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What would Jesus do?

The fad may be over, but that doesn’t mean the spirit of WWJD isn’t still alive and kicking. It is.

And although it may sound pretty harmless, even helpful, I would suggest that the WWJD mentality is more sinister than it may at first appear. Here are seven reasons:

1. It can turn Christianity into moralism. Now you might think, “Wait a second! God himself tells us to imitate Jesus in passages like 1 John 2:6.  How, then, can asking, ‘What would Jesus do?’  turn Christianity into moralism?” Answer: because the question doesn’t assume our undeserved acceptance through the gospel. In other words, if it is not clear to me that my call to ask “What would Jesus do?” is only Christian in light of what Jesus has already done, then my default mode will be to see the imitation of Christ as the means to God’s acceptance rather than a response to the truth that I am already accepted solely on the basis of what Jesus has already done for me on the cross.

2. It can feed our self-righteousness…because we measure and define ourselves and justify our existence by how well we imitate Jesus. This is self-righteousness – whatever you look to in life to justify your existence apart from Jesus’ righteousness. So don’t turn self-righteousness into a caricature of itself, like how so many Pharisees are depicted in the movies and thereby get yourself off the hook. Self-righteousness is looking to anything other than Jesus’ righteousness as the justification for your existence. And by reducing the Christian faith to imitating Jesus, you will look to your practice of Christian morality to justify your existence rather than Jesus’ absolute moral perfection given to you as a gift of sheer grace. And when you do that, you move decidedly away from the Christian gospel.

3. It can engender “Christian Bipolar.” If you embrace WWJD as a summary of the gospel, then when you’ve had a “good” day, you’ll feel accepted by the Lord, and when you’ve had a “bad” day, you’ll feel rejected by him. Your sense of assurance will vary by the circumstances of your life, which makes for a very volatile relationship with God – something the heavenly father does not want for you.

4. It can breed feelings of insecurity and superiority. On the one hand, if your conscience is at all sensitive, you’ll come to realize that the idea of a good day or a bad day is a mirage; instead, you’ll have good minutes and bad minutes, which eventually will all turn into complete badness because you’ll always be able to find some way in which you did not love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength or your neighbor as yourself! And so you’ll feel defeated and hopeless. On the other hand, if you’re not so sensitive, and find that you are doing what Jesus did, you’ll tend to be very self-congratulatory and superior to people who just can’t seem to get with the program.

5. It can enflame a sense of entitlement with God. Your “success” at doing what Jesus did can lead you to conclude that God owes you something: “What’s all this obedience for if God is still not going to give me a husband?”; “What’s the point of all my WWJD if God doesn’t rescue me from the financial trouble I’m in?” From here, you’ll find yourself very angry with God…and then you’ll rip your bracelet from your wrist and throw it in the garbage and say, “I’m done with ‘What would Jesus do?’! Now I’m gonna play a new game, ‘What would I do?’! And what I would do is have some fun for a change!”

6. It can turn Christianity into a (sub-) culture: Wear this, do this, don’t do that…etc.  If you have the bracelet and wear the T-shirt, you are a Christian. And because we tend to identify Christians by what they say no to or what they wear or what magnet is on their car or whether or not they go to church regularly, we will stop preaching the gospel to an important group of people who desperately need it – people who think they’re Christians because of what they wear, but in reality are not Christians at all!

7. It can give people a false sense of assurance. “Since I prayed ‘the prayer’ and wear the WWJD bracelet, then I must be a Christian. Who would wear something to call attention to his Christianity if he weren’t really a Christian?” Answer: religious hypocrites.

Here’s the problem: because WWJD is a slogan, it tends to function as a distillation or reduction of Christianity, and as such, it does a very poor job.  If you were to sum up the Christian faith, it would not be, “What would Jesus do?” It would be: “What has Jesus done?” This, then, would drive our obedience and passion for being like Jesus. Considering what he’s done for me, considering how much love he has shown me, how can I now do what I now know grieves and displeases him?  In other words, his love for me creates a proper sense of obligation – you feel compelled to live for someone who did so much for you.

THE BLOG HAS MOVED!

For your dining pleasure, the blog has moved to the Solid Food Media site. Click here, and then don’t forget to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to click the “Blog RSS” link.

How to pray better than a pagan…and a pastor, part three

This is the third installment on the Lord’s Prayer, which is Jesus’ word on prayer for both the superstitious and religious. Superstitious people use prayer as a totem against evil, fearing that their gods (or n0n-gods) will smite them if they fail to petition them in the right way with the right words for the right number of times. Religious people use prayer as a show of piety, trying to get leverage over God (“I’ve been so pious, now come through!”) and to get leverage over others (“I’ve been so pious, so I’m better than you!”). Christian prayer is radically different. Christians pray to a Father they know loves them because He mortgaged his very heart in order to rescue them from their superstition and religion by giving them Jesus Christ. Therefore, prayer is a way of connecting with a loving God, yielding to his benevolent leadership, and asking him to act in power in our weakness.

