Another response to an online forum post.
Yep there is an interesting paradox at work here and Paul does a good job of getting at it.
I think this is the big difference between what I promote and the prosperity preachers everyone is so angry with.
I do acknowledge that we need to be aware of the blackness of our deeds before coming to Christ and how far we fall short of perfect with our best efforts. It is possible to become so wrapped up in the Grace of God that we take it for granted. There is an overwhelming joy at being released from our sins and those who are released from more and worse are all the more joyous. Also the suffering of Christ on our behalf is a beautiful testament to the Love God has for us. He didn't "just get over it" he paid for it out of his own blood and suffering. All this is true and important.
I tend to focus on the opposite problem because that's the one I see more often in modern Christianity. We get so wrapped up in our own failings that we forget to embrace the freedom Christ died to provide. The degree to which we hate ourselves is the degree to which we can't embrace the love of Christ.
Our God is so big that we live in a constant state of paradox. We are prisoners set free who choose to become slaves to God, which is the only way to remain free. We serve in order to lead, we must die in order to truly live. We must hate our lives to come to Christ who died to give us life abundant. We grow more Christ-like everyday even as we rot inside our physical bodies. We don't ever have to sin again and yet we know we will--still there is grace.
You can't feed this religion into a computer and make any sense of it, but when God speaks it all makes perfect sense. We can't confuse unworthiness with being worthless. What man or woman is truly worthy of the love your spouse gives you, much less God? Do we really deserve to receive gifts at Christmas or our birthdays? These things are given because to the person who gave them you are worth it. So while we are completely unworthy of salvation, especially at the cost of God's only son, because God provided salvation at the cost of his son that says we are worth it.
So we have to be careful not to engage in unbelief. Not the kind of unbelief that says there is no God, but the kind that says my sins are so black Christ didn't really die for all of them. We have to accept that we are loved beyond comprehension in order to fully embrace salvation. Its not enough to say God restored me to Him because he is good, we must believe that God wanted to do it because He loves us. When God feels his love radiating back at him its not complete without you, specifically you.
It's amazing how hard it is to say that though and not get called a prosperity preacher. Well so be it.
A. R. Bunch
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Grace and Same Sex Attraction
I wrote this in response to a emailed question about Same Sex Attraction in Christians.
---
I separate believers and non-believers when it comes to SSA, but of course its a journey. I believe homosexuality is a sin like any other sin. Christianity as a religion has done itself a disservice and totally misrepresented God's heart by setting homosexuality in a category of "super sins" which are extra abhorrent. I know you are asking specifically about lust but I'm setting up the background for my answer.
We spend too much time as churches, disapproving of the world in order to set ourselves apart, and very little spot-light is shown on growing as Christians ourselves. Christians are directed to look at the fruits in each other before accepting that someone is actually from Christ. We are to live closely together and grow as iron sharpens iron. I believe Christians are to be helping each other past things. I don't see anything that tells me I'm to pick on non-believers and show them my disgust at how they live. There is nothing edifying in that.
So when someone walks in the door of a church at an early stage of returning to Christ and they struggle with same sex attraction, it shouldn't be any different than if they were an alcoholic, or wife-beater, or pedophile. For that matter it shouldn't be any different than if they have one of the "acceptable sins" for Christians like neglecting your children, verbally berating your spouse, dishonoring your parents, pride, etc. It's no different than the sins Christians tolerate because they aren't very obvious like masturbation, envy, greed, or gluttony.
Same sex attraction is just a sin. It will fall away naturally as someone draws close to Christ. The things we must be weary of are the "Gateway Sins," the ones that we tolerate because we still kinda like them, or we don't know life without them, or we fear life without them. I think the big one these days is phariseeism. But pride, unbelief, and idolatry are core three. If we put our trust, fear, or hope in anything other than Christ we will fall prey to all the other sins. If we doubt that God can or will come through for us we will fall prey to the other sins.
