The Gift and the Gift Card.

This ministry is based on something very simple yet almost too incredible to believe. The fact that Jesus Christ came from heaven - His sole purpose was to hang out with humans long enough for us to get to know him and then die a vicious death to pay for all the wrong things we did, do, and will do - ever. That was it - the entire mission. He came. He taught. He paid, because he loves us. And then He was taken back up to heaven.

In Mark's account of his time with Jesus he recounts the abuse that Jesus endured for me. In chapter 14 Mark tells how Jesus was before the Jewish ruling counsel and how they physically beat him with their fists, slapped his face, and spit on him. But this abuse just scratches the surface. Later, in chapter 15, Mark tells about how the roman soldiers scourged him. If you've ever seen the movie The Passion of the Christ, you now are aware of what a scourging is. Even as I write this I get queasy over the memory of that scene. For those of you who haven't seen the movie, a scourge is a handle with many leather cords attached to it. Today it's most commonly referred to as a cat o' nine tails. Often, metal objects were attached to the ends of the tails so that when it hit the skin it would tear it open. Even after the scourging, Mark tells us that the roman court pressed the crown on thorns into his head, spit on him some more, and beat him in the head with a stick.

My friend, you and I were separated from God by the sin in our lives. God saw this and he didn't like it. He wanted a way to have a relationship with us again. The only way He could do that was to have Jesus Christ endure this punishment and eventually die and go to hell - all so that you and I could have a relationship with God again. You and I should have been the one spit on, beaten up, and scourged - our skin ripped apart in searing pain. You and I are the ones who rightly deserve to die and go to hell for the sin in our lives. But God doesn't want us to go to hell. He doesn't want us to die. He loves us and wants a relationship with us. He wants us to be with Him.

Jesus Christ took our place in the beatings, the abuse, the death, and our place in hell so that we could go on living in community with God. He loved us that much. He gave us this gift - the gift of forgiving the wrong things we do and a seat with him in heaven forever. We don't have to pay for it - the price has already been paid. We can't earn it like a paycheck. It comes with no strings attached - it's free!

For Christan married men, this gift comes with a gift card attached. The card says just one thing on it:

Ephesians 5:25
"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her."

*If you haven't accepted Jesus Christ as the one who saves you from the wrongs you do in your life you're still separated from God. If you want to change this, send an e-mail to Info@4BetterOr4Worse.org and someone will contact you and help you make this happen in your life. We can't do it without him, and what's more is that we were never meant to.

Encouragement 101

In the last week I've really been made aware of the value of encouragement and of the large number of people who desperately need it. There are two people in my personal life who are in crisis and I answered a call for help from one of my facebook friends who posted a "lament" about bad things happening to a friend of hers. I have a good friend who is far from home and his support group, and is drowning in the struggle to find and keep a job and establish himself in a new community. The past 24 hours have found me trying to figure out how to encourage him - man to man.

My answer to most of these types of questions is to get back to basics. So, this morning I cracked open the Good Book and started thumbing my way through the New Testament. I wonder how many men are like me - plenty familiar with the front half of the New Testament but not so much with the back half. There's some great stuff back there! The Apostle Paul does a lot of encouraging through letters to pastors in the middle part of the New Testament. His letters to the Philippians, Titus, Timothy, and the Hebrews are all about encouragement and motivation. In my back to basics philosophy, you can not only receive encouragement from these books of the Bible but you can also take a lesson in the how to's of encouragement as well. If there's someone in your life that has really hit a rough stretch of road in life and needs some propping up, this is where you figure out how to do it. Most of these books are not a long read - some of them can be read in just a few minutes.

I am by no means an expert in encouragement. Yet, I think there's a right way and a wrong way to encourage someone. In my efforts to encourage my friend I'm taking some cues from the way Paul writes his letters and I've found a few things that might help you if you're in the same boat.

1. The template.
   I've been accused of being very analytical and left brained, rigidly conforming to templates for my actions and reactions to things in life. While that may be a valid criticism of my habits, I think there is some value in it. Paul's letters of encouragement all have similar elements. There's a greeting before he gets down to business. Paul uses the greeting to express his heartfelt love and concern for the people he's writing to. Then he gets down to business. He addresses issues with heartfelt sincerety and sound principles. Paul is a master at delivering love with accountability - truth with grace. In the end, he turns personal again, leaving the reader with a very heartfelt goodbye.
   
