Did you know that coffee was almost a sin? In the 16^th century, the clergy called coffee satanic and asked Pope Clement VIII to ban it.  Clement tasted it, decided he liked it, and decided not to ban it. I can almost guarantee you that if coffee hadn’t been to that cat’s liking, it would’ve went down in religious culture as something we just “know” is sinful. Because that’s how superficial sins like that become a thing.

It’s funny how the little decisions we make about right and wrong can affect generations to come. (Think about those poor souls at Starbucks who wouldn’t have jobs had Clement thought coffee was disgusting.) Romans 14 gives us instruction on how to handle it when we disagree on things that aren’t vital to the faith. It’s some really great advice that we often misuse (or ignore completely).

Romans 14:1-4 says, “Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them. Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.”

There’s a difference in saying that your conscience will, or will not, allow you to do a thing and saying that thing is indifferent from God’s word. Our preferences are just that. Ours alone. That runs the gamut from political candidates to certain foods to music preferences. It can be most anything.

It’s said that Moody once confronted Spurgeon, pointing at his cigar and saying that it wasn’t honoring to God. Spurgeon responded by poking Moody in his rather round stomach and saying that it wasn’t honoring to God either.

It’s hard to keep our preferences to ourselves. I get that. Some of those things are so personal and our reasons are so spiritual to us that we get the idea that others are sinning if they don’t do them. That’s why Paul’s advice is so important to us. He’s giving us a way to deal with it. It may not be the answer we want, or the one that’s expedient to our circumstances, but it’s what God told him to say.

We lack respect for one another to a humungous degree in the church. Our personalized Christianity becomes the only one that we can imagine one having, and that’s not cool. We’ve got to respect the weak brother and the weak brother has got to respect the strong. Why? Because we’re family, and God said so!

Unless someone is going around telling others that they’ve got to do something aside from accept God’s free gift of Salvation to belong to God, then we need to chill. It’s not our job to make everyone like us. We’re not policemen, we’re brothers and sisters. So assigning ourselves the duty of correcting every nonessential is both a waste of time and disruptive to the community of believers we should be. Doctrine should be kept pure, but whether someone wears jeans to church or votes Democrat should be something we shrug at and move on.

Love is how Jesus said the world we know we belonged to him. A supernatural, otherworldly love that overlooks the things that the world deems important. A love that transcends, race, creed, sex, religion or political party. We’re so bad at that. I’m writing this because I’m so bad at it and I do my best thinking on paper, and I’m hoping I’ll say something inspiring to myself here.

I want so badly for us to fall in love with each other. And that doesn’t begin with the other guy. It’s on my shoulders and I want to take that responsibility very seriously. I want to love you, warts and all. I want to care about your soul whether you agree with me or not on any given subject. I want to love the jerks and the selfish and the rude and the disingenuous because Jesus loves me and I’m made up of far worse adjectives than those. I’m so not there, but God knows I want it (well, sometimes). And that’s all I’ve got to give. But, with Jesus, it’s enough.

Photo used under CC

Christian Life

10:45:00 PM

 

Guest Post by Erik Guzman

A publisher asked me to write a book on living sober. I laughed… out loud, right there in the publishing meeting. The publishing folks just smiled and stared. It turns out they were serious.

When I told my wife about the request, she laughed too. “Don’t you have to stop drinking to write a book about living sober?” she asked. I poured myself a glass of wine and said, “We’ll see.”

I like to drink. I enjoy drinking beer, wine and whiskey. I like to drink with friends. I like to have a couple drinks with dinner and then stop. Sometimes I drink way too much. Sometimes I drink on the weekends. Sometimes I drink every night of the week. Sometimes I don’t drink for a year; sometimes longer.

There are aspects of living with and without alcohol that I love and hate. I’ve been open about that on our talk show and in what I’ve written for Key Life. I suppose that’s what started this talk about me writing a book on sobriety.
Here’s the deal, with all the ways I've abused alcohol, and all the fights that it has caused between me and my wife, I have never been able to take the first step in Alcoholics Anonymous:

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”
 – The Big Book of AA

Yes, as a husband and father, I have been concerned about my excessive drinking, but after a lot of counseling, I don’t believe I’m an alcoholic; a self-medicating manic-depressive, but not an alcoholic. I just can’t admit that I’m impotent to control the way I drink or don’t drink.

