Peter apparently had someone who owed him. But he wanted to impress Jesus with what a great guy he was. So, he asked Jesus, “How many times do I have to forgive someone who keeps on doing bad things to me? I’d be willing to go as high as…seven times!”

See, the rabbis suggested that a person had to forgive up to three times. Peter doubled it and added one because he was looking for a gold star on his behavior modification chart.

Jesus, however, was not impressed. He said, “Not just seven times but seventy-seven times.” Or maybe he said, “Not just seven times but 490 times.” Whatever. He said, “A lot.”

Peter must have had a strange look on his face, because Jesus can see that he doesn’t really understand. And Jesus really wants Peter to understand. So, he tells him a story. Stories are good because you don’t have to be really smart to understand them.

Jesus says, “This is what life in God’s kingdom is like: There was a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. One servant owed him a zillion dollars, but he was not able to repay the debt. So, the king ordered that he and his whole family and everything he owned be sold in order to pay back the debt.

“The servant was obviously distraught at this, so he fell on his knees and begged for more time. The king was moved with compassion, so he released the man and canceled the debt. Wiped the slate clean.

“This should have made the servant ecstatic. He wouldn’t have to go into slavery. His wife and children were saved. As he was on his way home to tell them all the good news, he ran into a co-worker who owed him a hundred bucks. He grabbed the guy by the throat and began to choke him, demanding that the guy pay him what he owed.

“His co-worker did exactly what he had done with the king. He fell on his knees and began to beg for more time. But the man refused and called the authorities to have him put in prison until the debt was paid off.

“When people began to hear about this they knew it was wrong. It was an affront to the generosity of the king. So, they went and told the king what had happened. Needless to say, this really angered the king, so he called the man in saying, ‘You’re a wicked person. I canceled all that debt because I felt sorry for you. You should have had the same kind of compassion for your co-worker.’

“Then the king had the man thrown into prison where he was tortured until he could pay back his zillion dollar loan.”

Then Jesus took a deep breath. He certainly had Peter’s attention — and everyone else’s for that matter. And Jesus uttered what is perhaps the scariest sentence he ever said, “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive a brother or sister from your heart.”

I talked about this story a couple of weeks ago out in California. It was one of the hardest sermons I’ve ever preached. I’m going to talk about it again this weekend in Cleveland, OH.

I’m interested in your take on this story. What do you do with it? There’s no real command here — just Jesus telling us how things are in God’s Kingdom. But he certainly doesn’t pull his punches. It’s pretty scary if taken literally.

What do you make of it?

I had dental surgery on Thursday afternoon, and it hurt. I’ve got a gaping hole in my mouth where my tooth used to be, and the worst part is one of the four stitches came out and started floating around in my mouth while I was speaking to a group of singles at their Memorial Day Weekend retreat on Saturday night.

Good times.

Actually, it has been good times here this weekend. I’m in Panama City Beach, FL. The North Atlanta Singles’ Retreat was this weekend, and I was honored to be invited to speak to about 65 young adults about their expectations and how our expectations sometimes set us up for all kinds of disappointment.

We talked about our expectations of God and learned from the apostle Paul how to stop expecting God to improve our circumstances and start expecting God to show up in surprising ways in the midst of difficulties. Then we talked about our often unreasonable expectations of ourselves. We learned from Nebuchadnezzar how crazy we make ourselves when we forget that we’re not God and try to live with just our own strength. Then we talked about our expectations of others, and we learned from Solomon that the thing that often makes our relationships so disappointing is that what people really long for is unfailing love. People just can’t offer that — no matter how hard they try. Finally, we talked about how Jesus taught people to pray — specifically how he taught his earliest followers to close their prayers: “Yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever”. If God’s is the kingdom, then our response is to surrender. If God’s is the power, then our response is to ask. If God’s is the glory, then our response is to worship.

It was really a good time — hopefully, it was a time folks will remember for a while. I was surprised by God once again, because I was pretty unprepared for this weekend — what with my face going through so much trauma and all. I came down here with something of an idea for what I would say in the first two sessions, but not much beyond that. Still, God showed up and surprised me. The vicodin helped a lot, too. Hopefully, others were helped too — by the messages — not by the vicodin — I’m not sharing my drugs with anyone.

