:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

While in seminary I read a lot of job descriptions for pastors and letters from search committees. They usually consisted of bullet point lists that were about as long as any other job description. However, as I read these lists I realized I wasn’t qualified for these openings.

In fact, I’m not even sure if Jesus would have been qualified for the positions at most churches.

I’m sure that someone was eventually hired, but I’m equally certain that whoever took on this mantle of “pastor” let his/her congregation down pretty quickly. Perhaps letting a congregation down is the best thing a pastor can do, since it forces everyone to talk about their expectations and abilities.

There are no simple solutions here that I know of. I wouldn’t dare offer a one-size fits all solution. However, I can offer a few thoughts on what we should aspire for in our pastors and some dangers to avoid.

What Pastors Must Do: Managing Direction

A pastor keeps a group of Christians pointed in the right direction. That applies to big picture stuff and to smaller groups and ministries in our churches. This is a huge task to fulfill, and I know many pastors who do this well.

However, some congregations expect their pastors to do a lot more than this. Whether they’re from a pastor’s personal expectations or a congregation’s expectations, these can contribute to burn out.

The Pastor as A Jack of All Spiritual Trades

Pastors are usually one of two kinds of people: leaders of people or managers of people, both of whom love teaching the Bible and praying for people. However, most churches want a visionary leader/manager/counselor/custodian/communications manager/whatever else needs to be done.

I grew up in a church that had a head pastor and counseling pastor, which struck me as one of the smartest things a church could do. 

The Pastor is Responsible for All Spiritual Growth

Most people go to church hoping to be “fed” in some way. We want something spiritually significant to happen each Sunday, and that is a huge burden that pastors have to carry. In addition, our church service formats place all of the emphasis on the pastor to make it happen.

That is one of the reasons why I don’t put a lot of stock in Sunday meetings. I prefer to view church as a bring your own lunch, with the pastor responsible for preventing a food fight.

Most Churches Want a Visionary, Big-Picture Pastor Who Does Stuff

You can spot a manager pastor by looking at his to-do list. Is he/she involved in every committee in a hands-on capacity? Does he/she take on smaller tasks that should actually be delegated? I’ve found that many churches want a visionary pastor who can see the big picture, but they may feel slighted if that pastor isn’t involved in a hands-on way like the manager pastor.

The visionary pastor and manager pastor are two very different people. A visionary pastor will be more hands off, while a managing pastor will be more hands on. Expecting both qualities in the same person will lead to burn out.

The Pastor Serves “Us” or Else

The hardest part of being a pastor is being placed in a position where he/she must challenge or confront a congregation to move in a new direction. When I look at the ministry of Jesus, he spent a lot of time telling his followers what they didn’t want to hear. Can you imagine what we would say to him today?

“Why do you keep talking about going to Jerusalem so you can put us and yourself in danger? Talk sense Jesus!”

Any pastor who suggested the possibility of death in Jerusalem wouldn’t have a salary for long.

And that’s the problem: our pastors serve US. If they don’t give US what we want, we can cut them loose. Even worse than that, if pastors don’t meet our unrealistic expectations, we may view them as failures.

Maybe some pastors have issues. I’m not here to discuss that. All that I can see for certain is we pay some very ordinary people very little to do some very extraordinary work—work that requires incredible dependence on God.

The fact that most congregations have some kind of financial power over their pastors is perhaps inevitable. I don’t know if there’s a better way to compensate pastors through freewill offerings or some kind of tent making hybrid—I’m sure there are advantages and disadvantages.

However we set up our compensation for pastors, we need to remember that we are putting quite a lot of pressure on the men and women who serve as pastors and that we hold tremendous power over them. This is a power we can use to bless or to curse.

I’m not really sure I can write the following post without offending some people. However, this issue comes up often enough, that I think it’s worth addressing head on. I’ll do my best to speak of my personal experiences, and I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to judge or condemn anyone’s calling.

