Amateurs!

According to Dictionary.com, amateur originates from the Latin word for lover and means:

1. a person who engages in a study, sport, or other activity for pleasure rather than for financial benefit or professional reasons.
2. an athlete who has never competed for payment or for a monetary prize.
3. a person inexperienced or unskilled in a particular activity.
4. a person who admires something; devotee; fan.

In Luke 7:36-50, Jesus was invited to the home of a Pharisee for dinner. The Pharisees were the religious “professionals,” who worked hard to keep all the commandments and added more commandments just to be on the safe side. During the meal a woman who was known to be a sinner (often assumed to be a prostitute, but the Bible doesn’t say that) comes and washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair. Jesus uses her example to point out, “her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little” (v. 47). This woman, who was considered a religious amateur because of her lack of obedience to the law, was held up as an example to the professionals because of her love.

Growing up in churches of various denominations (because we moved frequently), I got the impression that Christianity was about obeying the laws of the Old Testament, especially the Ten Commandments. I knew from a young age that I was a sinner in need of repentance. I don’t remember ever hearing a clear presentation of the Gospel message—that we can never perfectly obey God’s standards and that is why Jesus came to die for us, so that by believing in Him we could be made right with God and considered holy in God’s eyes. Up until college, as far as I knew it was all up to me to be as good as I could and to confess my sins and hope that God would let me off the hook one more time.

I worked hard to be a professional Christian, not knowing that Jesus Christ is more interested in amateurs—those who know they can’t live up to the perfect standard but follow Him out of love. Even years later I find myself thinking “I should be better than this by now.” To paraphrase Brennan Manning’s words, “God expects more failure from you than you expect from yourself.”

In 1 John 4:19 we learn that “We love because He first loved us.” Working backward in that chapter, His love casts out fear of punishment (v. 18), we can have confidence before God (v. 17), we abide with Him daily (v. 16), and we love others with the same kind of love (vv. 7-12). When Jesus was asked to name the greatest commandment, He responded, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37-40). Christian faith is not about trying harder to be perfect, but about loving the One who first loved us and letting His love flow in and through us.

There is no call for religious professionals in the Kingdom of God. We are all called to be amateurs—for the love of God. The Apostle Paul threw away his religious credentials “because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8). Religiosity will tend to make us (like the Pharisees) think of ourselves more highly than we ought. But remembering that we are only saved because of God’s grace should make us grateful recipients and loving followers.

“For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that One has died for all, therefore all have died; and He died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for Him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Cor. 5:14-15).

© 2022 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images are copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

We the Church

As often happens, multiple books that I am reading have converged on similar ideas. This time it came from two books I received for Christmas and one I bought for the church library. See if you can spot the theme:

Sunny Side Up: The Breakfast Conversation that Could Change Your Life, by Dan DeWitt:

“[In John 21] Every time that Peter says, ‘I love you,’ Jesus tells him to feed the sheep. His question about Peter’s love is directly tied to his command to care for the sheep. But why can’t Peter just love Jesus and leave the sheep out of it? …Look back at Jesus’ conversation with Peter. Jesus didn’t tell Peter to love the sheep. He told him to feed the sheep: to take care of them. The love should follow. But even if it doesn’t follow right away, the command still remains… We can’t commit to loving God but refuse to love his people. These two great commands are forever wed together. And what God has joined together, let no one separate” (53-55).

Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community, by Brett McCracken:

“Many Christians today have no problem disengaging from local church life and instead opting for a largely ‘me and Jesus’ faith that only occasionally overlaps with the complex requirements of community… One of the ways Western individualism informs how we think about church is that we conceive of ‘fit’ in terms of how a church fits us…What if the biblical approach is actually that we should fit ourselves into the life and mission of the local church, adapting ourselves to the family and filling gaps where needed, even if that means we are the ones who have to change? We shouldn’t look for a church that will change to fit us. We should look for one where we will be changed to better represent Christ” (126-128).

Deep Discipleship: How the Church Can Make Whole Disciples of Jesus, by J. T. English:

“People are leaving the church not because we have asked too much of them but because we have not asked enough of them. We are giving people a shallow and generic spirituality when we need to give them distinctive Christianity. We have tried to treat our discipleship disease by appealing to the lowest common denominator, oversimplifying discipleship, and taking the edges off what it means to follow Christ” (8).

