Tag Archives: Gospel

Disruptive Faith

How God Disrupted My Life

“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…”Safe?” said Mr Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 

“Ha!  You Christians think you’re so perfect, but you can’t even change your stupid sign.” 

This was the thought that ran through my mind as I sped passed the church.  It was just off the highway I drove every day to and from work. You know the type — a billboard with a Christian slogan or scripture verse.  I supposed it was the Church attempting to attract people to visit.

Normally, it changed weekly, but I was making fun of them because it had been seven weeks since they had changed it.   I now can think of a dozen reasons it might make sense to leave a scripture on a billboard for an extended time.  At that moment, I guess I assumed it was a dereliction of their duty – a failure.

This childish glee continued for another week as I yoyoed between work and home while the sign remained unchanged.  Then I became bored with that mental game and started another.

As I began to actually comprehend the text, I fixated on the first four words – “And be not conformed”, I doubled down in a new condemnation: “What do you guys know about non-conformity anyway?  You’re all about conformity.  I’m a true non-conformist.  You’re just about the status quo, you conforming little sheep.”

I had always been an outcast and unaccepted – at least in my mind.   I did not attend a single school for two years in a row until high school, so I learned to go it alone and not get too attached.   In high school, I found I did not fit in with any of the cliques.  I spent most of my time with the drama group who seemed like a diverse mix from the island of misfit toys to me.  Even here, I felt like an outsider. 

I found some weird type of safety in seeing my identity as a non-conformist – even to the non-conformist.  Certainly, this church was not about non-conformity.

I played this game for a week longer picking on the conforming goodie-two-shoes that could not even faithfully change their ridiculous sign.  But I read it each time I went by. Back and forth, day and night, its words seeping in.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed
by the renewing of your mind. 

Romans 12:2a

This amusement became tedious as well and was replaced by this daring declaration, “I bet that’s not even in the Bible!”

I am confident that anybody will likely catch why this is a bold, if not comically arrogant, thought.  I mean, this was a church billboard and I was not a Christian at the time – certainly not a Bible reader.   

I was not unaware of Jesus and God.  I was raised Catholic – casually – meaning mass on Christmas and Easter and when we visited my grandparents.

If you have not experienced a Catholic mass, you may not know that the faithful do not use a Bible since the Church conveniently provides the scripture necessary in a missalette. This little printed pamphlet contains an outline of the service. It tells you when to pray, what the Priest will say, what you will say in response, and when to sit or kneel. It also includes readings from the Old and New Testament printed with very formal references to the scripture such as: “A reading from the letter of Paul to the Romans.”

Despite my limited exposure, I did have moments growing up where I felt a connection and heart calling to God.   I also thought these readings were correspondence that some missionaries at our church had written and had no idea they were in the Bible.

I was pretty sure we had a Bible at the house, even though we never used it.  Sure enough, I found it on a top shelf in our living room and after cleaning the mountain of dust off it, I dove in to prove this passage about non-conformity was in error.

I discovered all these tabs on the edge of the book pages and ascertained they were abbreviations of the sections in the Bible. So far, so good.  I was shocked when I opened to the beginning of Romans and saw the words, “The Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans”. 

“Wait!  That’s the guy from all those letters at mass!  That’s from the Bible!”

Mind a bit blown, I made my way to Romans Chapter 12, Verse 2 – deciphering the structure for the first time.  Confirming that the verse was mostly as advertised on the church billboard, I decided I needed to understand the entire context.  Maybe that would make it different somehow.  Romans 12:1-2 told me:

I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12:1-2

I found these little symbols in the text – T and R.  Continuing my improvised study of Biblical structure, I found references that led me somehow to the book of Matthew.  

Once there, I was confronted with something new.  Some words were red and some were black. Reading a few of each, I quickly saw that the red letters were the words of Jesus and I was very intrigued by what I read. 

Before I knew it, I had read this entire Gospel and I found myself in love with Jesus and frustrated, if not a bit angry, that my Christian friends and church people had not been able to share with me what I clearly saw now.  

