The Cancer of Self-Supremacy

There is a kind of supremacy that’s worse than white supremacy because it is the root of every supremacy on earth.

And because it behind every attempt by any group or human being to exercise dominance over others.

And because it is also behind intractable conflicts, polarization, and partisan spirit and hostility.

The Monster Within Us All

There is a master supremacy that lurks within us all.

It is rooted in a vastly overinflated view of ourselves and our own importance.

It is animated by a determination to control rather than be controlled.

It is governed by a passion to hurt those who have hurt us and put them in their place.

It desires above all else for all other people to bow down and worship us and obey our laws and satisfy our needs and end our pain.

I’m speaking, of course, of self-supremacy.

Hallmarks of Self-Supremacy

In self-supremacy, I will allow no one else to tell me what to say, what to do, what to think, how to feel, or where to go.

In self-supremacy, I require all others to say what I want, do what I want, think my way, feel what I feel, and go where I want them to go.

And in this contradiction we find eternal conflict that no human can solve.

If self-supremacy was a matter of ideology or conscious beliefs alone, it might be solved.

But our problem is our fallen human nature itself, and its underlying passion to “be like a god” and achieve god-like dominance.

Inescapable and Unsolvable

We therefore take this lurking self-supremacy with us wherever we go and cannot escape it.

Changing our environment is not enough.

And we are born with it so changing our genetics will not help.

It corrupts our thinking, our emotions, and our wills, so self-help and willpower cannot overcome it.

It defines our alliances and our enemies, our politics and our battles, so it will defy all governmental or market or systemic solutions.

Economics and political power will not heal it or change it, even if our group gains temporary political power and tries to make our self’s enemies comply with our will.

These others will, of course, resist our will and seek to counter-impose their own, being animated as well by a sense of wounded pride and thwarted self-supremacy.

A Deeper Surgery

Recently, I’ve written less because it’s been a season of soul surgery.

God has been rooting around inside my soul and has been uprooting roots of feeling like being a perpetual disappointment to my non-nurturing, absent parents.

He has been touching again my deepest wound, the molestation trauma and the psychological torture my abuser inflicted.

He has been surfacing bitter root judgments against my dominator and the inner vow to never let anyone dominate and humiliate me like that ever again.

He has been surfacing bitter root judgments against those who failed to protect me and who allowed injustice to go unpunished, and my vow to go after doers of petty injustices and punish them myself.

He has been showing me that a lot of intense feelings I am feeling over politics or certain issues are rooted in these vows to resist domination and fight against unpunished injustice.

He has made me worse temporarily and let these things flare up, so He can free me more deeply and make me permanently better.

Pursuing the Healing

Which means reversing the verdict of my bitter root judgments, forgiving at an even deeper level, and renouncing the vows that fuel self-supremacy.

He has reminded me that He alone is supreme, so there is no room or need for anyone to be that.

He has reminded me that He chose to be victimized, humiliated, and dominated as an offering for my sin, out of love and compassion for my plight.

So when I read about progressive Christians or conservative Christians engaging in dominance politics and marked by mass self-protection and reactivity against those they see as wanting to dominate them, I see myself.

And I want to gently say what God so gently has shown me, that the problem isn’t these others who disagree, it is our own thirst for supremacy disguised as fighting against injustice.

And I want to point them to the One who is reigns supreme and who loves us best, the One who slew our old nature on the Cross and moves us out from under the control of our wounded pride.

Crucifying Our Self-Supremacy

Self-supremacy isn’t a good thing to be gratified; it is a cancer that is killing us all and destroying us, our groups, and our society.

It is driving us mad and turning us all into punishing, sanctimonious monsters–and we don’t even realize it.

Thankfully, by dying to self and relinquishing the throne and handing all control and all of our wounds and our judgments and our vows over to Christ, we can be free from this worst of tyrannies.

There is a solution!

What WON’T We Do?

Of course the government shutdown is going to go on and on!

We live in a time and place where everyone loves to trumpet their morally superior views.

All virtue is held by our side, and all vice is on the other side.

There is an absolute certainty in our own (or our group’s) rightness.

It seems like everyone is both rigidly inflexible and boundary destroying at the very same time.

The True Test

How did we end up like this?  And how might we find our way back to collective sanity?

An older man once told me:  don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.  Instead, watch what people do and the fruit of what the do.

So here’s a self test:

What won’t you say about your enemies–no matter how provoked you might be or satisfying it would be to slander them?

What won’t you do to those you despise–however painful it would be to refrain or pleasureful it would be to harm them?

It’s in that “not for sale” moral center, that place where threats and punishments cannot touch and will not budge us from our integrity, that tell us what we really believe is the most important.

Situation Ethics

What I find the most disturbing is how both parties, and both leadership teams in both parties, are willing to dispense with all precedents and traditions and checks and balances and limits for the sake of prevailing.

