Living the Christian Life Together
As we move deeper into “Ordinary Time,” let’s retain our experience of the Holy Spirit, something we celebrated not that long ago on Pentecost Sunday. This depiction by Jean II Restout certainly captures the power and awe of the moment. The Divine Presence stirring within us and among us is truly life changing!
Romans 2:17-29 (NLT)
By Chuck Griffin
The early church in Rome was a mix of Jews and Gentiles, and sometimes they had trouble combining their world views. In today’s text, Paul clearly addresses the Jewish portion of his audience.
Paul begins with a call for an attitude adjustment, upholding the value of the law but emphasizing how knowing the law was supposed to move the Jews toward something greater.
I suppose I should pause and make sure we have a basic understanding of what Paul means by “the law.” Certainly, Paul is talking about the laws spoken by God to the Israelites on Mt. Sinai, what we call “The Ten Commandments.” He references three of those commandments, ones related to stealing, adultery and idolatry, when he accuses the Jewish Christians of hypocrisy.
He also may have been thinking of additional, more culturally specific rules God gave Moses to establish a covenant with the Israelites. He may even have been referencing the interpretations of the laws developed by rabbis over the centuries.
To a good Jew, the Mosaic law was everything. How well you followed every jot and tittle of the law served as evidence of your righteousness to God and the people around you. Let’s not forget Paul himself had once been a Pharisee, a sect of Jews known for their rigorous adherence to the law.
And yet, Paul had seen the true purpose of the law through his encounter with Jesus Christ. He wanted to be sure these early Jewish Christians saw it, too.
It helps to think about the law in a big-picture way. You may recall that a lawyer once tried to trap Jesus by asking him to name the most important commandment.
Jesus replied: “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40)
Jesus took the law and explained it as a matter of the heart. He then lived out that truth in how he lived and died. In Romans, Paul developed his message along the same lines.
The Jewish mistake was simple enough; it even seemed noble and holy. God gave the Israelites the law to live by, and those who wanted to be obedient saw the law as a call to action.
There were rituals, sacrifices and festivals to be performed. There were specific actions to be avoided, the “thou shalt nots” that were always to be kept in mind. The pursuit of obedience seemed paramount, and we can tell from Paul’s writings in Romans and elsewhere that Jews who followed Jesus as their promised Messiah continued to emphasize obedience to rules.
In the fifteenth chapter of the book of Acts, we see this problem reach a crisis point. At this point in the life of the church, there was a lot of friction between the Gentile followers of Christ, who were drawn to a message of universally available salvation and grace, and certain Jewish followers of Christ, who essentially believed all converts needed to follow Jewish law as well as Jesus. Perhaps the harshest requirement: The Jewish Christians said the Gentiles needed to be circumcised in order to be saved.
In what is now called the Council of Jerusalem, the early church leaders, including Peter and Paul, decided Gentiles did not need to be burdened with rituals and behaviors that had never been part of their culture. Instead, they simply asked that the Gentiles abstain from sexual immorality, food offered to idols, and from consuming blood or the meat of strangled animals. The ones related to food may have been simple measures of politeness, as Jews found such consumption detestable, making it difficult for the community to eat together. Acts tells us the Gentile Christians rejoiced greatly when they received word of this lenient decision.
Paul and the other early church leaders understood the law was intended to be more than just a call to “head knowledge” or a series of repeated actions. The law was a call to transformation. Understanding the law was supposed to change the heart, bringing a person into a full relationship with God and a proper relationship with others.
This is the full meaning of the word we translate as “righteous.” It’s not just getting certain actions right—it’s having our innermost being aligned with God’s will.
Lord, may your Spirit help us pursue that true, scripturally sound heart righteousness, knowing that once we have that, our actions will fall into alignment with your will. Amen.
Pentecost is this coming Sunday, June 5. The story of Pentecost is found in Acts 2. We at Methodist Life encourage everyone to begin meditating this week on the role of the Holy Spirit in our personal lives and in the lives of our churches. In terms of importance, this Sunday ranks right up there with Easter. After all, it is through the Holy Spirit that we experience God directly in the time we now live. How will you honor that great truth this Sunday?
