Our Non-Missional Christmas

This Christmas I will celebrate what has been done for me, and for my family.  For at least a brief portion of time I will cease to be concerned about the rest of the world, about my neighbor in need, and about the problems others face, and I am just going to focus on what has been done for us.  I know this flies in the face of the new missional Christmas where we all try to give as much money to feeding people as we do giving presents to each other, and to many people the Miklovic selfish Christmas seems to be the very antithesis to what Christmas should be, but I disagree.

I was born in sin, and have sinned since my earliest of days, so has my wife, and my two young children.  We have known right, and chosen wrong.  We have had God’s law revealed to us, and chosen disobedience to it.  The Miklovics without any outside intervention are a pretty hopeless bunch.   I could take Christmas and turn it into a time to pour blessing upon the world and make it a time of monastic self denial, but I am not going to. Christmas is about the redemption of the Miklovic family by our Lord who saw it fit to be born in human flesh in a manger.  Christmas, is all about undoing that curse that the Miklovics were born into because of original sin in Adam.  Christmas, the celebration of the advent of Christ was for the Miklovics and we are going to view it in that light, as something done FOR US.  You say yes, but was it not for the rest of the world too?  Of course it was, and I encourage you and the rest of the world to celebrate Christmas in the same manner, as Christ coming FOR YOU.  Yes, we will still give our traditional gift to our kids that they are required to use to serve someone else, yes we will still lead youth on food drives, and give to those in need, because that is a part of who we are... but that is not, nor will it be the focus of our Christmas.

Let me give a little more explanation.  During the mega-church or church growth movement we had a horrible streak of selfishness driving evangelicalism.  Everything in churches was to be carefully crafted to make congregants happy with the style, and comforts of modern worship.  Of course most of us are now ready to admit that this consumeristic mentality is the wrong way to go, and that people should not be drawn to the church simply to be given coffee, tips for life, and good music.  Yet how have we responded to the consumerist failure?  We have turned around and created the missional movement to curb our self absorbed appetite.  We have taken the growth model which tells vistors “we are all about you, be comfortable enjoy yourselves” and replaced it with the total opposite “it is not about you, get out of your ‘comfort zone’ and join us in mission.”  The growth movement catered to the consumer, and the missional movement caters to the wannabe superhero.  Both movements at their heart are consumeristic trying to create what people want to consume.  Neither movement offers comfort with regard to our own fallenness.  The growth movement was to capture those who remember nothing but dead fundamentalism and wanted something more joyful.  The missional movement is for those who grew annoyed with the growth movement and wanted their life to mean something and to make a difference.  In either case, both movements addressed and are addressing the desires of the consumer of the day.  (This is why people are so unfortunately infatuated with Barna polls.)  The problem is that in reaction to the growth movement, the missional movement has thrown out any notion whatsoever that Christ has done a great work FOR YOU.  It quickly forces you to reach out to others while never receiving anything yourself.  The growth mentality was all for you, yet it did not placard the Christ which died for you and the implications of that, it instead structured the church experience ‘for you’ with all the amenities of your local shopping mall.  The ‘for you’ of the growth movement is not the ‘for you’ of the gospel, yet in the rejection of the growth movement, the actual Gospel ‘for you’ has been placed on the back shelf by the missional movement.  Essentially in an effort to get out of one ditch we have fallen into the ditch on the other side of the road.

That is why my family, which is a mission minded family, will see Christmas not as a call to mission, but a call to receive with gratitude once again that Christ was incarnate FOR US.  This is not selfish, this is receiving and appreciating a gift that was given to us.  Not in the form of good coffee and a Christmas ham, but as Christ incarnate FOR US.  Enjoy the gift and the giver, certainly you will go out on mission, and certainly you will serve others and certainly your living faith will propel you into works, but take time to see that the gift is FOR YOU.

Love -- Law or Gospel?

In Wesleyan theology there is a large emphasis placed on love, and many in the Methodist movement would go so far as to say “the Gospel in one word is love.”  I could agree with that statement if what is meant is that the Gospel is that God has so loved us that Christ had our sin imputed to him and his righteousness imputed to us that we would receive the benefit of righteousness while Christ endured the curse of the law for us, and that this actually took place in history as an actual event.  In other words, I can agree that our theology should be all about love if you are speaking of the love of God for us.  However if the Gospel is that we are to love God and love others because of what Jesus did then we are greatly confusing the Gospel and the Law.

