This past
week, my wife and I enjoyed several days at our denomination’s annual meeting. It was a wonderful time of worship,
fellowship, making new friends, and discovering resources for church
ministry. Embedded into the time was, of
course, the matter of business that goes into any kind of church or
denominational apparatus. At its best,
church polity concerns itself with deep discernment, focused prayer, and
intentional listening to God’s Spirit.
At its worst, church political structures clunk along with loud opinion-making,
the dysfunction of personal agendas, and an inability to understand what others
are truly saying.
I appreciated the decorum of my
denomination’s delegates and the leadership that went into ensuring that policy
and procedure were carried out with decency and order. Yet, as critically vital as church polity is
in carrying out the business of the church, policies and procedures alone cannot
bring a total transformation of life – only the Holy Spirit of God can do
that. As I sit and write today, a church
shooting in South Carolina last night took the lives of nine black
parishioners. It seems clear that the
tragedy was racially motivated. Here is
the point I am making: even though an
Emancipation Proclamation was passed in this country 150 years
ago; even though Jim Crow laws have been upended; even though African Americans
have equal access and opportunity according to the laws of this country; none
of those laws, political triumphs, and policy making we have experienced in the
United States has the ability to do a thorough renovating of any person’s heart
from one of malicious bigot to benevolent citizen.
We all desperately need faith in the
Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit to even begin addressing the
profound brokenness of the human experience.
Apart from the Spirit, there will be individuals who continue in soul
crushing stances of justifying their racism, excluding the LGBTQ community from
their list of acquaintances, and insisting that their ideas are the only decent
ones worth hearing.
Jesus preached his Sermon on the
Mount in order to upend such proud thinking. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). Only those who are spiritual beggars
recognizing they have nothing to stand on in and of themselves are worthy of
Christ’s righteousness. In a world where
pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps is hailed and validated, the biblical
virtues of humility and meekness seem almost like concepts from some bygone era. Yet, like a church building devastated by a
tornado, until we can come to the end ourselves and admit how much our hearts
are in chaos and need Jesus in the presence of the Holy Spirit, there will
continue to be an endless stream of posturing and positioning to get what we
want so that the other who seems so different from us will not get what they
want or even need. Indeed, there will be
no mercy, purity, and peacemaking apart from identifying the deep depravity of
our own hearts and inviting God to do an extreme makeover of our interior
lives.
While I applaud and laud every
policy and law that turns the tide away from injustice and puts a death nail
into systemic evil, I am realistic enough to discern that only the gospel of
grace can bring human hearts in line with the kind of society that will truly
be characterized by peace. I hope that
you will join me in praying for the shalom of God to takeover this broken world
so that our hearts of stone are replaced by hearts of flesh by the Spirit who
alone transforms both culture and church, society and self, law and life. Soli Deo Gloria.
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