December 7, 2009 Cover

Y2K. Botched Presidential Election. 9/11. War in Afghanistan & Iraq. Corporation Bankruptcy. Mad-cow & SARS. Tsunami killing 200,000 in Southeast Asia. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Radical Islamic Bombings. Bird Flu. Gas Prices Skyrocket. Steroids in Sports. Virginia Tech Shootings. Moral Failures by Politicians, Preachers, Celebrities, & Sports Figures. Stocks Plummet. Car Industry Fails. Ponzi Scheme. H1N1. Unemployment.

A daunting list by any standard, but only the “lowlights” of an otherwise forgettable decade. What are we going to call this one? “The Decade of Doom”? Whatever we call it, one can hardly argue that it was a decade full of heartache, shattered dreams, and uncertainty.  I’m usually a glass half-full type of guy, but even I can appreciate a good buzz kill when it’s due. And if anything, this decade was a huge wake-up call. We can conjecture all we want about how and why we got here and how we’re going to pull ourselves out of this hole, but it’s pointless. Andy Serwer, the author of the The Decade from Hell in the issue of Time Magazine showed above, says, ”So here’s the big question: Why? Why did so much bad stuff happen in this decade? Was it just rotten luck or something more? Sure, some of it was simply randomness, but I think a strong case can be made that it was more than just chance that got things so bollixed up.”

You’re right and you’re wrong, Andy. I’ll tell you this for sure. It wasn’t just randomness. Evil? Maybe. But random? Definitely, not. There’s much more too it. It’s the age-old story really: God creates man. God loves man. Man loves himself. Man chases after other gods. Man chases after false idols with false hopes. Man is left wanting. Man dies never finding true contentment.

And more than previous years, it was in this last decade that our Nation’s idols were tested. If America stands for anything we stand for the American Dream: Health, Wealth, & Happiness. But all three were found wanting this decade. Our health was tried by the frenzy of flu. Our wealth was waned by the spiraling stock market. And our happiness was interrupted by terror and tragedy. America’s idols proved to be lackluster. Yet, America seemed to find more and more hope in their false idols. They chased after their counterfeit gods all the more when they were stripped away. They held even tighter to their empty dreams.

So here’s the deal folks, we’re in Redemptive History. God promised deliverance for His people. Jesus came once and He will surely come again. Even the creation groans and eagerly awaits His coming. Meanwhile, we’re going to see the ugly head of sin rear itself over and over and over and over and over again. We’re going to witness the rise and fall of false idols. This decade was just a preview of things to come. But good news…there’s hope.

However gloomy the first ten years of the 21st century may have seemed, there was room enough for celebration. Not only did the Red Sox win a World Series, but the Nation voted in the first Black President. But what I find most encouraging is what seems to be an undercurrent toward orthodoxy in Jesus’ Church. Old and young are being beckoned back to the Cross. The Church is realizing its deep need for the Gospel. The Body of Christ is showing signs of unity and reconciliation. But even that shouldn’t complete our hope.

Our hope lies in the truth that God is the same God yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Jesus is alive. And the Spirit lives in us. That’s why we have hope. A hope that tomorrow we’ll live by Grace through Faith. A hope that tomorrow God will be good to His people. And a hope that Jesus will be back…real soon.

What a great example and God honoring perspective. I was really inspired by this post from Matt Chandler, the pastor of The Village Church and gifted preacher known world-wide. I don’t even know him personally, but I’ve been incredibly challenged by God through His preaching ministry. The short story is he fell unconscious on Thanksgiving morning and found out that there’s a mass on his frontal lobe a few days later. Now he goes into surgery with no assurance of full recovery or surgical success. But this is what he has to say…

The last seven days have been some of the most interesting of my life. I have felt anxiety, fear, sadness and a deep and unmovable joy simultaneously and in deeper ways than I have felt before. I am grateful for this heightened sense of things. Today at 10:45 a.m. CST I will have a good portion of my right frontal lobe removed. I head into that surgery with a heart that is filled with gratitude and hope.

Here are some of the things I am thankful for in no particular order:

1. I am thankful for the thousands of you who have prayed and fasted for my health. It has brought far more tears to Lauren’s and my eyes to receive this kind of attention from the Church universal than this tumor has.
2. I’m thankful for health insurance because I’m guessing they aren’t doing my five-hour surgery for free!
3. I am thankful that I have deep, real friendships at The Village with Michael Bleecker, Josh Patterson, Brian Miller, Chris Chavez and Beau Hughes. They have been such a comfort to me and my family this past week. Pastors should have good friends on their staff. It’s risky but worth the risk.
4. I am grateful for the men of God in my life, namely John Piper who taught me to hold my life cheap and to join with Paul in saying “I don’t count my life of any value or as precious to myself if only I might finish my course and complete the work that He gave me to do to testify to the Gospel of the grace of God. I’m nothing, I just have a job. God keep me faithful on the job and then let me drop and go to the reward.” Without this strong view of God’s sovereign will, I’m not sure how you don’t despair in circumstances like mine.
5. I am thankful for my wife Lauren. “Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.’” “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.”
6. I am thankful for my children. Audrey the Beautiful, Reid the Valiant and Norah the Joyous. Being a daddy to these three is one of the greatest joys of my life.
7. The privilege of seeing and appreciating all of life through the grid of a heightened sense of my own mortality.
8. I am thankful for brilliant doctors and surgeons who have been given a real gift by our great God and King to repair things as complex as the brain.
9. I am thankful for The Village Church. If there is a place that loves Jesus more, takes sanctification as seriously and wants to see the lost love the great King deeply I am unaware of it. These last seven years have been a spectacular joy!
10. More than anything else I am grateful to my King Eternal, my Lord Immortal, for my God invisible. He alone is God. All Glory and Honor, Forever to You O God. I am overwhelmed in these moments by God Himself and the assurance of a future inheritance of a Kingdom that cannot be shaken and where all things are made new (Hebrews 12).