   
2. Grace and Peace
   Frequently, in his letters, Paul starts out the letter by using the phrase "Grace and Peace be with you". I think it's important that those two elements become the goal of our encouragement. Grace and peace come from God - no where else. But we who are doing the encouragement are the hands and feet of God. We men, as brother's in Christ, are the method by which God delivers his grace and peace. I think it's really important that we keep this in the forefront of our minds when we set out to encourage and motivate another person.
   
   
3. Prayer.
   Paul prayed a lot! Often, when we are in a position to encourage someone it happens over a peroid of time and not for just one point in time (i.e. death of a family member, loss of job, divorce, etc). Pray for the person you're encouraging consistantly. Yes, it's possible that this means doing something you're not used to.
   
   
4. Truth and Grace.
   As I said before - Paul was a master at delivering accountability with a purpose. One of the venue pastors from my church said to me once "Grace always follows truth.". Accountabilty is important. At times, the reason why someone may need encouragement is because of consequences from poor choices they have made. When this is the case, as brothers in Christ, we need to shine the light on that and see it for what it is. However, grace needs to follow that truth. It has to be communicated in love and support - never with condemnation and condecention. Paul sometimes throws in references to his own failures in order to support his point of grace and to remind his reader that they're in the same boat. In other cases people are in bad spots through no fault of their own. A little different approach might be in order here. Remind them that God loves them and is in control of everything. This can be really difficult sometimes. I'm struggling with this myself. Sometimes it seems that the words "Jesus loves you" and $2 will buy you a coffee at Starbucks. My advice, for lack of anything better, is to acknowledge those feelings but continue to validate the truth. "I know that might be hard to believe right now, but it's true - God cares for you."
   
   
5. Teach - Don't Preach
   Paul always manages to maintain an attitude of sincerity. Many times, as he writes, he explains how his teaching is in their best interest. He communicate that the motivation for his teaching is because he cares for them so much and wants the very best for them. This is another critical element anytime you set out to encourage someone.
   
   
6. Humor.
   I often wonder why the writers of the contents of the Bible never included anything funny? I have been blessed by some very funny people in my life and I have recognized the asset that humor can be when encouraging someone. There are physical and emotional benefits to laughter and I think this can be an important part of encouragement - even if it's just to get someone's mind off their troubles for a few minutes. Just be careful to keep the humor appropriate. Racy or inappropriate jokes (not to be confused with bad jokes or groaners) can lead you down a path you're tying to avoid in the first place.
   
   
7. The wrap up.
   I think it's important when you end your time with someone that you do two things - pray together and let them know you love them.
   

I've written this for two reasons - First, I hope you find some value in what's written in this post. Second, one learns by doing. To that end I'm teaching myself by writing this to you. If you have anything to add, or if you think something needs to be corrected, please grab the comment box and give me your thoughts.

Thanks for tuning in.

Here We Go Again!

A friend of mine referred me to an article this afternoon that got my hackles up. It just goes to prove my point about the gong I've been bangin' about leadership in marriage and men taking seriously the God-given task of raising children - especially boys. The article is actually an excerpt from a blog and is published in the Christian Science Monitor.

The article is called The Coming Evangelical Collapse and was written by a guy named Michael Spencer. He maintains that within the next decade Evangelical Christianity will wither away and be relegated to a fringe group within a country that is secular and agnostic. While I'm not sure I agree with him on the doomsday scenario he paints for the future of American Christianity, Spencer seems to be observing a trend that I've been concerned about for a long time - the diluting of faith by a popular culture bent on tolerance.

Okay - I can dismiss this guy as a kook for saying that Christianity will all but go away before I retire to my condo and plaid golf pants. But here's where he pushed my button. When Spencer explains why he feels this is going to happen he has a laundry list of points. Number two on the list is where I start to feel my blood pressure going up:

We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

The thing that gets me all worked up about this point is that I believe he's right. I'm not sure our efforts have been abject failures. Still, I do believe there are many Christian fathers in our communities who would rather leave the job of training sons and daughters in the deepest values of our faith to the youth group leaders and Sunday school teachers. Unless we men step up to our positions as leaders in our homes and grapple with the tough moral issues that face our children today they WILL cave in to the pressures of the age of social tolerance. I understand this because I see this in the life of my teenage daughter who is a standout in her peer group because she's the only one among them who believes that a bisexual lifestyle is morally wrong. Has she merely chosen the wrong group of friends? I have a hard time thinking she has chosen poorly when most of them profess to be Christians! I'm thankful that my daughter and I have had the awkward and difficult discussions about these things so that she is ready to stand on her faith and her value system in the face of a culture diluted by tolerance.

