05.22
I’m often asked what I think of Joel Osteen and similar teachers. I don’t think they’re false prophets, but I do think they’re little misguided because they ignore key parts of scripture. I read this blog from Donald Miller (one of my top three favorite authors) and Donald summarizes my thoughts about the Osteens of this world better than I can. So, I’ve copied Donald’s blog into my blog below. Read it and let me know you’re thoughts (BUT… don’t slam Joel Osteen and tele-evangelists in your comments – stay on topic and discuss the content).
If you want to read the blog directly from Donald’s blog, click here: http://donmilleris.com/2010/05/21/the-person-god-designed-you-to-be/
Here we go…
I’ve heard this little phrase in Christian circles that says “you can be the person God designed you to be.” The implications of the phrase are:
1. You are not the person God designed you to be and
2. The speaker or writer has some sort of formula that is going to help you become who God intended for you to be.
Now to be sure, every time I’ve heard this the intentions have been terrific. It’s always the nicest (and for that matter, most God fearing God loving better than my cynical self) people who say these things. If the world were more populated with people like them than people like me the world would be a better place, for sure. God knows they mean well, and they mean well for God and for you.
That said, I take issue with the phrase. I don’t believe you and I are going to be the people God intended for us to be until we get to heaven, until we are reunited with the Trinity. Until then, we are the people God never wanted us to be, that is people who are separated from Him. We have access to Him through Christ, but we won’t be with Him, as it were, until the wedding feast of the lamb, so until then, we are incomplete and that’s the most obvious truth in the world, all you have to do is watch the news, or have a video camera follow you around for an hour.
If you want a good picture of what life would be like if we were the person God created us to be, you just have to look at the book of Genesis. Moses repeats one descriptive phrase over and over, that before the fall, people walked around naked and weren’t ashamed. He really doesn’t explain much else. He just keeps going on about how when people were with God they could walk around naked. It actually makes you start wondering what Uncle Mosie was thinking.
But if you think about it, it’s quite a meaningful way of saying that, in the presence of God, we are hardly self aware. That is, we can walk around completely naked and feel no shame. That’s very hard to believe, you know, because every time I’m naked I am acutely aware of the fact I am naked. Honestly, it never slips my mind. I never find myself at the grocery store, catching a chill in the frozen food section when I suddenly realize I’m in my birthday suit.
What Moses is saying is that we were designed to live in the presence of God, and in His presence, and His presence alone, self awareness fades away, and we are made complete in an exchange of love we can’t possibly imagine. Moses, then, summed it up pretty well: They were naked and felt no shame.
And so when we hear we can be the people God designed us to be by obeying a formula, we are being sold snake oil. If you were the person God designed you to be, you’d walk around naked and not know it. In other words, if you were the person God designed you to be, you’d be in an insane asylum singing Third Day songs only wearing a keytar.
It sounds like a slight thing to contend with, but believing you can become some sort of actualized human being before the wedding feast of the lamb has negative emotional consequences. If you actually believe that, you aren’t going to be happy because you’ll spend your life believing you are missing out on some kind of life that isn’t accessible till you are reunited with God. No formula is going to reverse the affects of the fall of man. You don’t have that kind of power, and neither does a formula. God will bring you to Him when He chooses, and at that point you will be the person He designed you to be, namely, you’ll be with Him, which is what He designed you for.
Instead, Paul repeats over and over that what we have in Christ is hope. HOPE. He says he counts all things rubbish compared to the hope that awaits us in Christ. And he says the hope we have in Christ will not disappoint.
And there’s nothing depressing about that at all. Ever meet a girl who just got engaged? She’s happy. She’s not happy because she’s not married, she’s happy because she knows she’s going to get married. She has hope. In fact, the truth is she’s happier engaged than she ever will be married (booo….bad joke, just kidding. Please don’t tweet me angry, 140 character hate mails.)