Christ is All,
Matt Chandler

Pray for our brother in Christ. God’s gifted the man. But ultimately pray God’s will be done. What a beautiful picture of the Church that we can pray for a dear brother we have never met personally. You can also find the post here.

It doesn’t surprise me one bit what Tiger did. Humanity has never had a good track record with marital fidelity. I mean, God had to use one of his 10 commandments to make sure we’d stay faithful.

What does surprise me though is the reaction that’s come as a result of his statement. On TV shows, news articles, and twitter responses, there’s a collective sense that, “Tiger’s human after all.” Really? Does it really validate your humanity when one cheats on his wife? Now, I know it brings a mega-personality down to size when celebrities act like, well, “normal people”. But do we really have to say things like, “I hope Tiger and his wife can move on from this tragic situation.” (First & Ten, ESPN) When did adultery become something “tragic” that happens to a married couple? I can’t imagine Tiger “fell” into unfaithfulness. But while a society muddied in moral relativism sees this as just another day at the park, Christians ought to realize that this is a far cry from our Edenic identity. Men and women weren’t created to cheat on each other. It was never a part of the design.

Tiger, you screwed up. But it’s not because you failed to stay “true to your values”. You can try for a million years to live up to your own standards. And let me tell you, from personal experience, you’ll fail once again. And the next time you fail, you’ll think, once again, you failed to stay “true to your values”, but I hope then you’ll realize it’s much bigger than that. There’s Good News, Tiger. Our constant falling short proves our depravity. But there has been One that lived it perfectly and obeyed God’s Law. The righteousness of God is ours through Him, namely Jesus Christ. So though we may fail more often than we’d like to admit, Christ is exalted all the more in our weaknesses. For if we trust in Him, we declare in our failures that Christ overcame our sin. And by His Spirit, we are empowered to fight our sin, for if left alone, we’d be hopeless. That’s the Gospel, Tiger. We are weak, but He is strong.

Romans 3:10-11, 21-26, “10 As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one;  11 there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.  12 All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one….21   But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference,  23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,  24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished —  26 he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

If you’re in the mood for some masochism tonight, then I dare you to open God’s Word and begin reading. As unpopular as it may sound, the Scriptures call us to die to ourselves. A little different than what we’ve heard in Sunday School, eh?

Exodus 20:19, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die“

Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and  gave himself for me.”

Matthew 10:39, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Philippians 3:7-8, “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I  have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ”

Matthew 16:24, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23, “Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’”

God’s word is a double-edged sword. It cuts us to our deepest core and lays bare all that we work so hard to keep hidden. It’s a deadly word, but a living word. Deadly to our sin, but life-giving to our spirit.

I didn’t know people like this existed until today. R.C. Sproul has never used the internet, much less heard that his podcasts are Top 10 in Religion & Spirituality!

He’s never sent an email and still uses fax and phone to communicate. Caveman or Renaissance Man?

Watch this video clip on The Resurgence

Proud Non-Reader Kanye West Turns Author

Didn’t realize this came out until today, but Kanye West apparently wrote a book!? He’s a self-designated “non-reader”, who thinks books take a back seat to real life. He contends he’d never waste time to read a book and would rather live life. But this self-designated “non-reader” has now done what? He’s written a whole book?! Well, let’s not carried away. The book is about 52 pages of Kanye-isms, or one-liner nuggets of wisdom coming from the very mouth of the Wise One, Kanye West. This non-reader thought it was a daunting task to write all 52 pages by himself, so he’s signed on this project with his co-author J. Sakiya Sandifer. And together they’ve produced genius like the page below…

Ok. I shouldn’t be so cynical. I apologize. But this just embodies the self-absorbed ethic of our age. We aren’t willing to listen to anyone, yet we feel entitled to have everyone listen to us. Kanye won’t pick up a novel for the life of him to hear another voice, but he wants everyone to go out and hear his for $8. Trouble lurks around the minds of those that have shut themselves out of hearing a different voice than their own.

