Wednesday, May 31, 2006

 

The Successful Demon

Warning...this post contains one instance of explicit language.

[continued from here]...for all to bow down and worship, and his name is success. Success has pervaded every area of life and culture, secular education is under attack from this taskmaster, and as Sabrina Broadbent, a novelist and English teacher, says 'her students are ground down by the pressure of success'. Speaking of her students, her picture paints a scene of utter futility and bondage when she says 'At first, they told me, they had quite liked school. But now, after seven years, they couldn’t bear the pressure, the endless exhortations to succeed in order to prepare a survival route through the struggle and debt that they now saw was adulthood'. Her article is well worth reading in full, and can be found at women.timesonline.co.uk.

Even Christian religious education is under this onslaught, preparing men and women for ministry in which they must succeed, Dr.Harold Dean Trulear, Associate Professor of Religious Education at
Howard University and pastor of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Twin Oaks, PA gives this sound bite at a recent conference detailing the danger of an enforced requisite for academic success.

Dr Harold Dean Trulear audio file 02:26minutes...PLAY.

Much of this desire for success has pressed into the gospel through teachings by men like Robert Schuller and the positive confession movement.

Success is the demonic desire to have ascendancy and pre-eminence, and ultimately to make a name for oneself. To receive the 'rich trappings' that success brings, and to feel wanted and needed is the reward of this pursuit at all costs. For those who claim to be part of the
Kingdom of God this presents a problem, for the DNA of success is inherently different to the DNA modelled on weakness, servant hood, compassion, love and kindness for our neighbour.

The construction and blueprint for the Kingdom is found in the ministry and model of Jesus, it is into His image the disciple is being conformed. To chase success will only 'kick against those goads' , the goads that work to direct us to that perfect image.

Success takes no prisoners; it is an insatiable monster that requires constant feeding. Therefore those of us believe that Mark's gospel has some relevancy for our lives should step into our callings as exorcists, take up our ministry of exorcism, and cast out all those elements that stand opposed to the weakness of the Kingdom of God.

I think Eugene Peterson in The Message gives a good insight into those elements as detailed by Paul in Galatians 5 when he amplifies the verses saying...(bold is my emphasis)

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on...[more].

Success often goes hand in hand with effectiveness; current thinking says that if something is non-effective it is unsuccessful and should be discarded. Something is only worth keeping if it is successful and effective, and it is exactly this mentality that is leading the church astray, so much so that it now finds itself almost completely out of touch with the Kingdom of God and totally in one heart and mind with the world, now matter how emergent it tries to be.

I know what this is like, this chase for success and effective ministry, for within the prayer letters I write for the Railway Mission, I feel compelled to be effective, to sound successful to the readers, those whose kind gifts enable the work to continue. I ask you, who would want to receive a prayer letter that said 'absolutely nothing visible happened since I last wrote'. Believe me, I have worshipped at the temple of success, and I have signed the constitution and agreed the statement of faith at the First United Church of Successfulness.

The church in its pursuit of success and effective ministry measured by recordable targets is moving very far from God, and I fear that it may have gone so far that God may now say 'I will not permit you any longer to work in my field' (Heb 6:3). Maybe we have flirted with the idols for too long, oh yes we will get to heaven in the end, but like a corpse needs to be carried to the grave, so we will have to be carried to heaven like helpless babies.

You recall that 'God hates divorce' and I think one of the reasons is because of the heartache of broken relationships. This is what commitment to success brings; it encourages broken relationships because in the pursuit of success we almost only ever please self.

Yet maybe another reason God hates divorce is because his bride to be is constantly serving divorce papers on Him. The almighty God, full of love and compassion comes to woo and nurture his bride, yet she rejects and spurns his advances, preferring to lift up her skirts to the world, and her lover has to watch as she prostitutes herself to the world.

You may have seen the film Jarhead, director Sam Mendes' dark and intense war drama. One scene represents what is happening to the church. The US Marines have been away for 100+ days, camped in the Kuwaiti desert, waiting for action in the 1991 Gulf conflict. One plotline follows the relationships of the soldiers and their loved ones back home, the tensions and mistrust those miles of distance can bring. One Marine cheers because his wife/girlfriend has sent him a video of The Deerhunter for them to watch. All the marines gather in a big tent and he inserts the video and presses play, after a few seconds of the film, the video changes to his wife on the bed at home having sex with one of his neighbours, he begins to scream. Then his wife, speaking from the video, tells him that this is payback for his unfaithfulness...a very disturbing scene.

Now God has in no way been unfaithful to his bride, in fact he is faithfulness that we can never understand, yet still the great cosmic audience stands in shock as it witnesses the disgusting show of all manner of idolatrous entities fucking the bride to be as she sells her body and inheritance to the idol gods of success and achievement. Now I think some of you will probably be more offended by the use of such explicit language than the scene that God has to witness each time the church he has purchased for himself gives herself to the bondage he came to set her free from.

I am not sure what there is left to say about this - other than we need to stop trying to be a success, stop trying to meet achievable goals, stop thinking that the universe revolves around us, for as we immerse ourselves in those things that we are already doing for good, then even though we may look to be weak and foolish failures in the world's and often the church's eyes, in Gods eye we will be those on whom He smiles.



Comments:
Determination to succeed is the outcome of competition, and it stems from believing that there is not enough of what we think we need to go around.

If we didn't believe there was a shortage of something, we wouldn't compete for it. Threaten a food or petrol shortage and people will queue for hours to get far more than they need of the scarce item - remember Thatcher and the sugar bags?

Once we buy into the scarcity mindset, we begin to fear that however much we have, there is never enough to satisfy. We need the lot, because if someone else has got even a tiny bit, that is a bit that we could have. That's why unchecked greed in people causes them to become evermore greedy - no matter how much they have, there is never enough to satisfy.

In a christian conext, we don't believe that there is enough of God to go around, or enough of his gifts, or that we have to earn his gifts. And if he blesses you with something, that's something I can't get.

Which is quite ridiculous, because God doesn't work that way. He creates, if he gives something to you, he can create another instance to give to me, if he wants me to have it.

Ego thinking (which is what I think Paul meant when he talked about "the sinful nature"), believes that the more I have, the safer, more secure, and more complete I am. Egos compete to take, God creates to give, freely, and to all of his creation.

Does he not make the rain fall on the just and unjust alike?
 
best regards, nice info »
 
Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?