"We live in a performance based culture and the American church all too often operates the same way. The success of the church is measured by counting - counting the attendance, counting the offering, counting the conversions, etc. But may I suggest that not only is this not a true measure of performance for God's Kingdom, it may actually make God angry." - Jay Link

Joab, as the commander of all of David’s military forces, also recognized in David’s order to count the men that he was looking for increased security as Israel’s king – seeking to put his trust more in the size of his army than in the size of his God. Joab exposed this very motive when he asked David, “May the Lord your God multiply the troops a hundred times over, and may the eyes of my lord the king see it. But why does my lord the king want to do such a thing?” As one commentator said, “The spirit of vainglory in numbers had taken possession of the king…to trust in numbers and forget God.” 

So, what can we learn from this great counting tragedy? I think the lesson for us is quite profound.

I have two friends, both happen to have had retirement plans that were about the same size. My one friend constantly watched his account, running projections to determine if he had set aside enough to maintain a comparable lifestyle when he gets to 65 and retires. He always knows very closely the current balance. 

It was fascinating to watch how he handled his plummeting account when the market most recently crashed and how troubled he was watching his funds evaporating before his very eyes. Now that the account balance has come back, he is again much more relaxed, feeling secure he is again going to be able to “make it” with what he has accumulated. 

My other friend saw his retirement account as a stumbling block to him fully trusting in Christ for his and his family’s future. He found himself placing his security in the “things of earth” and not in the Provider of those good things. So, in response to this spiritual self-realization, this friend chose to liquidate his retirement account and give all the money away, so he could be better positioned to learn to trust God for his and his family’s future – looking first to Him for their “daily bread.

”In an earthly economy, my latter friend was just plain foolish. But in God’s economy, I would suggest he might have actually been the wiser of the two. He had learned that the less he had to count, the less he had to worry about losing and the more he needed to trust in God and not in mammon (riches). 

Many seek financial independence so they won’t be forced to depend on God. Those seeking financial freedom, on the other hand, are seeking freedom from finding security in their material things. Think about it. Is your planning motivation financial independence or financial freedom? 

David counted his men to gain a greater sense of self-security. We can easily find ourselves counting our “stuff” for the very same reason. And when we are motivated to count in order to gain a greater sense of self-security, our counting will be wrong."

RIVERS NOT RESERVOIRS
7982 Hillcrest Trail
Jonesboro, Georgia 30236
404.784.4618

BLOG:    www.hisrivers.org
EMAIL:  his.rivers@gmail.com

"We live in a performance based culture and the American church all too often operates the same way. The success of the church is measured by counting - counting the attendance, counting the offering, counting the conversions, etc. But may I suggest that not only is this not a true measure of performance for God's Kingdom, it may actually make God angry." - Jay Link

Over the next three postings I will be sharing a great article from Jay Link entitled: 
"When Counting is Wrong." 
If you want to download the full article you can do so at: Download pdf article.

TODAY - PART 1

"Even though King David was a man after God’s own heart, his life was riddled with periods of lack of self-control and deeply flawed judgments. One of the lesser known examples of his poor judgment is found in II Samuel 24 and I Chronicles 21. Recently, the Lord brought this story to my mind and how I and so many other believers still make the very same mistakes that David did. Let me tell you the story. 

David was undoubtedly the greatest king who ever reigned in Israel. His exploits before and during his reign are legendary. Towards the end of his reign, Satan appeals to David’s pride enticing him to take a census to find out how many able-bodied men he has available for his army. In demanding this count, David demonstrates three prideful mistakes that cause both David and Israel to endure a terrible tragedy.

Numbering Israel was a precarious business. Exodus 30:12 emphasizes that God is the owner of Israel, not any king or prophet. In ancient times a man had every right to count what belonged to him. But Israel belonged to God and if God wanted His army counted, it would have been His prerogative to order it, not David’s – who only served as steward-king of God’s people. As soon as David commanded Joab to count what did not belong to him, Joab and all the top military commanders immediately recognized this order for what it was - a dangerous mistake. In fact, Joab strongly objects and boldly confronts David by asking, “Why should (you) be a cause of guilt to Israel?” 

So, what can we learn from this great counting tragedy? I think the lesson for us is quite profound. 

Even though David wrote Psalm 24:1, “The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains. The world and all those who dwell in it,” he must have forgotten his own declaration and at some point began seeing himself as the owner of Israel and the one who had the right to count what he owned. You might question, “Wait, isn’t a careful accounting of our possessions just good stewardship?” Yes, on the one hand, it is. Solomon even tells us to, “know well the condition of your flocks and pay attention to your herds” (Proverbs 27:23). But on the other hand, if our counting is motivated by the “pride of ownership” and not by a humble accounting of God’s property, our counting, like David’s, will be wrong. 

I think we would all agree that there is a huge emotional and psychological difference between how an owner looks at his own, personal balance sheet and how his accountant looks at the very same balance sheet. And it was this ownership attitude that did David in and will do us in as well. 

This single issue of ownership is the central demand of the gospel. Are we willing to surrender everything – give it all up – return back to the rightful Owner everything we have wrongfully confiscated and claimed to be our own? When we do find ourselves tempted to count what we own, we must remember, it doesn’t take very long to count nothing! 