What this means for me is that I can learn about God, I can pray to God, I can long for God, I can cry out to God, I can allow God’s principles to guide me in this vapor of a short life, I can enjoy my suffering as a point of reference for His eventual deliverance, but in terms of being an actualized human being, all I’ve got going for me is Christ. I’ve got nothing else. And Christ will reunite me with the Father, and at that point, I will be the person God designed me to be. I’ve got no hope in myself at all, and no hope in formulas. I’ve got all my hope in Christ.
So next time you’re reading a religious book and the author says you can be the person God designed you to be, flip to the back cover and look at the author picture. If said author is wearing clothes, put the book back on the shelf. It’s like my Uncle Mosie told us, Never trust a fella wearing clothes.
Wow Ken this blog has blown me away. I do agree with alot of the points thare are made and I totally agree that we will never be the person that God designed us to be until we get to heaven. However, I do think that the movement that Joel Osteen has sparked among christians has been great. I often think that if there were not teachers out there that has given hope to the hopeless or have taught others how to open their minds and follow their dreams, then where would this world be. I can almost guarantee you that we would be far worse off then we are today. I have read a couple of his books and I look at them more as a self help book. They often bring to the forefront of your mind all of the things in the bible that God says that we as people can be while on this earth.
The last book I read by him was Become a better you: 7 keys to improving your life everyday. It basically says
1. keep pressing forward,
2. Be positive toward yourself,
3.Develop better relationships,
4.Form better habits,
5.Embrace the place where you are,
6.Develop your inner life,
7.Stay passionate about life.
Now the keys in this book are basic steps to aspiring to become a better person in your everyday thinking, speaking and thought pattern, which leads me to say that Joel and others are not heavy hitters on teaching biblical doctrine but they are great in encouraging people who are broken, down and out, lost, or otherwise ready to throw in the towel because they feel like God has forsaken them. It allows them to know that if you reach down and tap into you God given “potential”, you can become a better “you”.
I was at my cousins’ graduation at Oral Roberts University 3 years ago and Joel happened to be the speaker at the ceremony, as well as he was given a honorary doctrine by the University, and I remember him clearly addressing the fact that he is often criticized by others in the ministry because of his simply approach to the gospel and in the method that he has chosen to delivery his message. To paraphrase he basically said that God has given him that message to teach because it reaches people that are often forgotten about or that would otherwise never want to step foot into the church because they have the fear of having to feel as though they have to have it already ‘together’ before they can say that they are a christian and it is his desire and message to let them know that it is a process and that they will “become” a better person.
I am by no means stating that he is not missing it in some areas but I do believe that what he and others of his liking are doing with this evangelical movement has saved a lot of people who otherwise would have NO other hope.
I agree with everything that you said. I think that Joel is especially good at communicating practical truths that give us a good ‘kick in the seat of our pants’, yet motivate us with hope and inspiration. He’s MUCH better at it than me.
I do believe that problems develop later down the road, though, when we teach self-help in the context of God-help. Maybe it’ll never happen to you, but for me, this teaching took me to a place of frustration with God, while feeling like a personal failure. (And this happened LONG before Joel every appeared on the scene, so it has nothing to do with him. It came from my time in a typical, 20th century, evangelical church.)
Here’s a thought… keep this post tucked away in the back of your mind. Remember my ‘take’ on all of this. And if you ever get to a point of frustration with God, feeling like a failure, then pull out these thoughts. If you never get there, then I’ll be thrilled for you and you can let these ideas drift away into oblivion…
How does that sound?
The Bible is full of hope and directions for living our life on earth BEFORE we get to heaven. I don’t think developing better habits or being passionate about life means that you are taking your hope out of Christ and putting it into yourself. And I don’t think the phrase, “you can be the person God designed you to be” implies that you can be the same on earth as you will be in heaven. I think Miller is stretching it a little. That being said, I agree with some of his points. However, just like I think there’s a place for the Miller’s of this world, I definitely think that “the Osteens of this world” have a place and are used by God too.
