#232-The People who noticed there was something "different" about you...

This post will be brief...And no it is not the post I promised in my previous post about "the Fortunate Son," but that's because I know some of my limits, and one of those is not to write about your target when you are angry....

One of the staples about an Apostolic defense of Holiness is the classic line about how a certain Apostolic woman was out and about, and some random stranger walked up to them and asked either A) if the woman was Apostolic or B) Pointing out that there was something different to said Apostolic Woman....

Now, the first previous response on my part is that what really stinks about such a testimony is that I, as a male, am excluded from such a delightful experience....Nor have I ever met an Apostolic Man who has testified of some onlooker noticing the "holiness" within the male...

Apparently God is a feminist who only lets woman enjoy the fruits of holiness and separation....

But there is something that isn't talked about amongst the people who testify about the random stranger at the store who noticed the "difference" of the Apostolic Female...

Does that observant stranger ever "get saved?"

Of course, I am sure there have been such instances of "Salvation" by clothing, but I would argue most of the instances I have heard of, wherein an Apostolic is noticed for their holiness...there is no "follow-up" testimony of the observant stranger going to church...

So what the Apostolic separation "difference" tends to result in is the observant stranger politely saying, "I see what you're doing, and I want you to know that I know that you are oddly dressed."

Don't believe me?

My sister, who has never cut her hair and always wears skirts to her public school has been the source of this revelation....

She has gone over countless instances with me through the years of how people have certainly noticed the Apostolic Difference, and then after finding out that aforementioned differences are a result of her dedication to God and her beliefs, the person gives a polite grin and not-so-slyly remarks about how that's either "really cool" (which really means "I will tolerate you") or more aptly says something to the effect of "oh, I would hate to be apart of your religion." (mind you these are high-schoolers, so such offensive remarks are the norm)

So these separation that is supposedly intended to "draw" people to God offends my sister of having any witness whatsoever....

This is quite similar (but on a wider scale) of my experience in high school wherein I would wear gym pants to gym class, and get called "pants" throughout the class and laughed at for my strange beliefs. It would be beneficial to note that while everyone wore shorts in my gym class, I was the one who was frequently "pansed" in class which basically means someone would come up from behind me and proceed to pull my pants down in front of the whole gym class to get a laugh out of my "holiness."

Now people normally would say that what me and my sister experience was the burden of holiness, and the cost of being different. I understand this. But for the life of me, I cannot recall one person being lauded to offend people out of wanting to come to church because of their holiness standards in the Bible....

To clarify, my dilemma is not against Holiness standards. It's simply a rant against the testimony that some Apostolics get noticed in public because of their holiness standards.....while it can be a good thing, it seems to be publicly received in my experience as a deterrent towards my witness...

And my last question is, are standards the excuse for some of us not to witness...since our witness is in our clothing?

#231-Liberal Youth Pastors (A Lament to why the liberal position within the UPC is simply a codeword for: "Apostolics who say much, believe in little, and spend their lives designing sermon artwork on a computer")

It's the Creedence Clearwater Revival week here on Sal which means music from one of my favorite 60's bands...

Something at the turn of the millenium went terribly wrong. I'm not precisely sure what it is, but I can guess:

Liberals Apostolic preachers started reading books.

And while we were taught all our lives about the immense reward for reading, I want to go back ten years or so ago and tell those liberal preachers "whatever you do, don't read a book."

And I mean it.

Because, it's not that reading is in itself bad...

But rather, Apostolics have an amazing ability to walk into any bookstore and somehow bypass all literature that could indeed change themselves or change the world, they manage to come out with the weirdest, overpriced Christian inspirational book there is because the author was the pastor of a megachurch, and the design of the book is eye-catching and the title of the book is offensive. Shocking. Disturbing. And almost always, the book promises to change your life or cause Holy Ghost fireworks, or make you see Christianity in a whole different light. All of this translates to in actuality is that the book offers just another spin on a certain Biblical verse, a life-altering habit that will enrich your walk, and a jaw dropping story to two.

In other words: The book will be the next young minister's sermon for a youth service or youth rally (if the book is long enough, it can be a preaching series making being a minister that much easier!)

Seriously, I have higher hope for a 4 year old to be a fan of the films of Bergman or Hitchcock before a Liberal Apostolic Youth Pastor is caught reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ayn rand, or Melville....

......

And just because I lost my train of thought watching the Tigers play baseball, I have decided to make a flow chart instead to calculate what exactly you should read if you are an Apostolic...