So again the answer is "no," there is no difference between lusting after a man or lusting after a woman. The core desire of our hearts includes the desire to live in intimacy with men and women, our brothers and sisters in Christ, and if things wound our ability to experience that we are drawn to counterfeit ways of getting our needs met. True intimacy requires something of us, like trust, where lust requires nothing from us.
The best environment to deal with Same Sex Attraction in is a group of Godly men who will hold you accountable. If you are able to express your struggles and be accepted anyway you will begin to heal. The religion I grew up in constantly set themselves apart from the world by any manufactured means they could come up with. Instead of communicating God's love they came off as elitist.
One quick word about accountability though. Clearly I'm not talking about the kind of accountability that focuses on what you are doing or thinking, but the kind that focuses on where you're at. What you are suffering from is not as important as whether you are transparent about it. As long as our concern is intimacy with God we will do anything that will help including inviting our brothers into it. Conversely, if we make it about the problem then we are best served by hiding the problem and causing our brothers to feel like they need to go searching for the problem. While some friends will be able to give more targeted advice the truth is that anyone will do as a confessor as long as they can extend you grace.
For this reason Christianity has given those struggling with certain sins, especially homosexuality, nowhere to go to get better.
A. R. Bunch
---
I separate believers and non-believers when it comes to SSA, but of course its a journey. I believe homosexuality is a sin like any other sin. Christianity as a religion has done itself a disservice and totally misrepresented God's heart by setting homosexuality in a category of "super sins" which are extra abhorrent. I know you are asking specifically about lust but I'm setting up the background for my answer.
We spend too much time as churches, disapproving of the world in order to set ourselves apart, and very little spot-light is shown on growing as Christians ourselves. Christians are directed to look at the fruits in each other before accepting that someone is actually from Christ. We are to live closely together and grow as iron sharpens iron. I believe Christians are to be helping each other past things. I don't see anything that tells me I'm to pick on non-believers and show them my disgust at how they live. There is nothing edifying in that.
So when someone walks in the door of a church at an early stage of returning to Christ and they struggle with same sex attraction, it shouldn't be any different than if they were an alcoholic, or wife-beater, or pedophile. For that matter it shouldn't be any different than if they have one of the "acceptable sins" for Christians like neglecting your children, verbally berating your spouse, dishonoring your parents, pride, etc. It's no different than the sins Christians tolerate because they aren't very obvious like masturbation, envy, greed, or gluttony.
Same sex attraction is just a sin. It will fall away naturally as someone draws close to Christ. The things we must be weary of are the "Gateway Sins," the ones that we tolerate because we still kinda like them, or we don't know life without them, or we fear life without them. I think the big one these days is phariseeism. But pride, unbelief, and idolatry are core three. If we put our trust, fear, or hope in anything other than Christ we will fall prey to all the other sins. If we doubt that God can or will come through for us we will fall prey to the other sins.
So again the answer is "no," there is no difference between lusting after a man or lusting after a woman. The core desire of our hearts includes the desire to live in intimacy with men and women, our brothers and sisters in Christ, and if things wound our ability to experience that we are drawn to counterfeit ways of getting our needs met. True intimacy requires something of us, like trust, where lust requires nothing from us.
The best environment to deal with Same Sex Attraction in is a group of Godly men who will hold you accountable. If you are able to express your struggles and be accepted anyway you will begin to heal. The religion I grew up in constantly set themselves apart from the world by any manufactured means they could come up with. Instead of communicating God's love they came off as elitist.
One quick word about accountability though. Clearly I'm not talking about the kind of accountability that focuses on what you are doing or thinking, but the kind that focuses on where you're at. What you are suffering from is not as important as whether you are transparent about it. As long as our concern is intimacy with God we will do anything that will help including inviting our brothers into it. Conversely, if we make it about the problem then we are best served by hiding the problem and causing our brothers to feel like they need to go searching for the problem. While some friends will be able to give more targeted advice the truth is that anyone will do as a confessor as long as they can extend you grace.
For this reason Christianity has given those struggling with certain sins, especially homosexuality, nowhere to go to get better.
