God's Tool Box

Introduction:

I hugged the cold ground with all my strength because it was the only way to avoid the wall of lead passing over my head. The same wall of lead sheared the vegetation around me like a buzz saw and dug up the dirt like little splashes of pebbles in a pond. These were no pebbles! It was the best that the German Army could throw at us and for now, it made dirt huggers out of us all.

The worst damage was being done by a sniper in an old abandoned apartment building just the other side of the now denuded trees. Something had to be done and it was my job to do it. I cradled my Thompson sub in my arms and belly crawled around the small rise in the ground that was our only refuge. If I could just get the right angle I might be able to get off a shot at the sniper who was pinning down the entire battalion.

My elbows and knees where giving out as I came to a patch of trees that blocked me from his line of sight. I eased up behind a tree and began a cautious zigzag from one to another. Finally I was within range, but the thunder of small arms fire was deafening, and I dreaded looking around the tree to see if I could get a brief glimpse of the sniper. If I looked, would the last thing I saw in this life be him looking at me through his high powered rifle scope?

I had to chance it! I slowly peaked round the edge of the tree expecting to see a rifle bore pointed at me, but I was thrilled to discover that he had no idea of my presence. I could clearly see the prone shooter on the second floor of the building. The wall had a huge hole blown in it and the upper half of his body was easily seen through it from where I stood. I eased my Thompson up to my shoulder and debated a moment about moving the select switch to single fire, but I didn’t want to take the time to do it. I opened up and sent a half clip of 45’s into that sniper sending another Nazi to his appointment with his Maker.

That was pretty good shooting for a ten year old. My best friend/Nazi obligingly jerked with the impact of the imaginary striking bullets and died for the obligatory ten seconds that all good pretend soldiers experience multiple times in apartment living warfare. In fact, prior to my heroic maneuver to save the battalion, I died several times. A ten-second death will do wonders for removing the fear and terror of real life-and-death conflicts.

Twenty something years later, while a Police Chaplain, I was in several REAL life-and-death struggles and they were nothing like the pretend games of Combat that we played as kids. When it was real guns firing and real bullets flying, I felt REAL fear and real terror. The adrenaline high from being in a violent, terror-filled, life-threatening situation is like nothing you experience anywhere else in life. You don’t stay cool, calm, and collected when bullets zip by your head! The concussion of a high powered rifle being fired - in anger - inside a building - is paralyzing and shocking. The memory of feeling your finger tighten around the trigger of a Remington 870 shotgun as you wait to see who might come bursting through the door of a robbery in progress call, will leave you staring at the ceiling of your bedroom for several nights. Hearing an investigator say that the random fired bullets they recovered after a shooting impacted close to where you had been standing will make your knees turn into rubber bands.

I liked the pretend a whole lot better than the REAL thing. I especially liked the ten-second dying part.

Unfortunately, there are many who feel the same way about church. They like the pretend better than the real! When you pretend, you can make up whatever you want. In my ten year old brain, our apartments were bombed out German towns, my plastic toy was a classic Thompson submachine gun, and instead of 1961, we were sixteen years back in time. For many, church is a religious facility, a one hour event on Sunday, and an activity that good people should take part in to show that they are good people. That’s not the REAL church - the one that God built and His only Son died for! In the pretend kind of church, people pretend that they care about spiritual things, they play the part of a spiritual person, and they do the things our culture says spiritual people are supposed to do. In short, they do the church thing, but it’s just not the real thing! That church is something made by man and not by God. It fosters hypocrisy, mediocrity, and idolatry because it’s not about a growing personal relationship with God, but doing church.

The world’s understanding of church comes from an evolving culture not an honest theology. It is the result of two thousand years of man’s traditions that replaced God’s teachings, and developed something very different than what we read about in the New Testament. Even in congregations of people who claim to be following the Bible, church is a sacred building, a sacred day and time, and the performance of sacred activities, and it doesn’t bother them in the least that the Bible doesn’t support such thinking. And to many, not all - by any stretch - that’s just fine, because the goal isn’t seeking God as much as it is being a church goer. It is the way I thought for too many years.

That’s not said to be harsh, but to point out the obvious. If the driving motivation is seeking God, then one must know His Word. To ignore His Word is to ignore Him! It’s the same point a wife makes when she exclaims, You’re not listening to me anymore. She’s not just talking about hearing those specific words, but the hurt of ignoring her! Many Christians stopped listening to God a long time ago. They assumed that churches and church leaders had it all figured out and were carrying out the plan of God. Their job, the average Christian that is, was to show up, give up (money), and shut up. Traditions and cultural assumptions have turned church into a ritualistic, institutionalized, check-list righteousness that can only be indirectly found in the New Testament under the things Jesus condemned about the Pharisees. All this because, centuries ago, people stopped asking, What does God want? and focused on, How can we continue to do what we’ve always done?

