Everyone in Distress, in Debt, or Discontented (1 Samuel 22:2)

 Everyone in Distress, in Debt, or Discontented (1 Samuel 22:2)

I may be the weird one, but this little triplet from David’s experience of fleeing Saul grabs me. The alliteration helps, but I am impressed again with how God works so much differently than does the world.

Think of an exercise in team-building. Maybe you could think of building a church staff. How are you going to go about it? You might start with a careful description of the skills needed, but then you move on to the personalities and psychological profiles are needed to fill all the seats on the bus. Yes, that is the kind of language that is used in the popular business books, and yet I am not sure at all that building a church staff or building a team has much to do with who sits where on a bus. When I ride the shuttle bus from the parking lot to the airport, I could not care less whether someone is a lion or an otter, extrovert or introvert, Type A or B or Z - everyone looks straight ahead; no one talks, and we just hope to get off the bus.

David, on the run from Saul with his life at risk, desperately needed a team. He was able to form such a group, though it seems he never consulted LinkedIn. This group which at one time numbered 600 men were drawn to him perhaps as much by their own personal distress as due to their respect and admiration for David and his reputation. They had lost everything, though we are not sure how. Perhaps the Philistines had taken their land and perhaps destroyed their families. Whatever victories Saul had been able to gain, it had not spared them their dire circumstances. And so they came to David.

But they must have known something of the one to whom they were coming. This was the man who, when a boy, had defeated Goliath. This is the one who was challenged to calm Saul’s evil spirit with music. He was the poet who sang to the sheep, and seemed to treat people as well or better than those sheep. He is the one who would be known as the Shepherd/King. Though not yet a king, these men saw something in David - that he would shepherd them, and they were willing to pledge their lives and service to him.

But there were rough, very rough. They were fashioned into mighty warriors, and probably had plenty of raw material available for that quest, but they were also prone to wanton violence and interpersonal conflict and greed and the immoralities that go along with it. David would have to patiently and carefully disciple them to be those who would reflect his own character and then help them to be conversant with God’s way rather than man’s ways. It would take time, and some would leave and die in their sins.

Corporate style teams cannot afford this much time. They need sterling resumés to start with, and each person needs to gain a following soon after. But David lovingly struggled with some of these men for the rest of their lives. I wonder what would happen if we saw “local church” more in David’s terms than that of “this present evil age (Gal 1:4)”

This Mob-ocractic Spirit

This Mob-ocractic Spirit

It is dangerous to pluck a phase from the news, but not quite so dangerous if the phrase showed up in a speech back in the earlier 1800’s by Abraham Lincoln quite a while before he became President and thus before the Civil War. He included it in a speech to a group of young men and spoke of the duty of preservation of liberty, not so much out of passion, but in rational and reasonable ways.

A preceding event prompted Lincoln’s warning and his use of the term, “mobocratic,” evidently used from time to time by others, but new to me. The tragedy was the lynching of a black man by a white mob, which, you would agree, was a terrible violation of liberty of the individual by many who were certainly not much interested in preserving liberty.

When we turn to the Bible, as we should, we find mobs at work in various settings. The mob in Jerusalem rose up against the prophet Jeremiah when he did not parrot the party line. The people had been assured of “peace and safety,” and Jeremiah was predicting imminent judgment. They threw him into a muddy pit.

The heads of the religion department in Jerusalem complained to Jesus about the praise He received from the “mob” as He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. Those shouting “Hosanna!” would have seen this as participation in public worship and would have certainly rejected the term “mob.” Does it merely depend on one’s perspective? “One man’s mob is another man’s worship throng?” I don’t think so. Jesus’ worshippers were not throwing stones. They were not demanding death and destruction. They were praising Jesus, God’s Son.

But there was another mob, only days later, who would chant “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” to the Roman governor, Pilate. Yes, that would be a mob, individuals caught up into destructive activity, driven by passion, and with little reason or reasonableness. Yes, they were concerned about the preservation of their “old” religion in the face of this powerful prophet and teacher, and Jewish exiles would continue to persecute Christians throughout the Book of Acts. They were so caught up in the zeitgeist of the moment that they were unable to soberly consider what the Old Testament clearly said. They were driven to an action for which they will have to answer to God Himself one day.

But doesn’t that apply to us as well? Won’t we be judged when we fail to reflect on Scripture and to consider what is indeed Christ-like as opposed to the prevalent “spirit of the age.” It is not so much that we are to think for ourselves (I don’t know how successfully we ever do such a thing - we have very few “original” thoughts), but we should know who and what we are following. What we are committed to follow if we call ourselves Christians is the Word of God upon which we soberly reflect and learn in concert with other believers (not a mob).

I believe the devil loves to incite a mob, and he does so with a cleverness that fools us often. The phrase “everyone’s doing it” is almost a definition of mobocracy, following the crowd, lending your passions but leaving your brain at home. It has happened in Biblical times and it still happens today. Democracy is one thing. Mobocracy is something much more dangerous. And mobocracy is deadly for the testimony of Jesus Christ and of His Church.