Let me be clear, we should love others and love God, and in light of the Gospel we should be driven to love, I do not intend to negate that, nonetheless the Gospel has nothing to do with our love... in fact as far as action is concerned the Gospel has nothing to do with us.  The Gospel is news of a completed work, a work that was for us, but that was not carried out by us.  This is a very important post for this blog, because in Methodism as well as most of evangelicalism we are getting this confused.  As the veil has been pulled of my eyes regarding this tragic confusion of love being the Gospel instead of law I have been liberated and able to share this liberating Gospel others.  The reality that love is law not Gospel (in the sense that we are called to love) is a reality that we need desperately to discover in the UMC.

Just to get the terms right here, the Law is what we are commanded to do by God.  The Gospel is the work God did for us in Christ.  Law, our doing... Gospel, his doing.

Romans 3:19-20 ESV  Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.  (20)  For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

Galatians 2:15-16 ESV  We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners;  (16)  yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.

The scripture is crystal clear that we will not and cannot be justified by obedience to the Law, because we have already disobeyed it, and have the propensity to continue in disobedience toward it.  To attempt justification by the law is an uphill battle that produces a life of despair and leads to an afterlife of torment.  It is essential that we understand that we will not be justified by our obedience to the Law, period.  We also must understand that the Gospel is about Christ’s fulfillment of the Law for us, both the righteousness demanded by it, and the curses required for transgression of it... for us.

Which brings us to this:

Deuteronomy 6:4-5 ESV  "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.  (5)  You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

First off notice that the above quote is given from the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy.  This is not a New Testament call to Gospel love, this is an old testament statement of Law.

Leviticus 19:17-18 ESV  "You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him.  (18)  You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.”

Again, notice this is from the Old Testament book of Leviticus, this is not some New Testament paradigm introduced by Jesus.  This is the Law.  When you read the above verses from Romans and Galatians (and there are many more similar passages) which state we will not be justified by the Law they allude to these passages from Deuteronomy and Leviticus as well as any other passage from the Law.  Moreover we find Jesus quoting these passages directly when questioned what the greatest commandments are.  Jesus affirms that love of neighbor and love of God is the summation of the Law.  Jesus calls love the great LAW, not the Gospel.

The Law of God shows us our need for grace, it is a school master leading us to the foot of the cross.  When we take our call to love and put that call in the Gospel column instead of the Law column you create a huge problem, the very commandment which was meant to drive you to the cross instead becomes something altogether different.  It loses it’s power as love, yet gains nothing because it is not Gospel.  Our command to love is the Law, it is not the Gospel, and if you look at your own life, see the lack of love toward neighbor, and the lack of loving God with your entire heart soul strength and might you should be driven to see your need of Grace, and see that in Christ we have that grace given to us.  Yet if you refuse to see love as law, your lack of love will never drive you to grace.

Current trends in almost all of evangelicalism, and the long time trend in Methodism is to confuse love as Gospel instead of Law.  The surveys all tell us that if we focus on love we will grow our churches, and that what the world wants to see is love, and that is true.  If we make our entire focus on love than we will be the most excellent of all Law based religion, but we will cease to be Christianity.  The Jew, the Muslim, and every other major faith can claim its ethic to be love without any Gospel at all.  If we view Jesus only as example and not as sacrifice, if we see him as our best example of loving, and not as the one who fulfilled love for us, then we become no different than all other religion except that we have a better example to follow.  Yet if we see love as the law, and see the Gospel as something altogether different then and only then will we see the marvelous grace which has been given to us in Christ, and actually be freed to love from gratitude instead of loving because we are duty bound to do so.

There is a reason that even the most conservative Churches (Wesley and the Methodist church was ‘conservative’) eventually become liberal in the long run and it is because of this confusion.  With love as your Gospel you eventually end up with a religion that is entirely Law.  You can find common ground with every religious institution, every social service agency, every government, and every other humanistic endeavor because essentially they are all built on the same ethic... that is to love others and the to love the God of your understanding.  Christianity is altogether different, because Christianity alone knows that love is the summation of the law that we have been completely unable to keep, and that our lack of complete love necessitates a savior, and that Christ himself fulfilled the Law, that is fulfilled love, on our behalf and we stand on his merit, not our love.