“According to Jesus [in Matthew 16:24-25], discipleship is not about self-actualization or self-preservation: it is about self-denial. You will know yourself the most when you are carrying your cross. All of our self-actualized visions of discipleship and our own little kingdoms need to crumble and be crucified if the kingdom of God is going to reign in our lives” (27).

Anyone who has been around church for very long has seen the national attendance trends and the apparent apathy of many who “love Jesus but not the church.” While we don’t want to embrace a legalism that says you have to attend every church service in order to be saved, the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme so that many people think that all that is necessary for salvation is a vague assent to the existence of God and perhaps the birth of Jesus Christ.

I won’t go into all the topics covered by these three authors, but I will ask some of the questions they raise: How can we claim to love God if we don’t love His Body, the Church? How can we love one another in the Church if we are only looking for a church to serve us and make us comfortable? How can we make disciples who truly love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength and love their neighbors as themselves (Mark 12:30-31)?

“If we have a great philosophy of ministry that does not lead us to the great God, then we are wasting our time” (English, 212).

© 2020 Dawn Rutan. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture are ESV and all images are copyright free from pixabay.com. The opinions stated do not necessarily reflect the views of my church or employer.

One Thing

I’m reading a book that quotes part of a day’s reading from the One Year Bible. Out of that reading, the following verses caught my attention:

• Deuteronomy 10:9 – “That is why the Levites have no share or inheritance among their brothers; the Lord is their inheritance, as the Lord your God told them.”
• Luke 8:18 – “Therefore consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has will be taken from him.”
• Psalm 69:32 – “The poor will see and be glad—you who seek God, may your hearts live!”

The thought occurred to me that we should live more like the Levites with an awareness that the Lord is the only inheritance we need. Jesus said the same thing about the rich man who stored up more and more grain: “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:20-21 ESV).

In some ways, those of us who live in the affluent western world are handicapped when it comes to trusting God and valuing Him as our greatest gift. We have so many other resources at hand that we don’t often need to trust Him very much. Why pray for daily bread when you have a piece of plastic that will buy all you need? Why seek Him for healing when there’s a doctor’s office on every street? Most of us expect to receive at least some inheritance from our parents, and families are often divided by fights over who gets what. The Apostle Paul frequently reminded his readers that we are heirs—“heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17). That is the only inheritance we really should be seeking. Yet we get caught up in materialism, commercialism, and self-sufficiency. It’s all about me.

How can we even begin to understand Jesus’ words in the beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12): “Blessed are the poor in spirit… those who mourn… the meek… those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… the merciful… the pure in heart… the peacemakers… those who are persecuted…”? Those traits are often the very things we try to avoid if at all possible, and even if we aren’t trying to avoid them, we aren’t actively seeking them out. (When was the last time you sought a reason to mourn?) In the parallel passage in Luke 6, Jesus is even more blunt: “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and week. Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.” That should make some of us a bit nervous! Anything that comes before God in our priorities is destined to cause us grief later.

John Piper shares this observation in Don’t Waste Your Life:

“Consider a story from the February 1998 edition of Reader’s Digest, which tells about a couple who ‘took early retirement from their jobs in the Northeast five years ago when he was 59 and she was 51. Now they live in Punta Gorda, Florida, where they cruise on their 30 foot trawler, play softball and collect shells.’ At first, when I read it I thought it might be a joke. A spoof on the American Dream. But it wasn’t. Tragically, this was the dream: Come to the end of your life—your one and only precious, God-given life—and let the last great work of your life, before you give an account to your Creator, be this: playing softball and collecting shells. Picture them before Christ at the great day of judgment: ‘Look, Lord. See my shells.’ That is a tragedy. And people today are spending billions of dollars to persuade you to embrace that tragic dream. Over against that, I put my protest: Don’t buy it. Don’t waste your life.”

As Curly in the movie City Slickers points out, we need to dedicate our lives to one thing and one thing only. He said everyone has to figure out that one thing for themselves, but Jesus said that for the believer that one thing has to be God. If we get that priority right, everything else will fall into its correct place (Matthew 6:33). He is our source of life today and our inheritance forever.

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:26).