“Personal Relationship” - Where Does The Bible Say That? (November 23, 2003)
I received the following question; below is my response.
My brother-in-law asked me, "Where in the Bible does it say, 'A personal relationship with God'?" The preachers on Moody radio and other Christians often say this. My brother-in-law feels it is bold, arrogant and silly. I feel the same. But I feel you can have a personal way that you worship, rely on God and follow him. God does not greet me in the morning or tuck me in at night. I am not as strong on this as my brother-in-law but I do understand his feelings and anger.
God bless you both!
There are two phrases in today's evangelical jargon that I wish I could drop-kick into oblivion. One is "unconditional love" and the other is "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." I'll save my diatribe against "unconditional love" for another Pastor's Page. (See “Unconditional Love” Is Unbiblical Nonsense - June 11, 2006).
Your brother-in-law's question makes the excellent point that the words "a personal relationship with God" (or Jesus) are not found in the Bible. That right there should give us pause about including them in our religious vocabulary. It is possible, of course, for a non-biblical word or phrase to express a biblical truth - like "trinity." But when you go outside the Bible for religious phrasing then you must be prepared to defend it consciously and constantly - as we do with "trinity." For the most part, though, it is best to stay on the safe and sturdy ground of the Bible's own words. Carelessly wielded phrases hide inaccurate thoughts and lead to inaccurate beliefs.
I have become increasingly concerned about presentations of the gospel that nudge aside biblical verbs like "believe," "love," "worship," and "obey" and replace them with the bland and vague "have a personal relationship with." Like your brother-in-law, I ask, "Where does the Bible say that?" and "What in the world does it mean?" The Bible's gospel message is consistent and clear. We must "repent and be baptized." (Acts 2:38). We must "believe on the Lord Jesus Christ" (Acts 16:31). If we "confess with [our] mouth 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in [our] hearts that God raised him from the dead, [we] will be saved." (Romans 10:9) I don't see anything there about "having a personal relationship" with him. I have, however, heard calls to receive Christ where nothing at all is said about repenting of sins, or believing in the resurrection, or declaring one's faith through baptism - just simply, "Are you ready to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?"
Bad effects result from emphasizing "personal relationship" to the exclusion of concrete things like belief and obedience. Sometimes what happens is that dear saints are frightened into believing that they were never saved in the first place. I don't know how many testimonies I have heard - even from pastors and missionaries! - that speak of years spent attending or ministering in churches even though they were "unsaved." I always want to ask, "What do you mean that you were unsaved? Were you secretly an unbeliever? Did you not believe that Jesus was the Messiah? Did you deny that God raised him from the dead? Did you sin with a reckless, unrepentant abandon that gave the lie to your profession of faith?" If the answers to these questions were yes, then I would agree with their self-diagnosis that they had been unsaved. But the testimonies I have heard are never like that. The people had always been believers, but they just lacked some experience whereby they could say that now they had a "personal relationship" with Jesus. Under close inspection, their accounts of dramatic conversion turn out to be implicit denials of the gospel message that those who believe in Jesus are saved! It is no longer faith in Christ that saves, but the experience of sensing a "personal relationship" with him. This is not scriptural.
When a "personal relationship" is elevated to saving status, and people aren't sure whether they've got such a relationship, the temptation is to conjure one up. Sometimes I fear this is exactly what well-meaning believers do. They carry on a dialogue with themselves and label one of the voices "God." By putting words into God’s mouth they may provide themselves with the illusion of a relationship with him, but in reality it brings them no closer to him.
What brings us closer to God is obedience and faith. Obedience to what is right and faith in what is true. Worry about those things - “seek first his kingdom and righteousness” - and a "relationship" of sorts with God will develop of its own. But it will be under God’s direction and sovereignty, and not because we have willed it into existence. It will be only distantly similar to the kinds of relationships we know and enjoy with one another. Remember that he is God and we are his creatures. We are not on equal footing with him. We ought to remain amazed and astounded that he should stoop to welcome us into his family, and discreet and humble about daring to speak of our "personal relationship" with him.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Scary Dad (November 16, 2003)
I’ve got a couple teenage boys. I’d like to share with you my method for keeping them off drugs.
It starts with example. My boys know that in all my life I have never used any kind of drug, or even smoked a cigarette or tasted a beer. Though I am guilty of many things, when it comes to substance abuse I’m clean as new-fallen snow.
That is not to say I’m not an addict. Since the age of eight I’ve started every day with a cup of coffee, and though I don’t drink a lot (never more than 2-3 cups a day), a daily caffeine fix is part of who I am. I also bite my nails (disgusting habit!), and would probably quiver like Rain Man missing Judge Wapner if those nails ever needed biting and I tried to resist.
