Discipleship Archives - Page 114 of 167

I listen to all kinds of music, from country to rap. I find that music reveals the soul of culture. And when it comes to music revealing the inner emotions and feelings of people, “secular” music does a better job than a lot of “Christian” music. It seems that the vast majority of Christian music is about being “happy, happy, happy all the time.”

Secular music understands that people have a whole range of emotions and feelings, and secular artists are not afraid to give voice to these feelings. So as I seek to understand culture, and interact with people around me, it helps to listen to he music they listen to and hear the pain, longing, and desires that drive them.

And while music runs the gamut of emotions, I hear two primary themes over and over again: People feel insecure and alone. Our world is awash in people who do not know what their future holds, and who have thousands of friends but feel alone most of the time. Of course, this message is not only found in music, but in art and movies as well.

Just as an example, I heard the following song on the radio last week. It is “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia. The song is about her longing for love, and the fact that since she doesn’t think she’ll ever find it, she lives with perpetual insecurity. She doesn’t have faith any more that her relationships will last. Watch in the video that as she loses faith in love, her world is slowly torn down.

Do you know of any other songs that reveal these twin longings for security and relationships?

How Premillennialism Destroyed the Gospel

By Jeremy Myers

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Despite what I say below, I am a premillennialist. I believe in a future, literal, 1000-year earthly reign of Jesus Christ from Jerusalem. I want to state that first and foremost.

But I also believe that Premillenialism destroyed the Gospel. Here’s how:

Premillennialism is the belief that at some future point in time, Jesus will return to earth, set all things straight, and rule over the entire earth with righteousness and justice from Jerusalem for 1000 years. Among those who hold this view, it is also a commonly held belief that things will get worse before they get better. There are biblical prophecies which seem to indicate as much.

So when people who hold these two ideas read the Gospels, and specifically the announcments of Jesus that the Kingdom of God is at hand, that it is within us, among us, and breaking in on the world, they read such statements as prophecies about the future Millennium, and therefore, any instructions for how to live as Kingdom people or spread the Kingdom are pushed off into some future time.

In other words, it is argued that since the Kingdom did not fully “arrive” with Jesus, all the kingdom principles and values can be shoved onto a generation in the future by-and-by when Jesus return and sets all things right. Until then, the earth and most of the people in it can just go to hell.

That is strongly stated, but it’s how we live. We revel in wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, famines, and diseases because we think such things show that Jesus is about to return. And maybe it does, but that doesn’t mean that we can sit back, twiddle our thumbs, and watch it all with glee on the evening news.

In fact, I k now some Christians who actually pray for things to get worse, because the worse things get, the better off Christians are. After all, doesn’t Jesus say that He won’t return until the days become like Sodom and Gomorrah? These Christians want to read about rape, murder, and pillage, because these are signs of the end times.

And yet, all such things are completely and utterly contrary to the Gospel message of Jesus Christ. The Gospel is not just about getting people to believe in Jesus so they can get eternal life and go to heaven when they die. While that is part of the Gospel message, it is only about 1% of it.

The rest of the Gospel concerns how those who have believed in Jesus should work to make the world better. The purpose of the Gospel message is to bless the people of the world, to stop injustice, to free the slaves, to rescue the captives, to break the chains of bondage, to bring peace to war-torn areas, to restore health to the sick, to take light into the darkness, and help to the hurting.

By putting off the Kingdom of God until “the future millennial reign of Christ” we have divorced most of the message of Jesus from the Gospel of Jesus. We have gutted the Gospel of it’s significance for our lives here and now, and made it entirely about the life ever after.

Premillennialism has done this.

I’m not saying we cannot be premillennialists. We can. I think the Bible teaches it. But we must avoid the pitfall of thinking that since Jesus will return at some point in the future to fix everything, we can just sit back and wait for it to happen. That is not the Gospel. That is not following the teachings or the example of Jesus.

So this year, what are you going to do to live the Gospel? How are you planning to restore kingdom principles into your life, your family, and your community?

Goal Reached!

By Jeremy Myers

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Wendy and I want to thank everyone who participated in the Change Their Story campaign, either by giving money or by becoming aware of the child sex slavery problem here in the United States and purposing to get involved in some way in the future.

A special thanks goes out to my wife and three daughters, who gave up almost all of their Christmas gifts this year to put the money toward rescuing Russian girls caught in sex slavery.

And even though we reached our goal, you can still make a donation to help rescue young girls from sex slavery.