Acts 9:31 (NLT)
The church then had peace throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria, and it became stronger as the believers lived in the fear of the Lord. And with the encouragement of the Holy Spirit, it also grew in numbers.
By Chuck Griffin
I have been in professional ministry 20 years this year, including my time as a licensed pastor while in seminary. I keep wondering what it must feel like to experience a church at peace.
The ridiculously named United Methodist Church is in great turmoil, of course, having argued over scriptural authority for decades now. Yes, I know, liberals describe the dispute as being about the ordination of practicing homosexuals and the ritualizing of same-sex marriage. The deeper problem, however, is that a significant part of the UMC does not treat the Holy Bible as the primary rule and authority for faith, morals and service.
If you don’t think there’s an underlying doctrinal problem, just watch how our denominational divide will broaden in the coming months as the national debate over abortion grows.
A flimsy “unity” bandage offered by progressives and institutionalists is supposed to bring healing. They apply it with assertions that we are better together than apart. Their message begs a question, however: Unity in what?
As best as I can tell, the answer is unity in the preservation of an institution that began shrinking in this country from the moment it formed. This shallow call for unity comes largely from those who benefit financially from the institution’s ongoing existence: its administrators, the pastors of large churches lacking sound doctrinal moorings, and liberals desperate to maintain their financial connections to conservatives’ more dedicated giving commitments.
I saw deep, true unity last Friday and Saturday as the Wesleyan Covenant Association held important annual meetings near Indianapolis. Despite the large numbers of people involved, the work was handled seriously but swiftly, and the worship was driven by a Constant Joyous Presence.
All that happened for a simple reason. We had unity in our understanding of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, an understanding derived from that primary rule and authority for faith, morals and service I mentioned earlier. You see, when conservative Methodists are together, they can say words like “resurrection” and “Jesus Christ is Lord” and know no one is off to the side redefining core Christian concepts to suit a personal agenda.
It was, I think, a taste of what is to come in the Global Methodist Church, which the WCA has helped establish. We will have earnest debates about polity and procedures in the GMC, of course, but we will have an advantage. We will all be working from the same doctrinal foundation, rooted in fear of the Lord—not cringing fear, but heartfelt awe and humility naturally experienced in the presence of one so holy, powerful and loving.
I so wish the path to the GMC could be easy for traditional Methodist churches. It appears less and less likely that it will be, with bureaucracy and worldly stratagems filling the hearts of those who could make it easy. I wonder if they remember what it was like to be young men and women who went to seminary because they were so overwhelmed by God’s incredible life-giving grace.
As traditional Methodists, we have some difficult decisions to make in the next few weeks. Do not despair, though. Trusting in the Bible’s promises, we will be encouraged by the Holy Spirit. And one way or another, we will inhabit a new expression of Methodism, one at peace with itself and ready to engage with a broken world.
Dear Lord, may the Holy Spirit guide us moment by moment, and may we all remember those first hours where we followed you as Savior, receiving your grace and submitting to you without concern for money or position in this world. Amen.
Malachi 3:8-12
Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. But you say, “How have we robbed you?” In your tithes and contributions. You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need. I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of your soil, and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the Lord of hosts. Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says the Lord of hosts.
By Chuck Griffin
I should begin with a big word of thanks to all of you who have supported a church financially in any way. Those of us who lead churches don’t say thanks enough to those of you who support Christ’s mission with your dollars.
So, thanks be to God for you; thanks, whether you gave a dollar or a thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars. When you give, you are part of the solution the church offers to the world.
I wanted to start out with words of thanks because today’s verses, read without much context, sound like a mixture of threats and promises tied to whether you tithe and give other offerings. Don’t tithe, and you are robbing God and faced with a curse. Do tithe, and you will receive an overflowing blessing. And I know that preachers often imitate this text, making threats and promises where church giving is concerned.
I will note that Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament in our Christian Bible, so we should expect more legalistic formulas for relating to God. Jesus Christ, the ultimate expression of God’s forgiving grace, is not yet visibly in the picture.