Forgive me for being overly critical, but I would like to share with you some of the questions I have struggled with over the years. Think about some of these questions, and try to use as much New Testament scripture as you can to answer them.

Why is it no one in the early church ever went to church?

How do you prove that Sunday is the Lord’s day?

Why is the togetherness of Christians never called worship by people in the New Testament?

Where did the idea of acts of worship come from?

Where and when was church? (Could it be a who?)

How many people does it take to make a church?

What is the difference between formal and informal worship?

What glorifies God more, worship or a pot-luck fellowship?

In the new covenant, where is the Temple of God?

In the new covenant, who are the priests?

Where can we find an example of a complete New Testament assembly?

How do we know we are doing the things God wants done in our assemblies?

Why is it that it’s more blessed to give than it is to receive everywhere except when we’re at church on Sunday morning?

Where is the House of God?

How do you know that God is present on Sunday morning? (Please don’t use Matthew 18:20 Where two or three are gathered in My name, out of context!)

How do you encounter God on Sunday morning?

When should you wear your best for God?

Is church an institution?

How does one join the church?

Why do we never read of anyone in the first century church going to services?

Which day of the week did the early church meet on? (Hint: Acts 2:42)

Why did the Holy Spirit command Christians to not miss an assembly of

Christians? What is really supposed to happen? (See Hebrews 10: 24-25)

How do we know what church buildings, furniture, and symbols are suppose to look like?

What makes someone a faithful member of your church?

Who is the Head of your church?

What is the purpose of the church?

My intent here is to be thought provoking not antagonistic or seem condescending. I desperately want to be about my Father’s business, but do I really know what that is? Do you? Do you care? I suspect you do or you wouldn’t be reading this. And just for the record, every one of the above questions has a very clear biblical answer. Most, however, have been clouded by man’s traditions and defined by cultural practices. So let’s go back to the only question that really matters.

Chapter One: What Does God Really Want?

Ask that question in any group setting, including a Bible class, and get ready for a lot of blank looks. After the shock wears off, and the few smart-alleck responses like Why do you ask? or Don’t you know? are out of the way, you will start hearing the expected answers. Again, there really isn’t much difference between what the churched and un-churched say, except for some religious words that church-goers know. You will hear:

God wants us to be good.

God wants us to read the Bible.

God wants us to go to church, obey the laws, and say our prayers.

He wants us to live in peace with one another.

He wants us to worship Him.

God wants us to believe in His Son, Jesus.

He wants us to be honest, kind, and helpful to those in need.

He wants us to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Jesus.

He is pleased when we have faith in Him.

He wants us to live in such a way that we can go to Heaven.

There’s some good stuff in those responses. In one way or another, each one is at least partly correct, but each one also misses the heart of what God wants because what God wants is our heart. He wants us to want Him. What He wants us to do more than anything else is to seek a relationship with Him. It’s so simple and yet so profound. It’s so simple, and yet missed by me for so many years.

On the opening pages of the Bible God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness. (Genesis 1:26) It always seemed weird that He jumped from the singular to the plural, but it showed us that the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, were all part of creation and part of the long-term plan. It also gave us reason to speculate about what ways we really are in God’s image. Do we look like Him? Does it mean that we have the capacity to have His characteristics in our life? Is the similarity found in the fact that He put us in charge of all the creatures on earth? It’s true that if you could computerize all the faces of all the people on earth, and merge them together into one face that it would match the face of God? Okay, that’s a little far out, but I have heard that said on several occasions.

I believe the reason for the use of the plural was to emphasis that God, who is Love, exists in relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Creating us in His image is not about our looks or our capabilities, but about our need for relationships. He made us to be seekers of relationships. That’s a driving force in our life whether it’s seeking a spouse, a friend, a co-worker, or a group of like-minded people to be with. Even the most introverted of us still need to be around someone sometime. Our God is the creator of relationships.

It makes perfect sense when you remember that God is love and you can’t possibly learn about love without relationships. Yes, I realize that true agape or God-like love is a choice that can transcend feelings and closeness, but it’s also the goal or the peak kind of love that comes only from a long journey to spiritual maturity. That is why love, or knowing God, is a journey, a life-long seeking after God. We may do it wrong more than we do it right, but it’s a process we must stay focused on as we learn and grow. Only God can love with total unconditional love.

Since God is love, it’s impossible to know Him without knowing love. Relationships that teach us love and help us grow in love, are the very things that will help us know God and share His characteristics. That was His plan from the beginning. Why did He have a plan for how we can grow through loving relationships? Because His singular desire before He said, Let there be light was to have a relationship with us.

