The Kingdom Way

Lately my pastors have been preaching through the Gospel of Luke. They've just got through the "sermon on the plain" in chapter 6. Here's where Jesus says things like:

• love your enemies
• do good to those who hate you
• bless those who curse you
• to one who strikes you on the cheek, invite him to strike the other also
• and when someone wants to take some of your stuff, offer him even more stuff.

Oh yes, and

• give to anyone who begs from you
• don't demand back what someone has borrowed

And finally,

• treat other people (all of them) the way you would want them to treat you.

Now here are some rules to live by that virtually no modern self-improvement books will repeat (if there is a section in the bookstore for self-forgetful books, it might be in there). When I first heard this passage preached in my early days as a Christian, the preacher simply said (in essence), no, Jesus didn't really mean you should live this way, because of course you can't live this way, it's a ridiculous suggestion. All Jesus wanted to do was to drive you to your knees in repentance by showing you what a self-focused person you are and always will be.

That was bad exegesis, and consequently bad preaching, but not uncommon. I cut my teeth in a church tradition that was incessantly wary of what they called "works righteousness," and they saw every portion of Scripture in light of that wariness. They mistrusted any talk of good-deed-doing as inevitably leading to, you guessed it, salvation-earning works righteousness. Consequently, all discussion of passages like the Sermon on the Mount (and the Sermon on the Plain) were essentially acts of concentrated avoidance of the obvious.

Anyway, there remains the obvious, right where it has always been. Jesus' ministry starts with an announcement of the kingdom of God (see Luke 4:18-21, for example, and also 4:43), and the appropriate reaction to that is a celebration. The bridegroom has come! (see Luke 5:34) 

Probably all of Jesus' imperatives should be predicated on this thought: the kingdom has come! That seems to be the order of things in the Gospels. Jesus comes announcing the kingdom, and then he gets down to teaching what that's going to mean for people who follow in the Jesus way. It's going to look like, well, loving your enemies. Oh yes, and then he lives it out, even to the bitter end.

As I see it, this is Big Truth. The whole rest of the NT, from The Acts of the Apostles to The Revelation, is the ongoing working out of this Big Truth in all its implications. We will have to keep reading in order to understand all this better. What is more, we will need the Helper in all this. There is no blueprint for how to love your enemy, only the moment of truth when you have to decide whether you're going to love them or not love them. And in that moment, just like the Apostles in Luke's sequel, you're going to need the help of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 1:4,5). 

It would be Paul who would one day write, "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." Then he said, "If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit." I don't think we can even begin to think about leading the life that Jesus prescribes in Luke 6 until we have begun to see that it is also the Spirit-led life that Paul is telling the Galatians about (Gal. 5:22).

Have hope, for the King has come, overthrown all your enemies, and he's given you his Spirit to guide you in the Kingdom Way.

Have Mercy

"Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy."

Mercy is a word I'm going to focus on in 2018. I'm going to look for it in my daily Bible reading, and I'm  going seek to grow in understanding it. What does God say about mercy? How important is mercy to God?

O course it goes without saying (but I'll say it) that mercy is very important to God.

"He has told you, I man, what is goodl and what does the Lord require but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." Micach 6:8

That word translated "kindness" (ESV) is "mercy" in the King James ad many others. "Kindness" is perhaps a more down-to-earth word for mercy. And kindness, you may recall is one of the fruits of the Spirt (Gal. 5:22).

In fact, that passage, Paul's list of the fruits of the Spirit, provides me with all my keywords for 2018. These are the concepts I'm going to focus on in my Bible reading this year.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

As I said in the last post, all virtues are foretastes of the Kingdom of God. Their "down-payments" of the Kingdom. But (to take today's example) what is mercy? I'm not going to rest on what I think I know about it. I'm going to ask the Bible to refine my knowledge of mercy, and all those other virtues listed by Paul.

That's the idea, anyway. The Spirit wants to raise up a crop of kindness/mercy in the children of God. May all of us grow in mercy in the coming year.

Reading (and writing, and blogging) the red letters

I've been slowly reading the Sermon on the Mount. The emphasis here should be placed on the word "slowly." I'll take a brief passage, write it out in a journal that I bought just for this purpose, and then just think about it, recall it, mull it over, for the next few days. In the course of that process, I might be reminded of other Scriptural texts on the same theme and write out one or two of those as well.

