Let’s Keep it Crazy People

I remember one of my very first church experiences. The preacher was bashing people he called “heathens” and “pagans.” I thought that was pretty yucky. So someone once asked me, “What do YOU call people who aren’t Christians?” Easy: I wouldn’t tar and feather them with pejorative labels. Honestly, I simply call them normal.

Seriously, we’re the ones who aren’t normal. We obey this 2000-year-old (infinitely-older, actually) Jesus-Person who tells us to do some pretty abnormal things-like, love our enemies? Please! Then, we believe this thing called “grace” which means God loves us no matter what? What?

Then God gives us all these stories in the Bible that illustrate His amazing abnormal love for us. And they’re crazy. Like, God uses a murderer on the run as a fugitive to deliver Ten Commandments, and one of those laws, of course, is “Do Not Murder.” Moses’ face is plastered in every Post Office in Egypt and he’s the guy God uses to deliver the “do not murder” message. Is this not nuts?

See, it’s TOTALLY NORMAL to hate our enemies, to put ourselves first, and get even. But turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give people your shirt if they steal your coat, “rejoice” when people talk bad about you; that’s crazy-talk, and that’s what we’re supposed to be all about.

So I don’t call people “pagans” or “heathens.” I call them perfectly normal. And I love them and I like to hang around them as much as I can, because I hope for opportunities to share my craziness with them, so that they can get crazy too. 

Urgent

The video is 15 minutes long and hopefully will leave you asking, “Does anything on earth really matter more than this?” Click here and scroll down to “God, Make us Messengers.” Please then ask yourself, “What am I personally going to do about this?”

Make Us Messengers

“God, make us messengers.” I can’t get that prayer out of my head. I hope you can’t either. I want to always be looking for ways to be a messenger in my everyday life. I want my life to be defined by the mission of Jesus. This past week, I found a new way — a new avenue for being a messenger. There are unique opportunities just a few short miles away. We’ll talk about that this Sunday.

An Amazing Experience

It’s no secret that Columbia sits nestled in one of the richest counties in America. But did you know that growing homelessness exists just a few miles away? The sightings along Route 1 between Laurel and Elkridge tell only part of the story. There are way too many people living in cobbled-together-makeshift campsites along the wooded Laurel/Jessup corridor.

And winter is coming.

On Monday, October 13^th, I served my first shift at the Route 1 Day Center – a place of refuge for homeless folks. Here, our weather-battered friends can get a hot meal, do some laundry, take a shower, grab some “new” clothes and a few non-perishables to go.

I am committed to this effort, and I hope you’ll consider it too.

Lisa made a seeming four tons of hot Potpie and we slung those trays up the steps to the Day Center kitchen. The weather-worn travelers began to come from everywhere. I looked out the window, seeing them in clusters from every direction. I had no idea there were so many.

And I saw some people from church there! You know who you are, wink! It was like being at church; it was great. It was the “send us out” part of Calvary’s recurring “fill us up, send us out” theme.

So this is where the church comes in — the rest of us. We need drivers to pick up people, cooks to prepare meals, people to provide food for the pantry and clothes for the closet, and a few warm/real people to just be there for whatever.

You’ll be hearing a lot more about this very soon. We are conspiring and organizing. If you can’t wait another minute and need to get involved now, contact the heart and soul behind all this, Anne Dunn at anne@spiritofcommunity.net. I look forward to serving with you!

Notes From Whiteboard

Scattered Notes…

 

Speaker: Mark Batterson

 

Isaiah 55:8-9: My thoughts are not your thoughts… As high as the heavens are above the earth…

 

Compared to the expanse of the universe, God’s ways are higher than ours. Your best thought on your best day is about 13.2 billion light years short of God’s thoughts.

 

Is systematic theology an oxymoron? Our best theories will probably be amended because we always make new discoveries that will result in paradigm shifts.

 

Your dreams are too small. We confess our sins all the time but when was the last time we confessed the smallness of our dreams?

 

At some point we stop doing ministry out of imagination and we start doing it out of memory. We need to shift from memory to imagination.

 

“Sideways energy”: Spending too much energy arguing with each other.

 

I would rather have one God idea than a thousand good ideas.

 

Jesus: Preach the good news to everyone everywhere. What a great dream. Cover 196,800 square miles of planet earth with the good news. The great commission might be better called the Great Dream.

 

 

Get Wild

I occasionally purposely leave the comforts of life to go into the wilderness of Canada’s interior—miles away from cell reception. There’s a time for the everyday mundane, but there’s also a time for adventure. There’s a time for pushing yourself to your extremes to see what you’ve got, in order to get more of what you don’t. And each time I’ve gone to a place like India or Canada, I’ve come out different, better, stronger, braver, and definitely more appreciative of what I have here.

The Bible says that the Holy Spirit “drove” Jesus into the wilderness. Wilderness was the proving ground where Jesus would get the divine energy that can only come through tempting, testing, and hardship.

You know it: People acquainted with hardship are typically stronger, wiser, and broken. That’s why Paul told Timothy to “endure hardship.” We need to be broken. I don’t trust people who aren’t broken. There is a very, very short list of people that I would call in the middle of the night when everything is falling apart—and the one thing that each of those people have is that they are broken.