If you’d like copies of the cds of the sessions, leave me a comment here, and I’ll see that you get them. If you were praying for me, I appreciate that more than I can say.

The best part of the weekend, however, is the time I’ve gotten to spend with my wife and daughters. We played on the beach and made sand castles and went out to dinner and shook hands with a dolphin. We watched some college students do a high-dive act. We played and walked and talked and had a really wonderful time. And the folks at the retreat loved on my kids so much! They treated them with respect and sat in the middle of the floor with them, had conversations with them, swam with them. I love watching other adults treat my daughters well.

All in all, it’s been a very memorable Memorial Day Weekend for us.

Now we just have to drive home tomorrow. (pray for us please)

my tooth is broken

the pain is unbearable

pull it tomorrow

Sorry about the absence. Last Wednesday I flew out to California to spend some time with the folks at New Vintage Church in Santa Rosa, California. Faith 2.0 is wrapping up a year-long consulting contract with them, and I’ve been traveling out there approximately every six weeks since last summer.

On Thursday and Friday nights we did an event called Married Life Live. I’m indebted to my friend Jeff Sandstrom for the way he’s produced three of these events for New Vintage. All I had to do was show up and speak.

On Saturday night and Sunday morning I spoke in the weekend assemblies. It’s amazing to see a church of nearly 1,100 regular attenders in the midst of a county where only 5% of the population attends church. It’s especially amazing when you hear Pastor Andy Vomsteeg tell the story of how the church of less than 100 people that hired him lied to him, tried to fire him after they started growing, lost 10 of the wealthiest members and then exploded in growth.

I got to hear Andy tell that story Sunday night to 180 pastors from 20 different denominations from places as far away as New Zealand. They were all attending a conference in San Francisco, and they all came across the Golden Gate Bridge to see New Vintage and celebrate what God can do in a relatively short period of time.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: I have a love/hate relationship with the church. There are times when I wish I could quit church altogether — stop attending, stop being concerned, stop fighting the people who want to keep things the same, stop being sucked into arguments that will never change anyone’s mind, stop worrying about the whole thing.

And then there are times when I want to find a really good church and plug in fulltime again. Take a church that’s willing to think strategically and make it into the lighthouse it’s supposed to be, train Christians how to leverage their influence in this often-dark world, create relevant and engaging environments that help non-Christians recognize the claims made in the Bible in language they can understand.

Times like this weekend nudge me from the first path towards the second.

It was an exhausting trip. There were some hard conversations that had to take place. There were two difficult messages (one for Married Life and one for their weekend assembly) that I was called to deliver. There were lots of questions to answer and problems to solve, strategic pieces to be put in place. There was an overnight red-eye flight home.

But I’ve come back from my trip to California humbled and honored to be a part of what God is doing at New Vintage and excited about the prospect of finding more places where God is working, partnering with him in that work, celebrating the ever-advancing kingdom into which we’ve been invited.

Frost & Hirsch (remember them?) have this interesting thing to say:

[I]f we aim at ministry, we seldom get to do much mission. But if we aim at mission, we have to do ministry because ministry is the means by which mission is achieved. The established church has generally got this wrong. Most never get to do real mission with real outsiders because they aim primarily as the “saved.” This we believe is a distortion of authentic New Testament faith and praxis. The church does not exist for itself but for its mission.

I had a conversation with a different church leader a couple of weeks ago. This church leader is a personal friend, and his church is currently looking for a new leader. He’s one of the elders in this church, and he told me that he is primarily concerned with two questions for each of the candidates:

1. How much time do you spend in prayer?
2. Are you a minister or an evangelist?

That second question gets at the difference we’re talking about here: Are you a minister (focused on “insiders”) or an evangelist (focused on “outsiders”)?

Every church has to make a decision about this. You can do a lot of work with both insiders and outsiders in mind, but eventually those two core values will come into conflict and one will have to win out. Which will it be?

In other words, you can have one of the following two goals:

• We will reach as many new people as we can while our energy is primarily focused on keeping as many of the people we already have

or

• We will keep as many of the people we already have while our energy is primarily focused on reaching as many new people as we can
  

One of these sees ministry (keeping insiders) as the end and mission (reaching outsiders) as the means. The other sees mission as the end and ministry as the means.

