Jesus is a purple cow.

Jesus is unique, exceptional, remarkable. He is unlike anyone who has ever lived. I base my case for his uniqueness on two fronts. One is his resurrection from death. Not resuscitation only to die again later. Not just becoming “spiritually” present to those who loved him and cherished his memory. He died, was buried, and rose again to a new kind of life – indestructible, liberated, eternal. About no one else can this be said.*

The second argument I first heard from Vinoth Ramachandra. In Jesus we see a unique combination of outrageous claims and spotless character. Lots of people gain fame by making grandiose claims about their central place in history – Muhammad, Hitler, Ron Hubbard. Lots of other people are famous for being or doing good – the Buddha, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Tim Tebow. But nowhere else do we see both claims and character to the degree that we see them in Jesus.

While some explanations of Jesus “claiming to be God” stretch the evidence, Jesus did present himself as Israel’s Messiah and the figurehead of a theopolitical revolution. Leaving the divinity question aside, the Messiah was central to the unfolding of God’s purposes for creation. This claim is enormous. And also leaving aside the theological question of “sinlessness,” Jesus was by almost all counts a good man.

You can certainly choose not to believe in him, but don’t dismiss him on account of being just like other religious leaders that we either detest or appreciate but don’t take seriously. Jesus is different.

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NOTE: In light of my 30th birthday and in honor of the guys who have all the fun, I’ll be offering thirty reflections in thirty days starting December 19th. Today’s post is #10 (see the so-far list here). The only rule is that I have 250 words to make my point. After that just stop reading. Thanks for making my blog part of your internet experience. 

*This claim – along with various weak and strong objections raised against it – is rehearsed often enough, so I’ll let it be for now. My focus here is on the next point anyhow.

Stop hating on the church.

What if I told you I was divorcing Beth because she burned dinner or shrunk my shirt or failed to properly greet me after work one day, explaining that I married her with the understanding that these things were unacceptable. You’d tell me I was being stupid, that my expectations were based in a silly fantasy that has no business regulating my decisions.

Similar fantasies corrupt our attitude toward the church.

Listen, I’m as critical of the church as anyone. I’m no half-baked Lutheran who thinks Christians never really become less sinful. I believe the church is God’s appointed means of displaying what life looks like when God is rightly honored as King. I believe Romans 7 describes the struggle people experience before they meet Jesus, not after. I believe we can know freedom from sin so that we actually desire and do good. I hold the church to high ideals because I believe God’s Spirit indwells us and constantly renews us into Christ’s image.

But if the church ever finds itself full of mature and radically devoted disciples, the church has failed. The church exists in a state of compromise because the church welcomes people at all levels of immaturity and ungodliness. If all the hypocrites go home, no one would be left to serve coffee or teach kids or lead worship or preach.

To paraphrase Bonhoeffer, if you love your idea of the church more than the actual people who make it up, the problem is you.

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NOTE: In light of my 30th birthday and in honor of the guys who have all the fun, I’ll be offering thirty reflections in thirty days starting December 19th. Today’s post is #9 (see the so-far list here). The only rule is that I have 250 words to make my point. After that just stop reading. Thanks for making my blog part of your internet experience. 

Defining “missional”

Chances are you’ve heard the word “missional.” Some of you know it well – you’ve read books and blogs about it, written posts or papers of your own, analyzed it, praised it, critiqued it. Others think you should stop now and come back tomorrow because you fear I’m going to assume you know more than you do. I’m not, so keep reading. Actually I’m convinced that very few who use word know what it means. At the risk of proving my own suspicion, I’ve got 156 words left to define it as best I can.

Being “missional” means approaching every cultural situation as a missionary.

• Missionaries look for ways God is already moving and jump in midstream.
• Missionaries recognize that no culture already reflects the gospel, so they critically analyze their context on all levels – personal, familial, social, artistic, economic, political, historical – to discern how the gospel affirms some parts of the culture and how it rejects or challenges others.
• Missionaries take at least some cues from their cultural context to guide how they embody the gospel and share it with others.
• Missionaries know they are “resident aliens” – though at home in the culture, it is not their home; though integrating, they’ll never be absorbed. They are outsiders. They are weird.

So missionality involves joining what God is already doing, paying critical attention to culture, incarnating the gospel locally, and never letting yourself feel fully at home. And part of the point is that we can and must do this everywhere.

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NOTE: In light of my 30th birthday and in honor of the guys who have all the fun, I’ll be offering thirty reflections in thirty days starting December 19th. Today’s post is #8 (see the so-far list here). The only rule is that I have 250 words to make my point. After that just stop reading. Thanks for making my blog part of your internet experience. 

Let the gospel live.

Jesus preached the gospel of God’s kingdom arriving in him. God was fulfilling his promises in Jesus by reclaiming the world as his rightful domain through the deliverance of his chosen people. Paul preached Jesus as the mysteriously revealed Messiah and Lord, through whose death and resurrection God acted to save the world. Jesus saves by ushering in the new age, offering himself as a sacrifice for sins, exposing the evil powers and basic principles that enslave humanity, unveiling the depth of God’s love as well as the image of authentic humanity, etc.