Also, everyone who donated was put in a drawing for a free copy of Priceless, a book by Tom Davis which tells the story of rescuing girls from sex slavery in Russia. The winners of this free book are Johannes and Laura Rehm! We will get the book sent out to you.

Although the fund raising campaign is over, I will continue to make occasional blog posts about rescuing girls from sex slavery and what you can do to get involved. To keep informed, check the blog regularly, subscribe to get the posts by email, or subscribe in a reader (I recommend Google reader). I have an eye-opening post scheduled for next week called “I Want to Be a Prostitute.” I don’t personally want to be a prostitute, but you don’t want to miss this post.

To learn more about Human Trafficking and sex slavery, check out some of these posts:

Human Trafficking Posts

The Death of 2010

By Jeremy Myers

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Last year a coworker gave me a “2010 Buddhist Desk Calendar.” I’m not sure why, since I’m not Buddhist. I suspect she regifted it.

To be honest, most of the Buddhist quotes didn’t make any sense to me. But below are the few that I tore out and taped to my office wall. As I read through them today, I noticed a trend. See if you notice it too.

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. the greatest loss is what dies within us while we’re still alive.” -Norman Cousins

“Do not take life to seriously. You will never get out of it alive.” -Elbert Hubbard

“There is no murder worse than the killing of time.” -Yamamuto Gempo Roshi

“If you’re born clumsy, it’s not bad. If you’re born clever it’s not good. The proper way to serve tea is to find your own way.” -Zen Saying

“If I had to live my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.” -Muriel Spark

“We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up; this is our world. All we have to do after that–is die.” – Ikkyu

Did you notice a trend in those selected quotes? Yes. They’re mostly about death and dying. I’m not sure what that says about my year. But then, as I think over the past three years, they have, in some ways, been a death to certain elements of my past.

But this is encouraging for me, because one of my core convictions in life is that without death, there can be no resurrection. So maybe 2011 is the year of resurrection.

Would you Fight Slavery?

By Jeremy Myers

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If you had lived during the Civil War, would you have been a slave owner? “Of course not!” we all cry. And would you have fought to free slaves from their bondage? “Absolutely!” we say.

But the truth may differ from our desire.

To see this, look at what Jesus said to some religious leaders in his day. In Matthew 23:30, Jesus tells the religious leaders that they say to each other that if they had been alive in the days of their forefathers who killed and murdered the prophets, they would not have taken part. They would have defended and protected the prophets. But even as they say such things, they are plotting to kill Jesus, who is not just a prophet, but the long-awaited Messiah.

So back to the question of slavery, we like to say to ourselves that if we had been alive during the time in our country when people owned slaves, we would not have been slave-owners ourselves, but would have worked to free slaves wherever we found them.

And yet today, in America and around the world, there are slaves in almost every city. There are more slaves right now in the world than ever before in human history (Linda Smith, Renting Lacy, p. 85). And more tragic still, millions of these are children.

But even that is not the worst part. If the enslavement of children wasn’t bad enough, it is what these children are enslaved for. It’s not to pick cotton, grow tobacco, or work in sweat shops. These children are sex slaves. Here are some facts:

• The FBI estimates that well over 100,000 children and young women are trafficked in America today. They range in age from 9 to 19, with the average age being 11. And many victims are no longer just runaways, or kids who’ve been abandoned. Many of them are from what would be considered “good” families, who are lured or coerced by clever predators (1)
• 1.2 million children are trafficked every year; this is in addition to the millions already held captive by trafficking (2)
• The average victim is forced to have sex up to 40 times a day (5)
• The average age of a trafficked victim is 14 years old (5)
• Sex trafficking is an engine of the global AIDS epidemic (4)
• People are trafficked from 127 countries to be exploited in 137 countries (3)
• Between 14,500 and 17,500 victims are trafficked into the USA each year from other countries (4)
• In 2010 Sex Trafficking will be the number one crime worldwide (5)
• Over 25% of victims are trafficked from Southern and Eastern Europe.
• Tragically, only 1-2 percent of victims are rescued, and only 1 in 100,000 Europeans involved in trafficking are convicted.
(1 – ABC News, 2-UNICEF, 3-UNODC, 4-US Department of State, 5-The A21 Campaign)

After learning about the plight of these children, can you still do nothing for them while at the same time thinking that if you had lived during the Civil War, you would have been on the side of freedom?

To learn more about Human Trafficking and sex slavery, check out some of these posts:

Music and Mission

How Premillennialism Destroyed the Gospel

Goal Reached!

Human Trafficking Posts

The Death of 2010

Would you Fight Slavery?

Human Trafficking Posts

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