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GUC 9

Jesus, Joseph, and the Law.

People think Charismatics are anything-goes free-love hippies, but even in Charismania there exists legalism! Growing up Charismatic, I was much more under the Law than under grace, a result of our Pentecostal Holiness roots. Even though our pastors had thought the Pentecostal Holiness movement extreme, there still lingered a superstition in the air that condemned our consciences when we bought groceries on Sunday, watched movies in the theatre, drank alcohol, or heard “secular” music. It was “worldly” and God wouldn’t be pleased with us and might even be angry and take away His power if we participated in these types of Egyptian living. We taught regularly that holiness was prerequisite for spiritual giftedness and God’s manifest power, which was the focal point of our meetings. It was later on we learned that spiritual gifts don’t equate spiritual maturity.

Last blog I drew some interesting parallels between the lives of Joseph and Jesus so as to explain how the Lord set me free from this kind of legalistic bondage. Continuing on in that thread, here is another commonality between these two characters. 

Joseph and Jesus both embody the exact same position towards Egypt in faith: outside of the Law. Joseph lived before the giving of the Law (Abrahamic faith in God resulting in righteousness) and Jesus lived in the culmination of the Law (faith in God resulting in righteousness). Joseph’s conscience didn’t condemn him for eating Egyptian cuisine, dressing like an Egyptian, speaking Egyptian, and marrying an Egyptian wife. Jesus’s conscience didn’t condemn Him for healing on the Sabbath, eating with tax collectors, and allowing His disciples to eat with unwashed hands because His ministry was the ministry of grace and therefore one that fulfilled the Law. 

Several things must be said regarding matters of conscience. Firstly, a weak conscience is not necessarily a mature conscience, and dancing around a believer with a weak conscience isn’t necessarily a sign of spiritual maturity: even God offends weak consciences. God offended Peter’s immature and weak conscience by telling Him to eat things that his conscience condemned as unclean. Why? To mature Peter for ministry. It almost worked: Paul still had to rebuke him later for being too legalistic. Self-righteousness is a hard habit to shake!

Rather than keep a believer immature by granting them immunity to anything that they deem a matter of conscience, expose them to Paul’s letters to the Galatians so as to eliminate all spiritual superstition. Then teach them that God wants us to walk in liberty, free from licentiousness AND fear of being polluted by association or environment, the latter being a place most believers fail to come to, rendering them unfruitful in impacting, engaging and renewing culture. 

Joseph’s integrity was completely internal, not external. We don’t see Joseph getting sidetracked from his mission to save Egypt for fear of unGodly association or worldliness. Joseph doesn’t turn down his marriage to the daughter of the high priest of the Egyptian pantheon for fear of demonic union or power over his home. No, he stays with the dream and call, by marriage becoming fully Egyptian—body and soul—but maintains adamantine loyalty and integrity to his God.

I’m not promoting missionary-dating or unequally-yoked unions (bad moves lacking in wisdom!), just trying to break unGodly, un-Scriptural charismatic superstitions that would try to thwart the call of God on people’s lives by placing a deep-seated heaviness and condemnation in the heart of man that is not from God.

Just how Egyptian was Joseph? 

GUC BLOG #8 

GUC #8
Jesus and Joseph
Among the 130 similarities that have been observed between Joseph and Jesus, here are twelve:
1. Both were the the favorite son of a wealthy father: Gen. 37:3, Matt. 3:17
2. Both were rejected and hated by their brothers.
3. Both were sold for the price of a slave: Gen. 37:28, Matt. 26:15
4. Joseph and Jesus were the Savior of their people and of the Gentiles.
5. Both loved those who hated them, pardoning them, and even raising them to honors: Gen.50:20, Matt. 5:44
6. Both were taken into Egypt to avoid being killed: Gen. 37:28, Matt. 2:13
7. Both began their ministry at the age of thirty: Gen. 41:46, Luke 3:23
8. Both were falsely accused: Gen. 39:14, Mark 14:56
9. Both were silent before their accuser: Gen. 39:20, Mark 15:4
10. Both were condemned between two prisoners: Gen. 40:2-3, Luke 23:32
11. Both became a servant: Gen. 39:4, Phil. 2:7
12. Both became a lord / Lord: Gen. 45:8, Rev. 19:16.
As I view the call and life of Joseph and Jesus comparatively to the call and life of Israel out of Egypt, I see several massive differences that are crucial in understanding what I believe to be not only my call as a Christ-follower but the call of the Church.
Firstly, God has called me not to leave Egypt or be separated from Egypt indefinitely.  There is certainly a season of training and separation that ought to occur so that I can establish my identity in juxtaposition to Egypt. But that’s not a New Testament hermeneutic. Jesus did ask the Father to take us out of the world, He prayed that we would be protected from the Evil One (John 17:15). 
Much of the teaching on absolute cultural separation (in Pentecostalism) stems from fear and an accompanying charismatic phenomenon known as Dispensationalism in which the church is seen as a weak and defensive Helms Deep being over-run by the hordes of hell. 
It’s an emphasis on “gross darkness” and not “the glory of The Lord”. 
It’s a poor eschatology that inevitably informs daily living. My parents pastors didn’t go to movie theatres because they thought Christ’s return was imminent and didn’t want to be found by Jesus in worldliness. 
What an Israel-out-of-Egypt hermeneutic continually does is ascribe to the Satan power that he does not have. Charismatics are the worst at that. What it also does is ascribe too much power to the world. Jesus said, “Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.” 
And finally, an Israel-out-of-Egypt hermeneutic calls everything in Egypt unclean. What was unclean to Israel was not unclean to Joseph or Peter (“Rise, kill and eat”). It makes the church look like the Levite and Priest in the parable of the Good Samaritan, afraid to help a dying man for fear of being “unclean”. 
Another difference is Israel’s deliverance and Egypt’s deliverance. In Israel’s case, the Red Sea was a win; in Joseph’s case, the famine upon Egypt was a loss. Two truths need to be balanced here: what God did in delivering my parents was real and their out-of-Egypt season was crucial: Egypt in their minds needed to be buried in the typological waters of baptism. But that’s not where we are called to live for the rest of our lives.
Our world needs Joseph’s: men of God that are sanctified and missional. And the fault that I found with my elders Growing Up Charismatic is that they were not missional, and I almost said worldly, enough. 
Next week I’ll talk about being a misunderstood Joseph.