In the Roman world “gospel” announced political victory or accession to the throne. It celebrated the beneficent reign of a new ruler. The “good news” was that Augustus now reigned as emperor, and this news was good because it meant stabilized taxes, better roads, pirate-free seas, and the possibility of a fair trial. (Or so the story went.) Similarly, “gospel” in the Old Testament announces God’s victory first of all, and subsequently the blessings attached to God’s reign.

Put all this together and the gospel is the declaration that Jesus of Nazareth is the world’s true and rightful Lord, who became king by overcoming all rivals through his death and resurrection. This news is good because Jesus is good, because his reign means forgiveness of sins, reconciliation with God, liberation from bondage, peaceful unity between races and factions, hope of transformation now and glory in the world to come.

This is the gospel. Let it live.

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NOTE: In light of my 30th birthday and in honor of the guys who have all the fun, I’ll be offering thirty reflections in thirty days starting December 19th. Today’s post is #7 (see the so-far list here). The only rule is that I have 250 words to make my point. After that just stop reading. Thanks for making my blog part of your internet experience. 

Know your why.

Most of us get caught up in what we do. We see this reflected in and fed by one of the first questions we ask of someone we’re getting to know: “What do you do?” Next time you meet someone, I dare you to replace this question with another: “Why do you do what you do?” They may look at you funny or walk away, but if not then you’ll probably have a much more interesting conversation than you otherwise would.

Inspiring leaders (as well as great marketers) know that people don’t deeply connect with your what. They buy your why. Close friends don’t connect over what; they become one in why.

Why? Because our why’s are deeper and more intriguing than our what’s. Our what might be great or goofy, but it’s probably not unique. Whatever you do, someone else does the same thing. Knowing your what might conceal as much about you as it reveals. But your why is different. Your why is what makes you you.

So do you know your why?

I believe God has acted decisively in Jesus of Nazareth to set humanity free and redeem all creation, I believe he continues this saving mission through the church, and I believe the church must take on a particular form to be faithful to its calling. This is my why. I do everything I do because of the shape I believe God’s mission has taken through Christ and the church.

I know my why. Do you?

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NOTE: In light of my 30th birthday and in honor of the guys who have all the fun, I’ll be offering thirty reflections in thirty days starting December 19th. Today’s post is #6 (see the so-far list here). The only rule is that I have 250 words to make my point. After that just stop reading. Thanks for making my blog part of your internet experience. 

30 for 30 – Contents & Schedule

In light of my 30th birthday and in honor of the guys who have all the fun, I’ll be offering thirty reflections in thirty days starting Monday, December 19th. (I’ll post on weekdays only so it’ll actually be over a six-week span.) Below is a table of contents for this series, with links added as I post them. Each day’s thought or suggestion stands alone, though some weeks are more themed than others. I haven’t tried to make a coherent case for anything, in part because that typically causes me to write way-too-long posts! So the only rule is that I have 250 words to make my point. After that just stop reading. Thanks for making my blog part of your internet experience.

1. Take your life seriously.
2. Balance doing what you love with doing what needs to be done.
3. Don’t avoid risk because you’re afraid to fail.
4. Words matter.
5. To a worm in horse radish, the world is horse radish.
6. Know your why.
7. Let the the gospel live.
8. Defining missional.
9. Stop hating on the church.
10. Jesus is a purple cow.
11. The scariest thing about teaching.
12. Embrace this season of life.
13. Fear, failure, leadership & love.
14. How (not) to love Facebook.
15. How (not) to waste time.
16. Be weird.
17. Love your enemies.
18. Jesus wants to kill you.
19. On the problem of evil and suffering.
20. The answer is yes. Or no.
21. On (Christians) cussing.
22. Politeness is more than just a middle-class coverup.
23. Gender-inclusive Bible translations are superior.
24. Keep reading people you don’t understand.
25. Convictions become idols more easily than you think.
26. Stop lying to yourself.
27. Don’t hate your doubt.
28. I’ll never get rid of my pride and that’s a good thing.
29. Don’t take yourself too seriously.
30. Everything I know I learned from Jesus.

To a worm in horse radish, the world is horse radish.

The other day Beth texted me the following: “FYI my phone is going to die any minute.” But when I first read it, instead of “phone” I saw the word “mom.” I panicked, but only briefly, because I did what anyone would’ve done: I looked again. When we see something we’re not expecting, we look again. Sometimes the second look confirms our surprise, and sometimes it reveals our initial misperception. But the point is that we look again.

But what if we don’t “look again” often enough? What if we put too much faith in our first glance, and thereby see something other than reality? If we only see what we’ve always seen, we’ll only be who we’ve always been.

What if we could find a way to see with new eyes? People often describe conversion as feeling like your eyes have literally been opened wider. Isn’t continual conversion what we need? Don’t we need the Spirit to re-open our eyes – and thus redefine our possibilities – again and again?