God has always been clear about what He wants, and it hasn’t changed since the first time He declared it in Deuteronomy 6:4-5. Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. With the later addition of and love your neighbor as yourself it became the summation of the whole law and the prophets and was repeated by Jesus, Paul, Peter, and James in the Bible.

The message of the Bible is the message of what God has done to allow unholy people to have a relationship with a holy God. He has shown how much He loves us and wants us to be His children, but He will not force Himself on anyone. Why? Because love is a choice and since God is love we must choose Him. This is embodied in the biblical principle of seeking. Once we know what He has done for us to make a relationship with Him possible, He wants us to seek Him like He sought us.

Just think about it for a second! God is love, He wants us to love Him like He loves us, and that means love is a matter of choice. Since love is a choice, and man -being like man usually is - makes wrong choices, God had to provide for our redemption and reconciliation to Him before the first day of creation. Here is how Paul described it,

"For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in this sight. In love, he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will - to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding." Ephesians 1:4-8

This passage is overflowing with God’s love for us and his meticulous planning that pre-dated dates. Everything about his plan is driven by his desire to make a relationship with him possible. The reason a holy God can have a relationship with unholy people is because he made a way for our un-holiness to be paid for, thus allowing us to be declared holy and adoptable by him.

This is all because of his love for us and not our lovability. He loves us in spite of us, and we need to love him in spite of us too. It’s called grace - and isn’t it amazing?

A Religion of Rhetoric

When I became a Christian at the age of fourteen, it was during the mid-sixties. Three years later, in the fall of my Junior year of High School in 1968, I preached my first full-length sermon at a little country church in south Georgia. The next fifteen years was the peak of the Youth Rally fad in our church fellowship. A Youth Rally was just a Gospel Meeting for teens and pre-teens, with youth songs, emotionally charged preaching, and a hint of we’re doing stuff your folks wouldn’t dare do on Sunday morning. I suspect that a lot of it was just a token effort to be relevant in order to prevent the swan-song of the traditional Gospel Meeting. It didn’t work, but boy could I preach up a storm at a Youth Rally.

I spoke at many throughout the seventies and into the early eighties, and I have some great memories of some amazing results. Sometimes kids responded by the scores. We’d have baptisms, rededications, and commitments to do mission work and preach the Gospel. After all, it was at a Youth Rally in 1968 that I rededicated my life and made the commitment to preach the Gospel. Do the math. That’s a lot of years ago. So I have nothing bad to say about Youth Rally’s! I do, however, cringe when I think of how empty a lot of the things I said truly were back then.

Do you remember all the religious cliché’s that we threw around so much? I still see them today, and there’s still little, if any, explanation of what they mean or how to do it.

Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?

Have you made Jesus Lord of your life?

Jesus is the only friend you need!

Put Jesus on the throne of your heart!

Is Christ your Savior?

Surrender all of yourself to Jesus!

The list could fill pages. They’re all wonderful, biblical, and preach-able sentences, but I’m convinced that most people don’t know what they mean or how to make them happen. Knowing about Jesus is not the same as having a relationship with him. Faith in information, even information that touches and motivates you, is not a personal relationship with the person it’s about.

I know Thomas Jefferson. I’ve read books about him, studied him, visited his house, and I truly believe that he was the most talented and intelligent man to be called President of the United States. I am a Jeffersonian - in many respects - politically and historically. Yes, I know TJ!

Do I have a personal relationship with Mr. Jefferson? Do we talk, visit, and love each other? There are no bedrooms at Monticello with a Reserved for Mike Root sign on the door. I know him. I believe many things about him. We are not buds.

Most of us have been raised to believe that if we read the Bible enough, go to church enough, do enough good things, and say our meal prayers, bed-time prayers, and Psalm 23 prayer enough - we will wake up one morning and just know that we’re tight with God. We want a relationship with God, but we don’t understand how it happens. We don’t realize that seeking a relationship with God is intentional not accidental. It is no different than seeking a relationship with anyone else. The only difference is that this relationship is based on faith not sight.

Faith is not just knowledge and it’s not just obedience. Faith is believing in the reality of God and seeking a relationship with Him. We quote Hebrews 11:6 to prove all the wrong things. It’s not a call to please God by obeying Him. Since faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see, in faith we want to be close to God. And without faith it is impossible to please God, - this is usually where we stop, because we’ve been taught to think that faith is all about obedience. But the Hebrew writer is stating one of the most important absolutes in all the New Testament. He defines pleasing God: …because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

What pleases God is when he looks into our hearts and he sees that we know he is real, he is present, and he is approachable. He is pleased when he sees a heart that passionately seeks a relationship with him. He is so pleased that he will reward that passion - in spite of sin and imperfections - with fulfillment and with discovery. As he promised, Come near to God and he will come near to you. (James 4:8) He does not force himself on anyone, but when you sincerely want to know him, he will make sure you find him.

