choices

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Maybe in my old age I’m getting wistful, but lately I’ve been thinking a bit about choices I’ve made over the years. And why some of them have been repetitive… good and bad. Especially in light of our series Perfect Takes Practice that Joe Boyd wrapped up this weekend.

Just prior to his death, Moses addressed the nation of Israel. They were about to enter into some real estate that God had promised years before. Moses knew that the only way they would be successful in settling it would be if they continually chose to live for God and follow His ways. Sadly, he also knew prophetically they would not. And so with a philosophical “Whatever...”, he gives them a simple encouragement regarding their choices:

“… I have set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Oh, that you would choose life; that you and your children might live! Choose to love the Lord your God and to obey him and to cling to him, for he is your life and the length of your days.” Deuteronomy 30:19, 20 Living Bible

A few verses earlier he put it even more succinctly. To paraphrase, “Because you are made in God’s image, you have this remarkable ability to choose between life and prosperity or death and destruction.” Living our lives for God and the resulting wholeness is a continual string of choices. Moses is simply saying that a full life is largely about choices.

C. S. Lewis made a classic comment about this in his little book Mere Christianity that has stuck with me for decades:

“…every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

With that in mind, consider the absolutely PC-less comment Jesus made to a hurting man in Jerusalem:

Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda (Bethesda means “the house of kindness”) and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?" John 5:1-6.

Excuse me, but shouldn’t that have been obvious? Really? After all, wasn’t the man at the “healing waters” of the House of Kindness?

Get the picture: There could have been hundreds of people lying about this natural spring waiting to be healed. The rumor was that the water rippled ever so often when a supernatural being touched it…and the first ones in would get healed. When Jesus arrived, he headed for one person in particular, a man disabled for nearly forty years. His muscles would have atrophied to the bone. It’s obvious what’s wrong, but there was something deeper. And so Jesus gets to the core of the problem with a simple question: “Do you want to get well?” There is a flash of divine psychoanalysis. “You need to be whole. Do you want to be whole?”

As harsh as this may sound, many of us have problems that we don’t want to get rid of. There are varieties of Biblical ways to get rid of them: restitution, forgiveness, confession, repentance and so on. All of them require being painfully honest. I feel on a regular basis that God asks me, “Do you really want to get well?” There are those of us who will not—do not want—to be healed of our emotional stuff. Our identity may be wrapped up in our problem. “I have a right to feel like this…this person hurt me deeply…this employer stiffed me…” It gives us an excuse for certain behaviors. Some of us would have very little to talk about if it wasn’t for it.

When I was a little kid, if I got sick enough to stay home from school, mom had a routine. For some reason, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and a laxative were always involved. It didn’t matter if you fell off the playground slide and your collarbone poked through your skin, you had to take laxative. For mom, it was like “digestive bloodletting”. But she also had this wonderful tradition of going to the corner drugstore and buying a comic book for me to read while she worked if I was sick at home. Sometimes I’d just act sick to get a new comic book, in spite of the laxative.

For some of us, that becomes a way of life. A pattern for identity that we carry throughout our adult lives. I’ve learned there’s always a question whispered behind the choices I make. And those questions reveal more about the Real Me and the choices I make than anything else. Further, those questions expose the depth of wholeness I actually desire with my Father.

And despite how we may want to redefine heaven and hell, it seems they still have more to do with our choices than we dare to admit.

I think many of us would find it easier to blame God.
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baggage

This weekend we began the series Baggage…what we believe are the five most common dysfunctions in families. We’re using Jacob and his family in Genesis as the poster boy. For all five. Although if you looked closely at the baggage pictures on the projection screens, you would have seen my initials on several of the pieces. No kidding. Jacob, schmacob—I could have used the Workman family tree.

Though this week was about The Controlling Family, I wish I could have spent some time on blame. Blame is a power tool for The Controlling Family. I would have talked about genuine blame and false blame as it relates to both others and God.

