The soft answer is because it is hard. The hard answer is because we are soft. When I feel overwhelmed, and I do, when I feel like there’s just too much tension in my life, I often go back to D-Day. However difficult a situation might be, I’ve never been in that kind of situation. I do not struggle to understand why so many soldiers suffer from PTSD. I do struggle to understand why they all don’t. My hardships may seem more difficult than some other people’s but surely there are others whose hardship is more difficult than mine.
Perhaps, however, what makes it so difficult is the devil’s incessant attacks in the midst of hardship. He does not flee during hard times but attacks, pressing his advantage. He adds insult to injury by insisting that not only are we going through hardship, but that such proves that God is against us. It is one thing to have a health scare, one thing to have month left after the money is gone, but it is a whole other thing to have the Maker of Heaven and Earth see you as His enemy.
Which is why the solution to hardship is rarely to alleviate it. Instead the solution is always to repent and believe the gospel. We repent for, among other things, our ingratitude. So much of our hardship is grounded in a stubborn refusal to be grateful for the overwhelming blessings we already have. We look at the glass as half empty, forgetting not only that it’s half full, but that we are due no glass, no water and we are in no danger of literally dying of thirst. He leads us beside still waters, and we complain that we not on a tropical beach watching waves roll in. He brings us to green pastures and we grumble that it’s been a while since He gave us a sugar cube.
Repenting and believing the gospel go hand in hand. As we repent for our ingratitude we enter into gratitude, remembering that even if we are literally dying of thirst, when we are good and dead we’ll be warmly welcomed into paradise. We answer the devil’s accusations with God’s assurances. Not only does He not see me as His enemy but He tells me I am His son. Not only is He not pouring out His wrath on me, but has already poured out His wrath on His Son.
Which means that every hardship is a gift, the work of God in reshaping us into the glorious image of Jesus. Of course it hurts to have our rough edges sanded off. Hardships don’t come wrapped up as blessings. Often, in fact, they come from others who are intent on hurting you. None of which changes the truth that they are blessings and that they actually help us. Jesus always wins, and He is the one orchestrating all things. We do not simply grin and bear it. We do not either deny the pain. Instead we cry out to the One who loves us, trusting Him and giving thanks.
Even cowboys are sometimes Indians. The double cliché is that on the one hand the cowboys who opened up the American west were as wasteful as they were courageous, littering the great plains with the rotting carcasses of buffalo. We, or so we are told, took the choicest cuts, and left the rest. Indians, on the other hand, are said to have been a rather resourceful lot, who found a use for everything in the buffalo, eating the meat, tanning the hides, even using the sinews and bones for sundry tools. The cowboys have now made it all the way to Hollywood, where they now likewise live lives filled with waste, creating trash culture that has as its defining quality it is consumable. Pop culture, Ken Myers sagely argues in All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: The Christian and Pop Culture is something to be used, and then to be discarded. Like the first two of the three little pigs, the purveyors of pop culture have no care for tomorrow, and live only for today.
Which is why it is so odd that they are so often mining yesterday. Pop culture, for all its lack of a sense of history, for all its lack of a sense of the future, is positively giddy about nostalgia. And often that nostalgia is directed at itself. Pop culture in our day is a bastard child consuming its inattentive parents. Like the Indians, every pop culture form is put to use in creating and marketing every other pop culture form. Our commercials have as their soundtrack the pop songs of the generation before. Our blockbuster movies are made from the comic books two generations back. We tune our televisions to the TVLand, and Boomerang, cable networks that thrive on bringing us again what we once watched as kids. We have magazines about television programs, television programs about pop music, and reality shows about the real lives of people who once starred on other reality shows. Pop culture, having served us a steady diet of the thin gruel of pop culture lies, now sells us the lie that we can go back home again.
And Christians may be pop culture’s best customers. Because the culture’s moral standards have been in freefall for decades, there is something quaint and reassuring about older pop culture. Surely it is more healthy to feed on Leave It to Beaver than those kids from South Park. Surely the Little House dvd set won’t be as destructive as keeping up to speed with NCIS. Which shows again how we are far too easily satisfied. A cleaner consumable culture is still a consumable culture. You are surely more likely to get sick eating a Twinky that has been dropped on the bathroom floor, but such doesn’t mean eating Twinky’s that are clean will make you healthy.
