Revise Us Again
Page 1
What people are saying about …
Revise Us Again
“Perhaps you know Frank Viola as a prophetic voice lifting up Jesus Christ and God’s eternal purpose; perhaps you know him for his iconoclastic writings on church reform. Maybe you’re encountering his work for the first time. In any case, you’re in for a compelling treat with Revise Us Again. In ten easy-to-read chapters, Frank gently—but directly—invites us to revise our long-held ‘scripted’ assumptions about how God communicates to us, how Christians speak to one another, the work of the Holy Spirit in our midst today, and the content of the good news we proclaim to our friends and neighbors. The result is vintage Viola—a sacred-cow barbecue with little aftertaste. Highly recommended!”
Mike Morrell, journalist and futurist, zoecarnate.com
“Frank masterfully describes the process of success for our future as Christ followers, and God is writing us a prescription in this book. His prescript for us is to de-script us from religious mind-sets and activities that do not profit us or others—and to rescript us into His heart, His ways, and His likeness. Frank takes us to the core issues of the heart and of life in Christ. Take the prescription by reading this book, and you will go forward in a mind-set that is healthy and whole for your journey ahead.”
Robert Ricciardelli, founder of Converging Zone Network and Visionary Advancement Strategies
“I loved this book. I wish I would have written it myself. From the introduction to the concluding remarks, there was a spirit of grace that invited me to reexamine some of my own ideas about the Christian life. While Revise Us Again is an easy read, its message is profound! Please give yourself permission to ask some hard questions. I highly recommend Frank’s new book.”
S. J. Hill, Bible teacher, speaker, and author of several books, including Enjoying God
“I like short books. They’re usually written from pure motives. Frank Viola’s Revise Us Again is not only short but full of humor and wisdom—a plea (with directions!) for sanity in the storm of flesh-corrupted chaos that is called ‘Christianity’ in the twenty-first century.”
Don Francisco, songwriter and recording artist
What people are saying about …
From Eternity to Here
“From Eternity to Here is a masterpiece. A must read for those who believe and for others who want to believe. It reads like a movie on paper.”
Dr. Myles Munroe, pastor and author of Rediscovering the Kingdom and God’s Big Idea
“Frank continues to challenge the church-at-large with a powerful mind, an impassioned voice, and a love for the bride of Christ. You need to get this book and wrestle with Frank through the biblical passages regarding our identity in Christ as His body and the mission our God has entrusted to us.”
Ed Stetzer, author of Breaking the Missional Code, www.edstetzer.com
“As Viola unfolds the glorious story of God’s quest for a bride, readers will find their imaginations inspired and their lives transformed. The sheer beauty of God’s magnificent plan compels our allegiance and revolutionizes our lives. This retelling of the ‘old, old story’ is a much-needed gift to the church today.”
Greg Boyd, pastor, theologian, and author of Letters from a Skeptic, Myth of a Christian Nation, and God at War
What people are saying about …
Reimagining Church
“In Reimagining Church, Frank Viola is at the top of his game, showing a serene, soaring mastery of the theology of church as organism rather than organization.”
Leonard Sweet, author of Soul Tsunami, 11, and So Beautiful
“Dissent is a gift to the church. It is the imagination of the prophets that continually calls us back to our identity as the peculiar people of God. May Viola’s words challenge us to become the change that we want to see in the church … and not to settle for anything less than God’s dream for Her.”
Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistible Revolution, activist, and recovering sinner (thesimpleway.org)
“True to form, this book contains a thoroughly consistent critique of prevailing forms of church. However, in Reimagining Church, Frank Viola also presents a positive vision of what the church can become if we truly reembraced more organic, and less institutional, forms of church. This is a no-holds-barred prophetic vision for the church in the twenty-first century.”
Alan Hirsch, author of The Forgotten Ways and The Shaping of Things to Come
REVISE US AGAIN
Published by David C Cook
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David C Cook U.K., Kingsway Communications
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resource to you. These Web sites are not intended in any way to be or imply an
endorsement on the part of David C. Cook, nor do we vouch for their content.
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the Holy
Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by
Biblica, Inc™. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.
www.zondervan.com. Scripture quotations marked MSG are taken from THE
MESSAGE. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000,
2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group; KJV are taken
from the King James Version of the Bible. (Public Domain); NASB are taken from
the New American Standard Bible, © Copyright 1960, 1995 by The Lockman
Foundation. Used by permission; NKJV are taken from the New King James
Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All
rights reserved; ASV are from The American Standard Version. (Public Domain).
