This young man, of whom I spoke and who was my friend, began to tell me “why” he and his “Christian rock-band” had the right to do what he was doing (going into worldy nightclubs) and “how” he believed he could do it without any repercussions to him or his group. He felt it was “wise” to go into these nightclubs, where worldly bands played, so he and his group could “learn” new things, new techniques, and new musical chords and such. He felt it was not only his right, but it was his duty to do such a thing.
Furthermore, he believed he had nothing to worry about, regarding this dark (and I mean dark in the spiritual sense) “night life” they were subjecting themselves to, because he said they always prayed before walking in through the doors. That way nothing could touch them or harm them. Sadly, though, it was not true. We must be praying within the will of God, in order for our prayers to be effective. This is just a very basic principle of the Lord’s Kingdom; one which we cannot “bluff” our way around.
And what happened to my friend? In a very short time these young men had suffered the ravages of the enemy ripping them apart. I had tried, in vain, to warn them, but they were convinced they were right, so they listened to no one. I have no idea where any of these men are today...I just know that they all struggled for many years. Our rights are not what we think or claim them to be; our rights only fall under the covering and within the limits of His Righteousness. Let’s look, for a moment or two, at the life of Jesus as a comparison.
While He could have gone about demanding that everyone must respect and honor Him as the Son of God, Jesus chose instead to go about as the Son of Man, “doing good and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with Him” (Acts 10:38). As Powerful, as life-changing, and as Miraculous as His Life was, He was, for the most part, a simple and a lonely Man. Here is His humble life, foretold by Isaiah:
Isaiah 53: “(1) Who has believed our report? And to whom is the Arm of the LORD revealed? (2) For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground. He has no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. (3) He is despised and rejected of men; a Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with grief.
We hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. (4) Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. (7) He was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth. He is brought as a Lamb to the slaughter; and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He did not open His mouth.”
Barabbas...Not Jesus
I’m fairly certain that most of the disciples, and especially Peter, suffered and agonized greatly as they watched Jesus -- their Teacher, Mentor, Messiah and Lord -- hauled away as a common criminal, then as He was tried and mocked and cruelly tortured before finally succumbing (or rather gladly giving His Life) upon that Cross. I’m fairly certain that they would have done anything they possibly could to stop this horrible, horrible travesty of justice. The thing is...this was His High Calling. This is what He came to earth for. His Life would have been incomplete without His death...His death, burial and resurrection, that is.
Jesus was righteous; He was undefiled; He was Perfect in all His Ways, and yet they killed Him as they would an enemy of the state. Instead, they chose to let one Barabbas, a true enemy of the state, go free. See Matthew 27:16 & following; Mark 15:7-15; Luke 23:18 and John 18:40 to get a more clear picture of who this murdering, thieving, trouble-maker was.
As evil and troublesome as this man was, the Jews chose him over Jesus, for Barabbas was something of a hero to the Jewish nation. He had led an insurrection against the occuppying Roman armies. So, when given a choice, the Jews chose an unworthy man instead of a righteous Man. But the flesh will always choose Barabbas over Jesus, just as the fleshly, carnal church will always prefer an Abiathar over a Zadok to minster to them.
The Zeal of Your House
I mentioned earlier in this letter that the greatest, or the most radical thing, Jesus ever did was His giving freely of His Life for us, as a Lamb to the slaughter, for the saving of many. He did, of course, “chase out” the money-changers from the House of God (Matthew 21:12-13; Mark 11:15-18; Luke 19:45-46). Following this thought, let’s take a look at another example of this incident, John 2:13-17:
(13) The Jews’ passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, (14) and He found in the temple those that sold oxen, sheep and doves, and the money-changers sitting (at their tables). (15) And when He had made a scourge of small cords, He drove them all out of the temple, including the sheep and the oxen, and He poured out the changers’ money, overthrowing the tables.
(16) And He said to them that sold doves, “Take these things away, and do not make My Father’s House a house of merchandise”. (17) And His disciples remembered that it was written, “The zeal of Your House has eaten Me up (or: has consumed Me or overwhelmed Me)”.
The word zeal means to have a “fervent mind, indignation, Godly jealousy or zeal”. And while this scourge of small cords may have seemed to be pretty severe for the Lamb of God... let’s not forget the terrific “violence” He caused the kingdom of hell each and every time He healed an infirmity, performed some miracle, cast out devils or even brought the dead back from the realm of death! Jesus Christ inflicted great damage upon the devil’s kingdom, and looking at Colossians 2:13-15 & 1st John 3:8, we can see just two passages where this is brought out.