The end justifies any and all means to get there.

And if no limit will stop them, no sense of decency, propriety, or morality can check them, what then?

If they give their word only to go back on it as soon as it is advantageous to do so, how can there be any basis for trust between them and anyone else?

If lying is OK so long as it advances the cause, then our given word means nothing at all.

If a deal isn’t really a deal, and any agreement can be broken at will, then why would your opponents bother to forge one with you?

Why compromise and give a little in order to get a little if the other party can never be trusted to give their little or takes it away at the first opportunity?

A World Without Integrity

Welcome to a world without moral integrity.

The sad and ominous cloud hanging over our entire political establishment is this:  ideologies give us unlimited sanction for lying and both the ideologies on the Right and the Left are live by the credo:  “the end justify the means.”

I say this because, based upon the last ten years of public actions in and out of power, both socialistic progressivism and populist conservatism have this in common:  they will stop at nothing to win.

And they want not merely to win and then govern, but to win and then use their power to dominate and crush the other side.

The raw “will to power” is all that’s left of our hollowed out, amoral elites and our aimless, enraged citizenry.

Only the Will to Power

Power for its own sake.

Power as the one moral absolute left and the one command which must be obeyed.

Power to impose one’s views upon all others and to silence all dissent by all means possible.

So, again, what won’t we do?

It’s an exercise worth taking, listing out our core ethics and morals we won’t sell for advantage or ditch when threatened enough.

Keeping in mind that ever-present moral line and not permitting ourselves to ever cross it and always choosing positively to live by it.

The Why Behind the What

But keeping in mind we need a why to live by these compromising absolutes.

For me, I find my core in an Absolute, Perfect, Infinite Person who has spoken a Word to us all.

He sits on the throne and tells me what is right and wrong–personifying it and living it out perfectly in the Person of His Son.

He intervened to dethrone my inner sin-monster and birthed a new person when I surrendered to Him.

His redeeming love, and the gratitude and thirst for intimacy with Him it created, now govern my soul and redeem all my sorrows.

If it drives us insane to seat ourselves on the throne of the universe and fight with millions of other wannabe gods and goddesses, then maybe we were wrong about God after all.

Maybe our collective insanity and moral dead end we find ourselves in–the frenzied partying hiding a profound emptiness–is a sign that we were wrong to jettison God and replace Him with our self.

Both paganism of old and biblical Christianity were in agreement on one thing:  hubris is inevitably followed by nemesis.

Our inconsolable misery and chronic fighting with each other is a sign we are cracking under the pressure of ultimacy, and more of self can never be the solution to the problem of self.

God is the solution!

Letting Go of Dominance

American society, even the most religious parts of it, is no longer shaped by Christianity.

The New Gods Nietzsche and Marx

On the right, America now follows the teachings of 19th Century German atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

On the left, America now follows the teachings of 19th Century German atheist philosopher Karl Marx.

God is dead, therefore anything is permissible.

It’s therefore it’s all about “will to power” and achieving dominance over others.

Dreams of Earthly Dominance

When I hear today’s journalists and politicians, when I observe today’s professors and commentators, I hear the competing utopian ideologies of populism or socialism.

Having given up heaven, it’s all about creating a strongly national or a justly progressive paradise on earth.

Having abandoned theology, it’s all about politics and gaining power at any cost.

The individual or the collective is supreme.

The self or the government is on high and at war with the other.

And each of these centers of dominance seeks to dominate their ideological opponents.

No dissent is allowed.

All compromise or pragmatism is seen as treason.

Not merely content to win elections or make a good society, the goal is now a perfect society that expresses the projected wishes of the self upon all others.

Controlling Yet Out of Control

The goal is to control the environment which necessitates the control of all other people.

Yet, despite these wishes, our populace is now more personally miserable.

The harder we seek control and dominance, the more out of control we behave and the more enraged we become at the defiance of others.

Gun control is passed, yet lawlessness, addiction, and crime increase.

Regulations on commerce are eased, then greed and exploitation in businesses are multiplied.

Speech codes are adopted, then racist and offensive speech mushrooms.

Having banished God and ditched the Bible, we find ourselves enslaved to our own independence and addicted to our props that hold us up in a chaotic world.

Religious Atheism

Even among my own group, Evangelicals, the will to power and passion for dominance in reaction to being dominated reigns supreme.

Our tribe, our region, our culture, and our values must be protected at all costs.

Whatever alliances are needed, whatever politicians we need to get into bed with, is done and is justified.

The moral absolutes which once marked us have been traded away for protection from our ideological enemies and victory over the other political tribes at war with us.

It’s dominate or be dominated.

Which is why Donald Trump’s rise isn’t the rise of the religious right, but the triumph of irreligious right-wing philosophy within religious groups.

