In Dave's Words

The following Manning quote has been bouncing around my head and heart. “The ordinary pablum of popular religion caters to the idealistic, prefectionist, and neurotic self who fixates on the graceless getting worthy for union (with Christ), while allowing the protitutes and tax gougers to dance into the kingdom. Our strategies of self-deception persuade us that abiding restful union with Jesus is too costly, leaving no room for money, ambition, success, fame, sex, power, control, and pride of place or the fatal trap of self-rejection, thus prohibiting mediocre, disaffected dingbats and dirtballs, like myself, from intimacy with Jesus. ”

Guilty as charged!

Why is it that I constantly feel I need to get or stay worthy for Christ’s affection? I guess that, as with everything else in this world, our worth is so often earned. As much as we talk about “God so loving the world”, mainstream evangelicalism may talk about the grace and love of God, but lives out the reality that we need to work to continue to earn something we have been freely given.

God…help me to recognize and reject contemporary Pharisaism and go deeper into an experience of your wild grace for me.

Why is it that we sanitize so many sins? There is this list of stuff that most would unequivocally call wrong. This list makes us recoil in what looks like righteous indignation. These are the sins that seem black and white when we hear them out loud. Adultery. Sexual immortality. Theft. Murder. Abuse. Idolatry. (Not that most of us really know what that looks like today.) Whenever it becomes public that a fellow follower has been caught in these sins, we cringe in self-righteous piety wondering how someone could end up down this path.

But there is this other list of stuff that, while we would likely agree in principle that they are just as bad as the bad list, we live like these sins are not quite as…sinful.  These are sins of comfort and convenience…and much easier to justify. Greed is often disguised as being “blessed”.  Gossip is disguised as “concerns and prayer requests”. Anger is disguised as “venting”. Arrogance is disguised as “experience”. Gluttony is condoned as a “private matter”. Jealousy is justified as a normal response in an affluent society.  Judgmentalism is justified as “spiritual maturity” and conviction about right and wrong. We would never think about calling each other on these more sanitized “private” sins. But the reality is these sins are often much more dangerous than the more obvious “bad” stuff. The subtlety of the sanitized sins wraps us up in a spiritual pride that leads us to overlook the “small” stuff. Yet the consequences of the sanitized sins are every bit as dangerous to the community and testimony of Christ as the major league sins.

I read this passage today that is pretty clear about the consequences of the small stuff…  

Galatians 5:19-21 (New Living Translation) ¹⁹ When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, ²⁰ idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, ²¹ envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.

Do we have the personal courage and corporate commitment to deal with the sanitized sins just like we would with the “real bad” stuff?

Empathy…I read this definition:  “The ability to understand or enter into another persons reality, motives, situation and feelings.” It’s the ability to remove yourself from the center of your understanding and chose to see situations through another persons reality. Really…the opposite is self-centeredness and pride.

Our default setting is to evaluate, judge, and compare everyone to our experience, reality, sandards and motives. We can’t help but define normal as we ourselves are. We so easily think that our “normal” or our standards are the most right. We judge or critic people because they are not like us. They don’t feel like us, think like us, act like us or value what we value. While I obviously believe in absolutes of right and wrong, I also believe that we should rarely think we absolutely know what they are and absolutely know how to live them out.

Without empathy, we generalize, stereotype, and judge. Without empathy, it’s impossible to treat people the way Christ did. Without empathy, it’s impossible to live a compassionate life. Without empathy, we push people away by our self-centered expectations of them to become like us. Without empathy, we focus on the weaknesses of people rather than on their gifts and strengths.  

It’s much easier to empathize with those we like more or have invested the time to get to know. That is not the test of Christ-like self-emptying. While empathy might be easier for some, we can all learn to see and understand from the perspective of whoever it is we are relating too. We can all choose to shelve our generalizations and stereotypes before passing judgement. The result will be an ever increasing community of grace dispensers that draw people by the attractiveness of our humility and Christ-likeness.

A few months ago, it occurred to me that the reason I wish that people would change has much more to do with my benefit than their’s. When I really stop to evaluate my heart and when I stop and listen to people complain about other people, the reason we wish people would change is because it would somehow make my life easier or more…comfortable.

Oh…sure we talk about the need for people to become more like Jesus…and I don’t doubt that we mean it. But humanly speaking, I am usually ticked off that people aren’t “normal”…like me more than I am that they’re not like Jesus. If people would see things my way…act like I would…do what I want, the way I want it done…then I would be happier and my life would be easier. The more people don’t see things my way…don’t act like I would…or don’t do what i would do, the way I would do it…the more frustrated I get. My reason for wanting people around me to change is self-centered.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself about how much your self plays into people needing to change:

• Is your emotional well being tied to people agreeing with you? Do you get defensive when people don’t see things your way?
• Do you feel the overwhelming urge to control the way people do things because of your need for things turn out your way?…which is obviously the best way
• Why do you get so frustrated by how people around you act?
• Do people joke about you having a controlling or obsessive nature?
• How much emotional energy do you spend on situations where people don’t agree with you or where people don’t appreciate your way of doing things?
• Is your sense of “ok-ness” dependant on being stroked by those you lead or lead with?

Those with the gift of being able to influence others need to constantly take stock of our motivations. There is a fine line between manipulation and good leadership. For the sake of this argument, I view manipulation as trying to change people around me for my benefit or to make them like me. Good leadership, on the other hand, influences people toward becoming more like Christ.

I was talking to my son tonight about his day at school. He told me a story I remember all too well from my days at school. And while I vividly remember hating living through the moment just as he did today…I realized tonight that we do the same as adults.

He told me about how much he hates it when the teacher hands a test or assignment back and the scurry of comparing grades starts. Each student looking over at the desks and papers…hoping to confirm that they are better than everyone else…or hoping to disappear knowing that you are about to feel very small…compared to others. Always on lookout searching for ways of reminding people that you are smarter…prettier…more popular…or just plain better than everyone else the “handing back of the tests” moment is always there for the value vultures to swoop down and make someone feel a little bit smaller so they can feel a little bit bigger.  Kids and adults alike think they hide it. “Oh…”, someone asks as if they don’t really care, “what did you get?” And if, per chance you did score lower than they did, they take the moment to casually volunteer their test scores…just to make sure you know they are better than you.

Car’s, houses, friends, cloths, jobs, social networks, schools, titles, name dropping…all opportunities to do the same as adults…only the stakes are higher…because my pride is greater than that of a 10 year old kid. It seems that many of us never outgrew the need to compare ourselves to those around us…sizing up our lives to the lives of others to get some sort of idea where we fit in the social network chain or the pecking order at church, work or school. For those who don’t follow Christ I can understand it. But for those who claim they do…its even more sad. Why is it that we, who are the most valued in all of creation, can spend so much emotional time and energy trying to make other people look small so I can look big? How free we would be, and consequently like Christ, if we could be so solid in who we really were than we could be unmoved by what other people think of us or how they try and make us feel for their benefit.