We Could Not Exhaust Our Common Jesus

Posted by Jim Thornber on October 4, 2010
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For four years I was an Assemblies of God minister AND a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. This is an excerpt from my book  Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes: Removing Religion to Find Relationship , which  recounts some of the the lessons I learned as a minister/monk.

During my four years at the Little Portion monastery in Eureka Springs, AR, I was usually the only non-Catholic at the community.  Because of this, I was often the “go to” person when non-Catholic guests arrived. Since the community is located about ten miles from Eureka Springs, AR (a vibrant tourist destination that is the home of the Great Passion Play), and 60 miles southwest of Branson, MO, we would often have visitors who were either fans of John Michael, or curious about our community, or both. If these visitors happened to be non-Catholics, then the call usually went out, “Find Brother Jim.” Besides John Michael, I was the only one at the community who was bi-lingual; I spoke both Protestant and Catholic.

One day, two couples showed up at the community, one Baptist and the other Mennonite. I was in the library when one of the sisters came in and said, “Brother Jim, some Baptist people are here.” By this time, I had been at the community long enough to know what questions they might ask, and they did not disappoint me.

The two couples were sitting in the dinning commons when I walked in and introduced myself. After a few niceties, one of the men cut to the chase and said, “Aren’t Catholics mostly work-oriented? I mean, don’t they believe that they are saved through works?”

I said, “Have you ever asked a Catholic what they did to ‘get saved’?”

“No,” he said.

“Well, let’s ask one. We’ll ask the first person who comes into the room. How does that sound?”

They thought that was a good idea.

About one minute later, Sister Betsy walked into the dinning commons. Sister Betsy is from Cut Off, Louisiana, which is WAY down in the bayou. (This is not pertinent to the story, but she is the only person I know from there, so I wanted to include it.) I called her over and said,

“Sister Betsy, what did you do to get saved?”

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My Monastic Encounter With Sex

Posted by Jim Thornber on September 23, 2010
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For four years I was an Assemblies of God minister AND a monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. This is an excerpt from my book  Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes: Removing Religion to Find Relationship , which  recounts some of the the lessons I learned as a minister/monk.

When you receive Christ as Savior at thirteen and get serious about God, it is natural to start making decisions that run counter to those in your peer group. Sex was one of those decisions.

Naturally, I had plenty of opportunities to have sex, but three things that kept me from doing so. One, I believed in God’s Word, and it said sex before marriage was a “no-no” (“No-no” is a literal translation of a Hebrew word that means, “Please don’t do that, because the years of resulting pain will be WAY BEYOND any momentary pleasure.”). Two, I didn’t want the possibility of a little Jimmy running around, however cute he may be. And three, if I was going to engage in what my dad called “amateur night,” I wasn’t going to do it with someone who would be spreading stories about my talents (or lack thereof) around town. I’d wait until I was married.

Does that mean I didn’t think about sex while I was a monk at the Little Portion? Nope. Thought about quite a bit. (What? You were expecting a different answer? Hey, I was a monk, not an angel).

Fortunately, I found the sexual tension in our blended community to be blessedly low, which is a significant advantage to those of us to have taken a vow of chastity. We had no television reception, no internet access, and didn’t watch R-rated movies. The Little Portion is not inundated with the media’s fixation on sex, the men and women dressed modestly, and a man didn’t travel in a car alone with a woman (unless they were married. To each other.). That relieves a lot of pressure.

But even in a monastic community, the temptation and the opportunity to have sex remained.  This is how it happened to me.

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Scriptures That Bother Me — Luke 21:2-4

Posted by Jim Thornber on September 14, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

Poor Widow’s Rich Offering

“A poor widow came by and dropped in two small coins. ‘I tell you the truth,’ Jesus said, ‘this poor widow has given more than all the rest of them. . . she, as poor as she is, has given everything she has.’” Luke 21:2-4 (NLT)

This passage is an instant challenge and bothers me for one reason: I don’t know if I could drop everything I have in the collection box of God and walk away.

Yet, that is exactly what this widow did. She took her entire net worth, two of the smallest of Jewish coins, walked into the presence of God, and without considering anyone was watching, especially God as Messiah, dropped them in the collection box and walked away. She didn’t get a receipt, couldn’t write it off on her taxes as a charitable donation and didn’t tell the pastor she no longer had food money or bus fare to return home. She simply gave her all to God and walked away because that was what her heart wanted to do.

Not me. My ego always struggles with acknowledgment. I want the leaders of the church and denominational officials (and truth be told, God, to a lesser extent) to know exactly what I’m sacrificing. I not only want my left hand to know what my right hand is doing (Matt. 6:3), I want them to get together and start and avalanche of applause because I’ve done it. Who really wants to give in secret when a bunch of our friends can get together and give us a big party for all our generosity?