The Devil’s Offer of Easy Dominance

Yet none of this is new.

Jesus, when He went into the desert to experience temptation by the devil, was offered dominance.

All the kingdoms of the world and dominance over all humanity could be His for the asking.

Just worship the devil once and it was a done deal.

Thankfully, He refused the temptations of cheap, false dominance and chose to go to the Cross instead.

And, in His refusal, is a way out of our mess.

Forsaking Control, Finding Peace

Ironically, it’s in laying down control that we enter into God’s good control.

It’s in becoming absolutely vulnerable to Him that we find freedom and peace.

Weirdly to our minds, leaving the false throne we occupy is when we can become our true selves, our new selves.

The great challenge of our times is to abandon this false hope of dominance.

To give up the fantasy of achieving absolute security or restored greatness or perfect justice or total equality on earth.

To give up the dream of making the people who threaten or hurt us the most bow down to us.

To give up the wish of making them validate us and comply with our plans for the universe.

Living With Tension By Faith

How do I know I’m progressing?

It’s seen most clearly in letting people disagree with me without reactivity.

It’s seen most clearly when I lose elections, when my preferred vision for America is in retreat, when things don’t go my way.

It’s in resisting the temptation to have the last word and to always win–for I no longer need to win earthly battles.

It’s marked by learning to live with unresolved tension, with unsecured threats, with painful realities one cannot change.

For the sake of “a better hope and an abiding one”, as the writer of Hebrews puts it.

Bringing Our Pain to God

Behind our will to dominate others is a deep core of woundedness and soul fright.

We need healing and comforting from our fears by Someone Supreme and in charge of all.

It’s admitting that our atheism has failed and we really do need God to function with any semblance of humanity.

That we have been proud fools and are incompetent as lords of the universe.

That we are out of control and cannot fix ourselves or make the world a safe place for our selves.

It’s letting these false dreams of dominance be shattered, then forsaken.

And coming lowly, coming vulnerable, coming as a sinner, to a God who offers mercy to sinners.

“You’re right, God.  And I’m the one who’s been wrong all along!  Forgive me!” is the idea.

There is a solution!

From Child Sacrifice to Beloved Child

You’ve done your spade work.

You’ve pinpointed the idols your parents worshipped, and owned how you were an unwilling child sacrifice to them.

You’ve been surfacing your rage at the arbitrariness of it all, the terrible cost you’ve paid from actions taken by adults when you were small and powerless.

Now what?

How do we find our way to serenity and joy instead staying stuck in turmoil and rage?

How do we break the parental idolatry-child sacrifice cycle of generations?

How do we avoid both replicating our parents idols? Or reacting and riding the pendulum to the other, opposite idolatry that results in child sacrifices as well?

For me, at least, I need a love greater than the pain to invade from the outside and set me free.

Speaking for Myself

As a voiceless, ignored child who is finding my true voice, I’m just going to say it.

I need an infinite, ultimately good parent who sacrifices Himself at His expense for me.

I need One who ever hears my cries, and is utterly good to me even when I’m at my worst and out of control and then displease or hurt Him.

In other words, I need the real thing and the right thing in huge doses to displace the toxic thing and the raging thing of being an unwilling child sacrifice.

I need to be plunged into the ocean of God’s immeasurable, utterly uniquely good love when rivers of rage from human evils are flowing hard.

Unbreaking the Utterly Broken

Something horrible done against my will to me needs to be broken off of me in my innermost being.

Something wounded and producing its own “superfund toxic dumpsite” of fresh wrongs inside of me needs healing and undeserved care.

It’s owning that I am both victim and victimizer, wounded and wounding, child sacrifice and one who blindly sacrificed my own kids as well.

It’s owning that, like so many of you, I had ridden the pendulum to some opposite extremes from my parents.

And, as a father of 20-something young adults, I can see how, beyond their own choices, some of my own blind spots of idolatry disguised as “the right way” have hurt them.

Encounters with Grace

I was processing all of this at a recent prayer retreat where we leaders were directed to stop preaching about but simply receive the love of God.

It was kind of hokey.

I’d heard it all before.

Yet, strangely, beautifully, this time I began to have a fresh experience of the immensity and immeasurability of God’s love for children.

That He especially loves children sacrificed against their will and over their objections to something terrible that selfish adults wanted more.

Something shifted and softened because something good filled my waste places.

I began to see that the answer wasn’t more analysis, or better emoting, or wiser coping strategies.

It was simply to plunge my sorrows into His infinitely more immeasurable and very personal love for adult children like me.

To go to Him with my bag of pain and open again the door of my heart and allow His ever-knocking love to come on in and reside again–holy and triumphant and happy!

Elegant Simplicity

There is a world of difference between a crass and simplistic approach and this elegant, indescribable simplicity of letting ourselves be loved by Him.