I don’t, however, want to simply write off Malachi’s words about tithes and offerings as somehow irrelevant. In fact, this minor prophet makes a major connection between what he says about tithes and offerings and the reasons for Christ’s entry into the world.
Malachi’s straightforward question, “Will anyone rob God?” comes in the midst of other, more mysterious and far-reaching words. Just before he speaks of tithes and offerings, the prophet has been speaking of a coming messenger, to be followed by the arrival of the Lord. These words long have been associated with the ministry of John the Baptist—the Messiah’s herald—and the coming of Jesus Christ.
After Malachi speaks of tithes and offerings, he raises a new subject, how God will respond to the faithful. That leads ultimately to prophecies about “the great and terrible day of the Lord,” a time when the wicked and righteous are finally sorted, with the righteous entering a glorious new life. These images remind me of Jesus’ more detailed words in Matthew 25:31-46, where he makes clear that he will be the one to do the sorting.
All of that Messiah and End Days imagery, with talk of tithes and offerings sandwiched in between, causes me to reconsider my understanding of tithing. In fact, that big-picture perspective is what should convince us to tithe.
Certainly, tithing was part of the Mosaic law, the code the Jews tried to live by to remain in relationship with God. It’s important to note, however, that tithing predated the law.
Tithing also didn’t just go away after God’s grace more clearly entered the picture through Christ. Consider this: How did the early church, made up largely of Jews used to tithing, respond to the resurrected Jesus? Rather than shrinking their giving, they gave everything they had. (See Acts 2:43-47.)
If we could interview them, I think we would be hard pressed to find an early Christian who would describe tithing as anything more than a starting point in support of God’s redemptive work.
Scripturally, tithing for thousands of years has served as the baseline for how we participate in God’s effort to move us toward a time when evil is vanquished for good. In the world we live in now, a world where money is the primary driver behind how everything works, we still have to talk frankly about how money gets into church coffers. It gets there because people like you make commitments that the money will be there, and I think the tithe remains the appropriate beginning point for Christian giving.
Here’s a little church math to consider. As best I can tell, United Methodist households in churches I have served give about 4 percent of their income toward the work of their churches. That’s an average covering every active household, whether a household gave nothing or thousands of dollars.
If we could raise that average by one percentage point, incredible things would happen. A percentage point doesn’t sound like much, but if churches would move from an average of 4 percent per household to an average of 5 percent, our funds for ministry would jump by 25 percent.
I dive into this church math for one reason. I want you to see there is increasing power as we move toward tithing in a community, the kind of power that helps change the world.
With more finances available, we could tell more people about Jesus. We could feed more people and clothe more people in Jesus’ name. We could do more for our children and youth and our homebound elderly. We could start ministries we have yet to imagine.
Maybe we would minister with more programs and facilities to serve the people we’re trying to reach. Maybe we would reach out to the community with more paid ministry staff to lead the way. However our churches might minister, lives would be changed, even more so than they are being changed now.
Here’s what I want you to walk away with today: You are not required under some sort of law to tithe, or to give at any level. As grateful recipients of God’s eternal grace, however, you are invited to participate in God’s restorative work, using the financial resources God has given you.
Lord, speak to our hearts directly about how we use our resources to benefit your kingdom. Amen.
Acts 28:23-31 (NRSV): After [the leaders of the Jews in Rome] had set a day to meet with [Paul], they came to him at his lodgings in great numbers. From morning until evening he explained the matter to them, testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus both from the law of Moses and from the prophets. Some were convinced by what he had said, while others refused to believe.
By Chuck Griffin
I’m going to use what some think is an ugly word, even a scary word: evangelism. Before ascending into heaven, Christ called us to evangelize, but we sometimes avoid the topic because it carries some negative connotations.
All that negativity stems not from use but from abuse of the basic mission Jesus gave us. Evangelism isn’t about ambushing people with difficult questions so we feel we have discharged our duties. It is about preparing ourselves spiritually and intellectually, and then helping people find the answers to questions they naturally have.
The end of Paul’s story as he arrived to house arrest in Rome serves as a good example. Through letters and representatives, he already had built a relationship with a small group of Christians there, and his reputation allowed him to draw leaders of the Jews to his guarded home. There they heard the message that Jesus Christ is Savior, a deeply controversial idea.
