Merlin's Mustache

2 Peter 2:1-22 (MSG) 

1. But there were also lying prophets among the people then, just as there will be lying religious teachers among you. They’ll smuggle in destructive divisions, pitting you against each other—biting the hand of the One who gave them a chance to have their lives back! They’ve put themselves on a fast downhill slide to destruction,

2. but not before they recruit a crowd of mixed-up followers who can’t tell right from wrong. They give the way of truth a bad name.

3. They’re only out for themselves. They’ll say anything, anything, that sounds good to exploit you. They won’t, of course, get by with it. They’ll come to a bad end, for God has never just stood by and let that kind of thing go on.

4. God didn’t let the rebel angels off the hook, but jailed them in hell till Judgment Day.

5. Neither did he let the ancient ungodly world off. He wiped it out with a flood, rescuing only eight people—Noah, the sole voice of righteousness, was one of them.

6. God decreed destruction for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. A mound of ashes was all that was left—grim warning to anyone bent on an ungodly life.

7. But that good man Lot, driven nearly out of his mind by the sexual filth and perversity, was rescued.

8. Surrounded by moral rot day after day after day, that righteous man was in constant torment.

9. So God knows how to rescue the godly from evil trials. And he knows how to hold the feet of the wicked to the fire until Judgment Day.

10. God is especially incensed against these “teachers” who live by lust, addicted to a filthy existence. They despise interference from true authority, preferring to indulge in self-rule. Insolent egotists, they don’t hesitate to speak evil against the most splendid of creatures.

11. Even angels, their superiors in every way, wouldn’t think of throwing their weight around like that, trying to slander others before God.

12. These people are nothing but brute beasts, born in the wild, predators on the prowl. In the very act of bringing down others with their ignorant blasphemies, they themselves will be brought down, losers in the end.

13. Their evil will boomerang on them. They’re so despicable and addicted to pleasure that they indulge in wild parties, carousing in broad daylight.

14. They’re obsessed with adultery, compulsive in sin, seducing every vulnerable soul they come upon. Their specialty is greed, and they’re experts at it. Dead souls!

15. They’ve left the main road and are directionless, having taken the way of Balaam, son of Beor, the prophet who turned profiteer, a connoisseur of evil.

16. But Balaam was stopped in his wayward tracks: A dumb animal spoke in a human voice and prevented the prophet’s craziness.

17. There’s nothing to these people—they’re dried-up fountains, storm-scattered clouds, headed for a black hole in hell.

19. They promise these newcomers freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption, for if they’re addicted to corruption—and they are—they’re enslaved.

20. If they’ve escaped from the slum of sin by experiencing our Master and Savior, Jesus Christ, and then slid back into that same old life again, they’re worse than if they had never left.

21. Better not to have started out on the straight road to God than to start out and then turn back, repudiating the experience and the holy command.

22. They prove the point of the proverbs, “A dog goes back to its own vomit,” and, “A scrubbed-up pig heads for the mud.”

BOTTOM LINE: Anything above sound familiar to you considering our current events? I suggest you continue on into chapter three and then enjoy rereading both I & II Peter every month or so. If I recall, I’ve heard some theologians infer that these two epistles were written expressly for the “suffering church.” I’m thinking perhaps the American remnant may soon qualify. Are we ready?

NEXT UP: You ever hear how the Twelve Disciples transitioned to their eternal rewards? I’m sure you did, but if not, here goes… Blessings on your journey to sainthood… mle 050824

by Eugene Peterson …   Psalm 132 explained.

I was recently introduced to the author Eugene Peterson by my friend Chuck so I ordered the four books he suggested but have only completed three so far savoring them like quality ice cream after an tasty meal (actually ice cream is welcome here anytime) .  And to think I had been incorrectly assuming all along, he had only written The Message! No longer! I find it noteworthy and indicative of the wordsmith he was, that Peterson once commandeered a key word phrase associated with atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche – that the only way to live life is to find a standard and stick to it – and repurposed it to be about following Jesus nonetheless! Peterson literally stole the nonbeliever’s catchphrase, “a long obedience in the same direction,” and made it the name of his own best-selling Christian book first released in 1980. What makes Peterson’s message so unique today is he exudes the bedrock transformation offered only by Jesus Christ, whereas many believers today tend to view the Nietzsche and Marxist deception as smoke and mirrors leading to death. Take note for The Message, his paraphrase of the Bible, has transformed the dusty, ancient Christian scriptures into imaginative literature for contemporary readers seeking truth.

