Articles and manuscripts and talking heads across the country announce and bemoan and celebrate (depending on their particular proclivity) in the news that "biblical" Christianity is in decline. As numbers decline and influence wanes, there is much evangelical hand-wringing and second-guessing and blame-assigning taking place all across the fruited plain. As the truth of this turn of events becomes increasingly difficult to avoid, there is one thing that every Sunday School teacher, choir member, and chairman of the committee on committees wants to know...
How can this be?
Our star-studded and/or silver-tongued prophets of prosperity and perpetual proliferation have assured us for decades that, if we are faithful, God will bless us with ever increasing returns of buildings and programs and numbers. And yet...
How can this be? Inquiring minds want to know.
Having pledged "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred Honor" to the inspired, inerrant, infallible, and authoritative word of the living God, shouldn’t we expect more bang for our proverbial buck?
I’m going to argue "No."
No...
A commitment to a book, no matter how good, is no guarantee of the blessing of God.
No...
A commitment to a book, no matter how holy, secures no promise for the power of God.
No...
A commitment to pen, and page, and ink, is no substitute for commitment to the God who inspires women and men to write in the first place.
My intention is neither to bury nor to praise the book of our common faith, but to challenge us to be more faithful to the Bible by serving it less in order to serve God more.
My concern is that, in becoming so identified as people of the book, we "Bible-believing Christians" may have lost our primary identity as the people of God.
My concern is that we may have become so consumed with following the written words of Scripture that we’ve failed to follow the living Word of God.
My concern is that we have been actively engaged in surrendering the more glorious ministry of the life-giving Spirit in order to fight and metaphorically murder one another over written words. (2 Corinthians 3:5-8)
And I now invite you to ask and answer the question with me; how can this be?
If you love Me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever--the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you. A little while longer and world will see Me no more, but you will see Me. Because I live, you will live also. At that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you. He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him. (John 14:15-21)
The promise of the Lord Jesus Christ was not to turn us over to a book: inspired, inerrant, or otherwise. The promise of God was to never leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13:5).
Jesus didn’t leave us with a promise to "write back soon." The Lord promised that the "Spirit of truth" would come to dwell with us and in us.
When confronted with the powerful promise given in the previous passage, how many of us go scrambling through the pages of the book to try and figure out just what commandments we need to keep in order to earn the love of Christ; we have been convinced that faith is complicated. Confronted with the promise of adoption into the family of God, how many of us focus instead upon what rules we believe may be necessary in order to achieve it...as though God were more like a broken bureaucrat from social services than a loving Father longing for the love of His children?
Do not miss the power of these verses! These few words contain the hope of every man, and woman, and child who ever suffered injustice, oppression, and or failure...Regardless of race, regardless of nationality, regardless of financial means, or beauty, or intelligence, or ability...everyone is welcome to see in themselves the power and potential of the infinitely Good. The world may not see it. Your family may not see it. There may be others all around you who are blind to the reality, but that does not make it any less real. The promise of the Christian faith is the promise of our Lord, if you receive Him/trust Him/welcome Him/Love Him...the God of all creation, of all dignity and power and worth will be with you and be in you.
Oh, but I can hear them now...the blind and nay-saying wolves in sheep clothing: "But aren’t you forgetting about keeping the commandments? Aren’t you forgetting about the conditions?...the standards? ...the rules? Aren’t you leaving out the requirement of the Scriptures to keep the Lord’s commandments?"
Absolutely not!
But I must hasten to add that His commands are not so onerous or obscure as you may have been led to imagine. The Lord Himself said that all of the Law and the Prophets hang on two simple imperatives. There are two commandments, and only two, that the Lord requires of His children: (1) Love God and (2) Love your neighbor...everything else we might add is simply the small print...and everybody knows that it is the Devil, and not the Lord, who is in the details. Jesus said to love God and love our neighbors, and I would argue that He would urge us not to worry about the fine print. Certainly there are details; important details; useful details...but we have got to remember that according to John 14:16 the Lord reads those details through the lens of a defense attorney and anyone who simply wants to argue about them is playing the Devil’s advocate.
We have been promised adoption into the family of God, and we have been given the dignity of being the very vessels of God. Best of all, these gifts come with no conditions save for the condition that we love as we have been loved and show mercy as mercy has been shown to us. (Luke 10:25-37)
Love God and love your neighbor...the only way you know that you’re doing one of them right is if you’re doing the other one right. Love God! Love your neighbor! The real test, according 1 John 4:20-21, is whether or not we can and will love our neighbors...
Love our...white neighbors...our black neighbors...our brown and red and yellow and whatever other color-size-or-condition-they-may-come-in neighbors. Love your heterosexual neighbors...love your law-abiding neighbors...love your Christian neighbors...love your American neighbors...love your Republican neighbors...and, ESPECIALLY, love all of your neighbors who are none of these.
This is the only requirement that matters and we shouldn’t have to study a book to help us figure it out. If you want to love God and love your neighbors, then God Himself will Himself enable you by the empowering presence of His Spirit who will be with you and in you...at least, that’s what I read in my book.
