Is God our Godfather?

The film series, The Godfather, depicts the rise to power of a fictional mafia boss, Michael Corleone.  The story demonstrates the force of Michael’s growing power, as well as the one thing that power alone can never provide him.  Halfway through the second film, Michael has just intimidated an FBI witness scheduled to testify against him at a Senate Committee hearing by subtlety threatening the witness’s brother.  His wife, Kay, can no longer remain with the person Michael has become and explains that she is leaving him:

Kay:  At this moment I feel no love for you at all, I never thought that would happen, but it has.

Michael:  Kay, you can leave tomorrow.  Why don’t you take the kids back to their room?

Kay:  Michael, you haven’t heard me.

Michael:  Kay, what do you want from me?  Do you expect me to let you go? Do you expect me to let you take my children from me?  Don’t you know me?  Don’t you know that that is an impossibility?  That it could never happen!  That I would use all my power to keep something like that from happening? Don’t you know that? Kay, in time you’ll feel differently, you’ll be glad I stopped you.  I know that.

(The Godfather, part II)

Blinded by him immense power, Michael does not understand that he cannot force anyone to love him.  Without freedom love is impossible.

Throughout the creation account in Genesis, God’s Will and God's Power are united as He speaks the universe into being.  How much Power is packed into the Voice of God?  When God says, “Let there be light”, there is LIGHT as hundreds of billions of stars explode into being!  Pretty impressive, but that is hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy and there are 80 billion galaxies in just the observable universe.

God speaks and light is light; light is not given a choice.  Throughout most of the creation account God’s Power accomplished whatever His Word declares.  However, God understands that power alone cannot create love.  For the creation of humanity God adds freedom to the mix.  To do this God chooses to separate His Will (Voice/Desire) from His Power (Life/Spirit) in order to provide us freedom

God first gives us the gift of Life: 

Genesis 2:7   “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath (Spirit, Wind, Power) of life, and the man became a living being.”

Then gives us His Word, or Will for us separately:

Genesis 2:16-17  “And the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.’”

The rest of Scripture can be understood by tracing these two primary themes, as God desires to reconcile Humanity to the relationship of love and trust we were created to experiance with God's Voice and God's Power.  Over and over He reveals His Word to lead us to His Life.  The Power or Life of God is a gift, but it is not a gift that God forces onto us.  By trusting God’s Voice we experience God’s Life.  No other creature is offered this choice, because no other creature is created for this unique kind of loving relationship with God.    

What Makes Jesus a Counterfeit?

The book, “The Art of Making Money” tells the story of Art Williams Jr a master counterfeiter.  As a teen, Art is taken under the wing of one of his mother’s boyfriends and trusted with the closely-held generational secrets of a counterfeiter.   After later being arrested and serving time for a more “low-brow” crime, Art is picked up by his girlfriend and determined to never make that mistake again, prison time has left him focused and determined to only focus on counterfeiting from now on.  It’s shortly after being picked that Art lays his hands on one of the new 1996 hundred dollar bills.  The bill is pack with security features focused on challenging counterfeiters like him: a security strip which responds to ultra-violet light, a watermark of Benjamin Franklin, micro-printing, acid free paper which reacts to counterfeit-bill-detecting pens, color changing ink which responds to the angle it’s being viewed.   

Art’s girlfriend asks, “How hard would it be to counterfeit one of these” and Art spends the next several months finding out.

At the end of the Civil war, Abraham Lincoln commissioned The Secret Service to protect the United States currency.  Some estimate that by the end of the war as much as half of the currency in the United States was counterfeit.  Years later, after doing such a good job with their sole mission of protecting the currency of the United States from counterfeiters, an additional mission of protecting the President was added to their responsibilities.  Art would eventually produce tens of millions of dollars of his bogus bills which The Secret Service would rate as 9 out of 10 for their near flawlessness.  As talented as he was there is one thing that sets real bills apart from the fake ones; let’s come back to that in a moment…

Israel at the time of Christ was crying out for redemption from the brutal Roman Empire who had occupied their nation for over 60 years.  The prophets told of an “anointed one” authorized by God to save Israel from their enemies.  Faced by the over-whelming power of their enemies, salvation could only come from someone authorized and empowered by God.

