Francis Chan :: Fighting Hypocrisy In the Church

Fighting Hypocrisy In the Church
This is an audio message by Francis Chan.  Take a listen and check out more sermons on Sermon Index.

Youcef Nadarkhani's Execution Expected Wednesday or Thursday

 Youcef Nadarkhani is expected to be executed as early as Wednesday (9/28/11) or Thursday (9/29/11) according to several sources.

As discussed earlier, Youcef's case was to be re-examined, Sunday, September 25th, 2011.  During this court appearance, Youcef was given the opportunity to recant his Christian faith, to which he responded,

"Repent means to return. What should I return to? To the blasphemy that I had before my faith in Christ?"
"To the religion of your ancestors, Islam," the judge replied, according to the American Center for Law & Justice.
"I cannot," Nadarkhani said.

Youcef has been given four "opportunities" to recant and escape his death sentence of being hanged by the Iranian government.  He has stood strong for Christ telling the court each time that "he cannot." Many are expecting his execution to be enacted at any moment given the unpredictable nature of the Iranian government.

FoxNews.com has also reported today (9/28/11) on Youcef's current status and has also included statements by House Speaker John Boehner.  Boehner had this to say,

[Youcef's case is] "distressing for people of every country and creed."

The State Department declined to comment to FoxNews concerning Youcef's case.

Please be in prayer for Youcef, his family, and the underground church in Iran as well as for the nation itself.  Today and the next few days are critical.  Urgent prayers are needed on his behalf as well as on the behalf of all persecuted peoples world wide.

I Prayed Some Heresy Today...

Today our West Blocton HS teens bury their friend, school mate and family member...

Pamela and I lay in bed last night after our Emerge Twenty-Something Bible study looking at our phones (Facebook, of course) in the dark, just reading and not saying a word to each other.  Neither of us told the other what we were doing, but we were both doing the same thing.  We were reading our teens' Facebook pages.  Not that Pamela and I have teens ourselves, per se, but we have a whole gaggle of them from our youth group REVOLVE!Student Ministry. We were reading their comments about their friend.

I finally broke the silence, "It's not fair, is it?"
"No, it's not," she sort of whispered back into the darkness of our room.

Both of us were hurting for our teens so we posted a couple of statements onto their walls to let them know we were praying for them and thinking of them.  It seemed small.  The prayers seemed small. 

I half feared that the tragic events would turn these guys -- not necessarily our students but the school friends, though I worry for our students as well -- away from God instead of to Him. (I half worry that confessing my thoughts of this here in this blog will spark the idea itself as if it hadn't been conceived in their minds already.)  If I, in my theological prowess, struggle with the fairness of it all, how would they not be struggling with it already too?

So I got up this morning and prayed some heresy...

Rob Bell's book, "Love Wins" has taken a lot of rightful hits and largely negative critique because of it's promotion of universalism -- the idea that all roads lead to God regardless.  Its heresy is seen as so dangerously influential that my far away hero, Francis Chan, wrote a response to it called, "Erasing Hell". 

The premise of Bell's book is to say that no matter how people lived their lives, or how they believed spiritually, that God's love is so strong, and so irresistible, that, even if He is rejected in this life, He will ultimately be accepted in the life to come.  The implications -- dangerous as they are mind you -- are that no one ultimately misses Heaven. (Notice here how I can't even bring myself to type the phrase "goes to Hell". "Misses Heaven" is such more more palatable and acceptable to our sensibilities.) 

So this morning, I prayed that this young guy who lost his life this weekend gets a pass.  Here's my prayer in a nutshell:

God I know the rules.  There's only one way to You.  I don't know what was in his heart, but I'm asking You to bend Your rules for Him if he didn't know You.  Please bend the rules... or let there be rules that we don't know about on earth; and that because of those unknown rules he gets to know you regardless.  Let Your love ultimately win out.

 I don't know this guy's heart, so this isn't a judgment on his eternal state of being.  The fact that I don't know, however, is what unnerves me.  I pray that he knew Christ, and now knows Him in peace and comfort and in eternal rest.  The thing, too, that bothers me is that he came to our youth service a couple of times.  My blood runs cold when I wonder what we did on the nights he visited.  Did I do my normal, stupid youth pastor junk that makes kids like me and coming to church?  Did we goof off and not get through our service because of other stuff?  Was the Word that night a side note to all that was going on? Or was there anything of substance that the Holy Spirit could use moments before impact in the back seat of a teen driven car? 

