Conversations about Risk and Faith

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Four conversations about risk and faith, at first, do not seem very congruent.

Is it really possible to have faith, and take risks? If God is sovereign, and he calls us to any circumstance, does God view those actions as risky?

I had the honor of writing a four-week small group discussion guide that mirrored the theme of the RE:FUEL Men’s Conference in Memphis this year. Through a pretty intense time of prayer, it became clear that I was to write four different conversations about Paul. Specifically, those four conversations cover his transformation, and each of his ventures into the world for the sake of grace.

It became clear that his motivation was, really, about Christ’s love. He wrote as much in 2 Corinthians 4, claiming that Christ’s love is all compelled him.

So when I think about risk, and I think about the Roman Empire, and I thought about why men are so afraid of risk, Paul became the clear model. He completely changed his perspective on faith, moving from zealously earning the affection of God, to zealously receiving the affection of God that was already his.

But … to receive grace is one thing. To adamantly leave every comfort, to travel to unknown and unfamiliar places, only to share grace with others, is quite the different story. Why did he do this?

These four conversations may help answer some of those questions. I hope, too, they fill in some of the missing pieces, and decisions, and revelations, that prompted such a clear call in his life. And I hope it becomes clear to you that Paul’s travels were not entirely planned, but were reactions to a constant move of the Spirit of God in his life.

So what if we lived this way? What if we completely transformed our perspective, from how life should benefit us, to how we could benefit the lives of others? We get a sense that we can really, truly receive Christ’s love, but when was the last time Christ’s love actually compelled us? Are we ready for change? Are we ready to surrender our life, really, for the sake of an everlasting love?

Here’s the link to these conversations. They are free to you. You can teach them, or use them in personal study. But either way, I promise you’ll be inspired by Paul, and you’ll begin to rethink the very structures of your life that you hoped were unshakable.

Because that’s what happened to Paul.

The Depths

An image from the deepest part of the world's oceans.

I think all of us, at some time, have experienced that great empty, hollow feeling.

It’s a little bit like James Cameron’s solo sub dive to the Mariana Trench last weekend. He dove to the deepest part of the world’s oceans, and he described the event like being on another planet. Being seven miles underwater, he said he felt very isolated. I thought of him today.

It’s hard to describe, though. You have this perspective of goodness before your eyes. Favorable situations. You are surrounded by those who love you. Those moments are great. You consider those in extreme need, and you are shaken to the core that life may not be that bad for you.

Yet, when you refocus your perspective, and you still see your life played before you like clips from great movies, there is a deep longing that doesn’t seem to be satisfied. It borders on the edge of pain. It resides with wandering and lostness, and you feel that you may just be walking a tightrope, and though you have the skills to stay on the rope, you fear a great wind that would cause you to lose balance.

It’s that hollow, empty, gut nausea that causes great evil. Disillusionment. Purposelessness. Lost. Doubt. Emotions that could never be judged as evil before a jury, yet they border on treason. Treason, because belief in God requires a high degree of constant faith in a skeptical world, and once you join the side of the believers, to even sway — to even dangle in those thoughts of God’s absence — is an extreme betrayal. Yet, you are there. And the depths of emptiness that seem to burrow in your heart just aren’t able to be filled.

I am a worship leader. I love songs of worship, and I am very selective about the lyrics of such. I want songs that declare an allegiance, and I want melodies that are easy to sing, that almost disappear when you contemplate the words themselves. I plan worship around those thoughts. Yet I wonder if anyone pays much attention to these stark declarations and confessions that slip from their voice in the shape of musical notes.

I also regularly minister to students. And I fear for them. I almost feel outmatched. They are bombarded, and don’t even know it. Our culture worships achievement and stamina and creativity, and feeds it to them through the venue of personal success, rarely caring to mention that gifts and talents are to be used for the kingdom first. Many times I feel completely unworthy — frozen, even — when I consider that the surest way to an enriching relationship with God is to retreat, withdraw, and spend time in disciplines such as prayer and meditation and fasting and reading the Word. It is challenging to teach these when America sees those disciplines as formula conversations and memory verses and abundance and verse tweets. In other words, the disciplines should be engaged just enough.

And, I also spend time with dads and families. Racked with great pressure, a failing economy, and children involved in several activities at different times, “dad moments” are all but gone. Fathers engage fatherhood through authoritative decisions that must be made quickly. We’ve celebrated social interaction, at times, over family community, and dads seem to bear much of that decision. Moms do too, but I spend lots of time talking to lots of dads.

