From Fatigue to Fascination

 From Fatigue to Fascination

As humanity we have become accustomed to fatigue. Even spiritually. Ministry fatigue defines the life of many people whether they lead a church, or just attend. Much of that has to do with a consistent pressure to always be doing productive things for God. If we as Christians are afraid of anything, it’s disappointing, missing, or squandering the favor of the Lord. That can certainly wear you out. If you live your life in fatigue long enough, you can find yourself in a spiritual desert. Fatigue happens when our perspective of life includes the word “complicated.” It’s when merely living becomes a labor and a chore. Engaging with people becomes work. Returning emails becomes work. Connecting with people becomes work. Ministry becomes work. Being a good spouse becomes work. Juggling friendships becomes work. Handling the pressures of parenting becomes work. And the holiday season just seems to compound it all. 

In life and ministry, we can start relying on our own gifting, skills, and abilities, rather than operating in the wisdom and the power of God. This is called replacing divine synergy with human strategy. Eventually, our lives become marked by complacency, distraction, and apathy. That’s the point where we find ourselves unable to manage the state of our emotions. Soon we start making decisions that lack wisdom. It’s the opposite of the prosperity of soul. Now for many years, I have said that we are suffering as the body of Christ (and humanity in general) with an identity crisis. Yet I believe it goes deeper than that. We are experiencing an intimacy crisis. A crisis of intimacy comes from extended periods of time of not beholding the Lord or living the reality of our union with him. When Jesus isn’t first in our focus we lose that childlike gift of wonder. 

So is intimacy with God that brings strength and rejuvenates our joy actually something that is accessible? Absolutely. When we experience the new birth of the saving grace of Jesus Christ, there is an inward witness of the Holy Spirit that reveals the power of God that makes all things new. We realize that the resurrection of Jesus Christ validated our innocence, severed us from the bondages of sin, eliminated the barriers of distance and separation, and reconciled us once and for all to the loving heart of the Father. When we become disconnected from intimacy with God, our very identity gets distorted. Now you may say that your life is relatively simple. I would ask you this question. Are you fascinated with Jesus? As far as I can tell, the more complicated life gets, the less fascinated we are with Jesus.  

Jesus said in Matthew 11:28-30, “Come unto Me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and you shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

The main thing I’d like you to notice about this Scripture is the that it’s all about Jesus and the priceless gift of His rest. He is our union. He is our peace. He is the one who heals the mind, the will, and the emotions. Christmas is such a beautiful time to shift our perspective from the distracted world around us to behold Jesus from the cradle, to the cross, to our hearts, and into eternity. This Christmas, our prayer for you is that fatigue is replaced with fascination. And that the fascination with Jesus would impart rest to your heart and soul. 

St John of the Cross (1542-1591) wrote the following poem for the advent season.

If you want, the Virgin will come walking down the road

pregnant with the holy, and say, “I need shelter for the night, please take me inside your heart, my time is so close.”

 

Then, under the roof of your soul, you will witness the sublime

intimacy, the divine, the Christ taking birth forever,

as she grasps your hand for help, for each of us

is the midwife of God, each of us.

Yet there, under the dome of your being does creation

come into existence eternally, through your womb, dear pilgrim–

the sacred womb in your soul,

as God grasps our arms for help; for each of us is

His beloved servant

never far.

Recovering What We've Lost

Recovering What We've Lost (Transcribed from the podcast)

Is it possible that we've been living far below what God intended for us for 2000 years? I've read quite a bit of the early church fathers in recent weeks and hearing some of the regular miracles that these guys walked in. Things that we would call miracles were normal lifestyle to these folks. Matter of fact, it was the lifestyle of Jesus that they emulated it. They weren't simply imitating Jesus.

They had stepped into something in the term terms of a new covenant, what we call the Christic covenant around here, the covenant of Christ. The awareness that our oneness with God had opened up let me just use the term realms. Realms of access, empower and authority that made the supernatural power of God the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead that now dwells in us physically. That same power was now made available to the early church. Read stories of people who raised the dead on a regular basis.