To be honest, I had never really had a Christian treat me poorly. Yet, somehow, I had in my mind that they thought of themselves as perfect and they (and I) knew I was a hot mess and not accepted by them – even though I had never really been shunned or treated badly.

In the Bible, I found Jesus going, not to the religious people, but to the hot-mess, non-conforming, outcasts like me!   I could hardly believe it.  But the pattern was clear over and over again.  I realized the Pharisees and Sadducees were the religious holier-than-thou elite and Jesus was constantly trying to help them get over themselves and their rules so they could love people.

What was not to love about Jesus?

I did not have anyone there with me to teach me the sinner’s prayer or tell me my next step – but I did not need that.  God had disrupted my seemingly non-conforming, tragically truly conforming life and showed me the only real non-conformist, Jesus Christ, His son who laid down His life for others instead of claiming His right to it – because he loved us that much.

What is Real Non-Conformity?

I have spent about 37 years with Romans 12:1-2 since that night and God still shows me amazing new things from these two verses.  That is crazy-awesome-miraculous.

It is still sad to me when this verse is used to heap judgement upon people – Do not conform any longer to the pattern of the world with the pattern being drinking, sex, cussing or whatever other infraction being condemned by the speaker.  The pattern of this world is self, separate from God, and the Pharisees as well as those they condemned as sinners were stuck in this pattern. The modern equivalent is no different.

The transformation that comes from renewing your mind is the one that Jesus enabled for us – by us viewing instead, His mercies that enable us to be a living sacrifice because we too give up our life to let Christ live His through us. 

Even after we become a Christian, Satan accuses us constantly that we are not good enough – as if we were still separate from Christ. But Christ already disrupted Satan’s power when He claimed us and came to live in us as one with us – as our very life. 

That is what disruptive faith is – the faith of Christ to overcome both sin and death in us, which he has already done.   This is why we must continually renew our minds to see the mercy and grace Christ already provided – Christ in us, the hope of glory – and continually let this revelation transform our lives.

Why Does This Matter?

People are often amazed when I share how I came to know Christ through a billboard rather than another person.  I am sure others had talked to me before about Christ, but it never seemed they had introduced Him to me.  I think that is true for most of us, even if we come to Christ when another shares the gospel with us. Usually, there were previous experiences too but this one is the one in which Christ reveals Himself to us – even if facilitated by another.   Saint Paul tells us it requires God’s revelation:

But when God, who had set me apart even from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles.

Galatians 1:15-16a

When we see Christ as one with us, it is not our environment, behavior, capabilities or even beliefs that change – It is our identity.  We are now one with Him, inseparable.  This is true regardless of our environment, situation, or circumstances.  This is true despite our behavior whether good or bad.  We are not operating under the law of good and bad – but under the reality of Christ’s grace and life in us as one.

When we are one with Him, we love Him and His life in us begins to transform us as we journey with Him. Like Paul, God reveals His son in us for a purpose God reveals His son in us SO THAT we might live out a unique calling with Him in our life. 

Seeing His presence in us is how we come to know how we are uniquely called to live and love others. It empowers us to co-create with Him the same types of environments of love and grace He created when he walked the earth.

We are not here to only work and live and consume and experience our culture.  Christ has disrupted all that.  He has replaced life with life abundant.  We are here to partner with Christ in the restoration of all things – to create His culture – on earth as it is in heaven.  

If you have invited Him in, Christ lives in you and through you and is disruptively revealing Himself to you, SO THAT you can disruptively partner together.   Your calling, His mission through you is at stake. 

  • Do you see Him? 
  • How will you partner with Him? 
  • Will you accept His disruptive calling and live life abundantly?

Are You A Sinner Saved By Grace?

If you attend a church, certainly a Bible Church or other conservative church, you are likely to hear the idea that “Christians are Sinners saved by grace”.  What is interesting is that this cannot  be found anywhere in the Bible. 

