Tommy Boy and Idol Destruction

Mike Leake

Do you remember that scene in Tommy Boy where Chris Farley backs David Spade’s car door into a pole and it rips the door off?  Remember how Tommy (Farley) tries to “fix” the problem and simply place the door back on, so that whenever Richard (Spade) open the door it falls off in his own hand.  As the door falls off into Richard’s hands Tommy is heard screaming in shock (the way only Farley could do), “What’d you do!” 

Doesn’t this seem very similar to what Adam and Eve did in the Garden?  Isn’t this what you and I still do today? 

Rather than coming to the Lord in faith and repentance we are like Adam.  We try to flee the presence of the Lord.  I don’t think it is necessarily that we do not desire a relationship with the Almighty. 

We want to be in His presence. 

But we don’t want to be naked in His presence. 

And so we run away and try to sew fig-leaf garments for ourselves.  We’d rather have itchy undies than face up to our fall.  And so we hide and try to fix things on our own.  And when our shallow efforts at “fixing it” are exposed we turn to our fellow man and say, “What’d you do!” 

It is because I do not want to be naked in His presence that I often run away from the heart work of exposing idols.  It takes much grace for me to come to a spot where I am willing to look at the idols in my heart that are often driving me more than the Lord Jesus. 

But whenever I remember verses like Romans 8:1 I decide to come out of hiding and face some of these idols.  In those moments i have found Tim Keller’s book, Counterfeit Gods, to be very helpful.  Here he gives a few suggestions for uncovering idols of the heart.  I will summarize these four questions:

  1. What do your thoughts effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding your attention? (That may be what you are daydreaming about right now)
  2. How do you spend your time and money?
  3. How do you respond to unanswered prayers and frustrated hopes? What are those things in your life that when God says “no” or “wait” it is met with explosive anger or deep despair? These are your functional idols.
  4. What are your most uncontrollable emotions? Where do you find fear? Anger? Despair? Guilt? This is often where we can find many of the deep idols in our hearts.

I know from the character of God and the work of Jesus that whenever these idols are exposed, and whenever I bring them to the Lord through faith and repentance, they will be met with love, mercy, and grace. 

There is never a time when I will go to the Lord with an idol that is so vile that He will refuse to meet it with grace.  Though the idol and its damning effects may be more than I can bare to see—I know that Jesus Christ has already peered into the cup of wrath, saw that sin, and drank it’s punishment to the dregs.  None of my idolatrous affairs will surprise Jesus. 

Brothers and sisters, we cannot take idolatry as a passive thing. The beautiful thing about our union with Jesus is that he does not just sit passively by and allow us to wreck our lives on these idols. No. He lovingly exposes our less wild lovers. He exposes and strips bare those false gods that will only leave us wrecked and ruined. He does this because He desire to replace them with strong affections for Himself. Christ is a jealous husband. And that is a good thing.

He will not let you go. He is passionately dedicated to you in this rooting out of sin and unbelief. We will find that each idol will be met with grace, love, and power to change our affections and our worship. Christ is a jealous husband but He is also patient.

May we join with him in rooting out these idols. They are ripping us off. I pray that we might join with the Spirit in searching our hearts for God-belittling idols and that in so doing we might also trust Him to root them out and replace them with God-honoring affections.

The SBC and THE Hope of the World

Mike Leake 7 Comments

Timmy Brister has posted 10 Thoughts about the SBC.  Because I strongly identify with his #10 I thought I would share it:

10.  I believe the best Southern Baptists are those who don’t spend their time and energy talking about the SBC but focus their life on Jesus Christ.  The SBC is not the hope of the world.  Jesus is.  The SBC may not be around 100 years from now, but the kingdom of God is eternal.  Those who spend their lives in the politics, debates, and other peripheral issues may gain attention in the blogosphere and domain of bureaucratic conference rooms, but the future of the SBC does not belong to those wearing pajamas our suits.  Rather, it belongs to those with a towel and basin, following Jesus on mission–serving, loving, and giving their lives away.  I want to be found in that number because I love Jesus, because I believe in the local church, and because I am grateful to be called a Southern Baptist.

Amen! 

