Christ

John 3:16 – Yeah, Yeah, We’ve Heard It All Before

/ ME / 1 Comment

Imagine my surprise at opening my devotion book this morning and finding the featured verse was John 3:16. Okay, you’re probably wondering why that was such a shocker.

It surprised me because that verse is everywhere. It’s on posterboard held up at NFL events. It’s painted on the walls of Sunday school classrooms. It’s hand-stitched on decorative embroidered wall hangings for baby nurseries. It’s even on coffee mugs, billboards, T-shirts, and one unfortunate beer coozie I saw at a barbeque.

It’s losing its impact. Even worse, people see it so often that instead of being a message about how much we’re loved and cherished by a creator, it’s become an instant-sign of your Christianity. You don’t have to live your faith for others to see, you just have to have a Jesus fish car sticker and a John 3:16 license plate on the front.

What really gets me about that verse is that I don’t think the writer of the Gospel got it right. Good thing there are no hordes of soldiers working under the king’s command right now, or I’d be tied to a stake and roasted like a hot dog before I finished typing this.

When you look at that verse in great detail, it’s all about God. How much GOD loved us. How HE sent his son. How HE did this so we can have everlasting life.

That’s not how I read it. John Milton, in Paradise Lost, describes the scene that took place in Heaven when the moment that sparked the verse actually took place. In that scene, God is devastated and heartbroken by man’s disobedience; he’s been trying and trying and giving chance after chance after chance, but man is a jerk who keeps doing whatever he wants to do, instead of obeying the Lord. The angels are actually rending their garments in agony over how utterly sad God is.

Jesus stepped forward. According to Milton, Jesus was the one who said, “Dad, I’ll go. I’ll die as the sacrifice so your people will come back to you. Please don’t be sad anymore.”

That’s a beautiful image of love, one that is far bigger than a sign someone scribbled for the benefit of national television. More importantly, it reverses the willingness in the sacrifice. God may have physically sent Jesus to die for us, but Jesus stepped up first. He had a moment of weakness in the garden where his very human heart cried to be delivered from this, but ultimately said, “I’ll do it if you need me to.”

It’s not important whose idea it was. None of that really matters. What matters is Jesus agreed, and God allowed it. I will tell you that I hadn’t even left the hospital with my firstborn child before I realized exactly how big a sacrifice that was for God. I wouldn’t let my child die for anyone, let alone hurtful, sinful strangers.

It’s good to know God loves me more than I deserve.

God, Be BIG!

/ ME / Leave a comment

This is one of my favorite phrases, and I’ve completely stolen it from Beth Moore. She said one time in a presentation that when she gets so overwhelmed by a situation, she simply prays, “God, be big!” which basically translates into, “You’re God, you’re enormous and all-powerful, now do your thing!”

It takes a lot of trust to pray those words. You’re essentially saying, “I’m turning this over to you, and I’m willing to take whatever you want to do.” Those words don’t mean, “Give me blessings,” or “Make me happy,” they mean exactly what they say. “God, this problem is so far above me and my ability to comprehend, so do with it as you see fit.”

What are the “Be Big” problems in your life?

I’ve had to fall back on Be Big when I learned my friend had had her fourth miscarriage in a row just that morning. I had to ask God to Be Big when my daughter told me her friend and the friend’s mother are living with an abusive man. I’ve asked God to Be Big over the lawsuit we waged against our handicapped child’s school, over job changes, over the decision to quit my job and start my own business.

Of course, God will be big even when we don’t need him to. I’ve prayed for God’s bigness over my daughter’s auditions, over the decision to build a house or buy one, over whether or not we should change churches.

Basically, God can’t help being big. It’s what he does. So when I’m struggling with the words to say to him and I don’t know what to even ask, I take an incredible amount of comfort in asking him to do what he does best, and that’s BE God.

But If God Is Real, Why Do Bad Things Happen?