Basically the idea of being a liberal youth pastor involves whether or not you have the attention span to read.

If you don't have a good attention span, listen to a podcast of your favorite non-Apostolic preacher.

If you have a short attention span, and hate woman, you should listen to Mark Driscoll and also believe in predestination.

If you like woman, you should listen to a large number of other preachers depending if you want to be more theological oriented (e.g. John Piper) or want to be talk about helping poor people but doing nothing about actually helping (e.g. Rob Bell). ..

But if you want to think yourself of the educated type of youth pastor, read books with disturbingly large font that are under 200 pages that talk about how a certain, hip pastor was able to help the poor and watch his church grow three fold in church growth.

And then the actual books.... what do they end up actually doing? You know, those "fluff" books that I have been talking about? Well, all they do is make one feel guilty and cry about how little they are doing and condemn other preachers and peers for not reading those same books and therefore not feeling equally as guilty as the liberal youth pastor for being lazy and doing nothing. The best case in point: Francis Chan books. The dude is pretty cool, i suppose....

But what he does well is talk about how much of a burden he has for the lost and poor, etc....and how he actually did something about it. And then we as Hip, Apostolics read the book and see that we don't have the same burden as him which makes us cry and feel guilty so we can say we "finally" have a burden and now we can recommend Francis Chan to everyone, but after a month of reading the book and recommending it to all our friends, we have done nothing but whipped ourselves on the back for our lack of care...*I owe this point to fellow SAL writer Chady Hosin*

So essentially, all being a liberal UPC youth pastor tends to amount to is condemning conservatives for not caring about the poor (True) and reading books that make you feel insufficient, but in the end, doing nothing about it....

There is one more think that is frustrating about the Liberal UPC youth pastor, but that will come later on in the week...and here's the hint

Arise ye young generation....the Revival is at hand

Fin.

#230-Grace? (And this is what we can do when we are in love with ourselves aka as if we keep on doing this, I would rather join the Black Panthers).

Appealing to grace when all you do is pray and go to church is almost as bad as a Nazi defending the Holocaust by pointing out how much the German economy had blossomed in the first decade of it's reign of power, and how low the unemployment rates were during that same period.

Okay, I jumped ahead of myself.

The thing I LOL at more than gnostic Pentecostals these days is when people rail on Acts 2:38 plan of salvation as works-based and thus heretical .

(cue awkward music):


These people who argue that being Apostolic Pentecostal is the same as not understanding the love of God (because, they say God's love isn't earned)....

These people who argue that salvation is found in faith and faith alone.

These people who have hijacked the very definition of love and manipulated it to simply meaning tolerance of others who we were told to not like by our parents in the past.

These people who happily point you to Romans 3-4 and Paul's exposition of faith via Abraham and the book of Galatians...

These people who end up talking about grace and love, fluffy clouds and Care Bears when they talk about their Christianity...

These people....

Psst...

Such corruption of grace and love is one of the most reviling theologies this side of the Enlightenment.

This very "grace" is talked about as "freeing" and tolerant is no grace at all.

Rather such grace treats the cross as an absolute debacle in which the message of Christianity is manipulated into a doctrine of "You may, but you don't have to because your saved because you once upon a time closed your eyes and apologized for what you did."

Now before I rant on, let me be clear...

Talking of God's grace as a thing to be sought is just as pathetic as someone seeking tongues to be saved. Grace, like tongues is not to be sought. It is to be received.

The point for the grace-monger who flaunts grace as the trump card to why a non-Apostolic Pentecostal Christianity is better than an Apostolic Pentecostal Christianity is inevitably a wicked system that allows for indifference and apathy in the name of Christ.

One who flaunts grace surely does not know grace.

The ones who know grace are the ones who are militantly acting in response to the Grace and love received at the cross.

This is why there are two kinds of liberal, ex-Apostolic Christianity...the ones whose sole selling point is the one that is purely reactionary who sell a Christianity based entirely in preaching that Christianity "is not that hard" and do so under the banner of grace in which the results is a pahetic indifference to the cross since it's all based on "belief."

And then there are the liberal ex-Apostolics who actually believe in grace and love and thus works faithfully to such an Event as God dying on the cross....these people know at their core that Christianity is no "selling point." They just work without disdain towards their past.

On Paul...