Let’s look at 1st John 3:8: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested: That He (Jesus Christ) might destroy the works of the devil”, and that is precisely what the Lord Jesus did! His Godly, holy zeal is what led Him to do all that He did -- all for the Glory of His Father...all for the Glory of Heaven. Never did He do anything for His own glory. Never.
Now, let’s look at some “zeal” and some “confrontational” things in our own lives -- only our zeal and our confrontations are not always as noble and righteous as His were. Please, saints of God, let our hearts be honest and forthright when considering what we do many times for the Lord...our motives and our purposes are not to destroy the works of the devil, else they would be “being destroyed!” Most of the time our zeal and our confrontations are for the sole purpose of gaining praise and attention either for ourselves or for some cause we embrace. Stop and consider this, saints of God...it is time we “came clean” with our Lord, confessing our soulish, selfish ways.
Confrontations and Other Scenarios
We Can Be Wrong Being Right...
One of the things I am attempting to
“unmask” within the church of the Lord Jesus is the
“confrontational” Christians who believe any good ends always justifies any type of means. In other words, “It doesn’t matter how you do something, as long as you get (seemingly) positive results”. Oh yes, my dear fellow Christian...it does matter. As I said in the first part of this letter, “We can be wrong being right!”
What that simply means is that even though our “intentions” are noble and we think we are correct in our motives, we can still be dead wrong, even as James and John and Peter (all three of whom we addressed in Part 1). With that thought in mind, I would like to use four different “true-life” situations to show how that might be so and to uncover some harmful attitudes and situations within the Body of Christ.
One such incident is a
“confrontation”; one is a gross “mis-handling” of a situation; another is a “mis-understanding” and the last is what I called a “kidnapping”. Remember: All of these situations were done in love, with the sincere belief that they were done “for the sake of the Lord”, with very little forethought, and all were done by people who were loved ones or close to those to whom they had committed these acts.
First up: Confrontation...
In a church where my wife and I were members for nearly fourteen years, we had a visiting “brother team” of ministers one Wednesday night, and I use the term ministers loosely, for they were more of a vaudeville act. Seriously. They clowned around on the stage (I call it a stage, for that’s what it was that night), singing very silly songs and generally being very disrespectful of our sanctuary. Our head pastor was out of town, and the assistant in charge was not exactly as “spiritual”, shall we say, as some of our church members had hoped, and this night was a true test for him.
I sat there, with my wife and a lady who was a “spiritual mother” to us, and the three of us were feeling more and more uncomfortable with these “goings-on” in our church. I was literally minutes away from getting up and leaving, and (we found out later) so were others, when suddenly we heard another voice in all of this hubbub. I thought, at first, this must be a part of their “act”, till I saw someone moving down to the front of the church. It was a young man that I knew, around my age (this was over twenty years ago). He was carrying his bible, speaking with a very loud voice, “My house is a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves”.
He was reading from Matthew 21:13, and about the second time he spoke those words you could hear a pin drop. Immediately and very softly, these two brothers “transitioned” into a worshipful hymn. The young man had more to say, but another minister got to him quickly and ushered him out.
Let me say -- and this event has stayed “fresh on my mind” all these years since -- that this young man was “right”, in a sense, because this nonsense at our altars was unnecessary, but he was wrong in the way he went about confronting the situation. As I said: I was, and others were, moments away from getting up and leaving. I had already begun looking around, seeing many unhappy faces. Had this young man waited, the exodus of people would have defused this unseemly situation.
Now, lest you become sympathetic with this young man, let me fill in some gaps. This young man was somewhat of a “rebel” in our church, enjoying contentious things, arguing about scripture, claiming that marijuana was acceptable to the Lord, because Genesis 1:30 says so, and he also had a type of free-thinkers “communion” at his house, passing around a jug of wine until it was empty.
He and I had some lively discussions, and I overheard some other viewpoints of his, and I know this: He certainly had the “intestinal fortitude” to walk down that church aisle, quoting scripture all the way...but he was wrong in his handling of this situation. He was wrong being right, and it is not always the easiest of things to see and understand this.
Next: Mis-handling Situations...
This next event happened to a very dear Christian friend of mine, while she attended college. I will broach several subjects in this little story, and most of them we will teach on in our regular Gifts series. This happened at the height of the charismatic movement, when many Christians were seriously searching for the Truth about supernatural gifts and spiritual things in general. My friend roomed with a girl who was of the same denomination, so they had some similar interests and knowledge about God, the Holy Spirit and spiritual things. What they did not have, though, was a clear and accurate understanding of this thing called “glossolalia” or tongues.
