Destructive Spirituality
Slowing Down, part 2
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
October 18, 2008
I want to talk to you tonight about destructive spirituality. Last week we talked about how important it is to make sure we follow Jesus the Way in the right way, lest we find that the way is not leading us to the Way.
Proverbs 14:12
12 There is a path before each person that seems right,
but it ends in death.
Will you think with me for a minute about all the damage that has been done in this world in the name of God. I mean on a world scale there’s the thousands of wars that have been fought with each side believing God was on their side. Of course there’s the Crusades and the Inquisition. The Salem witch trials. The Vatican’s persecution of all who disagreed with them in even the slightest way, while maintaining the idea that everything they did and said was infallible and directly from God. Going back to Jesus, there’s the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, and the way they twisted a law God gave to be good into a tool of wickedness and oppression. There’s the murderous rebellion of the Zealots of Jesus’ time who, in God’s name, slaughtered Roman soldiers believing they were doing the will of God.
Then there’s other religions. There’s the persecution of Christians by Hindus happening right now in India, which is part of an overall pattern of violence and bloodshed on the part of radical Hindus in that region. There’s Suni vs. Shiite in the Muslim world, and of course terror in the name of God. Of course everything we’re talking about is some form or other of terror in the name of God, right? Coming back to Christianity, there are the thousands of indignities done in churches all across America week after week in the name of God. Verbal and sometimes even physical assaults on gays. Attacks on the right coming from the left and on the left coming from the right. Condemnation. Blame. Guilt. Judgmentalism. The fact of our unique creation by God used to justify and defend blatant selfishness, materialism, and greed. Husbands who use scripture to browbeat their wives into submission. Wives who use it to demean and devalue their husbands. Children who are alienated from God because of the destructive religious impulses they saw in their parents. Adults turned away from God by the arguing and pettiness and infighting that happens in churches. Preachers that line altars on Sunday mornings by appealing to guilt, hell, punishment, pressure – whatever it takes to line altars and fill offering plates and build ever-bigger buildings.
I could go on, but this is getting a little depressing. Destructive spirituality. This planet tells the story of destructive spirituality. Countless human lives have ended at the hands of it, countless bright futures have been crushed beneath it, countless happy children have been filled with fear and suspicion under its influence. Countless numbers of confused people have filled the waiting rooms of psychologists and counselors across the land attempting to rid themselves of its effects, and countless preachers and teachers have molded countless numbers of the faithful around its twisted ideas. Destructive spirituality.
Where does it come from? My friends, destructive spirituality is always what results when we attempt to follow the Way in a way which is not the way. Destructive spirituality is what happens when we dabble with religion, when we tack God onto the edges of life in hopes that he will make our lives more comfortable, more pleasurable, more stable, perhaps even more profitable. Destructive spirituality is what happens when God is cast in the image of man, when God is infused with all our tendencies to fear, all our superstitions, all our twisted notions of justice and love. Destructive spirituality is what results when we assume God must, after all, be quite a bit like us. It’s easy to project our guilt onto God. We are guilt-ridden, therefore God must have guilted us. We are in lust with a person, therefore that relationship must be God’s will. We long for this toy or that vain thing, so God must certainly long for us to have it. With hearts like this, is it any wonder that nations ultimately go to war claiming God is on their side? After all, we long to have victory over the enemy – certainly God must long for it with us. And if God longs for victory, then surely he will bring it about on our behalf. So we think.
All of this nasty stuff I’m talking about raises one question that I want to spend the rest of our time talking about this evening. How do you pursue God without doing great damage to yourself and others?
This is perhaps one of the most important questions we could ask when we set out to learn about God, and love him, and serve him. How do I pursue God without becoming corrupted by the search? In Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins is in a precarious position. Frodo is charged with the task of destroying this evil ring, which somehow grants to the one who wears it the power to rule all the kingdoms of the earth. He keeps it off his finger by putting it on a chain around his neck, and is required to make a journey to the only place where the ring can be destroyed. As he’s on that well-intentioned journey, he finds himself again and again being exposed to the temptation to keep the ring for himself, use it for his purposes, see what benefit he can get from it. It becomes a constant struggle for him. His vulnerability to something extremely evil is only there because of his willingness to do something extremely good by destroying the ring.
