Radical Christianity

I’ve probably posted something under this title already, whether on this blog or my blog at http://www.rosecreekvillage.com.

However,  it bears repeating. We should never underestimate the power of unity.

I don’t think American Christians, for the most part, have any idea what the Bible  says about the unity of Christians. It says a lot:

• Christian unity will prove to the world that the Father sent the Son (Jn. 17:20-23).
• Our growth as Christians hinges on Christian unity (Eph. 4:11-16; Col. 2:19). We’re supposed to grow together!
• Doing good deeds to one another is more important than showing love to those outside!!! (Gal. 6:10)
• The light that God intends to shine to the world requires us to be together (Matt. 5:13-16, where all the “yous” are plural, not singular).
• Christian unity–among those obedient to God–will prevent deception (Eph. 4:13-16; 1 John 2:26-27; again, the “yous” in 1 Jn. 2 are plural).

Do you realize that the Bible teaches that trying to grow alone, with just the Spirit and the Bible to guide you, is dangerous?

Hebrews 3:13 says, “Exhort one another daily, while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.”

There is a promise that together we will be led into truth. That will not happen unless we are speaking the truth in love to one another. If that is not happening, then what you have is a constant danger of being deceived.

I’ve never heard of a deceived person who knew they were deceived. It goes against the very definition of the word. Deceived people think they’re right; they think they have truth.

Christian unity is worth working for. It’s worth giving up some of our doctrine for.

P.S. What Unity is Based On

The Bible says that we are to diligently maintain the unity of the Spirit. If we do so, we will be led into the unity of the faith (Eph. 4:3, then 13).

We will never achieve unity based on doctrine. However, a true unity of the Spirit will produce doctrinal unity, because together the saints have the promise that God will lead them into what is true (see above).

P.P.S. Sorry for the Time Between Blogs

I’m working on putting up a web site at http://www.christian-history.org. It dawned on me yesterday that this means I’m trying to write the whole history of Christianity in my spare time.

What am I thinking?

The site is going up bit by bit. I worked on the Reformation page some last night and this morning.

It’s slowing down my blogging, though.

Cursed are the men who turned the most exciting stories and interesting facts of all time–for those are what history is–into dry, boring academia. ~Paul Pavao (that’s me!)

My forté is early church history, before the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325. I’ve spent almost twenty years reading the writings from that period. I also have a somewhat solid knowledge of Christian history since the Reformation era (and a little earlier).

Now, however, I’m working on a new web site on church history, so I have to brush up on that missing thousand years of history known as The Dark Ages.

I read something in a history book I want to tell you about.

(Note: the following quotes are from Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, vol. III, p. 432-435, most cheaply obtained from Christian Book Distributors. It’s available online at http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/history/About.htm and http://www.bible.ca/history/philip-schaff/.)

Evidence for the Fall of the Church in the Nicene Period

I’ve always maintained that the church completely fell after the Council of Nicea (actually, after the Edict of Milan just over a decade earlier). My proof for that is the drastic difference between the history written by Eusebius in A.D. 323 and that of Socrates Scholasticus in A.D. 375. One is about holy living, the growth of the church, theology, and overcoming persecution. The other is about corruption, violence, and political intrigue.

Today, I found as clear a statement as any in a history book that Constantine’s reign was the destruction of the church’s power.

In the first three centuries the veneration of the martyrs in general restricted itself to the thankful remembrance of their virtues and the celebration of the day of their death as the day of their heavenly birth.

Okay, I knew that. The Pre-Nicene church honored the martyrs, encouraged martyrdom, and the day of a martyr’s death was celebrated each year as their birthday.

But in the Nicene age it advanced to a formal invocation of the saints as our patrons and intercessors . . . and degenerated into a form of refined polytheism and idolatry.

In the Nicene age!!!

That would be the early 4th century. The Council of Nicea (or Nicaea) was in A.D. 325.

I didn’t know that started so early.

Augustine’s Role 

The author, Philip Schaff, is right. It did start that early. Even Augustine, who was converted in the A.D. 390’s, was forced to defend the practice:

But here rises the inevitable question: How can departed saints hear at once the prayers of so many Christians on earth, unless they either partake of divine omnipresence or divine omniscience? . . . Augustine felt this difficulty, and concedes his inability to solve it. He leaves it undecided . . . 

He leaves it undecided, but he defended the practice! He even defended building altars with martyrs’ names on them! He simply argued that Christians built altars to offer [spiritual] sacrifices with these departed saints, not to them.

Harumph!, I thought.

So did the author:

But in spite of all these distinctions and cautions, which must be expected from a man like Augustine . . . we cannot but see in the martyr-worship, as it was actually practiced, a new form of the hero-worship of the pagans.

Okay, the Nicene Church began to pray to dead saints and even build altars to them. That’s bad, but here’s . . .

. . . The Real Evidence of the Fall

For the great mass of the Christian people came, in fact, fresh from polytheism, without thorough conversion . . .