/ Mercy / Leave a comment

More than any other question, this one seems to be the one that gets more people riled up than any other, whether they’re believers or not. I can safely say it’s the single most often asked question when I’m trying to justify my faith to people. There are lots of answers, some of them deep and requiring you to cite Thomas Aquinas and Socrates, but there is also a really simple answer:

“Because people are screw ups.”

God created us and gave us ONE rule. Just one. And we broke it before sundown. Don’t eat this. It wasn’t a tough rule, it was actually for our own good. But just like with your four-year-old sneaking mouthfuls of Play Doh when your back is turned, we ate it. We sinned. And it caused us to all be sinners.

“But I wasn’t there, I didn’t eat it.”

Well, you would have. We’re all sinners. We all do bad things.

One of the hardest things for me to let go of from my childhood in church was the concept of different “kinds” of sin. Much love to the Catholic church and all, but there’s nothing in the Bible that says God thinks some sins are bigger than others. Funny, there are A LOT of Protestants (the denominations who don’t believe in “levels” of sin) who will blatantly gossip about someone, then condemn a gay man. As though somehow those two sins aren’t equally horrible in the eyes of the Lord?

But back to us being wretched, bad people who caused all the bad things of the world to happen…

We brought sin into the world, and we’re suffering for it. In the Garden, God used to come down and walk with Adam and Eve after dinner, hanging out, chatting, playing Jenga (I made that up), but they caused the separation when they brought sin into God’s perfect world.

The other side of the coin in this question is that some of the things are NOT God’s will. I’ve stood right next to someone as the man told a grieving mother that “God killed her son in order to teach us all something. We don’t know what of course, but it was part of God’s plan.”

Bullshit. A man with a gun doing Satan’s work killed her son. Could God have stopped it? Maybe. I don’t really know how all that works. But I do know that God didn’t kill this woman’s child just to teach her a lesson. He taught her plenty of lessons with the Bible, and didn’t need to reinforce the concepts with murder. He’s bigger than that.

Bad happens. That’s a fact. It won’t stop happening until the end of days. I don’t know all the ins and outs of why it happens, but I do know that I have a Father and a Savior watching over me at all times. I am prepared to fight evil around me, and to try to lead others to the comfort that only my Father’s arms can provide.

Hi! I’m a Christian!

/ Mercy / Leave a comment

Unfortunately, instead of proudly proclaiming my love for Christ and carrying his message out into the world, I find myself ducking my head and mumbling, “Uh, yeah…so, um…I go to church.” WHY am I such a bad follower when it comes to sharing the Good News? Because of the way Christians behave today, especially the way they behave for mainstream media outlets to enjoy. I can’t stand for even one person to think that I carry the same message of hate as so many so-called followers of God.

I’m a Christian. I love God. I love Jesus, his son, who died on the cross for MY sins and rose from the dead so I can be saved. There, I said it.

I also have no problem with gay people; I’m not gay, my marriage and my faith are unaffected by their presence, and the Bible told me to love everyone.

I pray for women who are faced with the heart-wrenching choice of terminating a pregnancy and I understand that it’s not about not wanting this tiny blessing, it’s about looking at their four other blessings and realizing they’re all going to starve if she brings another child into their lives.

I don’t get a pinched look on my face when the person in front of me pays with food stamps, I smile and make conversation while quietly thinking to myself, “That could be me, except God has (for some unknown reason) provided in abundance for me and my family,” and I remember that the person in front of me with an EBT card was put there to test MY faith and willingness to serve the Lord, NOT to test that person’s value as a human being in the eyes of God.

I have a degree in biology and fully believe that evolution is real, and that it was set in motion by the greatest scientist the world has never known.

I am flawed by design, smudged by sin, and I am no better than anyone else alive. God risked his reputation when he let me join his club, and I fully intend to live my life so that others can see my flaws, learn from the errors of my ways, and decide that maybe they’d like to see what this club is all about.