TheyCallMePastorBryan

I have barely updated in the past week.  For some reason, it feels as if mid June to mid July will be the busiest time of the year for me this year.  This weekend I was in Spokane for Hoopfest.  It was a lot of fun, though we were definitely on the receiving end of an old fashioned beat down for one game.  I was also able to go to a cousin’s wedding.

I’ve had a lot of thoughts flying around lately, and I’m hoping I’ll have some time this week to pen a few of them on the blog.  But for now, we will have to live with a couple pictures my mom took over the weekend (possibly more pictures coming from another source later).

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The conversation about worldliness that I started last week has made me spend a little time reflecting on how our understanding of worldliness effects other thoughts, and especially our thought on holiness.  We will almost always define holiness and worldliness in regards to each other.  So if my definition of worldliness is a set of actions, holiness will be an opposite set of actions, if it is an attitude, holiness will be the opposite attitude, etc.

I was looking through some of the old posts from the Anchor blog and discovered a post about holiness dealing with some similar things.  I feel like my writing style has changed some over the duration of time since the Anchor blog, but I felt like the post was important enough to ressurect(albeit with some editing ).  This will probably be the longest post I will have on here in a while, but I think it gets at some interesting ideas.  Without further ado, this is “Reclaiming Holiness.”

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A pastor who I value, once told me “if we are just trying to be the anti Church, we as leaders will become the antiChrist”. In other words, we can’t just deconstruct for the sake of deconstructing, but rather if we are to deconstruct, it is to reconstruct. I want to keep coming back to the quote from Augustine: “The church is a whore, but she is also my mother.” We must keep this tension in mind as we seek to address problems in the church. We never give criticism solely to criticize, but to build towards something better..

Jeff’s last post brought up the issue of holiness, an issue that God has been working on my heart about for a long time now. Too many times our idea of holiness has become a list of do’s and don’ts. Do give to the church, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t watch rated R movies, etc.

When we talk about issues of holiness, we must primarily look at how the Bible looks at holiness(particularly through the lens of Jesus). In this sense, it is my conviction that at the root of the Gospel is the message that as humans, apart from God we live in sin. This sin starts as self love, loving ourselves as more important than God, and more important than others.

In the gospels we have the story of how Jesus comes to earth. Jesus continues the revelation of the Old Testament, a revelation which reveals a God that is entering into relationships with people- a God in stark contrast to most religions which see their god(s) as angry and needing to be appeased. Even in the Old Testament, we see a God who has come to man first, a God who seeks us out because He knows that we will not turn to Him of our own will. A God that allows us to freely turn away from Him if we so choose. Jesus continues that revelation and shows even more deeply how God is willing to enter into our context, so that we might be able to come back to Him. In this sense, Jesus’ entire life plays a role in the Gospel. He entered into our story, went through what we go through, that He represented God’s love through healing the sick and casting out demons, through the acceptance of the outcast and the “sinner.” In this He points towards the true way, a way that rejected the guards around the law that the Pharisees and Sadducees had constructed, and throughout He forgave people of sins and called them to changed lives as they experienced relationship with Him. In this way, Jesus embodied the law of the Old Testament serving as an example of it. And He clarified the Law, that central to it was the idea that we love God with every part of ourselves, and secondly that we love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. And yet Jesus showing God’s love was not over, for He knew that we would continue to be enslaved to sin. He was crucified on a Roman cross, dying the death of a criminal. Three days later, He rose victoriously from the dead. Through His death, He provided forgiveness of sins. Through His resurrection, victory over the power of sins. Because of that death and resurrection we are all invited into relationship with God. And as being people in relationship, we are identified as disciples, students of the Way that Jesus taught. To help us in this, God sends the Holy Spirit to live inside of us to assist us in the Christian life, to communicate God’s love to our hearts, and to guide us from sin and into Truth. This is the Gospel that is central to the Christian life, and must be the foundation point from which we talk about living holy lives.