LCCN 2010923215
Hardcover ISBN 978-1-4347-6865-0
International Trade Paperback Edition ISBN 978-1-4347-0101-5
eISBN 978-1-4347-0331-6
© 2010 Frank Viola
Published in association with the literary agency of Daniel Literary Group, 1701 Kingsbury Dr., Ste. 100, Nashville, TN 37215
The Team: John Blase, Sarah Schultz, Jack Campbell, Karen Athen
Cover Design: Amy Kiechlin
Cover Photo: iStockphoto
First Edition 2010
CONTENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
God’s Three-Fold Speaking
Revising the Lord’s Voice
CHAPTER 2
The Lord Told Me
Revising Christianeze
CHAPTER 3
Let Me Pray About It
Revising Christian Code Language
CHAPTER 4
Spiritual Conversational Styles
Revising Our Semantics
CHAPTER 5
What’s Wrong with Our Gospel?
Revising Our Message
CHAPTER 6
The Felt-Presence of God
Revising Our Awareness of the Divine
CHAPTER 7
Captured by the Same Spirit You Oppose
Revising Our Attitudes
CHAPTER 8
The God of Unseen Endings
Revising Our Spiritual Expectations
CHAPTER 9
Stripping Down to Christ Alone
Revising the Holy Spirit’s Ministry
CHAPTER 10
Your Christ Is Too Small
Revising Our Chief Pursuit
AFTERWORD
The Three Gospels
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
—2 Corinthians 3:3
GOD rewrote the text of my life when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.
—Psalm 18:24 MSG
The very day I was converted to Christ, I was handed a script. And I began living from it.
Over the years, that script has expanded both in size and variety. As I attached myself to various churches, denominations, parachurch organizations, and ministries, new lines of text were added to my script.
In the same way, every human being is scripted through their upbringing, their surroundings, their culture, and their religious influences. Our scripting works unconsciously. We are usually unaware when the scripting is happening to us. Somewhere along the line, however, I became aware of the religious script that was given to me.
As Christians, we can safely assume that some of the script we have been handed matches the heart and mind of our Master. But typically, much of it doesn’t.
In such cases, we want those lines of script that are incompatible with the teachings of Jesus revised and re-visioned to match His heart and mind.
Transformation (spiritual formation) can be described as editing out that which is not Christ and revising that which is. Or to use Paul’s metaphor in Ephesians, it’s a matter of “putting off the old” and “putting on the new.”
Revising is a process. And it begins with opening ourselves up to the possibility that the script we have been given in life is not perfect. It’s in need of regular evaluation and reevaluation.
In the pages that follow, I will introduce you to ten specific areas where many of us are in need of revising. Some of these areas touch on things that are rarely talked about in Christian circles today. They work below the surface. Yet once they are exposed, we can look back and say to ourselves, “How did I miss that?” (This has been my experience at least.)
A good bit of what you will read in this book will be intuitive. Therefore, I expect that during the course of your reading, you will say in your heart, “But of course!”
In much of this, I’m simply sharing some of the discoveries I’ve made in my own personal struggles and challenges as a follower of Jesus Christ. So I hope you will find this book to be challenging, inspiring, and encouraging all at the same time.
My hope is that the Holy Spirit of God, who writes not on tablets of stone but on the tablets of our hearts, will use this book to help edit those religious habits that do not map to His heart, and in turn, begin rescripting us into the glorious image of Christ.
CHAPTER 1
GOD’S THREE-FOLD SPEAKING
Revising the Lord’s Voice
There’s a very obscure passage in the Old Testament that sheds light on how God communicates His mind to His people. It’s found in Jeremiah 18:18:
The teaching of the law by the priest will not be lost, nor will counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophets.
The ancient Hebrews divided the Old Testament up into three sections. The first section is called the Torah, or the Law. It includes the first five books of the Bible. The steward of the Torah is the priest.
The second section of the Old Testament is the Prophets. It includes the Major and Minor Prophets and the Historical Books. The steward of the Prophets is, of course, the prophet.
The third division of the Old Testament is called the Wisdom Literature, or “the Writings.” It includes Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Job, and the Song of Solomon. The steward of the Wisdom Literature is the sage, or wise man.
These three sections of the Old Testament represent the three major ways in which God communicates His mind to His people.