Ineffective Leaders

Mike Leake

I haven’t read a book on leadership in awhile so I thought I would pick up what sounded like a good one from Dave Kraft: Leaders Who Last.  One gem that I’ve picked up so far is Kraft’s list of Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Leaders:

  1. They spend too much time managing and not enough time leading.
  2. They spend too much time counseling the hurting people and not enough time developing the people with potential.
  3. They spend too much time putting out fires and not enough time lighting fires.
  4. They spend too much time doing and not enough time planning.
  5. They spend too much time teaching the crowd and not enough time training the core.
  6. They spend too much time doing it themselves and not enough time doing it through others.
  7. They make too many decisions based on organizational politics and too few decisions based on biblical principles.

I have found that while many want an effective leader and one that lasts, within the church they often require him to be ineffective.  How many pastoral job descriptions have you seen that are populated by the first statement in each sentence and not the latter? 

Sifting Through Donkey Dung

Mike Leake

In Mark 5 we read of a woman

“…who had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse.”

There were many options for this lady to find healing.  The Talmud lists eleven.  In Lightfoot’s Commentary we are made privy to a few of the more ridiculous ones:

  • “Take of gum Alexandria, of alum, and of crocus hortensis, the weight of a zuzee each; let them be bruised together, and given in wine to the woman that hath an issue of blood.
  • But if this fail, “Take of Persian onions nine logs, boil them in wine, and give it to her to drink: and say, Arise from thy flux.
  • But should this fail, “Set her in a place where two ways meet, and let her hold a cup of wine in her hand; and let somebody come behind and affright her, and say, Arise from thy flux.
  • But should this do no good, “Take a handful of cummin and a handful of crocus, and a handful of faenu-greek; let these be boiled, and given her to drink, and say, Arise from thy flux.
  • But should this also fail, “Dig seven trenches, and burn in them some cuttings of vines not yet circumcised (vines not four years old); and let her take in her hand a cup of wine, and let her be led from this trench and set down over that, and let her be removed from that, and set down over another: and in each removal say unto her, Arise from thy
    flux.”

Apparently she never Arose from her flux.  MacArthur gives us a few more examples:

  • One was that you had to carry the ashes of an ostrich egg in a linen bag in the summer and transfer them to a cotton bag in the winter…
  • Another was that you had to carry around on your person a barleycorn that had been found in the dung of a white she-ass**

I would imagine that within that twelve year period of time this woman drank plenty of potion, slung around a good amount of corn found from donkey rear, and heard more than her fair share of “Arise from thy flux”.  But NOTHING worked.  (Don’t seem so surprised). 

This issue of blood would have left her ceremonially unclean.  So, this is more than just a physical malady.  This is something that is hindering her worship and making community almost impossible.  This woman is in much pain. 

One day she hears of Jesus.  Maybe he can help.  She probably thought to herself “I’ll drink anything, touch anything, be told anything, etc. I just want to be healed.  This guy seems pretty powerful so perhaps if I touch the hem of his garment I will be better”.  Maybe it was superstition and Jesus was just another name on her list of “Junk I’ve Tried”. 

Or maybe not.  We don’t know. 

But what we do know is that she grabbed hold of the only thing—the only Person—that could actually give her healing.  That which potions, doctors, magical chants, and ostrich eggs could not fix Jesus was powerful enough to heal by her touching his robe. 

Dung Sifting in the 21st Century

There is a lesson here for us as well, because we are like that woman.  We would often rather feed a donkey some barley, follow him around with a pooper-scooper, and sift through his dung than we would actually follow Jesus.  Because if I get my hands stained with donkey excrement I can at least say that I’m dedicated and that I discovered my own cure. 

Actually we are worse than that woman.  She didn’t have a dusty Bible sitting on her shelf.  She hadn’t heard of Jesus.  She only knew of a few remedies to “Arise from thy flux”.  Not us.  We know Jesus.  We know his power.  And yet for some reason we still shuffle through donkey dung looking for barleycorn while we neglect Life Himself. 

Today I want to be humble enough to take my burdens to Jesus.  I want to start, progress, and end with trusting Jesus to make me “Arise from thy flux”.  (Though I’m not certain if dudes can have a “flux” or not).  I want to find all of my feeble solutions to healing and discard them on the way to following Jesus.  Only Jesus.  Only Jesus.
——————–
**As a side note if a preacher wants to wake up the snoozers a sure remedy is to say the words “white she-ass” in your sermon.  That will wake them up.  It may be the last Sunday you preach…but you’ll have their attention for at least a couple of minutes.