A. R. Bunch
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
A Moment of Inspiration
I want to apologize for neglecting this blog. I have been super busy lately and it seems like this blog gets the very last effort I have. Strangely enough its one of the projects I'm most excited about. Here's a story you may find inspiring, and we'll see if I can get back to writing here soon.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Repost: Churning Churches
By DAVID VAN BIEMA Mon Feb 25, 5:35 PM ET
A major new survey presents perhaps the most detailed picture we've yet had of which religious groups Americans belong to. And its big message is: blink and they'll change. For the first time, a large-scale study has quantified what many experts suspect: there is a constant membership turnover among most American faiths. America's religious culture, which is best known for its high participation rates, may now be equally famous (or infamous) for what the new report dubs "churn."
The report, released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is the first selection of data from a 35,000- person poll called the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Says Pew Forum director Luis Lugo, Americans "not only change jobs, change where they live, and change spouses, but they change religions too. We totally knew it was happening, but this survey enabled us to document it clearly."
According to Pew, 28% of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another one. And that does not even include those who switched from one Protestant denomination to another; if it did, the number would jump to 44%. Says Greg Smith, one of the main researchers for the "Landscape" data, churn applies across the board. "There's no group that is simply winning or simply losing," he says. "Nothing is static. Every group is simultaneously winning and losing."
For some groups, their relatively steady number of adherents over the years hides a remarkable amount of coming and going. Simply counting Catholics since 1972, for example, you would get the impression that its population had remained fairly static - at about 25% of adult Americans (the current number is 23.9%). But the Pew report shows that of all those raised Catholic, a third have left the church. (That means that roughly one out of every 10 people in America is a former Catholic, and that ex-Catholics are almost as numerous as the America's second biggest religious group, Southern Baptists.) But Catholicism has made up for the losses by adding converts (2.6% of the population) and, more significantly, enjoying an influx of new immigrants, mostly Hispanic.
An even more extreme example of what might be called "masked churn" is the relatively tiny Jehovah's Witnesses, with a turnover rate of about two-thirds. That means that two-thirds of the people who told Pew they were raised Jehovah's Witnesses no longer are - yet the group attracts roughly the same number of converts. Notes Lugo, "No wonder they have to keep on knocking on doors."
The single biggest "winner," in terms of number gained versus number lost, was not a religious group at all, but the "unaffiliated" category. About 16% of those polled defined their religious affiliation that way (including people who regarded themselves as religious, along with atheists and agnostics); only 7% had been brought up that way. That's an impressive gain, but Lugo points out that churn is everywhere: even the unaffiliated group lost 50% of its original membership to one church or another.
The report does not speculate on the implications of its data. But Lugo suggests, "What it says is that this marketplace is highly competitive and that no one can sit on their laurels, because another group out there will make [its tenets] available" for potential converts to try out. While this dynamic "may be partly responsible for the religious vitality of the American people," he says, "it also suggests that there is an institutional loosening of ties," with less individual commitment to a given faith or denomination.
Lugo would not speculate on whether such a buyer's market might cause some groups to dilute their particular beliefs in order to compete. There are signs of that in such surveys as one done by the Willow Creek megachurch outside Chicago, which has been extremely successful in attracting tens of thousands of religious "seekers." An internal survey recently indicated much of its membership was "stalled" in their spiritual growth, Lugo allowed that "it does raise the question of, once you attract these folks, how do you root them within your own particular tradition when people are changing so quickly."
The Pew report has other interesting findings; the highest rates for marrying within one's own faith, for example, are among Hindus (90%) and Mormons (83%). The full report is accessible at the Pew Forum site. View this article on Time.com
A major new survey presents perhaps the most detailed picture we've yet had of which religious groups Americans belong to. And its big message is: blink and they'll change. For the first time, a large-scale study has quantified what many experts suspect: there is a constant membership turnover among most American faiths. America's religious culture, which is best known for its high participation rates, may now be equally famous (or infamous) for what the new report dubs "churn."
The report, released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is the first selection of data from a 35,000- person poll called the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Says Pew Forum director Luis Lugo, Americans "not only change jobs, change where they live, and change spouses, but they change religions too. We totally knew it was happening, but this survey enabled us to document it clearly."