This subject of tongues is one of the areas we will get into in our teaching on the Gifts, and there are times when I wish that I could have been there to help my friend out of an embarrassing and disruptive situation back then. My friend and her roommate attended the same church together, as did the roommate’s mother. Having just been recently “baptized in the Holy Spirit” at some charismatic meeting and full of zeal, this roommate’s mother stood up in the midst of this church and began speaking in an unknown tongue. She thought -- and that will get us into trouble many times -- that what she was doing was spiritual, somehow being a “sign” to the people in that church. Well, it was a sign all right, but not the kind she had thought.
This church was a denomination which did not believe in spiritual gifts, and certainly not in some strange, unknown tongue. Needless to say, it was an embarrassment to my friend and of course the roommate, but beyond that it brought confusion to my friend. I remember when she came home from college, asking me questions about “what happened” and
“why”? But I was young in the things of the Lord, and even though I fully understood this thing of unknown tongues, I had no comforting words and no words of wisdom to satisfy her many questions.
But let us be very clear...what this woman did that day in that church was a grievous mistake, bringing confusion and harm to many and certainly no approval from the Lord on her actions. I knew it then, and I know it even more so today...this woman was clearly out of order.
There may have been a way to convince this woman’s daughter about the Truth of speaking in an unknown tongue, and there may have even been a possibility of this woman getting the chance to explain this spiritual phenomenon to my friend. There may have even been the rare chance that the Lord had intended for her to be a true witness and slowly and gradually bring this Truth to her entire church, but she “blew it”; she mis-handled the situation.
I have known of individuals in churches, patiently and carefully waiting for God to open the right doors, allowing them to move in at His speed, but this break-kneck speed with which we charge into some circumstances of our lives is more of a “killer” than a “life-giver”. We must be so very careful when handling the things of God, making certain we don’t tarnish them or misuse them or abuse them. As I have often said, we are accountable for all of our actions. Why do we pretend that we are not?
The Third thing: Misunderstandings...
In a small church we attended for the space of a year or so, we had a special speaker (one of the very rare occassions we had a guest speaker) come and teach us about some very simple Truths of God. He taught how to get to “know” God, what to do when you do know Him, including how to “treat your family with respect” rather than to dishonor and annoy them. He explained in great detail what to do and what not to do, regarding our families. One Sunday morning he very specifically and clearly said (and I stress this for a point),
“Do not harass your family or make them feel uncomfortable, but instead love them and show them love and then keep on loving them. Make them want to come to you to find out why you have so much love and so much peace in your lives.”
He was specifically addressing those people who had witnessed and prayed and done everything they could do to get their families saved, but nothing was working; no change and it seemed to only get worse. He specifically said, “Do not corner your families and force them to hear about Jesus Christ. You will only drive them farther away.”
As I said, he made it very clear and easy to understand. He didn’t speak in riddles or with mystery, and yet that night, after we all had returned for the evening service, one lady stood up at “testimony time” thanking him with big smiles and proudly proclaiming how she had gone home after his “great” message that morning and was so inspired she gathered all of her family together. And what do you suppose she did then? She forced every one of them to sit and listen, while she declared the “way of salvation” to each and every one. She had totally and completely missed the whole simple point of his words.
But she was happy and proud, because now none of them had an excuse to go to hell! “Misunderstanding” can not only be harmful for you...as in this case, it can also be harmful to your entire family. This is scary, when people who call themselves Christians can sit and listen for an hour or more and completely miss every ounce of Truth intended for them. Scary, indeed, which brings me to my final point...“kidnapping” in the Name of Jesus, and I’m not referring to people being snatched out of cults by de-programmers.
Finally: Kidnapping...
I once knew a young man who was very zealous for the things of the Lord, after he got saved. He witnessed and handed out tracts and read his Bible and prayed. He did all that he could to please God, and one day during a break from Bible School, he drove by his younger brother’s house to pick him up and take him for a ride. An innocent gesture; just a ride in the car. I believe he had promised to take him out to eat. Once inside the car, this young Christian drove his younger brother away, and he drove and drove until finally he had driven very far away from the younger brother’s house.
They were now by a lake, and the older brother drove around the lake several times and began telling the younger brother that, unless he gave his heart to Jesus, he would die and spend an eternity in hell. He pounded at him all the new spiritual Truths he had been learning, trying to be certain as to leave no “spiritual stone” unturned. He had a captive audience, for they had driven so very far from home, and now they were at some far-off lake. Yes...this young Christian did have his younger brother’s undivided attention.
