Divided: An Open Letter to the Disaffected Youth of the Church

I hope this finds you well.

I don’t know where you are in your walk with God, but I hope that this can help, regardless of whatever “chair” you may be in.

* I put “chair” in quotes as if to use it loosely or sarcastically; to (attempt to) quantify the spiritual life as only fitting in 3 stages is to think analytically, not poetically (more on that later).

When I became a Christian, there was a profound change in my heart, and one of the things that I set out to do was to be eternally available to anyone who needed my help for any reason.

Basically, I set out to be the nicest guy someone could meet.

But that’s not what Jesus is about.

I mean, he came to send swords, for crying out loud (Matthew 10:34).

And he set out to accomplish much more than that in his time here on Earth. He came to fulfill the law and restore what was lost (Matthew 5:17, Luke 19:10).

What a lot of people don’t understand, however, is that the “fulfilling of the law” is not accomplished in following rules, but inside of your heart.

When Jesus stepped on the scene, the Pharisees – the religious leaders – were teaching people left and right that in order to accomplish one’s salvation – that the whole point of their religion – was to do these things and not do those things.

Pathetic.

Jesus comes and, in the Sermon on the Mount, lays out the profound depth of the intent of the law:

• It’s not just committing adultery if you sleep with someone, but looking at them with lust (Matthew 5:27-28).
• Killing is not just taking a life, but hatred without cause (Matthew 5:21-22).
• “Loving your neighbor” is not just those you get along with, but even those who hate your guts (Matthew 5:43-44).

It’s so easy to get sucked in to rule-keeping and following a list of do’s and don’ts.

This is what almost happened to me as a young believer in college.

Then something happened that changed my life just as much – if not more – than when I became a Christian, and that had to do with how I viewed my faith.

In the summer of 2003, I read a book that irreversibly impacted me. That book was Wild at Heart by John Eldredge.

What I realized is that a lot of what the church tries to do is get guys to do the right thing.

And it bores us to death.

Don’t get me wrong, because doing the right thing is good.

But doing the right thing only because it’s the right thing goes back to the rule-keeping that Jesus came to free us from.

Religious people are especially bad at missing this distinction, because Christianity is So. Much. More. than a list of do’s and don’ts.

I mean, for crying out loud, we have the opportunity to know the Man who created the world and everything in it – Jesus!

But alas, there is another terrible misconception regarding our “relationship” with him.

Most people focus on the aspect of Jesus being “Lord.”

Person pet peeve: I hate when people refer to the Father or Son as “the Lord.” It just seems so impersonal...

No offense if you do this lol.

But anyway, although this is true, at the same time, it’s not.

This is the difference between the poetic and the analytical.

For hundreds of years, cultures knew the value of the poetic and spoke in terms that the heart could understand, but this has been lost in the last few hundred years with the Enlightenment and the Modern Era, with their emphasis on knowledge, pragmatism, and seeing religion as a functional means to enact change instead of a path to lead people to their Creator.

Let me explain:

The analytica deals in terms of breaking things down to get a good look at their parts – looking at the tress, but not seeing the forest. You could say that they miss the big picture because of this...

When asked what a kiss entails, someone dealing in the analytical would say that, technically, it’s two sets of the fleshy parts forming the margins of the mouth pressing together for a duration of time, with the possible exchange of digestive fluid and the touching of the tasting organs.

Now, technically, that’s correct.

But it strips the life out of the thing it just analyzed.

Solomon – who was the wisest man who ever lived (1 Kings 3:12) – put it much better when he described the woman he was in love with and what it was like to kiss her:

“Your lips are as sweet as nectar, my bride;

    Milk and honey are under your tongue.”

(Song 4:11)

So much of the church deals in the analytical that we have forgotten how to speak to what really moves us: the poetic language of the heart.

Jesus does this with those he relates to:

As the disciples walking down the Emmaus road told of their experience with him, their hearts burned within them as he expounded on the prophecies about himself.

Freaking prophecies!

Academic information can be dry to say the least; I had to read a purely academic book during my senior year in college, and I trudged my way through another one just after college.

But when Jesus spoke about prophecies with these 2 men, their hearts burned because of the One who spoke to them – even though he was veiled and they didn’t recognize who he truly was (Luke 24:15, 27, 30-32).

This is because the words of the true Jesus are empowered by “spirit and life” (John 6:63, 68).

You could almost extend that and say that anytime your heart burns when someone is speaking to you (or as you are reading something), that it’s Jesus speaking through them – even if you don’t recognize him...

The whole point that I’m trying to get at here is that there is more.

There is more to Christianity and this whole “God” thing than what most of the church teaches.

Let’s go back to the relationship piece and take a look at how the church misses the point.

It’s been said that “Christianity is a relationship, not a religion.”

Which, technically, is true.

But there are different ways that we relate to God within different seasons of our life, part of which depends on the condition of our hearts.

