Five myths Christians believe

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/116/11668/11668-64117.mp3

I used to believe that as long as I was “doing the Lord’s work,” God would protect me from physical harm with some kind of magic force field whenever I visited overseas mission fields.

Historical ignoramus that I was, it didn’t dawn on me until years later that countless faithful believers have died through the ages from sickness, accidents, attacks or persecution while serving the Lord. Was I supposed to get a special exemption when they didn’t?

I still occasionally rely on the magic force field idea to help me get through turbulent plane flights. It’s not faith; it’s a mental trick to keep me from running up and down the aisle screaming, “We’re all gonna die!”

Lots of otherwise reasonable Christians depend on various shortcuts, myths and spiritual distortions to get through the day. Often we buy into such counterfeits to avoid trusting God and obeying Him. California pastor/author Larry Osborne addresses some of them in his book, “10 Dumb Things Smart Christians Believe” (Multnomah, 2009).

At least five of the myths Osborne identifies affect how we respond to God’s call to take the Gospel to the world:

* “Faith can fix anything.”

Faith in an ever-faithful God sustains us moment by moment as we follow Him. But it doesn’t “fix” everything the way we want it fixed. Nor does God. He is concerned with accomplishing His will, not ours.

Faith is not “an impenetrable shield that protects us from life’s hardships and trials,” Osborne writes. “It’s not a magic potion that removes every mess. It’s a map we follow. … It’s designed to guide us on a path called righteousness. Along the way, it doesn’t promise to fix every flat tire.”

That applies to daily life — and to missions. Missionaries get a lot of flat tires. Cross-cultural ministry entails endless frustrations, hassles, confusion, misunderstanding and discouragement. The payoff might not come for years, even generations. But it will come. The Word of God does not return void.

* “God has a blueprint for my life.”

A blueprint contains detailed instructions for building an entire structure (i.e., life). God gives us guidance for today and asks us to trust Him for tomorrow. Thinking too far beyond that brings little but anxiety.

“The starting place for finding God’s will is obeying the commands and instructions we already know” from His Word, Osborne reminds his readers. “The pathway of obedience always leads to further light.”

If God tells you to go to a strange, possibly hostile place or culture with no guarantee of success or safe return — no blueprint, in other words — how will you respond?

* “Christians shouldn’t judge.”

How convenient. If we redefine Christ’s command not to condemn sinners (when we are sinners ourselves) to mean that we cannot call good and evil what they are, we have surrendered to evil.

Osborne: “Underlying the idea that we have no right to judge the beliefs and moral standards of others is another widely held belief. It’s the dogma that truth and morality are relative. … If we refuse to label the behaviors Jesus called sin, sin, we’re disagreeing with Jesus, not following Jesus.”

We’re also undermining His mandate to make disciples among all peoples. If the world isn’t lost in sin, what’s the point of preaching the Gospel of salvation?

* “A valley means a wrong turn.”

“Most of us understand that hardships (even long-term hardships) are a natural part of life,” Osborne acknowledges. “But something fundamentally changes when the deep and lengthy valley is our valley. The truths we so easily accept in theory and so quickly apply to others become difficult to fathom in our own life.”

Valleys, especially ones that pass through the shadow of death, force us to trust God or despair. In missions, deep valleys often come before mountaintop breakthroughs.

* “Dead people go to a better place.”

Really? All of them? Jesus spoke of the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth for those who reject God. He spoke of the narrow path to heaven and the wide highway to hell.

“To our modern-day sensibilities, the exclusivity of Christ, the reality of hell, and the need for salvation that includes personal piety have all become passé, if not downright offensive,” Osborne says. “And it’s not just our culture that rejects these ideas; so do many Christians. …

“The cross and salvation are central to the Gospel. Once we lose any real concept of hell, the natural consequence is more than just putting us at odds with Scripture; it eventually devalues the cross, redefines salvation, and turns obedience into an extra-credit spiritual add-on.”

The Bible is a hard book to read in our day. It contains judgments, absolutes and non-negotiable commands — as well as the words of the Lord’s abounding grace, love and mercy.

It’s not the message we want to hear. It’s what we need to hear.

An atheist praises Christian missions in Africa

(Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/72/7268/7268-40896.mp3)

If you think evangelical Christianity is unfairly caricatured by American opinion makers, you might want to avoid Europe.

There, cultural commissars in some circles compare evangelicals with the Taliban — unfavorably. By their lights, we’re medieval, superstitious enemies of enlightenment and progress who should be silenced for good.

So it was noteworthy when an article praising Christian missions in Africa appeared in The Times of London a few months ago. Even more remarkable: It was written by Matthew Parris, a self-professed atheist (read it at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece).

Parris, a Times columnist and former Member of Parliament, spent his boyhood in what is now Malawi. He returned there last year with a secular charity that assists villages lacking clean water.

“It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities,” Parris writes of the journey. “But traveling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my worldview, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

“Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa, Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.”

Parris has applauded such efforts before, but he used to qualify the praise with a caveat:

“It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write,” he acknowledges. “[O]nly the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

“But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.”

African followers of Christ, Parris says, have a different look in their eyes. And they look you in the eye, not down or away. The “most impressive” African members of the secular aid agency he worked with in Malawi “were, privately, strong Christians.”

They worked diligently and optimistically, he believes, because they have a different view of the universe and their place in it. They and other African Christians he has encountered over the years don’t fear ancestors, evil spirits or spells. They are curious, engaged with the world. They take action, because they don’t believe they are victims of irresistible fate. They don’t buy into the traditional tribal pressure that keeps villages under the thumbs of chiefs and nations under the thumbs of “big man” gangsters.

Parris rejects the notion, fashionable among many academics, that tribal culture is off-limits to criticism just because it is indigenous to Africa. Tribal values have many strengths, but they tend to “grind down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won’t take the initiative, won’t take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.”

In stark contrast, “Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective … smashes straight through the philosophical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold onto to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.”

Contrarians will say Parris is a prisoner of his own culture, an intellectual imperialist trying to re-colonize Africa with a Western individualism that doesn’t work all that well in the West. If Christianity is so great, they may ask, why hasn’t Parris himself become a believer?

True, Parris is much more interested in the cultural benefits of Christian faith than the faith itself. But as a nonbeliever, he recognizes an undeniable fact: The Gospel changes hearts and minds, transforms societies and liberates people from the cultural chains that bind them. In African and Asian cultures that stifle the individual will, Christ shines the light of spiritual freedom. In Western cultures dying from individualism and materialism, He points toward a community — the church — where people love one another as He loves us. His Spirit works within every human culture, but He confronts and transcends cultures when they contradict His truth.

Africa — like the rest of the globe — hungers for such truth.

“Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation,” Parris says, would “leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.”

(Gordon Fort, IMB vice president for global strategy, also grew up in Africa and served there for many years as a missionary. Read his reaction to Parris’ article in this Baptist Press story: “ATHEISM: Both agree, Africa needs God”)