Making Men: Face-to-Face

I have a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and my own, personal web-site. I belong to LinkedIn, I regularly publish e-letters via Constant Contact, and I have to fight the urge to text while driving. In our home we have a wii, which I occasionally play, and an X-Box, which I have never played. I’m thinking about launching a YouTube site upon which I can publish videos of me saying and doing stuff. I’m learning to communicate on Skype, and I’m trying to figure out a way to do a virtual bible study, where people can all come together virtually instead of venturing out into the night. All this being said, we have a problem, people. Our young men are checking out of analog society and finding all they need in a virtual world. It is getting to the point where they would rather look at pornography than “deal with” a real relationship. They are becoming less and less equipped to deal with life face-to-face. Ladies, it is going to be increasingly harder to find a real man because we have stopped producing them.

I am a participant in the virtual worlds of social media, but I love to look people in their eyes and shake their hand. Being around real people energizes me. I hate dealing with important matters through e-mail and text. In fact, I won’t. Face-to-face we can pick up on facial gestures and tone. In an e-mail or text we have to infer those things and we can be really off-base. Young men today are growing up with a diminished capacity for reading facial expressions and body language.

I read some shocking statistics from Psychologist Philip Zimbardo (Leadership Journal, Fall 2011 edition, pg. 11) and I’ve posted his video at the bottom.

“By age-21, boys spend over 10,000 hours gaming, two-thirds of that time in complete isolation. The average young man watches 50 porn-clips each week. We’re raising a generation of men who suffer from arousal addiction. Their brains are being digitally rewired for change, novelty, excitement, and constant arousal.” Zimbardo, TED video: TED.com (August 2011)

They want fast-paced and rapidly changing stimuli and they want it all the time. They are finding it increasingly harder to sit, be still, and learn. They find it too frustrating to invest in a long-term relationship with a woman because it is too tedious. Relationships build gradually and subtly and social skills are learned over a life-time of interaction with actual people. The virtual world will stimulate a person, but it doesn’t offer the environment in which we can grow socially.

Men, we have a responsibility to raise men. As I am writing this I’m feeling convicted about how often I sit my six-year-old son down with a computer, so I can get some work done. If we want to raise a generation of men who will be good husbands, good fathers, good leaders, and strong Christ-followers, then we have to model that behavior. The only way to raise a boy who knows how to deal with people face-to-face is to love our sons face-to-face. Let’s get down on the floor and play with blocks and let’s go out and play catch while we talk to them about how important their mom is to us.

After all, if we follow Christ we’re going to spend forever in heaven. We’ll spend eternity learning about God face-to-face, so we may as well start working on those skills right now. Let’s raise our sons to be able to listen to their Heavenly Father and “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10)

Mardi Gras

Today is Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras. Thousands are camped out in New Orleans, waiting to party the night away before Lent starts tomorrow on Ash Wednesday. I’ve heard the Mardi Gras event called the “feast before the fast.” It is the time when people party and overindulge before they participate in the forty-day religious Lenten fast. I wonder how many of the people in New Orleans who will take their shirts off, show their breasts, stagger around in an intoxicated stupor, and/or indulge in any of the many sins of the flesh that are available to them, will actually deny themselves anything of substance over the following forty days.

The whole “party while we can, because tomorrow we’ll have to do our religious duty and deny ourselves” mindset demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about God’s character and nature. God isn’t shallow; He isn’t stupid; and He isn’t mocked. He is looking for people who will worship Him is spirit and in truth, not with a bunch of robotic religious rituals. God wants relationship, not mindless, soulless religious activity. If we feel like we need to get a bunch of fun sinnin’ under our belt to hold us through the dark, cold period of religious self-denial we’re going to be forced into, then our religious denial is useless. We may as well not bother.

A true relationship with Christ enables us to worship with the same passion and sense of satisfaction that others find when they indulge in the pleasures of the flesh. We are blessed when we hunger and thirst for righteousness and that appetite only develops as we walk with the Lord. How fitting that my daily bible reading today included this verse from Proverbs 21:2-3

“Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart. To do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.”

Let’s honor the Lord today and let’s do it because we love Him. That is what pleases our Father. He deserves our best…everyday.

Are Christians Supposed To Judge Others?

The following is my answer to a friend’s question. Somebody had accused him of not truly being saved. This accuser told my friend that salvation was “fruit,”  and that he wasn’t exhibiting it, therefore, he must not be saved. My friend asked me what Christ died for if salvation was about acting the right way all the time. He also wondered how another believer could be so judgmental. Here is the answer I gave him. I hope it is helpful to others as well:

Here’s the problem. We’re all a mess. Christians acting in the flesh can look and sound just like lost people, because lost people always act in the flesh. Lost people can look and sound like believers because we are all made in God’s image and are, therefore, capable of goodness, creativity, grace, and mercy–even apart from genuine salvation. So how do you tell a genuinely saved person from a “good” lost person, or how can you tell if a person is genuinely saved if they are acting badly? The truth is only Jesus knows for sure. He is the only One who can judge salvation, but every believer can judge other professed believers’ actions.