God help me?!

It's sobering to think that at any moment we're meeting people for the last time.  So I prayed a bit of heresy, and I don't think that God minds, because He knows how we're struggling to make sense of what seems so unfair.  I prayed a bit of heresy because I'm afraid ...my hands are actually trembling and my eyes are starting to sting at the corners because of tears that want to come at the next statement... I'm afraid that I didn't do my job very well the night he visited our group.  I don't know that for sure, but it scares me nonetheless.

God, you grant heretical requests, right?  For once, please, I hope you do... if this heretical prayer of mine is actually needed.  In the future, I can't hang my hopes on heretical praying.

Youcef Nadarkhani's Case to be Re-examined...

Youcef Nadarkhani: Iran

This morning (Friday, September 16th, 2011) The Voice of the Martyr's updated their Facebook status to report that Youcef Nadarkhani's case will be "re-examined" on Sunday, September 25th, 2011.  Here's what their status update said:

Youcef Nadarkhani is in an Iranian prison under a death sentence for apostasy.  Court is to "re-examine" his case on Sept. 25. Pray for justice for Pastor Youcef.

 Please pray for Pastor Youcef.  In previous updates of mine, I have outlined how I've been praying but I encourage you to pray as God's Spirit would lead you.  Pray for his justice, his salvation, his wife, his children; pray for the underground church in Iran and pray that those that don't know Christ in that country would be saved. 

The Nadarkhani's

I can't imagine what Youcef is going through and am so thankful that we get to worship freely here in America.  However, we shouldn't take these freedoms for granted.  Ever.  As an encouragement, don't get comfortable and complacent in your relationship with Christ.  Always push for closeness, even when it's easier to just coast along.  Reflect on the realities of our relationship with Christ; this world isn't our home, so don't cling to it like it's all we have.  Embrace the suffering of others in prayer and petition to God on their behalf.  Take nothing of our spirituality for granted, but be happy in Him and find a deep inner joy that comes only in knowing Christ and that, in Him, He has saved us from our sins!  We now are His, if we trust in Him.

Asia Bibi: Pakistan

Please keep praying for Youcef Nadarkhani.  Please keep praying for Asia Bibi as I have updated information in the past on Facebook concerning her situation.  Don't stop calling out to God on their behalf! These, sadly, aren't the only people being severely persecuted, by the way.  They are the ones that, for some reason, I've felt a personal need to pray for specifically.  I keep praying for all the others, but pray for these in particular as God's Spirit leads me.  Prayer is the key in all that they endure.

Shadow of Insecurity...

Insecurity keeps everything pushed away at truths length,
Albeit our perceived truth,
Which, frankly, may not be truth at all.

After all,
We're seeing through insecurities...

Finding love in Surety that doesn't waiver or break,
When we're vulnerable or when we're strong,
Renders impotent our tendency to be fake.

Then we become who we are
And not the shadow of our insecurity.

Scared of Confession...

What are we scared of when we hear the word confession?  What do we have to hide?  A lot.  Why do we have to hide it?  Because we're scared of what it means to be vulnerable, rejected, alienated, hated, flawed.  Why, then, if God hasn't given us a spirit of fear, would He ask us to do something that scares us to death -- to confess our sins to each other?

We aren't afraid to confess to Him, normally.  Most of our ingrained theology tells us already that He knows everything about us and that nothing is, or can be, hidden from Him.  So telling Him what He already knows takes some of the pressure off of us.  We know from Him, we are accepted.  He knows how to loves us with all our flaws and sins that the religious elite around us would scoff and count us out for. (Perhaps they are hiding greater sins?)

I wonder how many people I've counted out because of their sins?  I wonder how many sins that I've committed and and not counted that make theirs' pale in comparison?

What are we scared of?  Our reputations being ruined?  Rejection? Or how about growth?  Spiritual maturity?  When is the last time we confessed our sins to a friend?  When was the last time a friend confessed their sins to us?  How did we handle that?  With love?  A listening ear?  Gossip?

A wise man once said, and very recently I might add, "That if we can't confess our sins to the community, then the community isn't much like Christ." 

I'm convinced that God isn't much pleased with our hiding.  Think of Eden... they played a child's game with the Creator too, of hide-and-go-seek.  He's good at that game.  He has a way of finding us, exposing our inner wounds that will kill us, and then healing us.  We've been hiding since Eden first taught us that particular game.  He's been seeking us ever since as well.  Much of this hide-and-seek can be avoided, if we were more like Christ, less Pharisaical, and a lot more humble, transparent and trustworthy. 