Today, we’re going to look at the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer: Thy kingdom come.

This request is  meant to move us into a greater submission to God, reminded the entire time that we submit ourselves to a king who is also our loving father. Moreover, we also pray that the Lord would use us as agents of kingdom advance in his world both in terms of communicating the saving message of the kingdom (the gospel) and the loving mercy of the gospel through deeds of service to the poor and oppressed.

This sample prayer has been greatly helped by the Bob Kauflin song, “O Great God“:

O Father, let your kingdom come first and foremost in my heart. Uproot and overthrow the kingdom of self and replace it with your own kingdom. We are awful rulers of our own domains; we are terrible at running our own lives. We need you to be our king in order to be safe and secure. So Father, OCCUPY our hearts: be an occupying power, a foreign regime in our lives, come to take over; OWN IT ALL and REIGN SUPREME: Let there not be a single territory, province, or region of our lives that is not under your sovereign sway; CONQUER EVERY REBEL POWER: Whenever rebellion rears its head in our hearts, put it down immediately; LET NO VICE OR SIN REMAIN THAT RESISTS your HOLY WAR: O Father, put down every resistance movement that our hearts can muster as they pursue vices and sins. Win the war of our hearts, we pray. And then, O Father, let us live according to your agenda for our lives, remembering that we are the serfs and you are the sovereign; you are the king and we are the courtiers. Let us not think for a moment that those roles are reversed, as if you exist to be ruled by us. Let us never think we have the right to “punch out,” but remind us that as your servants, we are on call 24/7! And when we start to feel like your rule is too much for us, let us remember that it is the rule of a Father-King who loves to give good gifts to his children/subjects. We also lift up these prayers for kingdom advance [here is where you would insert prayers for the people you're ministering to who aren't yet Christians and/or need your help with their physical needs].

A Plug for the Psalm 119 Conferences

This Friday and Saturday in Minneapolis, Todd Friel, Phil Johnson, James White, Milton Vincent, and I will speak on the subject of biblical discernment at Wretched Radio’s Psalm 119 Conference.

What’s great about the Psalm 119 Conference is that it’s more like a concert tour than a conference. Rather than you having to travel to a central location to benefit from it, the conference comes to you! South Carolina was the first stop. Next Minneapolis. Then the conference will hit Ohio, Texas, Massachusetts, and California.

So find the one nearest you and register today! And if you’re near Minneapolis, there’s still time to join us. As a wise man once said, “Git-r-done!”

Do you struggle to believe God loves you?

The answer to this question is, We all do! The freeness and richness and depth of God’s love for believers in Jesus Christ sounds too good to be true. Our world operates as a meritocracy. Everything is about achievement, success, what you do to get ahead. So when we hear in the gospel that the Father loved us so much that he sent Jesus to live the life we could never live and die the death we deserved to die as a sheer gift by his grace, we are baffled. And because we’re in touch enough with our weaknesses and flaws and sins, we can from time to time feel insecure: Does God really love me?

How should you handle this struggle? Repent and believe the gospel.

Believe the gospel – meditate on and reappropriate the truth of texts like 1 John 4:10: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.” Or Rom 5:8: “But God demonstrates his love toward us that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Or Rom 8:1: “There is therefore now no condemnation (= no doom) for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Fight to keep the truth of the Father’s love in front of you. Pray the truth of these verses deep into your soul till your heart is at peace, resting confidently in the unchanging love the Father has for you. The Father loves you. The cross proves it.

But you also need to repent. And the reason you need to repent is that there is often a sinister and subtle mixture of faith and unbelief swirling around your insecurity.

First, you need to understand that part of you wants to believe that God the Father is cold and capricious…because who can blame you for rebelling against a vicious dictator? But if the God of the universe isn’t simply and all-powerful and transcendent deity, if this all-powerful and transcendent deity is also full of love for us, then to rebel against that kind of God would be nothing short of treason. What I’m saying is that if God is distant and disinterested in us, then we have a ready-made excuse for running our own lives without regard for his authority over us. It allows us, in a manner of speaking, to have our cake and eat it, too: we can rebel against God and feel justified in our rebellion. So we get rebellion and we get an unfettered conscience.