For instance, when someone has authentically hurt you, it’s okay to assign blame. To not do that is to deny your own pain and reality. But blaming isn’t the destination. If you stop there, you stifle the flow of the Holy Spirit. And whether the controller/person was intentional or not, you still have to go through the same process: forgiveness. Whenever possible, let them know how they’ve hurt you; don’t enable people to continue destructive behaviors. But regardless of how they respond, you have to move toward the process of forgiveness. It’s releasing someone from a debt they can’t pay.

And if you’re on the blame God track, you might as well get off. You won’t get anywhere with that one. The way we have to relate to God is with truth. There are times when I’ve just had to say, “God, You’re good” when the evidence seemed to the contrary. It begins with openness to God—spill your heart out, vent, get angry. God can handle that. But there’s a point where we must admit we don’t understand…and stop questioning His goodness. Hey, I haven’t sacrificed any of my kids for convicted criminals, so I’m not even in the same moral universe as God.

On the other hand, if God can genuinely blame me for an intentional screw-up, I must have one response: repentance. Repentance is owning responsibility and asking God for forgiveness. God has installed a fail-safe reconciliation strategy in His covenant when we screw up: If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9).

And here’s how: Jesus became the Ultimate Blame-Bearer

My favorite prophecy regarding the messiah is Isaiah 53. Isaiah prophesied about a coming King who would rule the nations. But also be a man of sorrows, a king of pain. Isaiah writes: Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53:4-6

God has somehow taken all of the blame that is rightfully ours and placed it on His son Jesus. Ever heard anyone called a scapegoat? That’s actually rooted in the Old Testament. On Israel’s national Day of Atonement, the high priest would be presented with two goats. The first goat would be sacrificed to make sure people understood the harsh cost of sin. Sin cannot be overlooked; what would you say of a local judge who simply dismissed rapists? Justice demands action. But then the priest would lay his hands on the second goat to symbolize the sins of Israel being transferred to it. The goat would then be led into the wilderness and unleashed...literally the escape goat. Israel’s sins were separated from them in symbolically.

This was all uniquely fulfilled in Jesus who became both: the sacrifice and the one who carries away our blame. We have been unleashed from blame and blaming others. We become mature people when we accept responsibility for ourselves. You can learn that watching Dr. Phil. But that doesn’t bring wholeness. We can’t rid ourselves of genuine blame. Only God can do that. The power tool God offers us is propitiation, the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. He became both goats: He died a sacrificial death, but came back to life to carry our sins away. Jesus, the Ultimate Scapegoat. It unleashes us from the blame that’s genuine. We receive forgiveness for ourselves...and we offer forgiveness to those who are rightfully blamed for what they did to us.

And we no longer blame ourselves.

That’s when we become whole people. And move toward whole relationships.

the eternal blame

"The woman you gave me…"..."The serpent tricked me… "

During my teenage years when I was training to be an insufferable jerk, in the middle of an argument with my mom I’d snap back, “Hey, I didn’t ask to be here”—meaning that all my problems in life, which at the point had mostly to do with school dress codes and raging hormones, were the result of my parents deciding on a third child. All my issues were conveniently blamed on them for having that little of bundle of joy: me. If I weren’t here, I would have no problems. My mom would answer that existential conundrum with this: “Well, I didn’t ask to be here either, so don’t give me any lip.” We were the Simpsons of Kentucky. The truth was, I was unwilling to accept responsibility for my behavior. I was a blamer.

What’s worse, it’s easy to carry that in subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways into our spiritual lives. One day a guy dropped in the Vineyard and told me he’d been “fighting a Jezebel spirit all day” that was causing problems for him. I told him he needed to get a job.

Truth is, I still wrestle with blaming after 32 years of following Jesus. And it may be that owning responsibility can be trickier in a high grace environment. Maybe.

Liberals blame neo-cons. Republicans blame Democrats. Arabs blame Jews. Calvinists blame Arminians. Donald blames Rosie. Evangelicals blame everybody. I like what Christian apologist/philosopher G. K. Chesterton wrote in response to an article in the London Times titled What’s Wrong With the World? In a letter to the editor he simply said, Dear sirs, I am. Yours truly, G. K. Chesterton.

Ouch.

People ruin their lives by their own stupidity, so why does God always get blamed? (Proverbs 19:3 Message Bible)