Tozer on discernment

“Many tender-minded Christians fear to sin against love by daring to inquire into anything that comes wearing the cloak of Christianity and breathing the name of Jesus. They dare not examine the credentials of the latest prophet to hit their town lest they be guilty of rejecting something which may be of God. They timidly remember how the Pharisees refused to accept Christ when He came, and they do not want to be caught in the same snare, so they either reserve judgment or shut their eyes and accept everything without question. This is supposed to indicate a high degree of spirituality. But in sober fact it indicates no such thing. It may indeed be evidence of the absence of the Holy Spirit. Gullibility is not synonymous with spirituality. Faith is not a mental habit leading its possessor to open his mouth and swallow everything that has about it the color of the supernatural. Faith keeps its heart open to whatever is of God, and rejects everything that is not of God, however wonderful it may be. Try the spirits is a command of the Holy Spirit to the Church. We may sin as certainly by approving the spurious as by rejecting the genuine. And the current habit of refusing to take sides is not the way to avoid the question. To appraise things with a heart of love and then to act on the results is an obligation resting upon every Christian in the world. And the more as we see the day approaching.” —A. W. Tozer

Yeast and salt

Here is the second entry of my nascent blog.

Among other things, I'm reading this great book The Three Battlegrounds by Francis Frangipane. The book is about spiritual warfare in three areas: the mind, in the church, and in the heavenly places. I'm just a few chapters in, and I have already come across a bit of advice (some might even go so far as to call it counsel or biblical teaching) that I have used a dozen or more times. It has to do with what our response is when our flesh or the enemy points out our sin or our fallenness. Think about it. When you are presented with the facts of your sinful decisions or your sinful patterns, what's your response?

This is a question that is really worth the effort to look back and consider how we respond. Now I know for me that it is really important to understand why things happen. For example, in my dealings with older men in positions of authority, I can see how some of my past friction with my dad has affected (I could also say colored) the assumptions I make about their motives and the defensiveness that I want to bring out. So you could say that one of my responses is to consider the question "Why do I respond the way that I do? or: What is the cause of this present pattern of mine?"

So that's one response. Another one is that I will try to justify my failings or point out why they're not as bad as they could be. In other words, I defend myself by shifting the true fault to someone or something else or else I try to compare what I did to what other people do or to what I could have done.

Analysis and defense. I'm surely not the only person who reaches for those tools when I'm confronted with my failings. But Frangipane suggests that there is a better and more Biblical way of responding when we are confronted with our sin. He suggests that we turn immediately to God. His Scriptural basis is the somewhat difficult parable of coming to terms with your accuser.

Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. (Matthew 5:25-26 ESV)

Here's a paragraph from Frangipane's book that gives the gist of how he reads this parable:

This parable explains God's view of human righteousness. In the narrative, the adversary is the devil and the Judge is God. Satan, as our adversary, stands as the accuser of the brethren before God, the Judge of all. The truth Christ wants us to see is that when we approach God on the basis of our own righteousness, the adversary will always have legal grounds to "cast [us] into prison" for our righteousness is "as filthy rags" (Isaiah 64:6 KJV).

When we try to defend our sin, then we are pitting ourselves against the righteousness of God, and that is a losing battle if ever there was one. And so when the enemy or our conscience or our flesh points out some sinful failing in us, then rather than try to mitigate our sin or excuse it, we would do better to admit the truth of our sinfulness and throw ourselves before God to receive mercy from him. We will always lose if we seek vindication on our own merits, but we will always win if we seek mercy from God.

A potentially important detail: this only applies to accusations that are true. You can't cop to a crime you didn't commit, and you can't beg for mercy to wash away a sin that isn't there. So this reminder to confess and count on God's mercy only applies for actual sins. If your flesh or the enemy accuses you of things that aren't true, then you'll have to respond in some other way.

For the past week I've been trying this out. When I realize that I've done wrong or failed to do right, then instead of justifying myself, I turn straight to Jesus and admit my failing and honor him as my necessary Redeemer. It's hard to describe exactly why this has felt like a maturation in my walk with the Lord. Partly it "feels right." Partly Frangipane's interpretation of Matthew 5:25-26 makes a lot more sense than some legal interpretation where we simply capitulate to anyone who tries to drag us into court. I'm going to keep trying it out.

So that's the "agree with your accuser stuff." In the following chapter, Frangipane starts talking about strongholds. Basically a stronghold is a pattern of thought or belief in us that is opposed to God. It's an area of darkness that gives demons an opportunity to oppress believers. As far as I understand (and this is Frangipane's understanding too), Christians cannot be possessed by demons; because we are inhabited by the Spirit of Jesus Christ. But when we choose darkness over light in areas of our life, we give the enemy a kind of inroads that can be used to tempt us, attack us, and wear us down. We can't be conquered, but we can be harassed, might be a good way of putting it.

So do not support strongholds in your life! Refuse to garrison the foot soldiers of the enemy by keeping some parts of your life under the veil of darkness. Refuse to support sin in your head and your heart, and the enemy will have no place to make a foothold. This concept that the sin patterns in our thoughts and feelings are places where the devil's minions can set upon us seems very useful. For example, it explains well what Jesus meant when he said "The ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me" (John 14:30 KJV; "has no claim on me" ESV). There were no strongholds for the enemy in Jesus's life, because he submitted himself entirely to the Father and to nobody else. Would that we could do the same! And yet we have the mind of Christ, so I say let's go for it.