I suspect that I am a dry alcoholic - that is, prone by genetics or disposition to be chemically enslaved - but I’ll never find out for sure because I’ll never take a drink. I’ve told my boys that a number of times: Never take the first drink, the first pill, the first joint, the first cigarette. Never consider yourself immune to addiction - I don’t. Both my boys know people who tried their first “whatever” and
then never stopped.
My other method is intimidation. I have spelled out for them with ringing clarity what I would do if I ever found, say, marijuana in their possession. I would call the police immediately and have them arrested, and I would not bail them out. They would spend time in jail. They know this, I’ve repeated it, they know I mean it, and they know I would follow through.
I know that some would see this approach as brutal and unloving, but I see it quite the other way. My message to both my boys is, “I love you enough to tell you ahead of time so that you know with 100 percent certainty that I will abandon your carcass to jail if you ever do drugs.
“So don’t do them.”
I’ve got a couple teenage boys. I’d like to share with you my method for keeping them off drugs.
It starts with example. My boys know that in all my life I have never used any kind of drug, or even smoked a cigarette or tasted a beer. Though I am guilty of many things, when it comes to substance abuse I’m clean as new-fallen snow.
That is not to say I’m not an addict. Since the age of eight I’ve started every day with a cup of coffee, and though I don’t drink a lot (never more than 2-3 cups a day), a daily caffeine fix is part of who I am. I also bite my nails (disgusting habit!), and would probably quiver like Rain Man missing Judge Wapner if those nails ever needed biting and I tried to resist.
I suspect that I am a dry alcoholic - that is, prone by genetics or disposition to be chemically enslaved - but I’ll never find out for sure because I’ll never take a drink. I’ve told my boys that a number of times: Never take the first drink, the first pill, the first joint, the first cigarette. Never consider yourself immune to addiction - I don’t. Both my boys know people who tried their first “whatever” and
then never stopped.
My other method is intimidation. I have spelled out for them with ringing clarity what I would do if I ever found, say, marijuana in their possession. I would call the police immediately and have them arrested, and I would not bail them out. They would spend time in jail. They know this, I’ve repeated it, they know I mean it, and they know I would follow through.
I know that some would see this approach as brutal and unloving, but I see it quite the other way. My message to both my boys is, “I love you enough to tell you ahead of time so that you know with 100 percent certainty that I will abandon your carcass to jail if you ever do drugs.
“So don’t do them.”
Sunday, November 9, 2003
I’m Such A Baby That Shrek Makes Me Cry (November 9, 2003)
A reference in Sunday School to Jacob weeping out loud over meeting Rachel (Genesis 29:11) led to a discussion about what makes people cry.
Crying varies from culture to culture and person to person. In Middle Eastern cultures people cry a lot more than Westerners do, and you will find the Bible full of unabashed weepers like Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Saul, David, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, Peter, John, Paul and Timothy - to name a few. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35) and over rebellious Jerusalem (Luke 19:41). The king of biblical criers has to be David, who wrote, "I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears." (Psalm 6:6)
Crying is at least partly voluntary - like a cough it can be suppressed or faked. Jewish funeral custom required that even poor families hire at least one professional wailing woman to weep and howl at a loved one's burial. Clearly such women could spout for pay for people they didn’t know. And of course, any good actor (or even a bad one like Jimmy Swaggert or Tammy Faye Baker) can cry on cue.
Western culture has traditionally shamed men for crying (as in Friar Laurence's rebuke of Romeo: "Thy tears are womanish...By my holy order, I thought thy disposition better tempered"), and that contempt has evaporated many a man's tears before they ever left the ducts. But attitudes are changing. Sportswriters point out, for example, that Hall of Fame inductees never used to cry on the lawn at Cooperstown - but now they gush buckets. Tom Hanks' comment about there being “no crying in baseball” belongs to the bygone era of Joe Dimaggio.
My own tears are a mystery to me. For some reason I don't cry at funerals, but the animated film Shrek had me rubbing huge wet drops from my cheeks when Rufus Wainwright sang,
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelu---jah
There is a time to cry. When my sister received bad news last year (following a string of other tragedies), I called my brother Dave and he responded with Malcom's words from Macbeth, "Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there weep our sad bosoms empty." God sees our tears, and bottles each one. (King David wrote, "Record my lament; list my tears on your scroll - are they not in your record?" Psalm 56:8.) But God also knows that our tears are not forever. Eric Clapton was right when he sang, "I know there'll be no more tears in heaven." Scripture promises as much in Revelation 7:17 where it says, "God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." Though this life can be a valley of woe, the ultimate destiny of God's loved ones is joy, not sorrow; fellowship, not solitude; fulfillment, not loss; and laughter, not tears.
A reference in Sunday School to Jacob weeping out loud over meeting Rachel (Genesis 29:11) led to a discussion about what makes people cry.