About ten years ago, I thought I would enter into full time ministry on staff at a church. I never thought I would end up writing full time, though I had hoped to one day write a book. The more I thought about the dynamics of ministering on staff at a church in a salaried position, the more I became personally convinced I should not go down that road.

I hope that every church handles money, power, and ministry well, and therefore I think we need to talk about it. There’s a huge elephant in the room, and we don’t always address it: Churches hire pastors to do a job for them. If a pastor lets his people down, the congregation can fire the pastor.

Perhaps a little context is in order.

I heard horror stories in seminary about the way churches handled their pastors. I ate lunch with pastors who lived under the threat of losing their jobs because their eschatology wasn’t quite right, they didn’t succeed as counselors, or their congregations didn’t like the new praise songs.

In a rather extreme case, a pastor who lived in a parsonage was fired and told to vacate immediately—leaving him and his family in a terrible position.

I know that there are plenty of good stories about happy pastors and churches. I’m not out to drag anyone through the mud or to question anyone’s calling. What I do want to talk about is money, ministry, and how the two work together in the power dynamics of the church.

I’m not out to justify myself or to criticize anyone specifically. My beef is with our system, which may work in some circumstances, but has clearly proven less than satisfactory often enough. We stand to gain quite a lot if we can talk about these dynamics openly.

I’ll lay my cards on the table up front by saying that I support a particular ministry financially. That ministry relies on freewill offerings. In addition, there are some folks who send me free will gifts to support my writing ministry. I have no problem with financially supporting someone who is in the ministry.

However, we could run into problems when a Christian minister counts on a group he or she serves to provide a set amount of money as a salary. There is an unspoken power dynamic that may come into play when a minister is relying on specific people to provide a set amount of money. I’ve seen churches handle it well, and I’ve seen churches handle it poorly.

I’ve felt compelled that I personally, at this point in my life at least, can’t take an officially salaried ministry position. I have good friends who minister quite well as salaried pastors, and for that reason, I want to ask, “What makes a salaried ministry position work?” and “What do we need to watch out for when we have a salaried minister?”

Tuesday’s Post: What’s at Stake for Pastors

Wednesday’s Post: What’s at Stake for Congregations

During the NHL playoffs I watch a lot of games through Canadian web sites that broadcast Hockey Night in Canada. It’s like I’m watching a different sport. The announcers are really into the game, commentators offer unfiltered opinions on the players, and features in between periods share interviews with the game’s best players.

The interviews of players add an element of human interest that makes it feel like HGTV for men. The sport of hockey is glorified, and you feel swept along by this great, amazing game with so many noble representatives.

Part of me wants to drive off to the nearest rink to practice skating backwards.

About a year ago, I spoke with a friend whose talented son considered taking a shot at professional hockey, but he decided against it. He offered a completely different perspective on the culture of hockey that didn’t necessarily spoil my Hockey Night in Canada moments, but revised the way I view the sport.

His angle gave me a dose of reality.

And honestly, why wouldn’t we want a dose of reality? Sometimes it hurts to realize we’ve had something wrong, but in the long run, we are usually better off, even if we’re a bit disillusioned.

As a growing Christian, I value doses of reality and challenges to my beliefs because I want to be sure I’m placing my faith in something solid. If my faith in Jesus is real, then it should stand testing. If it can’t, then perhaps I’ve had my faith in something other than Jesus.

Growing in Christ means changing our beliefs sometimes. That’s something that Peter, Paul, and John all had to learn. We’re in good company.

Our interpretations of the Bible and our theology may change sometimes, but how do we know we’re making a wise change? Here are some thoughts on how we can revise our beliefs faithfully:

Are We Departing from Tradition and the Global Church?

If we’re aware of what the majority of Christians throughout history and the world believe, then we should find out whether our revisions move us closer or further away from them. While joining the majority doesn’t always lead to the truth, it is proper to recognize the work of God’s Spirit among believers outside of our culture as a critical guide (see my book Coffeehouse Theology for more on this).