We also don’t want to admit that God is a loving, generous, gracious father, because to admit that would be to admit that we’re children – that we need him, that we’re not all that wise, that we’re not all that strong, we’re not all that powerful. I mean, the whole Christian life is summed up in terms of being a child – needy, humble, dependent, weak – Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

You need to linger over that and take that in…because what Jesus is saying is that what it means to be a Christian is to be a child of the Father. But to be a child is to be the opposite of every inclination of our hearts. You don’t want to be weak (or even seen as weak). You don’t want to be needy. You don’t want to be foolish, childish. Every fiber of your being (and mine) wants to be strong and self-sufficient and wise. So if God can be something to you less than or other than a loving Father, then you don’t have to admit just how much of a child you really are.

So if you’re struggling to believe that God loves you today, remember the gospel. Remember that God’s love for you is as certain as his love for his own son, as certain as the cross of Calvary. And as you remember that God’s love for you will never, ever change, you will find yourself free to confess to him that part of you wants to believe he’s not a loving father. From there, you can repent and run right back into his loving arms, knowing that even in your rebellion, you were and always will be his dear child.

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How to pray better than a pagan…and a pastor, part two

The Lord’s Prayer is Jesus’ answer to Christian prayer – what makes Christian prayer uniquely Christian. The pagans saw their gods as cruel and capricious. Therefore prayer was a method of appeasement, a kind of exercise in superstition: “Let me make sure I’ve got the right technique and get all my bases covered so that my gods don’t kill me or my children or my crops. The Pharisees (the pastors of Jesus’ day) saw the true God as someone they could leverage by their good works. Keep the rules so that you can have all the goodies you want out of life. This turned their prayer life into little more than a show – a way of paying their tax to God and impressing their religious followers.

By starting off the Lord’s Prayer with, “Our Father in heaven,” Jesus makes Christian prayer radically relational. Pagans used prayer as their magic words to keep the gods off their backs. Pharisees used prayer as a means of controlling God to get what they wanted, too. Christian prayer is meant as a means of communing with a Father who loves and accepts us apart from our works – indeed, in defiance of them! Therefore prayer for the Christian becomes a way of connecting with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who leveraged himself for our eternal good. He does not need to be appeased because in love he sent Jesus to bear all God’s wrath for our sin. Therefore there is no longer any condemnation for us. He also cannot be bought – by our prayers or giving or other religious acts – these don’t impress him. As our Father we are permanently a part of his family and therefore everything that is his is ours. What religion does to us is to make us love all that is his rather than all that he is. God becomes the means to an end rather than the ultimate end of our lives.

Today, we’re going to consider the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed be Thy name.”

“Hallowed” is a word we rarely use, even in the Christian church. The idea is that God’s name would be the most sacred thing in our lives, a name that is summed up in the divine confession of Exod 34:6-7, when the Lord reveals it to Moses:

The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness and truth, who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin, yet will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.

Two things come into sharp relief in this confession of the divine name: (1) God’s love; and (2) God’s justice. And nowhere do these two concepts become clearer than at the cross. Think of the vertical beam as God’s justice and the horizontal beam as God’s love. On the cross, Jesus was simultaneously the ultimate expression of God’s great love for sinners and his holy justice on sin. The cross teaches us that sin is serious because it cost the Father his son. And it teaches us that the Father dearly loves us because he gave over his son for our sins so that we would never have to experience his just wrath.

This is the name that is to be central to our lives: the gospel-name of God. And when our lives are in orbit around the gospel, our lives are full of peace, hope, and joy. But when our lives are in orbit around any other (lesser) “name” – comfort, acclaim, power, approval – our lives go careening out of control.

So as you pray, Our Father, hallowed be Thy name, acknowledge that you are praying to a Father who loves you so much that he gave his son to save you, and then ask that his great name would be what is the most sacred thing to you in the world.

Consider elaborating on the first petition with this:

Hallowed be your name first and foremost in our lives. Let us live with you as the center of our existence. Let us live with you as the most sacred thing in our lives. And when we’re about to put something else in the center (an idol), remind us of four things: (1) Vanity: Remind us that anyone or anything else that takes center stage in our lives cannot deliver on what it promises. Oh, it can grant something temporary and fleeting, a counterfeit of what you offer in the gospel, but it can never deliver anything genuine or lasting; neither can it forgive us when we fail or encourage us when we succeed; (2) Viciousness: Father, remind us that even though the idols of our heart are manufactured by our own desires and are as powerless as a scarecrow in a cucumber field, they inevitably become fueled by supernatural forces of evil. And with this evil comes a desire to see us destroyed. If we get the thing we crave apart from you, our idol will make us feel disillusioned, craving more (it will raise the bar). If we do not get the thing we crave apart from you, our idol will make us feel depressed, feeling like miserable failures (it will lower the boom). Remind us that our idols want to see us miserable and ultimately as impotent and vicious as they are. (3) Vileness: O Father, remind us that you take our idolatry seriously, that no one who is an idolater will inherit the kingdom of God. So we pray that we would not trifle with our idols or fondle them in our hearts, but that we would be quick to turn away from them, hallowing only you; (4) Vindictiveness: O Father, remind us most of all that every act of idolatry on our parts is a vindictive act of spiritual adultery that we commit against you. Remind us that our idolatry breaks your heart, like a spouse whose husband or wife has cheated on them. Let this be the controlling factor for hallowing your name – that since you have been nothing but gracious, loving, and merciful to us, that we would not want to turn around and stab a father like you in the heart. Hallowed be Thy name.