Here’s what Paul did:
Our churches’ situations can seem very different than what Paul faced, but these basic principles of evangelism remain. What creative efforts can we make to be Paul-like to our unbelieving neighbors?
Lord, grace us with a deeper understanding of evangelism so more may enter your kingdom each day. Amen.
The painting below, Raphael’s “Death of Ananias,” depicts a moment when God’s justice fell upon a husband who was part of a deceptive couple in the early church. (The wife receives her portion soon after.) The story is found in Acts 4:32-5:11. Does the story and its depiction shock you? Why might we be shocked that God’s justice could be so swift?
Lord, we thank you for the mercy and grace you continually shower upon us. We know that without Jesus Christ, your justice would be swift, righteous and terrible. Amen.
During my sermon this Sunday, I will return to the theme of the Lord as shepherd, probably most familiar to us in Psalm 23. The sermon will be available on Holston View United Methodist Church’s website.
Today’s preparatory text: Acts 17:16-31
By Chuck Griffin
When Paul began to preach in Athens, his was a strange voice amidst a babble of competing ideas. Americans, welcome to New Athens.
Christian Americans at one time were accustomed to the idea that we were the dominant voice in our culture. Any debate, it seemed, was largely limited to what type of Christianity people espoused; Paul’s core message about the crucified and resurrected Christ was commonly understood. Even the people who declined to accept the message likely had been dragged to church at least a few times.
I find it difficult to mark the turning point where secular thinking became truly dominant. In 1980, the British satirist and Christian convert Malcolm Muggeridge published a book entitled “The End of Christendom,” and I know that by the 1990s it was common to talk about Christianity no longer being the baseline of our society.
A couple of weeks ago, I watched a Saturday morning rerun of a 1959 “Wagon Train” episode. It was built entirely around the story of a preacher who lost his faith because of pride, abandoning his flock but ultimately rediscovering grace. I looked at my wife and said, “No one would write a prime-time show that way today.”
For crying out loud, the show had a sermon embedded in it! The slide from 1959 to now seems to have been gradual enough that people weren’t quite seeing it, but fast enough that it’s astonishing in hindsight.
To employ a tired but useful cliché, we are where we are. I think that’s supposed to be accompanied with a sigh, but I would encourage optimism. Let’s try to remember that working in a similar environment, early Christians were quite successful.
Of course, the early Christians we remember were also quite serious, willing to cut against the social grain, surrendering themselves to kingdom work and often paying for their countercultural attitudes with their lives.
Conservative, traditional Christians, having enjoyed Christendom for so long, need to relearn how to be countercultural. So-called progressive Christians are simultaneously dangerous to those around them and amusing—they go to bed thinking they’re countercultural, when mostly they’re just comfortably shifting with the secular sand beneath them.
At this point, I cannot do much to help the progressives. Conservative, traditional Christians: Well, I return to the message I delivered Wednesday. If we are to succeed, we have to deepen our discipleship. We likely need to give up certain aspects of our lives so we can better clothe ourselves in Christ.
A hurting world awaits word of the crucified and resurrected Christ.
Loving Jesus, call us clearly through discipleship so we may always have your voice leading us. Amen.
2 Corinthians 8:1-7 (NRSV)
We want you to know, brothers and sisters, about the grace of God that has been granted to the churches of Macedonia; for during a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For, as I can testify, they voluntarily gave according to their means, and even beyond their means, begging us earnestly for the privilege of sharing in this ministry to the saints—and this, not merely as we expected; they gave themselves first to the Lord and, by the will of God, to us, so that we might urge Titus that, as he had already made a beginning, so he should also complete this generous undertaking among you. Now as you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you—so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.
By Chuck Griffin
In 2 Corinthians, Paul was writing to a church in an affluent part of the world, with well-off people mixed into the membership. (Sound familiar?) But when he wrote about an offering being taken up for the destitute Christians in Jerusalem, he cited what had already been raised among other churches nearly as poor.
In effect, he was asking, blessed Church of Corinth, will you do your share?
