Often times, as Christians, we get this mentality that it’s our job to fix people. That mentality is fueled by two ideas: 1) that we can see a person’s life objectively and 2) that we can judge sin. Most time we don’t process it this way, but if we were to dissect our motives – then we’d know it to be true. But never once in scriptures are we called to fix people. Share the Good News? Yes. Show love and compassion? Yep. Fix people? Not once. If this is true then why we defaultly fall back on lecturing and preaching at people. It doesn’t work, so why do we do it?
What am I getting at? Well, in my latest clash with Pharisees, one of our students was being shackled by judgment – a harsh hand for something they did. Were they wrong? Sure. Do they know it? Yes. And in watching two people react to this student my eyes were really opened. One adult decided to lecture the young man pointing out the many ways his life has gone wrong. They wanted to convince him of their own rightness. This adult had not earned the right to speak into this student’s life.
The second person approached the young man very differently. This adult had been journeying with the student for quite some time. The first adult had not. The second adult had a conversation with the student; not lecturing or shaming them, but pursuing their heart. Through their conversation life change happened. The lecture just resulted in hardness of heart.
If journeying with a person works. If Christ’s example says that journey is the way… then why do we do it any other way? So many times we use the Bible or tradition or our own self-righteousness to separate us from others. It is used to fuel this air of judgmentalism (‘you’re sinful and I’m not’) which births this lecturing mentality. This way keeps us clean. It keeps us pious. And it keeps our hands from getting dirty. We ultimately remain in control.
To journey with people, we simply walk humbly with the Lord and invest our lives into others. With journey we are forced to be on God’s time table. It takes time and we have no control over situations or people that we encounter. Journey facilitates openness, authenticity, fragility, brokenness and a deeper love that we can experience alone. The lecture keeps an ‘us and them’ mentality that will always keeps us apart and we were never meant to be apart.
If we don’t journey with others in Christ, living loving, investing, then Gospel you live out is no longer the good news to those around you. It becomes a wall when it was meant to be an open hand. An open hand reaches out to others. An open hand accepts help. An open hand joins with someone else’s hand because the gospel was mean to be that way.
A fool lectures thinking they have it all figured out. A wise man knows he isn’t wise and has compassion for the one who has stumbled knowing they have stumbled too. Life is a journey that is out of our hands, out of our control, and beyond our understanding. So let us journey together, humbly together reaching out to the one who is in control and wants to journey with us.
We can tell people the right answers, but if we are unwilling to journey with them our words are meaningless… and so are our intentions.
I’m not sure how much is accomplished (or ever is) in debates like these, but both are well spoken and enjoy a good fight. If you don’t have an hour to invest, scroll over about half way to the Q & A session. That’s when the sparks start to fly.
Not sure how I feel about this upcoming documentary, but it seems interesting to say the least. Keep your eyes opened, it should be making the rounds. They’re trying to promote this in churches, but I’m not sure many will bite. Though, it should spur some interesting conversation.
One of my more popular posts has been my review of Acquire the Fire. I continue to get feedback arguing with my opinion of the event. So instead of continuing to defend my stance that youth ministry should be more pursing Christ than a wicked-awesome (pronounce with thick Bostonian accent) entertainment extravaganza, I’ll let Mr. Mike Yaconelli speak for me:
“If I witness one more Jesus cheer, if I hear one more “let’s have a hand/round of applause/praise offering Jesus,” if I have to endure one more pep rally for Jesus, I’m returning my youth ministry I.D. card. Because as much as we criticize and complain about our media-ravaged society, as much as we rant about the evils of MTV and pop culture, we’ve imitated them by rushing to create the world’s biggest youth event.
At these events we parade around and glorify all things “beautiful” - the dazzling musicians, the laser shows, the foxes and studs for Jesus. At these events we mesmerize young people with how “cool” Jesus is. These pep rallies give teens the illusion that God is cool, that God is winning, that God is the majority - and that their ministries and youth leaders are cool, too. But what these don’t dare say that the even cool, dazzling, “beautiful” youth workers are screwed up, broken and consistently in need of God’s grace.
So rather than cheering our young people into the kingdom, maybe we should point them to the broken, inconsistent, uncool followers of Jesus found in the Bible. Maybe we need to stop pressuring our young people to cheer long enough to prepare them for a world in which the real heroes are powerless, tiny, and considered insignificant. - Mike Yaconelli
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