So when I write about an empty feeling in my heart, it’s from these things. It’s from an isolated inadequacy that is chagrined by my very faith. I know better. You know better. Yet I feel very discontented. Our world is so broken. Hearts hang in the balance. Families survive in the midst of stress and distress. Children bear the stress of their parents.

So what’s left, then?

Listening. A time of listening.

This morning, I read this from the book of Job. Elihu, in the cast of characters, is a young guy who had enough of the extreme opinions of Job’s older friends. I love that spunk. Young guys have passion. Elihu has it, here, in Job 33, and these are his words about what happens when you have that hollow, empty feeling, and you feel God isn’t even listening to your cries:

For God does speak — now one way, now another — though man may not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears and terrify them with warnings, to turn man from wrongdoing and keep him from pride.

I’m beginning to think that we talk way too much to listen. I’m thinking our lives are way too crowded to hear. I think we give our attention to an incessant amount of things, and we’ve decided that the voice of God is too mystical of an idea to consider. We disregard dreams, and we disregard intuition, and call them crazy or coincidence. We fear that listening to God’s voice is a really big, fat ordeal, that will ultimately lead us to things that take us far away from normal.

And maybe that hollow feeling in our hearts is there by our own doing, or because plans are going awry. Either way, God still talks. And He talks to us through the changing circumstances of our environment. And his perspective is greater than ours. His words may dictate direction, or may not, but they will always be words of protection.

We have been lulled into a moment of extreme selfishness. Our world exists to serve us. We sound a bit like Job. Tragedy may pull us from that, but ultimately, there is always a Redbox ready to take you somewhere else. We can salve our wounds with noise and sound, so we can ignore any leading by God.

Maybe God is taking us to the depths, though. So we must go. And we must listen.

We must listen to God, for God, even in the depths. Even when life is certainly difficult, and when all the good of our personal world is screaming for us to see what the hand of God has already done in our own lives. God may want us to experience the silence, so can hear him most clearly.

But in the meantime, when the days are long, and the heart is pale and heavy, and the moments are paralyzed, and God’s voice doesn’t seem to be strong, heed these words of George Mueller. This is how this great man of faith survived the depths, and ultimately listened to God.

Thus, through prayer to God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my ability and knowledge, and if my mind is thus at peace, and continues so after two or three more petitions, I proceed accordingly. In trivial matters, and in transactions involving most important issues, I have found this method always effective.

The depths are often visited, but are no good for a prolonged stay. We have all been there. And we are all in good company.

Risk and Paul

I am writing a four-week study on risk.

And it has just completely overwhelmed all of what little free time I do have. Which is the reason my blog has been silent the past couple of weeks.

I have the privilege and honor of being on the board of directors for RE:FUEL Memphis. Of what we do, and hope to do, is the yearly conference, held in April. RE:FUEL Memphis is an organization designed to bless the lives of men in the city of Memphis with the life-changing message of Jesus. This year’s conference will be our third, and best ever, with two very prolific personalities bringing truth from the Word of God, as well as Christian artist Todd Agnew. And we are opening the final session of the conference to the families and friends of the guys who will attend, so we can all, as a community, spend the last moments of the conference in worship.

One of the ideas from our planning sessions was to offer a small group study resource that would complement the theme of the conference, as well as extend the conversations of the conference into every arena possible, albeit church bible classes, small groups, private studies, or neighborhood gatherings. The idea behind these studies was to introduce the topics to not just men, but to everyone.

And, thus, I have been writing these studies. The conference itself, through the messages given by Don McLaughlin and Buddy Bell, will look at risk through the eyes, and life, of Peter. Peter’s life is filled with risk, consequence, and reward. I love his story for many reasons, but, for me, it culminates in this one verse, in the book of Acts:

“In those days Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty), and said …” (1:15, 16)

To see Peter’s journey, his passion, his commission as the rock of the coming church, his treasonous betrayal of Jesus, and his doubt of the resurrection, and then to see him stand among the believers after the ascension, and speak words of leadership — it is almost too much to bear. Place yourself in his shoes, and be cast as the chief apostle, then the chief betrayer, only to rise as the chief leader.

It’s powerful.

Peter’s life will be well-documented in our conference. After some time in prayer, I believed that the four conversations I write should look at risk through the eyes of another great man of faith. I decided to uncover the risk and rewards in the life of Paul.

