It's In the Air

Jesus Te Ama. 我爱你. I love you.

I find it interesting that those of us travelling on short-term missions trips (of which I did several) usually learn an interesting mix of phrases. We start of with, "Hello". Then if we get comfortable we master the necessary, "Thank you", "Where is the bathroom", and "I'm sorry." But those of us feeling very confident in our linguistic mastery and pious for our mission will graduate quickly to "I love you."

God's love is something we should certainly learn to say in any language that someone can understand. It's worth translating. It's worth being shouted from a mountain top. However, it's so interesting that we would want to say something like that so soon. I mean, we're only going to be there for a week. Can we really love someone in that amount of time? 

My point is that I think we misunderstand the depth of love. I think we share it flippantly at times, and find it overused. We say things like "I guess I've got to love him, but man! I just can't stand when he does that." Or better yet, "Yeah, I think I love my neighbors. I mean, I wave at them when I drive by..." Or even, "I love you Lord, and I lift my voice..."

So what does it mean to love? I'm about a month late on this one, but I guess that'll have to do. What does it mean to really love someone or something? Can we grow in our love? Can we stop loving? Is it a feeling or an action?

If you're reading this, I am sure that you (just like me) have heard how love is more than a feeling (thanks, Boston). Many have explained to me how love is more about choosing to give yourself to someone. After all, God so loved the world that He gave His only son. As true as that is, it is still abstract to me. I have found Paul much more helpful as he instructed his young, newly-appointed pastor Timothy.

In 1 Timothy 1, Paul starts out by reminding Timothy that he needs to stay put to straighten out some guys as far as what concerns true doctrine and what is fitting to be used to instruct the people. The purpose of this, he says, is love. What is so profound about this to me, is not that the purpose of correct doctrines, or staying put to correct such doctrines, is love. No. What stands out to me is the map that follows of how we get to love.

⁵ The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith (coloring mine).

Paul is saying here that love comes from three things: a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. Obviously, where something comes from tells a lot about the thing itself. The fact that I'm from Mississippi and Arkansas usually leads people to believe that I speak slowly and have calloused feet from walking around without shoes. Where love comes from hints at some attributes that it might have.

First, love comes from a pure heart. As I imagined the people that I flippantly said I loved, this piece of love struck me the most. A pure heart. If I am to love someone I have to have a pure heart in love toward them. I am sure this means many things, but one of them is this: If you want to love someone (or make your words come true) then you have to actually want to love them. You see, you can have a pure heart toward someone if you are only "loving" them in order to tell someone else about how God is moving in your life or what marvelous things He is doing through you. You can't love someone if you are trying to get something else from them. You have to have a pure heart.

Secondly, love comes from a good conscience. I'm not sure if this what Paul meant, but in my mind a good conscience is a clear one. It could also mean one that works correctly, and directs you toward God, but let me focus on it being clear. In order to love someone, you must have a clear conscience before them. That's exactly what went wrong in the garden. Love for God was dispelled because our consciences weren't clear any more. We were trying to hide something. In order for us to grow in love for someone we now actually want to love, we must confess our sin. We must confess how we were only pretending to love them in order to look neighborly. We must at least confess it to the Lord, and have him absolve us from our sin. Love demands a clear conscience.

Lastly, love comes from a sincere faith. Now, here's where it all comes together. We can love only if we have good intentions (a pure heart), and confess where we've gone wrong (a good conscience), but that's not enough. To have only started along the way, and recognized that you've gotten off track, is not enough to love someone. You must have a sincere faith. But a faith in what? A faith that the other person will receive you? Maybe. Sincerity in expression your mistakes? Possibly.

What I think is hidden here is an allusion to the mystery of godliness that Paul talks about in Chapter 3 - that God was manifested in the flesh. You see, true love requires a sincere faith that there is one who has come with true love to give himself on your behalf. There is one who has come to make up for your good intentions gone awry. There is one who has enabled you to not only intend to love someone, and see that you've gone astray, but He has come and sent his spirit to enable you to actually love them as He has loved you.

So love is more than a feeling. It starts with a feeling and some good intentions (a pure heart). But we quickly see that we don't measure up, and need to confess our shortcomings (a good conscience). And praise the Living God, who came to love us, and now only requires our faith to be accepted.

The Good Work of Healthcare

When the Bible speaks of its own role as preparing the Man of God for every good work, what do you think it means by every? All good work would be included, right? Ok, then. What do you think it means by the word good? Well, after creating each day, God spoke of his own creation as good. And famously, Jesus directed any assessment of being good to God alone. So, it seems "goodness" has something to do with "Godness". Now God is not only in the business of saving people, He is also in the business of creating people. He cultivates gardens just as much as He cultivates the human heart. God is a God of the ordinary as much as the miraculous. In fact, we might contend by sheer percentage of time spent on each that God is actually much more a God of the ordinary than the miraculous.

