After seeing the importance, or the dominating influence of heaven upon the physical universe last week, I had a fictional conversation with Ted Turner. Ted made a valid point, "If heaven is in anyway like the church I was raised in, why would anyone want to go there?" While this leader of the rich and famous in America isn't an easy man to persuade, eventually I convinced him that I would devote this message to his concerns.
This also fits quite well in the timing of these articles. Since we are moving through our look at the biblical creation account, we are in the transition between the creation of stuff and the creation of life. Ted is also right, if we are going to bash dead godless evolutionary religion, we might as well spend a little time looking at dead godly evolutionary religion as well.
After thinking about it in a little more detail, light suckers in the human sense, really for the most part are highly religious people. It is just that their religion lacks the concept of grace. They are bound, or have been taught dead ritual, sometimes in a very complex systematic theology. This religion is dead, because it contains no life. There is nothing of the life giving personality of God in it. But this brings up the question, "How is anyone going to find this life in the modern church, through osmosis?"
Ted Turner grew up in a church that replaced the concept of God's gracious attribute with religious piety. While I was blessed not to have been subject to this religious heritage, I was subject to the cheap grace of Lutheranism, trying to fit within the religious structure of modernity. So when I read Bonhoeffer's "Cost of Discipleship" many years hence my Lutheran training, I finally understood the death that cheap grace brings not only to individuals, but to the church as a whole.
But not to be content with dead works of piety and cheap grace, the evangelical church has evolved over the last few decades into something even more dead, or deadly. Now, we must receive our understanding of grace through osmosis.
Amazing grace covers everything. Amazing, not because it brings life, or freedom from bondage, but because it is an ecumenical construct of our view of all the world's religious people. What is really sad, is that this is just our view of the world. Islam, and for that matter all other religions other than Christianity, do not contain the element of grace, but only of appeasement.
Now it is one thing for our "free" society to believe this amazing grace concept. To find angels on every street corner, talking about the love of God is one thing, but when you bring amazing grace into the church, center it in our worship and our preaching, you are left with nothing but the anathema of osmosis grace.
When God created the heavens and the earth, he started with stuff in the form of perfect randomness, ordered that randomness through the use of light into the physical world. Upon the goodness of that natural creation, God stepped to a new level of created complexity, creating life from the dust and water. Not to be satisfied with just that goodness, He created man is the image of God himself.
Giving that man, in this innocent state, the choice of freedom, God also provided a system to redeem man from sin and restore creation into that original harmony of goodness. Only the Christian church is given that completed message of hope, restoration, grace in love. It comes by faith alone, because of grace alone, because of Jesus Christ alone, to God's own glory. But the whole of modern Christianity has forsaken that message, for the message of dead natural diffusion, or osmosis grace.
Osmosis is defined as: 1. the diffusion of solvent through a semipermeable membrane from a dilute to a more concentrated solution. 2. the gradual, often unconscious, absorption of knowledge or ideas through continual exposure rather than deliberate learning.
Definition number two is specifically what I am talking about, but definition one is equally applicable. Because of his total depravity man is a semipermeable membrane filled with concentrated sin, any solute, in this case God's grace (from any source) naturally over time dilutes this sin concentration. This is of course limited to some extent by the will of the concentrated body, the permeability of the membrane. What is really important however, osmosis is not a living process. This diffusion only follows the laws of physics, not life.
Ichabod, the life has left the church and been replaced by the grace of physics, Dead science has become our god, because over the course of time that is the god the church has sought to appease. Is it any wonder then, that the God of the Bible normally saves through continual exposure rather than deliberate learning? This is true, simply because no one deliberately teaches the attribute of God's grace found alone in the Bible on a continual, deliberate, and consistent basis.
Now to give us all somewhat of a break, most of us learned what we know of God through a combination of cheap grace, religious piety, osmosis grace, and a little Bible thrown in now and then. That is the American way and therefore the Christian way, evangelically throughout the world. Many of us want to do a better job of making the church a more effective force for positive change in the world, and we know that requires grace alive with the presence of God. Many of our readers know this grace personally, many steeped in some religious teaching do not.
Worship in much of the evangelical church has become synonymous with the singing of simple osmotic choruses. The substitution of more complex hymns of history is a step in the right direction, but we do that only at the risk of no longer being relevant to people content in their opulent and dead prosperity.
We will treat this more in a later article. However, one thing I can say for the dead orthodoxy of my Lutheran liturgy, there was enough of the gospel present in that dead recitation of historic ritual, that through the grace of God it worked. The pastor and the musicians couldn't screw it up, even though I believe many earnestly tried. From my observation of religious piety, it doesn't have this redeeming characteristic.