Which way does your church lean?

I got a call from a church the other day asking me to consider becoming their fearless leader. This happens a lot this time of year; it’s the season for pastoral migration. Preachers — especially preachers with children who still live at home — prefer to move during the summer. In fact, I might go so far as to suggest that a preacher willing to move his family during the school year might have a higher tendency to prioritize his work above his family. Churches ought to consider this in light of their hiring practices.

Unfortunately, the way the system is set up in many places, the preacher decides to move, tells his church in late spring (to avoid being a kind of “lame duck” leader) and moves in early summer (to get the family situated before school starts). In some places, the church found out when the preacher put his house up for sale.

This sometimes puts churches in the awkward position of beginning a hiring process (which in itself is terribly screwed up and dysfunctional — but that’s another post) in May. The problem with this is that if the process begins in May it’s not likely to be finished until September (because it’s so screwed up and dysfunctional), which puts a guy in the position of moving his family during the school year as described above.

And so it goes.

But that’s not what this post is about. Really…it’s not.

When this church contacted me the other day, they said that God was doing some really exciting things at their church. Lots of exciting things.

So, I asked, “Tell me the one most exciting thing about your church.”

After some stammering and nervous laughter, this is what I got: “We’re becoming a missional church.”

Really.

“Missional” is the buzz word du jour in church circles. I’ve had several churches contact me this spring about joining them in their work, and the word “missional” has come up in most of those conversations. But what in the world does it mean?

I have my own ideas, but it seems that missional is one of those words that people use without knowing exactly what they mean. Or perhaps they do know what it means, but they don’t really mean it. They may want to mean it, but do they really mean it?

It’s like in the movie The Princess Bride, when Wallace Shawn keeps saying, “Inconceivable!”

Mandy Patinkin finally says, “You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

So, when a church says, “We’ve been a traditional church, but we’ve recently made the decision to become missional” — what do you think that means?

If a traditional church did grasp the meaning of missional, how would they go about transitioning? Is that even possible?

Finally, how would you define “missional”?

God creates everything and sets things up for people to live in a beautiful garden. But they mess it up by refusing to follow one stinkin’ rule! So, God starts over with a guy named Abraham. He makes this guy some outlandish promises and then begins the process of making good on all of them. Abraham’s descendents multiply and look more than a little threatening to the ruler of Egypt, who enslaves them all and starts killing off all the baby boys. God rescues his people through a guy named Moses, 10 plagues and a strong wind that parts the Red Sea. Once the people are out of slavery, they head for the Promised Land, but God takes them on a slight detour to give them rules so they’ll know how to live once they get in the land.

They get right to the border and decide not to go in.

What’s up with that? Someone tell me why the story of their failure at Kadesh is in the Bible.

I’m scheduled to speak at a retreat for single adults over Memorial Day Weekend. It’ll be in Panama City Beach, FL, and if you’re interested in more details you can go watch a commercial for it here:

North Atlanta Singles Retreat

Basically, I’m going to be talking about how our expectations sometimes set us up for some serious bouts of disappointment: Disappointment with God; Disappointment with Others; Disappointment with Ourselves.

I’m still wrestling with what to say, but I know a few things:

• I struggle with disappointment a lot
• I am not the only one
• When I am disappointed with God, it’s probably because I have mis-appointed God in some way
• Resetting my expectations is the healthiest way to cooperate with God in becoming the person he wants me to be
• There are worse ways to spend your Memorial Day Weekend than at the beach with a bunch of singles who are looking for ways to partner with God in changing the world

My family spent all of last week in California — southern California to be specific — Orange County and Malibu to be even more specific.

We flew out Monday afternoon and spent the night with Jill’s best friend from high school. Tuesday was our all-day Disneyland marathon. Wednesday I drove up to Pepperdine University early in the morning and got us checked in. Jill and the girls stayed behind to have lunch with her father. We spent the rest of the week on campus — where we were honored to teach two classes based on the material in Hearts and Minds: Raising Your Child with a Christian View of the World.

I learned some things last week that I’d like to share with you now:

My body is thoroughly 37 now. I used to be in such great shape, but the campus of Pepperdine will let a person know just how well they’ve done in the “keeping up with cardio” area of fitness. I didn’t fail, but I didn’t exactly pass with flying colors.

