Christian behaviorism is an area of study that has long interested me. The believer was never given the right to change his/her bad behaviors and subsequently DO good behavior but instead has been given the capacity to recognize bad behavior as revealed by God and then the responsibility to trust God as He changes that behavior and leads us in the good behavior He has already designed for us (Eph.2:10). This is a basic New Covenant truth. But this truth is such a big struggle for the Christian especially in today’s society because of the growing want to see God doing His work in us immediately. The “I want it all and I want it now” mentality otherwise known as living in the present or Hedonism.
Turns out that our perspective of time very much impacts how we live our lives. I invite you to watch the below video produced by the 250 year old London-based Royal Society for the advancement of the Arts (RSA). By no means do I subscribe to all of the RSA’s worldly philosophies but I do find that this specific video presents some fascinated scientific analysis that Christians can appreciate. As you watch this video think about your personal time perspective. Do you live your life based upon the way things have always been? Do you live for the ‘now’ wanting immediate gratification? Or do you live with the hope that what God is doing, seen and unseen, is far better than anything you could ever orchestrate – a hope that brings God’s rest and peace into your present state of living?
Open our eyes Lord and teach us to trust and rest in You in our daily living.
As God leads me through this transition in my life I have the privilege of hearing from many of you whether in email, your blog comments or in person. Some of you have offered words of encouragement and support while others have expressed skepticism, disagreement and opposition toward my direction. Frankly, I completely understand why all of these opinions exist. It is a direction that takes me and my family outside of the comfortable and passive Christian walk that is so easy to grow accustomed to. As I continue to listen to various opinions and speak with those willing to have an open dialog with me, I am also experiencing something else in my own life that priceless – honesty. True authentic and honest look at my own life. Is what I believe more than just academic information that I can regurgitate back to people? Is this life in Christ as real as the air I breath? All Christians naturally avoid the discomfort of being vulnerable and transparent but God who specializes in veil removal, the same veil that Moses continued to wear after God’s glory had faded, wants to pull back those veils in our life so that we will depend on Him in openness. As I gather with believers and share what God is doing in us from week to week regardless what it may look like, the Spirit in each of us can willingly move among us through our unique spiritual gifts. For many this seems frightening and random but God has called me to trust Him on this level and has promised me that I along with others who join me will experience the fullness of Christ as we gather while surrendering to Him (Eph.1:22,23). I trust that Father will deliver what He has promised.
For many believers, experiencing the working of Spirit on this level never happens because there is so much other distracting noise in their life. Can you imagine the difficulty of being open and vulnerable at a church gathering while the Spirit does His perfect work in you meanwhile having to stay on a schedule, play music on queue and preach for a pre-designated time? Add in crying babies, broken air conditioners, dysfunctional microphones and a person’s ringing cell phone. Most of our time and energy is spent making sure that the system is running smoothly all the while the Spirit yearns to minister among us. I am reminded of Charles Hummel’s classic Tyranny of the Urgent (Read free copy here) where he describes how the chaos of this earthly life hijacks our walk of faith. I am not so foolish to believe that Simple Church is problem-free but it does afford the believer an opportunity to gather, share, learn, listen and express Christ without most of the noise that has crept into our gatherings. I desire to see and hear from God through my brothers and sisters in Christ and follow that up with specific encouragement. What does the Spirit sound like in my 10 year old analytical son or in my 7 year old free-spirited song bird of a daughter? Is God’s Living Word nothing more that a compilation of short stories to them or is it living and breathing in their life? This is where God wants me to go… beyond the common and comfortable and into the personal and real.
For all of you who choose to continue to go to a traditional church I do not condemn you in any way nor will I mistreat you. You are free to make that choice and go where you believe God has lead you. I have much to be thankful for as God grew me in the traditional church. My prayer for you can be your prayer for me – that we will grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ and experience the fullness of His life.