While I was reading this chapter 14 (which I’ve summarized below – now with the Preface (verbatim) over 2300 words long; perhaps you can read it in installments while rationing out your ice cream) when I just laughed out loud thoroughly enjoying the lead off hospital incident. The truths of his Kelly parable and the pollster’s definitive “frivolous” report resonates with me as I too at times can mistake a sore throat for a descent into hell.(“Peterson, pray for me!”) Perhaps the best possible antidote is when we can combine an accurate memory of God’s ways with a lively hope in his promises, the essence of Psalm 132.

20^th– Anniversary Preface.. verbatim, not summarized.

As I sat down to revise A Long Obedience In The Same Direction I was prepared to do a lot of changing. I have hardly done any. It turns out there are some things that just don’t change. God doesn’t change: He seeks and He saves. And our response to God as He reveals himself in Jesus doesn’t change: we listen and we follow. Or we don’t. When we are dealing with the basics – God and our need for God – we are at bedrock. We start each day at the beginning with no frills.

So the book comes out in this new edition substantially as I first wrote it. I added an epilogue to reaffirm the ways in which Scripture and prayer fuse to provide energy and direction to those of us who set out to follow Jesus. A few celebrity names have been replaced by new ones (celebrities change pretty rapidly!), and I have changed a few references to current affairs. But that’s about it. It is reassuring to realize once again that we don’t have to anxiously study the world around us in order to keep up with God and his ways with us.

The most conspicuous change has been the use of a fresh translation of the Holy Scriptures, The Message, that I have been working on continuously since the publication of A Long Obedience. In fact, the fifteen Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120-134) that provide the text here for developing “discipleship in an instant society” provided the impetus for embarking on the new translation. All I had in mind at first was translating the Psalms into idiomatic North American language that I heard people using on the streets and in the shopping malls and at football games. I knew that following Jesus could never develop into a “long obedience” without a deepening prayer life and that the Psalms had always been the primary means by which Christians learned to pray everything they lived, and live everything they prayed over the long haul (No wonder I missed the boat spiritually so long. Only recently did I begin to read the Psalms).

But the people I was around didn’t pray the Psalms. That puzzled me; Christians have always prayed the Psalms; and why didn’t my friends and neighbors? Then I realized it was because the language, cadenced and beautiful and harmonious, seemed remote from their jerky and messy and discordant everyday lives. I wanted to translate these fifteen Psalms from their Hebrew original and convey the raw, rough and robust energy that is so characteristic of these prayers. I wanted people to start praying them again, not just admiring them from a distance, and thereby learn to pray everything they experienced and felt and thought as they followed Jesus, not just what they thought was proper to pray in church.

And so it happened that the unintended consequence of the writing of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction was this new translation of the Song of the Ascents, and then all the Psalms and then the NT and eventually the whole Bible. The inclusion of that translation in this new edition completes the book in a way I could not have anticipated twenty years ago.

Chapter 14. Obedience: How He Promised God

 “True knowledge of God is born out of obedience.” John Calvin

An incident took place a few years ago that has acquired the force of a parable for me. I had a minor operation on my nose and was in my hospital room recovering. Even though the surgery was minor, the pain was great and I was full of misery. Late in the afternoon a man was assigned to the other bed in my room. He was to have a tonsillectomy the next day. He was young, about twenty-two years old, good looking and friendly. He came over to me, put out his hand and said, “ Hi, my name is Kelly. What happened to you?”

I was no mood for friendly conversation, did not return the handshake,  grunted my name and said that I had gotten my nose broken. He got the message that I did not want to talk, pulled the curtain between our beds and let me alone. Later in the evening his friends were visiting, and I heard him say, “There’s a man in the next bed who is a prizefighter; He got his nose broken in a championship fight.” He went on to embellish the story for the benefit of his friends.

