Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The Doors

Has this happened to you before?

Say you attempted to join your church's year long plan to read the whole Bible and you started out strong. The first week, you follow the schedule to a "T" and your relationship with God is just soaring! Week two comes and you're starting to falter.  You're read about 3, maybe 4 days out of the week. By week three, you're barely crawling, You're reading maybe once, at the most. At that point, how do you feel? Most likely horrible. Not many of us like to commit to a task, only to fail so early on. The bigger question should be," How do we respond?"

There are two doors that people usually open in response to a failure in any spiritual discipline. Its not just in reading the bible, it could be in prayer, or meditation, or quiet times, etc.


Behind Door #1 is the attitude of "Try Harder!" Behind that door, people don't sympathize with you, but rather critique you. They put you through a guilt trip.  According to them, you just didn't give it a good enough try. "Really put some effort into it," they would say, or "have you tried reading the Bible early in the morning like Jesus would have done?" But...should Christianity be a "try harder, do better, just need to mentally convince myself to love it more so that I somehow can become more spiritual like everyone I see at church and thus, will be able to read my Bible everyday" religion? I don't think so (Phil 2:8-9)



Behind Door #2 is the attitude of "Don't Try!" Behind this door are people who espouse the idea that you need to "let go and let God." The idea here is that you are trying too hard. You need to just stop trying and allow God to work in you, to bring you to a place where you can, in this example, read the Bible every day. There is an imagery of us just lying in bed and saying,"Ok God...do your work on me. Make me into a mature, spiritual giant!" I don't know about you, but that just sounds lazy! While we cannot rely on our own strength, there must effort from our side. This doesn't sound quite right either (James 2:24, 26).


Most of the times, we stop at these two doors and either try harder or stop trying. However, there is a third door that Paul seems to advocate from the New Testament.




Behind Door #3 is the attitude of "Train Yourself." The idea here isn't that you're unspiritual and thus you need to try harder. Its not that you're trying too hard and that you need to just stop trying and allow God to work. The idea here is found in  1 Timothy 4:7:

Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather, train yourself for godliness. 

We also find this idea of training in 1 Tim 4:6, 2 Tim 3:16, Heb 5:14, Heb 12:11 and Titus 2:12. Dr. Roy King defined training as "doing what I can do, in order to increase my capacity to be able to do, what I cannot do, by just trying."

So, if you are desire to grow in the spiritual disciplines....to be able to pray deeper and longer, to be able to spend time in God's word every day for an hour, to be able to wake up and have a quiet time with God in the morning...instead of trying to run that "marathon without first training," first train. That might mean just praying a minute every day to begin. This could mean reading 1 chapter out of the New Testament every other day to start. Find where you're at and then take baby steps. No Olympic athlete got their gold medal without first training and neither will we.


So next time you "fail," what door are you going to enter?

Thursday, October 13, 2011

The Church = multiethnic

In class the other day, an interesting question was posed: does every church need to be multi-ethnic in order to be considered biblical?

My initial answer would be no. I think back on all the chinese churches that I've visited or been a part of. Are they not part of the true church? Is it so bad that they are mostly chinese? While I think being multi-ethnic would be good, I think the Chinese churches do a great job of reaching out to Chinese immigrants. If those churches were white or black, I doubt their ministry to the immigrants would be effective. The same would go with the Chinese Church trying to reach out to a black community.

On the other hand... doesn't Jesus teach that the gospel transcends race? If the gospel transcends race, shouldn't our churches? And didn't Paul rebuke Peter for disassociating himself with the Gentiles? How many times do we read in the New Testament about how the Jews and Greek Christians needed to love one another and to live in peace and unity? So, in that sense, our really ethnic chinese churches need to become more diverse and intermingle with Christians of different races, so that our unity, despite our diversity, can be evidences of God's glory!

But, on the other hand, I can't help but wonder if all this talk I hear in Christian circles about how God loves diversity, and how because "every knee will bow and every tongue will confess," our churches need to representative of that (instead of just sticking to our race), is a result of our current culture. We live in a post-modern society in which diversity is celebrated. Does that play a part in the church's current emphasis on diversity?

In the end, although much more could be said on this, I think its important to think about whom we are reaching out to. I think Chinese church need to stay chinese (at least for 1st gen), because they do a great job of reaching out to Chinese immigrants. For a young church in the city, I think its important to be diverse ethnically, because thats the culture of the young professionals.

No matter what we decide our churches should be like, we ought to keep this in mind...

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. -Gal 3:28