Visit here for part one.

Brothers, we are professionals

Brothers, we are professionals.

When John Piper said the opposite of this in his book, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, he did not mean that it’s okay for pastors to be sloppy and slothful in the work of gospel ministry. He meant that we should not be mercenary in the work of the ministry:

Banish professionalism from our midst, Oh God, and in its place put passionate prayer, poverty of spirit, hunger for God, rigorous study of holy things, white-hot devotion to Jesus Christ, utter indifference to all material gain, and unremitting labor to rescue the perishing, perfect the saints, and glorify our sovereign Lord.

Notice that for Piper, the opposite of professionalism includes “rigorous study of holy things” and “unremitting labor.” So please don’t take him to suggest that the opposite of professionalism is to do things haphazardly or half-heartedly because, after all, the church is not a business.

In other words, don’t take him to define the word “professional” as “a person who is an expert at his work.” If he meant that, then the above quotation would make no sense. Pastors should be expert – expert in the Bible, expert in love, expert in pointing people to Jesus Christ.

The Apostle Paul puts it this way to his protégé, Timothy, in 1 Tim 4:13-16:

Until I come, give attention to the public breading of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching. Do not neglect the spiritual gift within you, which was bestowed on you through prophetic utterance with the laying on of hands by the presbytery. Take pains with these things; be absorbed in them, so that your progress will be evident to all. Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching; persevere in these things, for as you do this you will ensure salvation both for yourself and for those who hear you.

This is hardly a call to unprofessionalism – to incompetent, amateurish ministry, but a call to a robust, vigorous, thoughtful, excellent, dare I say, professional ministry.

Brothers, we are not mercenaries. Piper is right. But we are called to do our work well and to do our work the right way.

Brothers, we are professionals.

Why we’re discouraged over our sin

Last week, I tweeted, “What lies beneath many Christians’ desire for victory over their sin is a secret wish to reach a place where they no longer need Jesus.”

Here’s what I mean.

I’ve found that Christians who are discouraged over their inability to have victory over specific sins are discouraged because they are self-righteous. If they understood at the practical level how deep is the problem of their sinfulness, they would not be discouraged for long, but full of joy over a savior whose grace is so big.

Now self-righteousness is a strange thing because it manifests itself in subtle ways. You cannot reduce it simply to a smug sense of superiority.

And one of the ways our self-righteousness subtly manifests itself is through our discouragement over our sins. Therefore, as the Puritan Thomas Brooks puts it:

Believers must repent for their being discouraged by their sins…[which] springs from their refusal of the richness, freeness, fulness, and everlastingness of God’s love; and from their refusal of the power, glory, sufficiency, and efficacy of the death and sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ; and from their refusal of the worth, glory, fullness, largeness, and completeness of the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

What Brooks is saying is that being discouraged over our sins is fundamentally unbelief in the gospel of grace – a gospel that involves the wiping away of our blemished record by the blood of Jesus in exchange for the perfect record of the life of Jesus given to us as a sheer gift by a loving God.

Do you ever feel mad at yourself, to the point of depression, that you are such a horrible person? Do you ever say to yourself, “What’s wrong with you? You’ve been a Christian all these years and you still haven’t gotten with the program! You’re better than this!”?

If you have, you’re probably guilty of righteousness more than you’re guilty of sin because you wish your own record were unsullied. You wish that you didn’t need Jesus to rescue you every day. But this is the whole point of the Christian faith: you need rescue, not just at the beginning of the Christian life, but every moment of every day!

Listen: your sin might seem overwhelming to you, but the fact is that you’re even worse than what you’ve seen. You are so terrible that the eternal son of God had to become man, live a sinless life for you, die a substitutionary death for you, and bear God’s everlasting wrath for you. The fact that you have trouble with this or that sin is only the tip of the iceberg.

