Sacred Cows Make Great BBQ's
In a culture obsessed by climbing the ladder, goals, targets, personal gain or recognition - Dave Gilpin aims to explore the myth of achievement. Is it really all it is cracked up to be?
Prosperity is an odd yet beautiful beast. It’s like an animal from the Doolittle collection with two heads, both at opposite ends of its body. When someone says that it’s God’s will for you to prosper, it’s a true but potentially precarious statement. Which way does the animal walk?
In one direction is a head that directly faces a land of abundance and overflow and in the other direction is a head that faces a desert.
It would appear that in the early stages of being a Christian, say in the first few years, a lot more ‘instant’ miracles take place than in the proceeding stages. The two headed animal called prosperity appears undivided as it marches directly into green pastures and still waters. As our Christian life develops, however, God’s plan isn’t just to simply give us what we want, but to develop in us what we need – inner character, deeper faith and a patience to wait for God’s perfect time and place. He wants not only to make us recipients of the blessings of Heaven, but partners in the business of bringing Heaven to earth! If you’re living for today only, you’ll miss the bigger purposes of God and resist every desert with passion.
Only in deserts do real character and inner cleansing take place. The prosperity of the soul flourishes when stripped of worldly reliance and attachments. The prosperity beast has a method in its madness, however, of choosing to walk away from green fields and into brown wastelands! Not only can it create an inner prosperity within both the heart and mind of a believer, but it can also position us for the most outstanding of ‘outer’ miracles. Since faith loves impossibility, deserts never stay deserts forever. They turn into amazing forests (Isaiah 41:19). For those who want more than a ‘quick fix’, the prosperity beast leaves us with a ‘double blessing’.
Living for the moment has its drawbacks. Not always being in God’s will is one of them. Living to create a movement and be a part of a movement of the Spirit wins hands down over living for the moment when it comes to its share of scripture. At each turn of the pages of history are Movement Makers who sacrificed living for the moment, going on to become giants in the land. That is maximised prosperity – leaving a legacy of breakthrough to the next generation.
Let’s do the maths
In the words of Alun Davies, a highly influential Christian leader across the Australian Churches, “we live in a fruit-obsessed culture”. We want our success now, even if we have to elasticate our current state of play to make it look more successful than it really is! People who live for the moment operate completely differently from those who live to create a movement. The mathematics of moment seekers is as follows:
Fruit – Loss = Achievement
The gains in life minus the losses in life equals the success or failure of life. For many the current losses and sacrifices far outweigh their current fruitfulness. Many live in a constant syndrome of failure. In a fruit obsessed world, it leads people to either inventing fruitfulness with evangelastic stories, retracting into isolation, or rejecting their real call in favour of a life of quick gain and impressive result.
The maths of Movement Makers are so different. The basis of all their decisions is:
Seed + Faith = Future
Seeds sown plus faith to believe in things unseen equals an amazing future. The Movement Maker’s life may look like a field of brown dirt, yet underneath is the golden seed of tomorrow’s world. A Movement Maker may have very little to show for himself because he gives away more than he keeps, but in the end he makes history, rather than just ending up as a part of history.
Alun Davies sites a number of problems with being fruit obsessed.
Firstly, you can’t create fruit. In 1 Corinthians 3:6 Paul wrote ‘I planted the seed, Apollos watered it but ‘God made it grow’. Fruit belongs to God. You can, however, plant seed any time, any day. Moment makers are waiting for the moment, while Movement Makers are creating history today by planting seeds in season and out.
Secondly, fruit is the evidence of yesterday. It’s the result of yesterday’s seed sowing. If you live for the moment you’ll always be half frozen in history. Fruit is final. Seed is the future.
Thirdly, fruit is momentary. You can’t keep it. You can try to preserve it, but it can rarely be kept outside of a memory. Fruit obsession leads to frantic desperation for more fruit the moment the current fruit begins to wane. Seed obsession is never thwarted. There’s always seeds of life to sow and there’s always more fruit obtained than those just looking for fruit, because of the multitude of seeds that are being sown.