The most distracting sound in the world (for me at least) is the sound of an aluminum bat striking a baseball. I got checked in on Wednesday morning and went to my dorm room for some writing. I figured it would be perfect because Jill and the girls wouldn’t be there, and I really wanted to push ahead on this book. But as soon as I got situated at my desk overlooking the Pacific Ocean, all I could hear was the sound of Pepperdine’s baseball team taking batting practice. I was unprepared for all the nostalgia that awakened in me! And I could not concentrate on writing at all. I can focus with the girls climbing all over me, the dog barking, the phone ringing and loud music playing in the background. But that “clink” every 30 seconds or so did me in.

I do not understand the culture of lectureships, workshops, camp meetings, etc. I counted 21 different offerings available for the 8:30am slot alone! There was not consistent theme to most of what was offered. It seemed to be a bunch of preachers bringing their best three-part sermon series. And you could probably attend five or six different lectures every day. That’s frustrating to me. As a speaker I want to call people to do something, but there’s no way to do that in this format because the next speaker’s going to do the same thing. An attender can’t possibly process all that information and will probably forget most if not all of what was said as soon as they leave. I guess the whole purpose is to pump people up — some kind of pep rally — send them home with a buzz. But that’s a self-defeating thing, isn’t it? I’m clearly too something — too utilitarian, too boomer, too emergent, too evangelical, too something to get what the purpose is other than to say, “Man, that was great. I can’t wait until next year to do it again.”

There seems to be something wrong with saying that you “enjoyed” a lectureship whose theme was drawn from Jeremiah — a prophet who called a stubborn and stiff-necked people to repentance with tears and performance art. I just have such a hard time imagining Jeremiah writing his words down, thinking about the future of God’s people, pleading with them to stop acting like whores and return to the only One who has ever really loved them — I cannot imagine him writing through his tears of frustration and anger and thinking, “Maybe one day people will gather in a luxurious setting to sift through this material and tell each other some great preacher jokes — yeah…that’ll be a good time.”

Malibu is among the most beautiful places on earth. If you can’t teach natural theology in that setting, you should look for other work. And yet the irony is that so few of the people who live in that setting (many celebrities) spend so little time contemplating the source of all that beauty. Clearly, Christians aren’t doing a very good job of explaining things. You’d think that people who live surrounded by that kind of beauty would be the easiest people in the world to connect with the God of beauty and creativity. But there’s some serious disconnect going on there.

There’s a lot about California that I miss, but I’m glad I live in Atlanta. I miss so much about the southern California culture. I miss the beach — specifically I miss staring at the Pacific Ocean, especially the sunsets. I miss the breeze. I miss good Mexican food. I miss the vibe of the place — the look and smell of it. But I love where I live, too. I love having a big yard and a decent-sized house. I love the trees and the green and the flowers and the southern culture. I have some nostalgia for SoCal — but Atlanta feels like home now.

The magic of Disneyland still works. It was absolutely amazing to watch my little girls discover Disneyland — in all of its glory and wonder. The old rides that I take for granted (Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, The Jungle Cruise, The Tea Cups, Dumbo, It’s a Small World) were the biggest hits of all. Seeing the looks on my daughters’ faces, watching their eyes light up as they were caught by surprise by all the same gags that I’ve known for nearly three decades now — that was so worth the price of admission.

The biggest lesson I learned last week — actually I learned it a long time ago but I continue to be reminded of it periodically:

I am not who I once was, and I like who I am becoming. God has taken me on an amazing journey over these 37 years. I’ve experienced so much for which I am grateful. I have done things that embarrass me to think about. I have done things I’m proud of. But I am constantly changing, emerging, evolving, striving for what is ahead while trying to honor what is in the past. Sometimes I’m better at doing one than the other. It’s difficult to actively reach forward without it feeling like you’re rejecting what’s behind, but that’s what I’m attempting. I like who I am now much better than the person I was nearly 19 years ago when I was a freshman at Pepperdine University. And I can’t wait to find out what God’s up to next, how he’ll continue to shape me as I move into the next season of life and who I’ll become as a result of his guiding hand.