That man rebelled against God and became separated from him is obvious.   It is this rebellion and separation, caused by sin that makes man a sinner and before coming to Christ, we were all sinners.  However, the identity and title used throughout the New Testament for believers is Saint.

This, of course, does not mean what Catholicism has sadly caused the word to come to mean – a person who has worked to grow holy and close to God and become so pure and good that we call them saints.  But it is very clear in the New Testament that we could add that prefix to a modern new convert as well as to St. Paul or St. Augustine. 

We were once sinners, but we were saved by grace and now, we are saints.  Sainthood, like salvation, cannot be achieved by our works – it is the title of the children of God who have become God’s children through union with Christ. Christ is now their very life, their only life and Christ was never a sinner – so neither are they.  Once you are a child of God, through your faith in God’s gracious provision, you are no longer a mere mortal, separated from God – a sinner.

That we were once sinners is true, but it is not the interesting thing – the amazing thing is that we are now Saints in Christ and we can boldly go before the thrown of God.  What’s the value of dwelling on the fact that we were sinners. And certainly, identifying ourselves as sinners can only serve to make our heavenly Father sad.  If we adopted a child from the gutter and loved them as our own but they constantly reminded us that they were not our child and kept dressing in the rags of their previous life, we would be greatly grieved.  How much more grief must God bear because of our misunderstanding of his gift.

Answer these questions for yourself:

1. If I died tonight, am I 100% certain I will go to heaven?

2. If I died and stood before God, and he asked my why he should let me into his heaven, what would my answer be?

If you answered no to question #1, would you like to be certain?

If for question #2, you answered with something like “I’ve tried to lead a good life” – can you not see that you are still working for your salvation.

The gospel – the good news – that God is proclaiming to man is that all man’s works are in vain and unnecessary for he has provided the lamb and the man who believes can be certain that he will be saved.  God, unlike men, keeps his word and is completely capable – can’t you see that you can be sure of God’s power and desire to do this – so trusting in him means you never have to worry about your ability to put it together.

When Egypt was plagued with frogs such that they were in the food and drinking water and beds and homes, Pharaoh summoned Moses agreeing to his demands and Moses asked Pharaoh when he would like God to remove the plague.  Pharaoh’s incredulous response was tomorrow.  Why in the world would he wait another day living with the frogs.   And why would we live another day being indecisive about accepting God’s infinitely better gift in Christ so we could sleep tonight certain that we will go to heaven because we can answer God’s question confidently that our basis for entry is on God’s Word, his son’s life indwelling us.

And what does that take?  Asking him for his life to count as our own. It is not merely believing – the Bible says even the demons believe.  Faith is asking his life to be your own.  If I showed you are sturdy chair and you told me you believe it could support you – but refused to sit in it – how much are you really believing in the chair?  Settle it once for all to fully engage with Christ.

Congratulations.

After you’ve given your life to Christ or if you already done that, then resolve to never again identify yourself as anything less than a child of God because no child of God is a sinner, separated from God.

The Revelation of Jesus

Galatians 1:11-12

I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

Like Paul, I did not come to faith by the preaching of men. I’m not saying that some did not attempt to share Christ with me, but unlike most people, God had to reach out to me directly – pretty much by the scruff of my neck.

Commanding a Non-conformist Not to Conform

Paul had a blinding light from above.  God chose to reach me through my own blind pride from a billboard above.  Specifically, it was a billboard that had Romans 12:2a on it.  That verse reads, Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

In my foolishness, I thought of myself as the ultimate non-conformist.  I hung with a group of outcasts but I pridefully observed that I did not conform to them either: I was a self-proclaimed non-conformist to the non-conformist.  All this really meant was that I was lonely and alone; foolish & prideful; lacking everything while I thought I was wise.

In his great mercy, God somehow held this weekly rotating church sign from changing for six weeks so that I could see it long enough to first make fun of the church for their failure to update it, then move to taunting the scripture (what could hypocritical church people know about non-conformity), to disbelief that such a statement could even be in the Bible which drove me to the decision to look it up. 

