The Rule of Law

The Rule of Law

Laws have the power to force people to behave against their own will. But they have no power to transform the will itself. That requires love.

The 5th century Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. But no Roman, Greek or Jew became a Christian in truth because they had to.  They were loved into our faith, or they were simply forced to kneel when Christians were looking.

For a century and more, beginning in 1478, Spaniards forced the Jews and Moors of the Iberian Peninsula, and the indigenous peoples of every geography their armies conquered, to recant their traditional faiths and accept Christ as Lord through the Spanish Inquisition. But even they knew that those who were made to change churches were not believers in their hearts.

Many Christians today spend alot of their finite energy trying to force all Americans to obey, or at least recognize, their life laws: the Ten Commandments, the Holy Bible, even their clothing rules. Yet I've never heard of one soul saved from the 'wrath to come' because they were forced to do anything.

It was Jesus Himself who told us that there is only one way to come to the Father, and that is through only believing in Him... as Lord, God, Friend for eternity. And by our true belief, our love which is our only right response to His love first offered us,  we are instantly saved to eternal life with Him, which begins NOW.

As we pray with our families at meal time today; as we discuss and study in our small groups, practice praise music with the worship team, or sit amongst our friends in worship this week, let's look around us and thank God for those we have come to know who have come to Christ as we have, drawn by His love which was first shown to us by the love of others.  

And then let us look beyond the cluster of friends we recognize sitting near us to those we do not know; whose names we do not recognize, and indeed farther, toward those homes and communities beyond our chairs and church buildings.  Do we see or imagine people there who might come to Jesus if only some law were changed or my kids could pray in school? Or do we see people who need the same thing the people needed who Jesus saw 2,000 years ago on those dirt roads and rolling hills of Galilee. His love.

Don't waste time trying to make public laws do your work for you; somehow force others to be more like you.  Nothing will replace the need for you and I to simply love others into Heaven along with us. Especially those we have not met yet.

Time to meet some new people!  Time to go.

-Pastor Ken

Beware what you legalize. You may get it.

Choices

I recently had a discussion with several wonderful Christian men around the concept that there is no situation in which we humans do not have a choice about the behavior we make.  One argued that if you are imprisoned in solitary confinement you have all of your choices made for you by your jailers.  Another said that in a world of infinite choices a person might have a choice in every situation but in reality, with only finite choices available in any situation there will certainly be some times when we have literally no choice at all.  And a third posited that since even our birth is not our own choice how can we really say anything but fate, luck, or chance determines anything that happens to us in life. He believes that fate, or in his words, God's will, determines all choices well before they are made. I decided to respond to each question by taking the last one first.

I will rephrase the position of the third man in a more theological context: There is no such thing as 'free will'.  God chooses those He will favor and He creates the world around those He favors. In other words, not only do we not personally get to choose our parents, the rest of our life is pre-planned as well. What an unbeliever might call a crap-shoot, and this believer calls predestination. We may be more intelligent, so we get better grades, go to a good college and come out a good lawyer, business person or preacher. But our intelligence level, and how we will use it, is a completed trip-tic, as AAA used to say when helping us plan our pre-GPS road trips.

So I asked him what it means when he chooses to eat a salad instead of a double burger for lunch. Doesn't that 'choice' make some actual difference in the health of his body? He granted that IF he had made the choice that would be true. However he believes that God has already planned out his life for him and that the decision that day to eat or not eat a salad was made millenia ago when God set the universe in motion. I could not sway his belief. "If God is truly in control", he said, "then God controls EVERYTHING."

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The second man had agreed from the start that 'free will' exists in some form and he quoted some great Scripture to define his belief. However he illustrated his point that there are definitely times when there are just not enough choices available that you would ever agree to so, in fact, he thought, you sometimes really have no choice.

I used the first man's argument that if he was in a maximum security prison, in solitary, without even spoken or written conversation with guards, would not that mean he has no choices?  I told the story of Corrie Ten Boom, the Dutch girl who watched her believing sister Betsy die beside her in their wooden bunks at Ravensbruek Concentration camp in  1944. But before her older sister died Betsy told Corrie that God had gotten them through so far and if she CHOSE to remain in God's will, she would be fine, even if she died.

What would happen if she did not make that choice, Corrie asked her sister.  "Then you will die, or live, in fear.  Why do either?"  To her own dying day, many decades and many thousands of miles traveled as an outspoken evangelist later, Corrie preached the choice each of us makes, every day, every minute, to follow, or not, God's desire for us.

He found that interesting and said he would think, and pray, on it.

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The first man had listened to the first two conversations and said that he now understood how someone even in the worst imaginable situation could still have a choice in the most important decision of all: how to live your life without fear, and in the knowledge of eternal life.  "But what", he asked with a kind of heartsick moan in his voice, "happens if you die and get to the judgement seat of God and He finds your life wanting; unapproved; too bad for entry into Heaven?  You don't have any choices left at that point, right? You spent your life and now you have to pay for it, right?"

