Defying Explanation

I learned a really cool word that became a big part of my vocabulary sometime in the late eighties. Paradox. A paradox is when something seems contradictory or opposing but in reality expresses a truth.

As I progress in Christian thinking, I learn to love the irony of how a paradox works. If you want to live, you’ve got to give up your life. If a guy wants to receive, he has to be an extravagant giver. The way to the throne room is through the servant’s quarters.

God loves a really good paradox. It’s one of the reasons I figure God absolutely loves the Brewer. Yes, that’s right, I am convinced that the great God of this universe loves me personally. I mean, why wouldn’t He? I am a walking paradox. I am a slob that carries around hand sanitizer because I’m a germ freak. I’m a jamming musician that preaches behind a pulpit on Sundays. I am a hillbilly from Johnson County that loves quantum theory.

There are lots of things about all of us that seem to contradict, but actually make up, our unique personalities. God loves that. He loves it when little children speak simple but profound genius. He smiles when He sees busy people slow down to help and great big guys cry over another’s hurt.

He’s like that because He always operates outside of the box. His ways are not our ways. I heard Graham Cooke say that the only time God has ever been in a box was the Arc of the Covenant, and if you touched the box, you died. God hates the box we want to put him in.

We put God in a box because we want God to be more responsible for being like us so we won’t be held responsible for being more like him. We desperately try to make God about our own agendas so we won’t have to be about His. We really want God to look like us and talk like us, and anything that doesn’t line up with who we are, can’t be God. That’s religion, and it’s really ugly.

Most portraits of God tend to fit Him into whatever culture we identify with. In a way, that’s fine because God loves our diverse cultures and how different people live and look.

In the artist’s defense, there are no scriptures describing the physical appearance of Christ because God knew we were knuckleheads. Had the Bible described Jesus as tall, there would be denominations specifically for people six foot two and above. The church in the Middle Ages would have thought it godliness to stretch people until all their joints popped out of place. Oh wait—the church did do that in the Middle Ages.

I saw a picture of Jesus at a shop in the Hong Kong airport that showed him completely Asian. Who among us hasn’t seen blond haired, blue-eyed portraits of Jesus walking across the water in his lily-white feet? We all recently heard Senator Obama’s Pastor in his ridiculous tirade on how Jesus was a poor black child that grew up under the oppression of terrible white people.

I don’t think God looks like any of us. I don’t think He thinks like us or acts like us. The pattern that Jesus showed is that God is the kindest and most thoughtful person in the universe. He loves deeply and lives passionately. Like King David, He has the heart of a warrior poet that kicks butt on the battlefield and intimately loves His bride. I think He could care less about a lot of the hang ups we church folks tend to have about people, and I think He cares a lot more about people having a true encounter with His heart towards them while they are still breathing planet Earth’s air.

He’s totally holy, yet He loves us. That’s a paradox. He’s completely sinless and separate from everything ugly, yet He thinks we’re beautiful. He hates sin and the darkness of our age, yet His goodness is towards us. That’s a paradox, and I love it.

Let me see if I can’t craft some words together that illustrate how God is oxymoronically supernatural. I’ll fill inn the blanks with contradicting terms explaining how God pulls off what nobody else can.

He is majestically humble towards us and anxiously patient with us. He is altogether separate because He climbed down into hell and slapped death in the face for all of us.

He is naturally supernatural and dangerously safe. He has made Himself the permanent substitute for our sin, and His plan is for us to be alone together with Him beyond infinity.

Mark 4:34

He did not say anything to them without using a parable. But when He was alone with His own disciples, He explained everything.

Contact the Brewer@ www.FreshFromTheBrewer.com

Loosing Control

When you write a commentary column, it is only fair that you get commentary from some of the people that read it. A lot of it is good, some of it is really bad and all of it is interesting.

Last week I spouted off on some of my Texas heritage. Since then I’ve gotten cards, letters and e-mails from other people saying the same thing. One letter says they had an ancestor that fought along side my ancestor, Henry Brewer at the battle of San Jacinto. Another wanted me to know they had an ancestor Micajah Autry who traveled to the Alamo with none other than Crockett himself.

Letter Rip
I also got a letter from a professional doctrinalist stating that he didn’t understand why I wasted valuable print space writing about anything other than the bible or “spiritual issues.” Let me say to you sir, phooey on you. Those of us that choose to be sane, wonder why you waste your valuable life trying to cram God into such a narrow box of churchdom.

Instead of trying to get the world to fit into church we should be taking Jesus Christ to the world. Furthermore, we shouldn’t just be preaching a message. We should be the message in all of those environments.

I am learning more and more to not separate the sacred and the secular but to just point out Jesus. I am more Kingdom of God motivated than I am traditional and more about transformation and hope than I am about education and church conformity.

If you have a God-given eye to see, you know the things going on around you ARE spiritual issues or have you not read Romans 1:20?

The Real Deal
Make no mistake about it; the Brewer is a Jesus Freak. I am the Christian the devil warned you about. I am highly caffeinated and dangerously obsessively in my belief that Christ is the way, the truth, and the Life. I have an open agenda to influence as many people as I can towards the hope that only comes through the person of Jesus.

It is just sad to me that most times it is easier to find the love of God outside the church than actually in it. I believe that these are the last days and the Lord stated to the last day’s church of Laodicea, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me. (Revelation 3:20)

How pathetic is it that Christ himself, by his own account, is standing outside of the church in these last days trying to get back in. Trying to sit down and eat with us like a family actually does. Trying to bring us all to the same table He sits at.

So that’s where I tend to see him and point him out. Outside, in the non-sacred world. Doing what He does, just like He did in his earthly ministry 2000 years ago.

A Piece of His Mind
A Kingdom mindset is one that says it is just as spiritually legitimate to be a Christian in the market place as it is to be on staff at a church. It is just as important to be a housewife or a bus driver, or work on an oil rig as it is to be a Pastor or an evangelist. Kingdom of God minded people know it is just as important to clean the toilet at the church, as it is to lead praise and worship. A Kingdom of God based lifestyle says its ok to be really good at something even if it has nothing to do with church whatsoever.

I am not against the pulpit or the church. I stand behind a pulpit in at least four church services every week to preach a message to good folks that want to advance and go forward in faith. But someone who is really seeking after God knows that some of the most powerful sermons preached to us may come from our situations in life and not from behind a pulpit. That’s why I “waste” valuable print space referring to secular mainstream and historical events. So people can learn to see God for themselves in their everyday lives.

Now that takes away control from those of us who are Pastors. But for those of us Pastors that don’t actually want to control anybody, its ok.