Later in the evening, as I was feeling better, I said, “Kelly, you misunderstood what I said. I’m not a prizefighter. The nose was broken years ago in a basketball game, and I am just now getting it fixed.”

“Well, what do you do then?”

“I’m a pastor.”

“Oh.” he said and turned away; I was no longer an interesting subject.

In the morning he awoke me: “Peterson, Peterson – wake up.” I groggily came awake and asked what he wanted. “I want you to pray for me; I’m scared.” And so, before he was taken to surgery, I went to his bedside and prayed for him.

When he was brought back a couple of hours later, a nurse came and said, “Kelly, I am going to give you an injection that should take care of any pain you might have.”

In twenty minutes or so he began to groan, “I hurt. I can’t stand it. I’m going to die.”

I rang for the nurse and, when she came, said “Nurse, I don’t think that shot did any good; why don’t you give him another one?” She didn’t acknowledge my credentials for making such a suggestion, told me curtly that she would oversee the medical care of the patient, turned on her heel and, a little too abruptly I thought, left. Meanwhile Kelly continued to vent his agony.

After another half hour he began to hallucinate, and having lost touch with reality, began to shout, “Peterson, pray for me; can’t you see I’m dying! Peterson, pray for me!” His shouts brought the nurses, doctors, and orderlies running. They held him down and quieted him with the injection I had prescribed earlier.

The parabolic force of the incident is this: when the man was scared he wanted me to pray for him, and when the man was crazy he wanted me to pray for him, but in between, during the hours of so-called normalcy, he didn’t want anything to do with a pastor. What Kelly betrayed in extremis is all many people today know of religion: 1.) religion is to help them with their fears but that is forgotten when the fears are taken care of; 2.) religion is made of moments of craziness but those are remote and shadowy in the clear light of the sun and routines of every day. In fact, I believe the most religious places in the world are not churches but battlefields and mental hospitals. You are much more likely to find passionate prayer in a foxhole than in a church pew, and you will certainly find more otherworldly visions and supernatural voices in a mental hospital than you will in church.

Stable, Not Petrified

Nevertheless we Christians don’t go to either place to nurture our faith. We don’t deliberately put ourselves in places of fearful danger, and we don’t put ourselves in psychiatric wards so we can be around those who clearly see visions of heaven and hell and distinctly hear the voice of God. What most Christians do is come to church, a place that is fairly safe and moderately predictable. For we have an instinct for health and sanity in our faith. We don’t seek our death-defying situations, and we avoid mentally unstable teachers. But in doing that we don’t get what some people want very much, a religion that makes us safe at all costs, certifying us as inoffensive to our neighbors and guaranteeing us as good risks to the banks. We want a Christian faith that has stability but is not petrified, that has vision but is not hallucinatory. How do we get both a sense of stability and a spirit of adventure, the ballast of good health and the zest of true sanity? How do we get the adult maturity to keep our feet on the ground and retain the childlike innocence to make the leap of faith?

What would you think of a pollster who issued a definitive report on how the American people felt about a new television special, if we discovered later that he had interviewed only one person who had seen only ten minutes of the program? We would dismiss the conclusions as frivolous. Yet that is exactly the kind of evidence that too many Christians accept as the final truth about many much more important matters-matters such as answered prayer, God’s judgment, Christ’s forgiveness, eternal salvation. The only person they consult is themselves, and the only experience they evaluate is their most recent ten minutes. But we need other experiences, particularly the community of experience of brothers and sisters in the Church and our local congregation, as well as the centuries of experience provided by our biblical ancestors. A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingertips and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and the experiences of the past week. (clearly a choice definitive sentence! merlin)

A Christian with a defective memory has to start everything from scratch and spends far too much of his or her time backtracking, repairing, perhaps even starting over. A Christian with a good memory avoids repeating old sins, knows the easiest way through complex situations and instead of starting over each day continues what was begun in Adam.

You ever notice for all its interest in history the Bible never refers to the past as “the good old days.” The past is not, for the person of faith, a restored historical site that we tour when we are on vacation; it is a field we plow, disc, harrow and plant, fertilize, lovingly work to insure a bountiful harvest.

