The cure for depression

My Mom recently reminded me that my Father, (who passed away in 1998), was a news-hound, “though he always found it so depressing”.   As much as I miss him, it’s probably best that Dad is seeing today’s headlines from the vantage point of eternity.

I seem to have inherited the news hound from my Father, and then had it supercharged by missions and travel.   And just like him, I fall into despair almost every morning by the time I’ve caught up on world events.  The creep of darkness seems to grow ever deeper, and few in the media are interested in anything hopeful.  So I’ve taken to refreshing myself with the truth of Psalm 2 after my daily dose of the news:

Why do the nations rage, and the peoples imagine a vain thing?
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers plot together,
against the LORD and against His anointed, saying,
“Let us break their bands in two and cast away their cords”.
He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; the LORD shall mock them.
Then He shall speak in His anger, and trouble them in His wrath.
“Yea, I have set My king on My holy hill, on Zion”.

(Psalm 2:1-6)

What a great reminder of Who holds the editorial power of history.  Try as they may, the nations haven’t a chance against this King and His determination to write a good ending to this story.

Revival or revelation

I’ve just about decided that today’s church doesn’t need revival nearly so much as we need revelation.  Revival is “an improvement in the condition or strength of something;  a reawakening.”  It’s a time-honored tradition in the church that calls up images of fresh faith, stirred emotions, and awakened zeal.  David, Nehemiah and Habakkuk spoke of revival under the Old Covenant, and down through the years the church has experienced dramatic periods of revival.  But the term is absent altogether in the New Testament.  Luke, Peter, John and Paul speak instead of revelation:  “a surprising and previously unknown fact, especially one that is made known in a dramatic way.”

What the church lacks today is revelation of the fullness of the Gospel.   A people who only half-embrace grace, disregard adoption, miss the fullness of Christ, and skip past the Kingdom can never be anything more than legalistic, insecure, powerless, and adrift.  Though I cringe at the harshness of that statement, I fear more that we have left the treasures of the Gospel unwrapped and have unwittingly forsaken our heritage.   If we knew who we were and the fullness of who Christ is we would no sooner lose our momentum than a prairie fire in a windstorm.

Perhaps instead of praying for revival we ought to pray with Paul “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give [us] a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him; having the eyes of [our] hearts enlightened, that [we] might know what is the hope of his calling, what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and the exceeding greatness of his power towards us who believe…”  (Ephesians 1:16-20)

How to shipwreck everything

In the early days of Christianity two dangerous heresies presented themselves to the church: legalism and gnosticism.  Take your choice, either will shipwreck your faith.

Many Believers with Jewish roots embraced the lie of legalism: Jesus and the law.  Jesus clearly brought them into life through no effort of their own, but labor and laws kept the whole apparatus in motion.  It was a hamster wheel of performance with religion shouting from the sidelines, “IT’S NOT ENOUGH!  YOU MUST DO MORE!  More Bible reading!  More prayer!  More attention to witnessing!  More careful obedience to the law!”  Paul blasted the Galatians: “Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?”  (Gal. 3:3)  Legalism in today’s church reveals itself in endless cycles of “recommitment”.  We cry tears at the altar, make pledges and promises, beat ourselves up, and decide one more time to “do better”.  But nothing really changes because it’s an empty system of human effort and determination.

But Greek believers chose Gnosticism:  Spiritual growth meant ever deeper experiences and knowledge.  We see it today in the frantic pursuit of supernatural experiences.  “If only I can get to those meetings and fall-out under the power of the Spirit, I’ll reach a new level of spirituality.”  Hogwash!   Gnosticism, too, is a hamster wheel of chasing ever deeper experiences:  “You’ve had Holy laughter?  But have you had gold dust fall on you?”  “Oh really?  Well what about an out-of-body experience?”  And so we run from here to there following signs, wonders and experiences.  (Signs and wonders are rather to follow us, but that’s for another day!)

The key to spiritual growth is neither deeper commitment, nor endless supernatural experiences.   It is in the simple choice of believing God.  “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ… for therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.”  (Romans 1:16-17)  Faith in what?  In the fact that Jesus has accomplished the entire work himself, and the only thing left for me to do is to believe that good news.  Everything begins and ends right there in the wonder of receiving all that God has so freely given.

Chicken Little, Mayans, and the Kingdom

New Year’s Day 2012 seems an appropriate time to bust-down another of the enemy’s well-planned strategies.  One of the big stories of 2011 was Harold Camping’s doomsday bus tour announcing the rapture on May 21.  Even though most of us didn’t buy into the circus, it provided the media with tons of fodder about clueless Christians shooting themselves in the foot.  This year, of course, the Mayan calendar has reserved “doomsday” for December 21st.   The enemy loves to send us off on apocalyptic rabbit trails that distract us from the true hope of the Kingdom.  It’s the Chicken Little syndrome, and we ought to know better.

