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Are you spending more time with cyber friends than neighbourhood friends? Are you focused more on quantity of friendships than quality? Are you listening to the kind of voices that are fuelling your anger? Or have you let charm and beauty take the priority that character and God’s grace were intended to have in your thinking? Let the Bible’s ancient wisdom guard your interaction with social media today.
The late Nelson Mandela once said, “It is never my custom to use words lightly. If 27 years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.” Although we’ve all experienced more solitude and isolation over the last two years, we haven’t necessarily grown in our respect for the impact of our words and how we use them.
When you leave your own culture, you learn things about it. One of the things that I learned about Canadian culture when I moved to Japan is that we don’t seem to place a high value on wisdom. In Canada, we work hard at helping our children learn skills with lots of after-school clubs and activities, but in Japan, proverbs still have a significant place in a child’s development. In kindergarten, our children started learning Japanese proverbs along with the other kids. There are lots of well-made comic books that introduce them to age-old truisms that are recognized across society. In elementary school, children are formally taught proverbs and even tested on them. As a result, children grow with a sense that older generations possess wisdom about how life can be navigated effectively.
Spiritual abuse can occur in a marriage, a parent-child relationship, and in the church and other religious settings. It’s powerful because it feeds on the guilt and shame that we can all experience and uses the Scriptures to assert control rather than to minister. If you’re being oppressed with the Bible, you need more than just someone else’s words – you need the clarity of the Word of God itself to discern what’s happening. Here are some Scriptures to use and questions to ask to discern spiritual abuse.
If you’ve seen the heartache and struggles of those who find themselves married to an abusive spouse, you’d do anything to try to help someone avoid that kind of pain. The problem is that most people have no idea that their spouse will turn out to be abusive until after the wedding. When you’re dating someone, there are so many things that you’re learning about the other person. And the excitement and thrill of being in love inevitably cloud your judgment and keep you from seeing things that you might otherwise notice. In her excellent book, “Is It Abuse?” Darby Strickland defines what the root of oppression is and gives a premarital assessment designed to help you identify the warning signs of abuse before it happens. Let me share some of the insights that stood out to me.
The most common term to refer to church leaders in the New Testament is “elder,” but it sounds foreign because we value youth so much today. The tech revolution has deemed most people who are over 30 as out-of-date, and so calling leaders “elders” seems to require that they be old and traditional. There’s value in holding onto the term, though. While it doesn’t demand a certain age, designating Christian leaders as “elders” does draw attention to the value of time as a necessary preparation for the role. In response to the question, “How old do you have to be to become an elder?” the Bible seems to answer in several ways.
We all know that Christian leadership is different than leadership in other areas. We’re not surprised to see certain requirements that you wouldn’t see, for example, in a senior management position. But there’s always been one requirement that seemed out of place. The qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 both list “hospitality.” Can you imagine being interviewed for an executive role and being asked about your grilling skills and the frequency of your dinner parties? Is that what’s required of an elder? Why is hospitality one of the essentials of Christian leadership?
If you can smile and make conversation on a Sunday morning and are willing to volunteer to help, chances are someone will eventually ask you to lead. How do you know if you’re ready? Just smiling and putting up your hand surely aren’t the qualifications. Then again, a Christian is someone who admits that they’re a sinner in need of God’s grace, so you probably don’t have to be perfect to be a Christian leader. In the case of an elder, the lines are drawn pretty clearly in Scripture. We looked last time at the first of those qualifications: integrity. Today, let’s consider self-control from 3 different angles.
What should you do if you’re asked to serve as an elder? Do you decide on the basis of related work experience? Is there an x-factor you should know about? Is it a question of who has the strongest opinions or whether you think you could make better decisions than the current elders? The Bible gives a clear benchmark, and the starting point is integrity. But it’s not just a requirement of elders. It’s the goal of all discipleship and should characterize every believer. We all need to work on integrity whether we’re ever asked to becoming leaders or not. The Christian version of integrity is slightly different than how people typically conceive of it, though. Let me explain.
Japan isn’t known for its level of English proficiency, but there’s a 3-word phrase that will elicit a knowing smile from almost any Japanese person wherever you go in the country. The phrase is, “Boys, be ambitious,” and it came from the farewell address that William Smith Clark made after an 8-month stint as head of the Sapporo Agricultural College in 1877. Today, there are statues of Clark bearing the phrase and a painting in the state capitol building in Sapporo with a full text of his speech. Clark was a devout Christian but is the phrase by which he’s remembered Christian? Should a Christian be ambitious? Or was this just an export of American capitalism? I think the answer is yes and no, depending on how we define the term. Let me explain.
