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The Fire Series: Culture and Conviction

Christians don’t dance. Christians don’t drink alcohol. Christians don’t curse. Christians don’t get tattoos. Christians don’t wear short skirts. Christians go to church. Christians read the bible. Christians pray. Christians pay tithes. Christianity has a culture. It has evolved over the years. It’s ok to dance now (but only to Christian music of course lol).

In 1980 an American management professor Edgar Schein developed a model for organizational culture. It looked like this:

Using this model, all the examples of what Christians do and don’t do, that I listed above, fall squarely into the category; Artefacts and Behaviour. These, and other things, are what people on the outside observe about us. Then there are the values that Christians espouse; values such as kindness, love, generosity and patience. Finally, at the deepest level are the basic assumptions of Christianity that I prefer to call our convictions. These are the underlying beliefs that are so fundamental that they are assumed. For example, a basic taken-for-granted belief of Christianity is that God is real.

I imagine that things were not always this way. Before Christ, there was no Christian religion (obviously) or ‘Christian culture’. The early church must have spent a lot of time preaching about basic beliefs and values and new believers were converted when they were convicted of the reality of the truths that the apostles and disciples of Christ were preaching. Their behavior flowed from deeply held convictions. Unfortunately, I see a different dynamic at play in the church today.

Today, I see thousands of people who have adopted some of the behavior, maybe a few values but rarely the convictions of Christianity. To illustrate my point let me give some hypothetical examples. Let’s define three Christians:

  • Person A only knows the most visible part of the Christian culture; the behaviour.
  • Person B knows the behaviour and the values.
  • Person C knows the behavior, values and convictions.

So, suppose all three persons lose their jobs and are struggling to gain employment. Here is a hypothetical reaction of each person:

  • Person A falls into a depression. He cannot understand how come this happened to him when he attends church regularly, says the ‘Our Father’ daily and pays his tithes faithfully. Soon he leaves the faith.
  • Person B struggles with depression as well but maintains a brave facade. When asked about her situation she says, “I’m too blessed to be stressed!” She fasts and sticks up scriptures about God providing for her on her mirror. She asks her pastor to pray for her but struggles to understand why this is happening to her.
  • Person C is not worried. She knows that God is faithful. She prays, and God tells her that she needs to forgive her old boss and open the business she has always been dreaming about.

Rare are the person Cs in this world. The sad reality is that many who have grown up in church have no deep convictions of anything; they have just mirrored the behaviours and adopted the catch phrases that they saw/heard around them. We have become adept at emphasizing what Christians should and shouldn’t do. There have been whole sermons dedicated to how women should dress for church. (Can you see my eyes rolling?) Most of us know what we should believe and are oh so quick to tell others what they should believe too. But too few of us actually believe and live the reality that God exists, loves all men unconditionally and wants to be in intimate relationship with us. We are working at the shallowest levels, failing miserably to reach the depths of conviction that can truly transform the church and the world.

We are wasting our time with whether abortion is legal or illegal, whether gay marriage is legal or illegal, why divorced sister so-and-so is receiving communion or leading worship, forcing our disinterested children to attend church and the list goes on. These are all symptoms of a much deeper problem but 90% of our effort is aimed at the symptoms. We are living the delusion that behavior modification is what Christianity is about. Christianity is about a real relationship with the living Christ!  Nothing less will do!

We need to get back to the core of our faith; the deep convictions of our faith. Let’s talk about those! Let’s live those and turn the hearts of men back to God. Then and only then will we see a cultural shift that will overtake the planet and shake the universe!

Joyfully,

Copyright 2018, Matik Nicholls. All rights reserved.

The Fire Series: God Thinks Outside The Box

Recently I have been getting the urge to write on topics that deal more directly with issues of the Christian faith. This week I felt it so strongly. Like the prophet Jeremiah said:

If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.

So today is the start of “The Fire Series!” which will be interspersed in between my usual posts.

This week one of the things that got me fired up was a message from Kris Vallotton of Bethel Church. I was listening to the podcast on the way from work and he illustrated something from scripture, from an angle that I had never thought of before. It struck a deep chord with what I knew to be true in my heart. So much so, that I felt like shouting “Hallelujah!” and acting like a crazy man in my truck. The scripture is the well-known account in Acts 2 when the disciples are waiting in the upper room for the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised. And He comes! Like the sound of a mighty rushing wind that fills the whole house, He comes! In divided flames of fire, resting on each disciple, He comes! And then they start to speak in tongues (languages) that are not their own. The people in the city hear them and are confused because they know that these guys don’t speak those languages. Unable to comprehend what could possibly be going on, they come up with the most likely explanation in their minds; these guys must be drunk.

But Peter addresses the crowd and says this (Acts 2:14-18):

14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them: “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. 15 For these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. 16 But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel:

17 “‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; 18 even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.

Familiar verse right? But imagine if we were there in that verse and we were Jews. What would we think? Well, we would probably call them crazy and we definitely would say that this speaking in tongues business is not of God (as some still say today). Because we would look at our bible (only the OT at that time) and say, “Speaking in tongues is not in the bible, therefore it is not of God!” (In our deepest, most authoritative tone of course.) And this crazy pastor/pope, Peter is leading people astray! I mean, plainly, Joel lists three things as evidence of the outpouring of the Spirit:

  1. Prophecy
  2. Visions
  3. Dreams

What’s not on that list? Speaking in tongues!!! The brightest Christian scholars would examine the Hebrew and the grammar and it would be dissected on pulpits around the world and this crazy, unscriptural, ungodly movement would be soundly rebuked as unbiblical – not of God!

So how did Peter connect this passage in Joel with what was happening in the upper room? What is it the he understood that we don’t? Peter understood God. He had walked with Jesus long enough to know that God is not what we expect. You see, Peter did not speak by intellectual acumen or human reasoning. Peter made a declaration of a truth that was downloaded into his spirit from The Spirit. He had a knowing deep in his gut that THIS IS THAT! And! He was willing to believe God rather than his own intellectual thinking. He understood the profoundly simple truth that God does not conform to the limits of our minds.

Today, the average Christian has been taught to put God in a box. If it’s not in the bible, it’s not God. The problem that is so well illustrated by the scripture above is that we do not have the mental wattage to interpret the mind of God in scripture. God never intended for us to go around looking for a verse that aligns to every situation. What He wants for us is so much more relational, so much more dynamic and so much more powerful!

I’m taking God out my mind-box. I want to see all that He is and all that He wants to do on this earth. I want Him to blow my mind and shatter my limitations! The God I serve is BIG. Bigger than I could ever conceive and I want to experience as much of Him as I possibly can.

In Matthew 12:22-32 Jesus delivers a demon-possessed man. (Again, something that had never been done before. At least not in the bible.) The religious leaders of the time again come to the wrong conclusion; it must be by a demon that Jesus is casting out demons. And it is in this context Jesus makes a deeply sobering statement, “…whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” I don’t know about you but that gets my attention. Really gets my attention!

When I hear about something new that seems strange I don’t want my first question to be, “Is it in the bible? And if not then it’s not God.” I want my first question to be, “Woah! God is that Your Holy Spirit at work? I trust you completely to lead me into all truth. So, if it is You, I want to know more! I want to experience it myself! Bring it on Holy Spirit!”

I thank You Lord that You are not a God that I can wrap my mind around. Then You wouldn’t be God, I would be god. But I’m not, and You are! You alone are God! Hallelujah!

Joyfully,

Copyright 2018, Matik Nicholls. All rights reserved.