Paul's anger at circumcision is because it was authorizing a religion that based salvation in something other than that offered through death and resurrection of Christ. The thesis of Romans is not about how salvation is faith-based. No. He was simply saying initial salvation is not based on merit, but subsequently it's not based on a simple mental consent that at one point in time Jesus died and was raised again. (Note: I went off into a page and a half rant here in my notes about Paul and faith, with positive praise here for Paul Tillich, David K. Bernard and Pauline Pneumatology...except this has nothing to do about grace...but if you want to know what I was referencing, please find a copy of Bernard's paper on soteriology or read Paul Tillich's History of Christian Thought and it's discussion of reformation and Lutheran theology. Both say about the same thing, and both annihilate the deadlock of the faith/works debate with logical dedication to the work of the Spirit in the matter (without finding themselves in a Calvinist "predestination" argument))...


But my rant amounts to this: The entire thesis of Romans then leads us to Romans 8 where we are LED by the Spirit in Romans 8. Being "Led" means we are in the process of being saved and through the cross, the GAP is opened up in each one of us to FOLLOW what the Spirit wants us to do in each one of us.

This means, that as outlined in Acts 2:38, to come upon Salvation, there must be Action in response to the Event of the Crucifixion. The Situation is Urgent and we indeed are to Work in Response to His Love. Our salvation is dependent on our Action (poo-poo this point all you want, but I have never known a love that doesn't search endlessly to demonstrate a loving response to the One whom they Love from the One who loves them). We as christians are not the Kings of the World, but rather the Servants to the World, ministering to the poor and those who are alienated and lonely from the same world which they were birthed from.

Rant

Christianity demands action. Grace is not at the heart of Christianity. Grace is subsequent to the Cross.

For Grace-Mongers, conservatives are the excuse to do nothing since taking action outside of displaying the fruit of the Spirit is a "work." (This is similar to the fact that for some monstrous Apostolics, the existence of backsliders and liberals is an excuse to do nothing except "be holy.")

The difference between the grace-monger and the Gnostic Pentecostal I spoke of last week is that the gnostics think they are doing something in their prayer but excuse themselves from actually doing anything within our material world. The grace-mongers just simply admit they are doing nothing and say "yeah we should do more, but Love Wins and thus we don't have to do anything."

Grace-mongers aren't actually speaking of Christ's love when they flaunt grace and love. They are talking about tolerance. That's the dirty secret us liberals don't want to tell the conservatives. Love for us (or them) is too hard a concept, especially when it says we have to LOSE OUR LIFE AND CARRY OUR CROSS. Love then for them is just an excuse to escape it's absolute dedication past going to church. This "grace" love just tries making Christianity palatable and mushy. That is, "grace" love is is weightless. And thus, this "grace" love ceases to be Christianity at all. Rather Grace-mongers heist the divine command for faithfulness to the cross in revolutionary upheaval of the powers of the world and replace it with an easy, moralistic positive humanism to which "loss," "death," and "obedience" to fidelity to the cross is cast to the seas.

I'm not saying Apostolics are any better off, but at least they still revere Christian Love enough to admit they aren't doing a good enough job with it.

Give me the Apostolic who sees the Love for your neighbor as yourself as a nearly impossible command to be pursued and thus tries it anyways over the liberal who thinks love means "politeness" and tolerance of the person as they stand in their nature.

For the Grace-monger, Christianity simply means having faith that Christ died and resurrected and in response we "love" our neighbors by asking them how their day went and giving five dollars to a homeless man here and there and saying "Grace wins."


The grace-monger will freely quote the phrase "work out your own salvation" conveniently forgetting the words at the end of the verse "with fear and trembling."

Now the accusation is that i am now a legalist or something to the effect...very well....my entire point of this post is that Grace should be the cause of our Action which is a response to that loving grace. To point to grace as an excuse to do nothing entirely obliterates what God's grace was intended for: To be reconciled so we can reconcile others.

Just as if proclaiming the Truth or Christ means nothing unless such declarations are actively lived out through dedication to redeeming and emancipating our Neighbor from the chains of bondage, death, and sin, so too, is proclaiming the grace of God useless unless it is lived out in a vigilant, never ceasing love in action.

Anything less than love accompanying our Truth, Grace, and our relationship with Jesus is pure delusion and self-flattery.

#229-Where do we go from here?

This is a very serious post. I didn't really mean for it to be, but it just happened. This has been on my heart now for what feels like an eternity, and I finally manged to write some of what I felt down. This isn't all that I feel though, but this was as concise as I could be for the time being. Just bear with me as I go solemn.