If we choose to depart from tradition or the global church, then we should have some really, really good reasons for doing so. Christians have been wrong about slavery, women’s rights, and colonialism, and there’s a chance we’ve made some other mistakes as well.

Are We Represented by a Minority in Christian History?

There are some church fathers who have both laid the foundation for our faith and held to some views that we would find quite disturbing today. Origen is one who preserved the Christian faith at a critical time and suffered for it, while also holding some views that would later be declared heretical.

Beliefs are tricky things, and sometimes our lines between heresy and orthodoxy are not as clear as we’d prefer. There are some church fathers who would probably like to have another shot at reframing some of their beliefs, and if the greatest minds of the church are in that boat, we’re in good company, even if we’re in the minority on a particular issue.

Are We Overreacting?

Christians are really good at swinging too far in one direction. Our latest trend is a movement away from certainty to doubt and questions. The danger is that we’ll embrace doubt, deconstruction, and questions to the point that we’ll never put in the hard work and faith required to find answers and to consequently do anything.

We can do this in our shifts over theology. On Friday I hope to apply some of these questions to our beliefs about hell, who goes there, and why. We’re at a time when perhaps an overemphasis on hell and punishment could be countered by an overemphasis on grace and salvation for everyone.

I’m not particularly interested in landing in the dead center of the two extremes, but I think it’s helpful to remember that in every time of shifting, we’ll be tempted to shift too far.

Friday’s Post: Perhaps we’ve made too much of hell in relation to the Gospel message, but let’s be careful that we don’t make too little of God’s justice, judgment, and the reality that anyone can reject God’s love and forgiveness

I used to look at the Easter story as simply the moment when Jesus delivers us from sin by dying on the cross and rising to life. Jesus did all of the work for me, and I just needed to accept his free gift by faith.

That captures part of the story, and while salvation is a gift that is accomplished by the work that only God can do, actually claiming it by faith is a process that involves hard work on our part. It’s just not the kind of “hard work” we expect.

Easter reminds me that I don’t need to earn God’s favor or save myself. His Spirit can save me and make me holy. However, tearing myself away from distractions and opening myself to God’s saving and sanctifying power is where the hard work comes in.

Whether it’s rising early for prayer, setting aside lunch time to read scripture, sitting still to meditate in the evening, or fasting from a meal in order to wait on the Lord, the hard work and disciplines lead to discipleship.

I like how the words discipline and disciple look so similar in English.

Our day to day decisions have everything to do with how we experience God’s saving work and power.

During the days leading up to the cross, Jesus worked hard at prayer, challenging his disciples up to the last moment in the garden to sacrifice physical rest for the sake of spiritual exercise—praying that God would protect them from temptation.

He didn’t tell his disciples, “Take a nap fellahs. I’m going to be crucified tomorrow anyway. I’ve got this sin thing taken care of. You don’t need to worry about sin and temptation since you’re going to be saved by faith!”

We can never add to our salvation, but we can neglect it and fail to receive the power that comes through the cross, leading to our deliverance from sin, and through the Resurrection, raising us to new lives in Christ. During Easter I remember that Jesus saved me, but in delivering me from sin, he has called me to the hard work and daily sacrifices that discipleship requires.

For more thoughts on Easter, read Bonnie Gray’s post: Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better.

I left for seminary an hour early on my first day of classes. I wanted to make sure I had time to grab a cup of sweet coffee from the cafeteria, casually browse through books in the student lounge, and then sit in class well before it began.

For me, seminary was the place to get all of the answers. I’d grown up in a fundamentalist church  learning all kinds of stuff about the end times, heaven and hell, and a host of other interpretive issues related to the Bible, particularly: how literal should we take the Bible? And especially, why do we interpret some parts of the Bible literally, while we others are not?

My pastor, at a church that wasn’t fundamentalist, had warned me that seminary would not give me all of the answers. It was sound advice that took years to sink in. As of that morning, I was beginning my quest to find the truth.

