Life's Healing Choices: Rick Warren Bends The Beatitudes For A Better Life

Churches across the country are currently immersed in Rick Warren's latest 40+ day campaign called Life's Healing Choices. Warren say's at his blog:

"every single person – as a member of the human race – deals with a hurt, hang-up, or habit at some level, in some form. That’s why we’re launching a national journey to spiritual renewal this fall. Life’s Healing Choices is a new church wide study of eight principles from the Beatitudes. These are the principles Jesus gave us for finding true, godly happiness and healing."

Rick Warren's announcement also infers the insufficiency of scriptural preaching of God's Word:

The multiple reinforcements you will receive in Life’s Healing Choices are what will make this experience so special. I discovered a long time ago that just talking about something isn’t good enough (emphasis mine). Sermons will inform, but it takes multiple reinforcements to transform. The truth is, we all learn in different ways. This campaign will help your people learn the eight transforming principles through a variety of fresh, experiential encounters. They include:

• Eight weekly sermons from the Beatitudes that you can adapt for your church
• Eight small group video lessons taught by me on DVD
• Small group discussion guides and group leader coaching
• A free one-year membership to the Purpose Driven Connection magazine, including small group curriculum in each issue and free access to the web community
• Deep discounts on the companion book, Life’s Healing Choices, by John Baker, founder of Celebrate Recovery

The campaign is based on the book, Life's Healing Choices. The author is Saddleback's Celebrate Recovery founder, John Baker. Baker claims that in his book, "you will find eight choices that lead to wholeness, growth, spiritual maturity, and happiness. Isn't that what we all really want?"

"...no matter where you find yourself, you can choose to emit your need, you can find help...

Using the Beatitudes of Jesus as a foundation, Senior Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church and John Baker, who is also a pastor at Saddleback, developed the eight choices shared in this book."

Warren reveals his theological understanding of Matthew Chapter 5 in Life's Healing Choices magazine:

"Jesus began his most famous sermon the Sermon On The Mount by identifying eight ways to happiness. Each of these eight "healing choices" called The Beatitudes begins with the word blessed...Hapiness is a choice, and the Beatitudes are the habits of happiness...you are as happy as you choose to be."

Perhaps Rick Warren should have studied the structure of The Sermon on the Mount before going to print by stating that there are eight Beatitudes. The Prince of Preachers, Charles Spurgeon counts seven:

The Beatitudes before us, which relate to character, are, seven; the eighth is a benediction upon the persons described in the seven Beatitudes when their excellence has provoked the hostility of the wicked; and, therefore, it may be regarded as a confirming and summing up of the seven blessings which precede it.

Life's Healing Choices totally misses the key and foundational concept of mourning over the sinner's depravity in this current age, and the coming glorification in the next age. Spurgeon continues:

The seven Beatitudes mark deepening humiliation and growing exaltation." In proportion as men rise in the reception of the divine blessing, they sink in their own esteem, and count it their honour to do the humblest works.

...Not only do the Beatitudes rise one above another, but they spring out of each other, as if each one depended upon all that went before. Each growth feeds a higher growth, and the seventh is the product of all the other six. The two blessings which we shall have to consider have this relation. "Blessed are they that mourn" grows out of "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Why do they mourn? They mourn because they are "poor in spirit." Blessed are the meek" is a benediction which no man reaches till he has felt his spiritual poverty, and mourned over it. "Blessed are the merciful" follows upon the blessing of the meek, because men do not acquire the forgiving, sympathetic, merciful spirit until they have been made meek by the experience of the two benedictions. This same rising and outgrowth may be seen in the whole seven. The stones are laid one upon the other in fair colours, and polished after the similitude of a palace; they are the natural sequel and completion of each other, even as were the seven days of the world's first week.

Dr. Steve Lawson describes the Beatitudes as a paradox of the Christian at the 2009 Resolved conference:

• in order to have the blessings of heaven, you must declare spiritual bankruptcy on earth


• God's wrath is propitiated through Christ's blood and God's grace is bestowed


• only those that confess their spiritual poverty before God receive the riches of his grace.

Lawson states that the Kingdom of God is antithetical to this world. He points to Christ's words. If you are to be:

• rich, you must be poor
• comforted, you must mourn
• mighty, you must be meek
• satisfied, you must hunger and thirst
• he who exalts himself will be humbled
• the humbled will be exalted
• you must die so that you may live
• if you try to keep your life, you will lose it
• if you lose you lkife, you will keep it

Lawson summarizes by saying that only one who is supernaturally born again can see the Kingdom of God.

Rick Warren as a pastor would better serve the Church by teaching on these eight points toward a "happier" life:

• sin
• gracy
• mercy
• sacrifice
• redemption
• regeneration
• sanctification
• glorification.

Life's Healing Choices may offer good advice. To use The Sermon on the Mount as the vehicle to deliver what amounts to self-help psychology is depriving people what they need most. The understanding of our depraved nature in the stayed hand of a Holy and Righteous God who's soon return will cause every head and knee to bow.