Earlier this weekend, my pastor and I were talking about playing it safe. As many of my readers know the United Methodist Church (UMC) is in the midst of working out the language towards traditional understanding on homosexuality and marriage—and ultimately whether or not we follow Scripture as our basis for belief or do we become socially acceptable and lose our identity as Christians who follow God’s word. In addition, my readers know that I am in the midst of becoming a candidate for Licensed Local Pastor in the UMC. After being deferred by my local dCom; I told my pastor that I thought it would be best to “Fly under the radar” until I could get through dCom and become licensed. Over the weekend, as I spoke to my pastor about his sermon and the UMC in general, he alluded to the fact that we have conservative Pastors in the pulpit who will not speak out about what is going on in our UMC. Why you may ask? In my opinion, it's because they are scared, they are nervous about what their congregations will think of them, and because they may be asked to step down from the pulpit by their local congregations who may be more liberal. They are uncomfortable and their true beliefs and stances will make them unpopular. However, what really gave me a chuckle was that he stated “Rai, here you are, talking about things on your blog that our ordained pastors need to be addressing…I thought you were going to fly under the radar and here you are—addressing what needs to be addressed in our churches!”
Friends, I recently read an article about “Playing it safe” and these four quotes stood out to me.
Craig Groeschel said, “To step toward your destiny, you must step away from your security.”
In The Barbarian Way, Erwin McManus says, “To follow Christ is to abandon the luxury of safety and security.”
In Radical, David Platt touts the same principal: “Radical obedience to Christ is not ... comfort, not health, not wealth, and not prosperity in this world. Radical obedience to Christ risks losing all these things.”
Francis Chan says that comfort and safety make no sense in the life of a believer. In his book, Forgotten God, Chan writes, “Why would we need to experience the Comforter [the Holy Spirit] if our lives are already comfortable?”
Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).
Most Christians want a comfortable enough, get-out-of-jail-free kind of faith. They want to go to heaven, but not now. Heaven is for the distant future, when they are very old and die in their sleep after having dozed off in front of the television. But Jesus, the radical revolutionary who overturned tables and cast the money changers out of the Temple, who called the Pharisees "blind guides, leading the blind," that Jesus is more than they want. They are both afraid of and unwilling to follow the history-changing Jesus who moves societies by moving individual human beings. They resist and even denounce the Jesus Who radicalizes His followers' minds with counter-intuitive teachings such as "Blessed are the poor," and "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” They don’t like the Jesus who said "You cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve God and mammon.” That Jesus, the Christ, the God made human who calls us to be more than the petty greed and selfishness that is humankind's pit in which we all wallow, is not at all to their liking. He is, at best, uncomfortable. At worst, He is convicting in ways they refuse to be convicted.
You notice that many of our liberal pastors (yes, I did say liberal pastors) can’t handle even these teachings. No where did Jesus ever teach, “after the narrow gate there would be a wide path.” Matter of fact, he taught us that the narrow path wouldn’t be easy, it’d be hard to find and follow.
Pastor friends, especially our conservative, evangelical pastor friends, stop being scared. I get it, maybe you want to be liked, popular, and want to keep that big congregation; speak up. Trust me, I know I have secret admirers, I get your private messages in my emails or on Facebook. I know you agree with me. But the time is coming when we are going to have to stand up for our beliefs. As Luke (9:23) states, take up your cross, deny yourself and follow Christ!
Friends, I encourage you to speak up, you can’t expect members of the laity to continue to speak for you. A friend recently said “Why aren’t your elders speaking up? Those are the officers, you are merely a soldier.” My response was “Sometimes your greatest generals, rise from the enlisted ranks.” However, we also know that great lay servants (enlisted ranks), only shine because they have great leaders (officers).
Colossians 3:16 states “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”
Ephesians 4:15-16 “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”
Matter of fact, follow Peter and John’s example in Acts 4:18-20 So they called them and charged them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” David Westerfield sums these verses:
Peter and John’s response to the Sanhedrin sums up what the Christian life is all about. They were with Christ for three years, they saw Him crucified, saw Him die, buried in the grave, saw Him alive after His resurrection, saw Him ascend into heaven, and were given power and strength by the promised Holy Spirit, the very Shekinah glory that was once only behind the curtain in the temple, but now lived within them as a result of the work of Christ on the cross. From everything that had taken place, their response was one of awe and amazement, “For we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” They were so struck by the glory of God, that they could not but speak of the amazing things they had beheld in Christ. To shy away and speak of anything less or opposed to what had happened, would have contradicted everything they had seen, heard, and experienced.
Your silence, friends, is contradicting everything you have experienced, everything you have read, everything you have taught your parishioners to do…so as one who may never be a licensed local pastor, but one who is called to speak the gospel, I am encouraging you all to take up your cross and follow Christ—speak to your churches, speak for your churches and most of all speak for the truth—as contained in our discipline, but most importantly the holy word of God—the Bible.
As I close this blog post, I am reminded of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, in this last verse, he talks about taking the road that is less traveled; and that made all the difference.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
In this poem, he’s talking about the road that people don’t often take (think narrow path). And in his life, that made all the difference. Why? More than likely because it led him where he never thought he’d end up. It was probably a road much like “Christian” takes in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress—fraught with many different characters, some well meaning, others not so well meaning and some that just didn’t know what they were doing there. However, in the end Christian’s journey lead his wife to follow the same path, with many of the same characters. Friends, Hebrews 12 tells us we have a great cloud of Witnesses that have fought this same fight—there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the fight that Christians are going to endure-Christ himself endured this-however, we must take heart, speak up—or you can be like Hebrews 12:14-17 states “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears. [emphasis mine]
It is time to SPEAK UP!
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