Our heavenly Father has such a great sense of humor and irony in his patient and faithful love pursuit of his children.  In my life, God used my own juvenile and pathetic crown of non-conformity to get me to surrender to his Lordship so He could make me a son and crown me himself with the eternal crown of life as a co-heir to his son, Jesus.

I’ve always been able to relate to C.S. Lewis in his account of his conversion in Surprised by Joy“I came into Christianity kicking and screaming. You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [College, Oxford], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

About Hypocrites – Takes One to Know One

My personal claim was that Christians were clearly hypocrites in their pursuit and push for moral perfection.  My Catholic upbringing left me filled more with guilt than the grace of the Lord.  I decided I could do without them if they could not accept me.  Yet here I was opening one of our dust-collecting, Bible decorations to look up Romans 12:2.

Being Catholic, we never used the Bible, just church missalettes so navigating scripture references was a novel experience.  Growing up in church, I occasionally marveled at the exploits of missionaries who sent letters that would be read during the service.  The Priest would read a letter from the missionary to different people or churches. 

I noticed the majority of our letters were from a missionary named Paul and I used to think, “Wow, he really gets around and he really writes a lot”. Imagine my surprise to find the proliferate missionary in my Bible as I opened to “The Letter of Paul to the Romans”.  I think I might actually have exclaimed out loud, “It’s that guy!”

I continued to decode this book figuring out what scripture references meant and trying to determine what “R” and “T” meant in margins, I found myself cross”R”eferenced to the Gospel of Matthew where I discovered some of the letters were black and some were red. Examining these, I soon determined that the red letters were the words of Jesus and before I knew it, I had read through the Gospel of Matthew and had completely and totally fallen in love with Jesus.

The Only True Non-Conformist – Jesus

What I was amazed to find was that Jesus loved the “wicked” (like me) even though he did not condone their sins but instead forgave them their sins.  Also, he loved the righteous (like the Pharisees) even when they were hypocrites though he did not condone their sinful pride but instead forgave them theirs sins.  It wasn’t that Jesus took sides or that he was about us being morally good.  He taught that none of us could be good but that God alone was good and that his love alone could nullify our sins and transform us from sinners into children of God. 

It was hard to imagine but I discovered that Jesus loved me just as much as all the good Christians who I thought were condemning me. I thought non-conforming through rebelling against the establishment was who I was but I discovered that my non-conformity was not non-conformity at all but merely living in the same sins as everyone else: lust, greed, and pride.

Our Father was so gracious in the way he revealed his son to me.  Jesus Chris is the one and only true non-conformist because he is the only conformist to God, the Father. I discovered that night that Jesus was the greatest non-conformist who ever lived and I decided to give my life to him fully.  That radically changed my life and I will be eternally grateful.  Romans 12:1 says, Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.

27 Years of Real Non-conformity

All of this happened when I was 18 and my life has been a river of blessing flowing to the sea rushing bigger and more powerful in Christ each year.  Besides having a wonderful wife and four amazing children that each have come to know Christ through the Savior’s leading, I have a had a life of increasing purpose and joy.  It is not that I have not had hard times because I have – but when I have them, I know the one who can give the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, and will guard my heart and my mind in Christ Jesus. Phil 4:7.

I have also been blessed to love so many people and watch them grow in Christ by the work of Jesus in my life.  This is not from me – anymore than what I received was from other men.  God uses people to reach others but it is always his work. 

I can promise you this – if you are reading this, the God of the universe is pursuing you mightily.  How can I say that?  First, that’s what the Bible says 2 Peter 3:9, .  Secondly, we are having this conversation through my blog or some other means.   Since the Father loves you and is pursuing you, I pray that our Father will reveal his son in you as he did for Paul and as he did for me.

Galatians 1:15-16

But when God, who set me apart from birth and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me