According to Pew, 28% of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another one. And that does not even include those who switched from one Protestant denomination to another; if it did, the number would jump to 44%. Says Greg Smith, one of the main researchers for the "Landscape" data, churn applies across the board. "There's no group that is simply winning or simply losing," he says. "Nothing is static. Every group is simultaneously winning and losing."
For some groups, their relatively steady number of adherents over the years hides a remarkable amount of coming and going. Simply counting Catholics since 1972, for example, you would get the impression that its population had remained fairly static - at about 25% of adult Americans (the current number is 23.9%). But the Pew report shows that of all those raised Catholic, a third have left the church. (That means that roughly one out of every 10 people in America is a former Catholic, and that ex-Catholics are almost as numerous as the America's second biggest religious group, Southern Baptists.) But Catholicism has made up for the losses by adding converts (2.6% of the population) and, more significantly, enjoying an influx of new immigrants, mostly Hispanic.
An even more extreme example of what might be called "masked churn" is the relatively tiny Jehovah's Witnesses, with a turnover rate of about two-thirds. That means that two-thirds of the people who told Pew they were raised Jehovah's Witnesses no longer are - yet the group attracts roughly the same number of converts. Notes Lugo, "No wonder they have to keep on knocking on doors."
The single biggest "winner," in terms of number gained versus number lost, was not a religious group at all, but the "unaffiliated" category. About 16% of those polled defined their religious affiliation that way (including people who regarded themselves as religious, along with atheists and agnostics); only 7% had been brought up that way. That's an impressive gain, but Lugo points out that churn is everywhere: even the unaffiliated group lost 50% of its original membership to one church or another.
The report does not speculate on the implications of its data. But Lugo suggests, "What it says is that this marketplace is highly competitive and that no one can sit on their laurels, because another group out there will make [its tenets] available" for potential converts to try out. While this dynamic "may be partly responsible for the religious vitality of the American people," he says, "it also suggests that there is an institutional loosening of ties," with less individual commitment to a given faith or denomination.
Lugo would not speculate on whether such a buyer's market might cause some groups to dilute their particular beliefs in order to compete. There are signs of that in such surveys as one done by the Willow Creek megachurch outside Chicago, which has been extremely successful in attracting tens of thousands of religious "seekers." An internal survey recently indicated much of its membership was "stalled" in their spiritual growth, Lugo allowed that "it does raise the question of, once you attract these folks, how do you root them within your own particular tradition when people are changing so quickly."
The Pew report has other interesting findings; the highest rates for marrying within one's own faith, for example, are among Hindus (90%) and Mormons (83%). The full report is accessible at the Pew Forum site. View this article on Time.com
Friday, February 22, 2008
Fear Is Good
This comes from Mike Pink. I hope you enjoy.
There are many identifiers of true humility, but one which is often overlooked is prayer. When we don't pray, we are saying in effect, "I can handle this myself." When we do pray, we are acknowledging our lack of ability and/or lack of trust in that ability and asking for God's influence, help, and aid in the situation. The more capable you are, the more you better learn to depend on God, or you will set yourself up for a fall.
One way to do that is to always be stretching beyond your comfort zone, beyond your known abilities and into that area where fear rears its ugly head. If you are not facing down fear, you are probably not attempting very much. If fear is paralyzing you right now, you are quite close to deliverance. You are entering the faith zone, where you must walk by faith and not by sight.
Get up a little earlier just to spend time with the Father. Read His word and then just get a pen and paper and listen. Write down the thoughts He gives you and obey. This is called listening prayer. So much of our prayer time is us telling God stuff He already knows and asking Him for things or favor, etc. But what He wants to give us more than anything is Himself, His presence, His love. He wants us to cognitively experience Him. Train yourself to be quiet and wait upon the Lord. How long should you wait? Until you experience His mercy (favor, grace) (Psalm 123:2)
In the end, you will find new strength, mount up with wings like an eagle and soar. When you run, you will not be weary and when you walk, you will not faint. (Isa 40:31)
There are many identifiers of true humility, but one which is often overlooked is prayer. When we don't pray, we are saying in effect, "I can handle this myself." When we do pray, we are acknowledging our lack of ability and/or lack of trust in that ability and asking for God's influence, help, and aid in the situation. The more capable you are, the more you better learn to depend on God, or you will set yourself up for a fall.