People who walked on water just simply because it was there. People who worked and read and just did life in the evenings, not by the glow of a candle or any light source other than themselves, by the glow of their own countenance would read and work into the night simply because the glory of the Lord shone upon them so deeply. We live in a wonderful modern age that is often vilified and cursed because of all of its complexity. But the reality is so many writings that were lost for centuries are coming to light and being digitized and made available to us from orthodox churches in the east, in Greece and Russia and other areas, monasteries and whatnot. That are able to actually give us insight into the first three and four centuries of Christian life as people stepped into an awareness of what it literally means to be united with God.

Not just simply have a relationship with Jesus, but recognize that that relational aspect of being invited into a family by adoption gives us rights and privileges as children of God. And who is left out of this equation? The cross was for everyone, for all time and eternity. For anyone who will just simply look to Jesus as the author and finisher of their faith, as the Savior of the world, the one who eradicates sin, who overcomes all of our infirmities, all of our weaknesses, single handedly saving us to the point where we put our trust in him completely. That it really is all about Jesus these days.

I love the fixation that people have on Jesus from a posture of recognizing that thank you Jesus for saving us so that someday we don't have to fear the shedding of this mortal life to step into the realm of the unseen in eternity. So that means that after we die there's a hope of heaven that's awaiting us. But you understand that what the gospel proclaimed was that the power of God was not just meant to save you from this physical age into a heavenly realm where there you would then meet up with Jesus when you die. It was more about the entirety of our life being entwined with God. We're like Enoch walking along with God one day just simply moves from one realm into another.

And as I read the writings of the early Church, the experiences that the first 300 years of Christians had impacting the world with the power of God. Not just the message of what Jesus did on the cross to save us from our sins, but the Gospel included what he saved us to. And that is to be sons and daughters with rights and privileges, walking in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit who now dwells within believers. It's amazing how those 1st 300 years of Christianity have somehow been lost to us. We don't know a whole lot about that period of time, but there's a lot of writing that gives us hints as to.

How the Holy Spirit in a time where there's so little distraction, no Netflix, no Facebook, no internet, no iPhones. What life can you build with God when all you have is Jesus, the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, the message of the Gospel? Don't get me wrong, I love the creativity and the storytelling and all the wonderful things that people create that give us the ability to step into another world. Hopefully it awakening your imagination to the possibility that there is more to this life than just to pay bills and die. More to this life than just the physical world that you see around you. More to this life than just the normal physical experience that people have. Think about 300 years, though. It doesn't seem like a long time when you think of it in the span of the last 2,000 years since the cross. But you know, the reality is our nation isn't even that old. When you think of all of the history wrapped up in this nation alone, the nation, the United States of America in less than 300 years, and think about how little we know of the Christians of the first three centuries.

I think it's important for us to go back and see, what did they have? I mean, did they accomplish anything in those first three centuries? Well, they actually did. Those Christians, in their day, made such an impact on the known world. And Constantin, the global leader at the time, essentially, came to Christ, came to faith in Jesus Christ. And isn't that what everybody wants today? They think this is going to be the salvation of society. If we can just get a world ruler who is a Christian, a world ruler who believes in Jesus. Well, that's happened before, and it didn't serve us well. I mean, granted, there was a lot of persecution that the first three centuries of Christians dealt with that Constante brought to an end. And thankfully, people could finally worship freely. So there were some amazing benefits. But what it produced was a society that legalized Christianity in force. Essentially, what we're dealing with is a world today that hopes we will go back to that, that forces people to become Christians, forces people in a sense where this country only tolerates Christianity. And by law, if you don't adhere to that, then you don't belong here.

I think lot of people think that that is utopia. That's the thing that we want. But the fact is that doesn't serve us well. God doesn't even restrict people to a place where you absolutely have to adhere to this in order to even have a heartbeat or a breath. He gives us freedom. He gives us liberty. And liberty and freedom are necessary for people to come to a revelation of a knowledge of God, who by his very nature is love because love can only be experienced in the context of choice. I think a lot of people are pressing toward a society where the choice to believe in anything other than Jesus completely taken away. And if you don't want to do that, then, well, you shouldn't even be. You shouldn't even exist. And you wonder, how in the world can things like the crusades even come about? Well, it's that mentality of forcing people to come to a belief in Christ. You're going to worship Jesus or else a concept. And that's not the way this thing works. Jesus Christ came to give himself freely to us, to reconcile us back to himself.

