Kopp Disclosure
(John 3:19-21)
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Smile, God Loves You!
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“I have come that My joy may be in you.”
Jesus
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“Watch the birds. They go where there is food.”
North Carolina Senior Citizen
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While I’m
no George Barna or Gallup or denominational research geek or anybody like them
who does a bunch of surveys and then writes and sells books to tell us why
churches are dying off so rapidly in America, most kids can tell you why in one
word.
Boring.
Dying
churches are boring.
If
excitement and enthusiasm were dynamite, their clergy wouldn’t have enough to
blow their noses.
Dougie
Watson provided a big clue long ago when he opened his hymnbook for the closing
hymn and then gasped to his mom Lila, “Just my luck! Six verses!”
An
unchurched guy who just moved into the community called me after a deacon
visited him in one of the rare occasions when a church got a beat on Welcome
Wagon and invited a newcomer to church: “If you want people to come to your
church, don’t send that woman to visit anybody else. I don’t know anybody who wants what she’s
got. She makes Christianity look like a
bad case of constipation.”
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Before
going any further, let’s make something as clear as possible.
Any form of
government can work well if good people are running it.
Isms depend
more on whom than how.
Just as any
ecclesiastical polity can work if the people in it are following Jesus by the
book, any liturgy can work as long as the people leading it can say with the
apostle, “It is no longer I who live but it is Jesus living in me!”
That makes
all of the difference in particular churches, denominations, liturgies,
litanies, rubrics, rituals, ceremonies, rites, and all of the other
ecclesiastical trappings.
It’s never
about form or style.
It’s about
the content and substance.
Where’s the
beef?
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Excuuuuuuuuusssssssssseeeeeee
me.
I made a
mistake.
It is about
style and form in dying churches.
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When the
unchurched look at too many of the churched, they must wonder if that’s what
believing in Jesus does to people.
Really.
I’ve looked
at the DNC and GOP and often wondered if being a Democrat means you’ve gotta be
a total heathen who makes Presbyterians look like the guardians of American
values and Biblical morality or being a Republican makes Pharisees blush.
When people
who don’t know Jesus look at how people who say they know Jesus behave, I think
they’re turned off a lot more than turned on to Jesus.
While
people who really know Jesus and act like it/Him more than less will tell those
people who don’t know Jesus that nobody should blame Jesus for some so-called
“Christians” who need a lot more of Him in their lives, guilt by association is
true even when false.
Jesus is
great!
He wants
the best for us and would just die for us!
He did!
He is
totally trustworthy, always loving, merciful, forgiving, and guaranteeing life
after life by grace through faith.
He keeps us
from drowning in life’s floods by holding fast to Him.
Over and
over and over again, He says people who trust Him lose fear of anyone and anything
and live triumphantly/victoriously amid the meanness, madness, misery, and
miscreance of this meantime.
People who
get that/Him, are irrepressibly and, more often than not, filled with a joy and
happiness and sense of well-being that cannot be suppressed, repressed,
daunted, diminished, dissipated, or detoured by people who don’t, won’t, and look
like life without Him in head, heart, and gut.
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He said it:
“I have come that my joy may be in you.”
But like
too many of today’s churches who create God in their image in so many ways
contradicting Biblical faith and morality, just looking at some people who say
they know Him but obviously don’t would cause someone unfamiliar with
Jesus and what He can do for anyone by grace through faith to conclude Jesus
came to make people miserable, cranky, contentious, contemptuous, irregular,
irascible, irreconcilable, and victims of a bad case of…
Really.
I say
really because that’s what lots of pulpiteers and pewsitters look like to
people who have no desire to get what they got.
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Jesus came
to make us happy, whole, healthy, joyful, and eternally secure.
His red
letters in the New Testament are a guide to being happy, whole, healthy,
joyful, and eternally secure.
Indeed, He
began the most famous sermon of all time by saying, “How happy are people
who…live like I tell them to live.”
He never
said, “Come, follow Me, and I’ll make you miserable,…
No, He
said, “Come, follow Me, and you’ll be happy and whole and healthy and joyful
and eternally secure…and you’ll be an example for others of how to get
there…and your deportment will be contagious and people will want to know why
you’re so strong and calm and sane in the midst of everyone and everything
bringing them down…and then you can tell them all about Me and that I can do
for them what I have done for you.”
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Let’s be
even more specific.
The word
for joy that Jesus used in John is χαρα.
It is an
experience of total well-being with all of those positive traits that we’ve
already mentioned that just happen when anybody invites Jesus
into the head, heart, and gut as Lord and Savior and takes the time to increase
intimacy with Him through worship, prayer, sacrament, Bible
reading/study/meditation, faithful fellowships, and other Biblical disciplines.
