"The Refiner's Results"

Dec.7/03 Mal.3:1-4 Php.1:3-11

Christmas is a'comin'...with "The Rebel Jesus"?

What would you do if you were driving along the road and a song came on the radio that was about YOU? And there was a touch of critique...would you listen? We need feedback and correction from others in order to grow in character and refine our habits. For the Christian church, secular songwriter Jackson Browne has written a piece called "The Rebel Jesus" which questions all the hoopla about Christmas. Last week driving back from my course at Emmanuel Bible College it came on the radio and got me reviewing just why the Messiah came - and what this agency He began called the church is doing about it.

      What can God teach us about needed refinements through a song from outside our boundaries? The first stanza starts amicably enough, like any pleasant modern seasonal piece: "All the streets are filled with laughter and light / And the music of the season / And the merchants' windows are all bright..." Then it refers to gathered families "Giving thanks for God's graces / And the birth of the rebel Jesus." REBEL Jesus? Hm, that's different. But so far it seems sympathetic to Christianity.

      The second stanza gets a little more testy. Christians are criticized for filling "his churches with their pride and gold..." and turning "the nature that I worship in / From a temple to a robber's den". Yes, we must admit there is a lot of money tied up in our ancient and modern cathedrals, from Notre Dame to Willow Creek. While believers have no doubt been a part of Western consumerism which has taken an environmental toll, Browne is pushing it if he's trying to lay all the blame for pollution and the depletion of natural resources at the feet of the church. But he's got us on our guard now.

      The third stanza is most critical of our materialist mindset, and how the celebration of Christmas gets tinged by greed. The lyrics speak of us guarding our possessions with locks and guns, then "once a year when Christmas comes / We give to our relations / And perhaps we give a little to the poor / If the generosity should seize us..." Honestly, most families, Christian or non-, would have to plead guilty here: the vast bulk of expenditure is on our own kin, not those who are most needy in our world. Browne even suggests that those who try to interfere in the factors keeping people poor "get the same as the rebel Jesus" - stiff opposition. Not many pulpits or churches make concerted organized efforts to affect the social order, religion is not supposed to be political in many people's minds. The poet does highlight the contrast between the way the world runs and how Jesus operated. In his last stanza he offers a polite apology if he has seemed judgmental. He acknowledges the need for "anything that frees us" "in this life of hardship". The song closes with wishes for pleasure and cheer "From a heathen and a pagan / On the side of the rebel Jesus." Quite an interesting juxtaposition - calls himself a "heathen" yet on Jesus' "side"? Seems to be implying that Browne sympathizes with our Founder's original sayings and intent, yet would distance himself from the workings of the present-day church.

      Through secular art such as this, Christ's church is offered a glimpse at itself in an imperfect mirror. Flaws are exaggerated and much is missed. Yet our critics may unwittingly be agents God uses to refine us, to call us back to our original mission when we're getting off track.

Messiah Comes for People...

Advent means "coming". Why did Christ come? What brought the Hebrew Messiah to earth if not simply to be a "rebel", or so we in the wealthier churches of the world would have an excuse to exchange unneeded gifts once a year? Basically, the Messiah comes for PEOPLE: people of Passion, of Purity, and in Partnership.

      Malachi was the final prophet whose sayings we find in the Old Testament. He served about 430 BC, roughly a hundred years after the Jewish exiles returned from Babylon to rebuild Jerusalem, the temple, and their way of life. Since the Temple had been completed, religious life had settled into a rut; people were going through the motions without enthusiasm. They found themselves trying to cut corners when it came to the offering. They were also forgetting the law of Moses, and adopting some customs of other nations. Malachi burst onto the ho-hum scene announcing that God was not pleased with this lackadaisical attitude towards spiritual matters. The Lord was looking for sincere relationship with people, and was about to do something about it.

      Malachi 3:1 says, "suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come...the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come..." Advent refers to God's arrival on the scene - not INvent, something we humans made up, but ADvent, the Lord Almighty's coming to us. What will be the outcome? V3 "Then the Lord will have MEN [people] who will bring offerings in righteousness..." The message of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is that God seeks to establish covenant relationship with the creatures called humans. "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son..." (Jn.3:16) Advent is this giving, this arrival of Jesus to make possible a God-to-person, one by one, reconnection. Christmas didn't happen so churches would be built that we could fill with our "pride and gold" [even if we DO think Living Water is the best around!] - Christ came to find and have PEOPLE: "For the Son of Man came [WHY?] to seek and to save what was lost." (Luke 19:10) That's our focus because that's God's focus: not programs or property but people, souls that are bound for eternity with or without a Saviour.

