These are a series of lessons adapted from Jonathan Fisk’s book, Broken. All are encouraged buy Broken to get the full content in the book.
Never follow a rule that doesn’t like rules
The 6th rule every Christian should break as often as possible is this: Freedom.
Idol Addiction
The Bible talks about sin as more than a few honest mistakes or some of those stupider things you didn’t intend to do when you were young. Sin is a disease. It is the universal tendency of humans to prefer self-serving actions and speak self-serving words. Why? That’s because we are constantly thinking self-serving thoughts, so we can get the most we can for ourselves in any given moment or circumstance of life.
The result is that we end up harming other people–often while being entirely ignorant of it! You know: war, famine, and poverty. No one person makes those things happen. We make those things happen. We do it with our habit of creating “hurt” in the process of working with all our might to benefit ourselves.
Sin is not a make-believe result because we fail to live up to some holy “to do” list foisted on us by mean-spirited religious people of bygone ages. No, sin is the Bible’s way of describing the inbred human tendency to do evil because we believe it will help us get more for ourselves.
God created the world and all that was in it as “good.” But we can twist almost any part of creation into our false idols self-trust, self-hope, or self-love. These are personalized idols, “stuff” in which the semblance of self-sufficiency, safety, and control can be worshiped in the form of whatever we feel we need most at the moment. Instead of receiving God’s gifts with thanks, we misuse them in the worst possible manner: to replace Him!
Romans 7:18: For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.
This is the highest possible good according to our sinful selves: That you can live your life in anyway that you see fit. It is also the real definition of sin and the sixth rule every Christian ought to break as often as humanly possible: Never follow a rule that doesn’t like rules.
Not liking rules is a rule (isn’t that an oxymoron!) that believes that God’s deepest wish for you is to live your life in whatever way you want. It’s the lie that “You can find God in Freedom.” It is the arrogance of thinking that the purest religion is no religion–that the truest spirituality is to be a law all unto yourself.
Read Romans 6:17-23
– Why is the belief that “pure freedom is always a good thing” dangerous?
The Secret Side of Christian Addiction
Dependent, weak, and out of control, we add up our countless individual needs to be laws unto ourselves into one vast culture of co-dependent, mass hallucination, high on white lies, hoarded stuff, and hurt people. But don’t worry. As long as we don’t believe it, we can get on pretty well (at least until we die) pretending all of the bad stuff isn’t really true, or at least it certainly has nothing to do with me.
At any moment where a lack of control rears its beastly head, we cast about for anything in our vast pantheon of stuff and forge it into a refuge, a god of momentary personal stability. We craft these gods from bank accounts and careers, hobbies and family, eating, dieting, drinking, teetotaling, shopping, saving, sex, spending, being entertained, finding a cure–it doesn’t matter. We worship anything promising to give us the momentary high of happiness.
It never works for long. As with the use of any other drug, sinners cannot get high on the same dosage of the same idol for very long. The more you look to the same substance for the same result, the more you build up a tolerance. The lies that we tell ourselves to believe that we are managing the danger of sin can only stave off the hard reality for so long. Whatever fills our need for hope, trust, and control in this moment, whatever might get you spiritually “high” today, it is never quite enough to keep the high going tomorrow. With time and use the immunity grows, and gradually we become numb to the effects of false promises.
Instead of telling a different story, many versions of Christianity have joined the fray as just one more way to feed the addiction. With the Bible open in his hand, one preacher or another tells you Christianity is God’s way for you to get control of your life. After all, “For freedom Christ has set [you] free” (Galatians 5: 1). Ripping a few verses like these out of their context, good-looking men and women who are obviously in total control of their own lives cheer on your discontent with the present. Desperately addicted sinners that we are, we latch onto their proffered lies like a junkie starving for a fix.
Thinking about all of this objectively is just as much a threat to our control as not finding a new fix. To realize our spirituality amounts to nothing more than bouncing from high to high, idol to idol, lie to lie, only to be disappointed with the side effects and built-up tolerance every time, would be as depressing as an alcoholic realizing he can’t quit drinking even if he wants to.
Rather than do that, much like the alcoholic, we develop a coping mechanism we wield with great efficiency. The alcoholic learns denial. The Christian idol worshiper learns to forget. Much in the way drunkenness deteriorates the mind, idol addiction begins to put holes in the memory.
