managing the Christ life...cheers

We don’t need anything. We can get anything we want, anytime we need it. We live in the richest country on the face of the earth. We don’t need anything. Our culture provides everything we need. Think about it: what do you really need that can’t be found in our society? What do you need right now? Love? Pleasure? Your needs met? Well, culture can give you a job, can give you a guy or a girl you can love, and can provide you with food and games to give you pleasure. But happiness, you need that, right? Comedy Central. Ok, what about purity of mind and emotion: yoga and introspective thought. If you can think about it enough it will effect the way you live. If you need something, culture can fix it. If culture can’t fix it, then we don’t want you around culture. Leave us, right now, because you make us uncomfortable.

So much of our lives are too surface. Our culture has so trained us to be consumers that we feel that we have no need at all. Think about this: consumerism. This one word drives the empirical mindset of our nation. We, the US, are a huge empire with individual empires. I am the King of my domain. No one can tell me what to do, how to do it, etc. If you are in front of me on I-85 and you aren’t going fast enough I pass you. Or if you stall at a light, I honk my horn. It is about me…this is my struggle, and it is your struggle.

We don’t need a Savior in our culture. The biggest issue here is that life can be figured out without a Savior. Go up to someone and say that you can tell them how to be saved: saved? Saved from what? Saved to what? Is someone after me? Why do I need to be saved? I am ok and you’re ok.

One thing I don’t want to be in this discussion is cliché. I don’t want to paint a typical evangelism sermon on you about why people need a Savior. The point I am making is that people have no desire or reference to saved, and maybe this analogy is not the best: the whole sin problem to Jesus conclusion.

See, the “saving” that provides for needs is different from the “saving” I hear about regarding heaven and hell. I have heard all my life that I need to be saved from Hell so I can go to heaven. Believe me, I don’t want Hell. But I fear that too many of us, myself included, can’t appreciate the “need” we have outside of the heaven and Hell context.

Let me ask this question: if there were no such thing as heaven and Hell, and a lot of people don’t believe in that other than metaphor anyway, what is the point of the Gospel? What NEED does it supply? You see, without heaven and Hell, a lot of evangelism and Christ talk goes array. Why do we need Christ in our consumer culture if it isn’t going to provide anything outside of heaven and Hell?

The problem is not the message; it’s the communication of the message. The problem is not culture; it’s the lack of communication to the culture. Every human being has basic needs:

• Food: we need nourishment
• Air: we need to breathe (physically and emotionally)
• Education: we need to know things (look both ways, etc.)
• Connection: we need to connect to people (friendships)

All of our consumer culture is based around these four basic needs. Find the loophole, please. I don’t think you will. Everything relates to one of these four things. Even myspace and television provides for a consumer need: relationship and networking.

The problem is not culture or the message, it’s the communication. Our culture fills the NEED well. Christ fills the NEED as well, and more eternally and fulfilling. The salvation of Christ is more than an escape from Hell; it is a life lived in community that meets a person’s basic needs. The problem is we, the church, fail at doing that much too often.

Read this passage with me from Acts 2:42. This is how people experienced the absence of basic needs when they came to Christ. Peter has just preached this dynamic sermon about Jesus and the past and he really hit it on the head so well with these people. It is a perfect sermon: it engaged their culture, reviewed their history, and revealed Christ. Now, people believe and this is what is written down about it:

“All the believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, and to fellowship, and to sharing in meals (including the Lord’s Supper), and to prayer.”

Acts 2:42 (NLT)

Four things they did:

1. Submitted to Apostles’ teaching
2. Had fellowship (lived life together)
3. Shared meals
4. Prayed together

Now watch this:

1. Submitted to Apostles’ teaching: EDUCATION NEED MET
2. Lived life together: CONNECTION NEED MET
3. Shared meals together: FOOD NEED MET
4. Prayed together: AIR NEED MET

This shows me four things we NEED and a relationship with Christ, done in community, meets the need:

1. We NEED submission:

What you submit yourself to educates you. Who do you sit under and listen to? What person sows into your life the truth of the Kingdom? You should be reading scripture, sure; but a person needs someone that speaks into their lives. Who is that for you? Judge and consider who you listen to: is it a person or idea from God or from the culture? We CAN'T separate from our culture, Jesus didn’t even do that. But we can live in contrast to cultural norms.

2. We NEED community:

We experience this daily. Who do you hang around with? Who do you talk to about stuff? Hopefully, it isn’t just a myspace or facebook community. Hopefully, you’re engaging in conversation and life with people around you. It is my desire that Underground will provide relationships for people. Every Sunday night folks hang out at restaurants and movies and different things. We have a group of folks who are purposefully friendly and welcoming to anyone needing community. We want our community to build and grow together. We have a motley cru of folks from professionals to students to cynics. Community CAN happen here and DOES happen here.

