Grabbing Hold of God

Much of the contemporary church has lost its reverence for God. He is too often viewed as a sugar daddy, a sort of cosmic automatic teller machine. If we say the right words and punch in the right code, He is obligated to deliver what we want.

True prayer, according to pastor and acclaimed Bible expositor John MacArthur, often involves struggling and grappling with God, proving to Him the deepest concern of one’s heart. Prayer is to be a persistent, courageous struggle from which the believer may come away limping.

Virginia Stem Owens wrote the following about wrestling with God in earnest prayer. Her sentiments stand in marked contrast to the glib, self-centered prayers of our day:

Christians have always interpreted the splitting of the temple veil during the crucifixion as symbolic and the liberation from the mediated presence of God. Henceforth they were “free” to approach him directly which is almost like telling someone he is free to stick his head in the lion’s jaws for once you start praying there is no guarantee that you won’t find yourself before Pharaoh, shipwrecked on a desert island, or in a lion’s den.

 

This is no cosmic teddy bear we are cuddling up to. As one of the one children describes him in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, “he is not a tame lion.” Jacques Ellul is convinced that prayer for persons living in the technological age must be combat, and not just combat with the evil one, with one’s society, or even one’s divided self, though it is also all of these; it is combat with God. We too must struggle with him just as Jacob at Peniel where he earned his name Israel – “he who strives with God.” We too must prepare to say, “I will not let you go til you bless me.”

 

Consider Moses, again and again intervening between the Israelites and God’s wrath; Abraham praying for Sodom; the widow demanding justice of the unjust judge. But in this combat with God, Ellul cautions, we must be ready to bear the consequences … “Jacob’s thigh was pulled out of joint, and he went away lame. However, the most unusual experience will be God’s decision to put to work the person who cried to him …whoever wrestles with God in prayer puts his whole life at stake.”

 

Awful things happen to people who pray. Their plans are frequently disrupted. They end up in strange places. Abraham “went out, not knowing where he was to go” ... After Mary’s magnificent prayer at the annunciation, she finds herself the pariah of Nazareth society.

 

How tempting to up the stakes, making prayer merely another consumer product. How embarrassing to have to admit not only that prayer may get you into a prison, as it did Jeremiah, but also that while you’re moldering away in a miry pit there, you may have a long list of lamentations and unanswered questions to present to your Lord. How are we going to tell them they may end up lame and vagrant if they grasp hold of this God?

(“Prayer – Into the Lion’s Jaws,” Christianity Today, November 19, 1976. pp. 222-223, italics in the original)

 

What Would Jesus Post?

Evangelicalism today appeals to people on the basis of what they want. The contemporary church for decades has been more interested in meeting the needs of its members than urging them to follow the commands of Christ.

Neil Postman, a Jewish humanist from the 1980’s wrote a book entitled, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” He felt back then that there was a tragic loss of serious thinking in Western civilization which he attributed to television. He could not have possibly imagined the big screen going to a small screen – from being a group experience and public experience to being an intimate, personal, private experience. 

The iPhone and other small screen devices enable every person to become a creator of his own private world. “It is a secret world,” explains pastor and acclaimed Bible expositor John MacArthur. “It is a secret world of preferences. It is a secret world of temptations. It is a secret world of relationships. It is a secret world that has a force and ubiquity that is unparalleled in human history. Unparalleled.”

The small screen is the most selfish necessity ever devised. Once, you had a phone to talk to someone. No more. Technology has put in the hand, and soon, on the ears and the nose, of everyone, the most constant, incessant, accessible, visual, private world of self-centered indulgence, temptation, and entertainment ever conceived.

“You choose everything,” MacArthur continues. “Choose your entertainment, and no one knows. You choose your music. You choose your relationships. You become God in your little world. And on your little screen, you create the world that you want. You are the creator of your own private universe.  And outside your own private cyberspace, and your Facebook friends, is the outer darkness of whatever and whomever you reject.”

Theologian Carl Trueman writes, “The language of friendship is hijacked and cheapened by the internet social networks. I don’t know what friendship is anymore.  The language of Facebook both reflects and encourages childishness. Childishness, he writes, “has become something of a textually transmitted disease.” 

A very astute comment by Trueman as the number one characteristic of a child is complete self-centeredness. He goes on to say that relationships play out in the disembodied world of the web. The latest statistics indicate that on average high school students look at a small screen nine hours a day. Nine hours. Trueman further writes, “Such are human amoebas, subsisting in a bizarre non-world that involves no risk to themselves, no giving of themselves to others, no true vulnerability, no commitment, no sacrifice, no real meaning, and no value.” 