The conviction that lies behind this procedure (well, one of them) is that we Christians don't think about and talk about the things that Jesus thought about and talked about. Not enough, anyway. We tend to put the focus on other things, and then--maybe--draw on a saying or two of Jesus for support. In our sermonizing--this is my experience anyway--we would much rather begin with Paul and may or may not let Jesus in on the conversation. Or we might begin with Calvin (or Jonathan Edwards, or Martin Luther, or C. S. Lewis, or whomever) then draw upon Paul, and maybe throw in a quotation of one of the Davidic psalms, but never ever get to the teaching of Jesus.

It was my decision, in response to this lack of focus on the words of Jesus, to correct for it in my own Bible reading by starting with the words of Jesus. Not excluding, mind you, any of the rest of the Bible, but beginning with the "red letters" and letting the focus be where Jesus put it, rather than relegating Jesus to a secondary or tertiary reference at best.

That's the idea. That's how I have organized my Bible reading lately. It's a slow process, and if I keep it up, it may take me the rest of my life to get to the last red letters in the New Testament.

In terms of my secondary reading, Bible commentaries and that sort of thing, I will, of course, be looking for authors that mirror the teaching of Jesus. If Jesus, for example, seems to put a very high value on peacemaking, I want to hear what modern commentators have to say on the subject. And I'm hoping for this emphasis to fuel my future blogging and sharing here (for example, yesterday's daily prayer from Scotty Smith). I want to commend and share that which puts the emphasis where Jesus put it (this, by the way, will correspond quite closely to the fruit of the Spirit, since the Spirit of Jesus naturally cherishes and promotes that which Jesus cherished and promoted).

That's all. But expect to hear more on the subject in the coming posts.

Now here's a song:

A few thoughts on the Holy Spirit (and those "spiritual" Facebook quizes)

Over the years I've heard a lot of stuff attributed to the Holy Spirit. You can get away with saying almost anything about the Spirit, in some charismatic circles, because after all the Spirit is wild and the Spirit is bigger than our reason, etc. Therefore--this is how the thinking goes--the wilder and more irrational your claim, the more likely it is to be the Spirit's work.

Secondly, the wilder and more irrational your claim, the more impressed people will be about your own spirituality. This is especially so for those professional speakers who use the term prophet in their promotional material.

My opinion: here's the one thing you need to know about the Spirit, and it will keep you from being misled by a lot of spiritual chicaneries: the Holy Spirit's whole purpose is to make much of Jesus. If the so-called "Spirit" that the speaker on the platform is claiming to be filled with makes much of the speaker, instead of making much of Jesus, you should just walk away quickly.

But here's a reason that those speakers are so in demand: they tend to make much of us, as well. They pick out a person in the audience (I mean, congregation!), ask for her name and maybe a few other personal details, and then after a few moments of communion with the "spirit" they say something like, "Well, Jane, I feel like the Spirit is saying to me that you are a great woman of God and that God is going to use you in a mighty way in the coming year. . . . "

Jane practically swoons in excitement. The crowd is wowed! Isn't the Spirit marvelous! Everybody loves being told exactly what they wanted to hear! Paul said something about "itching ears" that addresses this phenomenon. You can look it up!

So: if Jesus has been marginalized, then it's not the Holy Spirit. If Jesus is made little of, but the speaker is made much of, or the people in the audience are made much of, then it is not the Holy Spirit. The church does not exist to make much of individuals, but to make much of Jesus. And yet individuals love, naturally, to hear themselves extolled, their virtues praised, etc. If you make much of me, I may like you and come back for more, even give money to your mission, but none of this is the least bit the Spirit's doing.

The Spirit's work is to see that Jesus is all in all, beginning in the hearts and minds of believers, and extending out finally to all creation. So, you know, that spiritual quiz you found on Facebook that confirmed you as a Daniel or an Elijah (depending on how you answered a half-dozen "spiritual" questions about yourself), which you then posted to Facebook with great enthusiasm and many smiley emojis . . . you're being made much of in that transaction (and the quiz-designers themselves know that's exactly what makes their quiz attract frequent clicks), but Jesus is nowhere in the picture. The quiz just gave you an excuse to make much of yourself on Facebook, that's all. Conclusion: the Spirit had nothing to do with that quiz. Sorry. And you're probably not much like Daniel, either.