Christians who master Psalm 132 will be protected from one danger, at least, that is always a threat to our obedience: the danger that we should reduce our Christian existence to ritually obeying a few commandments that are congenial to our temperament and convenient to our standard of living. It gives us, instead, a vision into the future so that we can see what is right before us. If we define the nature of our lives by our mistake of the moment, or the defeat of the hour, or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give our obedience ballast and breadth just as we need a vision of the future to give our obedience both direction and goal.

If we never learn to do this – to extend the boundaries of our lives beyond the dates merely enclosed by our birth and death, and actually acquire an understanding and appreciation of God’s way as something larger and more complete than those anecdotes in our private diaries – we will forever be missing the point of things, by making headlines out of something that ought to be tucked away on page 97 in section C of the newspaper, or putting into the classified ads something that should be getting a full page color advertisement – perhaps mistaking a sore throat for a descent into hell! (“Peterson, pray for me!”) For Christian faith is a full revelation of a vast creation and a grandly consummated redemption. I prefer to define my faith, or your faith, by witnessing our obedient actions in the same direction, as led by the Holy Spirit

Christian living demands that we keep our feet on the ground, but it also asks us to make a leap of faith. A Christian who stays put is no better than a statue, waiting to be pulled down when the tides change. A person who leaps about constantly is under suspicion of being not a man but a jumping jack or worse. Our obedience requires we possess the strength to stand as well as a willingness to leap, and the good sense to know when to do which. Which is exactly what we get when our accurate memory of God’s ways are combined with a lively hope in his promises.         

So what if we do possess “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction” if the big “O” (obedience) is predominately “cultural” and has not been “visibly transformational” for a century or two and just perhaps there are persons within and without, that tell us we’ve lost our way? One thing is certain though. if strife and chaos either emerges or invades, unknown leaders will be born as the flames rise and the love of Christ will be witnessed by the masses before the ashes cool. And some leaders may well die for their obedient actions. And some of His witnesses among the masses may be sacrificed. But rejoice that the exiting witnesses will directly enter Glory! But do pray for the millions of the masses who know not God and are ignorant of His Ways.

The blood of the martyrs has always built the Church. Martyrdom has been happening around the world for centuries. Our communities may no longer be exempt. Believers may even become endangered species. Prepare your heart, your mind, and your soul for the battle of your life. And rejoice abundantly in the event our country and the world is granted a reprieve from the imminent strife and chaos all about us; simply more time for believers to prepare and be a witness to the lost masses of the Hope that lies within us.

Peace does not mean to be merely in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart, which is only possible by centering on Christ’s love for you.

Leaders don’t force people to follow. They merely invite them to join them on their journey to Glory.

Think about this. A true leader does not lead with the intent to only create followers, BUT with the intent to create an abundance of more Leaders!

Leaders become great leaders not because of THEIR power, BUT because of their ability to spiritually EMPOWER others!

Next Up: YouTube of Pastor Carl’s Sermon Sunday past On Being Blessed… And Oh, Are We Ever!! Start at 32:00 minutes for the reading of the text…

Last week I listened to nationally syndicated radio host and columnist Michael Brown’s handbook “Saving A Sick America,” (SASA) a biblically-based moral and cultural renaissance, revealing that the key for the inspiration and guidance necessary for a moral and cultural revolution for recapturing America’s greatness consists in returning to our spiritual and moral roots.

And yes indeed, at first blush, this book too appears to be just one more of the thousands continually appearing for decades now. But from my perhaps yet immature perspective as a blogger, I’ve already realized effective sustainable life change do not occur easily without significant reorientation of our perspectives and desires. And I particularly found Chapter Twelve in SASA titled “Putting An End To The Blame Game & Saying Goodbye To The Entitlement Mentality,” as a key document for exploration. But may I remind us as readers, since we are all to encourage and mentor others in various capacities every day, perhaps this has a wider application than I originally considered, therefore I am sharing it with you. Even though I spent considerable time attempting to condense this eleven page chapter, this document is still nearly 3000 words long. Make no mistake! This document remains a chapter. Pace your reading accordingly!

