Imperial Valley Christian Center

( This is episode 3 in the series, Becoming A Blackbelt Christian, Episode 1 is here, and Episode 2 is here.)

We're continuing the topic, What belt are you? Today I set forth the requirements, what you must do to earn each belt level, ( white, yellow, orange, blue, green with white stripe, green, 3rd brown, 2nd brown and third brown ), on your way to becoming a Blackbelt Christian. When I taught this in church I handed out a brochure listing each of the belts and the requirements to earn them, I've attached a pdf file of that brochure here.

This is the service from Sunday, July 2, it lasts about 44 minutes and was pretty darn good.

Audio: MP3    Large file (Good for burning your own CD)    Small file (Good for just listening.)

(This is Episode 2 in the series, Becoming A Blackbelt Christian. Here's Episode 1.)

God wants us to become Blackbelt Christians, He expects us to grow unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of fullness of Christ. We won't get there instantly, it is a process which requires many committments, much dedication, and much effort. Here we're looking at this process of Christian growth as analagous to the earning of color belts (In Karate they're called kyu ranks.) on the way to your blackbelt in karate. What do you have to do as a Christian to earn a white belt, or yellow, orange, blue, green with white stripe, green, 3rd brown, 2nd brown or 1st brown?

This is the Sunday, June 25 service it lasts about 40 minutes.
Audio:    Large file (Good for burning a CD)    Small File (Good just for listening.)

When Becky was first teaching at L.A. Unified one of the janitors was a man of about 60. He was your way too typical school janitor, which is to say a guy who hated his job and as a result didn't do it very well. One night he went home, died in his sleep and that was that. My greatest pity goes toward people like that who hate their jobs, who live for no purpose but a paycheck, who never begin to touch that for which God created them. Anyway, here's Steve Jobs' (The Apple Computer CEO) commencement address at Stanford from a couple of years ago. His topic is doing what you love. Please listen to it at least once. It only lasts about 15 minutes.  Here's the text version.

(This is the first message in the series Becoming a Blackbelt Christian. If you just want to listen to the tape skip to the end of the post. This introductory material is not on the tape however and I think it's very interesting and important.)

Christianity is supposed to do something, if it isn't doing anything it isn't Christianity. A few months ago one of the email newsletters I subscribe to from Bob Buford mentioned a dinner he had with Jim Collins the author of the business book, Good To Great, (A book I like and have mentioned several times on this site.) During the course of their dinner Collins asked the following question:

Collins began with a parable that went something like this: “If I came to you today and said there was a man wandering around in the Middle East with fifty followers. In 300 years, his religion would be the formal religion of the Roman Empire. What did they do to connect the dots? Put aside that it had to happen because it was true. How did it happen?”

One of my favorite karate stories came up again the other day. We were talking about the committment and dedication it takes to become a blackbelt. Most people think earning a blackbelt means you're a skilled martial artist, but after you've been in karate for a while you realize that getting to the level "shodan" i.e. first degree blackbelt, just means you're ready to learn karate. The real martial artists, the guys who can literally kill people with their hands, are the "godans" fifth degrees and above.

But just getting to shodan, first degree, the level where you can begin to learn karate, takes a tremendous amount of commitment. The vast majority of  people, I'm guessing well over 95%, who begin the journey never make it to first degree. They never make it to the level where they are ready to start learning karate.

This poses a dilemma for the sensei. On the one hand he wants to teach people real karate on the other he wants to have a successful dojo, i.e. one with lots of students. But the two desires work against each other. If you want to produce real blackbelts the way to a blackbelt will be hard, but if you want to have lots of students the way to a blackbelt needs to be easy. Put another way, if you make getting a blackbelt easy the blackbelts you produce may look like blackbelts but they won't be able to deliver. If you make getting a blackbelt difficult you won't produce very many of them but each one you do produce will be a formidable martial artist.

That's where my favorite karate story comes in.

The other night at karate, Sensei Jamie, who I belive is a godan, i.e. 5th degree blackbelt, was teaching us about eyes, feet, hands. First look, then move your feet, last you use your hands. This is something she has repeated quite often before. But she was explaining to us that the only people you really see doing it right are 7th and 8th degree blackbelts. It sounds easy but it's very hard. In fact she says that when she first saw the top American in our style, Doug Perry,  doing it right she thought to herself, this guy has slowed down with age, until she realized he just looked slow. Because

My son Jeremiah, age 16, my daughter Christina age 7, and I are in Karate together. (To the left is a shot of Jeremiah and I during our blackbelt testing.) There are quite a few different styles of karate. Our's is traditional Okinawan, bone breaking, karate, Shorin-Ryu Shorinkan. It’s a lot of fun. We get to play at “The Matrix” or “Kill Bill”. I get to spend time with my kids. Karate helps develop discipline and teaches submission, respect and honor. It gives me something to do to take my mind off of church business; which can at times be an insatiable black hole for energy. It’s great. I love it.

But karate doesn't serve any real purpose, i.e. the karate we learn will probably never be used for the purpose for which it was created. We are learning how to fight fights which will never, ever happen. We’re learning how to disable enemies we will never encounter.  Karate no longer serves its intended purpose. I think the decision makers at the top recognize this and so have developed new rationales for Karate's continued existence. They talk a lot about Karate helping children to develop discipline and learn respect. But those are obviously not the real reasons for the existence of a "martial" art. Karate no longer serves its true purpose. That’s why Karate is such a good analogy for Christianity. Christianity no longer serves its true purpose either.

