Your Facebook Post is Useless.

At times it is hard to get on to Facebook.  What once was a fun way to let friends know about what is happening in our lives has turned into a forum where one million Joseph Goebbels spout their propaganda.  The statement “Hooray for our side” can sum up most of the messages on Facebook.

Facebook allows you to vent your spleen in ways that would be completely impossible a generation ago.  A generation ago it was impossible for the average person to insult someone 2000 miles a way with several dozen witnesses to the conversation.  In the past such conversations could have only happened in person and would likely have come to blows.  Facebook allows a near complete abandonment of civil discourse without the consequence of an old-fashioned tail whipping. 

With Facebook it is possible for a person to identify with people who share a conviction without actually knowing them.  The person who is on your side may or may not be a decent person, but as long as we agree we can like each other’s comments and post supportive emojies, thereby reinforcing our mutual convictions and allowing us in some way to feel superior.  Which leads us to being more impolite and rude to those we see as opposition, becoming harsher, and leading us to greater heights of feeling superior.  A vicious cycle develops in which the communication of Facebook, rather than drawing people closer, actually deepens division.  We are not experiencing any real dialogue.  We are watching or participating in digital screaming matches before an audience of partisans that we are hoping to impress. 

The siren song of a Facebook argument is extremely alluring.  I have on more than one occasion been pulled into various frays.  So I can speak with some authority that, if other humans are fallen like I am, a part of the motivation is to demonstrate our superior insight over an opponent.  I have found that those who are most active and most aggressive in their Facebook campaigns are the ones least willing to have conversation via private message.  “Why PM when no one can see the brilliance of my positions,” might be in the back of our minds.

So, let us be completely honest.   Your Facebook post is useless; it accomplishes nothing.

Instead of Facebook we need splagna!  “Splagna?” You say.  Literally, it means bowels or the inner part of the belly.  It came to mean ‘heart-breaking compassion’. 

At the end of Matthew 9 Jesus is going about doing good deeds, healing the sick, raising the dead and evicting demons.  As a result of acts of kindness the crowds followed Him.  That in and of itself is a message for the church in America.  But we will save that for another time.  Verse 36: Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd. 

That phrase felt compassion is the word splagna, the stomach-churning, emotional reaction to suffering.  The people are described as sheep that are harassed and helpless.  Like sheep whose lives are marked by the attacks of wolves the lives of these people were marked by the ravages of sin. 

When we see messed up people we tend to see the revolting behavior, while Jesus saw suffering people who were ruined by the power of sin.  We are ready to be a part of a march or a rally to denounce those engaged in sin.  We want to wave banners or form human chains to offer demarcation between the “Them” and ourselves.  And if we can’t do it in person we do it via social media posts.  We take a distinctly high, moral tone to any who would disagree with us.  We are right and curse on you and yours if you disagree with our convictions. 

Notice Jesus’ reaction.  While our response to the wrong behavior is to sign petitions, get out the vote, attend a demonstration, or post something on Facebook Jesus looks at messed up lives as something different. 

Then He said to His disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.  Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest.”

Jesus saw the symptoms of a messed up world as a call to prayer that the Lord of the Harvest would send out Harvesters.  Jesus saw the wretchedness of sin as a reason to ask for evangelistic workers.  deomai, beseech carries the connotation of binding oneself, in other words tying yourself to the Lord of the Harvest so that you are insistently begging for Him to send out the workers.

Join me in this momentary exercise. 

Step 1: Select the group you find most repugnant (Isis, BLM, Neo-Nazis, Antifa, White supremacist, etc. just pick one).  

Step 2: Ask yourself, “When was the last time I prayed for someone to take the Gospel to them?”  (Asking God to change them to be more like us is not what Jesus commanded)

Step 3:  If it wasn’t today, then it is time to ask why and maybe do a little repenting.

Step 4: While you’re talking to God about them ask Him to arrange an opportunity for you to lovingly serve them.

It is my conviction that we will accomplish more for the coming of the Kingdom by petitioning the Father than by arguing on Facebook.  Let’s save Facebook for Philippians 4:8-9 kinds of stuff, for suggested resources and helpful tools, for the recommendation of enjoyable books or great pet videos. 