Ecclesiastes 1: 9–10 Tells us there is nothing new under the sun. The problems and challenges we face today, although packaged differently than in past centuries, are the same problems and challenges experienced by previous generations. We have the same fears, desires, lusts, loves, hopes, and dreams, whether we live in the 21^st -century A.D. or the 21^st – century BC. This is another reason God‘s word is so amazingly relevant: Our Maker knows us better than we know ourselves, and the sins and the shortcomings and the weaknesses of our forefathers, going all the way back to the garden of Eden – are our sins and shortcomings and weaknesses today. In many ways, we are just like Adam and Eve.

Let’s go back then, to the beginning, to an earthly paradise called the garden of Eden. We know the story all too well. Eve was deceived by the serpent, and she ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, giving the fruit to her husband Adam, who also ate of it. This is what is known as the fall of man.

Immediately, Adam and Eve were conscious of their nakedness. Before that they had the innocence of little children and were one unaware they were unclothed. Now they had to cover up. For the first time they also experienced guilt and fear. They hid from the presence of the Lord, whose commandments they had violated. They also learned to make excuses and pass the buck. The narrative in Genesis 3 is remarkable:

Then the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He replied, “I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.“

“Who told you that you were naked? “asked the Lord God. “Have you eaten from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat?“

The man replied, “It was the woman you gave me who gave me the fruit, and I ate it.“

Then the Lord God asked the woman, “What have you done?“

“The serpent deceived me, “she replied. “That’s why I ate it.” (v. 9–13 NLT)

This sounds just like you and me: “Lord, it’s not my fault! Someone else is to blame!“

When God confronted Adam, the man in essence replied, “It is not my fault! It was that woman that you gave me. She is guilty. And for the record, I never asked you for a companion. That was all your idea. You are the one who put her in the garden with me, so in reality, you’re the one responsible for what I did.”

When God confronted Eve she replied, “It is not my fault! The snake tricked me! And just for the record, although I’m not actually saying it out loud, you were the one who put that deceiver in the garden with me. Otherwise, I would never thought of disobeying you. Not in a million years. So, if there’s anyone to blame here, it’s you for putting that arch deceiver right in my own backyard.”

How did God respond? First, he pronounced a curse on the snake, then on the woman, then on the man (Genesis 3:14-19). Everyone is responsible before the Lord, and excuses evaporate in his presence. The blame game doesn’t work before an all-seeing God. To paraphrase the old joke, you can’t kill your parents and then plead for leniency from the court because you’re an orphan. Not in God’s court!

The Lord calls us to take responsibility for our actions, refusing to entertain her fragile excuses. This is something you find throughout the Gospels, where Jesus, who was so full of compassion and long-suffering and kindness and tenderness, showed no tolerance for excuses. He cut through them like a knife cuts through butter. He exposes them for what they were: empty words used to cover up the lack of willingness. That’s why, when Jesus was on the earth, he didn’t trust himself to people, “because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man” (John  2:24–25). He also knew that there was nothing new under the sun when it came to the human race.

When, in response to Jesus command to “follow me, “the man said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father,“ Jesus replied, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as  for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God“ (Luke 9:59-60).

The fact is that Jesus was sensitive, and he was committed to honoring one’s parents (see especially Mark 7:1-13). But he saw through this man’s excuse, recognizing that the man was procrastinating. Today Jesus might seem harsh and uncaring. He is hardly like the Jesus we hear preached from our pulpits these days. The contemporary Jesus would never hurt any one’s feelings like this. But that, of course, is one of the big differences between the real Jesus – the Jesus of the Scriptures who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, (Heb 13:8) – and the modern, fairy tale version of Jesus.

It is absolutely true that we are saved by grace, not by works, and that eternal life is a gift. But Paul also made clear that with grace came responsibility, writing, “I therefore a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called” (Ephesian 4:1). And “Therefore I exhort you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a sacrifice – alive, holy, and pleasing to God – which is your reasonable service. Do not be conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may test and approve what is the will of God – what is good and well pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:1-2).

Paul also had no places for empty excuses, telling the believers in Rome that “each of us will give an account of himself to God” and explaining to the believers in Corinth that “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” Rom. 14:12; II Corinthians 5:10).

These are sobering words. As children of God, we will give account to our Father one day, not to determine if we are saved or lost but to determine our future rewards.