      The apostle Paul, writing to the church at Philippi, reveals this same motivating urge when he says, "I have you in my heart...God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus." (Php.1:8) Eliminate any thoughts you might have of Jesus as cool, distant, reserved and uncaring: the Father's love motivated Him for ministry His whole life long. God is intensely concerned with YOUR individual development. YOU are His project, His interest, not castles in Spain or theme parks in the Carolinas. Php 1:6 notes, "He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." You matter to the Creator of the Universe: your personal growth is at the top of His agenda. When Jesus comes back, the incredible thing is we'll be LIKE Him; the celebration banquet in eternity revolves around the people God saved, those who've entrusted their lives to Him.

...People of Passion...

As prophet, Malachi warned those who acted as if they didn't really care about God. Their indifference was showing up in the poor quality of animal that they were bringing to be sacrificed as an offering. 1:8 illustrates the contempt they were showing for the altar: "When you bring blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong? When you sacrifice crippled or diseased animals, is that not wrong? Try offering them to your governor! Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you?" says the LORD Almighty." 1:13 says their attitude to worship was summed up in the words, "What a burden!" Elsewhere they are criticized for not honouring or revering God's name (2:1; 4:2).

      Even the priests and Levites, the religious officials, had grown indifferent to the things of God. In 2:5-6 the Lord reminds them how they got chosen to serve Him in the first place, what kind of passion their ancestor Levi had in following Him: "he revered me and stood in awe of my name.True instruction was in his mouth and nothing false was found on his lips.He walked with me in peace and uprightness, and turned many from sin." Levi cared about God's reputation, it mattered to him to have the Lord's insight and direction on topics. He walked with God.

      Unless we set aside time with the Lord for reading the Bible and praying each day, we atrophy, we shrivel into spiritual wimps. A regular daily quiet time is one way of saying "I care" to God, it's a barometer of your spiritual passion. What if in the new year I challenged you to set aside a one-month period for a personal retreat with God? Would you shake your head and say, "That's just not feasible!"? New Man magazine points out that by getting up half an hour earlier every day, over a year we'll have gained a whole week of extra time that can be put to best use. Actually that's more like a month, 4½ 40-hour work weeks! Perhaps the most important and monumental sacrifice you'll make for the Kingdom is deciding to turn off the TV or whatever earlier and just going to bed so you can be sure not to miss the Maker's daily appointment.

      You can be sure God cares whether you care. In 3:16 Malachi records, "Then those who feared the LORD talked with each other, and the LORD listened and heard.A scroll of remembrance was written in his presence concerning those who feared the LORD and honored his name.'They will be mine,' says the LORD Almighty, 'in the day when I make up my treasured possession.'" God takes note - hard copy! - when we act with regard for Him.

      In the New Testament, what does Paul pray for the church? Php 1:9, "that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight..." Jesus wants followers who are passionate for Him and for others, loving, concerned about spiritual things. Nurture your passion for God. Dwight Small addressing loneliness writes, "no other human person can perfectly share the secret of the inner self. God alone can perfectly enter into our deepest thoughts and feelings. Each person's life is ultimately bound up to God alone, whether one would have it that way or not. Only God can know the fears and anxieties that dwell in the inner citadel of the soul. Only He can know the longing after goodness and the heartbreak over sinful failure. Only He can know the true hopes and ambitions which motivate one's life. Only He can know the compulsions which control an individual person. Yes, one's real life is shut up to God alone, whether one chooses it that way or not."

      God's passionate about you...cultivate your passion, your thirst for Him; He'll call you "mine", you're His "treasured possession".

...People of Purity...

After weeks of late-fall rainy gloominess, we've been blessed with a fresh white blanket of snow. It's beautiful to look out on a crisp cloudless sunny day and see the purity of an expanse of snow bouncing up at you and brightening your surroundings. The freshly-fallen type is quite different that the exhaust-and-grime-covered banks that border city streets later on in the winter. Yet what makes one sparkle and the other not? Take away the light and both types would look the same. The brilliance then does not come primarily from the purity of the snow itself but from the light. Purity then is secondary to passion. Woe to the church if we lose our love for God and become focussed only on narrow morality; that results in self-righteous pride which songwriting prophets would be quite right to criticize.

      We don't seek purity for its own sake; purity is important because it's a by-product of not having anything that would interfere with our relationship with our Maker. Because we want to maintain a close relationship with God, we set up safeguards and boundaries to protect against sin's intrusion. Taste the enjoyment of a close walk with the Lord and you'll want to avoid anything that might sabotage that.