Central to the message of Christ is his claim to be the Christ or the Messiah, both Greek and Hebrew titles which mean “the anointed one” and refer back to the practice of anointing Kings with oil to symbolize that God called and authorized them alone to lead the people.  “Christ” was not Jesus’ last name; it was His claim that He alone had been authorized by God to be King.  The name “Jesus” means “The Lord is Salvation.”  Jesus is only able to offer salvation if He is in fact Lord.  No authority = no salvation.

There was one thing which Art was never able to fake on the $100 bills he took on spending sprees across the country.  Real bills are truly authorized by the United States Government.  Counterfeits bills fake the authority to plagiarize the spending power.  Real bills have real authority, and therefore authentic power.  Counterfeit bills are removed from circulation and destroyed as soon as they are discovered.

This is actually the reason that Jesus was executed.  The Jewish Elite did not believe Jesus had been authorized by God as He claimed.  From their perspective He was just one of many counterfeit Messiahs they had dealt with over the years.  For His followers, the death-defeating power of His resurrection from the dead proved His God-given authority was authentic.  The early church rallied around the creed, “Jesus is Lord” in direct opposition to the Roman test of allegiance, “Caesar is Lord.”  Caesar’s authority gave Him the power of death, but Jesus’ authority gave Him the greater power of resurrection.

Real authority = real power; no authority = no power.  Christ Jesus has real authority; he alone is the only authorized king.    Every national authority, along with the power of sin and death will be forced to kneel before His awesome majesty.  Maybe you’ve been offered salvation from a Jesus who does not require your complete and unconditional surrender to His authority.  Counterfeit Jesus is great at protecting our pride, but a word of warning: Counterfeit Jesus is powerless against sin and death.

Counterfeit Jesus runs around frantically asking the question "Where are you going?" but can only offer a mental concept of salvation.

Jesus Christ asks "Who are you serving?" and He alone has the death-defeating authority to offer the reality of salvation to anyone who surrenders the throne to Him alone.

The Fruit of the Harvest

Apple trees produce apples.  Not a particularly profound statement, but let’s keep exploring this idea…  Healthy apple trees eventually reproduce additional apple trees, but only if they first produce seed-bearing apples.  An average apple tree can produce 150-350 apples annually, and each apple contains around 5 seeds.  This means that each apple tree can produce as many as 1750 apple seeds per year and every seed has the potential to result in a new apple tree which will also eventually produce as many as 1750 apples seeds per year.  That’s the exponential potential of the harvest! 

So why are seeds encased in fruit?  Animals eat the fruit and the seeds pass through them, an effective way to spread, plant, and even fertilize the seeds. 

Why is all of this important?  The fruit is the purpose of the harvest and it is essential to reproduce the harvest.  Not only can an unfruitful apple tree not reproduce additional apple trees, what would be the point? Who needs more unfruitful apple trees?

Growing up in the church, I was taught that the fruit of the harvest Jesus speaks so often about is a harvest of souls.  What if we are wrong?  What if the fruit is something else?  How would we know?  Well, one clue would be if all of our results we were after led to less and less natural reproduction of the harvest.  With this evidence we might conclude that our results were not the authentic fruit Jesus had in mind we he spoke so frequently about the explosively reproductive nature of the harvest.  In the United States almost one third of the population (around 100 million) claim to be “converts,” that is souls who believe in Jesus and have their ticket to heaven.  Yet, strangely the Gospel is not spreading as fast as the population is growing.  This means that believers are not, on average, even reaching our own children with the Gospel of Jesus.  If the fruit of the harvest is conversions, then why is so much fruit so unfruitful?  Why is the popular understanding of the Gospel so infertile?

In Matthew chapter 9, Jesus has just demonstrated His love and compassion for the crowds as they were, “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”  He then goes on to say that the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.  By saying this was Jesus encouraging us to harvest souls by asking everyone “who wants to go to heaven?”  If so, this isn’t the example He had just given us.  Just before He said this He was taking care of the needs of the crowd.  He was sharing love with them, and He was planting the seeds of the Kingdom of love in them.  Those with open hearts would become disciples who also produced the fruit of the harvest, which is love.

