“TV Dinner” Christians

  Jonathan Gainey suggests we should pray about everything.

W
hen I was growing up, we had a specific name for those aluminum, compartmentalized trays that were filled with some kind of cheap food, sealed in a plastic top and frozen. We called them “TV dinners”. I liked the Salisbury steak and baked apples the most!

One problem with those dinners was that the compartments usually weren’t all that great at keeping the gravy out of the apples and visa versa and most of us don’t want our food all mixed together.

There are lots of people who treat life like a T.V. dinner. We separate everything, being sure to keep each part in its own compartment. This includes our Christian lives and what some of us may refer to as our secular lives.

For the Jews of Jesus’ time and today, prayer was always the method used to remind them that everything in the world belongs to God and exists for His purposes. Every prayer begins with the phrase, Barukh attah Adonai, which means “Blessed are you, O Lord.”

The Jews have a prayer or a benediction for everything, and the prayers are generally very short, due to the fact that they pray all day long and for every part of life. These prayers or benedictions are called berakhot, translated in English as “blessings.” And there is a blessing for literally everything. A blessing is a prayer of thanksgiving to God, it is not a prayer of power or effectiveness upon an item, situation, or place. In other words, we don’t bless food, but rather we bless God for the food.

Most Christian prayers in the Western world include a blessing for key events or issues, for example a meal, travel, family and rest.  In contrast, the Jews pray a blessing over everything. They bless God for food and wine. They bless God when they smell a flower. They pray a blessing when they see a person who has a birth defect, they see lightning, or hear thunder or even when they go to the bathroom. Yes, seriously.

An illustration of the thoroughness with which Orthodox Jews approach their expression of gratitude to God is the bathroom prayer:   ”Blessed is He who has formed man in wisdom and created in him many cavities. It is fully known before the throne of Thy glory that if one of them should be [improperly] opened or one of them closed it would be impossible for a man to stand before Thee” (Marvin Wilson, Our Father Abraham, page 157).

The people of God in Jesus’ day saw all of life as belonging to God. There was no part of life, work, or the world, good or bad, sacred or secular, that did not fall under the purposes and sovereignty of The Almighty. There were no T.V. dinner believers.

It should be no mystery to those of us who study God’s Word that everything belongs to and is provided by God. There is an ancient rabbinic story called “The Rabbi and the Exceedingly Ugly Man”, which helps to affirm the understanding that God is to be blessed for everything.

“On one occasion Rabbi Eleazer son of Rabbi Simeon was coming from Midgal Gedor, from the house of his teacher. He was riding leisurely on his donkey by the riverside and was feeling happy and elated because he had studied much Torah. There he chanced to meet an exceedingly ugly man who greeted him, ‘Peace be upon you, rabbi.’ He, however, did not return his greeting but instead said to him, ‘Raca ['Empty one' or 'Good for nothing'] how ugly you are! Is everyone in your town as ugly as you are?’ The man replied; “I do not know, but go and tell the craftsman who made me, ‘How ugly is the vessel which you have made.’ When R. Eleazer realized that he had sinned he dismounted from the donkey and prostrated himself before the man and said to him, ‘I submit myself to you, forgive me” (Brad H. Young, The Parables, page 9).

Though there may be moments, days, events, places, and even people that we do not thank God for, all things are a part of God’s creation, all circumstances belong to God, and in all things God is to be blessed by you and me.

The life of a faithful follower of Jesus must not be as a T.V. dinner Christian, but with a recognition that every part of a true Christian’s life belongs to God.

In His dust,
Johnny

 

Writer: Capt. Jonathan Gainey was born in Jacksonville, FL in June, 1969. He has been married to Staci, the daughter of retired Salvation Army officers, for twenty years and they have four children ages 18, 16, 12, and 4. Jonathan was commissioned as an officer in June of 2002, and is currently serving in his third appointment in New Bern, NC, USA. He is working on a Masters of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and is the creator and manager of the Flocks Diner website, where his passion for learning and teaching is expressed and shared through writing and a weekly podcast.

2 Comments to “TV Dinner” Christians

1. This is true, and beautiful. The ‘culture’ - perhaps that should read ’spiritual’- shock for someone who comes to Yeshua from an Orthodox Jewish background and who then becomes part of the church is considerable. What makes it worse is when the new Messianic believer is told they don’t have to do that stuff making blessings any more, because ‘you are no longer under the Law’. As a Jewish believer when that happens (over and over) to me, I feel bewilderment, wondering how anyone could so entirely miss the point.
   If it is ok for me to continue to pray at every moment, I mean if I have ‘permission’ and I am still a Jew, what is wrong with my continuing to pray as a Jew normally would? The words of the brachot are inside me, they are part of me, part of my spirituality, and flow naturally from within me. What is the benefit of changing them? I’ve yet to meet a Jew who remembers to make every brochah even in a single day. But most of the healthy Jews I lived amongst didn’t waste time beating themselves up about that either - they understand what it’s all about. ‘Your religion is all about legalism’ is a very strongly anti-Judaistic statement, and imagine how that comes across when said or implied. Apart from which it isn’t actually true.