The Rapture tells us that working for a better world is like rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic as it slides under the water.  And that’s exactly the Enemy’s intention: to infect us with passivity like a tropical disease.  Of course we believe Jesus is returning!  Nothing could be more clearly stated in the scriptures.  But many have gotten it backwards:  His return is not about Him taking us up to Heaven, but about Him bringing Heaven to earth.  “Then I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven”. (Revelation 21:2)  “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”   

Maybe we should take our cues from Jesus, who never once used the word “Rapture”, but spoke instead about the Kingdom and of making “all things new”.  (Revelation 21:5)  Let’s engage our neighbors in conversations about hope and possibilities, about God’s answers to aimlessness, despair, poverty, and injustice.  The Kingdom calls us to action: “live quietly, work hard, bless others, create beauty, plant gardens, raise families, preach the gospel, heal the sick, entertain strangers, and pray for my Kingdom.  Oh, and by the way, I’ll be back”.  This is the promise before us in 2012.   Earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes will come as the “Prince of this world” realizes his time is short.  I’m excited about this year.  It could be a difficult one, but my hope is grounded in a Kingdom that is growing nearer every day.

Truth and the battle for the Kingdom

The Kingdom is Truth, total Truth permeating every facet of God’s creation from relationships and government to economics and environment.  When the King identifies himself as “Truth” (John 14:6), you can be sure His Kingdom will reflect the flawless reality of His original intention in all of our living, loving, working, playing, and laughing.

Lucifer, the World-Hater, has only one real weapon in his arsenal of destruction, and that is the simple, yet effective strategy of deception.  Daily He disseminates lies like dandelion seeds, which in turn poison everything they touch:  Lies about neighbors contaminate communities.  Lies about government sabotage our freedoms.  Lies about morality breed slavery and destruction.   Lies about health metastasize into cancer and disease.

Recently God has been teaching me to pray for the Spirit of Truth to expose lies and to stir up an appetite for Truth in the church and in the nations.  Picture how effectively wars can be turned when the enemy’s plans have been laid bare.  It’s a non-partisan prayer, really.  Whether the lies are liberal or conservative, yours or mine, church lies, media lies, or Hollywood lies, they all must be rooted out before the Kingdom will emerge with great glory.

An additional bonus to this kind of prayer is the transformation of the way I read the headlines.  Instead of daily discouragement, I take heart when one more instance of corruption, infidelity and greed has been exposed to the naked light of Truth.  Imagine with me what God might do if His people banded together in asking that – come what may – the Enemy’s hidden agenda would be exposed like cockroaches to daylight for all to see.

The hopes and fears of all the years

I’ve just returned from a delightful week with the Crossroads Discipleship Training School in Kona, Hawaii.  It was a diverse group of international students ranging from their late twenties to well past retirement age:  attorneys, pastors, educators, farmers, engineers, sculptors, painters, an internationally acclaimed sports photographer, and a young musician who recently fronted a popular heavy metal band.

The “Plaza” at the University of the Nations in Kona, Hawaii.

The week convinced me all over again that the yearning for grace and the dream of a Kingdom are universal human longings.  Grace assuages our fears of abandonment and assures us that flawed as we are, we’re loved, received and valued by our Creator.

And the Kingdom?  It affirms our hope for a better world and whispers to our heart that we matter;  Though we are small, we are part of an epic story that is unfolding towards the grand redemption of all things.

Not an hour ago I was at the local nursing home singing Christmas carols:  “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight”.  Both the hope for a new world and the fear of abandonment were met in the manger when the King of grace took on the flesh of a child.

Everything matters

Back when I was religious, I had my life all sorted into neat piles of “things that matter” and “things that don’t”.  Church, Bible study, prayer, and Christian music had value because those things were “sacred” and eternal.   But other things, “secular” things, were essentially meaningless:  Hollywood and hobbies, politics and parties, the way I dressed and the way I kept my yard.  It was easy in those days to prioritize: I merely had to sort the sacred from the secular and turn my focus full onto the sacred.  Now that I see the Kingdom I’ve come to realize that my twisted thinking was just one more remnant of hyper-religious, super spiritual yada yada.   The truth is, Everything Matters!

From the majesty of a sunset to the stripes of a caterpillar, ours is a world designed for glory and destined for redemption.  Every little piece of it.  Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian captured it perfectly when He said,  “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!’”  There is no division between sacred and secular because there is no secular.  It all belongs to a holy King, from the tidiness of my car, to the trimming of my shrubs, to the brightness of my smile.  In fact, everything I do carries the seeds of significance.

I’m reminded of “The Broken Window” theory that became a crime-fighting strategy of former Mayor of New York City, Rudi Guilanni.  The theory says that there is a direct correlation between broken windows and crime rates.  When people go into a neighborhood and simply replace the broken windows of the vacant buildings, crime rates will drop measurably.  Glory begets community health as surely as neglect and broken windows beget crime.

So while our postmodern neighbors suffocate under the lie that says “nothing really matters”, we believers have inherited a message of hope, the glad news of a Kingdom where everything matters!