I’m Trying to Cut Down

I’ll tell you what. I am tired of hearing about Rick Warren.

I belong to an Assemblies of God church. That means I’m supposed to believe in the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, which increases as we pray in tongues. I’m not supposed to believe in self-help or life coaching. That stuff is nonsense. It’s the kind of thing Paul referred to as “dung.” It’s fine to work hard and try to get things done, but the central message of Christianity is that we have to humble ourselves, admit we can’t achieve on our own, and seek God’s help.

Last year someone in my church asked a group of us to read The Purpose-Driven Life, which is Warren’s big bestseller. I read a few chapters and then threw it out. In good conscience, I couldn’t give it away. I didn’t want anyone else to be harmed by it.

It was full of stuff about effort and character. The message was that we had to keep ourselves motivated, through carnal thoughts, in order to endure the extraordinarily difficult challenges of Christianity. That’s just wrong. It’s not helpful at all. It actually pushes us away from God’s truth.

When I say “carnal,” I don’t mean he was telling us to be full lust and greed and drunkenness. I mean he was telling us to rely on our little monkey brains, which are made of plain old meat. The word “carnal” refers to meat. Think of chili con carne. Without God, we, including our brains, are just meat machines. Anything we do without the help of the Spirit is meat-based, or “carnal.” So opening an orphanage can be carnal. Giving your last penny to a bum can be carnal. The fact that you do things out of a desire to please God does not mean those things are not carnal. Far from it.

Saul got shot down because of something he did to please God. He performed a sacrifice. The Spirit had made it clear that only the priests were allowed to do that. God was not interested in the good intentions residing in the meat between Saul’s ears. He removed him and his seed from the throne of Israel forever.

In 2 Samuel, God killed a man named Uzzah for doing something he thought was right. The Ark of the Covenant was on a cart, and it shifted, and Uzzah reached out to steady it. God killed him. BANG. Game over. No apologies. Why? Because the Ark was not supposed to be on a cart. The Spirit had given clear directions on the right way to move the Ark. Uzzah was trying to help, but he was doing it his own way, not God’s way. So God killed him.

God killed two priests for bringing strange fire to the altar. Fire was needed to perform the appointed rites, so these “helpful” priests got some fire and brought it. God killed them. They didn’t listen to the Spirit.

The stuff Rick Warren preaches is very carnal. He doesn’t know where the door to the kingdom of God is, and he is preventing other people from finding it. If self-help and effort were the answers, heaven would be reserved for people like classical musicians and Olympic athletes; only people with extraordinary self-discipline would make it. That’s just not the way it works. Paul himself asked the right question. If you have begun in the Spirit, will you finish in the flesh? Of course not. You’re not pleasing God by relying on yourself. It’s sin. It’s pride.

Rick Warren puts non-Christians in front of his church as teachers. That’s just wacky. Imagine Jesus doing that! But it’s the natural thing to do, when you think the flesh has all the answers.

Christians are not the strongest or most informed people, in the flesh. Think of Navy SEALS. Think of Orthodox rabbis. Scholars. Martial artists. Buddhist monks. Motivational experts. Behavioral psychologists. In the flesh, people like that are stronger than Christians. So what? In the flesh, the Assyrians were strong, but the Angel of the Lord killed 185,000 of them in a moment, and the relatively weak Hebrews, who obeyed God, got the victory. In the flesh, Gideon’s men were few and therefore weak, but God told Gideon to send most of them home, because he didn’t need man’s help to get the job done. In the flesh, 1.2 billion Muslims are stronger than the Jews, but they will always lose.

Zechariah 4:6 says it all. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.” If you don’t think the Holy Spirit will come through and give you real victory, here in the real world, when you need it and how you need it, you are not a good Christian. You are a man of little faith, and we know that God calls faith righteousness. Faith is what pleases him. If you have to look outside of God for help, relying on Oprah and life coaches and so on, it proves, conclusively and with no possibility of dispute, that you do not have faith in God.

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you to take from man those things you should only take from God.

I’m not saying you should never learn anything from anyone other than God. That’s crazy. You can’t withdraw your kids from school because they teach the Pythagorean Theorem instead of Noah’s Law of Angles. You shouldn’t refuse to take worldly advice, when it isn’t related to morality or your relationship with God. But if you make it an idol, it will destroy you. If it gives you success, that success will be hollow and meaningless. It will eventually be taken from you. At judgment, it will not be counted toward your achievements. It may count against you.

My own church has been polluted by Rick Warren’s backward teaching. That distresses me, because it shows we are not experiencing God’s power. If we had the treasures God wants us to have, we would not be foraging in Rick Warren’s dumpster. And if we become convinced that Warren’s way is right, we will waste time in a blind rathole. Some of us will die while we’re still in there, looking for nonexistent success. And the real horror of it is that God’s way is easy as well as profitable. It’s easier to pray and listen and have faith than it is to get up every day and force yourself to be perfect. You could waste 20 years fooling with the Warren Gospel and get nowhere, but a few minutes of listening to the truth could put you on the right path forever.

Christians point to Rick Warren’s success. Swell, but does that mean he’s right, when his advice conflicts with scripture? Pharaoh was successful until he ran into Moses. Jim Bakker was successful. Jimmy Swaggart was successful. Real success means listening to the Holy Spirit and doing what he tells you to do, his way. If you give one person a doughnut at the request of the Holy Spirit, it means more than building a cathedral in the flesh.

We won’t know who is really successful until judgment. At that time, we’re going to see a lot of big-name preachers with very sad faces. They will learn that they actually hindered God with their jets and charity hospitals and crusades. In Jesus’s time, the Sadducees were the most successful people in Israel. They were the TBN personalities of their day. They disappeared after 70 A.D., because God disapproved of them. If you want to know what pleases God, you have to ask him. You can’t judge by looking at a bank statement.

God tells us how to get things like love, wisdom, guidance, and success. If you look to anyone other than God to get these things, you are making a mistake. This is why life coaches, motivational speakers, seminar leaders and other purveyors of worldly “wisdom” are so dangerous. When you come to rely on them, you fail to know and rely on God.

God is not a reptile. When a lizard hatches from an egg, it looks around and sees nobody. It’s on its own. It has to lift itself up by its own bootstraps and take care of itself. That’s what the Rick Warrens of the world are telling us to do. God made us mammals, and mammals care for their young. Jacob and Esau lived with their father until he died, absorbing his wisdom and love. God wants to feed us and watch over us. He does not want us to be self-reliant. It’s not possible. It’s an illusion. There is no such thing as a self-made man.

God has told us that love is his biggest priority. This is probably the reason why he wants us to reproduce. No one understands love as well as a parent. Real love will push self-interest out of your mind. This is probably why the Bible tells us perfect love casts out fear. When Jesus agreed to be crucified, where did he get the courage? Surely it came from love. His love for us was so strong, it pushed fear out of his mind. If God loves us, then surely he wants to give, and he wants us to take. If you insist on doing things on your own, you are thwarting God’s desire to give. You are making his love of no effect.

I tell people around me about faith and love. These are the keys to the kingdom. I hope God will do the church a big favor and raise people up to spread the message and kill the weeds of self-help and greed. For 1700 years, Christians have been trying to push the car, when we should have turned the key and driven off. I’m sorry to criticize a popular guy, but Rick Warren does not know what he’s talking about. I don’t care if he becomes a billionaire and builds pyramids for himself. He’s not it.