Real fellowship cannot exist in a world of self-created avatars. It requires real persons.  Christianity is not an individual or private experience. We were not meant to live by ourselves in a world of isolation where we control everything without anyone else’s knowledge. That’s a recipe for disaster.

“The current trend is for people to create their own virtual world of virtual self,” observes MacArthur. “They recreate themselves as wonderfully as they would like themselves to be, and then project themselves that way. You can upload your self-creation into the Eden of the internet, the perfect you. Beautiful, indomitable, intelligent, wise, cool, self-actualized like some technological form of science. You can create a digitized self-projection of your idyllic design. I tweet, therefore I am.”

The culture of this is becoming more isolated, more narcissistic, more self-absorbed, more individualistic, more morally relative, more entitled. Deadly.

This might be tolerable and maybe understood if it stayed outside the church, but it doesn’t. According to MacArthur, the evangelical church has been trying to give the culture what it wants. And what is it that people want? “They want privacy,” he says, “They want convenience. They want low commitment. They want anonymity. They want unaccountability. And mostly, they want self-promotion and self-actualization. Church life is falling victim to this seductive self-design. People say, oh, it’s so hard to find a church. Well, of course. You have created the first church of my personal iTunes.  You’ve created your own music. You have your own playlist. You’ve created your own messengers. You know who you want to hear. You’ve created your own friends. You don’t feel comfortable at a church because you might run into an enemy.” 

And at the same time, there’s pressure from church growth experts saying, “What are you doing with social media? What are you doing with technology to help people know your church?” Of course the church has to embrace technology and social media on one level and use the tools for good – to connect and inform. But, as with everything, they can also be a source of isolation, disconnection, and ultimately temptation if not properly handled and monitored.

As a church body, we have to keep fellowship at the forefront. True, personal fellowship is the foundation of the church as underscored in the Book of Acts which details the early church and its ability to sustain its existence largely because of the strength of its fellowship. Everything about Christianity fights against privacy, and yet, we live in a world where privacy dominates. If we are not actively fighting against it than we are being pulled into it.

As ambassadors of Jesus Christ, it is our mandate to share his gospel – the forgiveness of sins at the cross of Calvary. It is a personal relationship that Christ beckons and then bids us to share with others. Fellowship at its essence.

Healing through Christ’s Sufferings

“God lets Himself be pushed out of world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which He is with us and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of His omnipotence, but by virtue of His weakness and suffering … Only the suffering God can help … That is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God. Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Christianity is full of paradoxes but perhaps none bigger than a crucified Christ offering liberty from the power of the present time, from the laws and compulsion of history, and from sin. Only the crucified Christ can bring the freedom which changes the world because the fear of death is defeated. 

In his landmark work, The Crucified God, Jurgen Moltmann asserts, “We have made the bitterness of the Cross tolerable to ourselves by learning to understand it as a theological necessity for the process of salvation.” Of course, theological necessities do not sweat blood in the night. Yet the Son of God did.

“The passion of Jesus did not take place on a cold, intellectual, starlit plain,” declares Brennan Manning in his book The Signature of Jesus, “It occurred in the deepest expression of emotion, amid dirt and sweat, blood and tears. Christ’s passionate outpouring of love on the cross is not only the source of our salvation; it is the source of God’s power and wisdom in our daily lives.”

There is no mention in the gospel of Christ’s sufferings coming from nature or fate or from the economic hardships of being a carpenter’s son. "Rather, His [Jesus] sufferings and humiliation came from His actions," underscores Moltmann. "From His preaching of the imminence of the kingdom as a kingdom of unconditional grace, from His freedom towards the law, and from His table-fellowship with ‘sinners and tax-collectors.’ Jesus did not suffer passively from the world in which He lived, but incited it against Himself by His message and the life He lived. According to the gospels, Jesus Himself set out for Jerusalem and actively took the expected suffering upon Himself. The more the mysticism of the cross recognizes this, the less it can accept Jesus as an example of patience and submission to fate. The more it recognizes His active suffering, the less it can make Him the archetype of its own weakness. If men and women in misery understand Him as their brother in their sufferings, they in turn do not become imitators of His suffering until they accept His mission and actively follow Him.”

The cross of Christ is not some relic that we wear around our necks. In the first century, the crucified Christ was regarded as a scandal and as foolishness. As the Apostle Paul confirms in I Corinthians 1:18, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

Today the church must turn to the crucified Christ in order to show the world the freedom He offers. Everything else is ornamental. Christ crucified is the very fingerprint of our faith.

Following Him means living dangerously and without compromise; it means living outside of our comfort zone and preconceived notions; it means reaching out to the outcast as well as the religious fanatic; quite simply it is having His signature written on the pages of our lives.