Crying varies from culture to culture and person to person. In Middle Eastern cultures people cry a lot more than Westerners do, and you will find the Bible full of unabashed weepers like Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Saul, David, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, Peter, John, Paul and Timothy - to name a few. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35) and over rebellious Jerusalem (Luke 19:41). The king of biblical criers has to be David, who wrote, "I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears." (Psalm 6:6)
Crying is at least partly voluntary - like a cough it can be suppressed or faked. Jewish funeral custom required that even poor families hire at least one professional wailing woman to weep and howl at a loved one's burial. Clearly such women could spout for pay for people they didn’t know. And of course, any good actor (or even a bad one like Jimmy Swaggert or Tammy Faye Baker) can cry on cue.
Western culture has traditionally shamed men for crying (as in Friar Laurence's rebuke of Romeo: "Thy tears are womanish...By my holy order, I thought thy disposition better tempered"), and that contempt has evaporated many a man's tears before they ever left the ducts. But attitudes are changing. Sportswriters point out, for example, that Hall of Fame inductees never used to cry on the lawn at Cooperstown - but now they gush buckets. Tom Hanks' comment about there being “no crying in baseball” belongs to the bygone era of Joe Dimaggio.
My own tears are a mystery to me. For some reason I don't cry at funerals, but the animated film Shrek had me rubbing huge wet drops from my cheeks when Rufus Wainwright sang,
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelu---jah
There is a time to cry. When my sister received bad news last year (following a string of other tragedies), I called my brother Dave and he responded with Malcom's words from Macbeth, "Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there weep our sad bosoms empty." God sees our tears, and bottles each one. (King David wrote, "Record my lament; list my tears on your scroll - are they not in your record?" Psalm 56:8.) But God also knows that our tears are not forever. Eric Clapton was right when he sang, "I know there'll be no more tears in heaven." Scripture promises as much in Revelation 7:17 where it says, "God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." Though this life can be a valley of woe, the ultimate destiny of God's loved ones is joy, not sorrow; fellowship, not solitude; fulfillment, not loss; and laughter, not tears.
Sunday, November 2, 2003
Good Men In The Service Of Evil (November 2, 2003)
The other day I chased a historical rabbit trail and discovered the story of a good man caught on the wrong side of an armed conflict.
I had long been curious about the backstory behind the Irish folk song "Grace" (sung magnificently by Anthony Kearns). The song is a first-person account of a man getting married just before his execution. The chorus goes:
Oh Grace, just hold me in your arms and let this moment linger
They'll take me out at dawn and I will die
With all my love I'll place this wedding ring upon your finger
There won't be time to share our love, for we must say good-bye.
The song is so emotionally powerful that I almost cried when first I heard it. So I looked it up and found that it referred to Joseph Plunkett, a key figure in the "Easter Uprising" of 1916 in Dublin. The uprising was a miserably ill-advised coup attempt by Irish rebels that the British easily crushed. Plunkett and 15 co-conspirators were arrested and executed. The night before facing the firing squad, Plunkett married his sweetheart, Grace Gifford, in a brief ceremony at the chapel in Kilmainham Gaol (Jail). Widowed within hours, she never remarried. Grace Gifford Plunkett became a leading voice for Irish independence as she honored (or some would say "exploited for political purposes") her husband's death, and died in 1955.
I do not know if there are any Sinn Fein sympathizers among my readers, but if there are, I will lose them right now by saying I think they are a bunch of terrorists. Their cause, methods and ideology are light-years removed from the valid struggles for independence on the part of India in the 1940s or the American colonies in the 1770s. It is not unreasonable to credit Irish nationalists with inventing the brand of terrorism that became the scourge of the latter 20th century and that now bleeds into the 21st.
The Easter Uprising of 1916 was wrong through and through, and it set the stage for the horrors that plague cities like Belfast to the present day. But - and this sets my mind reeling - Joseph Plunkett was a brave, devout Christian man. He was a fine scholar and poet, and some of his religious poetry is superb. Read this one, and note the simplicity and elegance with which Plunkett expresses the truth that Christ's glory is found in nature:
I See His Blood Upon The Rose
I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows
His tears fall from the skies.
I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice - and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.
All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined by every thorn,
His cross is every tree.
I believe that Plunkett's heart was touched by the grace of God. So, how could he have been so wrong in his choice of political alignment?
It occurred to me in mulling this over that Plunkett was not alone. Perhaps the two worthiest Christian men who fought in the Civil War were Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. (My favorite example of Lee's integrity has to do with the fact that, when offered money to write his memoirs, he refused on the grounds that he would not profit from the blood of his men. No such scruples inhibited Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell, who signed book deals for 5 and 6 million dollars each after Gulf War I.) But Lee and Jackson were on the wrong side. They did not see the war in terms of upholding the institution of slavery, but, ultimately, that is what it came to be about. Good men fought for evil.