3. We NEED food:

Now, this isn’t just about physical food. We need to feed and be fed. The whole food analogy is summed up in the phrase: “they shared meals together.” This is the whole Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven bit. Meeting others’ needs. Being the Kingdom and showing Christ. In doing that, you get fed. Your spirituality goes outside of itself and your perspective is broadened and you mature. This is the idea behind helping the hungry and the needy.

4. We NEED prayer

We need to talk to God together. We need a community that prays and learns to pray together. God talks to us in prayer and we talk to God…it is the air supply of our lives.

Look at those four areas:

1. Submitted to Apostles’ teaching: who are you learning from?
2. Had fellowship (lived life together): who are you hanging around?
3. Shared meals: who are you helping?
4. Prayed together: who are you praying with?

This is the NEED, and we call it offensive and ban it by not living it. It is taboo. But folks, if we really do this, then they will call us HIS disciples and we will be known by our love.

What happens when the Kingdom starts becoming present?

Read Rick McKinleys' book This Beautiful Mess
change your outlook on Kingdom growth here and now
great read and funny, too

greatness

behold greatness: eugene h peterson. you may not have heard of him, but if you have read the Message Bible, he is the guy who paraphrased it. before he did that he wrote quite a few books...he is my favorite author and i got to meet him. i was so nervous. he is great...

UNDO

I grew up in church, people. I grew up non-denominational, foursquare, and Pentecostal Holiness. Oh God, Pentecostal Holiness was torture. We couldn’t wear makeup, wear jeans, watch the smurfs, we had to boycott Disney because they hired homosexuals, we boycotted Proctor and Gamble products at one time, if you went down the beer aisle in the metropolitan city you were going to hell, if you didn’t vote against the liquor by the drink you were going to hell, if you weren’t a Republican you were going to hell, etc etc etc. There were so many things I was programmed with as a child.

I get very confused with the topics we bring up. Like this one, we hear this topic come up every doubt night: alcohol. Obviously, alcohol is something that, if you were raised in a traditional church culture, you were told to avoid. But why? Is alcohol, in and of itself, bad? No. Is marijuana, in and of itself, sin? No. it is what we do with these things that make it sin. So, the question we tend to focus on from there is “Can I have a beer with my meal and still be a Christ follower?” or “Can I drink and still go to heaven?” Honestly, I think we have this fixation as college aged adults, that we want to drink, we want to do these things like alcohol and late night romance because it’s almost like a rite of passage for some of us or something we can do now because we are of age.

I was talking to Pastor Rick (my boss) about this topic and he cracked me up. He said this: “This is not a new struggle! My generation dealt with this and the relative issues, too!” Ya know, when I think about it, Rick grew up in the sixties during the sexual revolution. Premarital sex and homosexual preferences were the normal for college (most, anyway) conversations. Now, granted, Janet Jackson’s boob didn’t fall out on network TV back in the sixties, but Lennon and Yoko did pose nude on their album…the Beatle extraordinaire himself. These thoughts of “what’s accepted” aren’t something that only we have to deal with…most folks who have lived through their twenties have had to deal with this.

Which makes me ask the question: what is the motivation for our questions? I think we get caught up in the “what can I do” and “what can I not do” that we end up forming theories and philosophies that end up no where. I mean, honestly, if the consumption of alcohol was a good thing for everyone, they would allow children to but it, right?

I love what Allen Griffen said a couple weeks ago. I heard him the FACS chapel during the week and he was talking about being trusted. He was mainly talking about romantic relationships and how no one should be trusted with a romantic relationship until they turned 18. It was so funny. He was like: “Our government doesn’t even trust you to get behind the wheel of a car until you’re 16…and then we don’t trust you to drive at night until you’ve driven for so long in the daytime! We don’t trust you to vote until you become 18! We don’t trust you to purchase tobacco, which most adults have now understood to be extremely harmful to your health, until you’re 18! And even then, we tell you this will kill you. We don’t trust you to work and make money until you are 16, and we don’t trust you to spend that money on alcohol until you are 21!”

See, these questions we ask “what can I do…”; these are very immature questions! It’s funny to me, sometimes. I see someone turn 21, and I did it, I wanted to go buy a beer, a drink at a restaurant. Because NOW I FINALLY CAN. That was my motivation.

I can’t answer what your motivation is behind these questions, but the UNDO button comes in to play when you start maturing. When you start exploring your faith for yourself, you have to re-do the UNDO.

Like the UNDO button on the computer, I have found myself hearing things from church culture and implementing them, and then coming around and “undoing” it because I find Christ’s actual teachings are, according to my mood, better or worse.