Conversion that is not thorough is not conversion at all.

Jesus did not say, “Whoever does not bear his cross and come after me is not thoroughly converted.” He said, “Whoever does not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.”

When Constantine became a Christian–in fact, as soon as his fondness for the Christian religion became clear,  since he was not baptized until on his deathbed in A.D. 337–when this happened, the church was no longer the gathering of those willing to lose their lives for Christ. It became instead the preferred religion and set of religious beliefs for an empire.

Those two things are not the same. They’re not even comparable.

God is with the one. He will have nothing to do with the other.

In fact, I highly suspect he hates the other.

Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they are trouble to me; I am tired of bearing them. When you spread your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; yes, when you make many prayers, I will not listen. (Isaiah 1:14-15)

Interesting Facts

Remember that quote at the top of this post? The one about the most exciting stories and interesting facts?

Here’s some interesting facts. The latest gossip, since this gossip is about 1700 years late .

<whisper>Did you hear that the emperor Julian “the Apostate” (reigned A.D. 355-363) said that he was glad the Christians had decided to reintroduce polytheism [by the worship of the saints], but with all their relics, he couldn’t participate due to the “stench of graves and dead men’s bones.”

Ouch!

Even the somewhat Gnostic Manichaeans, later guilty of polytheism themselves, reproached the Christians for this martyr-worship. “Ye have changed the idols into martyrs, whom ye worship with the like prayers, and ye appease the shades of the dead with wine and flesh.”

This was the 4th century, just a hundred years after this sort of thing would have been unthinkable!

I want to tell you more about how the church could have fallen into this sort of state. Why’d they let it happen? But that will have to wait until next post. (Which I trust will be quicker than this one was!)

The apostles once directly asked how to increase their faith. Jesus’ answer to that question is the sort of thing all of us ought to be interested in.

Jesus’ initial response is along the lines of what me might expect. He tells them, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you might say to this Sycamore tree, ‘Be uprooted and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you” (Luke 17:6).

That’s encouraging, and it tells us what would happen if our faith were increased, but it does not answer the apostles’ question as to how to increase their faith. The answer for how to increase our faith comes immediately afterward, and it is not what we would expect.

Which of you, having a servant plowing or feeding cattle, will say to him when he has come in from the field, “Go and sit down to eat”? Will you not rather say to him, “Prepare my meal, gird yourself, and serve me until I have eaten and drunk, and afterward you shall eat and drink”? Does he thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I think not. So likewise you, when you have done all those things which have been commanded you, say, “We are unprofitable servants; we have done only that which it is our duty to do.” (Luke 17:7-10)

I remember watching a video once on Mother Theresa. She had some charity work to do in Lebanon, but the city she was going to was in the middle of intense fighting. She asked the people who brought her if there was any way to get a cease-fire so she could carry out her mission. They said they knew of no way; she would have to cancel the mission. She responded, “I need the cease-fire.” She then went off and prayed, and a cease-fire started the next day that lasted the whole weekend.

It’s no surprise that Mother Theresa had that kind of power with God and man. She was a woman doing as much as possible in the service of Jesus. She was doing more, probably much more, than was commanded her, and her faith was great.

Are you doing the minimum or not even the minimum, hoping to scrape by into heaven because Jesus died for your sins? Your faith will never increase in this way. Faith is a gift of God, and it is given to those who wholeheartedly pursue the will of God. “I’ve done what you asked, Father. Is there anything else that I can do in your service?”

If we want to be men and women of faith, we need to be prepared to pursue the will of God wholeheartedly. If you are doing “enough,” then don’t wonder why your prayers so often go unheeded by heaven.

But let him ask in faith, nothing doubting, for he that doubts is like a wave of the sea being driven and tossed by the wind. Let not that man think that he will receive anything from the Lord. (James 1:5)

At our village, we have a midwife ministry. There’s around 250 people living here, so two or three children are born in the village every year. Over the last year, however, we had nine young couples that had children, which I’m sure is some sort of record. The last of those nine ladies had her baby last night.

Our babies are usually delivered at home with the midwives. Whenever there are problems—which is not that often; believe it or not, birth is a normal, natural process—we’ll get the village praying. Because the electronic age has arrived, we often have a record of those prayer requests.

Here’s the ones from last night:

8:01 pm: Pray for her water to break

8:04 pm: Water broke!

The baby was born not too much later. Then:

9:20 pm: Please pray, mom’s blood pressure dropped

9:22 pm: (From grandma, the mother of the mom, a bit more urgent) Pray!! Her blood pressure dropped. Using oxygen. Not critical.

9:36 pm: Blood pressure better. Placenta passed. Thank you for prayers!

All of that is a bit personal, sorry, but the texts going around provided such a wonderful opportunity to testify that God still answers prayer.