I could not disagree with Scripture.  We are told over and over that the life well lived in the will of God will be rewarded as in Jesus' parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25: 31-46). But I could also not disagree with the action of Jesus on the cross, when he told the thief who believed in Him that 'today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23: 32-43). And i know, along with Paul as he instructed his protege', Timothy, that God wants ALL of his kids, US,  to be with him forever in eternity (1 Timothy 2: 4).

 So I teach what I have learned: God will do all He can to get you in, right up to the last nano-second of your life, short of shoving you through the Pearly Gates. And the only reason He won't shove you through is that He wants you, and I, to decide for ourselves, make our own choice, to walk through.

Why? Because He did not create humans to be His slaves or robots, but rather in His own image. Able to reason, and decide, for ourselves.  You see, God had not wanted the first Eve to bite into that fruit, or King David to sleep with Bathsheba, or Jesus to have to die on the cross.  but they, and we, made and make decisions that create those consequences.

Some say that at several times in the imprisonment of Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsy they could have recanted their support for hiding Jews and been kept out of the Nazi death camp.  Neither made that choice.

I believe that our universe is in God's control.  And I believe God chooses to allow us to make our own choices, with, or without, His assistance. I want to make my decisions, my choices, with Him rather than without Him. I, and you, have free will to choose to live as an elected child of God, or we can vote Him out of our lives.

I choose IN.

-Pastor Ken

The Road to Easter

Did you know there is a road to Easter? Not the Road to Emmaus.  That would be rightly called the road out of Easter. No, the road to Easter is not a place, it is a dimension in time.  We Christians call this time LENT, from the German LENZ which means Spring, or more aptly, the time of preparation for Spring. Our LENT is a time of preparation for the Holy Week of Easter; a time to prepare our hearts and minds to once again remember most personally just how much God loves each and every one of us.

This road to Easter begins on Ash Wednesday, this year on March 5, 2014. Ash Wednesday is most often worshiped with services in Christian Churches where music, sermons, communion, and ashes are used to help us remember the suffering, and the reason for the suffering, of Jesus the Christ. Why ashes?

From the beginning of recorded time, in almost every human culture, the imposition (placing upon), or dumping upon, of ashes over the head and body has symbolized grief and the loss of a loved one. In some tribal or more rural / primitive cultures today mourners, upon learning of the death of a loved one will take cold ashes from a fire and place them over themselves to represent the return of the loved ones body to earth.  'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.'  And yes, some use dirt.

As the more technological peoples of the planet have moved away from the creation of much wood ash in the home some Christian groups have forgotten the symbolism. But not all. So we United Methodist Christians often gather in our churches, usually in an evening service, on this Wednesday each year to celebrate the human life, and remember the human death, of Jesus.

This road, like any on a map, has definite destinations along the way.  Called Waypoints by GPS users, these destinations involve each participant finding more of Jesus in each service, Bible study, or other event planned by their faith community as each of the seven weeks of LENT go by. Some waypoints are More Personal Surrender to Christ, New Transformation of Actions and Behaviors, Renewed Fellowship within the Body of Believers, The Discovery of Joy in the Midst of our Trials, and the Loving Forgiveness of Christ fort ourselves. Like any good journey, LENT is a time of finding something new around every bend in the road.

Hope Church of Douglassville, Pa, has special Lenten messages planned out of the book of Isaiah and Sunday Pastor led Bible Studies at 5 pm each Sunday evening.

But what if the road to Easter was not just a place in time, but was also a place on a map?  What if you could get to EASTER on a marked highway?  What if I search Google Maps and see if there is, anywhere in the world, a place called Easter.

I searched, and there IS!

Eastertown, UK!  In the middle of southwest England, actually in the middle of fields and sheep herds in a defined location named for the place our Lenten Road takes us.  Yes, the place is currently inhabited by only one family, but they have the distinction of living in the only Eastertown I could find on the planet.  So I looked further.  What if Google Maps could help me find a community with another derivation of the name EASTER.  Low and behold... Easterville, Missouri!

Not quite as idyllic as the photo before it but honestly, this is a Google View image so the quality just isn't the best.  And yes, this very rural setting, like it's English cousin, is made up of one family farm on the Missouri Plains east of Kansas City. Except that here there is a crossroads at the marked village location.

Perhaps both communities were at one time  thriving centers of some human habitation and commerce.  Perhaps, once, there was even a church somewhere nearby where people gathered to remember, as we do, the suffering of Jesus for each of us..

I began this post with the purpose of defining the road to Easter all believers should be taking together; a road of remembrance.  But along the way I discovered that every good journey has something new to teach, inspire, and excite us.

In three months Mona and I depart for the 'blue highways' (We'll struggle to avoid red roads- expressways- whenever possible) of North America. We will discover many new places and sights; some of which may not even yet be find-able on Google. I have to wonder if our roads will take us near any places called EASTER next LENT.  If not, I know they will take us to LENT and EASTER itself, and that will be with believers we get to meet for the first time everywhere we go.

One final word of warning to all who travel the mapped roads to Easter.  Drive carefully. Easter is all about Jesus for those mature enough to know, but don't ruin the holiday for the kiddies!

-Pastor Ken