Whiter than Snow

 Whiter than Snow

There is a beautiful verse in Isaiah 1 that uses snow’s whiteness as a word picture. I don’t know how in the world that phrase came to mind here at the halfway point of February, but let’s not talk about the weather. Let’s talk about the Gospel.

The verse goes like this: Is. 1:18 “Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the LORD, “Though your sins are as scarlet, They will be as white as snow;”

The last two lines are actually found in poetic form in the Bible text. “White as snow” is a pretty good illustration, not of whiteness, but of purity.

The problem was that as Isaiah was writing, Israel was anything but pure. Here is his poetic description: Is. 1:4 Alas, sinful nation, People weighed down with iniquity, Offspring of evildoers, Sons who act corruptly!” Come now, Isaiah, tell us what you really think. But remember, this is not Isaiah’s observation. It is God’s, which Isaiah was then led to write.

Not only were they dirty, but they were sick. “The whole head is sick, And the whole heart is faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, There is nothing sound in it.”

And then, there is nothing that Israel could do about it. They were not able to work or buy their way back into God’s favor. They could do all the religious rituals they could dream up, but it would be to no avail.

That’s the bad news. The bad news is needed before we are ready to hear and appreciate the good news. Without the bad new, the good news does not strike us as being all that good. The bad news states that Israel was anything but pure; disqualified from any kind of covenant relationship with the holy God.

The good news talks about these stained people becoming “white as snow,” pristine and pure and thus acceptable to God. It is a picture of purity, but it requires us to ask the question, “how?” If they can not do it themselves, then how is it to be accomplished? We will find the answer in the text that I gave above, but only in part. Here is the whole thing: Is. 1:18 “Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the LORD, “Though your sins are as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool.” Not only do we have the word picture, “white as snow,” but also this simile: “like wool.” I suppose we normally think of wool as white, though I’m not sure that is its import here. Wool does not fall from heaven as does snow. It comes from a sheep, from the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

So both pictures are important. Jesus, the Son of God, came down from heaven (like snow) for the express purpose of bringing cleansing to His people, that is, those who would accept His gift. And the way that He did it is by Himself becoming the sacrificial lamb (wool) who would "bear in His own body our sins on the tree, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By His wounds we are healed” (1 Peter 2:24). That’s the good news. White as snow, and reconciled into a relationship with the God of the universe, which is why you exist.

Staph Meeting

Staph Meeting

I was sitting all alone in a coffee shop with this laptop, deep in thought about something or other. A couple of older ladies sat to my left. I’m not sure how old, maybe my age. But then I saw him, a man with a book, a discussion book. He started to pull some tables and chairs together just to my right. Oh no! He’s getting ready for a staph meeting.

It was not my intention to listen to either the left side or the right. But if I had to hire someone, I would definitely go with the two ladies on my left. They were friends and talked about this or that. One of the things the one mentioned was trying to show some younger people how to get something done, as though these ladies could actually get things done. What a concept!

The tall guy getting ready for his meeting kind of gave himself away. Not only was it the Patrick Lencioni book on organization and leadership (who also wrote the classic, “Death by Meeting,” which was about to be played out just to my right). It was his loafers with no socks. It had snowed that morning, and the compulsion to be cool totally overwhelmed any instinct for common sense. Eventually the group gathered, three women and, finally, a young man. There was some small talk, and then the real issue came to the fore.

I suspected that they were a church staff before they even began churching. There’s just something about that crowd that gives them away, similar to how old, grouchy Baptist pastors are easy to spot. The pastor, that is, the cool dude, started it off by, well, talking about himself.

And that is what the meeting was mostly about: self. They were all supposed to have a list of what makes them most happy in ministry, and the longest segment was the pastor’s talk about what he enjoyed most. They were each to contribute, and around the circle they went. Not a single one mentioned getting paid, though I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Now let me step back from my negativity and cynicism for just a moment to make a point. For each of those staff members, there was nothing that they said that made me think they were not sincere. They were doing as instructed, and I think they most likely truthfully mentioned things that they enjoyed in ministry. It’s not wrong. It is just not what it is all about. I so wanted the Apostle Paul to attend that meeting and tell what he most enjoyed. What was it, Paul, the imprisonments or the stonings or the shipwreck? Oh, he wouldn’t have said that, but he would have changed the question to something like this: What is it that makes Jesus most happy related to this ministry with which you are involved? Your feelings are not to be central. Jesus is.

And so the fault wasn’t with the staff members, but with the leader, who liked to talk about leadership, but never talked about leadership the way the Bible talks about, not as leadership but as servanthood. Servants don’t talk about what they enjoy and don’t enjoy all that much. They talk about Jesus, and they talk about others. So that’s how you turn a staff meeting into a staph meeting.