I am willing to admit I may be living in denial. Maybe I just haven’t hit rock bottom yet. I may be lying to myself. But I doubt it. Why? Because with all my faults, I really do live sober.

What is Living Sober?

When it comes to drinking, I can stop at one or go without. However, I am aware that many can’t make that statement. Maybe you are one of those people. If so, you need to know that I have no intention of attempting to universalize my relationship with alcohol.

Living sober is another matter entirely. The need for sobriety is universal.

Living sober is way more than putting down the bottle. Any drunk will tell you that being dry is not the same as living sober.

To put it succinctly, living sober means embracing reality.

Sobriety is not simply about a compulsion or relationship with a substance, but a relationship with ultimate reality that quenches our thirst. To live sober strikes at the heart of what it means to be fully human.

The psychiatrist and therapist, Carl Jung, wrote this in a letter regarding an alcoholic patient of his:

“His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God ... You see, ‘alcohol’ in Latin is ‘spiritus’ and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.”

Spiritus contra spiritum means “spirituality against spirits,” and this concept is the seed that ultimately grew into Alcoholics Anonymous. The 12 steps guide the addict toward spiritual awakening. The guys who started AA knew that the only way to combat the lesser spirits is with the Spirit, and that is just another way of saying we need to combat the counterfeit with reality. We need to live sober.

True spirituality is simply desperation. We are all desperate to experience the transcendent, and when we don’t find that experience in dirt-under-our-fingernails reality, we look for it elsewhere.

When we give ourselves to the lesser spirits, our lives become unmanageable. But when, in our desperation, we give ourselves to the Spirit who loves us unconditionally and hovers over our dark emptiness, ultimate reality invades our lives and brings order from chaos.

The radically good news is that transcendence is ours for the taking by faith. Jesus said, “…the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out” (John 6:37). And what do we experience when Jesus receives us? Nothing short of union with the Trinity! Jesus told the Father, “…the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one” (John 17:22-23). This is the thirst-quenching living water of ultimate reality.

As a fallen creature without the Spirit, I am weak, needy and susceptible to alcohol abuse. But as a creature in communion with his creator, I have embraced reality by faith. I am sober. I am the image of God, filled with his Spirit, and by his strength in my weakness, I can enjoy making good choices. I’ve proven that over and over again. Yes, sometimes as a child of God I choose to disobey my loving Father who wants the best for me. But I never stop being his child, and that is sobering. My life is certainly not without its sin or struggles, but by God’s grace, living in union with the Spirit, life is quite manageable.

Embracing the Pain and Pleasure of Reality

Reality is infected with the pain of what we’ve done, what we’ve left undone, and what’s been done to us. Reality is also overflowing with the Spirit, God’s merciful presence, all of the undeserved blessings and joys in life, and on top of that, access to the Godhead and the ultimate redemption of the worst evil this bent world can dish out. Sobriety is letting all that hit you with full force.

Sharon Hersh is a therapist and an expert on addiction. She’s also one of my counselors (and she agrees I’m probably not a drunk, so there). Anyway, Sharon says that addicts believe two things that fuel their destructive behavior. The addict believes she deserves relief, and that she should be able to choose when and how she gets it. In that sense, we’re all prone to addiction.

We all construct barriers out of behaviors that provide protection from pain, but these walls also cut us off from all that we were created to enjoy. That’s easy to see in the behavior of an addict, but it also happens when we misuse religion, shopping, power, sex, achievement... pick your prison. We’re all users and abusers, but addiction sets in when we abandon reality in exchange for self-protection. We can’t selectively numb out, the ache and the ecstasy both go when we give up on reality. When we become addicted to providing our own relief, paradoxically, pleasure is drained from our lives.