Finally, if any of my former Facebook posts have offended you, please forgive me.  Don’t forget to check out my dog Mr. Bultitude.  

When you begin to "trend" up just walk away.

As you may have heard there is an effort by some Africian American pastors to organize a boycott of the NFL unless Colin Kaepernick is given a job with one of the NFL teams.  It is my opinion that Kaepernick’s unemployment has more to do with his on field performance than his politics.  The fact that his quarterback rating is down considerably from several years ago should not be lost in this conversation, rather than improve, his QB rating was down 20 points in his 5^th year from his 3^rd year level.  A quarterback that is inconsistent is deadly to his on offense and his career.  His lack of improvement may indicate lack of coaching and/or lack of focus or some other factor.  It is my firm opinion that if you can produce, the NFL is utterly unconcerned with what you are or what you believe.  Nevertheless, if people want to boycott the NFL go ahead.

Maybe all Muslim people should boycott the NFL until Az-Zahir Hakim is picked up from the Las Vegas Locamotives and returned to the league.  Maybe all homosexual people should do the same until Michael Sam returns to a team.  And no list of perceived snubbed players would be complete without Tim Tebow.  Would such a boycott be organized for evangelical Christians, white people, homeschoolers, or people who never drink Coke-a-cola? And if Manti Teʻo ever leaves the NFL all of us who had pretend girl friends ought to stop watching football.  That will certainly close down the league.

In a society that has developed a narcissistic epidemic everyone wants to be the center of attention.  Maybe we are organizing boycotts and social actions to gain attention for ourselves and for our opinions.  We have forgotten that our Lord seemed to take the opposite approach. 

Mark 1:5 speaking of John the Baptist says,

The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.

Later we read in John 4:1-3,

Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.

John was baptizing everyone and Jesus was gaining even more disciples.  Faced with growing crowds of listeners Jesus walked away.  He left the crowds and headed to a single conversation with a semi-single woman beside a well.  While His fame was trending up Jesus did the very opposite of what we teach, practice, and hope to accomplish. 

I am deeply concerned about what it means that we are forever trying to find a way to the top of the twitter feed, or the Facebook likes.  I fear that we are losing the ability to have the one on one conversation with people without the aid of or the insulation provided by social media.  We have become pretty good at picking sides and quarrelling for our side and doing it in such a way to get attention or likes.  As a 10 year old, little girl said, “When you get lots of likes you feel good about yourself.”  Clearly technology has its place.  But if virtual approval is what we are after we are in real trouble.

Let’s walk away from the crowd, especially on social media, and focus on the individual.  It will do more good for society as a whole and us as disciples.  

Why, "I look at porn", is not a confession!

The objective of confession is neither the revelation of sins committed nor to bring shame to the sinner.

Confession is to tell the truth about something.  In the context of our faith it is to tell the truth of not just what happened but the moral reality of the act, word or attitude.  Confession is to speak the truth and then take a firm stand on one side or the other, not simply to say there are two sides. 

To say “I look at porn” is not a confession.  It could be a simple statement of fact.  It could even be a boast.  It is not fundamentally different from saying, “I look at cars.”  It is only confession when there is a moral element involved.  It is not enough to say, “I look at porn and that is wrong.”  Confession needs three truth statements that are; admissions of the action, the evil of the action, and our personal guilt because we took said action.    Full confession might say, “I look at porn and looking at porn is evil and I am personally, morally guilty because I look at porn.” It is only confession if there is both the general moral element to the confession and a personal moral element.

In reaction to the Roman Catholic sacrament of confession the protestant and evangelical churches have down played confession.  We have reduced it to creedal statements of orthodox faith or of denominational loyalty or we have made it an ambiguous statement of the general condition of lostness.  Unwilling to get too personal or to insist on too much we dumb down confession to a level that is entirely acceptable to anyone.  A vague reality that we haven’t done very well at being good is enough.