On the cross, there was something that happened that gave us access to something in God we don't fully, today, yet grasp. I want to just come back around one more time to just saying the first three centuries of Christians, they had something, they walked in something. There was a measure of anointing and grace that these people walked in that we still don't fully understand. Matter of fact, I would say that we've lost something and part of the loss of that was people came into Christ and in the fourth century, it was nominal Christianity that came about. In other words, Christians in name only. They have no interest in Jesus at all. But they became cultural Christians because that was the norm of the day. It was a forced norm upon people because the ruler of the world at the time said it had to be so. So multitudes of people said, Fine, I'll believe in Jesus. Just because I have to. I have no doubt that there were people that were introduced to a faith in Christ because of that pressing of that pressure upon them to do so. I have no doubt of that.

But it created all kinds of controversies and ideas and complicated the faith so much that we pushed aside the theophany of the appearance of God, the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives to start arguing about theology. It's why the Nicene Creed was even needed for us to somehow define that Jesus was very God of very God, that Jesus and the Father were one, that Jesus was not just one of us who became like God because he somehow lived a perfect, sinless life. No, that Jesus was the incarnation of God into human flesh. We had to argue about that in the Nicene Creed, in the Council of Nicaea, in the early 300s. We had to argue about this entire concept back and forth as leaders of the church. Why? Because in the short 25 or so years from the time that Christianity was forced upon people. Suddenly, there were all these ideas about how this thing works in formula as opposed to how God is known by presence, by simply following his presence. As in Mark 16, verse 20, speaks about how the disciples went all over the world preaching the gospel. 

How did they carry the same message? Because the word is synergized. The Holy Spirit synergized their message. God was literally pulling them together and knitting them together because they were decentralized from human leadership to the point where they were led by Christ himself, who was always meant to be the head of the church. Could it be that those first three centuries of Christians who didn't have a single leader or figurehead lording over them in a sense from a human capacity were so synergized in their message because they actually believed that Ephesians 4 had come to pass. The Apostles, Prophets, Pastors, and Teachers were there for the equipping of the Saints, for the ministry, for the working of the ministry, for the edifying, the building up of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith, to the stature that belongs to the fullness of Christ under the headship of Christ. Could it be that for perhaps more than two centuries, and to three centuries of Christians, lived in such a way that there was such a plugging in to the power of the Holy Spirit in their lives that they realized that the fivefold Ministry of Apostles, Prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers had run its course, had done its job, and that we reverted, in a sense, back to needing the human fivefold Ministry Church because we perhaps stepped back away from the maturity that we had begun to walk in, from the power that we had begun to walk.

How do we know that's the case? Because you read the stories of these early Christians and how they treated laws of nature like they were suggestions. How raising the dead was not an uncommon practice. How common is it today? In civilized countries, almost never hear about anything about this. Maybe second, thirdhand information, questionable sources at best. Listen, these guys, apparently in the early church, in their first 300 years of Christianity, these people walked in the miraculous in such a way that it was commonplace. Story is told of a desert father named Abba Sioses, who is leading a group of young people to a revelation of who Christ is in them, the hope of glory. In other words, the joyful expectation, the power of heaven manifesting upon your life and flowing through your life is supposed to be common. And so a widow comes to him and she's weeping and she says, I don't know what to do. My husband died, but he borrowed this money from a man. And this man is threatening to take me and my children into slavery because we can't pay back the money because we don't know where my husband hid the money that he borrowed.

Abba Sioses says, Take us to this man, the dead man, not the living man, the dead man. She takes him to where her husband is laying in death. And he cries out to God. And next thing he knows, says to the dead man, Where have you hidden the money? And the dead man responds and answers, comes back to life to reveal where the money has been hidden. And Habeas Ciose, he finally says, Now sleep until your resurrection. In other words, he raises him up, then puts him back down again. Why he didn't keep him alive? I have no idea. But the men that are with this guy, this desert father who walked in this power, the men who are with him fall down on the ground in absolute fear. They can't believe what they've just seen. And Abel, this is the point of the story. He looks and raises them up and he says, Stand to your feet. He says, This is not a great matter. The Lord has done this because of the widow and because of the orphan. In other words, all the power of God flows through love. And he says, Yet what God desires most is a soul that is pure.

