John Fischer The Catch

It’s a game. It’s impossible to avoid because we are all wired to play it. It’s the comparison game. It’s based on the belief that there will always be those who are worse sinners than we are. (By whose ruling? Conveniently ours, of course.) It’s righteousness by default. It’s what keeps sinners in bars and the “righteous,” somewhere else.

It takes a lot of our attention to maintain the game. It’s even played in church, where levels of “spirituality” keep us from being totally honest with one another. And it’s an exhausting game that requires a good deal of manipulation of the facts to keep it going.

Deep down inside, we long for God to blow the whistle on the whole game. Deep down inside, we want the truth, and when it finally hits home, it hits with incredible fierceness. It’s the only way this will work. We are—every one of us—completely, utterly despicable sinners who are completely, utterly, and wonderfully saved. We gather around the same table, separated by society yet joined by God—Pharisee and sinner, weak and strong, beautiful and ugly, straight and gay, intelligent and ignorant alike, holding out our hands for the blessed forgiveness. There is no division here. No CASUAL SINNERS over here, or NICE PEOPLE SINNERS over there, or REALLY BAD SINNERS down there and to the left. We are all equally guilty, so we can all be equally and gloriously saved.

No one person in all of heaven will feel like they got there because they deserve it; all will be sure that they don’t; and everyone will be equally astonished at the all-consuming grace and mercy of God.

The gospel always calls us to do more than just choose sides.

There are so many issues dividing our country right now—abortion, gay marriage, capital punishment, gun control, universal health insurance, taxes—and in Washington, our legislators are pretty much divided right down the middle on everything according to party lines. But this is exactly what the problem is with politics: there are only two sides to everything. Any thinking person knows this can’t be accurate. There are nuances, subtleties and compromises everywhere, and yet the choice still comes down to one side or the other. Too much is at stake to cross party lines. And with little kindness and civility in the middle, the hope for gentle debate and reaching a more complicated, but equitable consensus is unlikely.

Where do Christians, or more importantly, where does the church fit into all this? Well, unfortunately the church has taken sides along with everyone else and lost its authority to speak into the deeper levels of these issues. The gospel, which values every human being and every human being’s right to freedom, justice and equality has lost its middle ground. While the truth should be speaking into both sides, it is being heard only in one.

But this doesn’t mean you and I can’t be wiser as individuals and act more responsibly with the truth. We need to always go deeper than just choosing sides. This will allow us to reach across the middle and value those who would otherwise be our enemies. We must remember these are real people we are talking about — people who like us, need Jesus. Making an enemy of someone for whom Christ died is not consistent with the message of the gospel.

This may not be able to be accomplished on a large scale but we can make a difference on a smaller personal scale where we live and work. We can reach across and value those on all sides of an issue. We can represent the love of Jesus to everyone. And we can listen and learn even from those with whom we might disagree.

“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ lend to ‘sinners,’ expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”  (Luke 6:32-36)

I am an expert at doing what I want to do. My mind is trained at choosing a path that will step around discomfort and instead, take me from one little comfort to another. But that’s what I want. It’s normal, because we all would choose the easy path over the hard one if we knew nothing else. And yet if I only get what I want, I will be forever dissatisfied with it. I will also hurt those around me because of being stuck in my own selfishness. I need to want something greater; I need to want what God wants.

Paul says there is a way we can actually experience both the death and life of Jesus in our bodies. In fact he recommends it as an excellent way of living. “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Corinthians 4:10).

What does it mean to carry around the death of Jesus in order to show the life of Jesus? It means that we see ahead through any adversity the Lord puts in our way, that to go through it is to put us in a place to experience His life in it. It means to get up and go when you want to lie down and stay. It means to drink the cup of death to that comfort you cradle because you see the resurrection on the other side. You know Christ is waiting for you in the hard thing, and you want to get yourself there to experience Him.

“Nevertheless, I will not do what I want to do, but what you want me to do,” Jesus prayed, and I believe that this needs to be a daily prayer of ours. It’s what it means to carry around the death of Jesus that the life of Jesus may be seen.

Jesus agonized over the cup of death. He struggled with it, but thank God, he drank it, because He knew what it would gain for Himself and for all of us. In like manner, we carry around a certain wrestling with ourselves (part of Jesus’ agony over facing his death was a shock at discovering his own selfishness in not wanting to go forward to the cross) that something far greater might be born in us and seen by all who know us.

Don’t you want to manifest the life of Christ in your life? Well then, the way to that is to carry His death to self.