This can be discouraging if – and this is a very big “if” – if you’re not remembering the gospel. But when you keep the gospel front and center in your life, you’re able to follow the advice of the late Jack Miller, “Cheer up! You’re worse than you think!” God’s grace is greater than all your sin.

How to pray better than a pagan…and a pastor

It is amazing how rarely we pray the Lord’s Prayer. And I don’t mean recite the Lord’s Prayer, I mean pray it.

Please don’t misunderstand: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with reciting the Lord’s Prayer. After all, in Luke’s version of it, Jesus says, “When you pray, say…” and then goes on to recite what has become so familiar to us. But we miss the point of Jesus’ teaching on prayer if we reduce the Lord’s Prayer to a mindless repetition of words (see Matt 6:7). Instead, what Jesus is after is the heart of prayer, and he gives us instruction for how to pray so that we’d have both a diagnostic and practical tool for gospel-centered prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer Diagnostic

The Lord’s Prayer is diagnostic because it offers a corrective for both the prayer of a pagan and the prayer of a Pharisee (= a pastor). Pagans used prayer as a magical incantation to control their world or appease their deities. Pharisees also used prayer as currency: by their pious prayer, they could both put God in their debt and make themselves look good to their religious followers and friends. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us how to pray better than a pagan…and a pastor.

The Lord’s Prayer in Practice

So the next time you wonder what to pray, consider doing what Jesus said. Consider praying the Lord’s Prayer.

Today, let’s look to the ground of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our father in heaven”:

This is the basis and key for the entire prayer. Jesus wants us to be reminded every time we pray that we are addressing a God who loves us dearly (“Our Father”) and who marshals all of his omnipotence to do us good (“in heaven”).

Our Father in heaven,

Thank you for being our real dad, our true father. Thank you for adopting us into your family and making us your kids despite how rebellious and disobedient we have been. Thank you that our status as your children will never change, that our adoption is a permanent and everlasting fixture of our lives. Thank you, too, for causing us to be born again, for spiritually birthing us into your family. Thank you that, as a result, our connection with you is like a blood connection, only stronger. Thank you that because you are a heavenly father nothing can stop you from showing love to us – not even our own sin, but that you even turn the tables on our sin to do nothing but good to us. All we have to do is look to the cross for the incontrovertible proof that your love for us is unstoppable.

For more on the Lord’s Prayer, check out the related messages from my series on the Sermon on the Mount.

Praying “in Jesus’ name”

In Matthew 7, Jesus tells us not to “heap up empty phrases” as we pray. What he’s talking about is the common practice in the ancient world of working through long lists of the names of deities, hoping that by just the right invocation you could cover all your bases and get out of a jam or receive from a deity whatever it is you were looking for. They thought that their “formal invocations and magical incantations” would enable them to persuade the gods to give them what they wanted.[1]

Therefore, prayer is all about technique. Say your prayer the right way. Invoke the name of the right deity. Follow this formula or spell or whatever, and you’ll be able to get what you want out of life: you’ll be rescued from calamity or be rewarded with prosperity.

Well, in my mind there’s a sense in which Christians are guilty of this same approach with the phrase “in Jesus’ name.” Jesus does tell us to ask the Father in his name in the gospels, so there’s nothing wrong with concluding our prayers by saying, “In Jesus’ name, amen.” But even though the phrase has become part of an unspoken evangelical liturgy, I wonder if we actually know what it means.

Consider this wonderful quotation from the groundbreaking book, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World by Paul E Miller:

Imagine that your prayer is a poorly dressed beggar reeking of alcohol and body odor, stumbling toward the palace of the great king. You have become your prayer. As you shuffle toward the barred gate, the guards stiffen. Your smell has preceded you. You stammer out a message for the great king: “I want to see the king.” Your words are barely intelligible, but you whisper one final word, “Jesus. I come in the name of Jesus.” At the name of Jesus…the palace comes alive. The guards snap to attention, bowing low in front of you. Lights come on, and the door flies open. You are ushered into the palace and down a long hallway into the throne room of the great king, who comes running to you and wraps you in his arms.

The name of Jesus gives my prayers royal access. They get through. Jesus isn’t just the Savior of my soul. He’s also the Savior of my prayers….“Asking in Jesus’ name” isn’t another thing I have to get right so my prayers are perfect. It is one more gift of God because my prayers are so imperfect.

So this week, as you pray, “in Jesus’ name,” remember: praying in Jesus’ name isn’t an incantation that you have to say in order to make your prayers perfect; it’s a gift of God because your prayers are so imperfect.

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[1] R T France, The Gospel according to Matthew: An Introduction and Commentary (InterVarsity, 1985), 132.