I’d love to hear a few Methodist friends weigh in on this.

Luther and Wesley - Strangely Warmed

In the United Methodist Church you will find many congregations named 'Aldersgate UMC' and likely if you have been around the UMC for a significant amount of time, or studied the life of John Wesley you have come across what has been deemed Wesley's 'Aldersgate Experience'.  Wesley records this in his journal:

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans.  About a quarter before nine, while the leader was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away mysins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.

I have began to ask a few pastors within the UMC if they had ever read, or been required to read 'Luther's Preface to the Romans' and have found that the vast majority have not.  Now certainly one does not have to read Luther's preface to understand Paul's Epistle to the Romans, but being a 'Wesleyan' denomination that appeals frequently to Wesley for it's understanding of scripture, you would think it would be incumbent upon UMC pastors to read the document which finally gave Wesley assurance of sins forgiven.  The 'Aldersgate experience' gets mentioned frequently when talking about Wesley, yet few dare go to the source which precipitated the experience.

The emergent and missional movements have found a warm reception in the United Methodist Church, and one of the reasons they are so welcome there is because of how missional Wesley was.  The missional mindset has been in the UMC since day one, and continues in it today.  While I am not against all things missional, I do find it unfortunate that as a church we have failed to see that Wesley was missional, long before he was strangely warmed.  What I mean is this, Wesley took huge risks traveling as a missionary, setting up societies, fighting against slavery, building orphanages, among many things, before he ever happened upon someone reading Luther's preface to the Romans there on Aldersgate street.  Wesley did countless acts of piety and yet had no assurance of sin forgiven.  Wesley did countless good things but had come to the point where it all seemed meaningless and that he wondered if he was still lost.  This is where the missional movement leads its people, eventual despair.  'Missional' Christianity leads people to associate their status in the kingdom with their works in this world, and eventually when a person has a strong sense of their sin the goodness of their works is no longer a source of hope.  The missional movement thrives on Matthew 25 when Jesus speaks of sheep and goats, yet never reads the text carefully enough to see that the sheep were unconscious of their piety while the goats put their hope in theirs.  They miss the fact that the sheep and goats are separated in that passage prior to their works being evaluated, not on the basis of the work.  We could go on an on here.

Anyway, I plead with Methodists who may come across this post to pick up a copy of Luther's Preface to the Romans, or read it online here.  It is not long, and is well worth your time, and maybe you too could be strangely warmed.  Here is an excerpt.

You must get used to the idea that it is one thing to do the works of the law and quite another to fulfill it. The works of the law are every thing that a person does or can do of his own free will and by his own powers to obey the law. But because in doing such works the heart abhors the law and yet is forced to obey it, the works are a total loss and are completely useless. That is what St. Paul means in chapter 3 when he says, "No human being is justified before God through the works of the law." From this you can see that the schoolmasters [i.e., the scholastic theologians] and sophists are seducers when they teach that you can prepare yourself for grace by means of works. How can anybody prepare himself for good by means of works if he does no good work except with aversion and constraint in his heart? How can such a work please God, if it proceeds from an averse and unwilling heart?

But to fulfill the law means to do its work eagerly, lovingly and freely, without the constraint of the law; it means to live well and in a manner pleasing to God, as though there were no law or punishment. It is the Holy Spirit, however, who puts such eagerness of unconstained love into the heart, as Paul says in chapter 5. But the Spirit is given only in, with, and through faith in Jesus Christ, as Paul says in his introduction. So, too, faith comes only through the word of God, the Gospel, that preaches Christ: how he is both Son of God and man, how he died and rose for our sake. Paul says all this in chapters 3, 4 and 10.

That is why faith alone makes someone just and fulfills the law; faith it is that brings the Holy Spirit through the merits of Christ. The Spirit, in turn, renders the heart glad and free, as the law demands. Then good works proceed from faith itself. That is what Paul means in chapter 3 when, after he has thrown out the works of the law, he sounds as though the wants to abolish the law by faith. No, he says, we uphold the law through faith, i.e. we fulfill it through faith.

Peace Friends.