He just
happens when conversion to/in/through/for Him goes from religion about
Him to an increasingly personal relationship with Him.
And as that
conversion goes increasingly from religion to relationship, all
of the beliefs and behaviors and emotions that are at His best in our lives
become increasingly obvious like, as the apostle listed, love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, humility,
and self-control.
Paul refers
to those things/traits that everyone wants and needs as evidence/proof/fruit of
an increasingly personal relationship with Jesus rather than a superficial,
boring, unsatisfactory, and unattractive religion about Him.
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“So,” as
the emperor said to Mozart, “there it is.”
If you want
to be happy for the rest of your life, make Jesus the Lord and Savior of your
life and get closer to Him every day.
Almost
sounds like a song.
No wonder
Christians like to sing so much!
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Let me put
it another way.
Our joy and
happiness and all of the other good stuff that God wants for us doesn’t depend
upon the circumstances of our lives because, as Jesus said, it rains on
everybody’s parade.
Everybody
gets wet.
But people
who take His hand and hold on to Him don’t drown.
It’s our
relationship with Jesus not the circumstances of our lives that make the
difference.
Too many
people without Jesus drown.
People with
Jesus have an existential and eternal life preserver.
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David Ring
comes to mind.
He has
overcome terrible circumstances in his life; but he has overcome them because
of his personal relationship with Jesus.
But let’s
hear about it in his words about what Jesus can do when things are going badly
for us.
Ring writes
in Just As I Am, “Why do we get down in the dumps? Because we have our eyes on our
circumstances. Let me tell you, get your
eyes off your circumstances and put them on God…Every time you get down in the
dumps, it’s because you have your eyes on your circumstances…”
He
continues, “People come up to me and say, ‘Brother Dave, I feel sorry for
you’…People think cerebral palsy is a handicap, but I have to beg their
pardon. If I had my eyes on my circumstances,
then it would be a handicap…We live down in the dumps because we’re looking at
our circumstances…If I looked at my shaky body or my limitations, you’d better
believe I would be down in the dumps…Thank God I don’t look at my cerebral
palsy. I look at what God does in my
life…”
Then he
exclaims, “Joy comes when you get your chip off your shoulder. Joy comes when you get your feelings off your
sleeve. Joy comes when you quit feeling
sorry for yourself…”
In short,
joy comes when you turn your eyes upon Jesus!
And then
Ring challenges, “Look at me, people.
Look at me! I still walk with a
limp. I still talk funny. But, ‘Oh, the joy that floods my soul,
because Jesus touched me and made me whole’…”
He
concludes, “I don’t have a daddy. I
don’t have a momma. I don’t even have a
healthy body. But let me tell you what I
do have. I have the grace of God, and
the Bible says that ‘God’s grace is sufficient for you and for me.’”
I’ve always
been chastened when Ring says this, “I have cerebral palsy. What’s your problem?”
He is
saying he has risen above his circumstances and found joy in Jesus.
That’s the
difference.
He is the
difference.
What’s my
problem?
Not enough
Jesus!
What’s the
answer to my problems?
More Jesus!
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Christians
know lots of people – I was one of them! – who can’t stand people who say,
“Smile, God loves you!”
That’s
because they have a cold to tepid religion about Jesus.
They need a
hot relationship with Him!
I think of
the woman who always complained about me saying, “I’m psyched!”
Know why?
She wasn’t!
She was one
of the crankiest and cold and nasty and mean people that I’ve ever met.
I thought
of her when this came to me while reading my Bonhoeffer books in April 2017
after first reading them in January 1973; and if anybody knows what it means to
rise above terrible circumstances by an increasingly personal relationship with
Jesus, it was him.
Anyway,
this is what came to me.
Anyone
tight with Jesus can say this: “It must be really annoying for me to be so
happy while you’re so miserable.
Wouldn’t you like to know who makes the difference?”
Jesus.
So if I
ever get the chance to be with that woman again – Hope not in a selfish way but
hope so as a follower of Jesus as you know if you know Him! – I’m going to say,
“Smile, God loves you!”
If she
does, I’ll praise the Lord!
If not,
I’ll ask her if she’d like to be…happy, joyful, and all of His best.
It’s the
only Christian thing to do.
I’ll smile because
of Jesus on her.
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Blessings and Love!
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Shatter the sound of silence!
Wake up! Look up! Stand up! Speak
up! Act up for Jesus!
Salt! Shine! Leavenate!
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