Jesus ministered (taught, healed, forgave, fed the hungry) out of His core Identity.  As a result the context mattered to Him very little.  Because what He offers is timeless, and common to man, no context exists in which His offer is secondary.  Because His strategy was His Nature, He spoke to fishermen about fishing, and farmers about farming.  He tenderly loved the prostitute, and firmly confronted the hardened.  This is the same Eternal One who became a man in order to reach mankind.  He was the only relevant Thing  in every context He entered.  But because He is love He invited our needs and circumstances into His circle of relevance.  We matter, because we matter to Him. We matter to Him because He is Love.

He would become to us whatever it took to show Himself Accesible, with one unchanging exception.  He was always intending to reach the spirit of men, and He would not feed our soul, or body when doing so would shut down our spirit.  We do the same thing within our own souls when we choose any higher good.  I will not feed my body junk food when I am willfully choosing the higher good of health.  I will overcome inertia (my soulish preferences) in order to feed my health (physical, emotional, spiritual).  Jesus did the same thing.  He refused to perform miracles in some settings.  He turned down the chance to provide food again when He discerned that to do so would feed the wrong part of the crowd.

The Presence of the Kingdom of God among men will always respond to their highest need.  God will feed our bodies if it will reach our spirit, or impose an exile on His people when our spirits are dying in the shadow of our soulishness.  Sometmes what we want the most is the thing we need the least.  Sometimes what we want the least is what we need the most.  God will always give us what we need.

I fear that as we see the massive shift in our church culture we will look only on the outward, and simply look for another way to appeal to the soulish desires of mankind.  Loaves and Fishes were a demonstration of a loving God, to people who were pursuing Him and had chosen to sit at His feet, while their bodies went without.

Bread and Circuses were an entitlement given by the Romans to citizens who wanted others to work harder than they themselves were willing to.   Relinquishing their created design, they wanted someone else to provide for them what they themselves were capable of.   Men were willing to surrender their higher nature for the satisfaction of their lowest nature.  A loving Father would never make such a concession.  Jesus never conformed to any aspect of culture that fed men’s souls at the expense of their spirit.

Let us always be relevant when it reaches the spirit of men, but let us always be wise to when we might be feeding the soul at the expense of the spirit.

It is our own misunderstanding of Jesus’ mission and message that has us continually needing to release the next update of “church”.  Cultural relevance, whether it is an adjustment to the Reformation or to Post-Modernism should never be the target.  If cultural relevance must be the target then let’s define the culture rightly.  To what culture should we be conforming?  The edgy new culture that is arriving on the scene? The traditional culture which many find difficult to release?  Here is how Jesus would answer this question.

“When you pray, pray like this;  Our Father (Source, Origin) in Heaven (Whose culture is the Spiritual realm) hallowed be Your Name (You belong at the center of all things).  Your Kingdom come (may the culture of the Heavenly Realm, the Presence of your Nature, be the thing that we conform to) your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven  (please be the shaping and transforming power that restores to earth and all its’ inhabitants, the original design of creation).

Because the Knowledge of Good and Evil has shaped our understanding and perceptual pathways we associate God with the Traditions from which we are trying to extricate ourselves, instead of associating Him with the Life-Giving encounters the whole world is starved for.

God heartily invites us to spend our day moving in His life-soaked presence.  We fear He wants us to give up fun stuff.  God urges us to let go of the things which choke our soul. We fear He wants to control us.  God offers us a connection to the very Force that brought all things into existence.  We fear He wants us to be slaves.

Listen again this week to the teachings of Jesus.  Though He occasionally instructed us about navigating the Earth-realm; overwhelmingly, the bulk of His teaching had much more to do with the Nature and Availability of the Heavenly Realm.  “The Kingdom of Heaven is like...” is not a statement which introduces institutional principles.  It is the beginning of a description of a place that He has been and we have not.  It is the description of a place that is available to us in our day to day lives.

Let’s not change what the church does again.  Let’s change instead, where we operate from.

I read one more article last night about a pastor who had a “moral failure”.  Let’s just say it, a pastor who had sex with someone besides his wife.  Sad as this is, it was the advice of the author that made me much more sad.  He gave advice to others to help prevent such failures in the future.  He suggested four steps, implying that they would help men and women “win the spiritual battle.”  Amazingly, it is the same four steps that have been offered for decades.  This fallen pastor, and several who have gone on before, probably taught these steps to the men in his congregation.  I fear that our propensity to offer these steps to men and women is one of the most significant things we must address in this cultural shift which is the modern church culture.

Jesus had a phrase He used to uproot faulty religious thinking.  “You have heard it said do not commit adultery, but I say to you don’t even look on a woman with lust.  When you look at another with lust in your heart, you have committed adultery already.  This pattern was used throughout His sermon on the mount to help the people of His day think differently.  Many heard this and only thought different, not differently (See the entry from March 26 Adjective or Adverb…).  Jesus was not making a new and harder set of laws, He was trying to shift the understanding of His audience as to where the actual problems resided.  The problems were not simply outward behaviors which must be managed, by changing behavior, they were conditions of the heart which desperately needed transformation.

I would like to address these four fallacies; “solutions” we hand each other regularly as if they will really work.

1. You have heard it said memorize more scripture but I say to you learn to let the living and active word of God renew your mind.  The first implies that if you somehow exert more memory power, and retain more scriptural data you will be able to act differently.  This actually seemed to backfire for the Pharisees, who had the entire Bible memorized but were the number one enemy of the Abundant Life that Jesus offered.