The lower levels consist of relating as:

• Clay to a Potter (Jeremiah 18:6)
• Sheep to a Shepherd (John 10:11)
• Vines to a Branch (John 15:5)
• Slaves to a Master (Matthew 25:21)

But Jesus never said, “I came to give you more to do.”

It was, “I came to give them life, and that they might have it abundantly” (paraphrased from John 10:10b).

When Jesus offers that life to people, they beg him for it (John 4:15, 6:34).

People ripped the roofs off of houses to get to Jesus (Mark 2:1-4).

If we knew what was really available, we’d sell everything we have to get it (Matthew 13:44) – and it would be worth it a hundred times over (Mark 10:29-30).

Jesus also said that “you shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16), and that there is a thief who comes to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10a).

So if something about our “Christian” religion doesn’t bring abundant life, then it’s not the way that Jesus would have us live.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.

If there’s one thing that I’ve realized (at least on a head-level; my heart is still absorbing it), it’s that our relationships are the most important thing about us.

How we relate to others is the greatest determining factor of our spiritual maturity – even more-so than spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 13:1-3).

The last 3 levels of our relationship with God deal with precisely that – a living, breathing relationship where there is intimacy and the bond of closeness that supersedes the give-and-take of reaping and sowing, or blessing and cursing – that tit-for-tat scorekeeping that people who are in a business relationship maintain because they are in it primarily for what they can get out of it.

But God is not a spiritual vending machine; if you ask for it with the wrong motives, he won’t give it to you (James 4:1-3).

Did the workers who were hired at Happy Hour (5pm) receive the wages properly due to them (Matthew 20:6-9)?

No, because his grace was sufficient for them (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Those who are concerned with accomplishing much in this world for God sometimes forget that the most important thing is to simply know him (Jeremiah 9:23-24, Matthew 7:21-23, John 17:3).

Sometimes he tells them, “Today, I’m all you get.” (John 6:28-29)

As Thomas Keating put it, “We should relate less and less in terms of reward and punishment, and more and more on the basis of the gratuity – or the play – of divine love.”

Friends who know each other deeply aren’t concerned with score-keeping...

Why not?

Because the value of the relationship supersedes any material things that have been exchanged between them.

This is where the value of the upper levels of our relationship with God come from:

• Children relating to a Father (John 1:12)
• Friends relating to friends (John 15:15)
• A wife relating to her Husband (Ephesians 5:25-27, 31-32)

What really struck me about the book that I read – Wild at Heart – is that there is a profound importance on the father-son (or father-daughter) relationship.

I don’t know what kind of relationship you have with your earthly father, but there is a relationship that is even more important than that one, and it’s that of your Father in heaven who desires to mentor you in order to raise you up to be your own man (or woman) of God after the desires he specifically set in your heart.

A lot of church people interpret Proverbs 22:6 –

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

– and they take “the way he should go” as “the path I follow because of my religion,” and so the children get raised in the religion of their parents (no wonder so many choose to leave the church when they move onto the next phase of their life).

But that goes back to the “slave” mentality and doesn’t take into account all the nuances and eccentricities that make each boy and girl unique.

No, our heavenly Father knows that there are desires uniquely placed in our heart and he encourages us – dares us, even! – to follow them, for if you don’t, you deny inviting him into the very places in your heart that make you the most unique, as well as the opportunities for him to open up paths in your life that you would’ve never thought possible – unless he was intimately involved in the process the whole way through.

If there is one thing I despise, it’s asexual religion: a belief system that fails – or refuses – to acknowledge the differences in men and women, and to tailor their experiences accordingly.

The yoke of asexual religion is a cruel one to bear, for it does not acknowledge us at the most fundamental level of how God created us – as men and women (Genesis 1:27).

Okay, so now I’m almost (an unbelievable) 1,900 words into this and I’ve come to a point of wrapping it up.

Basically, there is more to Christianity than what most of the church teaches. I’m not saying that what they teach is bad or false, but like I mentioned earlier, there is a way of speaking of things that are true that make them untrue (“fleshy borders of the mouth” versus “milk and honey are under her tongue”)...

I once heard a good man ask, “How would Jesus address ____ in a way that would bring life instead of just rightness?”

That, my friend, is an open-ended question, the answer to which is dependent on the given topic.

There are ways to talk about things that make them untrue – or, for that matter, unattractive or repulsive.

Our hearts seek truth and life, and I hope that you have found a little bit of each in these words – and that you find a lot more in the relationship with your heavenly Father that I hope this has encouraged you to pursue.

I hope you read your bible with a hungry heart, that you devour it as I did, and that it irrevocably changes you for the better – as God intended, from the inside, out.

Either way, I would enjoy the opportunity to discuss anything you’ve read in here, whether you love it or hate it – and no judgment on my part either way.