Living sober in union with the Spirit is the alternative. Granted, we can never be completely free from addictive tendencies. In fact, realizing that we can’t perfect ourselves is part of sobriety; it’s dealing with a hard reality. However, we can move forward into greater degrees of sober living. To do that, we have to be willing to let the waves of pain knock us down, so the pleasure can wash over us.

It’s scary. We have to own all the ways we’ve hurt ourselves and others. We have to name all that we’ve lost, mourn and ultimately accept that it’s gone. We have to trust we really are one with God, give ourselves to the cycle of death and resurrection, let go and hope for redemption. We have to face the fear that relief may never come, and then choose to trust the Spirit.

When we ignore the reality of our pain and the presence of the Spirit, we feel alone, aching for the transcendence that’s ours if we would only believe it. Refuse to embrace the pain and pleasure of ultimate reality and what’s left except to seek relief from the lesser spirits?

It’s so tempting to settle for comforting ourselves. But remember, true spirituality is simply desperation. Nobody is as spiritual as the addict who has encountered the futility of self-satiation. If you’ve come to the end of yourself (alcoholic or not), what have you got to lose? Why not face reality and take a step of faith toward sobriety?

Daring to Believe

Here’s where it gets messy. There’s an exhortation in 1 Corinthians that contains a hidden hope:

“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not!”
– 1 Corinthians 6:15

Before that verse, the apostle Paul just got done telling the Corinthians that all things were lawful, but not necessarily helpful. Then he brings up picking up a hooker. Certainly there are some negative consequences at this point, but those consequences do not include God leaving the believer. In fact, he says that believers are so “one” with Jesus, that if we have sex with a prostitute, Jesus is having sex with a prostitute. He goes on to remind believers that we are the temple of the Spirit.

Isn’t that great news? The ultimate reality of your union with God can’t be undone by your bad choices! Even if you’re drunk right now, God is right there with you, loving you no matter what.
That will drive uptight religious people nuts, but if you’re an addict who has tried to quit over and over and over again, that will give you some hope in the midst of all the shame and guilt.

“For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
– Romans 8:38-39

Spiritus contra spiritum! Focus on the joy of your union with God instead of what you just drank and it will lessen the attraction to your addiction (especially if the bottle is making your life unmanageable).
Will you dare to believe that you already have the transcendence you’re looking for in that bottle? Will you dare to thank him with lips wet with whiskey? If so, you may not stop drinking right away, but you will begin to live sober... and you will always be as loved and as close to the Father as Jesus is.

Read the follow-up piece to Drunk Believers, Pain is Your Friend.

Addiction Guest Blogger

3:35:00 PM

I struggle a lot with my faith. Not so much belief—although I do have those struggles too—but how I present it. I sincerely feel as though a lot of Christians are presenting some important ideas about the character of God in horrible ways.

They’re not heretics or anything, but…

 …What the church at large is teaching about God is often heterodoxy (that’s just a fancy word for wrong.) So, I have a lot of trouble identifying as a ‘Christian.’

It’s not because I’m ashamed of God. I’m ashamed of how God is perceived. Even though not even most Christians are like this, I’m ashamed of being grouped with the loudest, most hateful, angry group who are known more for what they are against than Who they are actually for. I wish not to be dismissed out of hand simply because of a title. So, it makes it difficult for me to categorize myself.

I’m surely not going to stop following God because some of those who call themselves Christians are making us all seem like uninformed, uneducated mental dwarves. I mean, if cheese got a bad rap I most certainly would not stop eating delicious, delicious cheese. And my faith is far more vital to me than congealed dairy products. (Delicious, delicious congealed dairy products.)

It’s difficult to be honest about my struggles because people want to beat you up for being human. They want to say you don’t have enough faith or that you aren’t mature in the faith, with the insinuation being that they are. But that’s okay. I want my faith to be clear and unsullied by all that stuff. I want to separate myself from their dogma while still acknowledging them as my family. My well-meaning family who are, in their own way, trying to live out their faith.

I guess I just wish to be authentic. I’ve been hungry to be that for a lot of years. I’ve worn a lot of masks over time. But I’ve gotten better. I don’t have it all together. I know that I’m not any better than those Christians who are misrepresenting God as a heartless tyrant who only wants you to toe the line. I’m just as neurotic as anybody else, Christian or not.