When we confess we reinforce our commitment to one side or the other of a moral position.  Confession is both the verbalization of repentance and the reinforcement of repentance.   In confession we are taking on the moral stand and a commitment to the side opposed to evil.  Our words do not create the reality of the future, but they do reinforce and strengthen our resolve to the present loyalty.  Our words strengthen that inner part of us that formed the commitment those words reflect.

Let us digress into a football illustration.  Let’s suppose that you are a casual fan of a college football team, we will use Alabama to illustrate, but any team will do.  As a casual fan you begin to say “Roll Tide” to other Alabama fans.  You begin to respond to people in team tee shirts or who have decorations on their cars.  You buy a team tee shirt and put a window decal on your car.  You make a point to watch their games and cheer at their success.  You begin to sing, “Yea, Alabama”, and insert “Roll Tide Roll” in the appropriate places when you hear Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama.  You watch videos of the post game victory and chant “Rammer Jammer”.  If you do this for long, you will move from being a casual fan to a more determined fan.

Confession works in much the same way.  An honest, repeated commitment to a side reinforces our loyalty to that side.  Confession is more than, “I didn’t do very well”.  It is, “I have by my choices taken sides against a Holy God; it was evil and I was evil for doing so.”  Repentance without real confession is all but impossible.  Our soft selling confession may explain why the church is in such a mess today. 

Experience is the by-product not the objective.

How much of our faith/walk is about what we feel?  How often is it about the experience of the moment? How often is our faith about how we, in general, experience the world? If sentimentalism is the attempt to experience the emotion for the sake of the feeling or the emotion, how much of our faith has become religious sentimentalism? 

We are in danger at times of reducing our faith to sentimentalism revolving around an experience that we have in a religious context.  Carried to an extreme the experience can become an idol.  This idol of experience, at least at its first manifestation, appears to be orthodox.  But experience requires ever increasing novelty to remain an experience.  If the measure of the life of faith is the experience the pursuit of experience can and often will come at the expense of orthodox faith.  The ‘high’ becomes so important that minor compromises are made and they pile up on each other till they obscure any view of the Lord.  

It may be that by the time we realize that experience has become an idol we have passed the tipping point.  If the life of our church is built on experience and if we took away that narcotic we would lose our members.  We would have empty buildings with large budgets and no patrons to fund the cycle.  We feel we cannot cut off the flow of experience.  Additionally, to attract new patrons we have to take the experience to the level beyond every other church in town.  Caught on a hamster wheel we race and race and race hoping the next “WOW” will be enough.  At some point we realize that we are caught in an endless cycle of chasing an experience.

Please don’t think I am targeting anyone specific expression of the Christian faith.  We are all susceptible to this infection.  It can manifest in highly traditional churches where every sermon has to be a hotter, louder, and more fist-pounding version of an old fashioned, hell-fire and brimstone, revivalist message.  It comes in liturgical churches where the pomp and procession replace relationship and there needs to be ever larger clouds of incense.  It comes to preachers when we desire the accolades of people and sermons become a TED talk to enlighten and inspire.  Experience can even whisper to us if we are boring and dull and convince us that in the plain drabness of our faith suffering for Jesus is something we need to feel.  Anytime we anticipate a feeling as the measure of our faith we are in danger.

Interestingly, the greatest experience in the Bible appears to have been almost a bi-product of something else.  It looks as if it may have been anticipated but was not the objective.  In Luke 9:28, we read that Jesus went up the mountain to pray.  To pray is an aorist middle deponent infinitive.  Without getting too much in to Greek grammar the middle voice (according to Dana & Mantley): “is the use of the verb which describes the subject as participating in the result of the action.”  In this case, Jesus was going up the mountain to pray.

It would be a mistake to say that the transfiguration was nothing but a bi-product of Jesus’ time with the Father.  But it is entirely correct to say that if Jesus had not gone to be with the Father the transfiguration would never have happened.  The greatest “experience” in the Bible record was not the result of pursuing an experience.  Rather it happened because Jesus was meeting with the Father.

All the stuff is in and of itself neutral, neither negative nor positive, but it can never replace the passionate pursuit of the Father.  Experience if it aids is a blessing, but if it distracts us from our Lord or becomes a substitute it is a curse that will disappoint.