A sound understanding of culture will indeed include a healthy sense of nostalgia. That is, the opposite of eating our parents isn’t eating our children. It is instead honoring our parents. Neither folk culture nor high culture are formed by revolution, by despising the wisdom of our parents, but are instead driven and directed by our parents. We take what we are given culturally speaking, and we move forward with it, rather than kick against it. We practice, in other words, reformation. We keep the baby instead of recycling the bath water. If we want to encourage the building of things that will last, we have to buy things that will last. If we want a culture worth passing along, we need to see culture as something to be received, rather than something to be consumed.
Herein may be the difference. Those outside the kingdom of God move from evil to evil. That is, they are born sinners, but enjoy for a time a stronger hand of restraint. Small children can be selfish, but as a rule don’t have much opportunity to pillage and plunder. Thus for them, the younger they are the more relatively innocent. Looking backward for them means looking toward a time when they were better than they are now. We are in the opposite situation. We are getting better all the time. We are growing closer to what we were made to be. Every day in every way we are getting better and better. We ought then to be looking forward, even as we look back with gratitude toward those who went before us. We, according to our story, began in paradise, and will end in paradise. They, according to their story, began in a fortuitous collision of time, energy and chance, and end once again as dust. We look to better things, they look to annihilation.
We ought to be stunned, and in turn filled with an unshakable joy as we consider how far God stooped to redeem us. God, after all, so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him would not perish but have eternal life. While we were yet sinners Christ died for us. He came less to rescue us from the evil hag, more to rescue us, the evil hag. May we never lose sight of the depth of our desperation- we were dead in our trespasses and sins, nor the reach of His grace- He made us alive, nor the fullness of His promise- we will see Him as He is.
That said, the glory of our first rescue should never obscure from our sight the glory of our ongoing rescue. That is, the astonishing grace does not cease at our salvation. Because neither does our sin stop at our salvation. He continues to pursue us, because we are ever so prone to wander.
There is something profoundly moving about Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, leaving the 99 to go find and bring back the one. I feel the tenderness of His touch as I picture that wayward lamb, safe across His shoulders as He returns to the fold, smiling. What is all too easy to miss, however, is that it is, in this context, a lamb that He went in search of. Have you ever considered that? This is not a picture of Jesus out in pursuit of His enemies, of Jesus raising from spiritual death those buried in their own sins and enmity against the Father. This is not the good shepherd chasing down a goat and by the power of the Holy Spirit turning it into a lamb. This wayward one had already been won. This word picture, from His own lips, is about the lengths Jesus will go to rescue those He has already rescued.
We, for whom the Shepherd has already laid down His life, who already have been led beside still waters and feasted upon green grass, who have already been lovingly held against His bosom, leave. Depart. Wander off. Seek out water that does not slake and grass that is poison. We, who have been given the gift of life, twice, walk away from the one who not only made us, but who gave up His own life that we might live again. We, like our mother Gomer, go back out on the streets and give ourselves to those who abuse us for their own pleasure.
And He chases us down. Not to execute vengeance against us, but to pour out His love on us. He washes our muddy, bloody, filthy wool until it gleams again. And He puts us back into the fold, where we are safe, secure, under His loving watchful gaze. The grace of God that redeems us is beyond our imagination. The grace of God that sustains us, that seeks us, that binds us, only He understands.
We, after all, affirm the same book. We, after all, are indwelt by the same Spirit. We, after all, are being remade into the same image. So why is it that we can’t seem to agree?
The short answer is sin. Though our sins are forgiven, though sin no longer has dominion over us, though sin is daily being mortified in us, it yet remains, and has power. Which leads us to disagreements, to failures to submit to the Word of God in all that it teaches. How does sin lead us to disagree? Here are a few ways.
1. Self-interest leads us into error. We tend to choose our convictions not on the basis of arguments in their favor, but rather based on what the convictions will do for us. This could be something as crass as, “If I embrace the view that babies are blessings from God’s hand I would have babies and lose my figure” to something far more subtle, “If I reject dispensational eschatology I won’t get invited to speak at eschatology conferences.”
