I’m going to try to post a short quote every week under the title “Weekly Wisdom.” Here’s the first one:

“Every Christian is either a missionary or an impostor.” – Charles Haddon Spurgeon

As promised in a previous post, I am going to write about Jonah and how he serves as an analogy for the condition of the American church. I’ve facetiously labeled this condition “Jonah-itis.”

It is crucial to understanding the Bible to know that God has always desired to be the God of all nations, not just Israel. This is made very apparent when God promises Abraham in Genesis 12 that all families on the earth will be blessed through His seed. This Seed is of course referring to Christ (see Galatians 3:16). God has always been a missionary God. There are numerous passages where God makes Himself known to surrounding nations in the Old Testament. The problem is that by Jonah’s point in history, Israel’s ethnocentrism keeps them from caring about other nations to whom God wants to reveal Himself. In the same way, the modern American Church’s ecclesiocentrism (focused only inwardly) keeps it from revealing God to those outside its walls. Now for a whale of a tale (bad humor, I know):

The Backdrop
Jonah was a very unwilling prophet of Israel under the reign of King Jeroboam II (early to mid 8th century B.C.). Of course Israel by this time had been divided into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. The northern kingdom along with its capital in Samaria had been captured and sent into captivity by the Assyrians (As a side note, these Israelites from the northern kingdom who were forced to intermarry with the Assyrians came to be called “Samaritans,” and the Jews considered them half-breeds. This helps you understand the role they play in the New Testament). The former citizens of the northern kingdom are what we today refer to as the “Lost Ten Tribes” of Israel.

So now the only true Israelites that existed are those of the southern kingdom, and they were not very fond of the Assyrians! And for good reason: the Assyrians shamefully tortured those they conquered in battle, viciously murdered political opponents, and a lot of other graphic and horrible things. And into this backdrop God tells Jonah to preach against the Assyrian capital city of Ninevah. Jonah wanted no part of this. At first glance, one might suspect that fear was the reason behind Jonah’s hesitancy. After all, these Assyrians liked to torture and murder anyone who opposed them. But that’s really not why. We actually learn why in Jonah 4:2. But I’ll get to that in a second . . . you’ll have to keep reading to find out!

Jonah (foolishly) tries to run away from God by sailing to Tarshish, a city in the opposite direction of Ninevah. Most are familiar with the story that follows. A storm rages because Jonah is being disobedient to God. Jonah was sleeping in the boat while his shipmates were desperately trying to stay afloat. At times the Church also sleeps through the storms of God’s judgment in the world, assuring herself that it has nothing to do with her. So Jonah’s shipmates throw him overboard, and Jonah is swallowed by a big whale. While in the whale, Jonah appeals to God’s mercy and the whale vomits him onto dry land.

Jonah Finally Obeys
Jonah then obeys (realizing he has no choice) and preaches to Ninevah that it will be overthrown for its wicked deeds. The Ninevites do the unthinkable: they repent and call out to God for mercy! And then we see the real reason for Jonah’s reluctance:

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. (Jonah 4:1-2, ESV, emphasis mine).

This passage is the key to the whole book. Jonah’s reluctance stemmed not from fear of the Assyrians, but out of his knowledge of God’s love. Jonah hated these foreigners and was a byproduct of his generation – a generation that was only focused on itself and believed that God had the same exclusive focus.

Bringing it Home
This same mentality has crept up today in the American Church. Jonah is the father to all those Christians who desire the benefits and blessings of salvation but refuse its responsibility. We are blessed to be a blessing! Whenever Tiffany and I express our desire to serve in overseas missions, we inevitably hear this: “Why go across the world when there are people who need help next door?” The part that amuses me is that the people who say this are doing absolutely nothing themselves to help their neighbors.

Now to get a little uncomfortable. Who are your local Assyrians? The Jews continuously avoided intermingling with other nations in order to preserve the purity of their bloodline. This is why when the northern kingdom intermarried with the Assyrians the southern kingdom told them they were no longer God’s people and despised them (see more about this on my post about Jesus and the Woman at the Well). It got so bad that the Jews would walk an extra day’s journey just to get somewhere without walking through Samaritan territory. We have a term for this same kind of behavior in our culture, it’s called “white flight.” Basically, people belonging to minority races begin moving into neighborhoods and white folks move out. When my wife and I moved into our neighborhood, we were discouraged from doing so and were warned that our property value would likely decrease because it is a multiracial area! We moved in anyways. We live in a duplex, and I’m happy to say that we get along just fine with our black neighbor (who we share a wall with) and our niece and nephew enjoy playing with their daughter.

