Compassion

Polaroids cameras, music CDs and the three ring Circus. Three things that once commanded a significant place in the cultural and economic consciousness of our world and yet all three in the course of a relatively short time, have been supplanted, replaced or subverted by new ideas. Polaroid no longer makes film in the face of the digital revolution, music CD sales dropped over 20% last year while online downloads increased over 40% and Cirque Du Soleil has reinvented the definition of what a circus is for most people. The free market is our greatest resource for innovation because it's a constant churn of the best ideas and the most creative applications where the incentives of innovation and the consequences of stagnation are always within sight.

But what happens when it comes to the story of Jesus and our involvement in his imagination for the world, a place where our story is not just about us and not just about what we can get from life? How do we take seriously the challenge of Jesus to step out from a purely incentive driven motivation for life and at the same time remain inspired to create and innovate?

I think Philippians chapter 2 challenges us with the idea that the invitation of Jesus is one into the best of both worlds. Where we can be inspired to be creative with our time, our energy and our resources and at the same time find the freedom to let go of outcomes that only involve ourselves, so that we can put our best creativity and our best ideas and our most significant commitments into the cause of compassion.

See you Sunday

Jeremy Duncan

8 Sentences about Growth and Community

From The Seeking Heart (by Francois Fenelon): “If you are not careful, you will acquire so much knowledge that you will need another lifetime to put it into practice.”

Ephesians 4 gives us a clue to a personality trait that tends to ‘activate’ our potential perhaps more than any other. I want to suggest that it’s openness: actually a radical openness to 5 kinds of input (an openness to being led, an openness to being challenged, an openness to being taught, and openness to being touched and an openness to be involved in grace for someone else).

I think those two thoughts (paragraphs one and two above) come together at a very important intersection. Being radically open without taking any action means we have all kinds of great information which does nothing. Taking radical action without being open means you might be growing, but only at the ‘snail’s pace’ made possible with one person’s worth of insight (your own).

If you had to pick one problem for your own, which would it be? Why not have a discussion about it this week with someone you trust?

This Sunday, we’ll be taking a fresh look at community and new ways that we can ‘do life’ together.

Have a great day,

Chris

Jesus and Your Fridge

Each week we review and extend the previous Sunday’s message at Westside King’s Church. As a kind of post-script to our recent thoughts about change, we took time last Sunday to consider the connection between body-image and identity with a one-off message entitled Jesus and Your Fridge. Does Jesus have anything to say to us as we stand gazing into our fridge looking for some comfort? Does Jesus care that we reach our ideal body weight?

Eating is a strangely paradoxical issue of course, for while we eat to live, unhealthy eating can shorten our lives. Common wisdom applies here: we live best when we practice moderation. And while this is understood for the most part, the issue becomes more interesting as we push deeper into the more complex issues of personal identity -- who we are versus what we appear to be. For in our culture at least, personal identity is often attached to body image.

Have you ever noticed how magazine covers (at least the one’s my wife reads) will often feature a diet program along with some sort of decadent desert recipe? This kind of strange juxtaposition makes me wonder whether the realities of over-eating and hyper-fitness are not merely two ends of the same issue. We seem quite empty on the one hand, and use food to fill an emotional and spiritual emptiness; and on the other hand we want to project an image of ourselves that appears ordered and together, typified by the fitness craze. Either way, I think, our spiritual confusion shows. So the intention this past Sunday was to drive down past the idea of healthy eating and fitness as a good (which obviously it is) and ask the deeper question: in what way do these things relate to the deeper core of who we are?

Gerald May has written one of the most insightful books about human nature that I know of, using the angle of addiction to expose the inner dynamics we all wrestle with. His book is called Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions. The truth about us, says May, is that our addictions actually reveal the incompleteness that exists within us, our personal insufficiency, and the hunger we have for life. Addictions are revealing of who and what we are. We attach ourselves to behaviors or ideas in the hope that such will solve the ache, heal the fear, bring us love. But these ways can never provide what they promise, because they never address our deepest soul. We become “lost”. But May says that despite the obvious problem of addictions: “[they do] not make us unacceptable in God’s eyes. Far from it; our incompleteness is the empty side of our longing for God and for love. It is what draws us toward God and one another.” I believe that this insight is one way to ask a better question. As to the tension between over-eating and hyper-fitness (addictions of different sorts), perhaps we should be asking this: just what is it that I am looking for? Who am I and what do I need?