As a God-seeker, your vulnerability to something extremely evil comes from your desire to know God – to do something supremely good. If spiritual reality didn’t have that kind of power we wouldn’t be interested in it in the first place, would we? But like anything that can do great good, it can also do great damage. Anything that can be used can also be misused, right? Marriage – the occasion for your greatest potential fulfillment and happiness and your greatest potential brokenness and pain. Nuclear energy – the upside is clean, endless supplies of energy forever. The downside is the possibility of wiping ourselves off the planet. Sex – the occasion for the greatest physical and emotional pleasure on earth. Also the occasion for our deepest wounds and longest-lasting regrets. You don’t get one without the other. You don’t get constantly renewable energy without the risk of Chernobyl. You don’t get marriage without the risk of deep heartache. You don’t get the rush of sex without risking some moments of awkwardness and frustration. And you don’t get to pursue God without risk. After all, God is far more powerful than a nuclear weapon or power plant, knows us way better than anybody we’ll ever have sex with, and offers the potential of vastly deeper intimacy and friendship than even marriage can provide when it’s at its best. Can we seriously expect to move this close to this much power, as ignorant and foolish and faint-hearted and gullible and self-deceived as we are and not end up doing some damage to ourselves and other people?
Writers like Christopher Hitchens say that religion is so dangerous and packed with potential for evil that we should just abandon it. Of course this is ridiculous. We wouldn’t abandon sex because of it’s occasional downsides, would we? We wouldn’t abandon marriage because of its downsides would we? NO WAY! The downside is nothing more than the underside of the upside, and it’s always that upside – that genuine connection to love, to compassion and kindness and grace – that we are seeking. But it can be hard to find. Yet we don’t abandon the search. Hitchens likes to think that if we could abandon the sadism that comes from spiritual pursuits, the world would be a better place. My answer to that: the Soviet Union and Stalin. See, there is evil in the name of God, and evil in the name of whatever else, but they are both evil, and neither of them have the first thing to do with God. They both come from the human tendency to do evil. Take a religious person who constantly does bad and hurtful things, drain the religion out of him, and he’ll just keep on doing bad and hurtful things, and perhaps even more so. It’s not the religion causing the evil, it’s evil that taints religion in all of us.
And the fact is that we’ll all be victims, to some extent or another, of destructive spirituality in other people. For example, that person you know who claims to be a Christ-follower but constantly talks down to you and treats you like an inferior? That’s destructive spirituality. That person somehow believes that the fact that they’ve been pursuing God longer somehow makes them rate better than you do. That’s destructive and comes from that sick place in all of us that would be there whether we pursued God or not, but suddenly is revealed for the sickness it is when compared to God’s perfect wholeness and holiness.
And we can’t forget what we talked about last week, which is how we damage ourselves in our pursuit of God. Remember? We let guilt consume us. We get lost in regrets. We establish impossibly high standards for ourselves and then constantly demean ourselves for not meeting those standards, and maybe even get angry at God that we cannot be the kind of people we think he wants us to be. But have we asked him? Those are ways in which we pursue God that end up being destructive to us and to our ability to receive God.
And then, because we each have destructive ways in which we pursue God, to some extent, we’ll all expose others to our own destructive spirituality. Perhaps we’ve been one of those parents that uses the threat of God’s displeasure to motivate our children. Perhaps we carry deep wounds from childhood that cause us to still do childish things, and instead of owning up to it and getting help, we cover it over with a “God-mask.” “God loves me no matter what I do,” we say, and then just continue throwing up emotionally all over whoever we come in contact with. That’s destructive. The person who does this is using God to cover over their own brokenness, not caring how much they wound themselves or others in their denial.
I want to be careful not to exempt myself here. No one has more potential to do spiritual damage to themselves and others than spiritual leaders.
James 3:1 (NIV)
1Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.
Why will those of us who are leaders in the church be judged more strictly?
Luke 12:48 (NIV)
48… From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.
Leaders are people who have been given much. In fact leaders, I believe, are people who are given the most important thing of all – other people. We are given a platform to speak into the lives of others, and that platform of respect and integrity is easily turned into one of “I know best and you’d better do what I say or don’t come crying to me,” or of “I told you this would happen,” or “God will not listen to you until you get back in church,” or countless other destructive and sick statements and attitudes. Why are spiritual leaders perhaps more guilty of this than everyone else? Simply because we have greater opportunity. It goes back to the nuclear, sexual, marital thing we talked about earlier. Spiritual leaders are people who work close to the fire. Our work is done amid the frayed nerves, fearful insecurities, dark demons, and unresolved wreckages of human lives. It has its high points because we also get a front seat to the triumphs – to the nail-biters – to victories in human life that are snatched from the jaws of defeat. But we don’t get to lead without risk. We don’t work long in the dark before we realize that the dark has gone to work on us. And it’s not just on us, it’s in us as well. We’re working in the darkness of others while we are still dealing with, and working out our own darkness as well. Add to this the fact that the darkest places in you and me are the places that we haven’t even identified as being dark, and you’ve got real potential for damage and difficulty.
