Mike Browning

Tag: Christian Blog

  • Not a Warning

    Not a Warning

    At least not the way I always heard it explained.

    Last week I wrote about resentment toward latecomers. How we might get a little jealous of people who lived however they wanted for years longer than we did, and still walked away with the exact same deal we got.

    But think about it. Why would we actually feel jealousy?

    If the life we were living beforehand was so great, why did it ever occur to us that something needed to change? And why, once we figured that out, could we not manage the change ourselves? Lucky for us, somebody else could.

    There’s a passage where Jesus talks about counting the cost before you follow Him. Every explanation I ever got made it sound like a warning label. You’re going to give up a lot, so you’d better be sure before you sign on.

    But like usual, the surface reading and the real one aren’t pointed the same direction.

    Living a worldly life means chasing what the world values. Money, status, whatever version of “made it” you’ve picked out for yourself. Sometimes you actually get some of it. And the second you do, you want more. What you did manage to grab tends to slip through your fingers anyway, one way or another, eventually.

    Once you’ve accepted Jesus, some people respect you for it. Plenty more will look down on you, or at least think you’re a little weird. You’ll probably lose some of your appetite for piling up wealth too, because you know good and well there’s something coming after this where none of it will matter.

    Trade a life that doesn’t satisfy you, and that you can’t hold onto anyway, for one that does and that you can’t lose.

    Sounds like a pretty good deal. Not much of a warning at all.

    So maybe we shouldn’t be jealous of the people who show up later. If anything, we should be kicking ourselves for not showing up sooner.

    P.S.-If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

  • We’d Never Do Something That Bad

    We’d Never Do Something That Bad

    Except we do, all the time.

    The story of Peter’s denial is one of the catastrophic failures in the whole Bible. Foretold by Jesus Himself the night before, like the whole thing was written in advance. It sounds like a uniquely terrible collapse of faith.

    It was terrible. That part’s not in question. He shot his mouth off about how he’d die before disowning his Lord. A few hours later he denied knowing Christ, in public, three separate times, to people who weren’t even pressing him that hard.

    A servant girl in the high priest’s courtyard looked at Peter and asked him directly, something close to, weren’t you with him too. Not a vague vibe in the room he had to read. A direct question. And three times, Peter answered it. No. Don’t know the guy. Never met him. Swore for effect on the third.

    So yes it was terrible. But it wasn’t unique.

    We do the same thing, regularly, and don’t call it that.

    We don’t usually deny Christ outright, because most of us never get asked that bluntly. What we get instead are smaller, more specific versions of the same question. Someone asks straight out what we actually think about something, and we know what the honest answer costs, so we give the rounded-off version instead. Technically not a lie. Worded carefully enough to stay out of trouble either way. We call that being diplomatic, or not making it a thing, or just being easy to deal with.

    Going along to get along. That’s the polite name for it. It’s also the exact move Peter made by the fire. He just didn’t have a softer phrase available to hide behind. He was asked, and he answered the wrong thing on purpose.

    Our version doesn’t get preached about on a Sunday. Nobody wrote it down with a rooster crowing at the end for effect. So it doesn’t feel like denial. It feels like being reasonable. Being easy to get along with. Not making things awkward.

    Call it what it actually is, though, and it’s the same transaction Peter made at the fire. Get asked directly, and trade a small piece of honesty about whose side you’re on for a small amount of comfort. He did it under torchlight with witnesses. We do it at dinner, at work, online, and walk away feeling like nothing happened.

    That wasn’t the end for him, though, and what happened after matters more than the failure itself. Peter wept over it. Didn’t try to explain it away. And later, after the resurrection, Jesus finds him on a beach and asks him one question three times. Do you love me. Once for every denial. Doesn’t make him relive the scene at the fire. Just asks, lets Peter answer, and tells him to go feed the sheep.

    That’s the man who ends up preaching at Pentecost, the one the whole early church gets built around.

    We definitely don’t have anything to be proud of, but despair isn’t called for either. It’s the opposite. If God still handed Peter the church after that, mid-failure, no cleanup required first, He’s not waiting on a clean record from the rest of us either.

    Your denial is real. So is what He’s still willing to do with you in spite of it.

    P.S.

    If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.

    No commentary. No telling you what to think. Nothing to buy. Nothing fancy.

    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

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