Nevertheless, my point (admittedly borrowed from Tim Keller in his book Every Good Endeavor) is simply that each one of us has work that has value in as much as it reflects the character of God. Work outside of ministry can be good work. In addition, however, we each face distinct roadblocks and troubles in our own disciplines that need to be addressed. Because I work in healthcare, and am around doctors all the time, I found the following passage to be very relevant. I will be posting more about the thoughts from this book, but this is a potent start.

The Gospel and Medicine
To let the gospel of Jesus shape how we work means to heed the influence of both the psychological idols within our hearts as well as the sociological idols in our culture and profession. For an example of this I will turn to the field of medicine. Some years ago I did an informal survey of several Christians in the medical profession. I asked them, "What are the factors inherent in the practice of medicine today that make it difficult to work as a Christian in this field? What are the main temptations and tests?" I was surprised, instructed, and helped by the answers I received.

One of the main problems mentioned was a deeply personal one - the great temptation to lose sight of your identity in your profession. The British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones was previously a successful physician in London. In one of his lectures to medical students and doctors, he said candidly, "there are many whom I have had the privilege of meeting whose tombstones might well bear the grim epitaph...'born a man, died a doctor'! The greatest danger which confronts the [medical professional] is that he may become lost in his profession...this is the special temptation of the doctor..." Another British doctor added:


...the temptation [is] for medicine to take over your life and rule your life as an enslaving power. It's a subtle one because...there is a kind of moral ego massage because you are giving so much - hours, responsibility, stress - to do so much good in other people's lives. There's a lot of self-justifying power in that kind of idolatry. It's much easier to feel morally superior as a doctor than as a stockbroker...There is also, in some people, the need to be needed and the power buzz you get from having influence...

Those in the helping professions (and that includes pastoral ministry as well as medicine) are tempted to feel superior because our work is so noble and so draining. And although medical professional pour themselves out in long, stressful hours and literally save lives, they meet plenty of ungrateful, unreasonable, and stubborn people who repay their hard work with venom and lawsuits. This can lead to a correlative spiritual peril. One doctor wrote:
It is easy to become extremely cynical about people and emotionally hardened to life. You see so much of the messy stuff of life and death that you feel your essential defense mechanism is to become emotionally detached and keep a distance in order to maintain your sanity.

Several doctors told me that only the gospel enabled them to see the traits of pride, cynicism, and detachment that were creeping into their characters. One said, "In the early days of a medical career you can work such enormous hours that your prayer life just dries up. That is deadly. Only if Jesus stays real to the heart can you be consistently joyful enough in him to avoid making medicine your whole self-worth, and then becoming hardened when you meet so much ingratitude."


My survey also revealed pressures on doctors that came from the culture. One woman I corresponded with pointed me to an article in The New England Journal of Medicine titled "God at the Bedside." The author was a doctor who often found that patients' spiritual beliefs and practice were very much a factor in their health issues, but "in the modern era, religion and science are understood as sharply divided, the two occupying very different domains." He wrote that he often found that patients' guilt and fears were factors in their illness and also that their faith in God was part of how they healed, but he felt completely unprepared by his training to address any of these realities. "Doctors," he wrote, "understandably are leery of moving outside the strictly clinical and venturing in the spiritual realm."


Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones makes the same point in one of his lectures to medical professionals. Lloyd-Jones was on staff at Saint Bart's in London under the famous chief of staff Lord Horder in the late 1920s. At one point the junior physician was asked by Lord Horder to rearrange and reclassify his case history records. He created a new filing system, arranging the cases not by name, but by diagnosis and treatment. As Lloyd-Jones did this task he was astonished that Horder's diagnostic notes in well over half the cases included comments such as "works far too hard," "drinks too much," "unhappy in home and marriage." At one point he spent the weekend with Lord Horder and took the opportunity to ask him about what he had seen in the case files. Horder responded that the reckoned only about a third of the problems that are brought to a physician are strictly medical - the rest are due to or aggravated by anxiety and stress, poor life choices, and unrealistic goals and beliefs about themselves. Severe cases, of course, could be sent to the psychiatrist, but most of the time that wasn't appropriate. So, Horder concluded, a doctor should basically mind his or her own business. Lloyd-Jones said that after he heard that response:


...we argued for the whole of the weekend! My contention was that we should be treating [the whole of the person's life]. "Ah," said Horder, "that is where you are wrong! If these people like to pay us our fees for more or less doing nothing, then let them do so. We can then concentrate on the 35 percent or so of real medicine." But my contention was that to treat other people [taking into account their whole life] was "real medicine" also. All of them were really sick. They certainly were not well! They have gone to the doctor - perhaps more than one - in quest of help.


Lloyd-Jones was not proposing that physicians were by themselves competent to do this, but rather that together with other counselors and helping professionals they needed to address the whole person. People have a spiritual nature, a moral nature, and a social nature, and if any of these are violated by unwise or wrong beliefs, behaviors, and choices, there can be interlocking physical and emotional breakdown. And even patients whose original illness was caused by strictly physical factors eventually need much more than mere medicine to recuperate and heal.