I don’t say this to boast about how “non-racist” I am. There’s enough white people clearing their consciences by doing that already. I say this to point out that you don’t have to drive to another neighborhood to reach out to people of a different culture — you just need to not flee when they move into yours. Michael Fuquay points out:

In his sermons, Martin Luther King Jr. was fond of quipping that “eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour and Sunday school is still the most segregated school of the week.” By pointing out the conflict between racism and Christian ideals, King hoped to shame white church leaders into supporting the campaign against segregation in the South and racism in the rest of the country.

Forty years later, Jim Crow segregation is a memory, and racism has become America’s most popular metaphor for evil. Yet King’s description of Sunday services remains largely unaltered.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m fully aware that racism works both ways. But “white flight” is an exclusive phenomenon to one race, as the name implies. Jonah-itis causes people to focus only inwardly, whether ecclesiocentrically or ethnocentrically – or both. Kem Meyer wrote a great post recently about how many church folks speak “Christianese,” which erodes our witness and alienates outsiders. The American Church is losing its relevance by the day. Why, just the other day a large American church body published an official statement saying they needed to revitalize churches and plant new ones. Well no duh! Maybe that should have been part of the focus all along! As one pastor noted, this church is essentially enhancing its mediocrity.

The Good News
But there’s another side to this story. While it’s easy to critique and shame the Church for its Jonah-itis, I can’t end on that note – because God doesn’t. “Concerning Israel he says, ‘All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and obstinate people’” (Isaiah 65:2, NIV). “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, ESV). God didn’t give up on Jonah, just like He didn’t give up on Israel or on the rest of the nations (read Romans 9-11). Despite Jonah’s unwillingness and direct rebellion against God, He used Jonah to proclaim His Law and Gospel to Ninevah. As Johannes Verkuyl so eloquently states:

God is still interested in transforming obstinate, irritable, depressive, peevish Jonahs into heralds of the Good News which brings freedom.

This gives me great hope. I have hope because Jonah was God’s chosen instrument to proclaim His Name to Ninevah. And all throughout Scripture I see example after example of God choosing to accomplish mighty things through jacked-up people like me. And that gives me hope that He has a meaningful place for me to serve in His kingdom. And that should give you great hope, too. God is pleased to use us as His instruments in order to make His Name known among the nations. We must continually thank and praise Him for this opportunity!

But if your heart is still afflicted with Jonah-itis, remember that God “will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you” (Ezekiel 36:26, NIV). “For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant” (Hebrews 9:15, NIV). Confess your Jonah-itis to God. Ask Him to change your heart. I know He will. And if you are now free from Jonah-itis, but your church is not, pray that God might move their hearts to focus on God alone rather than themselves. Because simply trying to focus on others won’t solve the problem, that will lead to self-effort and burnout. We need to focus solely on Christ, and from that focus we will overcome Jonah-itis and be enabled to preach Christ to our local Assyrians.

This post was inspired by an article I recently read entitled The Biblical Foundation for the Worldwide Mission Mandate by Johannes Verkuyl. I also gleaned a lot of the background information from the introduction to Jonah in my ESV Study Bible, a handy Bible companion!

It’s one thing to talk about overseas missions, it’s another to go and do it. Tiffany and I (Dan) just found out that her cousin Andrea DiCicco is a missionary to South Africa. She even has a blog! In her latest post, she writes:

Hello All,

Let me just dive right in –
The Christmas season tripled the population of J-Bay [Jeffreys Bay], sending the crime rate through the roof, and packing the streets with inebriated holiday makers, and locals alike.
We had a much needed 2 week break over Christmas and New Years, so I was able to stay away from town, and avoid most of the craziness.

I’ve been back at the Clinic for a week now. It feels like I never left. I’m staying very busy in the pharmacy, prepacking pills, restocking, and making myself generally useful. The Clinic is horribly short handed, lots of our nurses have been getting sick, and our doctor still comes only once or twice a week.

God is still revealing Himself to me in new ways here. Be it through a conversation with a waiting patient, a kind word from a nurse, or time reflecting on Him as I count pills in the pharmacy.

Thank you, for your continued prayers and support.