Do you count your stuff as the owner or as His steward? 

RIVERS NOT RESERVOIRS
7982 Hillcrest Trail
Jonesboro, Georgia 30236
404.784.4618

BLOG:    www.hisrivers.org
EMAIL:  his.rivers@gmail.com

This is the last of three postings of an article by Phillip Yancey entitled The New Mathematics of Grace, as excerpted from his book, What's so Amazing about Grace?

The first two parts looked at four parables - one each from the four Gospels and how Grace cannot be viewed from a literal or mathematics mindset. 

Today - The 3rd and final article from Phillip Yancey.

By my reckoning Judas and Peter stand out as the most mathematical of the disciples. Judas must have shown some facility with numbers or the others would not have elected him treasurer. Peter was a stickler for detail, always trying to pin down Jesus’ precise meaning. Also, the Gospels record that when Jesus engineered a miraculous catch of fish, Peter hauled in 153 big ones. Who but a mathematician would have bothered to count the squirming pile?

It was altogether in character, then, for the scrupulous apostle Peter to pursue some mathematical formula of grace. “How many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me?” he asked Jesus. “Up to seven times?” Peter was erring on the side of magnanimity, for the rabbis in his day had suggested three as the maximum number of times one might be expected to forgive.

“Not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” replied Jesus in a flash.

Some manuscripts have “seventy times seven,” but it hardly matters whether Jesus said 77 or 490: forgiveness, he implied, is not the kind of thing you count on an abacus.

Peter’s question prompted another of Jesus’ trenchant stories, about a servant who has somehow piled up a debt of several million dollars. The fact that realistically no servant could accumulate a debt so huge underscores Jesus’ point: confiscating the man’s family, children, and all his property would not make a dent in repaying the debt. It is unforgivable. Nevertheless the king, touched with pity, abruptly cancels the debt and lets the servant off scot-free.

Suddenly, the plot twists. The servant who has just been forgiven seizes a colleague who owes him a few dollars and begins to choke him. “Pay back what you owe me!” he demands, and throws the man into jail.  In a word, the greedy servant is an ingrate.

Why Jesus draws the parable with such exaggerated strokes comes clear when he reveals that the king represents God. This above all should determine our attitude toward others: a humble awareness that God has already forgiven us a debt so mountainous that beside it any person’s wrongs against us shrink to the size of anthills. How can we not forgive each other in light of all God has forgiven us?

As C. S. Lewis put it, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

The more I reflect on Jesus’ parables, the more tempted I am to reclaim the word “atrocious” to describe the mathematics of the gospel.

I believe Jesus gave us these stories about grace in order to call us to step completely outside our tit-for-tat world of ungrace and enter into God’s realm of infinite grace. As Miroslav Volf puts it, “the economy of undeserved grace has primacy over the economy of moral deserts.”

From nursery school onward we are taught how to succeed in the world of ungrace. The early bird gets the worm. No pain, no gain. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Demand your rights. Get what you pay for.

I know these rules well because I live by them. I work for what I earn; I like to win; I insist on my rights. I want people to get what they deserve — nothing more, nothing less.

Yet if I care to listen, I hear a loud whisper from the gospel that I did not get what I deserved. I deserved punishment and got forgiveness. I deserved wrath and got love. I deserved debtor’s prison and got instead a clean credit history. I deserved stern lectures and crawl-on-your-knees repentance; I got a banquet — Babette’s feast — spread for me.

RIVERS NOT RESERVOIRS
7982 Hillcrest Trail
Jonesboro, Georgia 30236

BLOG:    www.hisrivers.org
EMAIL:  his.rivers@gmail.com

Last weeks posting was the first of three on the subject of The New Mathematics of Grace - an article by Phillip Yancey, excerpted from his book What's So Amazing about Grace?

Last week he looked at 4 stories or parables - one from each of the four gospels. 1. The good Shepherd; 2. Mary pouring perfume on Jesus' feet; 3. The poor widow; and 4. The employer and his hired help.

This week in part 2, Yancey continues to examine the economic sense or nonsense of Grace.

“I recently attended Amadeus (Latin for “beloved of God”), a play that shows a composer in the eighteenth century seeking to understand the mind of God. The devout Antonio Salieri has the earnest desire, but not the aptitude, to create immortal music of praise. It infuriates him that God has instead lavished the greatest gift of musical genius ever known on an impish preadolescent named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

While watching the performance, I realized I was seeing the flip side of a problem that had long troubled me. The play was posing the same question as the biblical book of Job, only inverted. The author of Job ponders why God would “punish” the most righteous man on the face of the earth; the author of Amadeus ponders why God would “reward” an undeserving brat. The problem of pain meets its match in the scandal of grace. A line from the play expresses the scandal:

“What use, after all, is man if not to teach God his lessons?”

Why would God choose Jacob the conniver over dutiful Esau? Why confer supernatural powers of strength on a delinquent named Samson? Why groom a runty shepherd boy, David, to be Israel’s king? And why bestow a sublime gift of wisdom on Solomon, the fruit of that king’s adulterous liaison? Indeed, in each of these Old Testament stories the scandal of grace rumbles under the surface until finally, in Jesus’ parables, it bursts forth in a dramatic upheaval to reshape the moral landscape.