For Christians who get caught up in such preaching, this means not only do they learn to forget all their failed spiritual highs, but also bits of what should never be forgotten are shed to make room for yet more highs. Bits of Christian history and tradition become to us no more than another family heirloom that might be pawned at the shop in order to buy the next drink. Piece by piece, it all begins to disappear in a forever-search for the perfect rush, the one we are praying won’t be gone when we wake up with a hangover tomorrow.
Read Romans 1:18-32
– Who is the real tyrant that suppresses to truth from us?
– How is this suppression of truth happening in what Pr. Fisk just described?
I Hate Tradition on Principle
The effect of all such unbridled worship of Freedom becomes most apparent in those who benefit most from the firm ground of traditions: the children. Ironically, it has been to reach the young that “the freedom to get rid of the rules” has been sold to countless congregations and denominations over the last half-century as the one unassailable golden rule of youth ministry.
It is claimed that in order to reach the young, we must imitate their world, speak their language, do what they do, and think what they think, which means jettisoning anything of the past not part of the context they are being sold at the mall and on YouTube. Teaching them to embrace a culture of the past is out. The only true rule is that by the systematic shedding of all rules and connection points with previous generations shall the next generation be able to learn the faith. If anything is difficult, strange, or boring, it is anathema. What matters is keeping their attention, and nothing grabs attention like breaking all the rules.
The results couldn’t be more disastrous. The Church in America is in a total crisis. Far from keeping our young, we’ve entirely lost them. It is a painful fact to admit, but a careful glance around any local congregation on a Sunday morning will make it plain. The faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3) has simply not been passed down to a super-majority of the upcoming generations, those very children who grew up under the super-tradition of getting rid of traditions.
What do the actions of our children show us? They show that they have been listening to everything we say–and we’ve taught them only too well! They are practicing freedom to the full by staying at home on Sunday morning. Taught that “the Gospel” means the freedom to follow your dreams and ignore any stuffy warnings of the past that happen to cramp your spiritual style, those who have drifted away have done so because they have taken the lessons to heart.
Why sing songs about wanting to find God in my life when I can just go out and do it? Why put money in a plate for some spirituality club to spend on who knows what when I can spend it on the things that make me feel fulfilled? Why bind myself to an old tradition when I can worship freedom just fine all by myself? Why waste a perfectly good Sunday morning listening to some blowhard chide me about how his style of freedom is better than mine, when the real Jesus just wanted me to love people and be happy?
The Church of any era before our own would have had no trouble calling this glorious new religiosity exactly what it is–spiritualized immaturity. The die-hard commitment to pleasing Me, the zealous insistence on exerting my will, the undying passion for doing what I want, these are the religious equivalent of the stalled out, lazy, dysfunctional mentality of high-school senioritis. That today’s leading churches and theologians are rarely decrying it, more often boasting of it, preaching it as the next great dream, and lathering it on yet more children, only exhibits just how drunk on the love of ourselves we have become.
Read Hebrews 5:11-6:2
– What does the writer of Hebrews tell his readers about spiritual maturity?
– What teachings does he say are milk (basics) for Christians?
– That most of Christianity cannot agree on these teachings (and the disagreements are increasing even more), what does this say about where we are stuck?
Traditions that Jesus Loves
Matthew 15:6b–9: Because of your tradition, you have disregarded God’s word. You hypocrites! How well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is empty, because they teach as doctrines the traditions of men.”
But contrary to popular opinion and much misquoting of Matthew 15: 6, Jesus loves tradition. He likes rules. Even more, He created them. Rules are the way God designed the world to work, and tradition is the way God created for passing on knowledge from one generation to another. When He built the world, He programmed humanity, so we use traditions to help our children remember what we ourselves (and our fathers before us) have learned.
Receiving the past is part of what makes us who we are. It forms us as something bigger than ourselves. It helps us grow on a foundation raised above isolation and ignorance, and it aids us in passing on what we learn to those who come after us.
The entire reason Jesus condemns the Pharisees in Matthew 15 is not because they have traditions, but because they had the wrong tradition. They had a tradition of ignoring what the Word of God actually said. That kind of thing always got Jesus a little heated, because the entire reason Jesus came to earth was to restore to humanity the right traditions–His traditions–starting with the tradition of believing God’s every last word.