Now the young Christian was around twenty-one years old and should have known better, but his zeal for God and the fear of his younger brother going to hell made him talk to his younger brother the way he did. The younger brother was around eighteen at the time, and he was old enough to be very upset at what his brother was doing to him. Needless to say, there was no “miracle conversion” in that car that day.
Years passed, with very little communication between the two brothers. The younger brother had resentment against his older brother for driving him off the way he did and talking to him the way he did. This resentment grew and grew over the years until it finally had prevented the brothers from even speaking. Meanwhile, the older brother was completely oblivious to his stupidity and insensitivity towards his younger brother. More than fifteen long years would pass before God finally opened up communications between these two brothers.
I tell this true story to make a point that I’ve been striving to make all along: That which we think is the right thing to do is not always the right thing to do (no matter how “spiritual” the plan may sound). That which we do is so very closely linked to what our motives are. It is the heart of why we do what we do. We must know our motives. This young Christian, for example, that kidnapped his younger brother...his heart was in the right place, but his actions were all wrong. He caused great damage, not only to the mind and psyche of his brother, but to their relationship as well.
Truthfully...without God, it could have been irreparable damage. But God is gracious and kind and forgiving, even when family members we may hurt are not. Being a zealot for God can be a very harmful thing. It can cause one to be impatient, unwise and even dangerous to the Kingdom of God.
I have prayed for these two brothers many times over the years, and I am so thankful to report that God has so graciously healed their relationship. It isn’t perfect, but it’s so much more than where the foolish Christian brother left it that day so long ago. God is so very good!
A lot of what I’m saying can be misconstrued as being a namby-pamby Christian; weak and even too passive. Some people will say that “this kind of a passive attitude” is what got America into the shape she is in today. No, dear saints, this is simply not the truth.
What has eroded the moral fiber of this Nation is the back-slidden, compromising, unrepentant, non-praying, soulish and carnal-minded Christians who believe they not only “know” Him, but they foolishly think their zeal and their tactics actually honor and please Him! Let’s look at the Word once more and see what else it says about such thinking.
Simon the Zealot
When Jesus called forth those whom He would teach to be His disciples, He called forth a rather diverse group of men -- fishermen, a tax collector, and hard-working, blue-collar types, except for one... one man who was somewhat of an activist. His name? Simon Zelotes, or Simon the Canaanite, or Simon the Zealot (see Matthew 10:4, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:15 & Acts 1:13).
Simon called Zelotes (dzay-lo-tace’), means “a Zealot, i.e. a partisan for Jewish political independence; jealous or zealous.” Not much is known of him, and it’s odd how the Gospels are so silent concerning this man who was a zealot for the Jewish nation. Some people think these zealots had taken a blood oath, swearing death on themselves should they ever fail to accomplish their goals.
What were their goals? Very simply: The overthrow and removal of the Roman government in Jerusalem and Israel, even to the death of Roman officials. We are not sure if Simon Zelotes was this kind of activist or not, and maybe the silence concerning him hides the fact that he was. Or maybe it is because the fact that Simon was a zealot also shows how very little (or no) interest the authors of the Gospels placed upon that kind of mindset or lifestyle. It is empty and vain and pointless. Christ had no room for it, and neither should we.
The zealots of today do more harm than they know, wreaking havoc and confusion and causing division and disharmony in the churches of America. We, as Christians, need to get a firm grasp on what it is the Lord would have us do. Then we need to learn the best and most honorable way to do it. My fellow brothers and sisters of the Lord...be bold, speak out, take a stand for the Lord. Never be ashamed to speak on behalf of Jesus for the things of righteousness.
Just let us be so very certain that we are walking in Christian Love, pleasing the Father in all that we do, glorifying Jesus in all of our actions and being careful not to grieve the Holy Spirit!
As far as the so-called Christian activists out there...
...These manipulative, controlling and domineering tactics have got to be cleaned out of the House of God. Either we can willingly and efficiently do it, or we can wait and let Him send His Holy Spirit into our midst to sweep clean the House of the Lord. Me...I’d so much rather do it first and do it right.
The Lord is gracious and He is patient, but the time has come, dear church, when we must cleanse out the old leaven. May God be merciful to us as we do. Even so, Lord Jesus, do be merciful.
Thank you, Christian brother or sister, for reading this “open letter”. Should you have any questions or comments concerning what I have written, please e-mail me here.