Renewing our mind does not mean replacing wrong data with right data.  Paul tells us that the problem with law is that it does not have the power to transform us.  Memorizing scripture alone can simply become law, and still leaves the power of transformation in human hands.

When God speaks He is creating.  Engage the Voice not just the letter.  Don’t just learn the data of scripture, learn to think and see like the Author.  Let the words on the pages connect you to the Person of the Kingdom.  Allow Him to point out core lies, deception in the deep places of your heart.  Deception about Him and deception about you, and about the nature of reality.   More important allow Him to tell you truth.  Even identifying lies is not sufficient to change our behavior without the corresponding truth coming in to replace the lies.

2. You have heard it said have more consistent time alone with God but I say to you when you are alone with Him practice internal surrender.  What happens during your time with God matters more than how  much time you spend.  Jesus compared two guys, both of whom were praying.  One was telling God how glad he was that he was not a bad guy, and sharing his moral resume.  Certain that God was impressed, he prayed and spent time with God.   The other stood before God, and languished in his need.  He unashamedly told God he deserved nothing, and knew that his spritual resume was a declaration of his need for help. Both were spending time with God.

Jesus came to set the captives free, not to advise us about His moral preferences.  The restoration of our hearts, not the disciplnes of our flesh, will transform our outward experience.  Let Him heal the wounds of our lives, let Him exchange our heart of stone for His heart of flesh.  Let Him do His work, instead of telling Him how well you have done yours.

3.  You have heard it said practice accountability but I say to you the Holy Spirit comes to convict us of sin and righteousness and judgment, let Him do His job in you. While it is true that Jesus tells us that in God’s economy the opposite of evil is truth not good, (John 3: 20-21) truth sometimes eludes us in our limited sight.  Even when we are trying to be ruthlessly accountable we cannot confess to another the things hidden deeply in our hearts that we ourselves have yet to see.

Simply being able to tell another when we mess up is not sufficient to stop us from messing up.  And even if it prevents us from behaving badly, it is unlikely to transform the processes of our heart.  Fear or respect of another’s probing eyes may hold the beast at bay, but it does not have the power to crucify it.  When the Holy Spirit brings to light darkness in us, and shows us that this darkness is no longer compatible with our new nature the darkness is put to death, and the Holy Spirit ignites the righteousness of Christ in me.

4.  You have heard it said  maintain your integrity but I say to you learn how to take dominion, and practice your authority as a son or daughter of the Living God.  Somehow in our recomendations to one another we leave out one of the most siginificant aspects of Jesus framework of thought.  He clearly recognized and engaged a whole realm of reality that I will call “the invisible world”.  This is part of the creation that Adam was tasked with taking dominion over.  This is still our assignement to this day.

I remind us again Jesus came to set captives free.  If a man or woman is under the influence of another kingdom and has no idea what Jesus has done to grant us authority in this life, and how to practice this authority we remain under the influence.

In Jesus teachings on the sermon on the mount He was not discarding the first part of the “you have heard it said” statements, He was trying to reveal the hidden traps behind the statements.  I am in no way suggesting that we throw out Bible study, time with God, accountability and integrity.  I am, however strongly urging us that salvation and freedom are the acts of God in our lives, not the result of us arm-wrestling our behavior, thoughts and emotions into submission.  Behavior management has never been the objective, transformation of the inner man, and the restoration of God’s created design in our souls is the objective.  To offer the four solutions mentioned above as if they are sufficient for living the life we are called to, is like urging a man to swing on a trapeze, telling him the nets below will catch him if he falls, but neglecting to tell him that the nets are not anchored to their support and therefore will not hold his weight.

God did not send His Son to command us to behave like someone we are not, He sent Him to restore our factory settings so we might behave and think and feel like who He is in us.

So when most people think of Christians what do they think of?  How is it that God’s offer of hope to the world has become known by so many satirical images?  Rigid, judgmental, simple, one dimensional closed minded;  all pictures that much of the world conjures up of those professing Christianity.  How did this happen?  I think we must consider two factors;  the war against truth, and the knowledge of good and evil.  All the other factors, such as culture and politics, media and education, are simply tools in the war.  The real war takes place beyond the veil…let’s not fool ourselves.

If we want to examine the state of flux in the church today, most conversations will attempt to answer the question, how has the church lost relevancy, and what must be done to regain it?  The sad irony is that the most likely answers are modern resurrections of the very reasons that the church becomes irrelevant.

You cannot set people free from the knowledge of good and evil by modernizing your knowledge of good.  The war the church has fought historically has not been our failure to maintain a culturally relevant presentation.  It has always been the same war.  Are we turning desperately needy people back to a real and meaningful answer, or are we looking for ways to present the knowledge of good in a better more relevant package, hoping people will finally “get it right.”

More exciting knowledge of good.  More technologically savvy knowledge of good.  More edgy knowledge of good.  More flashy knowledge of good.  More doctrinally accurate knowledge of good.  What is the common theme?

No matter what the method or presentation, human capability, and the clever or persuasive urging for men to use their own resources to please God, is still returning to the foundational problem that Adam and Eve carried out of the Garden.  They left us all to live out of the powerless, death-filled, man centered knowledge of good and evil.  My knowledge, and your knowledge no matter how it is presented, communicated and motivated is simply an insufficient answer.  Once the new package fades, the answer is still insufficient and the ever-present Hope of the world hangs in the air, still and always available to those who come to know that in and of themselves they are stuck.

Relevance is not a cultural issue.  It is a human issue.  Respond to the real need of the human race with an open door to the Creator of the universe, and the Source of all Life and you will be relevant in any culture.  Re-package religion and you will simply take the next step in an ongoing cycle.