The Father's Heart: MDW & Why Sacrifice Matters

To judge from the culture, Memorial Day Weekend is a time for people to hold cookouts and for a bunch of people to get drunk and make bad decisions.  In other words, it is a time to engage in pampering yourself and focusing exclusively on you having a good time.

And yet, we know that the holiday is set aside as a time to remember those men and women who have sacrificed their lives in the defense of the United States of America through military service.  It is a day to commemorate self-sacrifice and valor.  These admirable qualities are often overlooked in today's increasingly self-centered society.

Sadly, many churches have the same problem.  With an ever-increasing consumer mentality dominating our culture, so many people ask, "what's in it for me?"

In culture, we can easily attribute this to the falling away from faith.  In the church, however, we can probably trace this back to a lack of understanding about the foundation of following Christ.

A lot of people boil Christianity down to the idea of proper behavior.  If you follow Christ, you should follow this lengthy list of do's and don't's.  The focus is constantly on the rules.  The problem with a fixation on rule-following is that it misses the point of following Christ--RELATIONSHIP. Also, when someone falls short of the ideal that God has for them according to those rules without a proper understanding of the healing power of God in restoring broken people and using them for great purposes, they might understandably walk away from Christ in shame.

Even looking the grand-daddy of all rules--the Ten Commandments, we can see that the law that God had given to the Israelites was really more about relationship than behavior.

What?  Did I just say that?  How can that be?

Andy Stanley writes in The Grace of God, that we should note that the rules came AFTER the relationship.  God initiated a relationship with Abraham, like a bazillion years earlier.  He pursued Abraham's heart and the heart of each succeeding generation.

He was a personal God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  And Exodus 20 begins by reminding Moses that "I am the Lord YOUR God"  not "Lord THE God."  Before God hit Moses with the Ten Commandments, He reminded Moses of the pre-existing relationship with the Israelites.  Andy Stanley writes, "God initiated a relationship with His people even before he told them what the rules were." 

Wow.  If you are like me, you probably never looked at that from that perspective.

Why is this important and what does it have to do with Memorial Day and sacrifice?

Because as Andy Stanley points out, "Rules without relationship lead to rebellion.  God understands human nature.  So He gave the Israelites rules after they shared a relationship."

Because God is a God of relationship.  Your value to Him is not found in WHAT YOU DO FOR Him.  Your value is found in YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO Him.  He wants your heart.  And from that heart will flow obedience, service to others, worship, and yes, sacrifice.

So many people miss that point. Sacrifice and serving others is born out of relationship.

It is not in our own strength that we can keep God's commandments, but out of the overflow of an intimate relationship with our Heavenly Father.

Putting others first and sacrificing your life for something larger than yourself is not commonly found in human nature, but it can be!  It is a reflection of the Father's heart for us.  Jesus made that point abundantly clear in his brief time here on earth and through His heart-breaking sacrifice on the cross borne out of love.

Those men and women who have willingly laid down their lives for us have given a powerful example for the world of the kind of self-sacrificing love that would be commonplace if people would just embrace their identity as a CHILD OF GOD.

If you think that being a Christian is all about following restrictive rules, you are missing the heart of God.  Yes, He wants obedience, but He wants your heart first and foremost.  Jesus wasn't a huge fan of the pharisees--a group of "rules" fanboys if ever there was one.  He was looking for something more than simple rule-following.  He was looking for something more INTIMATE, like RELATIONSHIP.

Not convinced?  Just think about it this way--most of the time when you mess up and do something really destructive in your life, it is born out of a selfish motivation.  In other words, you usually hurt yourself and others when you are motivated by prioritizing yourself--your needs, your wants, your desires.  When you put other people first by serving them and sacrificing for them, you very rarely end up engaging in destructive behavior.   Nowhere is that contrast more dramatic than on Memorial Day weekend as people engage in binge-drinking and self-indulgence to commemorate those who gave up their lives so that others could taste and retain freedom.

So, given that context, let's re-examine Jesus' greatest commandments in Matthew 22:36-40:

Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

Obviously, not every person who has died in the service of the military was a Christian.  They do, however, give us a glimpse of the power that "the greatest commandment" has in changing our world. Loving God will transform you.  Loving others will change the world.  Doing both is the Gospel of Jesus Christ in its purest form.

Take some time this weekend to thank God for the people who sacrificed for your freedom.  Take a moment to think about what motivated them.  Take some time to seek the heart of God and just see if it will motivate you to do the same.

Protective Hulk Smash Dad: A Lesson In Trusting Our Heavenly Father

My Daddy Hulk-Smash was imperfect, but God is not...

Recently, our 8 year old son came to us and admitted that he was having a hard time at school because some kids were being mean to him.  These kids were doing their best Amish impressions and shunning him during recess.  His little heart was broken.  As he cried about how hurt he was about their rejection, our parent hearts broke.

This was especially difficult because of our 3 kids, young Jack is the friendliest and most adventure-prone of our kids.  His raw courage and complete lack of fear in virtually every aspect of life is remarkable to me.  As a kid who grew up in the grip of fear, it's been exciting watching Jackson embrace adventure!  While I often opted not to do things and embrace the safety of my couch as a child, Jackson is always ready to pounce on something new and adventurous.  On this night, however, he was a broken-hearted boy crying over his "terrible life" because of this rejection.  We hugged him, prayed with him and attempted to say the right things to him to make this better.

But somewhere deep inside me, a seething papa bear rage began to rise up.

A big of a HULK SMASH, if you will.

Suddenly, I fancied myself a massive green character in the Marvel Universe willing to smash and destroy anyone and anything that would dare hurt my boy.  I know what you are thinking, "this is a guy who works in children's ministry and he's blogging about attacking a bunch of 2nd graders?"

Yes.  Yes I am.  Of course, I wouldn't attack 2nd graders, but the desire to protect my son rose up within me with an unbridled passion.  I really didn't know what to do, but I felt such a protective urge to save my son at that moment.

Lately, God has been impressing on me the importance of trusting Him as a good Father.  We always talk about how God can protect us and God cares about us and how God is good.  We don't always walk that out.  Sometimes it is easier to believe that God is good from the sidelines, rather than in the excitement of the game.  Consider Jesus' teaching in Matthew 7:9-11:

"Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!"

We've all read or heard that passage a million times.  You're probably reading this right now quipping sarcastically, "okay, Bill, are you going to cite John 3:16 too?  I already know this."

As misguided as my HULK SMASH rage in defense of my son was, it was rooted in this same Fatherly passion to protect his own that dominates the scripture.  We are SONS AND DAUGHTERS of God, He constantly reminds us through the Bible that as our FATHER, in all things HE works things out for our good.  He promises to never leave us nor forsake us. His fatherly love for us is perfect.  It is the perfection of fatherhood that we will never see in earthly fathers.  When we well up with passion to protect our kids, sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail.  When HE wells up with perfect passion to protect our kids, he conquers sin and death and opens a path to freedom.

As imperfect children here on earth, we will never fully understand the magnitude of His fatherly awesomeness.  And that's okay.  We can just rest in knowing that He is bigger than anything we will face and He is dying to provide for us in the way that only a perfect Father can.