It is true that he is for us, not against us; that he desires to bless, not curse; that there is no condemnation for those who are in Messiah Jesus; that Christ himself is our advocate, which means he is pleading our cause. Therefore we submit to the Lord out of love rather than cower before him in servile fear. This means we will take responsibility for our sins, which is something else we don’t hear about too often these days. As a Christian apologist Jeremiah Johnson observed, instead of repentance we hear “a lot of talk about brokenness and negativity, as if Christ humbled Himself to the point of death to cure depression and fix bad attitudes. The modern church has largely done away with the biblical language of sin and salvation, replacing it with gooey postmodern verbiage that appeals to a generation raised on psychobabble and self-help seminars.“

Johnson then quoted Pastor John MacArthur:

That kind of thinking has all but driven words like sin, repentance, contrition, atonement, restitution, and redemption out of public discourse. If no one is supposed to feel guilty, how could anyone be a sinner? Modern culture has the answer: people are victims. Victims are not responsible for what they do; they are casualties of what happens to them. So every human failing must be described in terms of how the perpetrator has been victimized. We are all supposed to be “sensitive“ and “compassionate“ enough to see that the very behaviors we used to label “sin“ are  actually evidence of victimization.

Victimization has gained so much influence that as far as society is concerned, there is practically no such thing as sin anymore. Anyone can escape responsibility for his or her wrongdoing simply by claiming the status of a victim. It has radically changed the way our society looks at human behavior.

We are not sinners anymore; we are morally challenged. We don’t break God‘s commandments; we have a disease. We are not wicked; we are weak. And above all, we’re not guilty, since guilt implies responsibility and God knows we are not responsible. Someone else is to blame!

The bottom line is this: if you want to grow spiritually, if you want to become mature, if you want to fulfill your God-given destiny, then adopt a no-excuses policy for your life.

You alone are responsible for your success or failure, and the quicker you learn to embrace this way of thinking, the quicker you will make progress – real, discernible progress. No one will be able to stop you from living a productive, meaningful life, and every stumbling block will become a steppingstone. His grace will empower you as you give yourself to him.

It is true that people often hurt us and that circumstances are often against us, and many times we do suffer because of other people‘s sins and negligence and misdeeds. But making excuses will make things worse, not better, while shifting the blame will not provide you with the single constructive solution.

But there is one more step to take if you really want to swim against the tide in today’s society, and so I encourage you to embrace this attitude as well: nobody owes me anything, and I’m not “entitled“ to a wonderful life. Unfortunately, many Americans hold the exact opposite of this belief, and this crippling entitlement mentality dominates much of our nation today. It is the mindset that says, “Society owes me a better life.“

Conservapedia.com defines entitlement mentality as a “a state of mind in which an individual comes to believe that privileges are instead rights, and they are to be expected as a matter of course.“ In the words of Alethea Luna, “a sense of entitlement is established upheld by the belief that we are the center of the universe, and if the universe doesn’t meet our needs and desires, all hell will break loose.“

According to Conservapedia.com, entitlement mentality is characterized by:

1.) A lack of appreciation for the sacrifices of others

2.)Lack of personal responsibility 

3.)An inability to accept that actions carry consequences

4.) Increased dependency on the Nanny state big government intervention, and expectation that the government will intervene to solve personal problems. Upon losing a job, for instance, someone with an entitlement mentality is likely to turn to the government for unemployment handouts rather than immediately seeking another job.

5.) Ignorance of the Bill of Rights. Those within entitlement mentality frequently imagine so-called rights that are in no way guaranteed – for instance, the “right to employment,“ or the “right to not be offended” or “the “right to healthcare.” Moreover, they misinterpret the Declaration of Independence’s affirmation of their right to pursue happiness as a Constitutional guarantee of happiness.

6.) Support for wholesale expansion of Welfare state social programs as a cure all for perceived “injustice.”

Now, if we go back to the garden, back to Adam and Eve, we can see that the entitlement mentality is the flip side of the blame shifting mentality. Blame-shifting says I’m not responsible for my failure; someone else is,“ while entitlement says, “I’m not responsible for improving my situation; someone else is.” Either way, someone else is to blame for my current situation, and if I don’t find myself where I want to be today, it’s someone else’s fault.