Cruising down the northeast extension of the PA Turnpike, I was fifteen minutes away from the seminary when traffic stopped.

We turned off our engines and waited.

Somewhere ahead of us, a truck had turned over, spilling oil, chemicals, acid, or something else horrible onto the road. I can’t quite remember. We eventually turned around, drove back down the highway, and took a series of detours on unfamiliar roads.

I made it to class where, in a rather surreal scene, our professor was leading everyone in a song. They were singing the Hebrew alphabet  to the tune of Yankee Doodle. On a side note, my girlfriend’s (as in the girlfriend who is now my wife) brother had taken Hebrew in college and knew the same song, so the next time we got together, we sang our mastery of Hebrew for her.

Sometimes the pursuit of truth leads us to traffic jams, unfamiliar places, and unexpected destinations. I never would have guessed I’d spend two-three hours sitting in traffic, winding through back roads, and then singing the Hebrew alphabet after arriving an hour or two late for class.

There are a lot of things about Christianity that surprised me over the years as I filled myself up with truth at seminary.

While I recommend seminary, especially my own seminary, seminary and truth have something in common: they have their limits. And when we say something has limits or can only do so much, that isn’t the same as saying they are bad or deficient in some way.

Limited truth is not the same as relativism.

Rather, we need to correct misperceptions and try to see their true value for what it is.

In my own case, I thought that having a handle on the truth, knowing how to interpret the Bible, and being able to spot fundamentalist errors would make me a deeply spiritual person who is close to God. Truth can set us free since it can lead us to God, but truth is not enough by itself.

In many ways, my seminary helped me figure this out. There’s more to Christianity than finding the right answer. There’s more to following Jesus than preserving what he taught.

By the time I left seminary, I had a lot of answers, but I didn’t have a lot of God. I’d given myself to my books and papers, but something was missing. My pastor had tried to warn me. My professor in a Christian spirituality class had tried to warn me. But I wanted answers, and I worked hard to find them.

I soon learned that truth couldn’t do what I expected.

If Jesus really wanted us to get his teachings 100% correct, he would have left us a document in his own words. Instead he trusted his followers to sort it out for us—entrusting his truth to a community. Just giving us the truth wasn’t enough. In fact, he gave us a whole lot more than the truth.

This week I want to look at the limits of truth, the ways we mishandle truth, and a full picture of the Christian life with truth in its proper place.

Tomorrow’s Post: The Problem with Defending the Truth

When I’ve felt most distant from God, God has eventually drawn me near again. The time I’ve spent feeling far away from God and unable to hear his voice has been difficult and uncomfortable. I have no idea why it happened sometimes.

On several occasions God overcame my doubts and fears by sending someone to pray over me. Something spiritual snapped, and I reached a new place in my spiritual walk.

Within a few months I had plenty of new problems. Thankfully God is able to draw us near to himself in several ways, the ones I know from personal experience are included below:

Confess Sins

We could say a lot about the theology behind sin and obedience, but I find it most helpful to think of sin as a matter of direction. That’s how Jesus often spoke of the Kingdom—either we’re entering it or we’re not. Are we moving toward God or away from him?

If we are sinning, we are moving away from God and will be unable to draw near to God. The laws of the Old Testament are among our many clues that God desires to have fellowship with us, but we must be holy and obedient. We show our love through obedience, and our obedience is sparked by our love.

Receive Prayer

Sometimes we need a friend to help us break through to the place where God wants us to be. I have found this to be particularly true in my own experience since it can be hard to get somewhere I’ve never been. When a fellow believer who knows where I’m coming from and where I need to go prayed for me, God moved me to a new place of freedom.

Whenever the Gospel spread, there is a clear precedent in the New Testament for believers to pray for one another, especially those who are new to the faith. I’ve found that the same principle sometimes applies when we need God to lead us out of a rut or into a deeper aspect of the spiritual life.

Wait in Faith

Yesterday we talked about letting go of our expectations, but there’s a balance to aim for here. While we don’t define how God will act, we should certainly expect to meet with him in some way.

