On the Rise (This Week's Sermon, 1)

There are some passages of Scripture so full of names and places and facts and figures that we are tempted to sort of tune them out. But can we learn something from them? And, more importantly, can they change us and make us more into the image of Jesus Christ?

(Click here to download MP3. You can access many more of my sermons on the church website, www.churchlansing.com)

Dem Bones (This Week's Sermon)

This week, I preached on Ezekiel's vision of the Valley of Dry Bones. In it, we find great hope for ourselves, our churches, and the Church Universal. When things look dead, all is not lost. Our God is an Awesome God and Resurrections are kind of his thing.


(Click here to download MP3. You can access many more of my sermons on the church website, www.churchlansing.com)

. . . And Arrows to Our Enemies

A Brief and Enthusiastic Review of Cliff Graham's Lion of War Series (so far)

I have an inexplicable drive to begin this review with some kind of expletive to hammer home just how insanely much I love these books . . . but of course none of the PG selections that would be appropriate in this space would get the meaning across. So, I tell you what—let’s just pretend that the words “holy cow” bear exponentially more weight than they do, and I'll begin with:

Holy cow, I love these books! 

Mr. Graham takes his years of experience in the army (as a soldier and chaplain), his obvious passion for biblical research, his pastor's heart, and an amazing gift for telling a compelling story, and combines them to give us an in-the-trenches look at life in King David's army, particularly for David's Mighty Men (with particular attention to Benaiah and the Three).  The result is, at the risk of being redundant, amazing.

In fairness, though, I do wish these books had been written a little differently. 

First off, I wish that I'd written them. Because this is how I envision the Old Testament stories as I immerse myself in them and I wish I'd been able to capture the larger-than-life-yet-accessible scope and feel. Failing that, I wish the timeline would have been different. Not the timeline of the story, but the timeline of the books themselves, such that Mr. Graham would have signed his contract with HarperCollins later or I would have signed mine sooner so that I might have been asked to endorse his work. I would like to have been one of the first people to gush over this series. As it stands, I'm way behind the curve.  

So what's it like reading these books? I'm not going to apply some tired cliché about how they “made the Bible come alive” because that’s been said about countless other books and you’ve never read anything quite like this series. I'm afraid the flannelgraph depictions and Sunday school pamphlets have left us with something of a cartoonized version of many biblical characters and events. It's easy to forget that David and his men would have dealt with PTSD (although they'd have no category for it), with guilt and shame after killing many of their fellow Israelites, with doubt and disillusionment when it came to the God who had made so many promises, and with the temptations that come with life in that setting. Graham's portrayals bring all of this into focus without trading in the supernatural elements or the overwhelming sense of reverence for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

As someone who has studied the Hebrew language and the history and theology of the Old Testament for many years, I was a little tentative upon first opening Day of War, since I've seen a lot of biblical fiction drop the ball when it comes to the language, customs, etc. of ancient Israel, not to mention how many of them are filled with anachronistic weapons, tactics, and titles. Still others are faithful to the history, but come off as remote in every way and inaccessible to modern readers. To my relief, I quickly realized that Mr. Graham was not going to fall into either trap. He's done his research, but he doesn't show his work.

These books come in language we get. Graham describe archers “firing” their arrows (even though no one “fired” anything at all until the advent of gunpowder) rather than “letting them fly,” as Lawhead (another favorite of mine) insists on putting it. Men are said to “bleed out” and there are at least two references to someone seeking “closure,” but these modern terms are used sparsely and do nothing to detract from the story. Rather, they remind us that David's soldiers were not untouchable superheroes, but real men who could be physically, emotionally, and spiritually damaged.
 
There's apparently a movie in the works right now, about which I'm equally stoked and apprehensive. I mean, this story is screaming to be made into a movie, but you know how it is when you love the book first. Rarely does the movie live up to it. Thankfully, the author seems to be quite involved with the film-making process and can hopefully keep it from being either Hollywood-ized (and robbed of its biblical integrity) or cheesy-Christian-movie-ized (and robbed of its grit and reality). One thing's for sure: if they're true to the source material, it will be rated R.

Speaking of which, some readers might be offended by the graphic nature of the battle scenes.  I get this, and would encourage people with weak stomachs to give these books a wide berth.  (I won't be letting my son read these suckers until he's in his mid-teens.) Others might be put off by the level of poetic license the author takes. I would argue that these readers have no business picking up a work of biblical fiction (seeing as how such license is what makes these books distinct from Scripture itself). The author's notes make sure that we understand what's biblical and what's a fictional device and I, for one, loved the clever back-stories created for Uriah the Hittite and Ittai the Gittite. They really made the Bible come alive. (whoops)

I'm hoping I might be able to briefly chat with Mr. Graham at an event for authors and agents in September and tell him how cool I think his books are. Before that, though, I plan on attending a book signing in August, where I can hear Mr. Graham speak, buy a water bottle that says Cover Me In the Day of War up the side, and then stand in line to get my copies signed with a goofy grin on my face. 