And I think that’s the point.

We think we’re somehow better than the rest of the world because we follow Jesus. Or that we’re somehow better than other Christians because we follow Jesus better. We’re not, and that’s the whole idea. We are, as someone has said, just beggars telling other beggars where we found bread. We’re the broken, telling the broken that there is a Great Physician. So, to anyone who made you think God was an animal, I’m sorry. To anyone that I’ve ever misrepresented God to, I’m sorry too. The truth is that God accepts all of us just where we are. If you’re going to change, it won’t be you, ultimately who does the changing, it will be Him. But, if you belong to Him, if you never change, he won't accept you any less as His child.

The truth is: you are loved. Period.

If you don’t believe me (and I don’t blame you if you don’t), ask God. Sincerely. If He’s not there, He won’t answer. Simple enough. But if He is, and you genuinely seek Him, it will be the most important thing you ever do.

Just one Christian’s advice.

Photo used under CC

Christian Life

6:58:00 PM

Preston Sprinkle, whom I interviewed here, recently wrote a post (here) about whether “feeling called” is a biblical concept. You should go read it—after you finish reading this work of amazing insight and profundity, of course—so I won’t go into great detail here here. But, his conclusion is that it’s probably not so much a biblical concept (especially not in the way we think of it), and perhaps even a little dangerous (On which he promises to expand upon later).

I tend to agree with Dr. Sprinkle (whose name sounds like a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic character when it's said like that. …Sorry, man). I think we over-spiritualize our faith to the point that it becomes about our personal feelings more than demonstrable, biblical truth. Due to a lot of wonky teaching, we tend to equate what we believe about God and God’s Word with God’s authoritative truth. In other words, we are afraid to question anything that we firmly believe because we feel like we’re questioning God. That creates this nebulous fear of God and an absolute acceptance of anything we view as coming from Him.

We also have this strange heritage that leads us to believe that everything we experience is a spiritual sign. (Every day your car won’t start is God saving you from a potential wreck—rather than poor maintenance on your part or a lemon battery. Every missed opportunity was God telling us we didn’t need that opportunity—rather than poor planning or readiness on our part. Worse, every crappy marriage is God telling us to move on—rather than seeking help in whatever capacity is needed.) We believe that every stray thought we have is God, or angels, demons or even dead relatives whispering in our ears.

With all that said, I am certainly not against the idea of the Spirit of God speaking to us, or God working in our lives. I recently had a life-altering experience that called on me to trust what God was doing in my life. I’m not saying God doesn’t speak. I’m saying that God lives in the practical decisions of everyday life as much—if not more—than the mystical ones we attribute to him directly. I’m saying, it’s too easy not to take responsibility for our actions when “God told us to it” is our excuse. Sometimes, perhaps often, our “feeling called” is just our preference rearing its head. As Preston pointed out by way of example, those who went into the ministry in the bible weren’t following some mystical call. The bible says they desired to be pastors, ...so they did it. (1 Timothy 3:1)

“Love God and do as you please” is not a bible verse either, but I think it comes closer to the truth than mere feelings. Doing what we love in the boundaries of knowing what pleases God is a much more valid system to live life by than ephemeral emotion. Because the problem with feelings is that they do change. And, as I mentioned, a lot of what we call feelings are just our preferences couched in spiritual language. We know we’re supposed to trust God with our life decisions, so we feel better confusing our desires (and, sometimes, our lack of desire—if we’re feeling “extra spiritual”) with God’s command.

By over-spiritualizing everything—equating feelings and coincidence with commands and providence—we are, I fear, often going places and believing things which are not ideal for us. We’re playing prophet and, often, being proved false.

Photo used with permission under CC

Christian Life

10:45:00 PM

Sometimes I think about David. Dancing violently before God. The image speaks to me. And so does the one after it. David’s wife, Michal, embarrassed by her husband, a king, dancing like an idiot in the streets, wearing something a simple priest might wear, not a leader.