I’ve often found that when I sit down and ask God to guide me, he’ll direct me to worship him.  I may not find the exact answer I’m looking for that day, but the important thing is to remain in Christ, our life-giving vine. We may have to wait a while before we experience God in the ways we’re looking for, but God desires to meet with his people. He will not abandon us.

How do you hear from God?

What’s your experience in breaking through a tough time when you couldn’t hear God?

Can you imagine the disciples signing up to follow Jesus, but then Jesus drops a thick scroll in their laps and wanders away? That’s how Christianity feels to me sometimes.

Christians have committed themselves to following Jesus, but then they’re handed this thick Bible and need to figure God out by thumbing through it. Who said that Christianity had homework?

And so we dig into the stories and hope that we’ll feel something, wondering what Christianity is all about. Is the deity in the Bible supposed to match the deity we experience today?

When praying we may feel discouraged because it seems like we’re just talking into the air. Where is God? What is the Holy Spirit up to?

When I read the Bible, I keep bumping into promises for abundance like a bubbling stream, for deserts turning into well-watered farms. We’re promised that God is seeking us, placing us where we are so that we can find him. Why does it feel like God is so hard to find if he’s actually reaching out to us, seeking those who are seeking him?

While I’m committed to studying the Bible and to persevering in prayer even when I don’t feel particularly spiritual, I want to know why God feels distant sometimes—perhaps he feels distant all of the time for some of us.

I’ve met Christians who seem to have a direct line to God. Other Christians have struggled through dark nights of the soul where there’s a long-term heavenly radio silence. What’s normal? What’s wrong, if anything?

We touched on this topic last week at small group, and the more I discuss it with fellow believers, I’m convinced that this is a complex issue that often defies one-size-fits-all answers. Having said that, the solution may not be as far away as we suspect. In fact, what we suspect may be a large part of the problem, but that’s for the next post.

As we dig into this topic, I’d like to look at the ways we can make things worse and then how we can take positive steps forward in our relationship with God, particularly in our prayer lives.

The Next Post: How We Make Things Worse.

I’m going to made a statement based on tons of anecdotal evidence—both my own and what I hear from others. I’m pretty sure it’s true.

Large numbers of church-going conservative to moderate evangelicals (especially the conservatives) would flip their lids if they really knew what the professors in many leading seminaries and Christian colleges/universities believe.

Some schools are more diverse than others, permitting a wider range of views, and for my purposes here, I’m focusing on those with greater theological diversity. And believe me, when I’ve mentioned what I learned in seminary, I’ve had to help a few friends put their lids back on…

Perhaps you aren’t easily rattled, which is great, but we need to look at what our leading Bible scholars are saying and then how their teachings reach us in the pew. It may help us relax a bit when new Christian theology “scandals” hit if we learn where some of our theological trends come from and how we learn about them.

An example? Let’s start with a tame one.

A leading Old Testament scholar at my seminary, who worked on little-known projects such as the NIV and NLT translations of the Bible, taught the following in his class:

• The days in Genesis were most likely long, indeterminate periods of time. Least likely? 24 hour days.
• God’s image is fully reflected in the creation of man AND woman—together.

The implications drawn from these two points are striking. They would rattle the interpretations and practices of many Christians who put a lot of faith in the world being created in 24-hour days and who teach that women are somehow below men—especially when it comes to teaching men.

The Diversity of Evangelical Scholars

It gets a little stickier in many seminaries and universities. How does salvation work? Well there are a couple prominent schools of thought that range from paying a debt to God to buying us back from Satan—both have biblical support among other views.

How was the Bible written and edited? Wait, did I just say the Bible was edited? And don’t get me started on who wrote which book when. I mean, Isaiah can’t be scripture if it had two different authors, writing in two different settings, can it???

Hell? Well, it’s not easy for some scholars to say something for certain about hell since Jesus spoke so much about Gehenna, a literal place in his day that we translate as hell. Are there consequences for rejecting God? Absolutely. However, the exact details of the punishment are not a matter of consensus among evangelical scholars. 