What does this all mean then in regards to holiness? I believe that the fact that Jesus was willing to identify with the “unclean” and the “sinners” means that our view of holiness being disassociation with all things sinful is blatantly wrong. Jesus in the Gospel of John prays that God would keep us in the world, though we are not of the world. So our view of holiness that says “stay away from everything that is bad, don’t even do something that might look bad” does not seem to fit with the picture of Jesus. I believe instead, that our holiness starts first and foremost with relationship to God through Jesus. Holiness starts with this mystic relationship-this relationship where God is ever present, ever speaking in our lives. Prayer is the foundation of the holy life. After prayer comes Bible. For many of us, we are sick of these because it seems that they are prescribed always. Let me clarify, I am not just saying read your Bible, because it is a magic formula, but prayerfully read your Bible. Read it in a way that you allow the Spirit to impact your life. Prayer and relationship to Jesus, is always a precursor to really understanding the Bible. It is always through us listening to the Holy Spirit that we are brought into truth. Even with these things, it cannot be a prescription, because we are in a relationship. For instance, a marriage cannot be watered down to x% sex, x% communication, x%budget and x%doing laundry. Neither can we water down our relationship to x% prayer, x% Bible, x% doing work, etc. That’s not the way relationships work. But until we approach our relationship with Christ as a relationship we will fail. A relationship always requires effort, always requires time, always requires intentionality.

So at the root of this issue of holiness is going deeper in relationship. There are however other things. As Americans, and even worse as people from the Pacific Northwest, we see ourselves as independent – what we do only effects us, everything we get is the product of ourselves first, we can exist outside of relationships with others, we can be fine by ourselves. The Christian life informs us that we can’t live this way. The Christian life is always in community with other believers. We don’t let this be an excuse to never talk to non-believers, we must identify with non-believers. However we are designed to live in community and to help each other grow as we share what is going on. In this way we can be privileged to encourage others through the gifts of the Spirit. Just the other night with our college small group, there was a common theme of people being depressed or at least being pretty down. God gave me a message that was not the message I had prepared, and I was able to share that message, a message that encouraged others, and a message that encouraged me. I do not believe that would have happened had I only spent time with myself.

The last thing that I would like to share as we think through holiness is the issue of morality. We have become frustrated by a holiness that focuses solely on morality and how we act because it misses the point that holiness is first and foremost a relational issue. We cannot however just ignore morality. Though our acceptance in Christ is not in our actions, we must live lives that are in response to how God has accepted us. Part of the reality of the Gospel is that we have been made new creations. In this new nature, we are freed from sin- from this self love. So as Christians we must live in this tension, that on the one hand we are people who no longer sin, and yet we are still fleshly humans, who do desire to place ourselves as first. We must exhort each other to live lives moving away from these issues. It pains me to bring up issues, because I know by bringing these up, friends will think I am judging them. I am not. I sin just as much, but it kills me when I commit these actions, and I want to challenge you to use these moments when we are convicted of our sinfulness to drive us further into our relationship with Christ, rather than as moments of beating ourselves up for failing. Among the issues that I see our generation, even the Christians of our generation, struggle with: drunkenness- the Bible puts no injunction on having a drink, but drinking to get thrashed and not think about our problems or have an excuse to do things we are too smart to do sober is sinful and wrong, sexual sins – any sort of sex, outside of marriage is violating the way God designed us to live, idolatry- when anything becomes more important to us than God, this can include sports teams, or even tv shows, or relationships with others, gluttony- we violate the way we are designed to live, lying, stealing, this list could go on and on, because we all have a tendency to sin, because we want to love ourselves first and then God as he fits into our plans or is convenient. I certainly am not one who lives without sin, and I don’t want to make the Christian life be about some self-help behavior modification garbage, because it is not. But when we do run into these issues of morality, let’s use them to drive us further into relationship with Christ, lest we continue to crucify Christ over and over by purposely turning away from Him.

In all things, our holiness must mean that we seek to grow in relationship with Him. If we aren’t doing that, and if our holiness does not equip us to love others, it is a worthless holiness, it is rubbish. Let us instead pursue Christ that He might through the Spirit continue to transform our lives. We thank you Father for how you love us.

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Hey all, I wanted to give you a quick update on my life.  Compassion SE went really really well.  My team functioned awesomely, and really could have done the entire day of without me (for which I am grateful!)  Sunday morning at 6, I flew out from Portland, to go to LA.  I met up with Rob Fairbanks and a couple other CA folks and went to a church plant in downtown LA.  This church plant was very multi-ethnic and I was excited to see them doing it.

SCO is going well.  I had an intense(but very good) 2 hr interview this afternoon, and now I’m hanging out at Starbucks getting caught up on my internet stuff.  I’ve been taking notes of some thoughts I’d like to blog about.  In the mean time, if there’s anything that you’d like to see me write about, head on over to the suggestions page and comment what you’d like to read.

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Tomorrow is Compassion SE, and tonight is our last two volunteer orientation meetings.  I’m really looking forward to serving with everybody tomorrow and being able to respond to Christ’s love by loving our neighbors and helping those who can’t afford healthcare get the attention they need!

Since I probably won’t be writing much the next couple days, make sure you check out Braxton’s parable – Gethsemene and tell me what you think.

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