Just an aside after my first aside: but, I am posting this at work. Hopefully I do not get fired.

Now as we all know, Pentecostals, because they cannot wear jewelry or other fun things like colored nail polish, tend to go overboard on ordinary things like clothes and shoes. It explains why men have cutesy little bowties made out of floral designs and women have mounds of ruffles on their shirts, jackets, skirts, and purses.

I don’t really understand the ruffle. In my opinion, it causes one to look like King Louis XVI or his wife, Marie Antoinette. This, in and of itself, is disturbing because that bunch of royalty were known for their ridiculous extravagances and tendencies to ignore the little people of France. “Let them eat cake!” Marie Antoinette famously cried. Meaning that she was completely ambivalent about the people of France who were currently starving and wearing rags. The people have no bread? Let them eat cake.

This reminds me of today. Today is all about the “saved” generations staying saved and in their finery. “Let them stay lost!” we cry. Because in all honesty, who wants to take time to dirty their hands and win a soul? Who wants to take time to reach out to the community around them? No one. That would require us to step out of our ruffles. It would require us to look beyond our insipid, fleetingly attractive appearances and delve into a matter that is greater than ourselves. Basically, it would require us to stop playing dress up.

See, this is where I have such a problem with Pentecostals. We sing about “giving ourselves away so He can use us” (just a side note, but the lyrics of that song beg to be misinterpreted) or “coming back to the heart of worship, where it’s all about Him”, but have we really done that? Have we stepped outside our Pentecostal boxes?

Youth Congress of 2009 was about “Going Beyond the Normal” or some such inspirational nonsense. But when I went, I saw nothing but repetitions of the same vanities. I saw nothing that actually went beyond any kind of normal, except for the odd explorations into large flowers, ugly bowties, and skinny jeans.

I don’t really have a point to make here, except that if we cannot learn to cast aside our “ruffles” and throw ourselves, heart and soul, into what really matters, then the Revival that God has promised us will never happen. And we will sit in our pretty churches with our pretty appearances and die on the inside.

I want to do more than just make it to heaven. I want to win a soul. I want to do something for the Kingdom of God – more than ever, I want to be so consumed with doing the the will of God that I get to the point where nothing else matters. I don’t want to be worried about the number of ruffles on my skirt or if my shoes match my purse. Those mindless trivialities are not for the children of God and they are most certainly not for the unsaved world that has no idea about the love and purpose of Christ.

This post started off about ruffles and how ridiculous they are. In reality, a ruffle is just a ruffle. In the larger sense, however, it stands as a symbol of a much bigger outward problem. My question to you today is this: what will you do? What will you do as you sit here and read what I have to say? Will you go to another youth service? Will you seclude yourself into the four walls of your church and NEVER, EVER allow yourself to reach a lost world? Or will you move? Will you shake off the stupidity that we have cloaked ourselves with, forget about our failing attempts to keep up with the world, and then go after what really matters? Like maybe someone who needs God? Someone who needs a helping hand, a caring heart?

This is the generation that will carry us into the future. We have everything before us. The tools to reach out are literally within our grasp. So, I ask you. Where do you go from here?

#228-Jesus, the Drug and the Holy Ghost Infilling Announcer...

First, the post on grace, and liberals and other stuff that i promised is still coming. It's just in two of the posts I sounded like a pastor. And a pastor is the last thing I ever wanted to be. I was using words like justification, and grace and discussing Paul's theology, and it was just very uncomfortable for me. I need time to adjust...as I compromise my position and values...

Anyways, In the meantime, I remember a message as I was growing up, both in church, and on television (yes, I was one of those kids who was raised amongst episodes of the Simpsons and violent video games)...

The message was kind of obvious....



So all they thought they needed to do to keep us from doing drugs was crack an egg over a pan, and somehow we were supposed to take them at their word, that if you ever do drugs.... the next thing you know...

Your head will be broken up and you'll see you're brain scattered all over the cement in your last moments on earth, because you did drugs...

Or it got a little more complex...



Because now there were cartoon turtles telling us to not do drugs.

In church, it was a little more refined....

It went something to the effect of a middle aged man, telling us of his days in the world in Sunday School Class...

The strange man would elegantly speak on matters of his past, and the drugs he did, and the depression he found himself in. There would usually end up being some breakdown at the lowest of low points....perhaps the man tried committing suicide or he nearly overdosed, or Satan came and talked to him during one of his drug trips.....