I could go on with debates about the impact of culture on our theology, the problems of American nationalism in the church, or different views on the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts. There is a lot of diversity among our leading scholars, but we don’t always glimpse that from the pew.

How Christian Authors Use Theology

Which brings me to my other point. You see, we have a lot of theologians who pioneer ideas or challenge the status quo of our theology, but not all of them are able to communicate effectively to wide audiences like a Max Lucado or dare I mention a certain pastor in Michigan… And then Brian McLaren is another good example of a Christian author who reads a lot of theology books by conservative scholars, but he also mixes in liberal scholars.

So we have quite a few theologians in our seminaries and universities who are immersed in the Bible, theology books, and church history who have limited access to the folks in the pews—the folks who would have a heart attack if they knew what their scholars are teaching. There are exceptions (say NT Wright for one), but by and large, our scholars are rarely the ones who carry new ideas to the church.

That falls to writers.

There are a number of Christian writers who take the existing theology that’s already out there and make it accessible for the average Christian. That’s what Brian McLaren did in  A New Kind of Christian. McLaren took the theology that had impacted his own life powerfully and wove a simple narrative with two friends having a spiritual conversation. He didn’t think a lot of that stuff up on his own for the most part, though he certainly included his own spin or innovations at times.

So when we’re concerned that a popular writer is introducing new ideas that will somehow corrupt Christianity, there’s a good chance those ideas are being pulled from some scholars who have already been teaching them to college students and pastors. Their ideas are already being considered among many learned Christians, but have not made a splash in the popular Christian market.

The good news is that the Gospel is still being preached and the many students and pastors who interact with these supposedly “dangerous” ideas are fully committed to following Jesus.

In many cases we have Christian scholars who are deeply committed to the scriptures and to Jesus who find that some of our “traditional” views aren’t quite on the mark. This presents an interesting quandary. There’s the traditional line by which “faithful Christians” have been defined for a particular belief. However, being a faithful Christian demands a commitment to the teachings of scripture.

What happens when a commitment to the teachings of scripture lead a scholar to believe something a little different from the traditionally “faithful Christian interpretation”? It’s not an enviable position.

However, there are many Christian scholars who have tweaked their conceptions of salvation, hell, theology and culture, and the nature of the Bible’s composition after carefully studying the scriptures. We often don’t know about their views widely until a talented Christian writer/communication takes the work of these scholars and presents them in a book for popular audiences who wouldn’t persevere through a 300-word theology book with tiny font and footnotes that sprout like weeds.

I write all of this because we often hear that this or that author is spreading a teaching that will somehow destroy the church. While we should certainly be careful about what we teach, often enough today’s raging theological controversy was yesterday’s tame class discussion at a Bible-believing, Jesus following university or seminary where everyone left class, checked their text messages, and then promptly ate lunch.

While in college in the Midwest I used to attend this church that was a pretty happy, high-strung place. They had a band up front and a bouncing choir that sang as you walked in. Depending on their song choice, you could describe the atmosphere as electric.

Everything crashed when the pastors’ plans for a new building met strong resistance among a vocal minority who held up the process by voting against it, landing them 1% below the 75% majority demanded in the by-laws. The senior pastor followed this by preaching a sermon on Numbers 16 when the earth swallowed Korah and his followers who defied the decisions of God’s chosen leaders for the people.

Neither story has a particularly happy ending.

While these instances of authority abuse among leaders are easy to spot, every Christian has a a certain measure of authority and that authority can be abused. We all can and do abuse our authority at times, and that makes it quite hard for us to love one another.

This week we’re looking at the things that clutter our relationships with fellow Christians and make it hard for us to love one another. Authority abuse is at the top of my list, and I want to look at the ways the average Christian can abuse authority today.

What is Our Authority?

