guides my mindset into the significance of Christ’s birth in His own time. The tipping point usually involves a different catalyst each year. In years past, sermons, devotions, concerts, songs, and conversations have brought advent into my personal reality.

Often, that catalyst takes the form of Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God record. One song, in particular, ironically brings the glory of Christmas into focus through the lowliness of Christ. Jill Phillips is the talented vocalist, and the song’s first line is the tipping point: “It was not a silent night.” Those words reverberate in my soul. This is an immediate contrast with the traditional Christmas carol that is likely coming to the forefront of your mind, which merits further consideration.

Was the night of Christ’s birth silent? There is no biblical indication that the world paused as Christ was born. Given the passages that specify a disregard for Christ, I find it more likely that He arrived on a typical night. There were hurried travelers, weary miles, and idolatrous men. You could hear the clamor of the street and livestock. However, the first coming of Christ was never meant to produce a global silence. It was meant to put in motion the means of redemption that God planned from eternity, and that baffles mankind to this day.

Philippians 2:6-11

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Christ was born into obscurity through humility. Therefore, He is forever exalted and confessed as Lord to the glory of the Father. His birth was a typical night with an eternally atypical impact. Amidst this season’s gatherings, shopping, and festivities, perhaps the ordinariness of Christ’s birth will also be your advent tipping point.

A Holly Jolly Melancholy Christmas

December 8, 2023 / Chris

Tis the season to be jolly. What if you fall somewhere between Buddy the Elf and Ebenezer Scrooge? Christmas is a time for remembering and focusing on family and faith. However, each of those areas can be a cause for sorrow and joy.

Family

Old emotional wounds tend to flare up at Christmas like achy joints that feel a change in the weather. Others may have difficulty understanding why dark clouds hover over the Christmas decorations and events. While everyone else sings along with Bing and Mariah, we may feel more like Billie Eilish.

What is it about family that can bring out the best and worst in us? Cherished memories and haunted flashbacks can surface as we attend gatherings or even think about them. Reminiscing is a double-edged sword that cuts through to our souls as we long for what is gone and ache for what never was. Our faith would typically be a reservoir of joy, but it can also highlight our struggle.

Faith

Sometimes, cultural goodwill softens the heart during this time of year. Other times, our faith is as distant and cold as the North Pole. Unresolved pain, being hurt by the church, guilt, or shame might leave us ironically feeling far away from God in the season we emphasize God with us.

We’ll likely have Christmas Eve services, lots of Christmas hymns to sing, and an advent sermon series to bring the incarnation into the spotlight of our spiritual lives. Yet, if we’re already feeling disconnected from God, these expressions of faith only serve to underscore the distance. Thankfully, our God seeks us out, draws us in, and reminds us that Christ has bridged any gap between us.

Foretold Joy

For those who lean toward melancholy, lights and tinsel aren’t enough to lift our spirits. Faith and family can lead us in the opposite direction of the candy cane forest or the tenderness of a manger scene. Nonetheless, we have a tremendous reason for peace and joy. The foundation of our hope is something ancient and perpetually new.

We must look past all the family baggage and celebrate our spiritual family heritage. We have to look beyond our faith to the object of our faith and listen anew to the angel’s pronouncement of old. “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people” (Luke 2:10). Zechariah’s prophetic words unpacked some of the substance of that good news.

“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
Luke 1: 68-70

I’m happy for everyone who can slide into the Christmas spirit effortlessly. For those who find melancholy sprinkled into this holly, jolly season, our hope, peace, and joy can only be found where it’s always found: in Christ.

When You’re at Your Worst

December 2, 2023 / Chris

Christianity isn’t a religion for the few who have their acts together. Our great temptation is always to think that merit is our path to God. The gospel’s good news is that despite being at our worst, Christ’s perfection is our own by faith. We have faulty assumptions and protest the notion that our standing with God would come from outside ourselves.

Faulty Assumptions

We think God might accept us when we string together a few weeks of decent Christian living. We fail to realize that the cross settled our acceptance before God. Our striving to bring our accomplishments, hard-won victories, and good deeds as the basis of our forgiveness is a slap in the face of the Savior who alone lived perfectly, died redemptively, and rose again triumphantly.

On the day that we live our most God-pleasing life and on the day that we find ourselves in the dumpster heap of sinful failure, God is equally for us in Christ. We find that mind-boggling, and it leads to spiritual hand-wringing. What is the alternative except works righteousness, which God describes as the filthy rags of human merit?