2. Pride leads us into error. We tend to choose our convictions based on how they make us feel about ourselves. First, if I have to change my mind about x, that means I was once wrong about x. Second, if I have to change my mind about x right after you debated with me on the subject, it means I lost a debate. Here too, however, we face more subtle temptations. Pride may lead me to think, hopefully subconsciously, “If I embrace a young earth view no one will take me seriously as a scholar.” (To be fair, it can also work the other way, “If I don’t stick to a young earth view all my friends will think me a compromiser and a denier of the Bible.”)
3. Sloth leads us into error. We tend to choose our convictions the same way water chooses its path- we go where there is the least resistance. More often than not it is easier to keep our old convictions than to change them. Not studying an issue is easier than studying an issue. Being less than deliberate takes less effort than being deliberate.
4. Sloppy thinking leads us into error. This is still the fruit of sin. Since the fall our minds have been fallen as well. We tend toward error simply because we are fallen. In the same way our bodies stumble, sometimes our minds stumble. In the same way we make mistakes doing simple math, sometimes we make mistakes in simple logic.
5. Finally, misplaced loyalty can lead us into error. Here we believe what we believe because we love whom we love. We fear disappointing family, friends, previous teachers if we depart from what they taught us. Loyalty, all things being equal, is a good thing. But not so much when it leads us to believe bad things.
We do err, and we will err. We would, if we could, of course, jettison all the errors that plague us. Trouble is, to our fallen minds the errors we believe look to us much like the truths that we believe. We do indeed have a perfect book. We are indeed indwelt by a perfect Spirit. We are indeed being remade into a perfect image. Which gives us cause to celebrate and give thanks. While we do disagree, what we share in common in the body is greater than what divides us. May we all pray to the Spirit that we would better believe the Word that we would better reflect the Son.
I don’t much care for physics. Never did. That, of course, doesn’t keep me from being grateful for physicists, and for engineers. This message has reached you through the labors of men who do care about such things. But usually when physicists start talking about wormholes, or engineers start talking about heat transfer rates, my mind begins to wander.
In like manner I have precious little time for books, articles, seminars about “leadership.” It strikes me as profoundly odd that “leadership” has become its own area of study, its own skill set, its own industry. I recognize, of course, that leadership is a real thing, a valuable thing. I have people in positions of leadership over me, and in turn I am a position of leadership over others. That said, it may be a sure sign of leadership failure on my part but I have never thought to myself, “I need to learn how to be a better leader.”
The questions I seek to ask myself when evaluating my interaction with those under my authority are far more fundamental, far more basic. I want to know if I encouraged my charges on to righteousness. I want to know if I treated them as I wish to be treated. I want to know if I exhibited patience with their frailties. I want to know if I was willing and eager to forgive, as I would like to be forgiven. In short, the measure of my “leadership” isn’t found in how well I measured up to some guru’s principles. Instead it is measured by how well I measure up to my Lord’s commands. To put it another way, I am far less worried about how I lead God’s people and far more worried about how well I follow God’s Son.
I fear that the seeming obsession the broader culture has with “leadership” as a concept, and the concomitant obsession of the church with the same theme is not a good sign. Given the lopsided attention given to leadership, isn’t it likely that we all give short shrift to our calling to follow not just Jesus, but those whom He has placed in authority over us? What does it say about us that while the Bible does from time to time talk both about leading and following, all our attention is on leading? Are we listening with lopsided ears?
Even when we get closer to getting it right we get it wrong. We talk about servant leadership, which on its face is indeed a good thing. But doesn’t that suggest that the reason we follow, or serve, is so that we can lead? What about servant servantship? If service is merely a means to the end of becoming leaders, if we race our brothers to the back of the line because we all desperately want to be at the front of the line, if we give with our right hand so that we might receive with our left, we’re not following Jesus aright. Followers, of course, don’t often write books or lead seminars on following, or on anything else for that matter. But that’s okay. We don’t become good followers by following a good follower. We become good followers by following the Good Leader.