For too long the world has witnessed the supposed people of God fussing and feuding and dividing over their commitment and interpretation of the written word. It is high time for the world to see the manifestation of the Spirit of God in our "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." (Galatians 5:22-23) Let us "give up the ghost" of trying to control one another and instead see if we might encourage one another in the Spirit of faith and hope and love.
In Jesus’ teaching on the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of John he goes on to say in 15:26-27,
But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with Me from the beginning.
And in these verses we have the revelation that, if it were believed and put into practice, would revolutionize our understanding of God, and the world, and one another...and might even breathe new life into our ecclesiastical institutions.
The greatest intellectual challenge being raised against the existence and activity of God today is also the question that resonates most deeply in the human heart: Where is God when I am hurting? Where is God when multitudes are starving? When disaster and oppression and disease roam without restraint across the continents, where is God?
When a little girl lies in bed, her brain deformed from birth, now severed, now swimming in a pool of toxic medication, half paralyzed, weak, and vulnerable, and confused...where is God?
And by faith we are called to answer that God is here, right here, as present as my next breath. Would you like to know what God is up to? Do you really want to know where God is and what God is doing? ...if you are a believer, then you need look no further than your nearest mirror. God will not be found at the end of a telescope, or a microscope, or at the conclusion of some logical or metaphysical algorithm. God is present as His people are present. God is moved as His people are moved. God is powerful as His people exercise their God-given powers of love and compassion and healing..."you also will bear witness."
If God were the god of a book, or a creed, or a tradition only, then we would have every reason for doubt and suspicion and for fear. But our God is the God of a people...and not just any people, but a people moved by the Spirit of hope, and liberty, and love. And our God is not far off, or bound between the covers of a bible, or locked up inside the tenets of any document made by man...our God is near...our God is here...for those who have eyes to see...
No book ever put its arms around a hurting child and offered comfort. No doctrine ever held hands with a widow and offered hope. No creed ever spoke peace to the afflicted, served and fed the hungry, or set a captive free. That’s what you and I were made for. We were made to bear witness to the comfort and hope and power of God by offering each and every of these things to those who are in need. We were made to be motivated by God’s ineffable Word to be living and active and sharp in service.
The record of the revelation of God to man in distant times may, in fact, be complete, but the story continues to this day in and with those who have eyes to see and ears to hear and the will to follow the Spirit of God. We know that God is real, not because of what was written down in ages past, but because He is real, living, and active in our souls today. God is either calling and equipping and moving us to address the hurts and pain and distress of this world with comfort and peace and joy and love, or we have fallen victim to a lifeless storybook idol of our own imaginations. The one is the hope of nations and worthy of all praise, while the other is a mere puppet of the ego and worthy only of our scorn. One is beautiful beyond description, majestic, and enthroned while the other is made to dance to the tune of modern day scribes and scholars and Pharisees trained to use words as weapons and to read both the lines and what may be between them depending on what suits their fancy.
Finally, in John 16:13-14, we note that:
...when he, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you.
And we must note that God has called us to be utterly dependent upon Him..His Voice...His Spirit for the challenges and choices that we face moving forward into the future. Too many of us would point to the distant horizon of the past and have us seek for answers there, but God himself has given us a better way: perhaps less certain, but certainly more secure. Our future is secure, not by looking backwards to the examples of the past, nor forwards to follow the imagination of our individual minds, but upwards to see and listen to the voice of the Spirit together...He will guide you (it is the plural form)...He will guide us, together, into all truth.
Together, God shares the practical implications of His love. Together, God calls us away from the illusion and abuses of authority into the far better promise of generosity. Together, God challenges us to swallow our pride and work towards a more hopeful future for us all.
With the written word we are too easily deceived into believing that we may know exactly what God wills, and feel compelled to force this "good news" on others. With the Spirit/the Living Word we are reminded that "the just shall live by faith," and that we must tread lightly as we move towards the future God has in mind.
God does not offer us the simple solutions of a divine dictator, but challenges us to consider the guidance of the Spirit. The Spirit of the Living God is the Counselor who helps us to recognize the truth for what it is rather than for what we would like it to be, and empowers us to envision a future where the transformational love of God may serve to "make all things new." A future that will be inviting to and for all people because they all actually want to belong to it rather than because they simply want to avoid some other darker possibility.
If "biblical" Christianity isn’t dead or dying, then those of us who love the Lord must rise up and destroy it. The Bible must not be thought of as some sort of totem that, if read enough and studied enough and invoked enough, will make the world a better place. The Bible is the record of God’s revelation of Himself to man: a revelation that continues to this day. If the polls are right, the momentum has already shifted in favor of those who consider themselves "spiritual, but not religious." For the love of God...for the love of truth...somehow, we have got to remember that this is a false dichotomy: a choice that need not be exclusively either/or. Christians must reclaim their heritage as children of the Spirit who will not be shackled by any book, doctrine, or written creed. We need to (re)learn to come together in love both for our own good and for the good of the world at large. We must overcome our differences in worship and distinctions in doctrine so that our greater unity in the Spirit is best displayed.
Considering the potential for worldwide transformation and human(e) advancement if Christians were to become united in love by the power of the Spirit, there is only one question worth asking:
How can this be?