Images like my wife holding close a fussy, tantrum-throwing, resisting toddler until the child relaxed and allowed her mother’s love to envelop her and change her misery into peace.

If we will allow Him, God’s love will emotionally re-parent us and work tirelessly to redeem us from the damage and pain of our being an unwilling child sacrifice.

He will, if we allow Him to love us like that, begin to use our sorrow as a treasury of kindness, wisdom, compassion, and goodness to our fellow pilgrims.

Because it takes one to know one.

Because the best help is from someone slightly further down the same road we must trod.

What we need is someone who, in kindness and recognition, reaches back to grab our hand and show us the next few steps forward through the mist.

There is a solution!

A Movement Towards Freedom

I’m not going to comment on the political theater in Washington, D.C.

Instead, I’m going to take a deep dive into the world of injustices done to me and my own responses to them.

Because I’ve found a new level of spiritual freedom and fresh joy in the face of wrongs that will never be righted in this life.

Rocky Recovery From Injustices

Six years ago my world was rocked with a series of injustices by a group of perpetrators.

Slanders, gossip, plots, secret campaigns, financial retaliation, etc. all happened.

And the results:  a lost job, a lost career, a lost income and earning capacity, and a heartbreaking level of emotional/spiritual damage to everyone in my family, including my own soul.

Given the nature of what happened, there was going to be no vindication, no consequences, and no resolution on earth–the losses were irreversible and there was no recourse left to me.

Along the way, there have been times of progress and insight, and times of stuckness and darkness of soul.

Helpful disciplines of forgiving the wrongdoers and a new job and new career have been received and found good.

Something Still Amiss

Yet there’s still been this sense that all is not well and of something unresolved deep within me.

I found an undercurrent of buried anger, an edge within that didn’t used to be there, a lack of interest in pursuing God, or in going deeper in church, or in living the open, fruitful life He called me to enjoy.

Something was still not right but the obvious, conscious bases were covered.

It was during a key prayer meeting, then the sessions at a men’s retreat, and then a very applicable Sunday message, that a new thought came.

It’s this:   there’s a buried part of me that still feels very strongly like a victim of injustice who will never get justice.

Facing My Unwillingness

Emotionally, there’s been this undercurrent of unwillingness and an undertow secret protest–this should never have happened and I shouldn’t still be paying for the damage of their wrongs!

Life spun totally out of control, and so my control monster has been sulking and manifesting itself in little, ugly ways.

And this unstated protest expressed itself in sudden boilings up of anger, in feeling threatened when there was no threat, in isolating my heart from God and others, and in moods of depression and in bouts of insomnia.

Admitting that I was still silently playing the part of an unwilling victim was the first step.

I was outed as a silent protester who felt entitled to better treatment and who saw myself as getting a raw deal and stuck with it.

Turning Losses Into Gifts

It was after this admission that a verse in John 10 came to mind, where Jesus says, “Nobody takes it (my life) from me.  I lay it down of my own initiative.”

This insight proved to be a fresh path forward.

Combined with the words of Jesus in Luke 14 where He basically says, “Unless you give up everything in advance to Me right up front–your life, all possessions, and all relationships–it will be impossible for you to be My disciple.”

When one has already given away everything and lost it all to God up front, then no human can take it away and there’s no way to lose it anymore.

This voluntary, preemptive surrender of all, this glad and freely chosen laying down before the cross happened, freed Jesus to conduct Himself unbound by fear, anger, and depression in the face of threats and harms.

And even in the midst of horrific losses and of grievous bodily harm and death–He was serene.

Turning Over the Harms

So, in imitation of Him,  I made a list of every loss from injustice–especially the losses I least wanted and most regretted, the ones most directly caused by the wrongs of others.

And I turned this list of fifteen items into a voluntary offering list–giving freely to God whatever others might have stolen or taken from me wrongly.

And now every morning I rehearse this exercise–surrendering ownership of all resented injustices, offering them as tributes to the One who loves me most.

It’s now about Him, about my love for Him and freely giving Him everything.

It was no longer about them, or about the wrongness of whatever they did.

It was no longer about paying any ongoing costs I don’t want to pay from their evildoing.

Nobody took away these good things from me, for now I’ve gone back and given them up freely.

A Fresh Serenity and Joy

The result has been a surprising settling of spirit, and a fresh gentleness and peace within.

My insomnia suddenly went away, and so did the defensive aggressiveness when out driving cars and riding bikes.

I find I no longer need to scan the horizon against incoming threats and armor up all the time.

And I’m less “hungry” for wrong kinds of foods–apparently buried anger was been a driver behind food cravings.

I’m spontaneously smiling more often and there’s a song on my heart again!

Two Paths

We could spend all of our time and energy on real or perceived offenses and injustices–not only our own, but those done against our side, our group, or our causes.