   From this question you can see how when Jewish believers are told to no longer keep or study Torah it is - depending on how far they believe Torah defines their identity as a Jew - indistinguishable from telling them they are no longer a Jew and should distance themselves from their people, their family, and their traditions. It also follows they should not then teach those traditions to their children and then you are basically telling them they cannot pass on the covenant down the generations - hardly good news for Jews.

   I look at the Jewish prayer book and I see not a word in those blessings that contradicts following Yeshua/Jesus. I can see nothing inconsistent. In asking myself what Yeshua/Jesus wants me to do, I cannot imagine my rabbi wanting me to be a Jew who doesn’t value Torah and mitzvot - good deeds (ie good ethical choices, for ‘Law’ think ethics). Would he want me to be unethical?

   Legalism is a whole different matter, but sadly most Christian believers I meet want me to dump the whole of the Torah simply because faith, not works, get us into heaven. This sounds so bizarre to my Messianic believer’s ears. So we dump ethical conduct and the endeavour to think clearly about ethical conduct simply because we know we can get away with it? Or because the Holy Spirit is going to sort of inject the knowledge of right and wrong into our heads without our making any effort in thinking simply because our hearts are changed and we mean well… because we MEAN well? Since when did not thinking clearly about ethics help humanity?

   I look at this very puzzled, and decide that they must see being filled with the Holy Spirit as some sort of exemption from the responsibility to think despite the fact our Creator gave us brains, however inadequate for the task. And I don’t buy that. Surely God works in us within our humanity, not separately from it. Our heart is changed, renewed, reborn, but we still make ethical choices day by day. Do even the finest good intentions make good behaviour?

   Of course the issues are complex - whether to keep the dietary laws for example, but they are only a (relatively small) part of Jewish spirituality. Hmm.

   Perhaps one step forward the Messianic community can make is to enable other Jewish believers who have not come from orthodox backgrounds to understand how Yeshua/Jesus’ Jewish spirituality may have been. The natural way for Jewish believers to move closer to being mindful of God all day would be to allow them to make brachot without being frowned at by the salvationists around them. Perhaps another small step forward would be for Gentile believers to appreciate the kind of article above, and see it not as evidence of the historical nature and strangeness of Jesus’ Jewishness, but as a bridge with which to connect Gentile and Jewish believers in common ground - not because the specific words matter, but because we all care about being focussed on God and being continually grateful and thankful. I love ‘Practicing the Presence of God’ by Brother Laurence, and have been so blessed by that book. Let’s feel comfortable as Gentile and Jewish believers sitting down and talking about these approaches together.
Eleanor Burne-Jones on August 12th, 2009

2. Eleanor,

   Thank you for commenting. The God-fearers of the Second Temple Period understood “Let the Jews be Jews and the Gentiles be God-fearers” (I am unable to remember who quoted that statement, probably in one of Brad Young’s books).

   In other words, Paul never intended for Jews to live like Gentiles, nor Gentiles to begin living like Jews, (unless they wanted to, I assume). This is the problem that Peter had with thinking that new believers in Yeshua were to suddenly get circumcised and start following the 613 “loving instructions of God”. Neither did Paul expect Jews to suddenly drop their ancient practices of honoring God with their commitment to Torah. To tell a Jew or a Jewish-Christian to stop obeying Torah is ridiculous. To tell anyone to stop obeying the Word of God is unwise.

   A misunderstanding of the rabbinical language of the Rabbi, Jesus in Matthew 5:17 has caused great confusion. When Jesus speaks of abolishing and fulfilling the Law and the Prophets, many have assumed a Western definition of “fulfill” which means “to finish”. This is an eisegesis of Scripture. The meaning of these words “fulfill” and “abolish” are rabbinic phrases which mean to “clearly interpret” or “misinterpret.” Jesus is a rabbi, a teacher. When he is questioned about his teachings of Torah, some have accused him of misinterpreting the Word of God, and Jesus responds rabbinically with, “I have not come to teach misinterpretations, but to clearly interpret God’s Word. He also says that nothing from God’s Word (the Tanakh) will change until the end of time as we know it.

   Some Christians have spent their entire lives with a cheap faith, never growing beyond their first year and treating the Word of God like a pocket-foreign-language-dictionary (it’s there if I need to explain something, other than that I’ll just keep making it up as I go).

   Ray Vander Laan (see http://www.followtherabbi.com) admitted that he was the only person in his Jewish seminary (though he is a Christian) who did not know the entire Old Testament in at least two languages “by memory.” The professor would say of him, “Oh yeah, Ray is the Christian. We can’t expect him to know what the Bible actually says without giving him a chance to look it up” (my paraphrase).

   God bless you, Eleanor. May you know the blessing of Christians who respect your Jewish heritage.

   Shalom,

   Johnny
Johnny Gainey on August 12th, 2009

Leave a comment