For most of my life, I was told Paul’s journeys looked like this:

Yet, truth be told, when I saw a map like the one above, my brain really saw this:

I had absolutely no idea what that map meant. I had no clue about the little lines drawn across land and sea. And I had no idea how to make any sense out of them. I knew only that Paul was merciless in his travels, but I could not, for the life of me, make any sense out of why those little squiggly lines were important.

The four studies I’m writing may not be able to interpret the map for you. But, I think, they may help us realize something of the personality of Paul, the decisions he made, and the experiences he had while listening to the Spirit of God.

I hope, too, they will engage us in all kinds of conversations about the events in our life that have culminated in this very moment, and how those experiences may actually be designed, by God, to propel us into arenas that, right now, make us afraid to consider.

These four-week studies are free to all who attend RE:FUEL. And, I’ll post them here, on my site, once they are completed.

I’m walking with Paul, though, in the next few weeks. It’s already been exciting, and exhausting, and I can’t wait to share what I’ve discovered.

Two Years Without Cable TV

I cancelled my cable service two years ago.

And it still has been one of the best decisions I, and my family, have ever made.

Last year I wrote four posts to describe the process. They were great journeys in writing for me. They are raw, I think, but certainly were written out of passion and intensity. They are a little bit funny, a little bit satirical, and a whole lot serious. And last fall, I wrote one addendum on how my views were tested, and my failure of that test.

Here they are, again, for you. May they inspire you a bit today to think about what you allow your eyes to see.

Television and Life: The Beginning of the End of My Cable Subscription

Television and Life: The Philosophical Reasons We Cancelled Our Television Subscription

Television and Life: My TV, My Movies, and Jesus

Television and Life: What I’ve Done Since Canceling My TV

Name: The Name of God and My Mistake

Minority

I am reading through the entire Word of God this summer. 90 days of total immersion, along with the students, and families, and members of all ages, in our church.

My translation of choice, this time, is The Message. Even though I have given The Message less than favorable reviews in the past, when reading it through, as a novel, it is very refreshing, and very approachable, and not at all what I once believed it to be.

That being said, here are two things I’ve gleaned from this summer’s reading so far:

The culture of the Old Testament was incredibly violent. From the flood, to Sodom, to the great escape from Egypt and the final plague, to the wilderness time and the occasional fights against cities, to Joshua and then Judges, and then the era of  the kings, the world of the Hebrews, as written, is very, very, very violent. Which has caused me, as of now, to rethink how I teach those stories.

I’ll not elaborate on that here. What I will say is that reading through in large passages, sometimes fifteen to twenty chapters a day, I am able to really see the entire story of the Word in perspective. Many churches don’t emphasize perspective when teaching the Word of God, because of the enormous expanse of historical information covered in the first dozen books. But, when you read it as it was meant to be read (and memorized), the understanding of the histories makes much more sense, and the idea of God’s displeasure with the Hebrews is more obvious.

This was not the culture God intended in Eden. And for God to watch his own children exact violence against his own children must have greatly disappointed him, and greatly broken his heart.

As this culture of violence spawned more and more violence, there is such an apparent need for grace, then. To teach a violent culture through violent acts would not have been memorable. For God to teach violent people, He had to do so with grace, with forgiveness, and not violence.

Saying that, and then knowing how often God exacted justice, through violent means, especially against the kings of Israel and Judah, would almost seem to be an oxymoron. I won’t defend, theologically, why those things occurred, to say only that God himself stated through Ezekiel (Ezekiel 18) that he takes no delight in the deaths of those who do not believe in him. My statement above really only implies the intervention of grace as the overwhelming way God chose to have his people approach him, after the culture of violence ended.

The second thing I noticed, and perhaps the most surprising, was how quickly the worship of Yahweh became the practice of the minority of people. The book of Judges itself is a testament to how quickly the Hebrews abandoned the worship of Yahweh, until God called a local commander to bring relief. And even then, the revival was short-lived. Judges 11 indicates that 300 years had passed from the Exodus to the time of Jephthah, (and 260 years had passed since the death of Moses) and in that time, the Hebrews had all but abandoned the worship of God as Moses instructed.

Which again leads me to the need of grace. If such an overwhelming miracle that delivered the Hebrews, and such an expansive, comprehensive, and explicit law was given, and then, in spite of those two things, the Hebrews still abandoned God, then God, to me, had no other choice but to bring grace to humanity.

I am still working on these hypotheses, to be sure, but I am convicted of God’s grace more, through every chapter and book I’ve read thus far.