So I say consider seeking out some kind of wilderness experience: (1) To show God, the devil, the world, and yourself that you got what it takes. And if you have Christ, you have everything and this is never proven truer than it is in the wilderness. (2) To shed all distraction in order to connect with God in a unique and powerful way. Here, in our climate-controlled bubbles, it’s almost like we hide behind all our busyness. Busyness is so noble, we think, and we equate it with importance. And isn’t that convenient? We can kill two birds with one stone: We can feel important and hide from all the deeper issues of life. But busyness will never do anything to remedy your deepest issues. It may treat symptoms, but that’s about it. Wilderness-like experiences are the remedy. When all is stripped away, and only God is left, there is healing and vision.

Pure Sexuality

 We hear a lot about sexual purity. But I wish we would hear more about pure sexuality. Pure sexuality is an expression I’ve coined to capture the bigger point of sex per God’s design. I’m afraid that the common expression “sexual purity” has a not-so-rich history and connotation that’s all about the things we can’t do. But pure sexuality gives equal time to the celebration of human sexuality in all its wonder, exploration, bliss, and elation-and that, within the beauty of God’s design.     

I think some people think sex is Satan’s idea. But it’s not. It’s God’s idea. And when the churches only speak of sex in negative terms, it makes us weird, with an unhealthy, yes, ungodly view of human sexuality. Sex is a blessing, most wonderfully experienced as a sacred covenant between a husband and a wife.

I’m not an expert or a “sexpert” but as a pastor, I know a lot of couples that really struggle with “the sex part” of their marriages. And I think silence makes it worse. Couples: I want to challenge you to have ongoing conversations about sex. What works, what doesn’t. And not just physically, but emotionally, because it’s all connected. Yes! Have many honest and detailed conversations about sex, sex, sex.

And guys let me let you in on a little secret: How things go in the bedroom starts with how they go in the kitchen. If all you are is some couch potato that never helps around the house and is aloof and disconnected emotionally from your wife then don’t expect things to be hot upstairs if they’re cold downstairs. 

Now: I can legitimately hear this: “That’s great Mark, but I’m single and I don’t have some so-called ‘gift’ of celibacy.” I hear you! So let me say that since I’m married and since I think it’s obnoxious for married people to tell singles how to deal with their sex issues, I’ll defer to another single guy. What might the apostle Paul say to help us out? I think he would say be on the lookout for a wife. His exact words were: “It’s better to marry than to burn with passion.” If it were me, I would get on eHarmony or match.com or whatever and start looking ASAP. But that’s just me. In the meantime, I think Paul would also say, take full advantage of the freedom of being single and look to Christ for fulfillment and serve him with all the time you won’t have when you have to please a spouse, change diapers, and provide a taxi service for future teens.

Now listen to Paul in Ephesians 5:3: “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality…” How do we move toward pure sexuality? We are barraged at every turn with images that are specifically designed to entice us sexually.

Let me go officially superficial for a moment. Here’s my appeal to the church-in a few cute, easy-to-remember catch phrases. Fashion-wise, clothing-wise, no question: Our culture thinks it’s cool to make me drool; but I think it’s cruel to make me drool. And since I can’t have it, please don’t flaunt it to make me want it!

End of the day, I’m going to have trouble seeing your truest beauty if I have to negotiate past all that cleavage. It’s like what one pastor said officiating the wedding of a scantily clad bride (I think her maiden name was Cleaver)-he saw all that cleavage and instead of saying, “Therefore, what God has joined together, let no man separate…” he accidentally said, “Therefore what God has joined together, let no man push together.” Wedding… over! Look, I’m not saying it’s your fault if I ogle at your boobs; ultimately, that’s on me. I’m just hoping that we can help each other out. And I think it’s our responsibility to determine where that line is. And I will promise to return the favor, hot stud that I am.

Listen: God’s grace is bigger than any mistakes we’ve ever made. Let’s receive His grace. And then let’s then move forward pursuing the HOTTEST pure sexuality. Sex is good, sex is from God. But there’s a way to keep a good thing a good thing; and that’s to follow God’s RX for sex.

Talk About Sex in Church?

Someone somewhere once said it well: When you ask the average person how they are doing spiritually the answer they give you is usually how they’re doing sexually.

Sex is difficult to talk about, and some pastors never talk about it. But I do and here’s why: The Bible talks about it, a lot. And I think it’s a mistake to ignore it because we need tools for negotiating life in a sex-saturated society. Moreover, sex was God’s idea. Listen: God invented sex. He had sex on the brain when “male and female He created them.”

I think some people think sex is Satan’s idea. But make no mistake about it: sex is a God thing. It is His gift to us, and we shouldn’t just talk about it in negative terms because it is a blessing from God. And when the churches only speak of sex in negative terms, it makes us weird, with an unhealthy attitude toward what should be beautiful.

In fact, sex isn’t just permitted, it’s commanded. It’s the very first commandment. In Genesis 1:28, God blesses Adam and Eve and then basically tells them to go have sex. And I believe it’s biblical to have lots of sex within the context of marriage. Check out 1 Corinthians 7: The Bible warns against NOT having sex.

So yes, I think we should talk about sex in church.

– Mark