That conversation took place in 1927, but two trends have only exacerbated the situation that Horder and Lloyd-Jones were addressing. First, there has been an enormous increase in specialization, so that no single helping professional ever seems to have the luxury of looking at the whole person. Just as important is the growth in influence of a view that has been called "evolutionary social constructivism," which believes that "all aspects of every level of reality [have] a single evolutionary explanation." In effect the very concept of the whole person is vanishing. Our consciousness and emotion, our choices and desires, our goals and joys are increasingly seen to be the results of our genetic hardwiring. The old idea of a person consisting of body, mind, and spirit is gone - now there is only a body that has mental, emotional, and spiritual neurology. In addition to this reductionistic understanding of human nature, the increasing economic and legal pressures on doctors and hospitals are likely to push medical professionals more cautiously to "mind their own business" when it comes to treating the whole person.


Because they understating the effects of both creation and fall on the human person, Christians in the medical profession can resist the narrowing implications of this view. The Christian view of human nature is rich and multifaceted. God created and will resurrect our bodies - and so they are important! If God himself is to redeem our bodies (Romans 8:23) then he is the Great Physician, and the medical vocation could not be loftier. Bot God does not care only about bodies; he created and redeems our souls as well. SO Christian physicians will always bear the totality of the human person in mind. Their faith gives them the resources to muster the humility and the ingenuity necessary to see patients as more than just bodies.

Becoming A Perfect Man - Easier Said Than Done

James talks a lot about talking. The Proverbs also talk a lot about talking and even about talking a lot.

This last week, a friend of mine and I were memorizing James 3:2 - We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault at what he says, he is a perfect man able to keep his whole body in check.

Like most people, my first thought was, "I know! If I could just keep a reign on what I said, I would be much better off!" We know the truth that controlling what we say is a very difficult task to master. Even when we think we are doing well, just wait ten minutes until the crowd changes and you say exactly what you were vowing you wouldn't say. We all do it.

But after a while, I got to thinking about this verse some more, and I started weaseling my way through it. I began to think, well, if all you have to do is never be at fault at what you say, then I guess my thought life is of no regard. Of course, I reasoned, if you think about good things, good things are bound to come out. But the self-justification wasn't aimed at how to improve, it was aimed at how to get by. I was thinking to myself, well if I think these terrible things, but then always say the right thing, then maybe I'm a perfect man. Maybe it's as easy as just saying it, and you don't have to do anything about it.

But then the words of Jesus come ringing in. In Matthew 12:34, Jesus reminds us that from the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. You see the words that come out of my mouth are truly a reflection of what is really inside my heart. And the truly sobering fact is that though I'm thinking I'm saying the right things, the truth of the matter is that my words sound just as self-justifying as they truly are in my heart. Love does not hide, nor does it cover over insincerity.

There is hope, however. There is one who though he was curse, he held his tongue. He only spoke what he heard the Father say. His words are truth and life. Jesus the Word of God has come to dwell in us to not only make us innocent before the law, but perfect - men and women able to keep our whole body in check.

Afraid to Worship

A friend of mine and I have been regularly listening to sermons from Fellowship Memphis via the extremely convenient app.

[A quick side note: I was listening to one of these sermons while building my back fence in the snow this weekend. I think the sermon was downloading and stopped for a while when I was too far from the wifi connection of my house. Several minutes went by with nothing, and I forgot I even had the earbuds in. Then, as I was putting up one of the last slats, somebody started talking to me. Startled, I looked around, through the fence, behind me. I ducked and look up, there was no one! Oh yeah, it's Brian Loritz. He is talking to me on the sermon. Right.]

This week I was challenged to think about Courageous Discipleship. One of the main points here is the relationship between fear and worship. I know that I have often been told that there is connection between fear and worship. Pastors will say that when the Bible says "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" they tell me it means something like reverence or respect. The same way you fear your Father.

I'm sure that's true, but I heard it in a little bit different way this time around. What I heard was, "You worship what you fear." It struck me, because I can see how it's true. I can see how our respect is given to those things which we consider powerful. I suggest this revision, though, "Your fears reveal what you worship."

Take the fear of the dark. The fear of the dark happens because you are unsure of what will happen to you. It reveals that you value, that you worship, your own life. You are afraid to die or to be injured. It's a perfectly natural fear - but Jesus has even conquered this idol for us. He has conquered death.

Or take a concern or worry about what others think of you. It may be that you worship them, or at least their opinion of you. Your fears about what they may say indicate that you respect their opinion. You worship their words over the words that proceed from the very mouth of God.

Or take my fear. My fear that I will not succeed in the roles in which I operate. This betrays that I value success. I value winning. I also value and worship my own abilities and am afraid to let God come in, use His strength and show Himself off to be great.

May we be afraid of the Lord. May we fear the Lord, and allow that to lead us to worship Him. What will He think? What will He do if I do this? What will He say of me?