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Wrestling With Faith

Posted by Jim Thornber on September 9, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

For four years I was an Assemblies of God monk with the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. This is an excerpt from my  book Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes: Removing Religion to Find Relationship.

There were times at the monastery when I felt so alone I could hardly express it. I would often go to the chapel, find a dark corner to sit in, pull my hood over my head and mutter over and over, “It’s just You and me, Jesus. Just You and me.” I felt so very lonely, isolated, and separated from all that was familiar.

These were also times of questioning God–big, loud, bodacious, tear-filled questions that seemed to bounce off the ceiling of the chapel and slap me in the face. “Are You still with me? Did I miss Your will? Whose idea was this monk’s life, anyway? Does anybody care? Will I always feel so alone and without a friend? Do You hear me?” If you are interested, the answers to those questions were: yes, no, mine (I think), yes, sometimes, and always.

There will come a time in your life, if it hasn’t already, that you will sense all you have in the universe is God, and then you’ll wonder if even He is big enough to deliver you from your pain and the soul-wrenching questions no human being can answer. You may even begin to doubt God’s ability to give you answers, but in desperation you pray with Job, “Though he slay me, yet I will hope in him” (13:15).

Welcome to the new WWF, Wrestling With Faith. You may think you’re wrestling with God, and you are, but you are also wrestling with everything you’ve held dear, substantial and true over the course of your Christian walk. Your faith is in a crisis, because for years you’ve expected the Christian life to be different from the one you are experiencing.

You came to Jesus expecting all your worries would be over, that joy would fill your life and the Church would be a place of love, laughter and unconditional acceptance. But it isn’t. It is filled with people who are struggling, sick, selfish, transitory, naïve, hypocritical, angry and judgmental. Then you spend some time with God and realize that is a fair summation of your own life. You’ve met the enemy and he is within your own heart. And that is not a bad thing, because now you know where that battle will take place.

Do I have the answers to all your burning questions? No, not really. I’m writing this to tell you that you are not alone. For those of you who will want to write me and tell me that if I just had more faith I wouldn’t be asking these questions, I will respond it is because I have this much faith that I feel comfortable asking these questions. A college professor of mine said, “If you have never seriously doubted you have never seriously believed.”

God is big enough to take my emotional outbursts in stride. I am so comfortable and assured of His complete and unconditional love for James Daniel Thornber that I will not hide from Him everything that I am. I’ve read Psalm 139 and I know that He already knows. I only hurt myself when think I can withhold from God even my smallest thoughts. He already knows I’m thinking them, and He already knows the thoughts I will have tomorrow, even when I don’t know them today. I’m giving you permission to speak to God from the miry pits of your heart’s deepest anxieties and questions. As of this writing, God has not struck me dead yet, and I don’t think He’ll annihilate you for asking the same questions.

Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes

Posted by Jim Thornber on September 2, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Publishing, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 7 Comments

My book, Taking Off My Comfortable Clothes: Removing Religion to Find Relationship, is finally available. I’ve been blogging excerpts of it for a year now, but the wait is over.

The book chronicles the time I joined the Brothers and Sisters of Charity at the Little Portion Hermitage in Eureka Springs, AR, where for four years I was the world’s only Assemblies of God minister who was also a monk. It was there I found it necessary to remove the comfortable, religious misconceptions of who I thought I was (and who I thought God wanted me to be) and put on the clothes of Christ to find true relationship.

I believe this book will be an encouragement to those who think and live outside the “normal” box of contemporary Christianity. It will help you see God cannot be categorized and above all else, His agenda is not to make us like our denomination, but to make us like Christ.

If you would like to purchase a copy, you can click here. You can see some of my archived blogs if you desire to get a peek into the book.

Blessings,

Jim

Tale of the Towel

Posted by Jim Thornber on August 31, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

BEFORE the Passover Feast began, Jesus  . . . .took off His garments, and taking a [servant’s] towel, He fastened it around His waist (John 13:1,4, Amplified).

Perhaps the best-known passage that shows us the servant heart of Jesus is John 13, where we see our Lord and Savior, the creator through whom God made the universe, washing feet.

Jesus was fully aware of who He was in God, where He was from, and where He was going. As such, He was not serving His disciples while He waited for God to bring Him into His “real” ministry. He didn’t wash feet as a way of passing the time before He got on with His studies at Seminary or waited for His first call to pastor a church (those are the things I would do). Service was at the heart of the life Jesus laid down for His friends.

