Category Archives: Fruit of the Spirit

Why God tells us to be perfect but doesn’t expect it

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(Part 2 on this subject)

“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

Would the Lord issue a command He does not expect to be obeyed?

We may as well raise the question before some reader does it for me and uses it to dismiss everything that follows.

Short answer: He’s trying to get something across, to teach us something important, by issuing the command.

Longer answer: everything that follows.

In His”Sermon on the Mount,” the Lord Jesus sets the bar alarmingly high for all who would live as His disciples.

–When persecuted, we are to rejoice (Matthew 5:12).

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Do what you do best, pastor: be you.

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Pastor, you have not been called by the Lord to be Abraham or Moses, David or Jeremiah.

He did not call you to be David Jeremiah, either.

Not Charles Stanley, or Warren Wiersbe.  Not Mark Driscoll, Stephen Furtick, Andy Stanley, or Louie Giglio–and not their clone.

Speaking of Louie, he says, “You are not a reprint or a lithograph. You’re a one-of-a-kind, original creation of God.”

What a marvelous creative inventive (someone get Roget’s Thesaurus down and finish this list!) God we have.  Billions and billions of human beings, no two alike, each one an original! Each one known by Him, and each loved, with a unique place in His divine plan.

Mull on that a while.

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A rhapsody on a theme of grace and mercy

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Mercy is God NOT giving us what we deserve. Grace is God GIVING us what we do not deserve.

Like that? It’s the truth, but it’s not the whole story.

Think of mercy as the restraint of God, His holding back on the judgment we have coming.

Think of grace as the generosity of God, HIs pouring out His blessings on the undeserving.

After God gives us mercy (forgiving us), we are still in need of grace (transforming us).  Mercy is the judge not sending the defendant to prison but suspending all charges and setting him free. Grace is the judge then recommending him for a training program and inviting him to his church where he will share a pew with a banker and his family.

God is a God of grace and mercy.

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The abrasive Christian

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“The Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance, leading to the knowledge of the truth…” (Second Timothy 2:24-25)

This week, in Lynne Olson’s “Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941”), I found this interesting depiction of Harold Ickes, a member of FDR’s cabinet during the Second World War:

“According to T. H. Watkins, Ickes’ biographer, ‘a world without something in it to make him angry would have been incomprehensible to him.’ A disgrunted Republican senator who had been the target of one of Ickes’ verbal assaults called him ‘a common scold puffed up by high office.’ To one cabinet colleague, Ickes was ‘Washington’s tough guy.’ To another, he was the ‘president’s attack dog.'”

Olsen tells how an assistant secretary of state once refused to shake hands with Mr. Ickes and described him in his diary as “fundamentally, a louse.”

Having such an irritating person in high government office is one thing; having them in church leadership is quite another.

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Why some preachers have oversized egos. What to do about it.

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A pastor friend who serves a large church pulled together a half-dozen preachers who serve some of the largest Protestant churches in his city. He had a burden for unity within the Christian community and felt a good place to start would be with these shepherds to whom everyone else looked up.

He opened by saying, “I’m going to ask you to leave your egos at the door.” He paused a moment, then added, “And there are some mighty huge egos in this room!”

They laughed, no one was offended, and they did business together.

Now, before anyone reacts to that, we need to say that not all ego is bad.

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The Lord has built a redundancy into the Christian life

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“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing….” (Ephesians 1:3)

You want someone to drive you to town and both my brother and I show up at the same time in separate cars. You can ride in only one car; the other is redundant.

The word “redundant” means something unnecessary, maybe just a little too much.

In design and engineering, redundancy is the act of building in safeguards to compensate for the failure of the primary system. The backup system you installed as a redundancy may never be used. But if it’s needed, it’s there in place, just waiting.

Say for instance, if an automated system of some type goes out due to a power failure, but there’s a hand-crank to work with. It’s slower but gets the job done.

I’m thinking today about the redundancy the Father in Heaven has built into the Christian life.  He saves us, writes our name down in Heaven’s book, we are adopted, and born again. He promises that He will never leave us, that nothing can ever snatch us from His hand, and that the life we now possess is everlasting.  He indwells us, overshadows us, goes before us, comes behind us, and undergirds us.  He gives us the Bible, the church, assignments to accomplish in this world, and teachers to show us how as well as colleagues to accompany us.  He tells us we are saved forever, that we have become “Sons of God” even, and that we shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever.