Love, Andrea

Our prayers go out to you Andrea. Please keep Andrea in your prayers as she faithfully witnesses the Gospel in South Africa. If you’d like to support Andrea financially (because missions isn’t cheap), please visit her donations page. You’ll also notice that I added her blog to my blogroll, it’s the top link.

Yes, the Pope has officially launched his own YouTube channel. The Christian Post reports:

The Vatican said it was launching the channel to broaden Benedict’s audience while also giving the Holy See better control over the papal image online. . . .

. . . . The site, http://www.youtube.com/vaticanit, was launched the same day the pontiff praised as a “gift to humanity” the benefits of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace in forging friendships and understanding.

But Benedict also warned that virtual socializing had its risks, saying “obsessive” online networking could isolate people from real social interaction and broaden the digital divide by further marginalizing people.

And in his message for the World Day of Communications, he urged producers of new media to ensure that the content respected human dignity and the “goodness and intimacy of human sexuality.”

The 81-year-old pope has been extremely wary of new media and their effect on society, warning about what he has called the tendency of entertainment media, in particular, to trivialize sex and promote violence.

Now if the Pope has managed to begin his own YouTube channel, I don’t want to hear any pastors tell me they can’t even start a Facebook account. I think this speaks volumes about Web 2.0 and its effect on our world and culture. The Catholic Church isn’t exactly known for its rapid adaptivity to cultural and technological change, yet they’ve apparently gotten on board with this one faster than most Protestant churches. It is becoming all too clear that Christianity 2.0 will embrace technology as a means of communicating the Gospel and connecting people.

I’m taking a class on missions right now called Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. The course has been amazing and insightful. One of the things they keep hammering home is that most of us begin with missions by asking how we as God’s people can fulfill the Great Commission. The problem is that this is the wrong starting point. This is a human-centered perspective, and with this approach we will eventually be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of work that needs to be accomplished and we’ll burn out. Missions is not a human response to human need, it is our privileged participation in the work of God.

I think too many of us think of missionaries as those irresponsible young people with no financial burdens or those older retired couples who can now afford to devote their lives to serving overseas. But according to the Bible, every Christian is a missionary — a full-time missionary. Yes we’ve all heard this cliche, but I really mean it. I’m not a soldier who is also a Christian, I am a Christian who has been called to serve my fellow soldiers. This is not a semantic issue — it’s a paradigm shift.

We over-complicate the Christian life. What does God require of us? Glorify Him as you fulfill your vocation. Remember how Jesus summed up all of the commandments? Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37-40, NIV). Doesn’t sound too difficult, does it?

But it is — when we try to do it in our own power. “The sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God. . . . But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you” (Romans 8:7-8, 10-11, NIV).

Remember that Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:44, NIV). Paul points out that “no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3, NIV). That’s the whole point of the new covenant in Christ: since we have demonstrated that we can’t do this for ourselves, He came and did it for us! Jesus humbled Himself and became a human being, then lived a life of perfection which we could not do, then He took all of God’s wrath upon Himself and all of our sin and the Father crushed Him for our iniquities according to His will. Because of this, Christ’s righteousness is given freely to all who believe, and His Spirit is our down payment on that inheritance, who guides us into all truth and causes and enables us to obey God.

When we get overwhelmed by the task of missions, it’s because we don’t really know God and what He did for us. The greatest work has already been done!

Here is a great quote from P.T. Forsyth, this entire post hinges on these words:

The weakness of much current mission work is that [we] betray the sense that what is yet to be done is greater than what [Christ] has already done. The world’s gravest need is less than Christ’s great victory.

Wow. That’s all I could write in the side margin of my book after reading that. We must remember that the Christian life is all about God — not about us. We are to live our lives to the glory of God and for His name’s sake — not for our own reputation and advancement. But somehow we seem to have this backwards. Salvation has become all about man, and not about God’s glory among all peoples. We must remember that God is the one working, He is loving enough to allow us to participate.

But don’t think for a moment that He needs us. Every time we think we are doing something, it is really God making it happen. The farmer plants seed and waters the soil — but God makes it grow. We are privileged to participate in God’s work, but we shouldn’t look at it as our duty, as though the burden rests on us. God WILL be exalted among the nations, regardless of our contributions, or lack thereof. For that we should praise Him. God continually used imperfect people whose hearts were not completely right to accomplish His purposes — even unwilling vessels. I’ll talk more about this in my next post, where I will discuss Jonah and parallel him to the modern-day Church. This is long enough for now. Thoughts, anyone?

