Cohort #3
I. INTRO
The moral and mental features that define a person, whether good or evil. The term also means moral strength, which Scripture regards as something to be highly valued.
What Does the Bible Say about Christian Character?
Character is defined as strength of moral fiber. A.W. Tozer described character as “the excellence of moral beings.” As the excellence of gold is its purity and the excellence of art is its beauty, so the excellence of man is his character. Persons of character are noted for their honesty, ethics, and charity. Descriptions such as “man of principle” and “woman of integrity” are assertions of character. A lack of character is moral deficiency, and persons lacking character tend to behave dishonestly, unethically, and uncharitably.
A person’s character is the sum of his or her disposition, thoughts, intentions, desires, and actions. It is good to remember that character is gauged by general tendencies, not on the basis of a few isolated actions. We must look at the whole life. For example, King David was a man of good character (1 Samuel 13:14) although he sinned on occasion (2 Samuel 11).
II. Kent Hughes and Bryan Chapell (1 & 2 Timothy and Titus: To Guard the Deposit, Preaching the Word)
I say all this to emphasize that Christian ministry and leadership is without question a matter of character. One’s authentic spirituality and Christian character is everything in church leadership. It is a sober fact that as goes the leadership, so goes the church. With some commonsense qualifications, it is an axiom that what we are as leaders in microcosm, the congregation will become in macrocosm as the years go by. Of course, there are always individual exceptions. But it is generally true that if the leadership is Word-centered, the church will be Word-centered. If the leadership is mission-minded, the church will be mission-minded. If the leadership is sincere, the people will be sincere. If the leadership is kind, the church will be kind. This is also true negatively—exponentially! Unloving, narrow, stingy leaders beget an unloving, narrow, stingy church.
III. Timothy Keller (Counterfeit Gods)
We maintain the fantasy that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed. But when our expectations and hopes reach that magnitude, as Becker says, “the love object is God.” No lover, no human being, is qualified for that role. No one can live up to that. The inevitable result is bitter disillusionment.
In the 1940s, C. S. Lewis heard from many of his peers in the British academy that sex was nothing but an appetite, like that for food. Once we recognized this, they said, and began to simply have sex whenever we wanted it, people would cease to be “driven mad” by desire for love and sex. Lewis doubted this, and proposed a thought experiment.
Suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?… One critic said that if he found a country in which such strip-tease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving.29
However, Lewis goes on to argue, we are not starving for sex; there is more sex available than ever before. Yet pornography, the equivalent of striptease acts, is now a trillion-dollar industry. Sex and romantic love are therefore not “just an appetite” like food. They are far more meaningful to us than that. Evolutionary biologists explain that this is hardwired into our brains. Christians explain that our capacity for romantic love stems from our being in the image of God (Genesis 1:27–29; Ephesians 5:25–31). Perhaps it can be said that both are true.
When God came to earth in Jesus Christ, he was truly the son of Leah. He became the man nobody wanted. He was born in a manger. He had no beauty that we should desire him (Isaiah 53:2). He came to his own and his own received him not (John 1:11). And at the end, everybody abandoned him. Jesus cried out even to his Father: “Why have you forsaken me?”
Why did he become Leah’s son? Why did he become the man nobody wanted? For you and for me. He took upon himself our sins and died in our place. If we are deeply moved by the sight of his love for us, it detaches our hearts from other would-be saviors. We stop trying to redeem ourselves through our pursuits and relationships, because we are already redeemed. We stop trying to make others into saviors, because we have a Savior.
The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one.… Thus … it is not enough … to hold out to the world the mirror of its own imperfections. It is not enough to come forth with a demonstration of the evanescent character of your enjoyments … to speak to the conscience … of its follies.… Rather, try every legitimate method of finding access to your hearts for the love of Him who is greater than the world.38
Ernest Becker wrote that our culture would replace God with sex and romance. Even earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche had a different theory. He wrote that, with the absence of God growing in Western culture, we would replace God with money.
What induces one man to use false weights, another to set his house on fire after having insured it for more than its value, while three-fourths of our upper classes indulge in legalized fraud … what gives rise to all this? It is not real want—for their existence is by no means precarious … but they are urged on day and night by a terrible impatience at seeing their wealth pile up so slowly, and by an equally terrible longing and love for these heaps of gold.… What once was done “for the love of God” is now done for the love of money, i.e., for the love of that which at present affords us the highest feeling of power and a good conscience.42
In short, Nietzsche foretold that money in Western culture would become perhaps its main counterfeit god.
Innumerable writers and thinkers have been pointing out “the culture of greed” that has been eating away at our souls and has brought about economic collapse. Yet no one thinks that change is around the corner. Why? It’s because greed and avarice are especially hard to see in ourselves.
Why can’t anyone in the grip of greed see it? The counterfeit god of money uses powerful sociological and psychological dynamics. Everyone tends to live in a particular socioeconomic bracket. Once you are able to afford to live in a particular neighborhood, send your children to its schools, and participate in its social life, you will find yourself surrounded by quite a number of people who have more money than you. You don’t compare yourself to the rest of the world, you compare yourself to those in your bracket. The human heart always wants to justify itself and this is one of the easiest ways. You say, “I don’t live as well as him or her or them. My means are modest compared to theirs.” You can reason and think like that no matter how lavishly you are living. As a result, most Americans think of themselves as middle class, and only 2 percent call themselves “upper class.”43 But the rest of the world is not fooled. When people visit here from other parts of the globe, they are staggered to see the level of materialistic comfort that the majority of Americans have come to view as a necessity.
Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it. Therefore we should all begin with a working hypothesis that “this could easily be a problem for me.” If greed hides itself so deeply, no one should be confident that it is not a problem for them. How can we recognize and become free from the power of money to blind us?