"I'll never know how much it cost to see my sin upon that cross," was a line from a chorus from Sunday night. Why not?
1. Because it is a simple chorus, and we never really think about the words.
2. We are too steeped in religious piety and osmotic grace to see that the words themselves really make a mockery of the true gospel of God's justifying grace.
3. While the mystery of the cross is somewhat true in this world, in the ultimate sense, we one day will perfectly understand that cost. That is the job that heaven is all about, not some eternal vacation trip.
4. The truth for the most part is however, we do not want to understand (just sing about it) that cost in any sense, for if we did, we would understand that we (as members of the body of Christ, the church) are accountable not only for our ignorance, but for the understanding of the grace required to remove our sin. The many faces of osmosis grace we present to the world, as Ted Turner rightly proclaims, just don't cut it.
To truly understand the concept of God's grace, it must be offered in contrast with the holy requirements of God's law. In that true biblical context, there is no room for sloppy agape, or osmotic learning.
When I was a kid, our extended family got together for Christmas dinner. Part of that ritual was for the adult men (after puberty) to play poker with grandpa. Now this was a high stakes game. You might win or lose a quarter in the course of the afternoon.
All of the men would play except for Uncle Don and his two sons, for they were fundamentalist Christians that believed that any gambling was a sin. So he would sit in the corner and scowl at everyone. His kids didn't have any clue why they were excluded from all the fun, except it was wrong to gamble. "Give us a break Don, losing $.25 over the course of an afternoon really doesn't fit the definition of the unforgivable sin in my book."
I have related my Lutheran upbringing earlier. The pastor of my local church was also absolutely against gambling and he walked the talk. He may or may not have participated in our Christmas ritual. But I did learn from personal experience that he was an absolute cut throat in poker when playing for match sticks.
Lutheran's, who take pride in their role as God's frozen chosen, while sharing that trait with Uncle Don however, do not share Don's concept of grace. I therefore just realized maybe my grace was too cheap toward my uncle. In broader circles of evangelical Christianity, Lutherans belong to a pale of orthodoxy that is sometimes called a "once saved, always saved" denomination. My uncle Don belonged to a denomination that believed that it was possible to loose his salvation.
So I now see what I thought was a harmless game that helped family unity, he viewed as a serious step that might truly lead not only to his own damnation, but to that of his family as well.
Now this division is quite serious if we are to move beyond osmosis grace. I believe that God does all the work in the saving of sinners, but once that work is completed what part does man play in his sanctification. If you can lose it, chances are you are going to think about that grace long an hard. Perhaps, spend some night's wrestling with it and not have a lot of peace about your place in eternity.
Therefore to blow off others views with our unconditional salvation and cheap osmosis grace really serves no purpose. But what to do?
Simply, it is time for the Protestant faith that traces its roots and its justification to the Reformation to once again specifically teach about grace. Unconditional grace. Unmerited grace. Grace that is an attribute of God. Not just grace that began in a covenant limiting the serpent in the garden. While that is when this attribute of God entered into the time continuum, God's graciousness exists outside our understanding of the created realm. This is the life giving grace all seek, for it is the only source of true personal peace and freedom from bondage, physical or religious.
In the creation sequence, God brought life to dead physical matter. That too is part of the personality of God, He is a living personality, not some force, or great singularity. The church is alive in God's perspective because He created it as the living body of Christ. In our new millennia we see only outwardly osmosis grace, because Christian leaders have been taught to teach grace within our understanding of piety, cheap grace and osmosis.
In that respect, our steps as Christian leadership are to preach a gospel message that finds salvation and its life in Christ alone, and to design, or redesign, a worship service in which self righteous piety, cheap grace, and osmotic learning have no place.
In a world in which in any terrorist moment, sloppy opulence may be incinerated as a passing pleasure, is there a remnant that having learned enough through osmosis, can take a stand in faith. We need to change history, not by our power, but by allowing God's living breath to transform our worship for the cause that only the freedom received from Jesus Christ offers. Lest we forget, that is the gospel the Bible teaches.
As I finished my article last week, my cough was not getting any better, but PTL beginning Wednesday morning I was feeling better, by Wednesday evening I was significantly improved. By Thursday evening I had almost forgotten about it except for brief and insignificant coughing episodes. That is continuing up till this moment. I can truthfully say that your prayers improved my situation dramatically.
Now if God would just take care of some of the three miracles I have been talking about for the last few weeks. Or give me some clue on how to take charge and fix the situation, then??? To me there doesn't seem to be any visible change that I am aware of, but then faith (something else we don't seem to be too good at) would not be required. Please continue to intercede for this ministry as we attempt to move forward.
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