For Paul, giving was a matter of the heart, and it only made sense that people blessed with abundant resources would give abundantly. Yes, the idea of the Old Testament tithe, the giving of 10 percent, became obsolete in the light of New Testament grace, but it appears most early Christians interpreted that life-giving grace as a reason to go much further in their giving than a simple tithe.
Acts 2:43-45: “Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
This pooling of resources sounds strange and even shocking to us today. As members of a capitalist society coming out of the Cold War and headed toward similar tensions with China, a lot of us don’t like anything that smacks of communism.
Don’t get lost in modern politics as you consider all this. The early Christians were filled with the Holy Spirit and madly in love with Jesus. Their resources became a way to show that love even from city to city, and Paul was praying the Christians in Corinth would join that movement, imitating what the earliest Christians and the Macedonian churches already had done.
The current-day lesson in all of this is pretty obvious: Our giving reflects our love for Jesus Christ and what he has done for us. Do we have a need to grow in love?
Dear Lord, inspire us with a deeper sense of your grace and a new understanding of how we are to use our resources to care for one another in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Acts 21:1-16 (NLT)
After saying farewell to the Ephesian elders, we sailed straight to the island of Cos. The next day we reached Rhodes and then went to Patara. There we boarded a ship sailing for Phoenicia. We sighted the island of Cyprus, passed it on our left, and landed at the harbor of Tyre, in Syria, where the ship was to unload its cargo.
We went ashore, found the local believers, and stayed with them a week. These believers prophesied through the Holy Spirit that Paul should not go on to Jerusalem. When we returned to the ship at the end of the week, the entire congregation, including women and children, left the city and came down to the shore with us. There we knelt, prayed, and said our farewells. Then we went aboard, and they returned home.
The next stop after leaving Tyre was Ptolemais, where we greeted the brothers and sisters and stayed for one day. The next day we went on to Caesarea and stayed at the home of Philip the Evangelist, one of the seven men who had been chosen to distribute food. He had four unmarried daughters who had the gift of prophecy.
Several days later a man named Agabus, who also had the gift of prophecy, arrived from Judea. He came over, took Paul’s belt, and bound his own feet and hands with it. Then he said, “The Holy Spirit declares, ‘So shall the owner of this belt be bound by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem and turned over to the Gentiles.’” When we heard this, we and the local believers all begged Paul not to go on to Jerusalem.
But he said, “Why all this weeping? You are breaking my heart! I am ready not only to be jailed at Jerusalem but even to die for the sake of the Lord Jesus.” When it was clear that we couldn’t persuade him, we gave up and said, “The Lord’s will be done.”
After this we packed our things and left for Jerusalem. Some believers from Caesarea accompanied us, and they took us to the home of Mnason, a man originally from Cyprus and one of the early believers.
By Chuck Griffin
These verses read like journal entries, written as Luke, the author of Acts, traveled with Paul on his third missionary journey. Along the way, people given the gift of prophecy by the Holy Spirit made it clear Paul would not fare well if he went to Jerusalem.
Events didn’t go well, of course, at least not in a worldly sense. The rest of Acts is an account of how Paul was arrested for preaching Christ crucified, and then as a citizen of the empire was carried off to Rome, where we know he was eventually executed. Along the way, he and those with him endured hardships at sea, including a shipwreck.
No doubt, working for the Lord can be a difficult task. Many of us might head a different direction when faced with repeated prophetic warnings about the dangers of going to a particular place. Paul’s friends and fellow travelers urged him to turn aside.
I deeply admire Paul’s single-mindedness. It genuinely seems that he did not care about his own welfare. He simply wanted to preach the message that Jesus Christ is Lord, taking word of salvation all the way to the heart of the Roman Empire, if possible.
Faced with far fewer impediments, I find Paul’s story to be a challenge. To what greater lengths should I be willing to go in order to reach people for Jesus Christ? Never has my freedom or life been in serious jeopardy while declaring Jesus’ lordship.
I thank God that I live in a time and place where the gospel can be preached so freely. But a question always remains before me: Do I use that freedom well?
Lord God Almighty, guide us to the places you would have us go, and give us new courage if we find those places daunting. Amen.
Methodist Life 