As a Biblical touch-point, we considered how the central section of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount addresses the issues of identity and performance. Although Jesus is speaking to different issues than ours (we are far more conscious of the over-weight/fitness idea than practically any other culture in history), he does speak to an enduring human struggle, especially the way we tend to go about manufacturing our identities, ignoring the real truth about ourselves. Why not take time to read Matthew chapter 6? Take note of the many ways Jesus addresses his audience on the question of appearance versus reality. You will find that he shines the spotlight on matters different from what they were used to, and by extension does the same for us. Perhaps, after all, the deeper issue on the weight/fitness question is really identity.

The gospel of Jesus proposes that since we are known to God in all of the various dimensions of our true being (the vast reality of ourselves that lies below the appearance), who we really are is the most important consideration. Body health is a practical question, but body image reaches more towards the spiritual.
The take-away from this discussion should simply be this: by all means, live healthily. Eat right and exercise. But as you work through this practical life issue, realize that the real you is loved by God no matter what image you project, or what emptiness you are trying to fill. And as you work to order your physical life, don’t forget the spiritual life and the question of identity.

This coming Sunday, we begin a series of messages on the vision of Westside King’s Church, a series we are call The Method in the Madness. We hope that you can join us at 9:29 or 11:11 am.

Bob

Inner Challenges

This past Sunday our two-week series The Five Things You Cannot Change moved from external to internal challenges. The intent was to consider those aspects of our human inner struggle that are endemic to us all, and perhaps as well, need a fairer consideration in our present culture. We asked: “what is it about our inner nature that we cannot change?”

Let me name something we cannot see but constantly feel the effects of. This past Sunday we wrestled a little with the meaning of the word “sin”. What is sin? An archaic idea no longer worth talking about? Mistakes? Dysfunctions? Is sin simply bad behavior? (provide your list here) Just what are we talking about? While this is a very large subject, requiring a needful clearing of the ground, the idea is vitally important because of its enormous explanatory power. We intuitively know that there is something about us that we have a hard time changing. We know that we should be different than we are. But how do we explain this intuition?

Here is where we realize our need to consider a very powerful idea. And ideas have consequences. Get this idea wrong, and we find ourselves continually disconnected us from our deepest reality. Get this idea right and we are not only illuminated but liberated. So the question should be asked: what idea about us could move us towards life, health and more possibility? And this might surprise you, but acknowledging an important thing about us that we cannot change may actually save us.

Think about this: for a very long time, whole cities and cultures were subject to plagues because of their ignorance of microbiology. When people failed to understand the existence of microorganisms, they also failed to understand that their experience of life was vitally connected to the world they couldn’t see. What we experience (in the case of my example: death and disease) is vitally connected to what we cannot see (in this case: the world of microbiology). Ignorance does not usually serve us well.

That is why we really need to understand that sin is first and foremost a disconnection from God, the author of life. Sin is a condition, an infection, a broken state of the heart. Only secondarily does it reveal itself in behaviors, attitudes, systems etc. But the visible effects of sin, what we often think of as hatred, abuse, deceit, greed, and a myriad of other “uglies” are merely symptoms of what goes on inside us at the root level of our being. When we acknowledge this, we become candidates for grace.

Our culture doesn’t like the word sin, and perhaps that is because the word has had to carry too much excess baggage. But consider this: that the idea we have casually dismissed has the power to open us back to the deepest change. By acknowledging our helpless state, God does what only he can do, unlocking our truest humanity through his amazing grace. Consider these words:

It wasn't so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It's a wonder God didn't lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.

Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It's God's gift from start to finish! We don't play the major role. If we did, we'd probably go around bragging that we'd done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing. (Ephesians 2:1-10, The Message Bible)

This coming Sunday, we will offer a one-off message entitled Jesus and Your Fridge. We hope that you can join us at 9:29 or 11:11 am.

Bob