There was a time in my 20′s when I didn’t “feel” anything for over a year. I didn’t cry or laugh. I was very depressed and had separated myself from God. I had stopped going to church and did nothing but go to work, go home and sleep. One day I mindlessly flipped through the channels and come upon an “Osteen type” preacher. Watching the “the Osteens of this world” was the beginning of me climbing out of the darkness. And that’s actually when I started going to WCC. So I’ll forever be grateful for the “Osteen’s of this world” and to God for allowing them to be used in my life. I’m in a different place in my life now, and God is using the “Ken Williams of this world” to teach me and help grow my relationship with Him.
P.S. Ken, I’m not skipping church tomorrow b/c of this blog but I have to go get Jay from the airport. : )
I want Joel’s hair so that I can be all God intended for me to be. Frankly, I don’t think God’s hair counting practices are consistent from one person to another.
On a physical, of this world, it’s all up to me, and I need to be on top of all this level; the “step” methodology so popular amongst self help, charismatic, send me a check televanglists may work great.
I sincerely doubt Jesus would subscribe to this pathway as a way to “being okay”. It seems like His path revolved more around a relationship with Him and actually not being okay. He shows us in the beatitudes that the least are the most. That those most down and out, addicted, downtrodden, depressed, not in control, weak, and just plain lost are those He yearns for. Doesn’t that kind of include all of us? If for some reason we are not in those categories at some level than is He not speaking to us or are we just blind to our own inconsistancies?
My issue with the “and the like(s)” is where is the fellowship we know is so important in our walk. In the paragraphs describing a teaching by one of these persons, Christ isn’t even mentioned, so is this a man’s teaching? Jesus as I recall didn’t give us 5, 7, or 10 step plans to anything. Instead He told us to know the word and seek Him. I bet when I get to Heaven and I look around I’m going to find out that some of us had 1 step plans and some of us had lifelong, infinitive plans. For the highly disciplined person I would imagine a “step plan” is amazingly comfortable. For someone like myself I have trouble just getting through my breakfast plan.
So what do I think of Joel Osteen and the like? Just men!
Dying to know. That’s the phrase I use about waiting until you reach Heaven to learn anything significant about God. God speaks to you. He speaks in a lot of differnt ways. If you are successfully able to ignore the Spirit of God’s promptings, the Word of God, God speaking through you Pastor and through your Godly friends, then, you’ll have to wait until you die to find out that God can speak. He speaks through Ministers that have TV shows too. You don’t have to approve of every bit of someone’s doctrine to get the one message God is trying to reach you with. The problem is that, genearlly, we have lost our antenae for God’s voice in our lives. Circumstances that repeat again and again, encountering the same kind of difficult person in job after job or relationship after relationship…these are all God talking. Try to befriend the difficult person. Pray for the people who hurt you over and over again. You will be obeying God and learning some important lesson that he has laid out for you. God is speaking through the night sky full of stars and the quiet forest on an early morning walk. God even speaks through poor situations, people with no education, children…even the uncondiitional love from you pets says something about God’s character. You don’t have to approve of someone for God to use them to reach you. Just start listening. He’s speaking all around you. Wake up.
I can’t respond any better than Mark. So I will just say Amen Brother!
pretty profound! I guess then that i am and always have been who God intended me to be then… flawed, imperfect, sinful, but every vigilant in effort (both good and bad – LOL). being the skeptical cynic that i am, i have always been respectfully resentful of the “experts” who pen manuscripts claiming the perfect one size fits all elixir that when applied, will cure my (& everyone else’s) innate deviance. glad to know its not just me. now the optimist in me can feel a little better knowing the when the time comes i really will be “that guy” one day, but until then it remains less about my efforts and more about my journey…b/c it’s the journey (which will occur either way), not the effort after all that gets me to the destination.
I am thankful that God doesn’t depend on our human effort to accomplish his goals. He only wants us to surrender ourselves (along with our prideful sense of self-sufficiency) to him. When we are at our lowest, then he is right there ready to do something amazing in our lives. In Luke 9:23-24, Jesus “…said to the crowd, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross daily, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.” (NLT) That would be “step one” for me.