(Source: gucblog2012)

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GUC BLOG #7

GUC BLOG #7

Growing Up Charismatic, the central theme of our church was joy, particularly the joy of salvation. This is such a powerful theme, and staying close to our First Love and the Salvation of God is crucial in the life of the believer and the church. 

And correspondingly, our worship songs and preaching were very often on the topic of salvation and the joy of it, because the entire church was made up of hippies that had all been radically translated from the kingdom of darkness into the marvelous light of Christ; that is my parents testimony, and all of their friends. And this absolutely contributed to their charismatic style of worship, as well as fit their expressive nature: they were pumped about their newfound freedom in Christ! 

Their had all come from really messed up backgrounds: drug abuse, broken homes, alcoholism, teenage pregnancies resulting from the free-love movement, and other such life-derailing situations. Life in “The World”, outside of Christ and the Church, was misery and a slavery to sin and brokenness. And when my parents read the Scriptures, they identified best with Israel coming out of Egypt. They were led by a patriarch-type pastor, had destroyed their idols, had decided to follow the one true God, and took on a new identity. Every former association, even to the point of family, was Egyptian.

And this was their primary hermeneutic, their Rossetta Stone, for interpreting both the Scriptures and how the church ought to relate to the world. Separation was the key.

All forms of non-Christian cultural goings on were Egyptian. Any place and any event where alcohol was served was Egyptian. I can still hear my mothers audible axiom, “I came out of that, and I’m never going back.”

And I take nothing away from that.

Only, that’s not my story. 

As I grew up and began to take on and develop a mantle and calling of my own, I realized that I identified much more with Joseph going INTO Egypt, and emphatically not Israel leaving Egypt! Imagine the juxtaposition in almost every practical area of my life that was formed from this developing and strengthening ideology! It’s almost completely contrary to everything that my parents, pastors, teachers, and mentors had experienced, as almost all of them were former hippies led by a patriarch! 

More and more I began to feel like and identify with Joseph, and my position both ideologically and philosophically began to solidify at a quicker pace when I was studying the life of Joseph and observed that Joseph is the greatest type of Jesus in the Old Testament. 

An Old Testament “type” is simply a likeness or “shadow” of things to come; if a flashlight was shone on Jesus from the end of human history, the Joseph narrative would be a very close representation of His shadow. 

Next week I will begin to develop and dichotomize my Joseph-Egypt identification as compared with the Egypt-Israel identification.

GUC BLOG #6

GUC 6 blog

Growing Up Charismatic meant that I was one of the worst fashion-sensitive kids in the neighborhood: the absolute worst.

Because I wore a tacky uniform in Christian School, and didn’t have many non-Christian friends, I had absolutely no clue of the sartorial going ons about me. None. The separation of church and state was so great that it was physical. Because we came out of “Egypt”, even the fashions of the world were considered “Egyptian”. I didn’t bleach my hair as a 15-year-old to be a regular 15-year-old musician wanting to be expressive and artsy. No, no, it was an outward manifestation of rebellion. My developing fashion sense was regarded as juxtaposed to my faith. 

One of the worst interpretations of Scripture fueled this world-church standoff, and I am referring to the teaching that Satan was the angel in charge of worship; more so am I referring to a teaching stemming from a reading of the King James wherein Satan is considered to have body parts that are musical. translators of the KJV didn’t know what to do with several obscure Hebrew words and assumptively translated them “timbrels and pipes” instead of how later, more careful translators contextually and correctly interpret them “bezels and sockets”, referring to priestly chest plates that indicate an elite vocation and calling: to minister to and before the LORD in particularly close proximity. 

Because we taught from the KJV, Satan was the lead worshipper of heaven and a musical instrument, and as such music was his primary means of seducing culture and wreaking havoc. That’s how we explained away the unrepentant and powerful gift of God in unbelievers: Satan. 

It wasn’t just music; it wasn’t even just “secular” music; it was “satanic” music. 

And seeing as fashion was so akin to and informed by “the gods of this world”, aka New Kids On The Block, Nirvana, and Wu-Tang Clan, all fashion stemming from that influence was a representation of the rebellious kingdom of darkness.

We hadn’t an understanding of Common Grace: that God gifts people for art, regardless of how they’ll use it. We thought that the art was demonic because it wasn’t “Christian” per se. Everything was black and white in that regard. God wasn’t viewed as a Creative, Artistic Genius who is the source of all aesthetic value and beauty: He was a dry, didactic polemic who couldn’t give a rat’s behind about culture, especially fashion. But what about Solomon in all his splendor? Or what about all the aesthetic description in Revelation or Song of Songs?

One day in my fourth year of Bible College I had an interpretive revelation that changed my view on church and culture forever. I’ll share that next week…  

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