In other words, he points all the way back to this idea that, listen, the biggest miracle of all is that you actually walk in the purity and the Grace that Jesus paid for on the cross. It's not raising the dead that's the great miracle. It's the fact that you and I live by the Grace of God. That's amazing. Stop and think about the idea of raising somebody from the dead and not exploiting it to write a book or build a Ministry, but purely because God loves and cares for people and wants their needs taken care of here in this Earth, but gives us power and authority to live and move and have our being in the Holy Spirit. Could it be that that early church, those early Christians transcended their need for the Apostles, Prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers because they had so plugged into the headship of Christ for those first three centuries. You can see writers putting out their things that they saw, they heard, they learned from the Lord. But the reality is we don't even know who was actually the point person, the human being that was leading during those times.

Who did the people look to? There was always desert fathers had disciples around them, but that was the deal. We were all supposed to be making disciples. You become a disciple of someone until you begin to realize the truth of the identity of who you are, then you turn and do the exact same thing. Every man was a minister. Every person was a pastor in a sense. Everyone was called to replicate the discipleship process that had happened in their own life. That's what keeps us from looking at the first three centuries of Christianity and saying, Oh, here's the Billy Graham of that day, or here's the person that everybody can point to in these decades and say they were leading the denomination. There was no denomination. There was only Christ. I just want to rip all of the complication division that we've just created today back down the simplicity of things. You say, why wouldn't we have advanced from that time? It's the same way that the old covenant was. You start with Ten Laws, you end with 613. And the complication creates concepts of God that caused us to crucify the Incarnate Son of God when He's standing before us.

Today, we have, I believe, done the exact same thing with the New Covenant that the Pharisees did with the Old Covenant. And we have complicated the theophany, the appearance of Christ with the theology, the rules of engagement, the terms of engagement. How do we even get to know it? Listen, let's come back to the scriptures again. It's almost like the Council of Nicaea was a necessary moment of clarification that was not necessary for the first three centuries of Christianity because people were so deeply connected to the heart of the Father because of the Holy Spirit. But when Christianity is forced, in a sense, upon a society, and people are forced to say yes to Jesus before they even have a knowledge of him or develop a love for him, then we live by theology. We live by dogma. And the reality is there was three parts to the process of bringing people to Christ. I think I've talked about this in past podcast, but remember this with me again. There was three parts of the first three centuries. Bringing people to Christ was a three part process, and it went like this. You bring people to a knowledge of God.

They know about God. And then the greater the knowledge of God, their heart would be stirred to fall in love with him. That's the idea. You know God first, then you love God. And the third step, final step, was when you have so soaked, pickled, marinated, saturated in the knowledge of God that it awakening a heart of love within you for the Lord, for Jesus, then you give yourself to Him. Lay your life down, surrender. Look at how the pattern has changed to today. See, today the first thing is give your life to him. Isn't that modern Christian fundamentalist evangelicalism? Cares if you know about him, give your life to him. It's not an issue of even knowing about him. Loving him is even an option now. You don't even have to love him. Just give your life to him. Because for whatever reason, we think giving your life to Jesus is the thing that saves you. You know why the knowledge of God and the stirring of the love for God in a person's heart was what they started with? Because they believed in what the cross had done to save us. They believed that the cross saved us.

It wasn't your prayer that saved you. It wasn't your giving your life to Jesus that saved you. It was Jesus himself that saved you. And he saved you on the cross, singlehandedly. Salvation had been paid for. And now you and I have access to this gift. And it wasn't giving our lives to Jesus. That was the starting point. It was knowing God. That was the starting point. And once you begin to know God, the intrig of knowing God drew you to an awareness of his presence to the point where the more you get to know him, you know what stirs in you? It's not fear. It was love. This is the deal. It wasn't fear. The more these people knew God, the more they loved God. That's why Abas e Oses and his disciples around him, he raises the guy from the dead. The disciples immediately react in fear because this is how we react to things we don't understand. They fall down on the ground in fear. And what does he do? He raises him up and he says, Look, no, God does his miracles, works by his supernatural power because of love, because he loves this widow and he loves this orphan.