We Doth Protest

At this point, you might be protesting. Such a radical view of God’s grace, mercy, and love will undoubtedly lead to reckless Christian living. Paul anticipated such an objection and raised it himself. Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! Getting it right requires a shock to our meritorious mindset, followed by the exclamation that we must not tolerate sin. One does not negate the other.

Where do you find yourself? Have you had a good month? Or have you made such a mess of things you can scarcely lift your head to utter a prayer? Remember, Christ came for sinners. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Go and sin no more. Think about what is honorable, just, pure, commendable, and lovely.

Do your iniquities burden you? Lift your head. You’re worse off than you think. Yet God in the great gospel reversal is for you in Christ. Your biggest problem is more profound than your actions of failure. You are a sinner who inherited a fallen nature from our first father. But thanks be to God that Jesus Christ has lived a perfect life, gone to the cross on our behalf, and risen from the dead.

Lift your head, but only to look to Jesus. Swim in the depths of His mercy and grace. Seek His face, deny yourself, and repent daily. When you’re at your best and when you’re at your worst, look to Christ, and you will find your judge and Savior.

Lording Logic Over Faith

November 24, 2023 / Chris

Logic and faith are not antithetical—however, only one leads to salvation. As I think back over my journey from Baptist through the Reformed and now to Lutheran, one of the strongholds I had to bring down was a rigid logical systematization of belief. Would I allow scripture to speak and form my belief, or would I superimpose my theological system onto the scripture? No better area highlights this struggle than the sacraments.

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper caused the most struggle in my transition. It took years of wrestling through the texts and recognizing my presuppositions to come to a point of open-mindedness. A combination of historical hubris, rationalistic reading, and a hint of Gnosticism was a recipe for lording logic over faith.

Historical Hubris

For the first 1500 years, the church accepted the efficacy of the sacraments nearly unanimously. Church tradition does not equal scriptural authority, but what changed in the next phase of church history? We must arrive at our conclusions from the text of scripture. Still, are those closer to the original author’s time or those centuries removed better temporally equipped to understand?

Ignatius, who was discipled by John, Augustine, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Cyril, and Thomas Aquinas, is a small sampling of the testimony of the early church for the bodily presence in the bread and wine. Zwingli departed from this and contributed to the many elements that hold a strictly symbolic view today.

The further away we get from the original events, the more likely we bring our cultural and philosophical baggage to the interpretive process. Does this mean we must hold all views that the earliest patristics espouse? No. However, to ignore their writings and teachings in favor of the contemporary is historical hubris.

Reading by Rationalism

If a equals b and b equals c, then a also equals c. That is exemplary logic. Does that translate over to Biblical interpretation? Does syllogistic law apply equally to scripture? How I understood scripture and formed theological convictions largely depended on a rationalistic reading of texts.

Sometimes, harmonizing seemingly contradictory thoughts in the Bible merely extrapolates our presuppositions. When this happens, we’re engaging in eisigesis. We assert that what the scripture plainly says cannot be the case because it rubs against the grain of our theological framework. We exhibit this tendency most clearly when we affirm the antithesis to a positive Biblical proposition despite the scripture not explicitly stating the antithesis.

Baptism is exhibit A. We see the passages that connect baptism to salvation and the forgiveness of sins, but we reason that they cannot mean what they say because it would “contradict” justification by faith. In our rationalistic bent, it doesn’t occur to us that God’s means are true and perfectly coherent despite our inability to connect the dots.

A Hint of Gnosticism

Gnosticism is multi-faceted and complex, but at its core, it has two key elements: a belief in secret knowledge and that the material realm is inherently evil. This mindset creeps into our perspectives on the sacraments as the secret knowledge of logic and our suspicion of the world and the flesh cast aspersion on any view that connects physical elements to faith.

With an inflated view of our knowledge on one hand and a distrust for anything material on the other, the efficacious nature of the physical means of God’s grace has two strikes. Supposing we are wise, we eisegetically undercut the wisdom that is the foolishness of the gospel revealed biblically in word and water.

How is it that we can affirm that a Jewish man was virgin-born, lived a sinless life, walked on water, raised the dead, and conquered death Himself yet stumble over biblical truths that don’t seemingly align with our theological system? Why do we balk at the supernatural when it defies our logic but not when it defies the laws of nature?

God’s revealed truth is never outdated, inherently contradictory, or subservient to our notions of logic. Do you believe that a particular divine Jewish man was born, lived, died, and rose again for the forgiveness of your sins? Christ is Lord over faith and logic. All of us should reflect on how we are prone to elevate logic over faith.