This dangerous attitude is crippling a whole generation, but once again, this attitude is nothing new. It is just greatly on the rise in our day. As expressed by Kate S Rourke, “Children in the most recent generation of adults born between 1982 and 1995, known as ‘Generation Y,’ were raised to believe that it is their right to have everything given to them more than any other previous generation.” This mind-set has been here before; it has just become much worse.

Once again, God‘s word has a major word of correction and redirection for us today. Entitlement mentality is destroying our culture and hurting a whole generation. The Bible’s directive to take full responsibility for our lives and quit making excuses is just what we need.

Notice the admonition in the Ephesians 4:28, “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.” And now since the former thief is also a follower of Jesus, he is working not only to make a living, but he is working to have extra money to help those in need. This is the complete crucifixion of the entitlement mentality. Others are not responsible for me; I am responsible for others.

I believe the entitlement mentality is one of the greatest strongholds in our society today. It undercuts initiative, encourages apathy, and discourages visionary sacrifice. Worst of all, it is so deeply in bedded that we’re not even conscious of it, making it harder to resist and overcome. But resist it and overcome it we must. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck on a merry-go-round of blame shifting and victim hood, getting angry, pointing our fingers, making accusations, and going nowhere.

Jesus gives us three practical principles in Luke 16:

1.) “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much“ (v.10). You will not be trusted with much until you prove yourself trustworthy with very little. In my early days of radio broadcasting when I was on the few smaller stations, I said to the Lord, “If you will give me a million listeners a day, I’ll make this the best radio show possible.” No sooner did I say the words that I knew what his answer would be: “Make this the best show possible, and I will give you a million listeners.”. 

2.) If you’re not faithful with money (what Jesus calls “the unrighteous wealth“), you won’t be faithful with true riches. (v.11). Many of us want to be spiritual heroes, but our earthly lives are a wreck due to our own irresponsibility, particularly when it comes to handling money. Of course, God doesn’t expect all of us to be financial wizards, but he does require us to be good financial stewards, and that means paying our bills on time, being generous, and being wise.

3.) “And if you’ve not been faithful in that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own?“ The principal again is simple: If you are irresponsible with the things that don’t belong to you, caring for them as if they were your own, then you’ll never be entrusted with things that are your own. If you don’t care take care of your parent’s car when they loan it to you, you’re not ready for a car of your own.

In summary, the bigger the stakes, the more our good habits (and bad habits) will be magnified. So, faithful with a little, faithful with much; faithful with earthy riches, faithful with spiritual riches; faithful with that which belongs to someone else, faithful with that which belongs to you.

None of this is rocket science but once again, that’s what is so wonderful about God‘s Word. It is as practical as it is profound and as pragmatic as it is penetrating. The Word of God is wise, and we do well to live by the wisdom of the Word. And the word of God destroys the entitlement mentality, giving us something far better in its place.

Dr. John Townsend wrote,

“There is a solution to entitlement, which I called the Hard Way. The Hard Way is the entitlement cure. It is a path of behaviors and attitudes that undo the negative effects of entitlement whether in ourselves or others.” This was his definition of the Hard Way: “The habit of doing what is best, rather than what is comfortable, to achieve a worthwhile outcome.“

It is the hard way that pays long-term dividends, the hard way that produces long-term fruit, the hard way that yields long-term gratification. So quit passing the buck and shirking responsibility; don’t blame others for where you find yourself today; and determine, with God’s help, to be a giver not a taker, a producer and not a drainer, one who lifts others up rather than drags them down. To quote Paul once again, “Do everything without complaining and arguing, so that no one can criticize you. Live clean, innocent lives as children of God shining like bright lights in a world full of crooked and perverse people” (Phil. 2:14-15 NLT).

That’s our calling, that’s who we are, and that’s who our nation needs us to be. So, let’s wake up from our slumber. It’s a literally time to rise and shine.

Next Up Sun 4/14: Snippets from Saturday Nights Live Bill Maher’s comments via Brad Jersak’s book “A More Christlike God, A More Beautiful Gospel.”