Hebrews Chapter 11 is one of the most interesting in the Bible. We often call it the Hall of Faith or the Heroes of Heaven chapter. It is, however, a list of people who actually never really made it in their lifetime despite their faith. The first person off the ranks is Abel, killed by his brother. Enoch is mentioned next and he simply disappeared one day. Noah saw all of his friends drown in a tragedy that makes the Titanic look small. Abraham died with only one son from a promise of thousands and only owning a small block of land from a promise of territories. Even the amazingly heroic events in the life of Isaac, Jacob and Joseph are not mentioned – only their faith in the future. The parting of the Red Sea and the walls of Jericho falling down are neither accredited to Moses or Joshua but to the people. What’s going on? In a quick summary of Gideon through to Samuel, we see that ‘faith conquered kingdoms’ but that is only squeezed into three verses before reverting back to people who saw a seeming reversal of fortune (sawn in two for example) but believed a lot!
This chapter does not belong to people who live for the moment. Many of our heroes failed dismally in the mathematics of Moment Makers. They succeeded, however, in the maths of Movement Makers. The seed they sowed in obedience and faith had more impact after death than before it. They sowed their seed into a generational God – a God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ... a God of history! They may have been unimportant in their day when it came to the Nations of the world, yet they were actually the most significant people on earth. Their legacy remains today – even the blood of Abel, poured out as a beautiful act of generosity to a God he’d never seen.
Don’t be fooled by this age of consumerism that has tainted an honest attempt by the church to redress the balance of a church steeped in the humility of poverty, the holiness of glum and the piety of being unstained by the world. It’s time to get our priorities in order. It’s time to redress the redressing and free ourselves from our affluenza!
The Law of Hard
Hebrews 12 begins with some of the most difficult and dismissive theology in the Bible. The essence of it is found in the simple phrase, ‘endure hardship as discipline’ (Hebrews 12:7). It is all about the Law of Hard. When something is too hard, we often draw back. When someone endures it, is trained by it and incorporates it as a part of God’s providence, they get to receive a ‘harvest of righteousness and peace’.
It’s from that harvest that Seeds of Character are gathered and planted in the next generation. Everyone spawns seed of some variety that eventually gets picked up by the soil of the next generation. Character is a stronger seed than the Word of God alone because it is the Word outworked in our lives. It’s what shapes the future. They will not do as we say, they’ll do as we are. It’s the heavenly harvest of Character that changes us from being compromised, timid, tight and weak followers of Christ into fearless, generous and strong followers. And it’s through hardship, not despite of it. Hardship here is undefined but incorporates anything that’s difficult. Many teachers who major on abundance and blessing refuse to see how a loving God can allow anyone to go through hardship and pain when God has the capacity to relieve it. It’s this one dimensional view of blessing and of God’s nature that has kept the church shallow and suffocated. It’s high time for real history makers to emerge carrying all the necessary seeds of character that have the power to not just change this generation but the next.
Who’s the greatest?
In the light of living by faith and living to create a movement, who is the greatest history maker – Billy Graham or Edward Kimball? Billy Graham is seen as the 20th century’s greatest evangelist, seeing millions of souls won for Christ. Edward Kimball was a Sunday School teacher responsible for only a few won for Christ.
There are 5 degrees of separation between the two of them. Billy Graham was saved at a crusade held by Mordecai Ham in his home town of Charlotte in 1934. Mordecai Ham was there at the invitation of a Christian association that arose from meetings Billy Sunday had in the town a decade earlier. Billy Sunday worked for a period of time with J Wilber Chapman who had his faith affirmed by D L Moody, who himself saw over a million souls saved in his lifetime. D L Moody was saved through his Sunday School teacher – Edward Kimball.
The spirit of our age would say that Billy Graham is the greatest of the two, yet the spirit of Hebrews 11 would err on the side of Edward Kimball. If faith is believing in an unseen future, Edward lived by faith. If living to create a movement is more about what you sow than what you reap, then Edward was a movement maker.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon was saved in the mid 1800s to become one of Britain’s greatest preachers and church leaders. He was saved at 15 years of age in a primitive Methodist Church attended by around 15 people on a snowy Sunday morning. The Minister was snowed in and ‘a very thin looking man, a shoemaker, a tailor, or something of that sort,’ went up into the pulpit to preach a life saving message. Again, who is the greatest history maker – Spurgeon or the shoemaker? Both would be credited highly by the standards of Hebrews 11, yet if push came to shove, it would be swayed towards the shoemaker!
It’s time for us to see ourselves as Movement Makers alongside the Edward Kimballs and the Shoemakers of this world. This is our moment to live to create a movement that will not only see us doubly blessed, but bless the generations that follow.
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