In one of Jesus’ kingdom parables (Luke 13:22-30), he told about the owner of a house who closed his door, only to have someone knocking on it asking to be allowed in. The owner of the house said, I don’t know you or where you come from. The outsider responded by reminding him that they ate and drank together and they where in the crowd when the homeowner was teaching on the streets. The owner of the house was adamant about not knowing them and shouted for him to get away from his house.

Jesus then made his point. A lot of people who think they will be part of the kingdom are going to be sorely upset (i.e. weeping and gnashing of teeth) to find out that they are not invited to the feast.

While this was clearly a wake up call to the self-righteous Pharisees, who thought they had a First Class ticket to heaven, we all must see the bigger lesson that God wants real relationships and not just acquaintances. We ate and drank together, and we were in the crowd listening to you! Don’t you know us? He wants a Father/Child loving relationship, and we tend to point out that we’ve occasionally been in the same room together?

Less Religion, More Relationship

We were created by a relational God, who wants us to want him. He brought us into the world in relationships, called family, and he made us to desire relationships, to share life, and find fulfillment in life. Yet, for some odd reason, we are relationally incompetent. Women do a much better job than men at pursuing and maintaining relationships, but most of us fumble and bumble through relationships, while learning, but most often repeating, the same mistakes over and over.

Where do you go for training in relationships? No where! So we learn by observation, trial and error, and, as a last resort, buy a book about how to do it. Though, in truth, most guys just hope the girl of their dreams has already bought and read it, and can summarize it for them - when the time comes - after the honeymoon.

Relationships are tough. It’s the Devil’s lie that relationships are all about having the right chemistry. That may provide a comfortable way to dissolve a relationship because The chemistry is gone, but the only successful relationships are relationships that people chose to develop and keep.

There are at least two essential truths about good relationships. First, relationships must be built. When they stop being worked on, they start dying. Second, there is no relationship without communication. Communication is the building material for every successful relationship. Guys know it, they just can’t remember it. That’s why we violate another essential truth that is part of this communication truth. If you don’t communicate, you speculate. It’s a fact. If you don’t find the information, you will create it, and you’re usually wrong. That is how we damage friendships, marriages, parent/child relationships, and our walk with God. We don’t listen and share - we guess and assume. WRONG!

So how do you establish a relationship with God? If a physical relationship is tough - a relationship you can see, touch, smell, and hear - how much tougher is a relationship based on faith? Maybe not as difficult as some may think.

At the time of writing this, I have been married to my wife Donna for forty-two years. All three of our children are in their thirties. We have added to our very close family, one daughter-in-law, two sons-in-law, and nine grandchildren so far, with more to come. As a minister, I’ve taught and spoken on relationship building hundreds, and maybe thousand, of times over the last four decades. I share that brief resume` so I can say, I know something about relationship building.

It seems like yesterday that I first noticed a beautiful black haired coed in the soprano section of our college chorus just in front of the Bass section, where I stood. I made a conscious decision to pursue her. I managed to sit next to her on a long chorus tour, and I was truly thrilled that she stayed in the same bus seat every day for the entire week of travel. We had long hours of road time to talk and get acquainted (and play Hearts - literally and figuratively). Once we got back to campus, I spent every waking moment trying to figure out how I could be with her. I put all I had into letting her know how much I cared for her, and hoped she would care as much for me.

I guess it worked, because after two months of dating we were engaged and before the end of that same year, we were married. And the rest of the story is, well, two paragraphs ago.

Again, I’m not telling that story to inform you of our family history, as exciting as I find it to be. I’m telling this to you to simply illustrate how relationships are built. It has been my observation that there are four distinct parts of any relationship building.

1) Desire: There must be a desire to have a relationship. You want it, so you seek it. While we are sometimes thrust into one another’s life by chance or providence, it will go no farther than a chance meeting or rubbing elbows if we don’t desire for it to be more. God wants us to seek Him. It’s one of the most common themes of the Bible. It is not some super spiritual leap of faith. It’s simply a desire to know Him and have a relationship with Him.

2) Sharing: This is communication. There is no relationship without communication. Relationships start and are built on sharing ourselves with each other so that we know each other. It’s sharing information, feelings, goals, aspirations, and beliefs. It’s moving from the surface person and image we try to present to others, to the real person with fears, weaknesses, and the need for affirmation. The relationship is only as strong as the level of openness and honesty between those involved. When the communication stops, the relationship building stops and will die if not corrected. When