My Purpose Driven Life: 03/04/13 Monday – Day 12 – Values
The Purpose Driven Life discusses four secrets of developing a deeper friendship with God. This post is about #3: If you want a deeper, more intimate connection with God you must learn to honestly share your feelings with him, trust him when he asks you to do something, learn to care about what he cares about, and desire his friendship more than anything else.
The Purpose Driven Life suggests that this third secret is about valuing what God values: I must choose to value what God values. This is what friends do — they care about what is important to the other person. The more you become God’s friend, the more you will care about the things he cares about, grieve over the things he grieves over, and rejoice over the things that bring pleasure to him.
God has values; we also have values. I must choose to value what God values. And there is a major problem with that for me, which is that the four step process above begins with US, our being honest with God about our feelings. When we begin with us, we move from honesty (about what we understand) to obedience (to what we understand) to values (as we perceive them) to (finally) putting God first. Contrary to the basic idea of the Purpose Driven Life, this sequence is indeed “all about you” – and must be reversed if the principle is that it’s all about God. If we begin with God first, we’ll sit, patiently waiting to understand God’s values by listening to God; when we understand our values, then we’ll be working on obedience to them, and then honesty is about confession and repentance … because if we begin with God’s priority, we are going to fall short.
If we begin with our honesty, our understanding of what God desires is going to be limited by our understanding; we don’t fully grasp the mind and heart of God. But but our obedience is going to based on what we understand to be God’s instructions, and our values are going to based on that same faulty understanding of what we believe to be God’s values, and then we are going to finally prioritize our human understanding, instead of listening first to God with the assumption that God would wish to correct our faulty understanding before we begin to obey or value.
Carefully read through the criticism of Jesus in the four Gospels. We know that Jesus was sinless, but not in the minds of many of his contemporaries, including religious experts. Why? His values – from God – contradicted their human values. His instructions – from God – contradicted how they wished to live their lives. So they must have been right, and Jesus must be wrong. There is little doubt in my mind that if Jesus walked among us today, we in the church would be just as likely as they in our attempts to correct Jesus’ misunderstandings of what religion and spirituality is truly about.
There’s a famous saying: “Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God.” Until we spend some time submitted to God, we don’t have a clue what breaks the heart of God. But if we read the Gospels, and trust that Jesus knew the heart of God, we can see two realities: first, that what broke the heart of Jesus certainly breaks the heart of God. Second, that most people of that day did not understand at all what broke the heart of Jesus, or what breaks the heart of God.
We have an immature understanding of God’s values. Typically, in an childish understanding of values, everything is clearly right or clearly wrong, black or white, either/or, good or bad … the idea of a grey area between extremes is an adult understanding that life is not so simplistic. Typically, the values we give to God are simplistic, and they bear little relationship to the teachings of Jesus.
The Purpose Driven Life advises us to move forward from our being honest, to obeying, to prioritizing God’s values, and on to making God our priority. In each case, we will be attempting to go deeper with God on the basis of our limited understanding. But if we reverse these four steps, then we put God first, and from that position we learn God’s values, the how to be obedient, and then be honest about our failures. The major problem in religion, for all time, has always been that people have dared to speak for God and tell others that they don’t measure up based on their human understanding of God’s values. That’s the pharisee problem, one of many Jesus attempts to correct in Matthew 23: “They bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger.” (Mat 23:4).
I’m convicted a bit by what Jesus says in Matthew 9:11-13: And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.” No one in 33 years of full time ministry has accused me of spending too much time with sinners, but perhaps it’s because I’m not valuing what God values, or obeying the examples Jesus set.
The fact is that whenever we judge someone, if we take Jesus seriously, some of that judgement will fall on us. As a human being we cannot understand the depth of the mercy of God, so we are always drawing lines in the sand … God can forgive up to here, but no further! We have no right to speak for God; let God be the judge, and let’s be humble.
If you want to understand what God values, then obey what Jesus instructed: Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ If we begin to study God’s mercy, especially in the life of Jesus, our human values are going to change radically.
Just to give you an example of how the reality of what Jesus might do always catches us by surprise, I’d like to invite you to listen to Tony Campolo tell this story of how he came to help organize a birthday party in the middle of the night at a diner in Hawaii. The complete story is here, on video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRBM_YY_YX0.
Here’s the conclusion of the story: So, I finally said, ”What do you say, we pray?” It’s weird looking back on it now. You know a sociologist leading a prayer meeting with a bunch of prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning in a diner. But, it was the right thing to do. I prayed that God would deliver her from what dirty filthy men had done to her. You know how these things start - some ten, eleven, or twelve-year-old girl gets messed over and destroyed by some filthy man and then she goes downhill from there. And men use her and abuse her. I said, ”God, deliver her and make her into a new creation because I’ve got a God who can make us new no matter where we’ve been or what we’ve been through.” And I prayed that God would make her new.
When I finished my prayer, Harry leaned over the counter and he said, ”Campolo, you told me you were a sociologist. You’re no sociologist, you’re a preacher. What kind of church do you belong to?”
In one of those moments when you come up with just the right words, I said, ”I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for whores at three-thirty in the morning.”
I’ll never forget his response. He looked back at me and he said, “No you don’t, no you don’t. I would join a church like that!”
Wouldn’t we all? Wouldn’t we all like to belong to a church that threw birthday parties for whores at three-thirty in the morning? Well, I’ve got news for you. That is the kind of church that Jesus came to create. He came to bring celebration into people’s lives that have had nothing to celebrate…
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