Steve Farrar is the president of Strategic Living, based in Dallas Texas and the author of a great book called Point Man. He gives us men a great warning:

The enemy is no fool. He has a strategically designed game plan, a diabolical method he employs time and time again. When he wants to destroy a family, he focuses on the man. For if he can neutralize the man…he has neutralized the family. And the damage that takes place when a man’s family leadership is neutralized is beyond calculation.

The tolerance of today's popular culture isn't simply the evolutionary ebb and flow of society. This is a premeditated and tactical maneuver by the dark side. I believe it's time to call a spade a shovel and deal with it like the real men God intended us to be!

Our responsibility as fathers is to teach our children about what happened at the cross and the deep and meaningful love God has for us. We need to teach them awareness and recognition of spirits and the litmus test the Apostle John gives us for them in I John 4. Our children need to not only know the difference between right and wrong but need to be instilled with the courage of conviction to defend themselves among those who would make them look like fools for an outdated moral code.

My Bible is the Men's Study Bible by Zondervan. At the beginning of each book in my Bible is a small paragraph that sets the stage for the reading of that particular book. I noticed this week that just about every post-resurrection book in the New Testament is written to address false teachings. You have to wonder that if false teaching was such a problem in the generations of Christians immediately following the time Jesus Christ spent on earth, why would false teaching NOT be a problem in the 21st Century?

Gentleman, we need to wake up here. We have a job to do. If you're reading this post and you recognize the need to make some changes in your parenting but you're really not sure how to get from here to there, please let me know. There are resources and mentors available to help you along your journey.

This counts, guys. Thanks for listening to me rant.

Ego? Or Fear?

I had coffee a few weeks ago with my friend Ed.  He and I go all the way back to high school in 1981.  Great guy - Ed, but I never thought he'd end up a family ministries pastor at a church.  I'm very happy to have reconnected with him and we have some great discussions about our respective ministries.  One suggestion that Ed had for this blog is to pose some open ended questions.  You know - something to stimulate some comments and discussion.  Well Ed, this one's for you!

Lately, in my travels, I've noticed that the attitudes of men toward making changes in their marriages can be categorized three ways.  There are those who are willing to humble themselves and allow themselves to be stretched and challenged.  There are those who simply don't care.  The third category is those who seem to believe that none of this is their problem and if something needs to change, she better get to it.  It's this last category that has me scratching my head these last couple of weeks.

I think it's very possible that the arrogance and ego that these guys are displaying is actually a strong front for a lot of fear.  I believe that some men are afraid to be vulnerable, humble, and to have any chinks in their armor exposed.  I'm not sure where this fear comes from - it could be cultural.  After all, we live in a culture that demands independence and a resolute stance from our men.  We have to be all together - polished.  People are disappointed in us if we show signs of struggling with anything.  Maybe it's ethnic.  Here in the Dutch dominated West Michigan culture, there exists a certain arrogance among the men.  They're proud and they know what's what - even if they're full of crap.  It could be something else too.  But these are the things that come to mind.  

Whatever the case - ego or fear - culture, ethnicity, or whatever - it is clear to me that their relationships are less than ideal.  I've seen three cases in the last month where this attitude has driven marriages to the brink of failure.  What makes me curious is how this attitude makes a man blind to the crumbling of his marriage.  But, in time, when the man is sitting in his crappy one-bedroom apartment, the blinders come off and he suddenly wonders where his life went.  

So, here's the question for my good friend Ed - and for the rest of you:  If I'm right, and it's fear masquerading as arrogance, how can we help these guys over their fears and into a place where they can safely address the things that can bring joy and peace back to their marriages?  Whether it's Ed and his family ministry at his church, me in this ministry to Christian men, or Joe Smith who's wife tells him over morning coffee that the couple next door isn't doing very well and Bob refuses to go to counseling - how do we connect with these guys who have this tough outer wall of arrogance protecting their fears?  

If we could figure this out - what an impact we could have!

Let me know your thoughts.   I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks for stopping by.