Where We’ve Been
One of the greatest obstacles to hearing the Lord’s voice is our religious background. Virtually every Christian has at some point been given a narrow lens through which he or she interprets Scripture, the Lord, and the Lord’s speaking.
Therefore, it’s critical that we understand that we all have been given such a lens. The following list shows how incredibly powerful our religious backgrounds are in shaping these lenses.1 The list is obviously tongue in cheek, but I believe the truth is not far off.
Suppose that you are traveling to work and you come to a stop sign. What do you do? Well, that depends on your religious background. For example …
1. A fundamentalist, taking the text very literally, stops at the stop sign and waits for it to tell him to go.
2. A Christian who follows the traditions of his denomination does not bother to read the sign, but she will stop if the car in front of her does.
3. A seminary-educated evangelical preacher might look up stop in his English lexicon and discover that it can mean (1) something that prevents motion or (2) a location where a train or bus lets off passengers. The main point of his sermon the following Sunday on this text is this: When you see a stop sign, realize that it is a place where traffic is naturally clogged; therefore, it’s a good place to let off passengers from your car.
4. A legalist does one of two things. She takes another route to work that does not have a stop sign so she doesn’t run the risk of disobeying the law. Or she may stop at the stop sign and pray, “Thank You, oh Lord, for Your commandment to stop.” She waits three seconds according to her watch and then proceeds. She also keeps a condemning eye out to see if others run the stop sign.
5. A New Testament scholar notices that there is no stop sign on Mark Street, but there is one on Matthew Street and Luke Street. He then concludes that the ones on Luke and Matthew Streets were copied from a sign on the street that no one has ever seen called “Q” Street.2
6. A prophetic preacher of end-time theology notices that the square root of the sum of the numeric representations of the letters S-T-O-P (which are sigma tau omicron pi in the Greek alphabet) multiplied by 40 (the number of testing), and then divided by 4 (the number of the earth) equals 666. Therefore, she concludes that stop signs are the dreaded mark of the beast, a harbinger of divine judgment, and must be avoided at all costs.
7. A Charismatic/Pentecostal will stop only if he feels led of the Spirit and the sign is a rhema word and not a logos word.
8. A prosperity preacher will stop at the sign, make a positive confession about stopping, and offer “the prayer of Jabez,” concluding that God must make her rich.
9. An Arminian believes that if he runs the stop sign he will lose his salvation. So with fear and trembling, he works hard at stopping at every stop sign.
10. A Calvinist believes that God has predestinated her reaction to the sign. If she runs the stop sign, she was never saved to begin with. If she stops, she was elected before creation.
11. A Southern Baptist believes that God wants him to stop at the sign, but he will still be saved if he does not. For if you once stopped, you have always stopped.
12. Upon s
eeing the stop sign, a libertine begins to sing, “Hallelujah, I’m free,” pushes her foot down on the pedal, and runs the stop sign at full throttle. She then gets run over by a Mack truck.
13. A liberation theologian believes that stop signs should stop only those who are of the elitist, wealthy class. But the poor are free to run them whenever they wish.
Silly, yes, but this list makes a point. We all have a lens that we inherited from our religious background. And we are conditioned to interpret Scripture, the Lord, and His speaking through that lens.
How God Communicates His Mind
The Torah contains the foundations on which the community of God’s people are built. The Torah includes God’s enduring moral principles—the standards that spring from His very nature. These standards do not change, nor can they be compromised. In the Old Testament economy, the priest was the person who taught the Torah.
The Prophets section of the Bible often seems to contradict the Torah. The prophet is the person who enters the community of God’s people and causes an abrasive, disruptive upheaval of what the community believes or practices.
The prophet challenges the people’s response to the Torah, which is often a legalistic or libertine response.
In reality though, the prophet really doesn’t contradict the Torah. He contradicts the people’s response to it. We are fallen creatures, and we sometimes turn the standards of God into dead rituals. At other times we misapply or disregard them altogether. The prophet is needed at such times.
The Wisdom Literature contains something that we Christians often do not have a great abundance of—wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge gained through experience. It also includes a predictive element.
Because of his long experience, a wise person can detect patterns. And he’s able to foresee outcomes (Luke 11:49; Prov. 22:3).
A wise person may make a statement like this: “What you just said sounds really good, but it’s not going to work, and here’s why …”
The instrument of the Wisdom Literature is the sage, the wise old man with the gray head. The sage is sought after for his wisdom because he has the experience of life. As a result, he can peer into the future.