Entertain us!!

Nearly twenty years ago, the unknown singer of an unknown band suddenly propelled both into massive overnight fame when he shouted, "Here we are now, Entertain us."  The song, the singer, and the band quickly became synonymous with the dissatisfied youth of that day, and the emptiness and dissatisfaction of the singer culminated in his apparent suicide only three years later.  Even if it wasn't a suicide, as some theorize, his life was still an empty one of self-absorbed pity that no amount of fame or wealth was able to change.

What has transpired since that time, combined with a new generation of youth, is technology that entertains us like none that could have been imagined nearly twenty years ago.  Yet that entertainment seems to have produced an even less satisfied generation of youth.  It is now to the point where these youth - and their parents of the previous generation - cannot be entertained enough.  Gone are the days when a movie had no sequel, or when one had to make an effort and spend time going to a store in order to buy music.

Today, an original, fresh blockbuster needs to be re-hashed over and over to attempt to squeeze every last ounce of warm, fuzzy feelings out of it until people get bored and no longer wish to spend a profitable amount of money on sequels.  And the entertainment needs to be here, now; waiting is no longer acceptable.  And people no longer want to read a paragraph that's longer than three or four sentences, so people like blog writers have to conform - despite their convictions otherwise - and dumb themselves down to the level of our fast-food, information-overloaded society.  Otherwise, they risk their impatient readers becoming "bored" and looking for that ever-elusive fulfillment with the next click of their mouse.

Entertainment has become like an addiction, a drug where each injection into our senses gives us the illusion of excitement, but it only lasts for a moment, quickly fading away and making us long for more.  But every time the entertainment industry strives to top what caused a sensation before, it seems that the new high is less intense and doesn't last as long.  Our technological society has basically been numbed by entertainment and information overload.  And its inhabitants wander mindlessly around, numb and bored, looking for their next fix and wondering why nothing satisfies any more.

The saddest part about this progression (or regression?) is how educators and the body of Christ are starting to succumb to the idea that they need to come up with some sort of song-and-dance in order to try to capture the attention of their audience.  It's as though they dread the thought of - gasp! - "boring" their audience and thus losing them for good.  Educational training institutions are trying to re-invent teaching so that students get up and move around more and aren't 'restricted' to one type of task for too long.  And you'd better use multi-media or else you might really bore your students! - as if modern educators don't already have enough additional burdens and pressures upon them.  Yet despite all these good intentions at pleasing rather than instructing, North American educators in particular are scratching their heads and wondering why academic standards and results have taken a nosedive in recent years.

As for the church, the body of Christ, I've come across reports the past couple of years about church youth groups trying to entice kids to show up through things like video game nights.  The problem with this approach is how, for example, one church in the U.S. was letting kids blast beings apart while playing Doom then afterward trying to teach them how to 'love their neighbor.'  In the desire to entertain, it seems as though the church can run the risk of sending contradictory messages.

Another risk the church faces is how trying to entertain forces it to take the low road of the lack of depth and substance that entertainment is all about.  The one true God and the Bible that writes of Him are intensely deep - too deep to ever fully fathom on this side of eternity - and therefore a great deal of energy and concentration are required to try to make sense of them.  Yet there is enormous reward in doing so because of the peace and fulfillment that come from knowing God in a personal way.  This peace and fulfillment are what our entertainment-seeking society is really searching for, yet they aren't finding it outside the Bible.  But then the church expects people to try to understand God through trying to put together the most entertaining music team or sermon at the expense of depth and substance and wonders why the depth of peoples' relationship with God is as shallow as the attempts to entertain them.

Please don't get me wrong:  multimedia and social networking sites need to be included in how Christians today send out the message of this amazing God of the Bible that will transform their lives in ways that absolutely nothing else can.  However, this needs to be done wisely.  We need to be wary that we aren't watering things down through entertainment just to try to win people.  Again, we can only expect watered-down faith and commitment on the part of believers if we water down the message of Christ, so we as a church need to hold fast to the things that have worked well to this point.

So what does this mean with our youth?  What things have worked well to disciple youth to this point in history?  I dare youth leaders to start doing verse-by-verse Bible studies with youth.  Sure, start out with one or two carefully-chosen activities or games to help them burn off some energy and/or set the context for the study time.  But then I dare a youth leader to tell their group that they have decided to start reading the Gospel of _____ or the Book of _____ verse-by-verse, starting now, then of course facilitating the understanding of the group as they read.  Maybe study only about 20-30 minutes per youth meeting, but keep at it until the entire book is read.

Why do we always resort to only a verse or two, completely out of context of the chapter or book, to form the basis of the message for a youth meeting?  To me, the more I think about it, this seems as absurd as trying to get a math student to understand algebra without them first understanding addition, subtraction, etc. and the order of operations, for example.  And how do we expect them to get excited about God when only a few verses not explained in context hardly give them any kind of understanding about who God really is and what He offers them through belief in Jesus Christ?  Most youth have never read the Bible on their own, so we need to start with milk before expecting them to understand the main course.  This is best achieved by tackling the concepts of a book of the Bible one verse at a time so that they remain in context to one another, since each concept will build upon another in order to create greater understanding.

The only risk that is run by such an approach is the reduction of a youth group from several mostly non-committed and indifferent believers and non-believers to maybe only two or three solid believers who sincerely want God to rock their world.  God is more concerned with quality, not quantity - refer to the account of Gideon's army as an example - because discipling a handful of solid, hard-core believers will transform a community far more than trying to keep a group of self-conscious youth entertained.

