Is Christianity and Socialism compatible? Many refer, in recent threads on social media that I have read, how the early church in its community shared its property and goods to give to those in need and the poor. Acts 4:32 “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.” No question this was the case, but is this the type of socialism being advertised in our society today. Absolutely not!

The main difference between socialism versus capitalism is the free market based on ‘private owners for profit’ versus socialism which is an ‘economic system driven by the production, distribution, and exchange, owned and regulated, by the community’. Many would say this best describes the early church. I would only partially agree. The early church may best be described as a theocratic socialism where they pooled their resources to survive and care for the needs of their community, but this was driven by a love for God, not government mandate. Should churches still use these principles in doing missions for those in need? Absolutely! But a government driven society robs the believer of the ability of freely giving and puts their hard earned work and production into the hands of the government not God.

For instance, how can you freely give as Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 9:7 which says, “Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.^” The “each man” gives it away that it is up to the individual to decide what to give not the community or society to dictate, but the church society is made up of individuals who freely give.

In a Socialistic society where the government controls what is given, not only will it reduce the quality of what is made in the production of goods because the individual has nothing to personally gain for better quality, no personal incentive in other words, but also it robs the person of freely giving what they have decided, the individual, in their heart to give. They have nothing of their own really because it is under the control of the community/government.

We need a capitalistic society so that we can earn what we can to be able to freely give, otherwise, our giving becomes stealing from the state. Sadly, too many are looking for the government to fill the shoes God ordained the Church to walk in, and Christians need to take ownership. It was the Church who started hospitals, modern science, and took seriously the poor and the importance of education. So a theocratic socialism, if you want to use that terminology, yes, but make NO mistake that this is not the kind of socialism that is on the ballot this year. Hopefully, I’ve explained the need for a capitalistic society for our communal giving as believers.

One final thought, the Bible teaches, “On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to make ourselves a model for you to follow. For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.” (2 Thessalonians 3:8-10) Work is the source of provision. We need to focus on work, not welfare, because giving is a wonderful gift we should all do motivated by the love of God in our communities, but our giving to those who play the victim becomes enablement and sets our communities up for future failure.

Have you ever had a question about life and someone responded, “just have faith”? In the angst of having a question it can be quite discouraging when someone gives you such a pat answer. So what does it mean to have faith?  

There are two types of faith that we can discuss: Blind Faith & Evidential Faith. Blind faith is how many describe their faith. Sadly, many believers, give this definition which is having no reason to believe something, but believing it anyway. It’s almost like a badge of honor to some. This understanding of faith is absurd, furthermore dangerous, and why people do crazy things in the name of religion!

The Biblical understanding of faith is one of evidence. It is not faith or reason, but rather faith and reason. Reason reveals the bread crumbs to follow and faith sees the inference. We have all watched the CSI shows where one rationally finds the evidence, and then can infer the most probable outcome. It is the same way with faith according to Scripture. As Ravi Zacharias once put it, “God has placed enough evidence before us to make Christianity a rational endeavor, but left enough out to make it a relational experience.” There are in fact reasons for faith such as the reliability of the Bible, existence of God, the person of Christ, and ultimately His resurrection.

Hebrews 11:1 NLT – Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.

So let’s begin with a few questions…What or who is guiding your life today in this very moment? Who are you taking advice from? Are they qualified to give advice? Who should we turn to for help?

As a person going through life there are many things that compete to guide our lives. The problem is that only One Person is qualified and that is not even ourselves. It is the Holy Spirit of God. God knows our lives from beginning to end and only He is qualified to be the captain of the  ship of life. When I lived in Nashville and was pursuing music, the drive for my career in music and what pleased me was the guide of my life. I was the “god” of my life, yet so very unqualified. I often found myself shipwrecked with despair and discouragement feeding desires that I had often said I would stay away from. We go to a mechanic to ask advice for our car, a doctor for our body, an attorney for legal matters, so why do we turn to ourselves for the greater questions regarding life? This makes absolutely no sense, but we are all guilty of it. Let God, who is life, guide your life so that you can miss some of the bumps in the road that maybe awaiting you up ahead.  

Galatians 5:16- So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves.

C.S. Lewis in his book The Four Loves speaks on friendship:

In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares two pence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague, or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

We all need friends so that we can learn better to be ourselves because they are revealing our blind spots and helping us to become what God intended for us to be. Friendship as he says in the end is unnecessary, but what gives ‘value to survival.’

With all that is going on in the world fear can rise up within us. The two ingredients for fear are “unknowns” and “lack of control” because these two push on our control needs. As we see the events unfold before us on the nightly news regarding politics, COVID, and all the rioting in would easily provoke fear to rise up within us. How do we deal with this?

Jesus said, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.” This is an invitation of all invitation that we could receive in that the living God is inviting us to Himself. A major truth of life is that God is still God when all hell is breaking loose. He is still in control and nothing has surprised Him. None of the riots or the pandemic has taken God off guard. We must stay the course and let our faith push against our fear. Let His truth and His words of invitation comfort our soul. So many times we feel like we have to know the outcome of a thing or else we won’t have peace. Let me remind us that peace is not being able to control all circumstances, but in trusting the One who has control over all circumstances.

So when the voice of fear is louder than our faith be still and recognize the reality that God is still God and has never been shaken or surprised. Let these events of life be interpreted not by your control but His.

Psalm 46:10 – Be still, and know that I am God;

When I was young my mother used to tell me I had “Ants in my Pants” because I wouldn’t sit still much as I was always into something. Sadly, we have become an “Ants in your Pants” society because most of us hate being still. How many people constantly stay on their phone nowadays? We are a culture of little busy-bodies! Over time this kind of approach to life is exhausting to our body and draining to our spirit.