This lifestyle of ridding our minds of the places where the enemy can fester and flourish reminded me strongly of the Jewish feast of Passover. You remember that back in Egypt the Hebrews were instructed by God (through Moses) to get rid of all the yeast from their houses and to kill a lamb and thereby be spared the death that was coming. And thereafter "yeast" became strongly associated with corruption and sin. Jesus frequently warned his disciples to refuse the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod and other enemies of the gospel. This yeast, as it were, would foul and corrupt whatever it was in. And so to remain holy and pure, you had to rid your entire house of yeast. The association of yeast with corruption and putrefaction and death and decay stands in opposition to, for example, salt and its connotation of flavor and preservation. Thus we are instructed by Jesus to season our speech with salt and to be salt to the world. You might know that in the Jewish culture of Old Testament and New Testament times, newborn babies were rubbed down with salt in the belief that this would be beneficial for the child, would "preserve" him or her as it were.

O.K., that's all for now.

A rolling stone gathers no moss

It's five minutes before midnight, and I am determined to put in a few minutes pounding keys on my laptop in order to produce a blog entry. I won't let this writerly paralysis get the best of me! My internal critic has a death grip on my wrist, and unless I am reeking of confidence, he (or she or it--internal critics are probably better lumped with things than persons), I say again, he won't let me crank out a word. Well, to that I say: pshaw. And I'll trot out a little trick that I've long recommended to neophyte writers: if you're having trouble writing, then write about why you're having trouble. It will probably be therapeutic to organize your thoughts about why you're having trouble writing, and--who knows?--as a result of turning the writerly gears a few revolutions in a highly self-conscious and artificial way, you might find that the writerly engine turns over and suddenly you've got your motive power back. If nothing else happens except that words get laid on the page, then at least you're getting practice employing syntax, vocabulary, grammar, and the most elementary rules of composition. And versus doing jack squat and feeling miserable about the absence of writing, moaning about your paralysis and composing well-formed sentences is pretty darn good, in my opinion.

So what I want this blog to be is a place where I can explore the intersection of Christian faith and the English language. I guess language in general--I'm not all tied up on the English language in particular--but since I know English best, and since I know only about the ways that Christianity and English influence each other, it just happens that the Christianity/English crossroads is all I really can write about. I'm sure there are interesting things going on in other languages; in fact, I'm kind of interested right this moment all of a sudden in what's going on in the Spanish language when it comes to expressions of Christian faith. (Did you know that Spanish is the fastest-growing language in the United States?) But I have to stick with what I know. And that's being a Christian and being a speaker and a writer of English.

That intersection of faith and language can be examined all kinds of which ways. But there are a few specific ways that appeal to me particularly and that I think I'd be good at handling. For one, it's the exploration of Christianese. Ah, Christianese. It's the specialized language that Christians use with one another. Some Christianese words have come about as reactions to the non-Christian culture around us, and other Christianese words have come from phrases or keywords in the Bible, which is understandably a strong influencer of how we use language. There's the popular saying What Would Jesus Do? (WWJD); I wonder if on some level Christians don't wonder How Would Jesus Say This? Jesus himself used specialized language that marked him as part of a special crowd. Language like "Son of Man" was from certain parts of the Jewish prophetic tradition. And he spoke in parables that didn't always make sense until he or one of his followers had clued you in on the deeper meaning. So Christianese isn't bad. And this blog isn't about criticizing people who use Christianese. You could say that the Bible is written in Christianese. There was this one time during Jesus's ministry when he told a Jewish rabbi that he would have to be born again. The rabbi, a well-respected man named Nicodemus, wasn't quite sure what Jesus meant, and he played off his confusion by cracking wise about a grown man trying to crawl back up into the womb in order to be born again. Point being, Jesus said stuff like "born again" and it wasn't immediately clear to the uninitiated what he was talking about.

So that's one topic I want to explore: Christianese.

Another topic is song lyrics in Christian songs. Probably I will focus my attention on the so-called contemporary Christian genre. Hymns are often simply lifted psalm texts, and what I'm interested in is the Biblicality of Christian lyrics. Christian songs can have a great beat, and mellifluous and melodic lyrics, but what is the song really saying? I wonder about songs that seem to promote beliefs about Jesus or the church that aren't true in light of what Scripture tells us.

One example of this is a song called "Mysterious Ways" whose performer I can't recall at the moment. The song's chorus goes "God works in mysterious ways" and some of the verses go along the lines of "when you walk past a tree and it rustles in the wind, how do you know that isn't God telling you hello?" I'm probably infantilizing some of the song, but the point is that the song promotes an understanding of God as a remote and inscrutable figure. Now it's true and it's Biblical that God's ways are above our ways and that even the foolishness of God (if there were such a thing!) is wiser than the supreme wisdom of man. So it's true that there are things to God that we don't understand. But in all the ways in which we have to interact or depend on God, there is clear Biblical teaching. Where things get more, shall we say, mysterious is when we move off the beaten path of faith-in-action and try to obtain answers for any old question we come up with. So I have some concerns about songs that emphasize the mysterious and incomprehensible identity of God. I mean, as far as God making himself understandable goes, he did cause a library of books to be written that explains his motives and goals with regard to his interaction with the human race. I'm talking about the Bible!

There was one more topic that I wanted to mention. Now what was it? I guess it was probably just the topic of being a Christian and using my writing to glorify God and teach and encourage the church.

Oh, I found that "Mysterious Ways" song. It was by Kim Hill. You can google for it if you want. I'm not going to analyze the lyrics in any kind of serious detail tonight. I'm too tired!