We could shake our fist at the heavens for robbing us of the good we didn’t want to lose, and for foisting upon us bad conditions we didn’t want to receive.

And we would ultimately end up bitter old people who feel cheated despite all the good they’d enjoyed in life.

Or we can turn our injustices and losses at the hands of sinners into offerings of love put into the hands of the Savior.

We can make them into free gifts of devotion to the ultimate Victim of injustice who died in our place freely even though He did nothing wrong.

There is a solution!

The User Society

I can’t think of a single person who enjoys being used by another person.

But I think all of us, if we’re being honest, will admit we use other people.

Users for a Cause

For some, other people are useful as tools of their ideology or cause.

They are recruiters and advocates and activists who use other people to build their great cause, to fulfill their social dreams.

We see such “users for the cause” in politics.

And, to be fair, we also see them in religion and in the university and in any and every organization that exists on planet earth.

Once the convert to the cause is secure, they are dropped and/or ignored as attention is turned onto seeking new converts or fighting new causes or finding new underdogs to champion.

Until the other person objects to being used, or refuses to kowtow to the party line, or dares to think their own thoughts and poke holes in the utopia or ideology.

Then the user rejects them.

Users for a Need

For others, people are a source of fulfillment and completion, an avenue to validation and status.

“I love what you do for me” goes the old pop song.

Being empty on the inside, they look to romance, sex, affirmation, ego-stroking, and/or companionship to fill the hole in their soul.

Their entire live revolves around the magical relationship, the intoxication of infatuation, and the status these relationships give them.

Until the other person no longer fulfills them or, horror of horrors, fails them or hurts them in some way.

Or doesn’t validate them or flatter them or loses their looks or isn’t there when fulfillment is wanted and needed.

How many people have woken up the morning after only to realize they were used?

How many people have after years of marriage come to realize they married a user instead of partner?

Users on the Rise

Still other people use other people to get ahead.

Raising their status, obtaining a promotion, securing that next deal, reaching the next level of success, obtaining fame–and others are means to that end.

Companies and governments and entertainment and organizations big and small are filled with climbers.

Their goal is to get bigger, higher, and greater.

Their goal is to be on top and in charge and the VIP of their little or big world.

Their former associates, former partners, former friends are discarded when they serve their purpose.

A trail of broken relationships and dead bodies up the mountain are left behind.

The Alternative

Weirdly enough, God the Most High models a completely upside down approach to our way of doing things.

He doesn’t use people.   He loves them.

And by love, I mean self-sacrificing, redemptive love for others when they fail, disappoint, hit bottom, and are unlovely and unworthy.

Seen most clearly in Jesus Christ, God in human flesh, this love is unearthly and not native to human hearts.

It is the opposite of selfish using.

It is endures greatest pain for the good of others.

It pays the price for others’ sins.

It is in a relationship for the good it can do another, whether or not that other responds.

It is freely given and mind-blowingly generous.

It defies dog-eat-dog thinking, and exposes using others for what it really is:  ugly selfishness from the pit of hell.

Our Mission

Agape love is what biblical Christianity is supposed to be all about.

And it is birthed in our hearts only when we ourselves are loved in this extraordinary way, when we lavished with good at the bottom of our lives.

We love in this extraordinary, supernatural way only because He first loves us.

If church simply becomes an ideological cause (or a wing of a political party) seeking new recruits or converts, or a mutual self-help and mutual using society, we have utterly failed.

And we have betrayed the cause of God and warped the picture He wants to give to fallen humanity:  a grace-redeemed society of over-loved, beloved lovers instead of a nasty group of empty, vicious users.

We cannot make the use or be used world different, but we can show its victims a way out and give them a hand up for His sake.

There is a solution.

Beautiful Contrasts

Lurking underneath the nastiness of our times is an opportunity.

An opportunity to serve as a beautiful contrast.

Grounded Amidst the Quicksand

This is a person who has a fountain of joy within.

They are an island of peace and are guided by a beacon of hope.

They do not look to circumstances for happiness or to other people for completion.

They are filled with the life of God and have too much for just themselves, so they share the overflow and are not covetous or miserly.

They are grateful and glad.

Low Drama Centeredness

They know how to suffer with patient endurance and turn their complaints into prayers until God works it out.

They are very slow to take things personally, quick to listen, slow to anger, and eager to understand.

They don’t take over the problems of others or demand that all others bend to their will.

They neither serve as somebody else’s messiah or idol, nor follow the false messiahs and gods of others, of society, or of their times.

Maturity the Goal

They are not constantly reacting to others but on a steady journey towards maturity in Christ.

They understand maturity is expensive and that life’s tests get harder the older they get–no expectations of an easy life.

