Category: Religion

To become

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As the modern evangelical voice of reason, draped in right-wing politics, becomes faint to the ears of our evolving culture, the discussion of moral rightness has ironically increased across the board. You see,  those on the right have not cornered the market of claims to what is morally right. The voice from the left has a large bullhorn as well.  Each side believes they are “right” about the issues of the day, and are equally passionate about it. When you consider the post-modern crockpot of relative truth, you end up with a “toxic stew” to borrow language from Apple CEO Tim Cook. 

From a biblical viewpoint, the Genesis 3 account, where the very character of God was first questioned in Eden, has proven at the surface as an overwhelming Satanic success. The Serpent was the first post-modern if you will with questions of “Did God actually say” and “you will not surely die” as he lured them into moving their worship elsewhere. Up until that time, Adam and Eve worshipped only God. They worshipped him by simply fulfilling his purposes for them in cultivating the creation, enjoying creation, and simply enjoying Him.  

We know from other scriptural texts that Lucifer, as the serpent was first called, desired to be worshipped above all, even his own Creator.  This unholy desire got him “kicked out” of heaven and banished to the earth, if you will. So it’s no surprise that he had designs of his own to thwart the worship of God by the viceroys God had created in the form of man and woman. Described as “crafty” and “subtle”, the Serpent set out to divert the eyes of the first married couple away from their Source of Life and it began with his own claims of what was “right”.  Following were lies about the goodness of God and the character of God, which meant, so he reasoned,  they could take their eyes off of the Creator and become what they wanted to be. 

Isn’t that still the prevalent message of the age we live in now? You can become what you want to be by simply turning your attention to whatever it is you deem necessary to accomplish the goal. The result of this philosophy is that you simply become what you worship. This profound truth is something I’ve heard recently and has impacted the way I think about the life I’ve been given. We all worship (turn our gaze toward) the Creator, or we worship ourselves. Self-worship means seeking the approval of others, our own comfort, and the search for purpose and meaning. These play out in the careers we choose, the relationships we form, the causes we champion, the hobbies we engage in, the religious activities we commit to, the foods we eat, the material possessions we acquire, and the entertainment we occupy ourselves with. We are trying to replace God as our life source with things and people in creation that can not fill the demands. That’s why we are all guilty of trying to experience so many things in life. It’s because we view this life, of which we have no idea how long it will last, as the opportunity to find fulfillment. 

The idea for “You become what you worship” was something I recently read in the following Desiring God blog which was about how our smart phones are changing us. I recommend reading it and considering what you really want to become not only in this life, but in the life here-after. Biblical Christianity has often been castrated of it’s power as it has been reduced to the heaven or hell question. Frankly, no one wants to go to hell so I find this gospel reduction rather unhelpful, and even dangerous. But when you begin to see that this whole world and it’s inhabitants have meaning in purpose as worshippers of Someone who is infinitely Good, Just, and Right, then the question of what you do with your life is much closer to Jesus’ question “what does it profit a man who gains the whole world but loses his own soul”.  The soul is not some glowing orb locked in a briefcase (Pulp Fiction reference), but it is your very being. It’s that invisible person hidden in the cocoon. It is what you eventually will be, and there is no turning back at that point. You and I are being formed into something so beautiful mortal minds cannot comprehend it. Image bearers! It doesn’t look pretty for any of us at the moment as we are more larval than lovely. But we were created to be Image Bearers of the most High and Holy God, which can only happen when the mirrors of our souls are pointed straight at him in endless worship. 

In Eden, the mirrors were knocked off-axis resulting in a fractured universe. Since then, all of mankind is inherently unable to bear the image of the Creator as he is unwilling to do so. We can only reflect brokenness because that’s all we can see.  Those glass shards disperse rays of light in a million directions and we spend our lives chasing down every one of them. Solomon called them vanities. Thankfully, our Creator put the plan of restoration and redemption in place immediately with the promise of the Serpent’s crushed head and his endless lies. At first glance, it seems the human experiment was just that. It would seem that God’s attempt to make man in his likeness was a failure, but his designs were not frustrated by our fragmented natures. There was a Man, the promised Seed, who maintained the pristine reflection as the incarnated Deity that he was and still is.  He redeemed broken mirrors and remade them into Holy reflections.  He bruised his heel while becoming sin for us, and crushed the Serpent’s head in order that we might become the Image Bearers we were always meant to be.

2 Old Shoes (part 2)

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I don’t think words in a blog post can properly convey how much I longed to be a worship leader. It was the year 2000 when i realized for the first time that this could be a job that I loved. We had been part of the same church for 11 years and the worship leader at the time left and I felt like this was something I would pursue. Alas, the timing wasn’t right, and the church moved on with someone else. For another 4 years, I burned with a passion to lead worship and actually sent my resume (sparse as it was) to some churches to no avail. Then my opportunity came when the worship leader at the time unexpectedly resigned. My time had come! On my first day of the job, I hit the ground running and I threw myself into the job. I loved going in to work every morning and I honestly didn’t want to leave. I was finally getting the chance to really use my musical gifts and get paid to do it.  It wasn’t a job that made you rich financially, but I didn’t care. I absolutely loved what I got to do everyday, planning worship services, talking theology with the other guys on staff, mentoring young musicians, just everything about it.  