What challenges me most about this episode is the fact that Jesus gave credibility and integrity to what He did because of who He was, while most of us are inclined to get that backwards. We have the tendency to define who we are by what we do. Continue Reading

Scriptures That Bother Me — James 5:1-2

Posted by Jim Thornber on August 23, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments

Look here, you rich people, weep and groan with anguish because of all the terrible troubles ahead of you. Your wealth is rotting away, and your fine clothes are moth-eaten rags. –   James 5:1-2

A few weeks ago, I took two suits to the cleaners. Even though I haven’t bought a new suit in a few years, I bought good suits that were fashionable without being faddish. They may never be totally “in” style, but they are never really out of style. Like the navy blue blazer I bought. It isn’t the newest thing you’d see in GQ magazine, but it is an acceptable jacket for most occasions.

When I got home with the clean suits, I noticed that one of the jackets had moth holes in the back, and that really disappointed me. You know the feeling when you’ve lost something of value and there is nobody to blame but yourself? That was the feeling I had. It is (or was) a nice suit, and because I neglected to take proper care of it, I feel I’ve wasted a couple of hundred dollars on a jacket I cannot wear. And, because I believe the money I spend is actually God’s money (1 Chronicles 29:14), then I felt I wasted His money, too.

Fast-forward to last Wednesday night. I’m humming along teaching out of James and we get to chapter five. As I read this passage it occurs to me – I’m so rich I have fine clothes that are now moth-eaten rags rotting in my closet! Yeah, that hurt.

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Without A Single Fault

Posted by Jim Thornber on August 15, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Religion, Scripture. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

“Now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.” Colossians 1:22

“Me? I’m standing before God without a single fault?” I’m thinking to myself after reading this passage. “Who’s Paul kidding?”

Yes, I believe in the Bible. It is one of the job requirements of being a pastor. But I must confess I have trouble wrapping my mind around this idea: I stand before God without a single fault.

After consider it for a while, I thought to myself, “Not me, baby.” I have so many faults I sometimes wonder why my wife doesn’t change the locks on the door while I’m at work. Besides, if I have no faults, then why am I still opening my mouth and saying inappropriate things? Why do I still struggle with selfishness, pride, impatience, joy, love and self-control? How on earth or in heaven can Paul tell me I stand before God without a single fault?

After wrestling with this idea for a few days, I finally began to understand that we must all know the difference between our position in Christ and our experience with Christ.

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The Look of Joy

Posted by Jim Thornber on August 12, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Religion, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

“Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.” — Mark Twain

The Look of Joy

Always be full of joy in the. I say it again—rejoice! Let everyone see that you are considerate in all you do (Philippians 4:4-5 NLT).

A while back, my wife and I were co-teaching the book of James to a small group. After spending an hour talking about the book, we barely finished James 1:2, which tells us to consider it an opportunity for great joy when troubles come our way. Doesn’t that sound easy and fun?

While Barbara led the group discussion around the question, “What does joy look like?”  I meandered over to Philippians 4. I knew it had some good stuff to say about joy, so I found the above passage I wanted and read it to the group. And as soon as I did, I knew it was going to bother me.

Although Paul wrote to the Philippians from prison, he still finds a way to be joyful. I didn’t say he was enjoying his stay in prison, but that he chose joy as his attitude. So far, so good. Paul is a better man than I am, but that is not what struck me. What struck me is what I call “The Look of Joy.” We’ll often ask what love looks like, and there is even a song called, “The Look of Love.” But what about joy? Barbara asked, “What does joy look like?” According to Philippians 4:5, joy looks like “consideration.”

That is when I got bothered. I knew from experience that when I’m in a good mood and everything is right in the world, I show copious amounts of consideration. I tip the waitress more than she deserves, give more money to the needy and smile for no sane reason. However, when I am not joyful – when I am hurt, angry, disappointed or preoccupied with my own problems, I am not very considerate to others. In other words, I’m joyful and considerate when I feel like it and not joyful when I don’t want to be. If there is a trial, I’m not joyful and considerate and if the trials are minimal, I’m a nice guy.

What an awful way to live like a Christian.

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The Box

Posted by Jim Thornber on August 2, 2010
Posted in: Christian Spirituality, Religion. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

“Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment” – John 7:24

I was driving home from church the other morning when I noticed something in the road. The car in front of me swerved to miss the item, and when I got closer, I could see it was a large cardboard box. For some weird reason, I got this noble idea to pull into a nearby parking lot, go out onto the busy street, dodge some early morning traffic and get the box out of the road. If people continued to swerve to avoid the box, sooner than later it was going to cause an accident.

As I headed into the street, I noticed a car slowing down to let me get the box. At first I thought, What a nice man. Then this thought quickly entered my head: I bet this driver thinks I’m the one who lost the box. Little does he know I’m actually the one doing the good deed.

Here I was just trying to do the right thing and STILL my ego wants somebody to see me and say, “Hey! What a nice, gray-haired man to get that box out of the street. Hope he lives.” Or some such thing. I wanted to be known for the good I was doing, not be judged for being the one who littered the highway.

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