In short, these books rule and I recommend them highly if you're into . . . well, if you're into super-awesome, super-intense biblical fiction with tons of action and compelling characters. This is one of those rare situations where a book truly defies genre. It's not exactly historical fiction, it's not fantasy, and it's very different from most of what we call biblical fiction these days. I've heard this series described as “supernatural thriller,” a label which has also been used to describe my own writing. I can only hope that something I write will affect people as profoundly as these books have affected me.  They really are amazing.

Just amazing.

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Revival

It's a new year and everyone wants a new start. People want to be thinner, more energetic, more productive, and to enjoy life more.  We writers want to write more regularly and crank out some really inspired stuff. Pastors like myself want to reach more people with the Gospel and to feed our sheep a diet of rich, biblical truth. But more than that, we want to see God moving in our midst. In short, we want to see Revival.

The word revival, of course, is not found in the pages of Scripture (at least not in any version I’m familiar with), but the concept surely is. Despite the evangelistic thrust of “tent revivals” and the like, the biblical notion of revival begins with those inside the church, the saints.  For example, in Psalm 85:6, David asks, “Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?” Re-vive means to return life to something. Now, I certainly don’t pastor a “dead church,” but I do believe that any of us could stand to re-discover the New Life that we have in Christ, the joy of our salvation, and the certain knowledge that we have been rescued from the darkness and now dwell in the light.  All of us can use a re-infusion of that sense of life. Revival is when a whole congregation re-discovers this at once.

Praying for revival is an essential pursuit for any congregation wanting to be used by God and to see his power to save the lost and transform us more and more into His image. We pray for it, because the movement of the Holy Spirit is not something we can control—not with emotional music or human excitement or perfectly written statements of purpose or doctrine. But I’ve realized that simply praying for revival may be akin to an able-bodied young man who wakes up every morning and prays for food, but never gets off his couch to go earn some money, purchase the food, bring it home, and prepare it. He just sits there and prays. One of my favorite preachers of all time, A.W. Tozer had a few things to say on this very subject. In his book, Born After Midnight, he writes:

"Have you noticed how much praying for revival has been going on of late - and how little revival has resulted? I believe the problem is that we have been trying to substitute praying for obeying, and it simply will not work. To pray for revival while ignoring the plain precept laid down in Scripture is to waste a lot of words and get nothing for our trouble. Prayer will become effective when we stop using it as a substitute for obedience."

Tozer is just echoing the words of Jesus who complained of a generation of religious people whose lips were working double time in the religious department, but whose hearts were far from Him. (Matt 15:8) To obey, He reminds us, is better than sacrifice. If we pray, “Lead me not into temptation” while willfully leading ourselves into temptation, we’re acting like spiritual schizophrenics. Again, Tozer writes:

"Revivals come only to those who want them badly enough. The problem is not to persuade God to fill us, but to want God sufficiently to permit him to do so. The average Christian is so cold and so contented with his wretched condition that there is no vacuum of desire into which the blessed Spirit can rush in satisfying fullness."

I think this is why the Bible never refers to salvation simply in terms of something added to our lives. It’s never just “Jesus coming into my heart” . . . it’s much more violent than that. It’s the upturning of everything, the expelling of many things, and the rearranging of all things under the headship of Christ. 

For Christmas this year, I received a little gizmo called a “Boogie Board,” which basically lets me jot down notes to myself and then erase them with a push of a button. (No more little scraps of paper and sticky notes floating all over the place).  When I came into my study at church the following day, I brought the new device with me and set it down right next to my tape dispenser. Everything on my desk—my lamp, my blotter, my cards and pens and such—is still there and very much organized in the same way. I’ve just added one more thing.  Salvation is not like this. Salvation does one of those cinematic moves where you clear the whole desk in one big motion, knocking books and papers to the floor, then it starts over from scratch. Some items are placed back on the desk in a different spot. Some are tossed in the trash. And when habit kicks in and we find ourselves slowly putting things back the way they were, that requires repentance, asking God again to swipe everything off and put it back in order.

Revival brings this about on a larger scale. When the Holy Spirit moves to convict Christians and we don’t plug our spiritual ears, entire congregations can find this process taking place—both individually and corporately. And when that happens, there’s no question of whether revival has taken place.

Church history scholar J. Edwin Orr has written about a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit during the Welsh Revivals of the nineteenth century. As people sought to be filled with the Spirit, they not only looked to add some spiritual passion and excitement to their lives, but to expel anything that was not in keeping with their faith.  This led many people to make reconciliation and restitution. This caught on to the point of creating a serious problem for the shipyards along the coast of Wales. Over the years workers had stolen all kinds of things, from wheelbarrows to hammers. However, as people repented of their “addition-only” Christianity and listened to the Holy Spirit, they began to return what they had taken, with the result that soon the shipyards of Wales were overwhelmed with returned property. There were such huge piles of returned tools that several of the yards put up signs that read, If you have been led by God To return what you have stolen, Please know that the management Forgives you and wishes you to keep what you have taken.

Would that we had such problems today! In 2013, I’m praying for revival—huge revival—and I hope you’ll join me in doing so. But I’m also, with God’s help, going to obey in the little things as well as the big. I’m going to ask the Holy Spirit to move, but also to move me. And I hope you’ll join me in that as well.