What an outpouring of encouragement from many of you regarding my previous post (Part I). More and more people like you are coming forward and expressing a desire to openly grow in Christ but just feel that there is no allowance for that in many of today’s traditional church gatherings. It’s not that the traditional church expressly forbids an open expression of faith but instead cannot break free of a pre-set agenda long enough to experience the wonderful leading of the Holy Spirit. The tendency in the traditional church gathering is to avoid any awkward moments of silence or breaks in the agenda by quickly filling in these gaps as though they were bad or harmful. There seems to be an immobilizing fear in showing that we are flawed as we respond to God in front of each other. The approach of “doing” church meetings perfectly with the same look and feel as theatrical performance is deeply ingrained in the mindset of many Christians and supported with statements such as “God is not the author of confusion therefore we must keep the meeting flowing in an orderly fashion” or “To not have an agenda is to potentially poorly presents the Gospel therefore causing others to lose faith or reject Christ.” I know what it is like to try very hard to organize and lead a church gathering - I have done so many times and found it to be exhausting and difficult to duplicate on an ongoing basis. Each time I walked away worried if I did a good enough job, if I said the right things, if I sang the right songs, etc. Oh my – is that what celebrating our life in Christ is about? Certainly not. In all of this fleshly human control the Holy Spirit is inhibited rendering Him of no effect in our lives and in our gatherings (Gal.3:3; 5:1-5). We are called to be active not passive participants as a normal part of our coming together. This will at times look and feel foreign to us with moments of awkward silence or meetings not flowing exactly the way we had envisioned. The celebration is the believer’s active involvement during the meeting while allowing the Holy Spirit to organize and guide the direction of the gathering. Yes, you guessed it – this is an act of faith for all those in attendance. Wow, imagine that… responding in faith to God’s plan as a group of believers.
For all of you who read this blog regularly or possibly even know me personally you have the opportunity to watch God work in my life because I have chosen to put it on public display. It is what Father has laid on my heart. It comes at a personal cost to me at times with some criticizing from the shadows which I have talked about before but the blessings I experience have begun to eclipse those moments of personal doubt and anxiety that come from the critiques. God has been incrementally setting me free in so many ways – some of which I see and also in ways that others have to point out to me.
This last weekend I had a life-changing moment that was so disruptive, so obvious that Father might as well have parted the clouds and audibly spoke to me face to face. His revelation on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the most clearly understood was a 20.
In an effort to protect those I really do love and do not want to hurt I will simply say this – God has absolutely called me, Cory Crabtree, out of the traditional, institutional church: the only kind of church I have known for 39 years. Sunday was a day I will never forget and will undoubtedly serve as a life-long reminder to me of what The Church really is and is not. I have struggled to know what is happening in my Home Group that meets in my living room every Tuesday night. What is God doing? Although all Christians are part of God’s family, the people that come together in my living room truly feel and act like family. They are there not out of obligation or duty but to share the living breathing life of Christ in them. Young and old, encouraged or discouraged – they participate and interact unlike any other Christian gathering I have ever seen. I have also struggled to know how to minister to my own children who view church as some place we go to on Sundays and not who we are as Christians. But my struggle is over… I now know where God wants to take me, my family and anyone else who willingly chooses to go – not to another church building down the road or across town but into The Church!
Just a few months ago on February 17, 2010, a women by the name of Felicity Dale left a comment to one of my posts on this blog and also sent me two URLs to consider. Yesterday, I followed those links which brought me to several YouTube videos that God has been preparing me for. Thank you Lord for your patience with me as you had to grow me for many years before I could see and understand what you are doing in me. Let The Church Arise!!!
I had a friend come and share with me a YouTube of Michael Card singing ‘God’s Own Fool’; a song that Card wrote in 2002. There are many parts to this song I particularly enjoy over many other Christian songs because the New Covenant message is so strong and yet so simple. For your benefit here are the lyrics and the video.