That story, over and over, is the story of the follower of Jesus. So full of joy, soon extinguished by the embarrassed, proper religious types.

Worthless Spirituality

A friend told me about a sort of spiritual retreat his young daughter went on at the religious school she attends. She came back confused and upset because others seemed to be having these emotional experiences with God and feeling His presence, while she was just sort of bored. It made her question her relationship with God.

Christians can make you feel as though you should be doing and feeling certain things or you must not really love Jesus.

For instance, when we don’t read our bibles every day or get up at the crack of dawn to talk to God (Because, those are His clearly posted office hours, people!) then we start to think that maybe we aren’t good enough, and maybe, just maybe, we never had a relationship with him at all.

The lies goes: you gotta be doing the things I think you gotta do to get the feelings I feel or you must not be connected to God the way I am.

When we believe that lie, and we don’t get the results people holier than us tell us we should, we blame ourselves.

What if I go to a prayer meeting and I don’t feel like praying? What does it mean if I’d rather read Neil Gaiman than the Bible tonight? Yes, I know attendance is low at the Wednesday night service, but I’d rather play Titan Fall with my friends. What does that mean? SWEET MERCIFUL MOSES! WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?!

What if it doesn’t mean anything?

If it just suggests that you’re a human being who doesn’t always feel like doing spiritual things. And remember this is just the way certain people define the term spiritual. It looks holy, but is worthless outside the context of our desire to do it. I mean, it could be that folding your laundry is a spiritual time for you. Perhaps you get far more out of bedtime prayers with your 2-year-old than you do with a piano playing softly in the background. Could be that you don’t have to feel guilty for reading Jodi Picoult sometimes instead of Leviticus.

I know some of you are already composing your angry responses. But I’m not saying some of those things we do aren’t important. I’m saying to get off the treadmill. I’m saying that your relationship with God isn’t a bookshelf from IKEA—it’s not a chore with a checklist of things to make sure you get it right. It’s a living, breathing relationship.

The Law is Ruthless

A friend of mine recently likened the Bible to love letters you might get from your wife. They’re so precious to you that you want to read them, you want to memorize them and have them near you at all times.

But what if someone were telling you that you weren’t reading them correctly? That you didn’t really love your wife if you weren’t reading those letters every day?

I’m not sure about you, but those words that had once meant so much to me would quickly sour.

The words in those letters didn’t stop being true, they didn’t stop having the power to inspire me. So, what happened?

The moment you turn joy into something which can only be achieved through a chore, it ceases being joy. It becomes a law, and the law is ruthless. The object of joy itself seems to become a taskmaster. Before, my love was freely welcomed, ferocious and had the entire universe in which to expand. It was wild and untamed.

Now it’s caged and domesticated because people don’t like wild and untamed.

We don’t like anything we can’t control, in fact.

So, we start reigning in that beast.

They say, “I know you think what you’re doing is love, but love is a discipline. Love is work!”

And we do want to love. We desire to please the object of our affection in the way in which the object of our affection most desires. But because that robust, exciting love has become a rote, serious chore that we constantly fear we are doing wrong (and often are), we start doubting our commitment to God, we start questioning every decision we make and every thought that we have.

And you can’t live like that for long. So, some decide they aren’t good enough and leave, and others, listening to these well-meaning voices, build a cage to house the idol that we have made of God. A tame version of the Lion of Judah, now only emerging at set intervals to meander toothless in front of an approving crowd before sighing and slipping once again, away.

Properly, with dignity and certainly not one ounce of impropriety.

And I think about David. Dancing, loud and embarrassingly joyful.

“Well, don’t you just look like the fool?”

          That’s the voice that we hear. Red-faced Michal, daughter of Saul.
          Say to it, as did David:

          That annoying, lying voice.

“And I’m willing,” and say it loud, with a lilt of musical joy in your voice, “to look even more foolish. This is love. That’s how it works.”

Let your love dance. Let it fall to your feet. Let it energize your heart and your hands to reach out to others so they too can know the joy of unfettered love.

Photo by Peverus used under CC

legalism

10:45:00 PM