As a kid at Mahaffey Camp, I remember a speaker saying something that absolutely stunned me. He said words like these:

Now, some of you are going to get right with God at the end of this service. You will come to this altar in this Youth Tabernacle, and you will make promises to God — promises to change your heart. Then you will go home to your family and tell them and your parents will say, “Yeah — right. We’ll see. You’ve made these promises before.”

The speaker went on to encourage us not to let our parent’s cynicism turn us away from the commitment we were making that day.

Here’s what stunned me: Why would loving Christian parents speak with such disbelief concerning the potential for positive change in their children? I still don’t have a good answer to that question.

But I see Christians expressing such cynicism all too often.

On August 12, 2012, a group of men stood before their church family and took The Resolution — from the movie courageous:

• I DO solemnly resolve before God to take full responsibility for myself, my wife, and my children.
• I WILL love them, protect them, serve them, and teach them the Word of God as the spiritual leader of my home.
• I WILL be faithful to my wife, to love and honor her, and be willing to lay down my life for her as Jesus Christ did for me.
• I WILL bless my children and teach them to love God with all of their hearts, all of their minds, and all of their strength.
• I WILL train them to honor authority and live responsibly.
• I WILL confront evil, pursue justice, and love mercy.
• I WILL pray for others and treat them with kindness, respect, and compassion.
• I WILL work diligently to provide for the needs of my family.
• I WILL forgive those who have wronged me and reconcile with those I have wronged.
• I WILL learn from my mistakes, repent of my sins, and walk with integrity as a man answerable to God.
• I WILL seek to honor God, be faithful to His church, obey His Word, and do His will.
• I WILL courageously work with the strength God provides to fulfill this resolution for the rest of my life and for His glory.
• As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. —Joshua 24:15.

The cynic will say, “Yeah — right. We’ll see. You’ve made these promises before.” Do you know who else will whisper that into the ears of these men? The enemy — Satan. Such discouragement is never from God. NEVER.

When you see these men, do two things:

1. Pray for these men and their families — that they will carry out this commitment.
2. Encourage them, telling them that you believe in the sincerity of their pledge and the power of their God.

~Pastor Steve

In The Reason for God, Tim Keller speaks of the danger of expecting all Christians to grow at the same rate. He makes a couple great observations as he explains what we often see as failings and hypocrisy in the body of Christ. The second paragraph is very applicable, however since it relies on the first, read them both.

“A central message of the Bible is that we can only have a relationship with God by sheer grace. Our moral efforts are too feeble and falsely motivated to ever merit salvation. Jesus, through his death and resurrection, has provided salvation for us, which we receive as a gift. All churches believe this in one form or another. Growth in character and change in behavior occur in a gradual process after a person becomes a Christian. The mistaken belief that a person must ‘clean up’ his or her own life in order to merit God’s presence is not Christianity. This means, though, that the church will be filled with immature and broken people who still have a long way to go emotionally, morally, and spiritually. As the saying has it: ‘The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.’

… Now imagine that someone with a very broken past becomes a Christian and her character improves significantly over what is was. Nevertheless, she still may be less secure and self-disciplined than someone who is so well adjusted that she feels no particular need for religious affiliation at all. Suppose you meet both of these women the same week. Unless you know the starting points and life journeys of each woman, you could easily conclude that Christianity isn’t worth much, and that Christians are inconsistent with their own high standards. It is often the case that people whose lives have been harder and who are ‘lower on the character scale’ are more likely to recognize their need for God and turn to Christianity. So we should expect that many Christians’ lives would not compare well to those of the nonreligious (just as the health of people in the hospital is comparatively worse than people visiting museums).” — Timothy Keller, The Reason For God, pp. 53-54.

I would take this a step beyond Keller’s excellent observation and say that our growth in Christ is not only influenced by our background, but even by how we are hardwired, so to speak. Just ask any mother who has had more than one child. Some children are born with a bad temper. Others are not.

This is not to say that we should excuse bad behavior in the church or condone spiritual stagnancy.

It simply gives us a perspective that can enhance our patience with one another as we grow together in our walk with Jesus.

It should move us to pray with compassion for one another.

I recently discovered that Amazon gives away a number of books every day, delivered straight to your Kindle. Some I’ve been able to pick up include Francis Chan’s The Forgotten God, Crazy Love, and Erasing Hell. These are not reject books. They are good ones. I actually paid money for a couple of them. Getting them from Amazon for free, well, what can I say? I like “free”.

One of the books I picked up this way was Secondhand Jesus. I had heard of it, but I didn’t know anything about it or its author. But free is free, right? So I grabbed it for my Kindle reader on my phone. (Now, when you see me walking about looking at my phone, you know what I am doing: Either reading a book or playing Wordsmith with Tim.)

Secondhand Jesus was written by Glenn Packiam. He begins by recalling the Thursday he and the rest of the staff at his church learned that their senior pastor, Ted Haggard, had been accused of involvement in drugs and even more as the scandal broke. Packiam moves from this event to discuss our need to have a personal relationship with the God of the Bible, rather than the god of convenience.

The book reminds us that God is God and we are not — that He is holy, separate, sovereign, and not there to serve our whims or ensure we have good parking spaces when we go to the mall. Packiam demonstrates this by giving personal accounts of his own spiritual journey and by retelling biblical stories, making them come to life. He reminds us of God’s holiness by spending time discussing the Ark of the Covenant, specifically the folly of thinking you can “use” it for your purposes. As Packiam unfolds this, he gives the best explanation of the death of Uzzah that I’ve ever heard. Perhaps it’s a common explanation, but it never clicked in my head until I read Chapter 9, Carts.

This book would be a good read for someone who is beginning to realize the shallowness of some Christian media presentations. It would be challenging to read for someone who feels God lives to make our lives pleasant. It would be a healthy read for anyone who wants to or needs to see God more accurately.

I recommend it.