Is God Worth Following? Eternal Life Doesn’t Suck!
Today as I made my way though Daniel I got to read my favorite of all Bible stories, “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and the Firey Furnace.” I don’t know why it is my favorite. Maybe it’s because I think the name Shadrach is the coolest name in the Bible and way better than his Hebrew name of Hananiah. Maybe it’s because even after they are given prominent roles in the governemnt of Nebuchadnezzar they still stand against the ungodliness. Maybe it’s because they do it without fear of losing their job and losing their life overcoming their fear of God. Maybe it’s because God saves them, and appears with them in the furnace. Or maybe it’s because of Daniel 3:18, “ But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”
I often wonder if we have crossed a significant line over the years as we have tried to make Christianity palatable. We try to convince people that there is something in it for them if they would just pray this prayer and get dunked in this giant bathtub. We preach sermons about how God can fix your marriage, your kids, your finances, and your health and we fail to proclaim with the same vigor that He’s still worth following even if our wife still decides to leave us, our kids still choose to disobey us, we still end up bankrupt, and we still get cancer.
I have a friend, much older than I, who asked me a question as he was obviously dealing with the same thing. He said, “Robert, would you follow Jesus even if it meant that you would go to Hell?”
What a great question. I’m haunted by that question every day, because when he asked it I had to really check myself and I had to deeply deal with just how selfish I was in my own personal walk and in how I was communicating the gospel to others.
My answer today is, “I think so. I mean, I would try to. It would depend upon how connected I am to what it was He actually has done for me. The more connected I am to His suffering, the more likely I will be to suffer for Him” If I learned anything from Peter on the night Jesus was betrayed it was that I am never sure until the opportunity arrises.
I’m not sure how hot Hell is, but it can’t get much hotter than that furnace in Daniel 3.
And those three guys went.
May my faith in the little things of today prove beneficial when the furnace comes for me, and for you.
Is God worth following? I hope so. And this hope comes from a place deep inside of me, that just showed up one day when God through His crushing grace saved me.
Addendum:
Daniel 3 also raises a question I’ll have to ask when I see Jesus face to face: “Where in the heck was Daniel in all of this? Was he unaware of what was going down? Did he try to stick up for his friends? Did he choose to worship the statue? He’s conspicuously absent…
Spiritual Formation Test
In my last post I shared results from the personality test that Tony Morgan originally pointed me to. I wonder what a Spiritual Formation Test would look like.
Would it have questions like:
1. You can name the books of the Bible
2. You can name the authors each book of the Bible.
3. You have a good grasp of the context of each book of the Bible including why it was written and for whom it was intended.
4. You own at least three commentaries.
5. You have taken a Greek and Hebrew class.
6. You passed Greek and Hebrew with flying colors.
7. You own software that includes thousands of volumes of books and you have more books than you have shelving space.
8. You often teach to crowds in excess of 10 people
9. You teach to crowds in excess of 100 people
10 You teach to crowds in excess of 1000 people.
11. You have a PhD.
12. You have been mistaken for Jesus.
I’m reading Brennan Manning’s “the furious longing of God” and he quotes Gerald May,
“The entire process (of self-development) can be very exciting and entertaining. But the problem is there’s no end to it. The fantasy is that if one heads in the right direction and just works hard enough to learn new things and grows enough and gets actualized, one will be there. None of us is quite certain exactly where there is, but it obviously has something to do with resting.”
Brennan goes on to lament all of the feeble attempts he has made and all of the time he has put into having the
“delusion that I was securely ensconced in the seventh mansion of spiritual perfection.
What would I actually do if I had it to do all over again? Heeding John’s counsel, I would simply do the next thing in love.”
Once again, I believe that while the Church must continually discover new lands in the world of what it means to follow Jesus it must, even more intensely, do what it already knows that it should do. While Kay Arthur and Beth Moore studies are tremendous teachers, and Serendipity Bible studies are great resources if all we did was learn then we have serious problems.
I think Brennan says something very profound. The real test of Spiritual Formation is whether or not we ar edoing what we are doing in love. If we do it for the love of ourselves it is good. If we do it for the love of others it is better. However, if we do it for the love of God that is the best of all.
Whether we study or dig a well the highest and greatest measure of how we are doing is determined by for whom we do it, and not how many or how much.
Your work is sacred…
More Good Work
In honor of Labor Day, more thoughts and quotes about the dignity of work.
Sep 4th, 2009 | By Skye Jethani | Category: Church, Faith, Formation, Main Feature
There’s an unemployed man in your congregation. After searching for months for a job, he’s finally gotten a position on a landscaping crew. On Sunday, before the close of the worship service, a leader calls the man up to the platform. He tells the congregation about the member’s new vocation and then invites others up to the platform to place their hands on him. Together the church prays and ordains him for his new work, asking God to make him an instrument of his beauty and care for creation, and praying that he would bring pleasure to God and goodness to others through his labor.
How would your church be different if this sort of scene was a regular occurrence? For landscapers? For business people? For students going back to school? For moms volunteering in the community? For financial planners? For nurses? For police officers?
Consider this remark from Dallas Willard:
“There truly is no division between sacred and secular except what we have created. And that is why the division of the legitimate roles and functions of human life into the sacred and secular does incalculable damage to our individual lives and the cause of Christ. Holy people must stop going into ‘church work’ as their natural course of action and take up holy orders in farming, industry, law, education, banking, and journalism with the same zeal previously given to evangelism or to pastoral and missionary work.”
I don’t think Willard is devaluing missionaries or evangelism. Rather he’s affirming that the scope of God’s mission in the world may be far larger than our church tradition often recognizes. Here’s another bit from Os Guinness describing the origins of our misunderstanding about calling:
The truth of calling means that for followers of Christ, “everyone, everywhere, and in everything” lives the whole of life as a response to God’s call. Yet, this holistic character of calling has often been distorted to become a form of dualism that elevates the spiritual at the expense of the secular. This distortion may be called the “Catholic Distortion” because it rose in the Catholic era and is the majority position in the Catholic tradition. Protestants, however, cannot afford to be smug. For one thing, countless Protestants have succumbed to the Catholic distortion as Wilberforce nearly did. Ponder for example, the fallacy of the contemporary Protestant term “full-time Christian service” – as if those not working for churches or Christian organizations are only part-time in the service of Christ. For another thing, Protestant confusion about calling has led to a “Protestant distortion” that is even worse. This is a form of dualism in a secular direction that not only elevates the secular at the expense of the spiritual, but also cuts it off from the spiritual altogether.
“Everyone, everywhere, and in everything.” What a beautiful way of understanding the scope of our mission. And it seems wonderfully congruent with the mission statement painted at the front of my church’s sanctuary: “Forming a people through Christ to glorify him everywhere.” I’m becoming more convinced that if we are to seek this purpose we’re going to have to address our implicit and false dualisms (sacred v. secular, clergy v. laity) head on.