Even Judah's best king, Josiah, fought in a bad cause. 2 Kings 23:25 says of him, "Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did." But when he was just 39 Josiah foolishly went after Neco, the Pharoah of Egypt, who had gone to help Assyria against Babylon. Neco warned Josiah to stay away, saying, "I have no quarrel with you. God told me to hurry, so do not oppose God." (2 Chronicles 35:21). Neco was right; Josiah was wrong, and Josiah died needlessly in battle.
In trying to sort out a lesson from such tragedies, it seems to me that they ought to inspire humility among the people of God. The best among us can sometimes be found contending on the wrong side. Remember that, and pray always for wisdom, and know that the holiness of your character does not guarantee the rightness of your cause. And let these cases move us to obey Jesus' command to love our enemies. Some of them are very good people. And even though - in the name of duty and justice - we have to kill them sometimes, remember that we may well see them in heaven, and be able to resume our brotherhood with them there.
The other day I chased a historical rabbit trail and discovered the story of a good man caught on the wrong side of an armed conflict.
I had long been curious about the backstory behind the Irish folk song "Grace" (sung magnificently by Anthony Kearns). The song is a first-person account of a man getting married just before his execution. The chorus goes:
Oh Grace, just hold me in your arms and let this moment linger
They'll take me out at dawn and I will die
With all my love I'll place this wedding ring upon your finger
There won't be time to share our love, for we must say good-bye.
The song is so emotionally powerful that I almost cried when first I heard it. So I looked it up and found that it referred to Joseph Plunkett, a key figure in the "Easter Uprising" of 1916 in Dublin. The uprising was a miserably ill-advised coup attempt by Irish rebels that the British easily crushed. Plunkett and 15 co-conspirators were arrested and executed. The night before facing the firing squad, Plunkett married his sweetheart, Grace Gifford, in a brief ceremony at the chapel in Kilmainham Gaol (Jail). Widowed within hours, she never remarried. Grace Gifford Plunkett became a leading voice for Irish independence as she honored (or some would say "exploited for political purposes") her husband's death, and died in 1955.
I do not know if there are any Sinn Fein sympathizers among my readers, but if there are, I will lose them right now by saying I think they are a bunch of terrorists. Their cause, methods and ideology are light-years removed from the valid struggles for independence on the part of India in the 1940s or the American colonies in the 1770s. It is not unreasonable to credit Irish nationalists with inventing the brand of terrorism that became the scourge of the latter 20th century and that now bleeds into the 21st.
The Easter Uprising of 1916 was wrong through and through, and it set the stage for the horrors that plague cities like Belfast to the present day. But - and this sets my mind reeling - Joseph Plunkett was a brave, devout Christian man. He was a fine scholar and poet, and some of his religious poetry is superb. Read this one, and note the simplicity and elegance with which Plunkett expresses the truth that Christ's glory is found in nature:
I See His Blood Upon The Rose
I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows
His tears fall from the skies.
I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice - and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.
All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined by every thorn,
His cross is every tree.
I believe that Plunkett's heart was touched by the grace of God. So, how could he have been so wrong in his choice of political alignment?
It occurred to me in mulling this over that Plunkett was not alone. Perhaps the two worthiest Christian men who fought in the Civil War were Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. (My favorite example of Lee's integrity has to do with the fact that, when offered money to write his memoirs, he refused on the grounds that he would not profit from the blood of his men. No such scruples inhibited Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell, who signed book deals for 5 and 6 million dollars each after Gulf War I.) But Lee and Jackson were on the wrong side. They did not see the war in terms of upholding the institution of slavery, but, ultimately, that is what it came to be about. Good men fought for evil.
Even Judah's best king, Josiah, fought in a bad cause. 2 Kings 23:25 says of him, "Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did." But when he was just 39 Josiah foolishly went after Neco, the Pharoah of Egypt, who had gone to help Assyria against Babylon. Neco warned Josiah to stay away, saying, "I have no quarrel with you. God told me to hurry, so do not oppose God." (2 Chronicles 35:21). Neco was right; Josiah was wrong, and Josiah died needlessly in battle.
In trying to sort out a lesson from such tragedies, it seems to me that they ought to inspire humility among the people of God. The best among us can sometimes be found contending on the wrong side. Remember that, and pray always for wisdom, and know that the holiness of your character does not guarantee the rightness of your cause. And let these cases move us to obey Jesus' command to love our enemies. Some of them are very good people. And even though - in the name of duty and justice - we have to kill them sometimes, remember that we may well see them in heaven, and be able to resume our brotherhood with them there.
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