They expect the world system to be fallen, and expect sin and selfishness to be the default setting of people, groups, and human institutions.

So they celebrate when anything goes well, when anything right happens, when things turn out better than they should.

The Honest Life

They don’t, however, believe in magic and are relentless realists with their feet on the ground.

They keep at it for a long, long time, knowing that patience and perseverance win the day more often than not.

They focus on dealing with their own issues, on being honest about their own souls, and about fighting their own daily battle against their own sin monsters.

They also seek to release the good, to stoke and cultivate the fires of goodness as born-again people, and are ever on the lookout for other people to encourage and help.

They are discerning–realizing that good and evil don’t change with the times or with popular fads–which makes them hard to dupe and impossible to convert to immoral causes.

They are relentless truth-lovers and truth-tellers–humility and honesty are hallmarks.

Revolution of One

Which is why the life of beautiful contrasts is not an easy one.

But it is the most needed kind of life when all anchors are gone and when everyone’s reacting to everyone else about everything.

We can’t change other people, but we can work on our selves.

We aren’t on the throne of the universe, but we can place ourselves under the Throne of the One who is and regain a sense of proportion and shrink our egos down to size.

We can’t make other people see but we ourselves can repent and take responsibility for our own pride, our own lusts, our own evils.

Pointing to Eternity

We can always show people what a lovely picture of Christ living within an unworthy person looks like–even when they don’t want to hear it.

We can give them a taste of something far better than this pathetic world offers.

Because 100 years from now none of us alive today will be here.

But some of us will be in a state of unending ecstasy in the presence of God.

The grave is looming but eternity beckons.

Until then, we can serve as a beautiful contrast.

Grace and Truth on Hard Issues

People either veer towards a truthfulness lacking in grace, or a graciousness lacking in truth.

We tend to either punish sinners without mercy or enable them without honesty.

We sacrifice love on the altar of holiness, or sacrifice holiness on the alter of love.

And, because we ourselves are both perpetrators and victims of sin, we tend to demand that others punish us or enable us, too.

A God of Grace and Truth

The hard thing about all this is we need both a relentless and exposing honesty that cuts through our lies, defenses, and justification as doers of evil.

And we need a grace that meets us at the bottom and loves us undeservedly and redemptively as sinners, as failures, and as powerless slaves of evil.

God is a God of grace and truth, of holiness and mercy, of righteousness and compassion.

Christ, the incarnated God-Man, also showed stunning compassion towards the broken and relentless honesty that cut through all manner of sin-justifying agendas, too.

Whether the issue is greed and materialism, or lust and sexual sin, or pride and selfishness, we can expect Him to confront us in our willfulness and to offer grace to us in our wretchedness.

Interestingly, two recent events in my life have brought into sharp relief this dynamic, supernatural tension in matters of sin.

Grace and Truth in a Unique Setting

The first is the Revoice ’18 conference for “LGBT Christians” who hold to historic biblical teachings on morality, righteousness, and who follow what’s permitted by God in our sexual lives.

Condemned and criticized by both progressives and traditional moralists, the conference was designed to create a space for those whose sexual orientations were at variance with God’s will but who have chosen to pay the personal price to live by God’s will nonetheless.

Reports suggest it was a time of extraordinary grace yet a time of neither enabling nor celebrating of sin.

Here is what Christianity Today has to say about it.

And what conference goers experienced as well.

I found myself smiling because true Christianity confounds the wisdom of the age and does not fit tidily into rigid human boxes.

Acknowledging one’s brokenness and enslavement, admitting our propensity towards certain sins, and crying out in absolute need for God’s mercy in all honesty, yet still drawing near to God by the shed blood of Christ and standing in His righteousness alone as a fully accepted child of God–it’s where we all need to live.

It was a stunning event by all accounts.

I wish there were many more spaces and places like this in every single church on a host of issues that people hide.

Weirdly, having these spaces would promote godliness and growth far, far more than the secrecy, shame, and graceless judging so common in our ranks.

How could I, a former sorcerer and persecutor of Christians, deny my dear brothers and sisters the same grace I myself have so sorely needed and received from Christ?

Responses to the Surprise Wedding

The second event is the coming out of the closet of a former leader of a Christian organization with the public postings of a same-sex marriage ceremony.

Some too hastily and harshly cut off their relationship with the person because they felt they were required to approve and celebrate what God clearly forbids and condemns in Scripture.

Others spent thousands of dollars going to a destination wedding and posing in pictures “to show love” while still privately disagreeing with the behavior and the choice.

In other words, it’s harder than it looks to strike a harmonious, godly balance between grace and truth and quite easy to veer into too punitive or too enabling a response.

Yet, clearly, the culture and expectations placed upon us are tilted very far towards the enabling of and the validating of and even the celebrating of clearly named evils in the sexual area of life.