We need to stop fearing that we'll "bore" our youth and instead trust in the power of God and His Word to radically transform them.  I dare youth leaders to rise to this challenge and thereby begin to fear God more than man.

The Blame Game

I've always found it interesting since I've become a Christian to notice how some people who want nothing to do with God in their everyday lives suddenly decide to blame Him when something goes wrong.

A few years ago, I was watching the news one night during the annual wildfire season that always strikes southern California.  I was surprised to hear the reaction of one homeowner who had just lost his home as he mentioned God along the lines of, 'If God was real he wouldn't have let this happen!'  The expression on his face and his tone of voice was one of defiance and anger.  It was pretty clear to me that he was one of those kinds of people I described above.

When I get angry about something (and yes, Christians DO get angry, although they try to restrict it to the "righteous anger" that Jesus talks about, i.e. those things that displease God as well), I usually say, "Ah, man!" or "Aw, crap!" instead of blaming God or Jesus for my misfortune.  We humans are the ones who destroyed the perfectly good relationship that God originated with us in the Garden of Eden, so I'd rather be mad at them than at God.  I also don't say "Geez" or "Gosh" because these are derivatives of "Jesus" and "God" that I find too many Christians use without realizing that they are really affronts to God.

More interesting to me is how people claiming to be agnostics or atheists will use "God" or "Jesus Christ" as derogatory terms or in a derogatory statement when they are angry about something.  Why are they even mentioning the names of beings they claim not to believe in?  By doing so, they are contradicting what they claim to believe, and it would make more sense for them to use four-letter derogatory terms instead.

I realized only a few years ago why it is so instinctive for humans to think that God's has a last name when they get angry or why shouting out to Jesus at the top of one's lungs is often their first reaction upon striking their finger with a hammer.  It's because God once gave a commandment to people saying, according to one translation,

"Do not misuse the name of the Lord your God, because the Lord will punish anyone who misuses His name." (Exodus 20: 7, HCSB)

Once that command was given (along with several others), people were now accountable to God in this respect.  If they broke this command, or "sinned", they were now guilty before God whereas before they were not.  (The book of Romans, Chapter 7, verses 7-12 explains this concept in detail.)

Now the Bible also describes how there is an enemy of God who wants us to screw up every chance we have to be reconciled to and forgiven by God through Jesus.  Why?  So that we can face the same eternal punishment as he already knows he's going to face after the Day of Judgement.  He wants to drag us into destruction along with him, much like how Hitler dragged the German nation into destruction rather than signing a peace agreement that would have saved thousands of lives and many historical landmarks and treasures.  He is named Satan and also goes by the title of "devil".  He is also known as the "accuser", the one who accuses men before God for their sins against God:

"The salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Messiah have now come, because the accuser of our brothers has been thrown out:  the one who accuses them before our God day and night." (Revelation 12: 10)

I've learned through observation and experience that Satan is a masterful theologian of deceit who has had thousands of years to perfect his twisting of the Bible in order to drag people into sin (sin = thoughts, words, or deeds that anger God or are contrary to His will).  It is very apparent in the book of Job that Satan has a primary role in testing humans to see whether or not they will take the low road of getting angry at God and thereby sinning against Him.

One way that Satan does this is by appealing to the sin nature that we are all born with and possess until the day that we get forgiven through the salvation offered by God through Jesus Christ.  This sin nature is the one we have inherited from Adam and Eve that naturally wants to rebel against God.  This is why it is very easy for non-believers to use the terms "God" and "Jesus Christ" when they get angry.

And although believers no longer possess a nature that wants to sin, even though they have been reborn and have a new nature since the Spirit of God now dwells in them (Romans 7:13-8:11), they can still succumb to the same urge to curse God because of the sinful body and world they still live in.

In either case, the act of "[misusing] the name of the Lord your God" by cursing His name or using it in vain (i.e. saying it in casual conversation outside of actually seeking Him or calling out to Him) adds a sense of guilt to the non-believer and believer alike that deep inside - either consciously or subconsciously - makes that person feel as though now that they've degraded God in this manner, God will no longer accept them if they actually were to want to come to Him.

When God was getting through to me in my early twenties, in the back of my mind I didn't think God would accept me because of all the bad that I had done, including the horrendously obscene trucker-mouth I had used to curse God and use His name in vain for most of those twenty-odd years.  Fortunately, Satan didn't win that battle in my life because I realized that God accepts all who come to Him seeking forgiveness through Jesus, regardless of appearance or any degree of past wrongdoing.

What I have learned within the past two years is how those thoughts inciting us to sin are whispered into our minds (not our ears, or else we would know those thoughts are not our own) by none other than our accuser before God, Satan.  If you want to read a remarkable book about things like how Satan works against us, read "What God Wishes Christian Knew About Christianity" by Bill Gillham.

If you doubt this above argument about why I believe that it is so instinctive for humans to curse God or to use His name in vain, ask yourself this:  Why, when people get angry, don't they instinctively say "Oh, Buddha!" or "Oh, Mohammed!" or "Oh, Satan!" when they curse?  Why do people have to consciously develop the habit of saying "Aw, man!" or "Aw, crap!" in order to override the natural tendency to curse God?  Perhaps there's some force opposing God at work in us, say, an accuser who wants to create division between us and Him?

So now that you know a very plausible explanation of the reason behind the game of blaming God, maybe realize instead that it is a combination of our desire to sin and the helping hand of our accuser that is truly to blame for our misfortune.