Aug 28 - Psalm 12:1

Help, O LORD,

for the godly are fast disappearing!

The faithful have vanished from the earth!

Psalm 12:1

According to a story from a few decades ago, a traveling salesman was driving through the forest and spotted a group of lumberjacks. He crawled out of his car and proceeded to tell them about the wonders of a brand new tool – the chain saw. “Instead of cutting down two big trees a day, you can cut down twenty.” They bought ten chainsaws.

A month later, the same salesman was driving along the same road. “How are new saws working?” he called out, as he crawled out of the car.

The men were furious. You promised we’d cut down twenty trees a day with these saws,” they said, “but with these newfangled saws we can only cut down two trees a week.”

Afraid for his life, the salesman gently persuade them to let him inspect the chainsaws to see why they weren’t working. He pulled the cord on a gas motor, and the chainsaw immediately roared to life.

The lumberjacks jumped back and shouted, “What’s that noise?!”

There is a rumor in many churches that the Christian life is filled with power. Have you ever heard that? More importantly, have you ever experienced much of that? Maybe you’re like these old lumberjacks. You’ve been told tall tales about the gift of faith, but it hasn’t really roared to life in the ways you hoped. Sound familiar?

A few years back, a researcher was shocked by a series of headlines. Things like, “Christians Divorce Just as Much as the Rest of Society,” “Drink Just as Much,” “Are Alcoholic Just as Much,” “Lie and Cheat Just as Much.” If there was such a thing as the power of faith, this researcher wanted to know why – as our verse for today says – “the godly [seemed to be] fast disappearing.”

The answer came as he applied the data from another project he was working on. He was trying to come up with a working definition for – essentially – “a faithful, active Christian.” Instead of asking how many times people went to church, he started asking what they really believed. Listing a few timeless Christian principles, he started asking, “do you believe in all six or seven of these traditional doctrines of Christianity?” His basic principles were things like …

•     Do you believe God actually created the heavens and the earth?
•     Do you believe Jesus is the Son of God, born of Mary?
•     Do you believe Jesus was crucified and literally rose from the dead?
•     Do you believe that Satan and evil are real?

What he found shocked him.

While most Christians believed SOME of these basic foundational principles, only one in eleven Christians believed them ALL.

•     One in eleven!
•     In other words, just 9% of Christians are “all in.”
•     Most believers pick and choose.
•     Most people who go to church every Sunday still say, “I like this part, but I don’t agree with that part”?
•     Ten out of eleven of us raise our own logic above the timeless doctrines of the faith.
•     Ninety-one percent of us tend to follow the whims of culture (or the lyrics of secular professors), rather than the unchanging Word of God.
•     We eventually make ourselves the arbiters of own truth, and then we’re surprised that we don’t live lives that are much different than the rest of the world.

Those are staggering results. But I know they are true. Why? Because that was my experience.

While I grew up in the church, I bought into the lie that I could decide right and wrong for myself. That changed one day when my attempts at life knocked me to my knees. I was unemployed, profoundly depressed, and utterly humbled. I had no hope except to admit that I couldn’t do it on my own. I submitted myself to God. I submitted myself to his whole Word and to the basic, traditional doctrines. And suddenly here was power, hope, and light. My outward circumstances hadn’t changed, but now I had a loud and powerful chainsaw. With God’s help, I could cut away successfully at life’s obstacles.

This researcher found that the-submitted-9% are two- … three- … five- … even eleven-times less likely to engage in the same sinful behaviors as the rest of the world. Submission doesn’t mean that we’re immune to the temptations in life! All it means that we’ll have a chainsaw rather than a butter knife as we try to cut through the weeds of sin and the jungle of lies.

By yielding our hearts to God fully and trusting in his Word, we can discover a power for living.

Are you all in? If not, what keeps you from it?

In Christ’s Love,

the tin-man

(a guy who traded in

his rusty axe for a chainsaw …

and as a result discovered

a bigger heart too)