Note: We often pick up an anti-tradition bias from our Bible translations. For example, the NIV uses the word “teaching” for the traditions of God and “tradition” for the traditions of men. Such a translation bias instinctively wires us to incorporate into our worldview that traditions in the Church are bad.
– Discuss: If traditions in the Church are bad, then what are we to make of the tradition of “Sola Scriptura”?
1 Corinthians 11:2: Paul writing to the church in Corinth, “I praise you because you remember me in everything and hold to the traditions just as I delivered [“traditioned”] them to you.”
2 Thessalonians 2:15: Paul writing to the church in Thessalonica, “So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions you were taught, whether by our spoken word or by our letter.”
– What does the Bible say about “tradition”?
1 Timothy 3:15: The Church of the living God, is the pillar and foundation of the truth.
– What role is the Church supposed to have on the handing down of God’s traditions?
Jesus wants Christians, Christian families, and Christian churches to believe and pass on every word of Scripture as entirely, totally, and necessarily true. He wants us to hand on from generation to generation all the statements, beliefs, customs, and information He established while He was still with us. But this means not only keeping the Bible on our shelves but also reading the Bible with the belief that Christians in every generation between Jesus and us have believed the same eternal truth we will find there.
God built us so we benefit from the past, whether as family, community, or society. Since He has also given us His Holy Word as the source of truth and redemption, if we are not creating traditions to pass that Word on, to benefit those who come after us, one has to wonder how much we really care for that Word at all. We certainly spare no effort creating traditions for passing on everything from politics to baseball. Neither adding to its substance nor subtracting from what it says, it is the obligation of the Church in every age to say to all ages afterward, “Yes! Your God says that. And don’t you dare forget it!”
We All Believe in Jesus–the Rest Doesn’t Matter
To say “we all believe in Jesus so the other things do not matter” does not lift Jesus up. It casts Him down because it casts His teaching down. It replaces Him with a man-made tradition of hating tradition, under which no single word of His is safe.
Once it has begun, one by one all the truths of Scripture will be rendered void, one by one relegated to the truthiness of the world and placed on the smorgasbord of half-believed religiosities until we welcome any false gospel with open arms but decry the scandal of the real Gospel’s particularity as the greatest possible offense. By then, Jesus’ crucifixion will have been quietly moved further and further from the center, an afterthought brought out on holidays as a nice story to remind us why we ought to be spiritual people and enjoy our freedom, until at last it is entirely gone with no one left who is religious enough to even notice.
Against this folly, St. Paul cries to us from the depths of our history, “I say it again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1: 9). Alas, too many of us have already forgotten how to hear. “Yes,” we say, “but that is only your interpretation.”
Ephesians 2: 19–20: You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone.
You cannot find God in the absence of God, that is, in your sinful nature’s idea of “freedom.” Jesus redeemed us not into chaos and discord but into a harmonious unity of mind and Spirit. Jesus’ pure doctrine fuses us together, through faith, into His own pure death and resurrection. These foundational facts for our faith are His proof that He loathes the thought of abandoning His creation to subjection in futility and vanity. Fallen though we are, He refuses to leave us without the fantastic gift of total certainty about who He is, what He wants, what He has done, and what He plans to do next.
This is why true Christian freedom begins with believing that the King who bought us back from our sin will not tolerate our use of that freedom to further prop up our rebellion (1 Peter 2: 16). There is no “Yes, I believe in Jesus, but He didn’t really mean that.” This root of all lies must be divorced from His kingdom as far as the east is from the west. Against it He sends the promise “Truly, truly I say to you!”
Both God’s lawful design of the world and His unconquerable Gospel working to redeem the world are the “truly that” which God has said, regardless of whether we believe it or not. No jot or tittle is merely truthy. Not a bit is given so we might say, “Isn’t that a nice story?” None of it is just traditions of men. It is the stronghold-shattering, doctrine-giving Word of the almighty God, which will demolish every lawless claim and, one way or another, pull out of our sinful mouths the sinless confession “Amen! Yes, yes, it is surely so!” For all these reasons and more, it is a pretty good idea never to follow a rule that doesn’t like rules. The forever King reigns, real and present. Based on true judgment and pure justification, His rule shall have no end.
Click here to go to the final lesson in this series.