That is why God speaks into the lives of His people. We have His Word given to us to speak into our lives; to be the other voice that we hear. The Word is a reality outside of ourselves that speaks objectively into our lives. And when we begin to shut that Word out, watch out…

I realized a long time ago that men and women have different engines when it comes to certain activities. For example, get me in a room where there’s a hint of competition or something to win & my senses are heightened and I’ll fight until I come out on top. My wife? She’d rather hangout and talk with those watching on the sidelines. But get my wife in a building with stores that are lined up in a straight line with red signs marked “sale” and she’s ready to have at it. Me? I’m the guy that sits on the nearest flat surface until we’re ready to leave. All that to say…we went shopping today.

While shopping, I ran in for a quick respite at the Apple Store. I know I won’t ever buy anything, but just being surrounded by cool technology inspires me. I was hovering around the section where they sold the new magic mouse, which happened to be sold out. While asking about when they were going to receive a new shipment of the mice, I was eavesdropping on a conversation close by. They were talking about the days when 30gb Hard Drives were the sickest thing on the market and how we find 1tb Hard Drives as a default on our computers now.

That led me to think, “When did we ever find the need to have 1tb of information on our computers?!” But the dude was right, without 1tb of Hard Drive space, we’d be hard pressed to have anything on our computer these days. We just have so much crap on these things. They hold our entire lives on a small spinning disc. And in one way or another, our lives have grown from dreaming about 30gb of stuff to needing 1tb of space. We’ve amassed so much junk, haven’t we? I can barely fit my life into my 160gb Hard Drive currently, but I remember a day when I didn’t know what to do with a 30gb computer. My how times change, but more poignantly…my how our lives are full of junk.

Spreadin’ the word on a SOLID collaborative effort headed by Eugene Cho from Quest Church in Seattle called One Day’s Wages. Check it out.

We read a lot of garbage these days. Judging from the New York Times Best-Seller List, America consumes romance, fictional thrillers, & self-betterment books like it’s going out of style. In my short years of reading and learning from the hard work of the authors that write the books, I’ve come across both garbage and precious stones. I’d like to say that every book is life-shaping in one way or another, but I thought I’d compile a short list of books that have changed my perspective on life and most importantly, shaped my thoughts about God. I don’t want to bore you with my thoughts on each and every book, but I hope at least the list can serve you well in exploring a bit further those books that I’ve found to be diamonds in the rough.

these are in no particular order

1. Desiring God by John Piper

2. The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer

3. The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer

4. Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis

5. Kingdom Prologue by Meredith Kline

6. Simply Christian by N.T. Wright

7. Revolution in World Mission by K.P. Yohannan

8. A Hunger for God by John Piper

9. The Next Evangelicalism by Soong-Chan Rah

10. The Confessions by Augustine

Not sure if you’ve seen some of the dialogue happening around this issue, but here’s a quick summary of what the whole ruckus is about.

Zondervan Publishing and the authors Mike Foster & Jud White have a book out, since 2007, called, “Deadly Viper Character Assassins: A Kung-Fu Survival Guide for Life & Leadership”. It’s essentially a book on character building and integrity keeping for Christian leaders, which no one doubts the contents of. But what’s caused a stir is their marketing and apparent exploitation of Asian stereotypes.

Brought to the forefront by Dr. Soong Chan Rah (North Park Theological Seminary), the issue surrounding Deadly Viper’s misuse of Asian stereotypes is alarming. Catch up with the conversation by reading this interaction between Dr. Rah and one of the authors of the book, this open letter to Zondervan & the authors, and this response by Mike & Jud.

I just thought I’d share a few quick thoughts on all this.

some caveats: I don’t know Mike or Jud personally, so please don’t take my remarks as lambasting them and their character. I realize Mike & Jud’s marketing of the book was all in good intention and I scarcely see how they were being racist or are racist. I also recognize that Mike & Jud are brothers in Christ, who share a passion to develop godly Christian leaders.

My surprise with this whole issue is the seeming unawareness of both the authors, Zondervan, and many of the book’s readership. How could anyone overlook the blatant racially charged stereotype of Asians for nearly 2 years since publishing the book? How did it get overlooked for so long? Did it have to take an Asian to point out the obvious flaws? Are we so blind to issues of racial stereotyping? I thought not, but this makes me rethink. I mean, do we really need “Kung-Fu Fighting” as intro music (click on Deadly Viper at Catalyst) to anything remotely Asian? Do we need images like this one to promote a Christian leadership book?

Do we really need random Kanji characters to authenticate our Kung-Fu theme? Don’t we realize that Kanji is a Japanese use of Chinese characters and that Kung-Fu is a Chinese martial art? I wonder how different this would all be if it was a book on character with pictures and themes depicting Native-American Stereotypes, or maybe more poignantly, African-American stereotypes?

It all just confuses me and mostly saddens me. I thought the people of God, the multi-ethnic multitude, were to love and encourage one another, not exploit and sell each other out. It saddens me that in 2009, we deal with issues like this, where there was no obvious malicious intent, but still a lack of awareness of different cultures and peoples. I know we’re all works in progress, especially me, but I hope that we can all work toward a respectful unity that exemplifies the Body of Christ and its beauty in diversity.