One of my friends on staff used to always talk about this book by John Piper called “Don’t waste your life” and I was mildly interested at the time.  I was reading an author by the name of Dallas Willard, a Christian philosopher, which I know sounds like an oxymoron, but it was in reading his works that I started to develop ways of thinking beyond the box of evangelical cliches that I had grown up around.  Reading Willard spurred me on to think deeply about what biblical Christianity was. He passed away about a year ago, and I thank God for him.  Meanwhile, my friend kept bringing up Piper and this other guy he listened to via podcast, which was a new technological phenomena at the time. This other guy was Matt Chandler, pastor of the Village Church in Highland Village. You remember from my last post that we are members there, but it’s an interesting journey how we got there. I remember listening to Chandler at my friend’s bequest and actually finding him sort of obnoxious and over the top. The depth of his vocal tone was like Howard Stern, and he seemed to be equally shocking in his content.  This guy was preaching, I mean preaching!  Looking back, I realize how far removed I was from hearing this kind of bold presentation, especially the last few years I worked in the church. I gave him a few listens and just basically wrote it off and went back to reading Willard. 

Around the same time, I was starting to podcast John Piper. I was too busy swimming in the philosophical waters of Willard that I didn’t have time to read Piper. So I listened to his sermons. I was a little put off by his style which reminded me of “old timey” preachers, but in spite of that, I couldn’t dismiss the weightiness of the Word he was preaching, especially when it came to the Sovereignty of God. While all this is going on, I began reading a blog written by an old school friend. This friend was actually the son of a teacher I had in high school who I was basically in awe of and had the deepest respect and admiration for. It seems he was the only one who could ever get me to study and in turn aim to please the teacher.  As a high schooler, I knew this teacher was a Calvinist and I was fascinated to hear him talk about it.  My earliest exposure to Calvinism was a younger child when my parents told me about it. But all I really knew about it was pre-destination, which is pretty much the extent of what every non-calvinist a.k.a Arminian knows about it.  So I began to comment on his blog (my teacher’s son) who was a Calvinist himself and it’s during this period of time that I began to learn of Reformed Theology. I was being bombarded from all sides, blogs, sermons, books, and let me tell you, I argued with him constantly through the comments I made on his posts. But there was something always gnawing at my soul in the debates with him. I was fighting a losing battle because I was trying to argue against something I knew was true. The truth that God is totally Sovereign over everything and does as pleases, and that what ever pleases him is just, right, and true. I began to see that Calvinism or Reformed Theology was not as minimalistic as the TULIP acronym it’s known for, and that there was more at stake than the doctrine of predestination. It was much bigger. We’re talking the Glory of God kind of big.

A friend of mine chided me the other day about being too theological and said that a theologian is something one becomes after he’s saved and the implication was we don’t need theology to become a Christian. As I replied to him, “everyone’s a theologian” in the strictest meaning of the word, and your theology is a determining factor to you becoming saved in the first place, outside of God’s sovereign grace of course. 

Becoming Reformed in my theology wasn’t instantaneous for me.  It was actually the blooming of a seed that was planted in my heart decades earlier. It was no longer synonymous with fancy theological terms like depravity and perseverance of the saints. No, for the first time, I began connecting this theological system to something more familiar to my brain.  The Gospel. 

 

2 Old Shoes

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I pulled out the old hymnal from the bookshelf tonight and began to peruse the pages of my youth. It’s funny how I can still remember the page numbers that correspond to many of the songs we did in those days. It probably helps that my dad the music director deployed me to the church piano at the ripe old age of 12. I have to admit that while sitting in the pew, I zoned out on the hymns and had no idea what was meant by many of the words we sang, like “bulwark” and “ebenezer”, for example. When I migrated from the pew to the piano bench, my focus was redirected to chords, treble clefs, and arpeggios and as a result, I remained zoned out.

As I grew older, my taste for other music genres developed, in part, because the hymns of my youth grew stale to me. After all, we probably sang “At Calvary” no less than a 1000 times by the time I reached musical puberty! I was starved for something new and it didn’t take me long to develop a disdain for the old music. This blossomed into a pride that began to dictate how I viewed anything that was “old” or traditional. In time, I transferred this snobbery to church life. My religious background was steeped in legalism and I naturally rebelled to everything I had been taught. If ever a baby was thrown out with the bath water, this was it. I didn’t give it much credence because so much of it was laced with “dos and donts”. I began fostering a performance minded attitude as both a musician and a religious person. I worked very hard at creating the image I wanted people to see and I had enablers along the way. 

But God has a way of cutting your legs out from under you, like the time I competed in a piano competition and took 2nd place to a kid who had been playing 5 or 6 years less than I had. It was the first time the illusion of my awesomeness fell flat in the desert sand. There would be many times thereafter that God would re-calibrate my assumptions about myself and about the traditions I was brought up in. 

I was always religiously active, especially centering around music. I had firmly rooted my identity in it, and whenever anyone pushed back, I would go out of my way to make them pay a hefty price for challenging it.  Eventually, I parlayed my reputation to a full time worship leader position which I used to embellish my image even more.  I began to read alot, increasing my knowledge which puffed up my pride to Corinthian levels. Meanwhile, I was at war with my soul! I was leading two lives. The one everyone saw, and the one I was actually living. 

As I mentioned, God has his ways of shifting the tides of our stormy lives, and one huge moment came in February of 2008 when I endured an extended period of depression. When you are in a period like this, you often don’t know why or how you got there. And worse, you don’t know how you will get out.  But mercifully, God reveals these things with time. I know many factors contributed to the darkness I experienced. It was a combination of hidden sin, uncertainty of my future, and most of all, the imminent death of the identity I had spent a lifetime carving out for myself.  Within a year, I was faced with an impending decision about my worship leader position and I sought counsel on the best way to navigate the treacherous waters. The advice I received was to come out of hiding, so to speak. I needed to be honest about where I was, theologically speaking, and openly acknowledge the incompatibility with the church I worked for and that my family had called home for 19 years. As a result, the decision was made for me and shortly thereafter we ended up at The Village Church. Losing my job was only the first shoe to drop. The second shoe was still double-laced to my stubborn foot. I will save that for the next blog post.