Salvation is not “fruit.” Genuine salvation bears fruit (James 2:17 and Matthew 7:15-20). But that fruit can be either so small that other people can’t see it, or it can be so obstructed by disobedient behavior that others can’t see it. God, however, always sees genuine salvation, no matter how small or obstructed its fruit may be.

When somebody professes to be a Christian, they give the rest of us permission to do “fruit inspections.” The bible tells us that Christians are supposed to judge each other’s behavior and hold each other accountable for behavior that doesn’t honor God (Matthew 18:15-17; 1 Corinthians 5:1-2, 6:1-4; Titus 3:10-11, etc).

What we’re not supposed to do is judge other people against our own righteousness. The command to “judge not” (Matthew 7:1) is a command against self-righteousness and arrogance, not against discretion. We are supposed to judge each other lovingly against Christ’s perfection (against which we are all found lacking) so that we can encourage each other to put off the “old self” and put on the “new self” (Ephesians 4:21-24 and Colossians 3:1-17).

We should never take it upon ourselves to judge another professing Christian’s salvation, but we are supposed to encourage each other to repent of sin and live in righteousness.

Christ accomplished our salvation on the cross. If we have truly been saved through faith in the first place, then nobody can take salvation away from us, not even ourselves by our own disobedience (John 10:28-30). Somebody would have to overpower God to do that and we know that can’t happen.

I hope this was helpful. There wasn’t really a short answer

Alone In A Crowd

Leadership can be a lonely responsibility. It seems that the greater the number of people one is responsible to lead, the lonelier the role can be. I guess that is because the more people there are, the more people there are who don’t “get it,” and the harder it is to keep everybody on task and aligned with the vision they can’t seem to see.

There are a lot of factors that isolate leaders, at least leaders who aren’t just going through the motions to earn a paycheck, or whatever tangible, short-term goal they may be fixated upon. The best leaders have a vision for their organization, or team, or ministry, which is bigger than the sum of the parts. They see what “can be” and move relentlessly toward that ideal. That alone can isolate them from others who just see the job, or the obstacles, or what is in it for them, or the minutes left until quitting time.

Leaders have to make tough decisions and they call on others to make short term sacrifices for long term organizational goals. Leading means not letting people, even your friends, stray from the vision or fall down on the job. Leaders constantly review, assess, compliment, and critique. That sometimes sets them at odds with others, but it always sets them apart from others. A friend you have to correct or otherwise hold accountable, may not be your friend for long. Leadership can be lonely, but does it have to be?

Granted, you can’t be a leader and be everybody’s friend, but you don’t have to be alone or unfriendly, either. The key to alleviating leadership loneliness isn’t “dumbing down” your game. The key is to elevate your game. Leaders elevate their game by establishing a visionary culture in their organization. If you feel alone, then identify those around you with the greatest potential and teach them to carry the vision as you do. You won’t be around forever, so it makes sense to train those who will take your place so they will be able to continue the legacy of greatness you care so much about. Mentoring quality people is the key to your organization’s longevity and legacy.

Jesus poured Himself into twelve men who didn’t seem to amount to much. Eleven of them carried the torch, establishing The Church we see thriving over two thousand years later. Today there are still countless men and women carrying-out God’s compelling vision and training future generations to do the same. The momentum is still building. But even Jesus lost one who couldn’t embrace the big picture. If you’ll establish a culture of compelling vision, you’ll find that some won’t embrace it, but enough will that leadership won’t be quite so lonely.

Take Everything. Give Nothing.

A friend of mine and I were once parked in “donut formation” having a conversation. Donut formation is when two police officers are parked in such a way that their squad car driver’s windows face each other. It is the only way to have a conversation without exiting the patrol car. We talked about many things, but the conversation came back to Jesus. I had been sharing with him off and on for months. He kept asking questions and I kept answering them as best I could.

“I don’t know how you can believe in Jesus when you work this job,” he said matter of factly, “You know, with all the crap we see, I mean.”

“I don’t know how you can work this job without trusting Jesus,” I replied, “You know, with all the crap we see, I mean.”

He laughed at the time and said he had never thought of it that way.

Many people have a hard time reconciling Christian faith with jobs in which people see lots of tragedy, pain, and human suffering; as if the presence of those things disproves Him or something. They don’t realize that, for believers, pain in the world confirms to them that people need Jesus and it magnifies the importance of what He accomplished on the cross.

Believers on The Job can fall into a dangerous trap, though. One of the tenets of Christianity is that we sacrifice ourselves for others. We put others first and we forgive those who repent, no matter what they have done to us. That is exactly what Jesus does, so Christian police officers can sometimes be too trusting. In our personal lives, our Lord teaches us to take nothing and give everything, but we need to remember the job to which He has called us.

The police are God’s sword-bearers (Romans 13:1-7). We are God’s avengers, carrying out His wrath on wrongdoers (Romans 13:4). We are often the front line, protecting innocence from evil. When we are fulfilling our God-given role, we often have to embody the charge King Leonidas gave to the brave 300 in the movie 300: “Give them nothing! But take from them everything!”