An Artificial Intelligence Tall Tale

November 3, 2023 / Chris

Tall tales have an ongoing relevance, and the wisest man there ever was reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun. The tall tale of John Henry is as applicable today as ever.

John Henry went up against a steam-powered drilling machine in an epic contest. He beat the machine but lost his life. The practical implications have spanned the railroads and automation across industries, and now, we are in the modern era where artificial intelligence is at the forefront of our societal conversation.
A blogging champion may arise to go toe-to-toe with Chat GPT. Unfortunately, we’ve already seen the results of that match-up, and humanity cannot compete in producing content. However, there are more profound questions to ask than whether or not artificial intelligence can do things more efficiently.

Will our literature be reduced to zeroes and ones? Can artistic beauty and creativity be computed? What are the long-term effects of sidelining people in the creative process?

Imagine a hero named Gates Jeffreys rising to challenge artificial intelligence to a dual of creative wits. The AI has five articles written before Gates can finish brainstorming a topic. Yet those five articles are missing something. Make no mistake, there are no mistakes. There is also no heart. There are no subtle, intuitive turns of phrase that bring empathy through a written format because of personal experience.

Gates Jeffreys possesses the spark of inspiration that comes through the ebbs and flows of human existence. AI can try to replicate patterns that emulate, but it cannot have a gut instinct. So, while the algorithms generated blog content twelve times faster than Gates, he followed a hunch and wrote something entirely uncharacteristic of his usual style. That hunch led to something that the competition metrics wouldn’t measure: meaningful resonance on a personal level.

Gates’ single article reached someone who needed to hear his story, and they reached out to him. The shared experience brought healing and discussion of connecting with others facing the same issue. AI pumped out another slew of articles, but Gates’ impulsive decision to finally share his story led to a movement of healing.

The debate on artificial intelligence is just beginning. Many, much more knowledgeable about the topic than I, are making decisions that will shape our future. Nonetheless, there is another layer to the conversation, and I encourage all my fellow humans to keep writing, thinking, discussing, connecting, planning, painting, and performing. A coded program may do it more proficiently, but it cannot do it more “human.”

A New Wine Reformation

October 25, 2023 / Chris

Time cyclically dulls our memories. This gap in remembrance occurs over centuries, decades, or even weeks. We lapse into a Pharisaical understanding of faith and find ourselves settling for the old wine of works instead of the new wine of the gospel. We are also offended by Jesus forgiving sins (Mark 2:7), eating with tax collectors and sinners (Mark 2:16), his disciples’ lack of religious observance like fasting (Mark 2:18), or plucking grain on the sabbath (Mark 2:24). The religious gatekeepers in the reformation era were offended by scripture being available in the common language and relinquishing their authority to Christ.

Reformation New Wine

The new wine of Christ, crucified and resurrected, is poured fresh and anew into the old wineskins of our expectations, and the results are explosive. The reformation was such a rediscovery with implications still felt today. Indulgences and meritorious works had become commonplace while the church became the intermediary between the ordinary person and God. Years of observance, tradition, and ignorance aged the wineskins of society. The reformers poured the new wine of the solas, and the church still feels the ripple effects.

Just as the reformers came along and identified how the church’s practices had veered away from the scriptural realities of justification by faith alone, we must examine current church practices to see where we are operating counterintuitively to the gospel. The new wine is perpetually ready to do its exploding work.

An Old, New Wine

While protestants are in doctrinal alignment with sola fide, we still tend to hand out prescriptions to treat the symptoms of our sin sickness. Spiritual disciplines and experiences have become the new indulgences. Spiritual disciplines are a good thing, but they are not a justifying thing. They do not impact our standing before God. Spiritual experiences can be incredible, but they can also be incredibly misleading. Experiences have ebbs and flows, and we must weigh them against scripture.

God has promised that He would continuously work in the bread and the wine for the forgiveness of sins (Matthew 26:28). The proclaimed gospel and the sins forgiven in the body and blood of Christ broken for sinners should explode the old wineskins of our misguided drifting to merit each time we receive the Lord’s supper and hear the good news heralded. These basic paradigms of Christianity are the old, new wine that shatters our illusions of faith by works.

Tasting New wine

Jesus’s offensive statement that we must eat His body and drink His blood to have eternal life was a new wine many of His followers’ wineskins could not contain. Modern reformation can only happen when we embrace this scandalously meritless and merciful promise (John 6:54).

The goodness of the good news is so powerful that it is unbelievable, except by faith. Many cannot accept that salvation rests entirely outside themselves, their effort, or their performance. The new wine of Christ’s all-sufficient, atoning sacrifice tastes off to our pseudo-connoisseur palates.

