Tag Archives: James

Faith, Faith and Culture

Practical Wisdom – Reading James Together

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Last night we had the youth group students over to our house, as we often do. We normally have a meal together and then have a discussion-based devotional. I love being able to have them over, but sometimes the discussion is more difficult than others. Teens these days have a lot on their minds. There’s the stuff that has always been on teens’ minds: school stresses, crushes, self-esteem issues, family angst, but now all those things are amplified by their awareness of everything all at once thanks to smartphones, the internet, and social media.

With all of that swirling around in their heads, its hard to want to dive deep into Scripture – actually, I don’t think its a lack of wanting to, but its a quicker frustration with not immediately reading and understanding well enough to have some thoughts. In our culture of immediacy, sitting and soaking a text up can be hard because we’re not used to doing those things.

Last week, we read Hebrews 11. I’m not sure we got past verse 1:
“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for, and assurance about what we do not see.” This is a great piece of text, but it’s so abstract! It’s so easy to get caught up in the semantics (just the English, not even the Hebrew/Greek) and lose the point. So many words to define. And after that we have to think about what this means for us, examples from our lives etc etc. I know that last week was fine, good, and helpful because we were together in our home reading the Bible, praying together, and talking about our faith, but afterwards Madeline and I were kind of left wondering whether we had all really “gotten it.”

Contrast that with last night. We’ve been reading through James as a church, and this week we talked about James 2:1-13, so last night we read it and talked about it with our students. It starts like this:

“My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. 2 Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. 3 If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” 4 have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?“

After we finished this portion, our resident eighth grader blurted out: “That is the easiest to understand part of the Bible that I have ever read!” It was a beautiful moment. She heard something from the Bible and it made sense to her. So of course, we didn’t call it a night and all head home, we talked about it. Sometimes following Jesus isn’t nearly as hard as we make it to out to be with all of our meetings and word studies. Simply put: Love everyone. Don’t treat people better or worse based on what they have or don’t have.

I’ve really enjoyed listening to, reading, and talking about the book of James with our church family over the last few weeks, and we’ve still got a few weeks to go! If you want to read and talk about the Bible with your family – or you want to think about how Christians should live – I recommend James as a great place to start. It’s Christian Living 101.

Blessings!
MC

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Rain, Prayer, and Provision

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So about a half hour ago, I had a pretty weird experience with prayer.  I had just gotten out of a meeting on campus, and started to head back to my apartment.  As I walked out the door, I realized the solid amount of rain falling from the sky.  I had no jacket, no umbrella, and the next few minutes looked bleak at best.  I stood under the overhang for a minute, trying to accept the obvious truth that I would soon be cold and wet.  So I looked up and prayed (it couldn’t hurt, right?).  I prayed, “God, it would be pretty cool if you stopped the rain for the next two to three minutes so I could make the quick walk back to my apartment.  I know that’s kind of high maintenance, and it is my fault that I didn’t plan accordingly for this rain, but that would be awesome if you took care of that.”  Then I stood there for another minute or so waiting for either the will to walk through the rain or for the rain to lighten up.  Neither one of those things happened, but something did.

All of a sudden, Ben, a friend of mine, comes up through the rain with an umbrella.  I gave him the old, “What’s up, man?”

He looks at me and says, “Nothing much, what are you doing?” I’m sure I looked pretty strange just standing there alone…

“Just trying to get up the courage to walk through the rain,” I reply.

Then he extends his umbrella to me.  I look at him like he’s crazy, and he simply says, “Take this.” I’m sure I gave him a really weird look, so he added, “It’s not mine…I found it. (Ben’s that friend that everyone has who is always finding weird stuff)”

So I took the umbrella, told him I would get it back to him, and walked off towards my apartment.  And I was dry!

I tell this story for a few reasons, and the more I think about it, the more reasons I have for telling this story.  I’ll try and give these reasons in an organized manner so that you can understand my seemingly disconnected, but possibly connected thoughts:

  1. Nothing is too small to pray about.  Maybe you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “Seriously bro, that was just a coincidence.”  I disagree.  Sometimes I think God answers those little prayers in unique ways because He delights in our delight.  It’s almost as if God is winking at us, as if to say, “I’m still here, and I love to see you enjoying My presence.”  And even if you are convinced that what transpired was 100% coincidental, I have to ask, what’s the harm in praying about the small things?  God is all-powerful, and He hears our prayers, even the wee little ones.  As a Christian, I believe that God wants us to constantly be praying about literally everything! 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, Philippians 4:6.
  2. The Lord uses the people around us.  I doubt that Ben felt that the Spirit walked him toward my location and told him to lend me the umbrella.  I’ll have to talk to him about that, but I doubt that is how it went down.  Sometimes people are unaware of the impact they have on us or the way in which they might be used in our lives.  I have had many conversations from which I walked away feeling completely filled, and I wonder if those people realized what their words meant to me in the moment.  God sends us into each others lives at just the right time, sometimes as an answer to prayer.  Proverbs 25:11.
  3. God doesn’t always answer prayer directly.  See, God didn’t answer my prayer tonight by doing precisely what I asked for.  God didn’t close up the clouds for a couple minutes, but He provided an avenue for me that I hadn’t considered.  Sometimes we become so frustrated with things in our lives that God seems to be ignoring us on.  We ask over and over again for the same thing, and we work towards it, but the necessary doors never open for us.  We cannot become so focused in on what it is that we want that we limit the ways in which we are open to the work of the Lord in our lives.  A life following the Spirit’s lead is surprising, and we rarely can look back and say, “Yeah, I saw that coming.” James 4:13-15.

And I don’t tell this story to say that every time you pray for rain to stop, somebody will show up with an umbrella for you.  We are never going to fully understand the working of God in the world, and sometimes waiting on Him to reveal Himself to us is so hard.  But tonight was a cool reminder of the mysterious working of the Lord in my life.  I hope that if you’ve read this, you feel encouraged about prayer.  God is always listening, no matter how small the request, and He is always paving new paths for us.  The Lord is faithful.

Father, thank You for working in ways that I would never choose; for Your ways are far greater than mine.

-MC

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Living with “No”

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Let me tell you a story.

Last summer, a man took his 8-year-old son (we’ll call him Jimmy) to his first baseball game, it was Jimmy’s birthday.  As most 8-year-old boys at a baseball game do, Jimmy brought his glove, primed and ready to catch a foul ball.  The boy waited expectantly for his opportunity, and he didn’t take his eye off of the game for the whole first inning.  The first inning went by, no foul ball.  The second inning passed with the same result.  Then the third, then the fourth.  Eight innings go by, still no fly ball for Jimmy.  The father, who has been sitting and watching his son wait, becomes distressed.  Jimmy still has hope, but will certainly be let down if they leave the park without having caught the ever elusive foul ball.  It’s Jimmy’s birthday, and his father wants him to have the best possible memory of his first experience at the ballpark.  So, Jimmy’s father prays to God.  He prays, “God, please let a foul ball be hit over here.  Its Jimmy’s first game, and its his birthday. Please, it would make his day.  He’ll remember it forever.”  Right on cue, with one out in the top of the ninth, the second baseman hit a lofty foul ball into the seats down the first base line.  People all around are reaching out trying to catch this foul ball.  The ball bounces off a man’s hand two rows in front of the father-son duo and hits Jimmy in the chest.  Jimmy picks the ball up off the ground, finally in possession of his newest prized possession.  Jimmy was beyond excited, and his father looked up to heaven thanking God for answering his prayer.  It was a miracle!  An everyday miracle.

I heard that story on a Christian radio station in Nashville about a month ago.  I don’t think I had ever felt so angry at a radio station in my life.  Why was I angry?  Because that’s not how prayer works.  Over the past several years, I have seen health declines and deaths, I have become more aware of poverty, both domestic and abroad, and time and time again, I have stumbled in my walk with Christ.  In all of these situations, prayer has been present.  So why the heck does God have time to send baseballs to little kids when people are starving and dying!?!?!?  With stories like that in our Christian circles, it no wonder that people think we’re all hypocrites.  Maybe God had something to do with the birthday boy catching a fly ball, and maybe he didn’t.  That’s not the point.  The point is that these aren’t the stories we should be telling.  I don’t have a degree in marketing, but if our evangelism point is telling people that we prayed a wish list to God, and he gave us all the stuff we wanted, then we are attracting people who have wish lists.  Then what happens when our Santa Claus version of God doesn’t come through?  We end up with churches full of discontent, unhappy non-followers of Jesus.