When we are dealing with suspects we must give them no opportunity to gain an advantage and we must take from them everything they might use to defeat arrest or escape custody. Our searches must be thorough and we must anticipate the worst…always.

We mourn with Mobile, Alabama Police Officer, Steven Green’s family and faithful fellow-officers. I pray we learn from this incident to take everything and give nothing. Thank you for your faithful service, Officer Green. You will be missed and you will be remembered.

Theft by Disciple?

Did the disciples steal Jesus’ body? Is that why the tomb was empty? Matthew relates in his gospel that the Jewish leaders bribed the guards who had been at Jesus’ tomb to say just that (Matthew 28:11-15). I have heard critics say that Matthew lied and included this in his gospel to explain away arguments against the resurrection and to deflect blame from his friends.

I know that no part of scripture is untrue. I know Jesus’ tomb was empty (and I know why), and I have no doubt that the chief priests and elders bribed the guards to say the disciples were responsible for the missing body. But I can also imagine that one of the most popular theories in Matthew’s day about why the tomb was empty was that the disciples had stolen Jesus’ corpse. No theory is more popular than a conspiracy theory, even today.

Today we don’t have to defend against that theory as they did in Matthew’s time. He wrote his gospel twenty or thirty years after Jesus’ resurrection. People who had seen Jesus crucified, taken part in His crucifixion, and seen the tomb empty were still alive. Most of the disciples were still alive, doing miracles, and establishing the Church. It made some logical sense back then that the disciples might have stolen Jesus’ body to keep their own fame alive. But that was then and this is now.

Theft by Disciple is no longer a valid theory. People may still make the argument, but that doesn’t mean it holds water. We know the disciples didn’t steal Jesus’ body for at least two reasons. The first evidence we have today, which the people also had at the time Matthew wrote his gospel, is the lives the disciples lived after Jesus ascended to heaven. These twelve guys, who couldn’t do anything right before Jesus’ resurrection, became powerful examples of God’s power after Jesus’ resurrection. They ran from authority and abandoned Jesus in Gethsemane because they were afraid of the authorities, but they stood up and put the authorities to shame after Jesus’ resurrection. They used to run from punishment, but after the resurrection they gladly suffered through imprisonment and beatings, counting their sufferings as joy for the sake of Jesus’ name.

The second evidence we have today for the disciples’ innocence are the deaths they suffered. Matthew’s readers didn’t know what was coming, but we know the disciples were crucified upside down, beheaded, and burned alive because they trusted in the living Jesus. The cowards who walked with Jesus in life wouldn’t have had the courage to die for Him as they did if they knew He had not walked alive from the tomb. Death could not hold Him, so they knew death could not hold them. Many people have been fooled into dying from many lies, but nobody willingly dies for something they know is a lie. True faith isn’t blind faith. True faith comes from clearly seeing Jesus for who He is.

I hope people can see the living Jesus by the way I live. I also pray they’ll see the living Jesus by the way I leave this world for the next.

Epic Fail

Are our sins written in stone?

Satan works overtime convincing Christians that we’ve failed God in epic fashion. One of Satan’s major schemes to keep Christians sidelined is to make us feel guilty, worthless, unworthy, and unusable. Non-believers feel guilty about stuff, too, but Satan doesn’t throw their sins in their faces like he does with believers. He doesn’t want to alert unbelievers to their need for Jesus, but he wants to alert believers to the fact that we fall miserably short of God’s holy standard.

Do you sometimes feel like a miserable failure in God’s service? If you do, I bet the things that make you feel the most guilty are repetitive sins… patterns of failure or disobedience that you just can’t seem to shake or “grow out of.”

Is failure really an option for true Christians? Can we fail so badly that we become useless to God? In Matthew 26:14-27:5 and John 21:15-17 we see two men who failed Jesus in stunning fashion. One is Judas who betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver. The other is Peter who ran away when Jesus was arrested and then three times denied even knowing Him. All of which happened after he had looked Jesus in the face and said, “Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you!”

Have you ever felt like you have failed God that big? I sure have. I promise to do better and I mean to do better, but often I don’t do better. I really want to stay faithful in certain areas, but then I fall and guilt sets in. Both Judas and Peter failed God, but Peter is sitting on a throne in heaven preparing to judge one of the tribes of Israel (Luke 22:28-30), while Judas is in hades awaiting his guilty verdict (Acts 1:24-25).

So what is the difference? Why is Judas’ sin an epic fail, while Peter’s is not? As it was with Judas and Peter, so it is with us. Our relationship with God is not an issue of performance, but an issue of faith and trust. Judas and Peter both failed Jesus in their thoughts and actions, but Judas didn’t trust that Jesus was Messiah, so he sold him out. Judas was then overcome with guilt and did not trust in Jesus’ forgiveness, so he hanged himself. Peter trusted Jesus completely. He sinned with his mouth (Matthew 26:69-75), but his faith was genuine. The quality of our faith, not the perfection of our actions, is the difference between failure and victory in God’s eyes.

Taking unbelief to the grave is the only epic spiritual fail a person can make.