Geeks For Jesus

It’s not christian words I dislike since some concepts are easier to explain with a word (provided someone is willing to explain it) than by explaining the whole concept behind it.  What I hate are those feel good phrases that allow us to feel good about being Christians without actually putting in the effort to offer help.

Ever go through a hard moment in life?  You’re worried about tomorrow and just not sure how things will work out.  Perhaps  it’s an area of weakness you just can’t get control over, maybe it’s you’re finances, or  family life.  You are worried and upset and really not sure what to do so you so you look to one of you’re Christian friends for help and advice only to get “just give it to God.”  How do I do that? I have already prayed and asked God to take this away.  But there is no more answer and what has already been given explains nothing.   What’s worse, they make it all sound so easy.  If it seems so easy, how much of a failure are you for not being able to master this simple task?

What could the well-meaning friend have done instead:

1. Finish letting you vent.
2. Remind you of examples from your life where God has come through.
3. Provided examples of God coming through in their life.
4. Admit to not having an actual answer.

Any of these would be better than just giving a pat “christianese”  answer.  They make the problem important instead of making it seem like this problem is so beneath them that they would never suffer from this.  So please keep this in mind next time you find yourself offering advice to a struggling or upset friend.

I’ve been looking for a good analogy for sin in our lives that answers the following questions:

1. If God finds our sin abhorrent then how can he forgive us?
2. If we are forgiven why do we need to stop sinning?
3. Why does our human nature fight our attempts to live good lives?

Well if you will bear with me I think I’ve found the perfect analogy for sin: toilette training.

When we are born we just don’t know better.  Our natural human nature tells us that when something is getting a little full inside we need to get rid of it wherever we are and whatever we are doing it just doesn’t matter we have to get it out now.

Toilets, on the other hand, are not natural.   We have to fight what our bodies want to naturally do and learn to hold things until the right moment.

Watching over the whole process is our parents.  They know that the resulting mess will make us sick so they clean us up and whatever mess we left behind is taken care of.  It’s disgusting but their love overrides all else. This is of course a stopgap measure.  Our parents don’t want to be changing our diapers when were thirty and there is much lower risk of us getting sick if we weren’t messing all over ourselves in the first place.   One day our parents decide we are old enough to learn to use a toilette.  They deal with the mess and still cleanup but they know we will eventually get the hang of this unnatural toilette thing.   Things don’t go well at first.  We don’t want to learn to hold it and even when we do learn that we need to master this things still  get messy and wet while we learn but they keep up the training. until one day we get the hang of it all and our proud parents celebrate the moment they don’t have to clean up after us or worry we will get sick from our own mess.

Sin works the same way:  God hates sin more than we could ever know or understand.  The bible has some pretty harsh words about sin but the story doesn’t end there.  God sent Jesus to clean up our mess and keep us from having to suffer the consequences.  We mess up again and again.  We get discouraged and want to give up but there is God nudging us onward in the hope that one day we will get the hang of it.

Our job is just like a child’s: we are to try over and over no matter the mistakes and setbacks we must pick ourselves up and try again.  Even though the journey will take a lifetime we will one day learn to master each task God sets in front of us.

update: It has been argued that my analogy does not account for God’s complete distaste for sin and the distance it forces between us and God. I’m guessing those people have never been around a baby with a smelly diaper and personally I’d rather not hold a baby close until it’s been cleaned up.

Lately I have been wondering what the Bible would say about Jesus if the parts that reference him directly were set aside. The idea is to determine the affect Jesus had on the people around him. I can honestly say that it’s been an interesting perspective.

We have all heard about how Jesus cared and loved the people enough to feed and care for them. That Jesus cared for his followers is not much of a surprise. That the Son of God was able to feed all those people with a few fish and some bread is not shocking either. In Exodus we read that God provided for an entire nation in a desert.

What is surprising?

Lets start with Matthew 14:13: (NIV) When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Hearing of this, the crowds followed him on foot from the towns.

The first thing we learn is that Jesus went out of his way to be alone and the crowds were so desperate to be near Jesus that they went looking for the place he was hiding.

Mathew 15: As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.”

The people were so enamored with Jesus that they were forgetting they needed to feed themselves and the disciples were worried that if they didn’t tell these people to go find food they would simply not eat.

The truly shocking thing was that it was every Jewish husband’s job to make sure his family was cared for and out of all of the people there none had managed to even remember his most basic duty to his family. Of all the women there none were asking about their children.

What does this tell us about Jesus? This crowd wanted Jesus so badly they forgot about everything except Jesus and yet they were not left hungry. This is a powerful lesson for us in modern times where everything else seems more important than spending time with God. Imagine what life would be like if we just let go of our day to day worries to spend time with God and learn for ourselves what had these people so enamored.

Lately I’ve been asked about why tithing is important and I think I’m in a good place to answer that since I’m not a pastor and since I have a well paying job I don’t need donations to support myself.

When I was younger I used to do what so many modern Christians do: just grab some loose change from my pocket and throw that in the offering basket.  In retrospect that’s pretty much how most people treat beggars the street so the comparison doesn’t make me feel all that good about the way I used to handle things.  Thanks to a lot of work on God’s part I’ve improved since then.

Tithing was originally a command by God in order to provide for the Levites who were entrusted with the full time care of the ministry needs of the Israelites and the temple.  They were not given farms of their own to provide for themselves and were completely dependent on the rest of the nation of Israel to provide for their day-to-day needs.

The logic behind tithing comes in two parts:

1. It provides for God’s  ministries.  Pastoral work is a full time job for any decent sized church and the pastor will not have time to handle the churches needs and still support himself with a job.  There are also other expenses such as paper, rent or mortgage, electricity, cost of outreach programs etc.  You may think your contribution is too little to matter but it isn’t.  A group of poor people giving 10% can easily add up to a lot.  At a church I used to go to I calculated that  if 600 attendees had an average yearly wage of $12 000 and they all gave 10% ($1200) a year the church would have doubled it’s income.  The additional income would have been enough to pay off the mortgage faster, get the new roof the building needed  and still have enough left over for the soup kitchen they wanted to open.
2. What’s most important to your average person? Money! What is supposed to be the most important thing in every Christian’s life?  God.  Tithing is the act of placing God first in our finances.

How important do I think tithing is?  For a couple of years I absolutely couldn’t find work and had no real income to speak of.  Yet somehow when money needed to be there it would just appear from an unexpected source such as random calls from family, one time out of the blue contracts, winning one of those survey draws and more.  Every month I would find myself in a state of panic before even setting aside God’s ten percent yet every month all my bills got paid.  In the middle of this someone asked me if I can afford to tithe. My reply was simple, “I can’t afford not to tithe”.

Like any spiritual discipline tithing takes practice.  I find that by putting the money aside as soon as I get my check, it bothers me less. I also find that it helps to remind myself of the reasons I tithe in the first place.

So here I am again. I’ve had this in mind for awhile but I’ve yet to come across forum software I don’t hate do heres hoping I have something that works this time.