This is not self-pity. This is not “Oh pain! Oh drudgery! Look what I have to go through!” This is “Lord, I am delighted to pick up this cross because I can’t wait to meet you on the other side of this pain.” Or in the words of Oswald Chambers on this subject, “The only thing that will enable me to enjoy adversity is the acute sense of eagerness of allowing the life of the Son of God to evidence itself in me.”

To carrying around His death always results in His love. It is not whimsy but mighty, strong, confident and bold. May we choose it and find it today.

“For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.” (2 Corinthians 4:11-12)

Now take everything we’ve been saying about the point of spiritual death-to-life and apply that to our continual effectiveness in the marketplace, and you have how God wants to use us. This death-to-life is not something that happens once or that even happens occasionally; it happens all the time. It is the spiritual reality of an effective believer. What does “always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake” mean, if it isn’t a continual reality?

It’s really simple folks. If people stop with us – if we are what impresses – we haven’t helped anyone. We’re not going to save anybody. But if people see through us to Christ, then we have truly helped someone because we have led them to God.

We are always operating from death to life. We are constantly coming to the end of ourselves and into Jesus. We are living there and showing off that reality.

Here is the essence of an effective ministry: A great God, our so-so lives, and whatever happens next.

If people are impressed with you, it better not be for long. Others need to see what makes you you – what makes you confident, what make you alive – and its going to be your weaknesses far more than your strengths that shows this off.

For more about this and other aspects of Transforming the Marketplace, join us tonight at 7pm PDT (10pm EDT) for our Catch On Teleconference Bible Study and Discussion by dialing 218-237-3840 and using #124393 as your access code. I know it’s late for you East Coasters, but it’s worth it.

Believe me, this is not what you hear every day, but it’s been in our Bibles all along, and when you put it up to life, you realize it’s really how the world works.

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24)

I’m thinking this morning about that seed that goes into the ground and dies, and what exactly that means. Dying, in spiritual terms, is a hard concept to grasp. What exactly did Jesus mean when He chose this metaphor? What does it mean to fall to the ground and die?

I’m not sure we can spell this out exactly. If it were a single dimensional, easily explainable concept, it wouldn’t have taken a metaphor to capture it. When God chooses a metaphor, it’s because He has built significant things into the process, all of which have some application to our lives. Perhaps we can get closer to understanding this death metaphor by identifying some things that most likely are included in this process.

A seed falling into the ground and dying must by nature include some form of each of the following:

Humility (or maybe humiliation is closer). Falling into the ground and dying doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun. It must include a certain death to pride, prejudice and a good reputation. This would be the opposite of achievement and accomplishment. It would be more associated with failure and loss.

Submission (or perhaps a certain letting go is included). A seed going into the ground is rather helpless. It can’t do a whole lot except be there. It can’t start growing on its own. It has to submit itself to the natural processes built into all seeds. Which must of necessity include…

Patience. A seed in the ground has to wait for itself to grow. It can’t push real hard and produce roots and a stem whenever it wants to. It takes time and water to get the process going. A seed possesses all the elements for growth, it’s just not in charge of when or how fast it takes place. A seed is not helped by those who would dig it up periodically to see how it is doing.

Trust. Because of all this, a seed must trust in the process, the care of the farmer, the water to nourish it and the sun to warm the earth. It must be willing to disappear for a while, and even disappoint the expectations of those who have no patience with these things. But just you wait. Not just growth, but a transformation is coming. You will no longer recognize this seed as a seed. We’re not talking about a little seed growing into a bigger seed; we’re talking about a seed becoming something else entirely.

Thinking in terms of each of these things may help us identify some of God’s purposes in our lives that may already be taking place. And this list is by no means complete. I’m sure all of you can add to it. I can’t make any direct connections between these things and what might be going on in your life right now, but I bet you can. I’m sure that’s why Jesus left this for us to figure out.

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24)

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24)

At least in spiritual terms, death is a requirement for life. I know you were under the impression that life preceded death, but that’s only partially true. It is true of the physical realm, but it’s spiritually backwards. You don’t live and then you die; you die and then you live.

The problem with us – the reason we aren’t seeing many seeds being born out of our lives – is because we are fighting this. We don’t want to die. We’d rather go to seed conventions, growth seminars for seeds, seed enhancers who polish our outer shell and make us look spiffy – anything but going into the ground and dying. Who wants to be placed in a damp, dark hole and get covered up by dirt and forgotten? Who wants to go into the ground and die? Isn’t it amazing that we fight the one thing that is a requirement for life?