There have been actual studies done on prayer. A couple have been famous, one backing up the fact that prayer works, and one indicating it doesn’t. Such “scientific” studies are meaningless. God is not subject to man; man is subject to God. You will not “catch” God in a double-blind study, and God doesn’t answer everyone’s prayers.

If you don’t believe that, read Psalm 18 sometime. In that Psalm, when David prays, the whole heavens move. When his enemies pray, there is no deliverance. They are beat as fine as dust.

When disciples pray, they should know when they are asking for something specific. There are general prayers that we pray for leaders of the world, the growth of our brothers and sisters in Christ, and for the ongoing health of our family and friends. We pray general prayers for missionaries. There are a lot of such general prayers that it’s important to pray, but for which it’s very hard to “see” the answers. It’s simply a work we Christians must do as part of our role as the salt of the earth.

For specific prayers, however, disciples ought to know what they are praying for and whether they have the faith to pray. If they don’t, they need to ask first for faith from God. There are Christians who are used to having most of their prayers seemingly ignored by God. This is not right. It is not the way we are meant to live. It’s not okay to excuse it by saying, “God answers all prayer: sometimes he says yes, sometimes he says no, and sometimes he says wait.” That’s a copout.

Look at Paul. He was told no by God in 2 Cor. 12:7-9. However, he got an actual answer. He heard God tell him no, and he heard God give him a reason why. We should be the same way. It should be normal for us to have all our prayers answered. When God does not intend to answer our prayer—with yes—we should know it inside, and we should adjust our prayers accordingly.

In the church here, we have prayed for the severely injured and seen them recover so fast the doctors were astonished. However, I remember another time that we labored in prayer for a desperately sick sister, and the word came from God that he intended to take her home to himself. It was the next day before she died, but in the meantime we were not meaninglessly laboring in prayer against the will of God. We were thanking him for what a gift this sister had been, and we were praising him for his gift of eternal life.

God does answer prayer, but it is the effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man that avails much. It is him who asks in faith, nothing doubting, who can expect to receive from the Lord. Let us learn to know God, and to be righteous.

Tomorrow I want to address a rather surprising way that Jesus said we should build our faith.

A friend of mine told me he once asked a godly lady how she became so powerful with God. She replied, “Have you ever been in a restaurant or some other public place and felt God leading you to go talk to some stranger there?” He said yes. She asked, “Did you do it?”

He was silent as he thought of opportunities missed. She said, “Well, there you have it.”

The life of a disciple is lived with regular knots in the pit of your stomach. Perhaps there are some great disciples out there who are never in fear that what they think is the voice of God inside is really just some inner impulse that will lead them to great embarrassment. I don’t know any disciples like that, though. The great disciples I know set the fear aside, live with the knot in the pit of their stomach, and risk embarrassment.

These disciples talk to people, including strangers, that they feel led to talk to. They say that strange thing that they feel God leading them to say. They do that unusual thing that they feel God leading them to do.

I remember one night in Germany feeling led to talk to a man I was walking past on the sidewalk. I didn’t know what to say, but I remembered years earlier that an evangelist (Danny Duvall) had said that straightforward is best. Just tell them that you want to talk to them about Jesus.

So I stopped this man with the question, in German, “Do you know Jesus?” His answer was amazing. “How could I possibly know Jesus? He’s been dead for two thousand years.”

I had one of the most interesting talks I’ve ever had with that man. I don’t know what impact it had on him, but it led to one of the more interesting nights of my life. He invited me to talk to him more at the bar he was walking to. I went home to tell my wife I was taking him up on the invitation, and then I went to the bar.

When I got there, the German man wasn’t there, but an old friend from the military was. I got to spend an hour talking to him about life and about the Lord. After that hour, another man came in talking about God. Yes, talking about God in a bar. He was very strange, and he had strange ideas about God. I talked to him until he let down and began talking a lot more reasonably, and he began admitting he knew he needed to give his life to God. It was a very, very unusual conversation.

Amazingly enough, it didn’t end there. The owner of the local “house of ill repute” (that was legal in Germany then, and it may still be) came in. The bartender refused to serve him and said he always came in to start fights with Americans. I asked him in German why he hated Americans, and he was surprised I spoke German. He said he was still mad about world war II, even though he had to have been a child during the war. I was able to preach the Gospel even to him, though he was very resistant to it.

Afterwards, I drove the strange man that had talked about God to his room on base. The military had sent him over for just one week, and so I never saw him again, but I know our conversation made an impact on his life. He had been drinking a bit in the bar, even though I hadn’t been, and he really opened up on the way to his room.

I’ve missed my share of opportunities by not listening to that quiet inner voice, but I didn’t miss that one. It’s been more than twenty years since that happened, but the stories from that night still inspire me and others not to let God’s whisperings go by unheeded.

Make your own memories. You can’t be a disciple without regularly feeling the gnawing fear that comes when God asks you to do something outside your comfort zone. The choice between obeying your fear and obeying God can be the one difference between being a great man or woman of God and being just another person who left no impact on this world.