Mt. 6:23 (NIV)
23…If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
That is why your leaders need your prayers. That is why we need you to give us the benefit of the doubt, to reserve judgment and criticism, to learn to speak with compassion and grace, even as we are learning. After all, we are speaking to each other through hearts of darkness, as we climb together toward the light. Your flaws and fears and insecurities mingling in with my flaws and fears and insecurities. The truth is that I’m never as bad as I might seem. And I’m never as good as I might seem either. Neither are you ever as bad or as good as you might seem.
1 Cor. 13:12 (NIV)
12Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.
We see and understand each other through a glass, darkly. This work we are doing, of being led by God, led toward God, led into God, all while we are trying to lead you to God, toward God, and into God, is messy work. As Pumba said in The Lion King, it is, “slimy, but satisfying.”
As a leader, I have gone from my most destructive moments being the times when I insisted on my way whether it was good for others or not, to the times when I allow some of you to have your way whether it’s good for you or not because of my own need for your approval. Either way I do you damage and I’m more committed than ever to not forcing you into my way because of my own needs, and to not giving in to your way because of my own needs. See, what I’m trying to do here is paint a picture, based on my personal experience, of how easy it can be to do right things for wrong reasons – to be sincerely out there wanting to serve God and glorify him, yet be listening to voices and impulses that do not come from God at all but rather from our own dark places, our own deceitful hearts, our own misconceptions of who God is. I’m trying to guide you through the complexities of this world in which we operate, a world that is so often taught as, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it for me.” That would be fine, except for this fact:
Jeremiah 17:9 (NIV)
9 The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
Even after coming to God – long after coming to God – our hearts are deceitful – they keep us from seeing and understanding things properly and because we do not see properly or understand properly (thinking), we do not feel properly (feeling), and because we do not feel properly, we often do not act properly. We must live in constant awareness that we have deceitful hearts. It is the deceit of the human heart that takes something as sweet and beautiful as the pursuit of God and figures out how to corrupt it so that it actually hurts those who do it, and others around them.
Do you see ways in which you have been damaged by religious faith? Churches or spiritual leaders that abused you in some way, or took advantage of you? People who wanted to tell you exactly where you were wrong, short-circuiting the voice of God in your life? People who conveyed that it’s about strict rules – don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t go to movies, don’t dance, don’t have sex, don’t enjoy it if you do, don’t be seen hanging out with non-believers… Do you see ways that you have engaged in God-pushing and judging others, effectively using your faith in God to bludgeon and hammer other people? Do you remember walking away from these occasions filled with the satisfaction that you had “done your duty” for God? This is damaging, and if you have done this, it’s because it was done to you and that is what you learned. Hurting people hurt people.
Have you spent your life listening to your own internal voices that place constant demands on you that you can never live up to? This is destructive. It’s amazing to think that in pursuit of the spiritual life we can adopt attitudes and opinions and ways of being that cut God’s Spirit off in us.
So parents, how do you influence your children spiritually without damaging them? Bosses who desire to make an impact in the world for God, how do you lead your employees without damaging them? Children and teen workers, how do you lead your students without damaging them? How do we lead you in worship without damaging you? As you are talking to your friends and family who may be seeking God, how do you lead them toward God without damaging them? How do you avoid imposing your own agenda, born of a need for approval, for adulation, for them to believe what you believe, on them? How do you pursue God without doing damage to yourself and other people?
The answer is: I’m not going to tell you. Think about it. Let the question work you over the way it did me as I prepared this week. Ask God. After all, he’s the one who told me, and he definitely wants you to know!
How do you pursue God without doing damage to yourself and other people?
Will you pray with me?
God, as a congregation we come to you seeking answers to this question. It is not our desire to damage ourselves or others as we pursue you. We are sincerely sorry that we have allowed our pursuit of light to be tainted by the darkness of our hearts, and we ask you to show us more and more how to walk in light. Thank you that you are greater than our darkness. Amen.
Let’s close by reading this together.
1 John 1:5
5…God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.