The women of Isaiah House I spoke to last night have a better chance of understanding this and seeing life being born in them and in those around them than do the others of us who appear, at least on the surface, to have life working for us. They have life experiences that are forcing them into the ground right now. They can fight that, or they can submit to it, trust in the process of growth God builds into seeds that die, and watch them grow into something that will soon push them up out of the ground as a seedling and then a stalk of grain, full of other seeds that spring up around them into a virtual field of wheat. It’s a miraculous transformation, nothing that any of us can control.

But we can decide whether we will submit to this death or fight it. Come on, there’s probably a hole somewhere near you right now that you can roll yourself into. Get there, and trust in God to work a miracle in your life – for every time a seed springs up out of the ground, even though it is a natural process and happens every time, it is still a minor miracle, and it is something that happens to the seed, not something it controls. It’s the natural process of death to life.

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24)

The greatest hindrance to our spiritual growth and effectiveness in the world is how thoroughly determined we are to making the old covenant work, and how unaware we are of this insistence. It is my firm belief, because I am among them, that the pews of Christendom are filled with old covenant Christians trying really hard to get from God all the things they already have been guaranteed by His grace, but are not experiencing because of an unwillingness to die.

Proof of this is how shocked and saddened we are when anyone fails, sins, or “falls from grace.” And what’s more, we are saddened by the very thing that is about to release God’s power in their lives. (Unfortunately they will most likely be gone from our company before we have a chance to see that.)

God’s purposes in our lives are not found primarily by figuring out the right thing to do. They are found out by failing to do the right thing and finding out, lo and behold, that God wanted to bring His presence and His purposes (His will) out of our failure. God wants to bring forth life in us, but He can’t do that without a death (and nobody wants to die).

Unless the old covenant fails, you don’t get the new one. As long as you think the old one is working fine, that’s how long you will fail to see God at work in your life. And yet for how many Christians is Christianity reduced to a list (or class, or seminar, or book, or sermon) of all the right things to do, and perpetuated by the false assumption that we are actually doing them?

The greatest enemy of Christianity is the insistence that given the right church, the right network, the right pastor, the right approach, it is working. We might as well send all our leaders back up the mountain to get a new version of the Ten Commandments for us to break as soon as they get back down (or before – while they’re gone – as was the case with the children of Israel. When do you think was Moses’ first clue that this wasn’t going to work even if he went back up the mountain and got new copy of the original?)

It’s really very simple: yes, we have a new covenant, but you don’t get it without getting rid of the old one, and you don’t break the power of the old one without a death.

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24)

Some family business:
Teleconference Bible Study tonight. 7pm PDT; 10pm EDT
Dial 218-237-3840; Access code 124393.
A Study Guide for tonight and special Survey have been sent to all our participants and are available to everyone by clicking on each respectively.
As for our fundraising campaign, we are now $5,000 short. (A more detailed report will be coming later.) Please help take us over the top, if only for Marti’s sake, in whose voice today’s Catch goes out.

As we have called on you to help protect the Catch ministry from someone capable of shutting it down, you have generously answered with gifts, challenge matches, prayer and moral support – leaving our hearts full of gratitude.

Yet behind me and before you is a woman whose sacrifices have allowed us to begin and expand a ministry that now is seeing a global impact. I ask and pray that consideration be given to this woman and her family who have loved you – even more than me.

As we near the end of our current campaign to change the course of another’s intent. I am turning to the voice of my wife to connect to us all. The words are taken from a full bevy of running comments she shares with me – some of which I actually understand. Marti’s writing is an intuitive expression of a mystery – for us to decipher for ourselves, for she is speaking of all of us – you, me, everybody within the body of the Catch – when she says, “I know you…”

You know me and I know you – and it has never been easy

You, dear friend of the Catch, have made yourself accessible to me and I thank you.

You have come to know me:  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Wretch describes me best. It is the means of transformation at the end of the road of no alternatives and no options, when, instead of death, destruction, disaster and devastation, I am along side of you, singing hymns of glory. It is like the warm morning sun breaking out on our shivering lifeboats on the other side of the Titanic.

I know you – you are a story about a revolution in a human life.

You may have sat in life’s pews where salvation is ever present, and the knowledge that when the daylight comes, you’ve always got another chance … but sadly for some reason I do not know, you rarely take it to its full advantage.

Yet the first time something comes along – a divorce, a death, a pain in your heart – you are swept along in its sadness. You, the child prodigy, were to be made exempt from life’s hardships unlike ‘those’ other people. So in church you remain dazzling. In private you war, warring with yourself and with your God. Except for Him with whom you battle, you are alone.

I know you do not know how you are surviving and are yet to understand this mystery – the mystery that you will never really know while here on earth with me.

I know you because the first time we spoke I related to your unacceptable self – and you were surprised, agreeing that you had gone on long enough in hiding.