In Matthew 13, Jesus compares the Kingdom to a wheat field which was planted with good seed.  Then an enemy sabotaged the field by planting weeds.  He warned of a judgment day when the weeds will be burned and the wheat will be gathered together and brought to Him.  So how does he differentiate between the wheat and the weeds?  In Matthew 13:26, He says, “When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.”  So what’s the difference?  The wheat form heads; translation the wheat was fruitful.  The wheat is disciples, and the fruit is love.  The weeds are the ones who grow among the wheat but are not fruitful. 

In Mark chapter 4:26-29, Jesus explains that the Kingdom of God is like “a man who scatters seed on the ground.”   The seed grow to “produce a stalk, then a head, then the full kernel in the head.”  What Jesus is saying here is that maturity means fruitfulness.  There is a cycle to it, first the seed results in a stalk, which results in a head, which results in full kernels (fruit of the harvest), which starts the cycle over again.  The stalks are the disciples, which produce full kernels (fruit) which is love, which result in additional disciples.  Unfruitful disciples do not lead to not reproduce other disciples.  Disciples who never mature to produce fruit are not really disciples.

For Jesus, the central test of orthodoxy was love.  For Jesus, the purpose of the harvest was love.  For Jesus, the way the harvest would be reproduced was through love.  May we praise Him that the fruitless Gospel is so infertile, because loveless Christians are almost as useful to a love-starved world as fruitless apple trees are during a famine.  May we all receive His love and allow His harvest to spread through us as we embody His words, in John 13:35:   “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

"Jesus Has a Fat Wife" or "Jesus Muscle"

On a recent trip to the doctor, you step on the scale and discover you have gained 20 pounds since your last visit.  Is this a reason to celebrate?  It depends, maybe you have been weight training and have put on 20 pounds of lean muscle and you are in the best shape of your life, or maybe you recently got a job at Krispy Kreme and have been doing too much “quality control.”

Few people would celebrate gaining weight indiscriminately; this is why a host of products have given us the ability to check our Body Fat Percentage.  From calibers to scales, these products shift our focus from our overall weight to the percentage of fat on our body.  A scale alone does not offer enough information about our overall health. 

Why are pastors who are entrusted with the care of the church, also known as both the “body of Christ” and the “bride of Christ”, often only focused on church attendance, which is simply a measurement of the overall weight of the church?  Our only goals are often focused on simply gaining weight at any cost!

The church has been packing on the pounds for years and we now stand huffing and puffing at a crossroad.  As we look around, the 30 and under crowd is largely missing from our ranks.  Is this because they want nothing to do with the real Mission of Jesus or because they don’t want to join the holy fat rolls of attendance? 

Often those outside the bulge are more aware of how unhealthy and ineffective the get fat at all cost mission  They desire a lean & mean mission for the church and they are waiting for someone to lead the way.  They cringe at any discussion of church growth or church attendance because they know that a fatter church is not going to solve any of the real problems our world is facing.  While they aren’t interested in just sitting around, they would jump at the chance to be the hands and feet of Jesus ministering to the needs around them. has been to the church.

The essential question of the Fat Gospel is “where are you going?”  In making the focus of the Gospel heaven or hell we have distorted the die to yourself invitation of Jesus into a dead-end movement of self-centeredness.  The authentic question of the Gospel and the power behind real Jesus muscle is “who are you serving?”  Jesus is building His Kingdom and the only way to join is to acknowledge that He alone is King, by dying daily to your will and power as you live every moment for His work of redemption to bring the “Father’s will to earth as it in heaven.” 

When we look around at the problems our world is facing, will we recognize that the church of Jesus Christ remains the world’s greatest hope and do whatever it takes to get healthy?  More of the same is not going to help in this case; we have to be willing to move in a completely different direction.  How can we trim the fat from the church?  We have to get off that padded pew and start sweating!  We have to stop trying to get people to come to church, and start inspiring people to be the church.  When we raise the bar high above attendance we will watch the fat peel away while the ripped and bulging muscles of the Body of Christ emerge to serve the broken humanity around us with all of the power and love of Almighty God.