“Love” has been redefined to equal absolutely approval and open celebration and affirmation, while holiness and biblical truth have been judged and found wanting and relegated to private preferences.

Unlike the conference discussed above, the person in question had been warned, challenged, and called to follow the Lord in a costly way, but refused and went full forward with their plans.

Which creates a lot of tension because it raises the specter of enabling and supporting not just the person, but the very wrong they have chosen above Christ.

Our Duty to Fellow Christians

Towards people who don’t claim any Christian faith, God clearly tells us to leave them alone and to not expect or hold them to standards of Christian conduct.

But to those who claim to know and love and follow Christ as a converted, born-again new person in Christ, there is accountability and church discipline and even expulsion from the group if the defiance of His will persists.

Our duty is, in all humility and gentleness as a “just as weak and no better than them” person, to lovingly confront them and turn them over to God if they won’t repent and step out of His way.

Yet our duty is also to provide and be what the conference above was to those who gathered:  a place of utter honesty and deepest fellowship that allows those carrying heavy freight to follow Christ at great personal cost over a lifetime in a community of holy intimacy.

And I find myself wishing that the former leader in question had found such a community and had found this kind of company before the unholy kind of intimacy opportunity came along.

I end with the long observation:  if given the choice, people will choose unholy intimacy over no intimacy at all every single time.

But what they and we need most is holy intimacy–the real thing the flows from God Himself and through His grace and truth community, and which is totally reflective of His lovely, holy character.

Loving Our Nation

Now the fireworks and the festivities of our National birthday are over.

So is it OK on this morning after July 4th to love our country?

Despite it’s flaws and failures?  Despite its collective blind spots and bad periods of history?

There are ever two extremes in response to this question.

An Object of Veneration

The first is “My country, right or wrong!”

This is a kind of patriotism that places loyalty to nation above all other values and virtues–blind loyalty that justifies anything and everything done under the flag.

Alexis de Tocqueville captures this idealism with the phrase, “America has the soul of a church”.

Building on the Pilgrims’ desire to create in America “a city on a hill”, a society that would be ideal and good as opposed to what they left behind in Europe.

Secularized through the centuries, this idea sees America as utterly unique and uniquely good among all the nations of the world.

And such a uniquely good and exceptional nation desires undivided and ultimate loyalty.

American Greatness

The USA is a nation of enormous opportunity and incredible inventions and prosperity unknown in human history and remarkable social mobility.

A nation of great achievements and preservers of the post-WW2 global order.

A nation that fought the Kaiser and Hitler until they fell and which successfully resisted Soviet communism until it fell.

A nation that transformed industrial capitalism with mass production and the assembly line and interchangeable parts.

A nation that then ushered in the technological revolution and a digitized society of social media and mass information.

By anyone’s measuring stick, these things are undeniably remarkable in all of human history.

An Object of Loathing

The second is to curse our country and blame it for all ills everywhere and argue there is really nothing good at all about it.

It is the ideal of rejecting one’s own nation and is a kind of self-loathing on a collective level.

Alistair Cooke, a British journalist and commentator on America, added a phrase to De Tocqueville’s, “and America has the soul of a whorehouse, too.”

Like all Europeans, our colonist ancestors viewed native Americans’ as subhuman “savages” who were without morals and without souls even.

So we could do to them whatever we pleased and call their lands unoccupied and uninhabited and uncivilized.

The colonizer mandate to “go to America for a fresh start” and the pioneer mandate to “Go west, young man!” was the result.

American Shame

There are great evils in our history.

There was slavery and the use of chattel slavery imported from Africa to extract cash crops like cotton.

And what we did later to Asians on the West coast in the 1800’s and the 1920’s and during WW2.

And what we did to the Mexican migrants and farm laborers in the 20th century.

And how we treated nations south of our border with engineering coups, support of dictators, economic exploitation, resource extraction, etc.

It is hardly surprising that we with modern eyes look back on our checkered past and the borrowed European assumptions of white superiority that governed our society, we are rightfully appalled and ashamed.

But then it goes a step further and causes some to deny anything and everything good about the United States and reject our society wholesale.

Like Any Family

Perhaps the solution is staring us right in our face.

Perhaps, like every single human being and every single family, we are and always will be a mixture of good and evil, flaws and talents, greatness and failure.

We will ever behave both honorably and shamefully, serving others selflessly and exploiting others selfishly.

Like our souls before God, our performance is disqualifying and worthy of condemnation.

Yet, from God, we receive grace and forgiveness and the opportunity for redemption in a place of humility and utter need.

We receive that extraordinary, shocking grace as a sinner and then extend that grace to others, to our family, to society, and even to all of fallen humility.

Under grace, we own our sins and confess our faults freely and seek to make amends and bring good out of evils as one loved by God undeservedly.