You would say, “What is it about?”

And I would say, “I have no clue what it’s about.”

“But for as long as I can remember,” you would say, with or without the question, “everyone had the answer.”

Yet you knew I didn’t know – didn’t need to know – the answer.  We just knew we fit into each other, and you were no longer alone in your sadness.

You know the times when you connect with someone and you know in the connecting that it is going to be right for you.  It’s like trying on a coat or a dress and going, “Well that fits me. Even if I have to get it altered a little. It’s the right style, it’s the right shape.” That’s how I know you.

I’ve worn you in many different places and you still fit very well. Like a good song, you are a fit that’s going to last forever. I find myself in your story – a story in which I find pleasure, even if I sing it 100,000 times. It is your story. Everybody owns it now because you are finally beginning to give.

You won me over with your story.  You are a love story – a story about unrequited love returning. You are in process, which makes you my favorite story.

And now you know that you must participate in this great adventure – your story. And your story needs to go public. You have to admit now that holding your story privately is rather silly. If I can know you – and I do – so can just about anyone else who wants to know.

I know you know this, but I also know that you find it easier not to participate in your story because it involves others. These others are not like your dazzling’ public side, but are ever so much more like you in your private, sometimes sad story.

I know you. I know you fear connecting because it requires some form of confrontation. But avoiding differences and the potential confrontation is like throwing away the keys to connecting – one to another and someday to everyone.

I understand that it may be painful for you, but I also believe that things that are painful for us sometimes transcend, helping us get through to the other side where there is healing. I’m hoping so.

You know me. There’s pain inside me. Yet, I don’t think I’m different from you or most people. I do experience pain. Yet, it’s always side by side with joy.  And if I do not share the pain, you can never embrace the joy.

The source of that is, of course, the mystery. While I do not think anyone welcomes heartbreak, tragedy and pain, I suggest we nonetheless embrace all three. It is the price of being alive. That’s the journey. The journey is a journey of joy and miracles. And it’s a journey of loss and how to rejoice in that loss.

Imagine being invited to a party, a lavish dinner while sitting next to a guest who is starving. You cannot tell me you do not see the guest everywhere you go. You cannot say to yourself, “I hope he gets help.” Nor can you just shout out, “Call a hotline. Get some help. Go see somebody.” I know you know that it is far more important to you and your guest to show up in this guest’s life and connect with your story. Help them get dressed. Take them out. Make connections. The wonderful thing is that the Healer is there already amongst the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with you if we are with your guest.  And the healing starts to take place in both of you, sometimes in spite of you, but always through you.

I know you. It is very hard for you to give up the public image you so desire with others so that the private story can come forward. It is much easier to keep a stiff upper lip, as they say. But you have to lose the dazzling because that is how you get you back. I think it’s found in your story.  Not just in the old story or today’s vulnerable story but in your new story out there for you to find and tell. There are new things coming, new avenues to travel and new people with their stories for you to listen to, care about, and embrace.

I know you. I know how valuable your life is. I know how precious your life is.  And now I hope you know, too.

Let’s think for a few minutes about the church in here, only because this has been the model of the church that has prevailed for at least my lifetime, and I am finally willing to admit it might be wrong.

The church in here builds walls.

The church in here is primarily concerned with its own safety.

The church in here is more concerned with what goes on in here than with what is going on out there.

The church in here stresses what is different between us (in here) and them (out there) and takes pride in those differences.

The goal of the church in here is to get everyone out there, in here.

The more time we can get people to spend in here, the less trouble they will get into out there (or so we think).

The rules for the church in here only work in here; they don’t work out there.

The church in here pretty much tells you what to think about almost everything, so much so that you don’t have to do much or your own thinking. Indeed, your own thinking is considered a threat to the church in here.

The church in here is most often closed to everyone out there and open by appointment only.

Our understanding of the church works in here but not out there.

Here’s the problem, with the exception of those people employed to run the church in here, most people spend most of their time out there, creating a huge disconnect in people’s lives. So little of what is going on out there has anything to do with what is going on in here and vice versa. Most of the talking is in here; most of the living is out there.

Our goal for the future, of course, is to get the church out there, indeed, to be the church out there. To do this will take some new thinking, a new agenda, and a new way of going about being the church in the marketplace. This really isn’t as hard as it seems. It will ride on the lives of believers, it will rally around a gospel of welcome, and it will run on relationships. No walls necessary; no building required except for what’s already there.

I’m not suggesting we abandon all those four-walled churches. I am suggesting we let go of the idea that what goes on inside those walls constitutes all of church. It’s really only a very small part.