Losing our Foundation

We were talking at FCA the other night about how important it is to have the Bible in our lives and the Bible in our churches.  It is our foundation...or at least it should be.  We talked about what life and church would look like without the Bible.  Well, it would be a life and church without a solid foundation.

One of our students equated it to playing Telephone as a little kid.  He was right.  In college ministry, we take Telephone a step further nowadays.  We add Pictionary to it as well and call it, of course, Telephone Pictionary.  Very original, I know.  We still play it with our students.  It's a fantastically hilarious game.  You start out by writing a sentence.  You pass your stack of small papers with your sentence on the top one to the right.  Those on the right are then supposed to draw the sentence.  After that, you pass to the right again where the next person writes a sentence about what they see in the pictures.  The stack of papers go around the circle until they are back with their original owner.  It's pretty funny how different the pictures are at the end compared to the first sentence.  You can look through the steps it took to get to the final product and it will give you a really good laugh.

This is so true as people move further and further away from the Bible, though the results are not comical.  The further lives and churches get away from their foundation, their sense of truth crumbles.  It gets twisted and distorted until one day, the final product resembles nothing like the original.  You can barely even tell that the original existed at all.  In some cases, there is simply no trace of the original.  And in that, it has lost it's power to change and transform lives.  It's lost all power to make an impact.

I've been reading a book recently called, Eternity in their Hearts.  It's been a really eye opening book so far.  I'm not through the whole thing so I can't recommend it yet, but so far, so good.  In it, the author talks about the fingerprints God has left on cultures all around the world.  In many of his examples, he searched out the beliefs from cultures worldwide to find a belief in a great creator who created all things.  He then would look at the culture's creation story.  In so many cases, the creation story was almost exactly the same as that of the book of Genesis.  Now, it wasn't ever word for word but a lot of times, it was pretty close.  One of the cultures he studied was that of the Karen people.

According to the author of the book, the Karen were a people who lived in Burma.  They didn't consider themselves Burmese though.  They were a minority living in that country.  They were persecuted by the Burmese for different reasons, one of them being that they clung to their folk religion and wouldn't convert to Buddhism.  As more was gathered about these people, they found a people who believed in a supreme being and creator named Y'wa.  It doesn't take a huge jump to see the resemblance to Yahweh, another name for the Jewish and Christian God.  It immediately jumped out at me when I read over it.  The author doesn't stop there, though.

He goes on to tell the Karen creation story.  The people believed that Y'wa created two people in the beginning.  They were given all the food and drink they needed.  There was a "tree of trial" they were not supposed to eat from.  It was a command from Y'wa.  But they were deceived by an evil spirit lurking in the garden.  They ate the fruit, and sickness and death entered into the world because of it.  Due to the act of them eating from the tree of trial, they were separated from Y'wa for generations to come.  With that separation, they turned to evil spirits to worship.  Still, they believed that one day, they would be reconciled with Y'wa.  There was even a prophecy in the culture that one day, a white foreigner would bring a book that would teach them how to reunite with their creator.

Yeah, that's pretty crazy stuff.  It really blew my mind, the similarities between their creation story and that of the Bible.  And while that story survived, they had still walked away from their foundation and served evil spirits.  Without a foundation, they believed that they could only serve the evil spirit that deceived the first two humans.

In my mind, these people at one point once had the full Truth of God.  Maybe, they took off from the source either before it was ever written down, or they took off and didn't bring the written Word of God with them.  Maybe, they had the Word written down and lost it.  Another possibility was that it was just passed on by a traveler passing through.  Whichever way it came to them, they had to rely on oral tradition to pass it on from there.  They basically played Telephone over the generations with their spiritual beliefs and truths.  Some things survived but most didn't.  Most was left behind, forgotten, or changed.

They didn't have most of the Old Testament.  (They certainly didn't have the New Testament either.)  Think of all they lost in that.  King David wrote about how he delighted in dwelling and meditating on the law and commands of the Lord day and night.  The Karen had lost those commands on how to live and how to stay close to God.  All they were left with was a creation story and a small glimmer of hope that one day, they might be able to reconnect with their creator.  They had long lost how to connect with him in their day to day lives.  They had lost the power and impact that connecting daily with God, brings into a life.

Many people in America are in the same position as the Karen people were.  They have lost their foundation.  Churches and people alike have lost the daily impact that only God's Truth can bring.  The saddest thing is that in this nation, the Bible is right at our fingertips but we instead choose to let it gain dust on our bookshelves.  That's if we even keep it there.  Might be safer to keep it in a box in storage.  Wouldn't want anyone to see it on our bookshelf.  I find more and more "mature" Christians that don't even know what the Bible teaches.  They rely on word of mouth, Telephone spirituality.  We have no idea what the Bible says because we don't read it in our homes and we don't preach it in our churches.

Some might say it's because people are lazy.  Some might say it's because people don't care.  Some might even say that people don't want to know what it has to say because they want to keep doing what they want.  In reality, it's probably a bit of all of those.

Surely, it's no wonder that Christianity is on the ropes and heading toward life support in this nation at an alarming rate.  When we don't know what it says, we lose our moral compass.  We become duped by whatever spiritual snake oil salesman catches our ear.  Over the years, we have walked further and further away from our spiritual foundation, the Word of God.  It has become about not what God  wants but what we want.  If what God wants doesn't fit with what we want, we just throw it out.  We want our own truth, not God's.  In that, we make ourselves a god.  Sadly, our truths are empty and powerless.

We have left a Truth that was spoken by a being powerful enough to create us and our universe, a Truth that says and shows He loves us with that same backing and power.  Think about that.  God spoke the universe into being.  Think of how much power and strength one must have behind their words to do that.  When He says he loves us, His words carry that same power and enthusiasm.  Yet, with our words and our actions, we have told Him, "You don't know what you're talking about.  I have a better understanding on right and wrong than you do.  I don't need your foundation and guidance." 

When I first started writing this blog post, my thought process was pondering something I thought was hypothetical.  I wanted to talk about how blessed we were to have the Word of God at our fingertips.  Well, we are blessed to have the Bible, unlike many other cultures and nations.  As I thought about it though, I saw that the question we were asking was not hypothetical...a life, a church, a nation without the Bible.

The truth is, that is where many of us who call ourselves Christians are at.  We have the Word but we don't use it, and we don't apply it to our lives.  So often, we pick and choose what we like or what is easy from the Bible and throw away what is hard.  We are good with just having knowledge.  Francis Chan uses the illustration of telling his daughter to clean her room.  When he tells her that, he doesn't want her to come back and tell him that she memorized what he told her to do.  He doesn't want her to get her friends together and study what it would look like if she cleaned her room.  He doesn't want her to learn how to say what he told her to do in Greek.  Those things aren't terrible.  They actually could be a good things but they are useless if they she never actually cleans her room.  It's the same way with the Bible.  Our knowledge and understanding of it is useless if we don't attempt to put it into practice.

In so many instances across this nation, we don't apply it to our churches or communities.  We find our churches weak or even dead; not strong, vibrant, and alive.  There is no impact on the community around us.  All this because we have left or ignored our foundation.  We have disconnected ourselves from God.  But just like the Karen, there is a glimmer of hope that one day, our so-called Christian nation might reconnect with God...only we don't have to wait for a foreigner to bring us the Truth.  We are blessed enough to already have it sitting on most of our bookshelves at home.