In this little verse, God is calling us to be still, but why? The answer is to know that He is God and not ourselves, or some circumstance or interruption in life. The reason many of us struggle with hearing from God is because our lives are too loud, too busy with our own self-will that we cannot hear as Elijah did ‘the still, small voice of God’ (1 Kings 19:11-13). Sitting in silence, allowing our minds to declutter and detox from the junk of the world is a necessary practice for spiritual sanity. Biblical meditation is refocusing the mind on God unlike the Eastern practice where one attempts to empty their mind which is actually logically impossible. We must learn to recapture the silence and the stillness of life and let the beauty of God rekindle the fire within our hearts. There is a time to be busy, but the joy you get out of the busyness of life will be determined in how connected you are with God in those still moments we create everyday. 

With all that is going on it is hard to believe what is true anymore, would you agree? It’s hard to find what actually is the truth in regards to so much that it taking place within our society. I can watch the news and find it very tempting to get spun up in a narrative that in the end I don’t know how much is actually right or not, or how much is for political gain or not, or (I hate to put it this way) how much is just people talking out their backsides, but this has become the new norm in our country! It is frustrating and a bit overwhelming, and I pray things change for the good soon.

With that being the case how then are we to keep our sanity in a time such as this? I believe the only way we are to find our grounding and a sense of stability is in the Holy Scriptures. This is by far not the first time a society has gone berserk, but we need to learn from our past, not erase it, so that we may know how to navigate through times such as these.

Scripture teaches there is absolute truth in life and truth is rooted in the nature of God, yet many today want to relativize truth and root it in the individual person. Truth is not a set of propositions or political in nature, but rather is a person. The person of Jesus Christ who embodies truth in love. May we take solace in His personhood and sift the rest of our lives through Him.

John 14:6 – Jesus said, “I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life…”

This week our country has a birthday. We are celebrating its 243^rd birthday if I’ve done my math correct. The 4^th of July has come to represent one main word, Freedom. The sad observance today is that we are losing a sense of what freedom actually means. Freedom doesn’t mean one can do anything one wants. If that were the case there would be no need for any laws to govern the people, and without laws to govern the people there would be wars and chaos within the people at catastrophic levels. Isn’t it interesting to think that in a free country where we consider ourselves free, we still need direction and accountability? It is because the human heart in and of itself is desperately wicked.

In the Christian thought there are two basic understandings of freedom. Freedom From & Freedom For. Freedom From regards the condition we have been set free from in the past with its governing statutes. In the sense of our country, the Revolution brought freedom from the tyranny of the “old country.”  Freedom For brings us into the present freedom to express ourselves in ways the “old country” restricted. In the same we as believers since the cross have been set Free From the tyranny of sin. We are now set Free For the beauty to walk with Christ that otherwise could not have happened until we were set Free From the holds of sin.  Freedom always comes with a past and moves us into a future that is determined by the choices we make today.

“Do you know Jesus?” Or “Have you found Jesus?”

These type of lead in questions in sharing our faith can be so confusing for folks. Heck, I’m a pastor and much of the Christian jargon that is used is confusing to me because many Christians don’t use Biblical phrases but rather “churchy” phrases. Many folks are simply turned off of this kind of talk.

What Christians need to do more than anything to have an effective witness to the world is to learn to have authentic conversations. Conversations that are real and honest and share the heart. The world has too many fake conversations and sadly many of these take place where truth is celebrated. We must return to allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and share what is on our heart and mind. When we don’t have it all together we mustn’t be afraid to say so because none of us do. We are all a work in progress. As evangelist David Ring used to say, “I’m not okay, and that’s okay.”

As a follower of Jesus I’m simply a work in progress putting one foot down in front of the other. My life is about allowing Jesus to take over my existence and be the Captain. It is about me letting go of control and allowing Christ to not only save me from myself and sins, but allow Him to redeem and transform me into the person He created me to be. This transformation can be messy which sadly many of us aren’t comfortable in talking about. The only way people are going to see what the grace of Jesus can do for a messy life is to reveal the work He is doing in you and me. Pray that these are the conversations that we get to have with people not just simple, short religious phrases that to the majority of the world make absolutely no sense.

This weekend we celebrate Father’s day. For many this will be a time to celebrate, for others, a time to mourn either the loss of their father no longer here or that lack of a father they longed to have but never received. For many this is why the idea of a Heavenly Father is a big pill to swallow because they don’t have a good picture of earthly father in mind.

Our Heavenly Father came to be for us what our earthly fathers never could. He came not only to show us love and forgiveness, but also to be a gift of light on a dark path, to guide us in uncharted waters, and to be a safe place to come to when life is overwhelming. Our Heavenly Father knows us better than we know ourselves, and didn’t think His creation would be complete without us. He loves us more than words can say, but He proved His own love for us in that He sent His own Son, who was willing, to take our place because of our sin. Jesus wanted us to be a part of His Heavenly family that the Bible says because of our faith in Christ we are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. Jesus was willing to share His own rightful inheritance with us so that we too could call His Heavenly Father our own.

So whatever position you may find yourself in this weekend, whether celebrating a wonderful dad, or mourning the loss, or lack thereof in regards to an earthly father, now in Jesus, you may reach out to your Heavenly Father. He will be a dad to you forever and ever. He loves for His children to call out to Him not because we give Him new information, but He loves to hear the voice He created in us.