Jesus’ parable of the workers and their grossly unfair paychecks confronts this scandal head-on. In a contemporary Jewish version of this story, the workers hired late in the afternoon work so hard that the employer, impressed, decides to award them a full day’s wages. Not so in Jesus’ version, which notes that the last crop of workers have been idly standing around in the marketplace, something only lazy, shiftless workers would do during harvest season. Moreover, these laggards do nothing to distinguish themselves, and the other workers are shocked by the pay they receive. What employer in his right mind would pay the same amount for one hour’s work as for twelve!

Grace is not about finishing last or first; it is about not counting.

We receive grace as a gift from God, not as something we toil to earn, a point that Jesus made clearly through the employer’s response:

Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?

Are you, Salieri, envious because I am so generous to Mozart? Are you, Saul, envious because I am so generous to David? Are you Pharisees envious because I open the gate to Gentiles so late in the game? That I honor the prayer of a tax collector above a Pharisee’s, that I accept a thief’s last-minute confession and welcome him to Paradise — does this arouse your envy? Do you begrudge my leaving the obedient flock to seek the stray or my serving a fatted calf to the no-good prodigal?

The employer in Jesus’ story did not cheat the full-day workers by paying everyone for one hour’s work instead of twelve. No, the full-day workers got what they were promised. Their discontent arose from the scandalous mathematics of grace. They could not accept that their employer had the right to do what he wanted with his money when it meant paying scoundrels twelve times what they deserved.

Significantly, many Christians who study this parable identify with the employees who put in a full day’s work, rather than the add-ons at the end of the day. We like to think of ourselves as responsible workers, and the employer’s strange behavior baffles us as it did the original hearers. We risk missing the story’s point: that God dispenses gifts, not wages. None of us gets paid according to merit, for none of us comes close to satisfying God’s requirements for a perfect life. If paid on the basis of fairness, we would all end up in hell.

In the words of Robert Farrar Capon, “If the world could have been saved by good bookkeeping, it would have been saved by Moses, not Jesus.”

Grace cannot be reduced to generally accepted accounting principles.

In the bottom-line realm of ungrace, some workers deserve more than others; 
in the realm of grace the word deserve does not even apply."

RIVERS NOT RESERVOIRS
7982 Hillcrest Trail
Jonesboro, Georgia 30236

BLOG:    www.hisrivers.org
EMAIL:  his.rivers@gmail.com

Over the next Three Weeks, I am going to share on the subject of Grace - from Phillip Yancey’s book, What’s So Amazing About Grace? Now before you respond with  “NOTHING TO SEE HERE - MOVE ON”, let me ask you to at least stop and take a quick look. 

I recently read a long article (long for this somewhat impatient reader) by Phillip Yancey,  In consideration of our culture,and the truth of - TL:DR - translation? TOO LONG: DON’T READ - I am going to share some of his thoughts in 3 short postings.

There are four parables  from the Gospels, that if taken literally ‘Do not add up’. 

Story 1
“Luke tells of a shepherd who left his flock of ninety-nine and plunged into the darkness to search for one lost sheep. A noble deed, to be sure, but reflect for a moment on the underlying arithmetic. Jesus says the shepherd left the ninety-nine sheep “in the country,” which presumably means vulnerable to rustlers, wolves, or a feral desire to bolt free. How would the shepherd feel if he returned with the one lost lamb slung across his shoulders only to find twenty-three others now missing?

Story 2
In a scene recounted in John, a woman named Mary took a pint — worth a year’s wages! — of exotic perfume and poured it on Jesus’ feet. Think of the wastefulness. Would not an ounce of perfume accomplish the same purpose? Even Judas could see the absurdity: the treasure now running in fragrant rivulets across the dirt floor could have been sold to help the poor.

Story 3 
Mark records yet a third scene. After watching a widow drop two puny coins in the temple collection bucket, Jesus belittled more hefty contributions. “I tell you the truth,” he remarked, “this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others.” I hope he said those words softly, for major donors would not appreciate the comparison.

Story 4
The fourth story, from Matthew, involves a parable I have heard few sermons preached on, with good reason. Jesus told of a farmer who hired people to work his vineyards. Some clocked in at sunrise, some at morning coffee break, some at lunchtime, some at afternoon coffee break, and some an hour before quitting time. Everybody seemed content until payroll time, when the stalwarts who had worked twelve hours under a blazing sun learned that the sweatless upstarts who had put in barely an hour would receive exactly the same pay. The boss’s action contradicted everything known about employee motivation and fair compensation.

The economics are atrocious, plain and simple. Grace sounds a shrill note of unfairness. Why should a widow’s pennies count more than a rich man’s millions? And what employer would pay ‘Johnny-come-latelies’ the same as his trusted regulars?”

RIVERS NOT RESERVOIRS
7982 Hillcrest Trail
Jonesboro, Georgia 30236

BLOG:   www.hisrivers.org
EMAIL:  his.rivers@gmail.com