The Father fully plans for us to arrive at His home safely.

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I met a pastor who does not smile.

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“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy….” (Galatians 5:22)

“Now, look me in the eye and give me a smile. I want to see your teeth.”

That’s my typical request of whoever is sitting before me for a quick sketch.  If they hesitate, I explain that everyone looks better with a smile on their face, that a smile lifts the sagging face, changes the shape of the jawline, and adds a gleam to the eye.

“I don’t smile.”

Usually, the one saying this is an insecure teenager who has been warned off smiling by the mirror, an unkind friend, or a critic.  That’s one thing that pulls me onto middle and high school campuses, to do my program and try to get across to them that “there is not a person on the earth who does not look better with a smile on their face, including you.”

One man told me, “My grandmother told me when I was fifteen that I did not have a nice smile. I went twenty years without smiling.”

I said, “What a mean old lady.”

We can understand teenagers having esteem problems that often make them withdraw and want to hide.

But a pastor?

More than once, I have been drawing at denominational gatherings where most of the subjects are pastors. And I confess to being knocked speechless by those who say, “I don’t smile.”

If they have time and are not rushed, I’ll speak to that.

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Why we don’t like grace

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Anything that puts us down, we automatically shy away from. For many, grace does that.

Oh, we don’t mind singing about it, but the concept of grace itself is repulsive to our natures and offensive to our pride.

Something in me wants to be self-sufficient, to believe that whatever comes up, I’m able to handle, that as the poem says, “I am the captain of my soul.”

The cry of a four-year-old–“I can do it myself!”–is the insistence of the stubborn will of the adult child.

That’s why, even though we sing about it and say we love it, something inside us resists the idea of grace. That same something insists that I am sufficient for my needs, that my good works will accomplish everything necessary to land me in Heaven, that the rest is just so much religious talk.

The sinful heart of man is an atheist, an egotist, an idolator.

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Recipe for misery: Dream up problems.

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“The prophet who has a dream may relate his dream, but let him who has My word speak My word in truth. What does straw have in common with grain? (Jeremiah 23:28)”

Some people are so frustrated when nothing bad is happening around them that they manufacture it out of nothing.

They dream up trouble.

I don’t normally remember dreams, but this one I did.

A few weeks ago, I took an afternoon nap of nearly three hours. That week, I’d been attending the Southern Baptist Convention in Houston, Texas, some six hours away. After driving there Sunday and returning home Wednesday, in between, I had sketched nonstop for some 25 hours total and was worn to a frazzle.

In the dream, Margaret and I were adults riding the school bus home for some reason.  As the driver stopped in front of our house, Margaret got off while I busily set about gathering up all our packages. I told the driver I’d be just a minute.  As he pulled away, I called to say I was still on board and that I had asked him to give me a second. He said, “I didn’t hear you,” and  added that it was now against the rules for him to stop the bus and let me out.

That’s how I ended up riding with him back to the bus barn. While there–remember, this is just a dream–some employees of the school system came outside to inform me that they were entitled to “one-tenth” of the money I was supposed to fork over for my release.

I awakened with a strong sense of the unfairness of this system, feeling that someone needed to get in touch with the school board members because surely drivers are allowed to let people off at unscheduled stops. Besides, employees are not allowed to scam their captured riders.

“It’s just a dream,” I kept saying until the frustration dissipated.

That was so silly. “Where did it come from,” I wondered.

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What to do after your moronic two minutes

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Pastor, have you ever had a meltdown in the pulpit?

In the news this week, two Atlanta radio jocks were fired for the on-air mocking they did of a New Orleans icon, former Saints football player Steve Gleason who has ALS (Lou Gehrig’s) and lives in a wheelchair and speaks through a computer.

They made fun of him, parodied his situation, and someone role-played Steve speaking of his coming death and such.

It was the ultimate in offensive.

In the article which ran here in New Orleans, one of the terminated idiots (I’m so objective in this story, as you can see) said, ‘What were we thinking?” The jocks apologized, and in a subsequent story, Gleason said he accepted their apology.

One of the men called it “a moronic two minutes.”

No argument.

I have had a few moronic two minutes in my long lifetime, and expect some of our readers have also.

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