All of this is right and well...

Drugs aren't good. The World is not good. Sin is terrible.

But then usually, in the testimonies, there would be a twist towards the end...

The Twist was something to the effect of Holy Ghost/Jesus being a better high than all the drugs they tried in the world...

God is the best of all Possible Drugs?

So thus when I was 9, every other kid in my Sunday School Classes was speaking in tongues like it was the easiest thing in the world, and there were pats on the back after the 5 or 6 year olds sobbed their little eyes and the nearby mother's bobbed their head in approval.

There was of course the Sunday School teacher all the kids loved, and it was that person usually designated to be the Holy Ghost Infilling Announcer...they would find the kids who appear on the brink of Holy Ghost Party in their Belly...and when that kid was selected (only the ones who had not spoken in tongues before), the announcer would bend down as if to descend like an Angel into the Holy Ghost Inferno waiting to happen.... (because when you're a kid, loved Sunday School Teachers are bigger than angels)...

.And when you, the praying child would stand there in the altar wondering how much longer this thing has to go on until the parents will be satisfied by your prayerful effort or until God finally remembers He had an appointment to enter into you 15 minutes ago and He is SOOO Late!...So when you wonder these thoughts for the 100th time in prayer you crack your eye lids open after wondering how much longer you gotta stand here, and you see that that LOVED SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHER is praying with you. There isn't a better motivator to seek GOd for all he's worth than seeing your favorite Sunday School Teacher's ear right in front of you with a smile the size of Texas across his face...

And kids would seem to go through this routine weekly....

And i was perplexed because i would run through this gauntlet on a monthly basis (usually whenever there was a visiting preacher because "visiting preacher" means "stronger God" for some reason), and I would not feel my tongue move one rumble outside of my own will...

but nonetheless i did know that when I got the Holy Ghost, and spoke in tongues I would experience the BIGGEST High of my life because that weird ex-druggier teacher told me the greatest drug in life is God... and God, the Drug, is LEGAL! Meaning I, little 9 year old me, wouldn't even get in trouble for trying that stuff...

Except when I finally got the H.G. (that's "Holy Ghost"), it was cool....

But i can assure you, my mental state did not ever enter into "Trip mode...."

The Holy Ghost got me a lot of approval amongst church folk, but I assure you....it was nothing close to what i imagined the greatest drug ever would be like...

So by the time I was ready to taste the world and I found out that the World wasn't completely "valueless" in terms of the resulted happiness and fun...

I was so ticked off at ex-druggie Sunday School Teacher, because the world was in fact fun....

And the vices of the world, in terms of the buzz I felt was greatly in "feeling" than the Holy Ghost....

And I didn't have to wait at the altar for a half hour to "feel anything."

This was the lie of my youth: The World-Not Fun. The Church-Fun.

So when I test the worldly waters, and find out they're fun, I very easily acknowledged that by comparison, the church was not fun whatsoever.

And I backslid, because some ex druggie turned Sunday School teacher had mistaken the high he felt in getting the Holy Ghost as what Christianity was about....

Oh but he was SOOO Wrong!

And this would be my message him back then if I knew then what I know now:



And this is not a rant against the Holy Ghost whatsoever. Because when you meet me i will talk your head off about the theoretical/Pauline implications of being baptized, and getting the Holy Ghost if you ask...

And nor am I saying that when the sunday school teacher, ex-druggie got the Holy Ghost, he didn't really feel as good as he said he did. No.

What I am saying and asking is, why are we putting the Holy Ghost and Christianity in conversation with the vices of the world, in terms of "which has a better buzz?"

The Holy Ghost is not a drug.

The Holy Ghost (although I could be mistaken) is never talked about in the Bible in terms of "Feeling."...or "the greatest happiness in the world." Or something to that effect.

Christianity is completely different and on a different plane than the drugs and vices of the World. And partly because I was raised as Christianity being "the best" drug/happiness/lifestyle/fun on earth, I got out of their so quick when I realized that in my own honest experience, the drugs/happiness/lifestyles/fun of the world were better than that of the claims of Christianity...

It was only when I realized that Christianity is not about comparison or "the better of the two options" but rather is on an entirely different foundation (e.g. God dying on the cross and resurrecting), then I could begin to "unlearn" the Holy Ghost as a drug, and relearn Christianity proper....