Jesus gave us authority to bind and loose things on heaven and earth, we are commissioned to proclaim the Gospel, and we have the responsibility of helping one another as part of Christ’s body. We can make a real difference in the lives of others, either helping God’s Kingdom advance or neglecting our roles by either inaction or misusing our authority.

How Do We Abuse It?

We all abuse our authority sometimes, but we generally only notice leaders because they’re the most visible. However, every time I have set myself up as a judge over another Christian and fail to pursue a redemptive and constructive course of action I’m falling short of my calling.

I’ve seen this kind of abuse plenty of times online as well when Christians accuse others of watering down the Gospel, call their salvation into question, or set themselves up in authority over another believer in an inappropriate way. We generally see authority abuse when one Christian assumes the role of gatekeeper for other Christians, a position that God never intended anyone but himself to occupy.

How Should We Use It?

All that to say, we have a responsibility to watch out for one another. That means we should speak up in a relational and redemptive manner when a fellow Christian is tangled up in sin or embracing troubling beliefs. However, we come alongside of them as equals who are pursuing God together and who share in the same measure of God’s authority.

Our goal is not to establish ourselves as the brilliant authority figure with all of the answers who will defend the faith, but rather to help fellow Christians attain the full measure of maturity and authority that God has given to them. We don’t want them to forever depend on us or to be alienated from God based on the way we relate with them.

We have been given authority for the benefit of others, making us servants who should automatically opt for the lowest positions, rather than using others to build up our spiritual merit badges. When we use our authority as servants we are in a perfect position to love others, to be loved, and to spot those who are abusing authority.

Understanding our proper position among fellow believers is critical in determining how we relate with the supposed “heretics” or those we deem “irrelevant traditionalists.”

Tomorrow’s Post:  We’ll dig deeper into the ways labels such as “heretics” and “irrelevant” impact Christian community and some suggestions to move beyond these labels.

Whenever someone brings up the problem of evil in our world or criticizes God for how things have played out, I always want to know what they would do differently or better. In a sense, this has everything to do with Advent. However, we need to set a few ground rules and look at a few options before looking at the birth of Jesus.

Why Are We Here?

Christians and any other religion that believes in a god, teach that God created the world. We didn’t arrive here by chance or luck. Christians in particular believe that God created us to be in relationship with him.

Therefore, if we follow this “free will” line of reasoning, God did not create us to be robots who obeyed him. God also doesn’t force himself on us. He wants us to choose to love him and to love others on our own.

What Options Do We Have?

Therefore, God could cancel his plans to work with us and to reach out to us. He could conceivably take control, force himself on us. However, God is defined by love and relationship, and such forceful action would run counter to his nature. His eyes are searching the earth for those who are seeking him.

If God doesn’t take control of us and our world, how else can he deal with sin and all of our other problems? I mean, there have been times when I wouldn’t have minded God taking control of things, but then again, that wouldn’t change anything for you or me personally. I believe God has a better way forward.

Bearing and Overcoming Evil

The thought of Jesus hanging on the cross with angels at his command is startling for me. God himself came to us in the person of Jesus, suffered like any other person, and then endured a painful death with the weight of the world’s sins upon him.

God didn’t choose a superficial plan that solves our problems for today and leaves us unchanged. God dealt with the roots of our problems by facing all of the evil in our world, bearing it on the cross, and then overcoming it through the Resurrection.

The Intimacy of God

God is not detached from us and our suffering. He faced it head-on in ways we cannot imagine. However, God will also not use the nuclear option. He modeled the way we should live and left his Spirit among us. If we can stop filling our brains with every other influence from the internet, TV, and radio, we may be quiet enough to hear him.

I crave that quiet time during Advent this year. I want to ponder the wonder of his incarnation and his plan to bear our sin and suffering. Every time I think of this incredible plan to work with us from the inside out, I’m blown away by the patience and compassion of God.

He gives us time to repent. He offers second chances. He waits for us when we can hardly scrape a few minutes together. He does all of this because he has not wavered from his original plan to be in relationship with his creation.