It’s kind of hard to nail down the real history of karate. It may be something that evolved over many centuries of contact between Okinawa and Shao-lin monks from China (Shorin, as in the name of our style of Karate, is the Okinawan equivalent of Shao-lin.) Or it may be only a couple hundred years old. One of the most common stories told about the development of Karate is that it developed in response to the Japanese conquest of Okinawa. The Japanese conquerors are said to have prohibited Okinawans from owning weapons apparently as a means of insuring their control of the island. The Okinawans developed  karate, literally "empty hand", as a means of protecting themselves from brigands, criminals and their Japanese conquerors. Karate was taught in secret only to trustworthy individuals.

I like that story. I like to imagine a sensei, i.e. teacher or master, using his karate skills, developed over many years of disciplined training, to protect the community. I see him raising up students to help him and teaching the members of the community how to defend themselves.  That’s also why I think that karate is a good analogy for what Christianity is supposed to be.

Karate no longer serves it's true purpose because the times have changed. We've become more civilized and there's very little need for anyone, at least living in the westernized part of the world, to be able to kill someone with your bare hands.  We have policemen and soldiers to do that kind of stuff. You can imagine the dilemma that poses for the students of Karate. They love it. They greatly honor the senseis who taught them. They want to see it continued. They may even have some financial stake in its continuance; although my experience indicates that that is almost never the case. What to do? How do you motivate people to years and years of training to learn an art they will never, ever use?

More later.

The other day Stevie wanted to get a haircut. We finally made it by the barbers about 6:00 p.m. and she was closed. I told Stevie I’d take him in the morning. The next morning he reminded me that he wanted to go but I told him that mom would take him to preschool first and then I’d pick him up in a little while so we could get  our haircuts. He wasn’t real happy about that.

I got to the preschool about 11:00 a.m. and he was sitting around the table with all of his little buddies. When he saw me he got up, but before he left he went around and gave all his buddies a hug. When he came out he said to me, “I was thinking you weren’t going to come, dad.” It made me feel a little bad that he would have thought that but I didn’t say anything.  As we were driving to the barbershop I told him that I was sorry that I had taken so long and he said, “I’m sorry that I thought you weren’t going to come dad.”  It struck me that he realized that it was a bad thing to doubt his father’s word. Most of us have lost that sensitivity with respect to our heavenly father. It rarely occurs to us that it’s a bad thing for us to entertain doubts about our heavenly father’s integrity.

Faith Is Not Optimistic

It sounds a little strange at first but faith is not optimistic. By optimistic I mean, "Seeing the glass as half full." Faith is not optimistic because faith doesn’t look at the glass. The sense in which I am using optimistic is that of seeing the silver lining in every cloud. Faith ignores the cloud.

This is actually one of the first things I ever learned about faith: Good news can attack your faith just as well as bad news. Why? Because attending to good news takes your mind off of the Word of God just as easily as attending to bad news does. Your faith cannot be based on news of any kind. Your faith needs to transcend all kinds of news, good and bad.

Imagine you go to the doctor and he gives you a pretty bad report, cancer, for example. Your first reaction is to fear but you do your best to resist that and you begin to study the word trying to get yourself into faith so you can receive healing from God. You spend enough time in the Bible and you begin to replace the Doctors news with God's news in your thinking and gradually the fear is driven out and replaced with faith.

But now comes the trying of your faith, the test of your faith, another appointment with the doctor. If the doctor gives you bad news fear will try and rise up again. If you’re a baby christian your first reaction might be to panic and to conclude, “I guess this stuff doesn’t work.” or “I guess I don’t have what it takes to walk by faith.” But if your faith is more mature you realize that this is just the fight part of the fight of faith.  You steel yourself, you thank the Doctor and make an effort to be like Abraham and “consider not” the doctor’s report.  You resist the thoughts of fear which are trying to flood your mind. You replace the thoughts of fear with the word of God that you have been storing up in your heart. You continue studying, meditating, hearing, reading the word  of God about healing so that your faith can stay strong and you can resist fear. If you continue fighting you eventually win.

But what if the Doctor has good news for you? “It looks like the tumor is smaller.” or even “It looks like the cancer has disappeared.” If you’re a baby christian your first reaction will be the same for the good news as it was for the bad.  You’ll take your eyes off the Word of God and put them squarely on the word of the Doctor. The fear will leave not because it was driven out by the unchanging word of God but because it was replaced by the always subject to change word of the Doctor.  The baby christian lets his guard down and positions himself to be completely destroyed by any negative change in the Doctors report.

Faith is not moved by good news or bad it’s moved by what God’s word says. Faith doesn’t make decisions based on the latest news from the battle front. Faith makes decisions based on what God says about the battle.

What brought this up again was a story related by Jim Collins in his book Good To Great, a study of, “Why Some Companies Make the Leap (i.e. to greatness) … and Other’s Don’t.” In the book he sets forth what he calls the Stockdale Paradox. As Collins describes it The Stockdale Paradox is the ability of the management team to respond to the business environment “… with a powerful psychological duality. On the one hand, they stoically accepted the brutal facts of reality. On the other hand, they maintained an unwavering faith in the endgame, and a commitment to prevail as a great company despite the brutal facts.”

The paradox is named after Admiral Jim Stockdale.  Most of us remember him as Ross Perot’s vice presidential running mate but more significantly he was, “… the highest ranking Military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner of war camp during the … Vietnam War.”

I’m going to have to finish this later. Got to go.

Here's an interesting 3 minute presentation about Google, designed to make you somewhat more paranoid when using the web and email. It's been produced as part of a marketing campaign for a book or books. Here's the main website. The one thing you can be sure of is that Yahoo and AOL think this is a great movie.