1-800-GOOG-411

Hat tip to Cyberbrethren for pointing this out.

Google now offers absolutely free 411 service — and more. Google is always taking it one step further. . . . Check out this video:

Go to http://www.google.com/goog411/ for more information. Technology never ceases to amaze me. . . .

UPDATE: Charles Lehmann made a great point in a comment on this post — the word tension would be better expressed as paradox. Read the helpful comment by clicking here.

This has come up before in a past post entitled The Great “Tensions” of our Faith. It got resurrected recently by a post at internetmonk.com entitled Spiritual Depression and the Search For the One True Church (I’d like to hear the opinion of the room.). iMonk writes about the depression which stems from trying to find theological truth. A commenter writes:

My “spiritual depression” is caused by the continual dueling (in my mind) of the various theologies within Christianity: Reformed, Wesleyan, Lutheran, Catholic, Orthodox, and on and on.

How can I know which, if any, are truly true? All have scads of brilliant and holy adherents. Is it all subjective? Just close my eyes and pin the tail on the donkey? As Lewis said, we cannot live in the hallway (mere Christianity.) We must choose a room.

To continue to study systematic theologies only seems to drive me further into “depression.” Yet it is like an unbreakable addiction.

iMonk was very interested in this and posed a series of questions for his readers. I commented in reply to it, and I decided to share my thoughts here. The following is what I wrote, and then I added some questions I’d like you to answer:

I don’t mean to sound too postmodern, but perhaps the reason it is so hard to grasp theology (and thus so easy to disagree with others’ conclusions) is because we are dealing with an infinite being, not a finite part of creation which we can dissect, study, and comprehend. Take the doctrine of the Trinity for example. No denomination is silly enough to presume to understand the mystery of tri-unity, yet we all believe it. Such theological thought has driven a friend of mine to say that “The Trinity is not a doctrine I believe, it’s a relationship I embrace.”

In reality, theology necessitates truths in tension. For instance, Jesus was fully man and yet fully God. Christians are sinners and yet also saints. God is absolutely sovereign yet man has free will. Jesus said “This is my body and blood,” yet it still looks and tastes like bread and wine. Grace is free, yet it is not cheap and it will cost you everything. The Law demands absolute perfection as the standard of holiness, and the Gospel promises imputed righteousness to all who believe upon Jesus. It’s no wonder theologians have drawn differing lines in the sand. I think doctrinal differences occur when we attempt to rationalize these apparent “truths in tension.”

What do you think? Do you think most doctrinal disagreements occur when we attempt to rationalize these “truths in tension” about our infinite and awesome God? What are other sources of theological contention? A huge movement is underway labeling itself as post-denominational, what does that word mean to you?

Welcome to the new and improved prayeramedic.com! prayeramedic.blogspot.com and 390days.com have been consolidated into this site, so you can expect all of the great content you enjoyed at those sites (and more) to be posted here! It was getting to be far too much work to maintain separate blogs for the same niche.

My school work is keeping me SOOO busy right now (see Where Have I Been? for more info on that) so it is hard to post quality content. Between writing papers and discussion boards on Blackboard (for an online class), my creative energies are typically exhausted by the time I log in to my blogs. Here is the stack of books I am currently reading (mind you I am a dual undergrad/grad student right now):

I show you this not to show off or feel smart, but to demonstrate that I’M BUSY RIGHT NOW! But I will make it a point to post this week, I’ll treat it like a homework assignment. Thanks for your patience!

This is a test post to see if my feed issues have been resolved. I want full text articles to appear in feeds — not just summaries. Hopefully this is working. If not, I’m not sure what the problem is!

Testing, 1. . . 2. . . 3. . .

OK, so a new platform comes with new bugs. First of all, to all of my prayeramedic.blogspot.com and 390days.com readers, you should be receiving this feed seamlessly — no changes required on your part. Also, you can expect to receive more great content!

For some reason, it seems that my feed is only publishing article summaries, not the full text. I have it set on full text, but for some reason it doesn’t appear to be working. Hmm. . . . I am trying to solve this dilemma. I will be shutting down 390days.com soon and auto-forwarding it here. The Blogger account will remain up for a little while. Please bear with me as I work these bugs out and try to resolve them. Thanks and God bless!