      Malachi prophesies that Jesus' return will be "like a refiner's fire or a launderer's soap.He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver." (Mal.3:2f) V5 mentions that God will be quick to judge sorcerers, adulterers, and perjurers - these involve an impurity of faith, of marital fidelity, and of speech. 2:11 calls detestable those Jews who married foreign women who worship idols. And a few verses later God laments the divorce that's happening, "breaking faith with the wife of your youth." Impurity of any kind in the sexual area undermines the covenant God designed to give us secure homes and families. It's refreshing to see the statement on marriage recently issued by our denominational leaders in the EMC, emphasizing God's original design not recent decaying social whims.

      Paul too notes that our passion for God naturally results in a concern for purity. What we just read in Php 1:9, his prayer "that your love may abound" carries through into v10, "so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ..."

      Christ calls us to be people of purity, not just in what we look at, but in what we hear. John Brandon in a New Man magazine article recalls that during college, "I dabbled in more eclectic artists such as Bruce Cockburn and early U2, trying desperately to balance my newfound faith in Christ and my love for rock'n'roll." But he became increasingly aware that his former secular favourites were probably putting non-Biblical ideas in his head. So, Brandon writes, "One cold rainy night, lightning cracking across the sky, I gathered up my back catalog of Radiohead, Foo Fighters, and other secular artists and dumped them in the trash...For me it was cathartic. God honoured my actions, because within just a few short weeks I discovered a new passion for Christian music, a passion that is growing ever stronger." We need to be vigilant about what we listen to. Den Diehl is product manager at Reunion Records. He comments, "Lyrics play a dangerous role here because I believe men are not as conscious of the lyrics as women...Men can be just bopping along listening to some song completely oblivious to what that song is saying until they catch themselves later wondering how that word popped out or that lustful thought entered their mind." Our passion for God will help us minimize the risk of letting an intruding influence create a roadblock in our walk with the Lord.

...People in Partnership...

Finally, our fellowship with the Divine Refiner will result in partnership with God and His people, taking part in His projects. Malachi says after the messenger of the covenant comes, people "will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord." (3:3f) We saw earlier that those half-hearted in their devotion were bringing blind, crippled, or diseased animals for sacrifice, not their best. In 3:8-10 God accuses the nation of robbing Him: "But you ask, ‘How do we rob you?’ "In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse— the whole nation of you— because you are robbing me. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house..." By withholding offerings, they were not only dishonouring God, they were shortchanging the priests and Levites who depended on the temple offering for their support. Plus, in a country with no welfare and no social programs, the offering provided an important source of relief for the most destitute -- kind of an Israelite "United Way" or "Red Shield Appeal".

      God also rebukes the nation for other materially-related abuses: 3:5 says God will testify "against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice." Thus they were rejecting partnership, reneging on their obligation to help the poor, to uphold economic justice.

      Coming to the New Testament, we hear Jesus telling His followers via the parable of the sheep and the goats that "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me." (Mt.25:40) Essentially the economic and material help we offer another is a partnership with Christ, even simply offering a cup of cold water in His name, as His agent (Mk.9:41). Paul commends the Philippians, saying in 1:5 that he prays with joy "because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now..." In chapter 4(10,14-18) he specifically thanks them for their most recent financial gift. So the apostle views these church folk as part of his mission team.

      Apart from the financial aspect, there is a spiritual partnership too. Paul prays for them regularly, and that's likely reciprocated. Paul keeps them in mind even when going through hardships, knowing they're behind him helps him through the tough times. 1:7, "...I have you in my heart...whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in [are partners in?] God’s grace with me." There's a real sense of solidarity that together they've been blessed by the Good News of Jesus, together they're carrying the cause forward for His sake.

      Our denominational Relief & Development projects are a very practical expression of the partnership with God and His people by which God's grace becomes known around the world. Indeed in the brochure we can find examples of projects that mirror God's concern expressed through Malachi for widows, orphans, and the economically challenged. The page titled "World Relief Canada" describes a micro-credit project in Mozambique, where the economy is slowly rebuilding after years of civil war. A credit union provides assistance to over 6500 clients, many of whom are women and probably widows, supplying them with access to funds to develop their businesses. The facing page mentions another micro-credit program in Cambodia; there, without this assistance, small businesses would have to borrow from moneylenders at oppressive rates of interest - 25-30% per month. Over the page, Children's Homes International provides much-needed care for children, many without parents, in Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Sri Lanka. Our gifts become the means by which we partner with the Lord in making His grace and kindness known around the world.

      So, the Messiah comes to have an effect that is thankfully far greater than just to fill churches with "pride and gold" or so we can "guard our fine possessions", as Jackson Browne supposed. Jesus has come to transform people, so apathy gives way to passion for God and others; greed and lust give way to purity; and selfishness yields to partnership, love expressed sacrificially and practically, near and far. If Jesus is a rebel, it's because He's broken the bank [so to speak] of worldly ideas of ownership, and brings a revolution to our heart in the best way. Let's pray.