Awake. Look again even when you don’t notice anything strange. Notice what you don’t normally see. Ready yourself for surprises. Don’t assume you’ve got things figured out – even little things like grocery shopping or responding to an email. You might not be seeing what you’re looking at, and you can never live beyond your vision. What you can’t see limits what you can think and do.

In other words, to a worm in horse radish the world is horse radish.

. . .

NOTE: In light of my 30th birthday and in honor of the guys who have all the fun, I’ll be offering thirty reflections in thirty days starting December 19th. Today’s post is #5 (see the so-far list here). The only rule is that I have 250 words to make my point. After that just stop reading. Thanks for making my blog part of your internet experience. 

Words matter.

After class on the first day of the second semester of my sophomore year of college, my roommate walked in and said, “Dude, I met your wife.” I had no idea who she was. We’ve now been married over eight years. Still might have happened had he kept quiet, but who knows.

Around that same time I became enamored with the Apostle Paul. One day a friend casually said to me, “I think maybe you love Paul more than Jesus.” I thought that was a silly thing to say, because my love for Paul was rooted in my love for Jesus. But I took it to heart and started to focus not just on what Paul said about Jesus, but what Jesus said and did. I’ve spent the past nine years obsessing over the Jesus question, and last year I wrote a small book on Jesus in about a month. I’d never have been able to do that had my friend not slightly misinterpreted my love for Paul, or had he not been willing to call me on it.

Before graduation I preached my “senior sermon” in chapel and talked about knowing God. I quoted Jeremiah 9.23-24a (which emphasize the supreme importance of knowing God). Afterwards a friend accused me of ignoring the rest of the verse (which highlights God’s commitment to justice). It took me two years to realize he was right, and I’m still figuring out how to live into the truth he helped me see.

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NOTE: In light of my 30th birthday and in honor of the guys who have all the fun, I’ll be offering thirty reflections in thirty days starting December 19th. Today’s post is #4 (see the so-far list here). The only rule is that I have 250 words to make my point. After that just stop reading. Thanks for making my blog part of your internet experience. 

Don’t avoid risk because you’re afraid to fail.

I recently lectured Claire on the difference between bad ideas and good ideas (because she wouldn’t stop shaking mommy’s craft table to the point where stuff was about to fall on her head). I explained in no uncertain terms, “Sweetheart, it’s time to learn the difference between bad ideas and good ideas. Bad ideas have bad consequences for yourself, other people, or God. Good ideas have good consequences for yourself, other people, or God. Can you say, ‘Consequence’? Con-se-quence.” She was riveted.

She will learn this lesson, because I won’t raise a fool. Evaluating results before acting is something that separates wise people from fools.

But good advice to tiny children often becomes dangerous advice to mature adults. Consequence evaluation often degenerates into risk aversion, because as we get older we focus more on the possible negative consequences. Consequently, we ignore the possibilities for good. Since we see only potential failure, we stop taking risks altogether.

We don’t take the job because we might not be good at it. We never start exercising because we assume we’ll eventually quit. We half-bake tasks or assignments because someone else does them better with less effort. We don’t plant churches because people might not come. We focus on the possibility that we might fail and therefore look or feel stupid. Nevermind the chance to change the world, the future, or ourselves.

What if we evaluated risk based not on the probability of success but rather the value of the goal?

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NOTE: In light of my 30th birthday and in honor of the guys who have all the fun, I’ll be offering thirty reflections in thirty days starting December 19th. Today’s post is #3 (see the so-far list here). The only rule is that I have 250 words to make my point. After that just stop reading. Thanks for making my blog part of your internet experience. 

Balance doing what you love with doing what needs to be done.

Every week I meet someone else who recently encountered the advice to “do what only you can do.” This bit of wisdom has created plenty of catchphrases and cliches, variously rolling off the pens and tongues of Andy Stanley, John Ortberg, Markus Buckingham, Seth Godin, and other niche gurus.

It’s wise advice. You are you. No one else is you, and you’re not anyone else. No one has your particular web of physical characteristics, gifts and talents, weaknesses and insecurities, quirks, interests, relationships, and energy. No one else can change the world in precisely the same assortment of ways you can. So take the advice and find your sweet spot, discover your strengths, arrive at your element, pursue you at your “youiest,” rise with the creative class, become indispensable. By all means, do what you love. Do what you’re good at. Do what only you can do.

But don’t forget about the other stuff that still needs to get done. Pursue your dream job, but don’t expect your dream to come true tomorrow. And don’t expect it to be just what you expect. Know that both the journey and the destination will require the doing of many things that don’t thrill you. Life is hard work, and work is not just about being happy; it’s about glorifying God by serving the human family (or your own family!). Spoiled children always want to do exactly what they want to do; big people also do whatever needs to be done. Be big.

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NOTE: In light of my 30th birthday and in honor of the guys who have all the fun, I’ll be offering thirty reflections in thirty days starting December 19th. Today’s post is #2 (see the so-far list here). The only rule is that I have 250 words to make my point. After that just stop reading. Thanks for making my blog part of your internet experience.