And what God desires most is a soul that is sinless, a soul that's pure. In other words, the love of God compels us to change the way we think. The kindness of God leads us to repentance. This was the message of the early church, and that is you're saved by Jesus Christ alone because of the cross. You need to get to know this God who has saved you by his grace. When you know him and you get to know him in all of his glory, you're going to love him. And as you love him and give your life to him, you're going to begin to realize your union with him in this relationship of love creates a theosis where the power of Christ actually becomes alive within you, where you become, as I say so many times, the holy of Holies is wherever the Holy Spirit dwells and he dwells in you. That you're the carrier of the glory of God. So you're the arc of the new covenant of Christ. This is the life that these guys lived. How did we lose this? Where did we go where we threw this away? Now all we do is argue on Facebook about what God is like.

In 2 Corinthians 4, verse 18 says, We do not look at the things that are seen, but the things which are not not seen. For the things that are seen are temporal. The things that are not seen are eternal. In other words, what are we doing? We got to fixate our eyes on an unseen realm, the realm that transcends the limitations of this physical life. Otherwise, we'll find ourselves living far below what God has intended for us to live in. John 16, starting in verse 12, Jesus said, I have so many things that I want to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when he, the Spirit of truth, has come, he will guide you into all truth. For he will not speak on his own authority, but of whatever he hears, he will speak and he will tell you of things to come. And he will glorify me. For he will take of what is mine and declare it to you. This is Jesus talking about things that are about to happen to them in the future. He doesn't say this is for your descendants. He doesn't say that this is for many, many generations from now, or this is for the end times fanatics thousands of years into the future who are constantly going to be predicting the end of the world all over again.

No, this is what he says. He says you, I have so many things to say to you, but you can't bear them now. When he, the Spirit of truth has come, he will guide you into all truth. This was a quick process that was about to trigger a life style that these early Christians walked in that is your inheritance and my inheritance. Let me just read this to you again. This is Jesus talking, I have many things to say to you, but you can't bear them now. In other words, I have so many things I want to reveal to you, but this is not the time for you to be able to understand them. What was happening here? The cross hadn't happened yet. When the cross took place and Jesus resurrected from the dead in Acts 1, he took them through 40 days where he spoke to them about all things pertaining to the Kingdom of God. Whatever he revealed in that moment, in that time is available to you and I today. Why? Because the Holy Spirit has been given to us, which is why I don't think any of the New Testament writers feel the need to write about that 40 days because everything that he said was available to every person in their heart because of the Holy Spirit.

I think I'm talking about some of these things to you today right now. Here's what the Spirit does. The Holy Spirit that you have access to, that lives inside of you, Christian, says he will guide you into all truth. Not some truth, not partial truth, but all truth. To the point that you and I are surrendered to the guidance of the Holy Spirit is the degree to which we walk in the truth of what God has intended for us. Let me say that again. To the point to which you and I are willing to be surrendered to the guidance of the Holy Spirit is the degree to which we walk in the truth that God has appointed for us to walk in. The Holy Spirit here goes on in John 16, He will not speak in his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak. So what was the method by which Jesus did all the things he did in this Earth? He says, I only do what I see the Father do and I say what I hear the Father say. So he was living his life as a man surrendered to the same exact connection to the Father that you and I have.

And the Holy Spirit descended on Christ in the river. And Jordan, that was the moment where he, Okay, I'm going to model life for you, humanity. I'm going to model this is how it looks to let the Holy Spirit rest upon you. The very Spirit of God that connects you. It's that connecting point to the very heart of God. No distance and no separation. Now you and I live by the Spirit of God, live walking by the Spirit of God. Now think about that with me for just a moment. You and I have the exact same access to the Holy Spirit of God. To the Father by the Holy Spirit that Jesus did. So then we can live the exact same lifestyle that Jesus led, and the early Christians did it. See, fivefold Ministry is a gift to the Church, but it's a temporary placeholder for the purpose of bringing us into this place here where the Holy Spirit is so prevalent within us that he guides us into all truth. He speaks by the authority of God, and it says he glorifies Jesus. It says he will speak and tell you of things to come.

Not of like the end time stuff. Things to come means what are the decisions and the choice is I need to make in the days ahead? In other words, he's speaking personally for your own life, the things that you are to do in this life in the days ahead so that you don't blindly walk into the future without direction and without hope. He will glorify Jesus. He will take what belongs to Jesus and he will, he says, declare it to you. In other words, he will make clear to you the authority that you have because of who you are in Christ. Do you know who you are? Do you know the power you walk in?