And, under grace, we can both own our nation’s terrible faults and still appreciate and be profoundly grateful for its blessings and benefits.

The truth is this:  both self-boasting and self-loathing are based upon naked and ugly human pride.

The Real Problem is Pride

We crow about our greatness and deny all our evils.

Or we camp on our failures and deny the possibility of redemption.

Out of injured collective pride, we brag or we reject and both reactions then go to war against the other in the body politic.

Cherishing the undeserved good we enjoy, and humbling owning our evils, are the markers of that supreme virtue:  humility.

What we need first and foremost–individually and collectively– is to have our ego collapsed and our evils exposed and our bragging exposed as a lie.

And then to come to God for desperately needed grace and a rescue from outside of ourselves only He can give us.

Then we learn how to treat each other and pay that grace forward and have compassion on our fellow sinners and even on our sinful ancestors.

There is a solution.

Jeff Sessions and Romans 13

It’s been several days since the “zero tolerance” policy of the Trump administration on immigrant families has come to light.

And the fact that 2,000 children are now in detention.

At the very same time, an address to a church given by Attorney General Jeff Sessions justifying this policy and using Romans 13 to do it has come to light as well.

Some Caveats

My goal is not a defend or attack the policy itself.

You can read arguments against the policy here.

And a clarification of the policy and a defense of it here.

My goal, instead, is to examine how the Bible was used to justify the policy.

Let me say right up front that an uncut, unedited, full copy of the entire address is hard to find.

So let me share a link to CNN’s Facebook page video of it here

With that said and done, let me make some observations.

Foolish Talk

First, much like the Southern Baptist Convention leaders did last week, Sessions fails to understand the reality of the 24-7 nature of Internet news.

He’s speaking as if in a closed setting, as an insider to fellow insiders, and fails to add “and to the whole world” to his filter.

However convincing his address might have been to the already convinced, and whatever level of Scriptural knowledge and interpretive wisdom his audience might be used to, it was not convincing nor did it do interpretative justice to the passage at a world-wide level.

To quote the book of Proverbs, “when words are multiplied, transgression is unavoidable.”

All Speeches Are World-Wide

There is no truly closed setting anymore.

In a world where everyone has a cell phone with a video-capable camera, in a world where the prestige of being televised and/or recorded is no longer prestigious or safe, one cannot be too careful or too wise with one’s public words.

What is whispered in the inner rooms is now proclaimed upon the housetops.

Things in the house will never stay in the house.

It would have been better to say nothing at all in any public setting than to give this weak, self-justifying, address to the already convinced.

Ideological Bible Abuse

Second, and far more important than the folly of words, is how the Bible has been used here.

So I’ll just say it:  anytime we come to the Bible looking to justify or validate any of our modern political ideologies–Right or Left–we are on dangerous ground.

What Jeff Sessions does is take his big political idea, “Law and Order”, and use a verse in the Bible to validate it.

An article from the Gospel Coalition discusses this bible misuse issue at more depth and can be read here.

To be sure, the Bible does indeed identify sin as “lawlessness” and does strongly affirm the God-ordained blessing of good government over chaos and anarchy.

But it does not teach the Law-and-Order ideology, or blind obedience to the State, or, to be fair, a pro-immigrant ideology, either.

The True Purpose of Romans 13

The New Testament letters (like Romans) were written to small groups of people who were part of a suspect religious minority.

They were strongly out of favor with the Roman imperial and regional authorities and were subject to persecution anytime, anywhere.

Paul and Peter and James and John and Luke has this one agenda in mind:  keep the worship and the message of Jesus Christ as the one and only bone of contention with the governing authorities.

Let there be no other causes or distractions from the Chief and Supreme Cause.

In all other matters therefore be model citizens and peaceable neighbors and outstanding workers and loving families as those animated by Christ.

Foment no civil rebellions, start no slave uprisings, break up no families, undermine no marriages, and don’t give the Roman State any pretext to wage war against the Church.

Let any and all civil disobedience by about loyalty to Christ and His supremacy over us instead of the State’s, is the idea.

Not Written to Defend Abuses of Power

But what we’re talking about here is a potentially grave abuse of governing power and the shallow use/misuse of the Bible to defend it.

And this is where Jeff Sessions has revealed a one-dimensional view and usage of the Bible.

To use a principle taught by Jesus, man was not made for laws and governments, but laws and governments were made for man.

Law and Order-ism is not the same as biblical Christianity, and biblical Christianity does not exist to service the ideology of Law-and Order-ism.

In fact, the teachings of the Bible, which tout both the supremacy of Christ and celebrate His hold over the hearts of His people, scares and infuriates abusers, bullies, tyrants, ideologues, and dictators.

Argue if you will for or against this policy, but, for the sake of Christ, let’s cease quoting shallow proof texts to justify or attack it!