Perfect love casts out our fear of His punishment.  Our love should be more like His then.  Others should be relieved of their fears of confessing because our love is like His.

Not On This Soil...

Lights of 9/11 Memorial

This September 11th, marks 10 years since that unbelievable morning.  It's hard to believe that it has been 10 years.  I remember it so vividly still.  I remember where I was standing and where I prayed in my office next to my desk in disbelief.  I remember having the feeling of, "We're under attack!" as the plans seemed to continue to bombard our country in flaming torrents of terrorism.  I remember the panic of everyone, and the uncertainty of everything going on, of that moment.  I remember just wanting to go home from my office in Birmingham, Alabama and wanting to be with my wife, Pamela, and six month old son, Caleb.  I didn't necessarily feel that we were under any immediate danger being in Birmingham per se, but the feeling of uncertainty and the heightened sense of fragility and vulnerability were unmistakable.

At that time, there was an arrogant sense that this couldn't happen here... not on our soil, not to us, not to Americans.  That feeling has changed.  Now the sentiment is more like, "When this happens again on American soil," as we've come to expect another, possibly multiple, attacks in our future.  The question of attacks has changed from "if" to "when".

Perhaps it wasn't so much arrogance, but more of naivety and a false sense of security.  Not on American soil... was the sentiment of September 10th; the eleventh, however, changed that forever.  Now in the back of our minds is the numb anticipation that a break-in news cast will again interrupt our "Good Morning America" lifestyles with news that we are yet still penetrable and vulnerable to terrorist attacks despite our best efforts to protect ourselves.

Uncertainty Is All Around Us

Hurricane Katrina Aftermath

Recently, we were jostled from the sleep that we had seen our last Hurricane Katrina when it came in crushing tides of tornado after tornado in April of 2011, ripping our neighbors and loved ones from our very lives.   I wonder if in March of 2011 Japan said, "Not here, not on our soil," when they were crumpled to rubble by an earthquake and the still looming nuclear uncertainty of all those exposed to the radiation that followed it?  Haiti is still in ruins, and billions of dollars could not save Port Au Prince.  Years after the Haitian earthquake there is little change from the destruction that rocked them.  I wonder if the Haitians said in their bewilderment, "Not on our soil"?  Our eastern seaboard was shaken by its own earthquake and a tropical storm that swamped the southeast.  Iowa and the Midwest were flooded and so much damage flowed from the flood's own wake.  Our economy is teetering at best, and will not be able to withstand our borrow/spend policies followed by our government.  Yet we keep borrowing and spending like the astronaut from the movie "Armageddon" who was convinced he wouldn't survive their mission to the meteor.  Eventually, even after saving the world, he had to face his mob-boss-creditors and would experience his own "judgment day" as perhaps we will too.

Not On Our Soil... But Why Not?  

Are we so much different from the rest of the world who lives daily in fear that a rocket from terrorists in Gaza or guerrillas in Somalia are going to permanently maim their children, themselves or their friends and neighbors? Why are we any different when radical Islam hails us as the Great Satan and are on a mission from "god" to destroy us or convert us?  We have had it so good here for so long, and I wonder if we've taken that for granted?

9/11 Flag amidst rubble

September 11th awakened us to the stark reality that September 10th is no longer a possibility.  We are also, sadly, well removed from the unity we experienced on September 12th.  Now, on this soil, we live with the with the quiet, numb remembrance of that horrible morning and we mustn't any longer live with the naive arrogance that this cannot happen on our soil.  The attacks on September 11th set the bar high for would-be terrorists all over the world to recreate and "one up" such an event that struck our two iconic symbols of wealth and prosperity, and it empowered them by showing that even our military power and might has a penetrable underbelly when it struck the iconic symbol of both power and might, The Pentagon.

On That Heavenly Soil...

We must remember those who have given their lives.  Pray for them.  Honor them.  Love and respect them.  But our answer doesn't lie in well placed patriotism or even in heroically honorable civic servitude.  It lies solely in the hands of the loving, merciful God-Jehovah.

If we turn completely to Him in trust and unwavering commitment, then no matter what may befall our nation, our world or our families our souls will be forever secure not on earthly soil that sees destruction daily and woes are ever increasing, but on that Heavenly soil... where nothing given to God in Christ can ever be lost.