Maybe I am being a little harsh.  I mean after all, ending world poverty is a huge prayer, and surely it was part of God’s plan when those loved ones got sick and later passed away.  Maybe God answers easy prayers.  No, it doesn’t work like that.  I pray for a lot of easy things.  Sometimes, I pray that the stop light will stay green long enough for me to make it through (and I work at a church, so God definitely doesn’t want me to be late).  In high school, I prayed that we would win football games.  And we did win a lot of football games…until my senior year.  I mean, come on God, Just make the ball bounce our way a little more.  Keep the refs from blowing the call on the last play of the game keeping us from going to the playoffs (I’m not bitter, I promise).  So why is God answering some dude at a baseball game’s “easy” prayer, but not mine?  God, why couldn’t You have given me enough knowledge and wisdom to get an A on my Greek final?  Where were You on that one?

We live in a culture saturated with wants.  After all, I’m a 20-year-old, white, American male from a middle class family.  I’m supposed to graduate college, get a job, get married, have 2.5 kids, and live a long and happy life after retiring at 65.  I’m supposed to live happily ever after because God wants good things to happen to me, right?  Wrong.  If anything, by the standards of our culture, being a Jesus-following Christian actually makes life worse.  Among other things, Sunday mornings are no longer sleep time for you, no more premarital sex, and you are called to give away your stuff and money.  On paper, without supernatural genie powers, following Jesus just looks dumb.

So Jesus, let me get this straight.  You’re calling me to come and die.  Ok, well at least I get little “everyday miracles” along the way for, you know, praying and being a good guy.  I may die for Your name, but at least before that I get to catch balls at baseball games and get to have perfect health for me and my family.  This whole following Jesus thing doesn’t sound bad at all.  No. No. No. No. No.  Once again, this is not how following Jesus works.

Imagine a guy (we’ll call him Mike) at a bus station looking to purchase a ticket.  Mike is sick and tired of the life he has been living in his hometown of Jackson.  Jackson is a town, not too big but not too small, and Mike has grown discontent with the lifestyle.  There’s not enough hustle and bustle in Jackson to keep Mike excited and on his toes, but he also longs for the simplicity and serenity provided by a farm town out in the country.  He can purchase a ticket to Los Angeles or Farmville, USA.  In a tragic miscue, Mike didn’t decide where he was going before leaving his house that day.  Mike sits at the bus station all day trying to make up his mind, and finally decides that he is better off just going home.  After all, home has got a little bit excitement, and a little simplicity.  Mike missed the bus.  Sometimes I feel like this is how we Christians are.  Discontent with where we are in life, we look heavily at two sides of the coin, the American Dream & the Way of the Cross.  After much thought, we decide that staying where we are is the safe play.  There’s no risk.  We’ve got some fun worldly pleasures, but just enough Jesus to get us on to heaven… or wherever it is we go when we die.  There is no fusion between the American Dream and Jesus.  That is a lie we as Christians have to stop telling ourselves.  The Spirit of Christ does not reside in the things of this world.  Jesus and his followers have gotten on one boat.  The American Dream and the things of this world have gotten on another.  You can’t sit in between the two boats.  You’ll drown.

As a Christian, I am concerned about what kind of message we give off when we broadcast certain things.  The beauty of following Christ is not how easy life becomes, but how much our struggles become worth the struggle.  Our struggles become worth it when we see others fighting alongside us.  The Church is God’s gift to us.  Paul’s command to the Church in Romans 12:9 is, “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.”  We have been given a group of people to cling to in times of trouble.  So let us not only tell people of the random “everyday miracles,” but let’s share stories of grief and pain.  Let us share stories of being uplifted in times of great hurting through the love of Jesus shown to us by his people.  Let us pray about everything without ceasing.  Prayer is a source of hope in our broken world.  Without hope, there is no prayer.

We must choose to live a life fully in pursuit of Christ.  That life is full of trials, hardships, and pain.  James (the brother of Jesus) comes at it like this: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, when you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.”  Not only does James acknowledge that there will be bumps on the road, but he argues that they are necessary, beneficial even.  If a child grows up getting everything he or she has ever wanted and has never been told “No,” then when they are finally told “No,” they will inevitably have a break down.  This is a new experience for the child, and he or she doesn’t know how to handle it.  After a while though, the child becomes accustomed to not everything going their way.  This doesn’t mean they stop asking for help or things they think they need, but when they are told “No,” they handle it better.  Also, having been exposed to “No” makes hearing “Yes” much sweeter.

So let us follow Jesus.  Let us pray, understanding that “No” is a potential answer.  Let us not be discouraged, but let us persevere.  Let us live, knowing that no matter how bad life gets, we serve a God who understands our pain having lived on earth Himself.