GOD’S OWN FOOL
Scribbling in the Sand: The Best of Michael Card (2002)
Seems I’ve imagined Him all of my life
As the wisest of all of mankind
But if God’s Holy wisdom is foolish to men
He must have seemed out of His mind
For even His family said He was mad
And the priests said a demon’s to blame
But God in the form of this angry young man
Could not have seemed perfectly sane
CHORUS
When we in our foolishness thought we were wise
He played the fool and He opened our eyes
When we in our weakness believed we were strong
He became helpless to show we were wrong
And so we follow God’s own fool
For only the foolish can tell-
Believe the unbelievable
And come be a fool as well
So come lose your life for a carpenter’s son
For a madman who died for a dream
And you’ll have the faith His first followers had
And you’ll feel the weight of the beam
So surrender the hunger to say you must know
Have the courage to say I believe
For the power of paradox opens your eyes
And blinds those who say they can see
CHORUS
So we follow God’s own Fool
For only the foolish can tell
Believe the unbelievable,
And come be a fool as well
Growing up, Rock music was strictly forbidden in my house and was certainly considered a punishable offence… and looking back I can understand why. Many Rock songs are full of messages of hate, despair, sexual innuendo, etc. so therefore it seems reasonable for a parent to forbid their child from listening to this genre of music. After all, it would be impossible to screen every last song for questionable content. I heard scores of preachers describe how Rock is bad from its heavy, deeply sensual beat and screaming electric guitar to it vast array of flamboyant and unruly singers dressed in leather pants, crazy hair and wild stage behavior. The nail-in-the coffin came when the preacher took the time to cherry-pick some of the worst lyrics they could find to validate that all Rock music is bad. But as a thinker I often wondered if truly ALL Rock music was bad. Not every group or song met the criteria. What if there was no heavy beat or no screaming guitar? Or what if the band members didn’t look so bad or sang songs with regular, acceptable words?
What really began to have an overwhelmingly negative impact on me was when I started observing the inconsistencies among the strongest critics of Rock. If Rock was bad because of specific criteria then Country music too had to be classified as bad based on that same criteria. Yet, there were some Country songs I heard referenced as “harmless” by the strict Rock critics… of course, these songs had no heavy beat, loud guitar, crazed singers or devilish lyrics. So if it doesn’t sound bad, look bad or act bad then it is good, right? Deepening the confusion was the willingness of these critics to tolerate otherwise “bad” music as long as it was a more palatable instrumental version… you know, the kind you hear in the department stores. Eventually I gave up in frustration – most of the rules and their exceptions didn’t make sense anyways. Diving headlong into Rock music I understood that would cost me severely among those who would condemn me… ah, unless I kept it a secret. And in a moment, the impostor was born. For years I absorbed as much Rock as possible enjoying the sounds of Aerosmith, Motley Crew, Journey, KISS, Kansas and a raft more while appearing to be the well-behaved Christian boy everyone expected me to be.
All those early years of phoniness and fakery have passed and I now have young kids. Amazing how life tends to repeat itself. In my exploration I have discovered that my 10 year old son has a strangely familiar liking for Rock music. Is it because I run through the house in my leather pants and crazy hair singing Rock music at the top of my lungs? No. Is it because he and I hangout in the mosh pits at Metal concerts? Yikes! – certainly not. Is it because my wife, my children’s loving mother doubles as a local Rock legend on the weekends? I my… no! Maybe it is simply because he is alive and well. Turns out that he really enjoys listening to Simon and Garfunkle with a dash of The Beatles, some Queen and little Beethoven. As a father I am at a critical juncture. Each of these bands (well… maybe not Beethoven so much) has songs with lyrics I do not agree with, advocate or even want my son listening to. Should I therefore restrict my son from listening to ALL of this music leaving him to have some of the same questions I had as a child? No way. What an opportunity for me exchange restriction for instruction. Why not take the time to teach him how to respond to God’s still small voice as he listens to music. Already he has come to me and told me he does not think a particular song was a good song because of what it says in comparison with what God teaches us. It has opened up a dialogue between him and me which I pray will teach him to live a life of honest transparency free of all of the rule keeping as he grows in Christ.
Below is a bonus. One of the Rock groups I listened to often was Kansas. Listen to the uncomplicated freedom in Christ this former band member has grown to love. Enjoy!