One way to do that is to always be stretching beyond your comfort zone, beyond your known abilities and into that area where fear rears its ugly head. If you are not facing down fear, you are probably not attempting very much. If fear is paralyzing you right now, you are quite close to deliverance. You are entering the faith zone, where you must walk by faith and not by sight.
Get up a little earlier just to spend time with the Father. Read His word and then just get a pen and paper and listen. Write down the thoughts He gives you and obey. This is called listening prayer. So much of our prayer time is us telling God stuff He already knows and asking Him for things or favor, etc. But what He wants to give us more than anything is Himself, His presence, His love. He wants us to cognitively experience Him. Train yourself to be quiet and wait upon the Lord. How long should you wait? Until you experience His mercy (favor, grace) (Psalm 123:2)
In the end, you will find new strength, mount up with wings like an eagle and soar. When you run, you will not be weary and when you walk, you will not faint. (Isa 40:31)
Thursday, January 3, 2008
A site that really echoes my beliefs
Here's a site I stumbled on that really resonates with my heart on the topic of religion. See what you think.
http://www.theschoolofchrist.org/articles/churchianity.html
Here's an excerpt...
http://www.theschoolofchrist.org/articles/churchianity.html
Here's an excerpt...
We must always be sure to distinguish between the Lord's invisible, universal, spiritual Church (the Ecclesia) and the non-profit religious organization that meets in a building with a steeple on top. The difference is incalculable, and we dare not make the mistake of confusing the two. Please understand that we do not question the right of any religious group to peaceably assemble together, elect their leaders, receive monies, have membership requirements, and govern themselves in the manner they see fit - as long as we realize that such a right is a civil right and is neither inalienable, Scriptural, or mandated by God Himself. That doesn't make it wrong, but neither does it make it spiritual. The Ecclesia is not an organization or invention of man, but an organism filled with the Life, and whether we worship "in Jerusalem or in this mountain" is not as important to God as whether or not we worship Him "in Spirit and in Truth."
So where is the distinction? What makes it an issue? It becomes an issue when spiritual or Scriptural significance is erroneously attached to a mere social contrivance, cultural norm, religious tradition, organizational structure, or place of meeting. When the waters are muddied and the lines are blurred between the social expectation, tradition, or custom of the religious organization and the true spiritual life and essence of the Ecclesia or the individual believer then such a system has the potential to evolve into a dangerous form of spiritual abuse or religious elitism.
What is Babylon? It is the marriage of church and state, religion and government; or to be more direct, it is allowing the leaven of the world to spread via Organized Religion and Institutional Christianity. As an example, consider how pastoring a church has become more of a profession than a calling, and how church government has digressed from a theocratic, Spirit-led consensus to a "Spirit-led" democracy, or worse, a "Spirit-led" benevolent dictatorship of a single pastor or a church board. This is the result of the spirit of Babylon. Whereas the True Church is to be "in the world, but not of the world", Babylon is that which is both in the world and of the world - it is by, for, and of the worldly system, yet it retains the outward appearances of godliness and spirituality. It is a synthesis of God and man, taking the best that each has to offer and fashioning a golden calf with it.
Babylon is always antithetical to Christ. It is anti-Christ. Babylon is represented as a religious whore riding on top of a beast which kills the prophets and saints of God. Perhaps we have missed the point by personifying the Antichrist as a Hitler-type world leader bent on global domination. Antichrist is the religious antithesis of Jesus Christ which flows from Babylon AS Jesus Christ. It is not coming, it is already here, and has been here from the beginning. Perhaps denominationalism is the real mark of the beast. If so, it is no wonder that so many are willing to accept it.
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