Our quest for a massive outpouring of religious fervor is an exercise in frivolity. Such an awakening cannot be manufactured by increased spiritual grit (disciplines) or the sweeping emotional movements we’ve become adept at creating. Instead, all we have to do is pour out the gospel and watch as any expectation that doesn’t align explodes.

Make Christianity Christian Again

September 23, 2023 / Chris

What makes Christianity Christian if not Christ? That is a self-evident question with an obvious answer; however, the church’s current status betrays that foregone conclusion. There is a spectrum of moralization and motivation that removes faith, grace, imputed righteousness, and Christ’s atoning work and resurrection. What’s left of the faith after such removal isn’t Christianity at all.

Moralization

When Christianity is a paradigm for moral reform, we ironically strip it of its impact on morality. We are quick to criticize pursuing Jesus for the sake of bread instead of the one who speaks of eating His flesh and drinking His blood (John 6). Still, we fail to see that pursuing Jesus, who curtails our cursing and modifies our behavior, is no different. Seeking the side effects instead of the source is no less real when we substitute moral lives for bread.

Let’s be clear. All scripture is profitable, and Christians must live their lives in light of the revelation of God’s character, as seen in the Bible. However, this is a result of God’s working in us, not the basis for God’s working in us. When we moralize the faith, we view scripture as a rulebook that helps us balance the ledgers. With this view, we could hand out copies of Aesop’s fables to the same effect as many sermons.

When the Christian faith is moralized, we’ve traded the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit through the proclamation of the gospel and the Sacraments for an evangelical form of operant conditioning. Preachers ring the bell to produce the prescribed response, with obedience expected. But we are humans created imago dei, not dogs, pigeons, or rats, to train into compliance. Scripture is profitable for training in righteousness, but the righteous shall live by faith (Galatians 3:11). We must “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:13).

Motivation

If we reduce Christianity to the spark that ignites the human engine of pursuing dreams, then it collapses like a neutron star. A merely motivational Christianity should defer to Tony Robbins or Dave Ramsey and hold pep rally conferences instead of services. Such motivational showmanship is increasingly common, and we are less aware of the absurdity.

The human condition is dire. An energetic speech to boost morale and productivity is insidiously and pragmatically effective. We may lift our heads and set our hands to the plow as we’re distracted from the true problem of our sinful condition and achieve a measure of bootstrap success. “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul” (Matthew 16:26)?

When motivation becomes the focus, then elements of Christianity become tools to improve our outlooks, performance, and lives. We misdiagnose the disease, and the wrong prescription is issued. In critical need of spiritual defibrillation, today’s Christianity offers the placebos of pamphlets, inspiring talks, and action items. The best motivational tools fail to produce a broken and contrite heart, which is the sacrifice God requires (Psalm 51:16-18).

Mitigation

How can we engage with morality and motivation gone awry? One dangerous impulse is to minimize the law, so we invert Paul’s question and rebuke on continuing in sin that grace may abound. Another is to burrow under our actions and link our faith to the sincerity and passion of our hearts. Both are problematic.

No creed but Christ is a naive, reductionistic attempt to simplify Christianity and reclaim focus that equally misses the mark. Christ and creed would be a better paradigm. Christianity is the faith once and for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). Christ alone is the means of our salvation, and this divine savior has affirmed and fulfilled sacred scripture. This is not a call for reductionism but for focus. True gospel centrality goes much deeper than a cursory nod toward the atoning work of Christ for sinners on any given Sunday. However, it does not bypass orthodoxy and the whole counsel of God in scripture in the process.

One proposed antidote to superficiality is the approach of Jonathan Edwards and John Piper to point us to the affections. The trouble is that beneath the behavioral level of our sin is the corrupted heart level of our sin. Calling people to fix their affections is no better than calling people to correct their behavior. We need a savior outside ourselves to take our sins and impute His righteousness. Once we die and rise with Christ, new desires and the fruit of the new birth will naturally follow.

Making Christianity Christian again defies nebulous, shallow motivation and rigid behavior-obsessed moralization versions of the faith. It shines the spotlight on Christ crucified for sinners because that’s where the scriptures place it. We’ve falsely assumed or surrendered to the notion that the true power of Christianity is to live victoriously or produce results. Ironically, faulty motivation and moralization suffer from the same fatal flaw. They make idols out of the product of faith. The true power of Christianity rests in humility and death (Philippians 2:6-11). Morality and motivation are supernatural works of God through Christ’s redeeming work given to us in word and sacrament. To make them the aim instead of the result is to strip Christianity of what makes it Christian.